The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. Organic Nature

[ 1 ] For a long time, science stopped at the organic. It did not consider its methods sufficient to comprehend life and its phenomena. In fact, it believed that all lawfulness, such as is effective in inorganic nature, ends here. What was admitted in the inorganic world, that a phenomenon becomes comprehensible to us when we know its natural preconditions, was simply denied here. The organism was thought to be purposefully designed according to a certain plan of the Creator. Every organ had its purpose predetermined; all questions could only relate to this: what is the purpose of this or that organ, what is this or that there for? In the inorganic world, if one turned to the preconditions of a thing, these were considered quite indifferent to the facts of life and the main value was placed on the determination of a thing. The processes that accompany life were not considered to have natural causes in the same way as physical phenomena, but were thought to be attributable to a special life force. What forms in the organism was thought to be the product of this force, which simply overrides the other laws of nature. Until the beginning of our century, science knew nothing about organisms. It was limited solely to the field of the inorganic world.

[ 2 ] By seeking the lawfulness of the organic not in the nature of the objects, but in the thought that the Creator followed in their formation, one also cut off all possibility of an explanation. How should that thought become known to me? I am limited to what I have before me. If this itself does not reveal its laws to me within my thinking, then my science simply ceases. There can be no question of guessing the plans that an external being had in the scientific sense.

[ 3 ] At the end of the last century, the view was probably still generally held that there was no science as an explanation of the phenomena of life in the sense that physics, for example, is an explanatory science. Kant even tried to give it a philosophical justification. He considered our understanding to be such that it could only proceed from the particular to the general. The particular, the individual things, are given to it and it abstracts its general laws from them. Kant calls this kind of thinking discursive and considers it to be the only kind that belongs to man. Therefore, in his view, there is only a science of things, where the particular in and of itself is completely devoid of concepts and is only subsumed under an abstract concept. Kant did not find this condition fulfilled in the case of organisms. Here the individual appearance betrays a purposeful, that is conceptual arrangement. The particular bears traces of the concept in itself. However, according to the Königsberg philosopher, we lack any ability to comprehend such beings. We can only understand where concept and individual thing are separated; the former represents a general, the latter a particular. There is therefore nothing left for us but to base our observations of organisms on the idea of purposefulness; to treat living beings as if their phenomena were based on a system of intentions. Kant has thus established the unscientific here, as it were, scientifically.

[ 4 ] Goethe protested strongly against such unscientific behavior. He could never see why our thinking should not also suffice to ask of an organ of a living being: where does it come from instead of what does it serve? This was in his nature, which always urged him to see every being in its inner perfection. It seemed to him an unscientific way of looking at things that was only concerned with the external usefulness of an organ, i.e. its usefulness for another. What should this have to do with the inner essence of a thing? He is never concerned with what something is useful for; always only with how it develops. He does not want to look at an object as a completed thing, but in its becoming, so that he can recognize its origin. What particularly attracted him to Spinoza was that he did not accept the external purposefulness of organs and organisms. Goethe demanded a method for recognizing the organic world that was scientific in exactly the same sense as the one we apply to the inorganic world.

[ 5 ] Although not in such an ingenious way as his, the need for such a method arose again and again in the natural sciences. Today, only a very small fraction of researchers doubt the possibility of such a method. But whether the attempts that have been made here and there to introduce such a method have been successful is another question.

[ 6 ] In particular, a great mistake has been made. It was believed that the method of inorganic science should simply be transferred to the realm of organisms. The method used here was thought to be the only scientific method at all, and it was thought that if organics were to be scientifically possible, then it must be so in exactly the same sense as physics, for example. However, the possibility that the concept of scientificity might be much broader than "the explanation of the world according to the laws of the physical world" was forgotten. Even today, this realization has not yet been reached. Instead of investigating what the scientificity of the inorganic sciences is actually based on, and then looking for a method that can be applied to the living world while retaining the resulting requirements, one simply declares the laws obtained at that lower level of existence to be universal.

[ 7 ] But above all, we should examine what scientific thinking is based on in the first place. We have done this in our treatise. In the previous chapter, we also recognized that inorganic lawfulness is not a unique entity, but only a special case of all possible lawfulness in general. The method of physics is simply a special case of a general scientific method of research, taking into account the nature of the objects under consideration, the field which this science serves. If this method is extended to the organic, then the specific nature of the latter is erased. Instead of investigating the organic according to its nature, a lawfulness foreign to it is imposed upon it. But by denying the organic, it will never be recognized. Such a scientific attitude simply repeats on a higher level what it has gained on a lower level; and while it believes that it can bring the higher form of existence under the laws established elsewhere, this form slips away under its efforts, because it does not know how to hold on to and treat it in its peculiarity.

[ 8 ] All this comes from the erroneous view that believes that the method of a science is something external to the objects of that science, not conditioned by them, but by our nature. One believes that one must think in a certain way about the objects, and indeed about all - about the whole universe - in the same way. Investigations are carried out to show that, due to the nature of our mind, we can only think inductively, deductively, etc.

[ 9 ] However, we overlook the fact that the objects may not be able to tolerate the way of looking at them that we want to impose on them.

[ 11 ] When he demands of all scientific endeavor that "the causal coherence of phenomena should everywhere come into its own",^{12Haeckel, Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, "Goethe und Lamarck", Jena 1882, page 53.} when he says: "If psychic mechanics were not so infinitely compounded, if we were also able to completely overlook the historical development of psychic functions, we would be able to bring them all into a mathematical soul formula", one can clearly see from this what he wants: to treat the entire world according to the template of the physical method.

[ 11 ] When he demands of all scientific endeavor that "the causal coherence of phenomena should everywhere be brought to bear", when he says: "If psychical mechanics were not so infinitely compounded, if we were able also to overlook completely the historical development of psychical functions, we would be able to bring them all into a mathematical soul formula", we can see clearly from this what he wants: to treat the whole world according to the template of the physical method.

[ 12 ] This demand, however, is not the basis of Darwinism in its original form, but in its current interpretation. We have seen that to explain a process in inorganic nature means: to show its lawful emergence from other sensuous realities, to derive it from objects which, like it, belong to the sensuous world. But how does today's organicism use the principle of adaptation and the struggle for existence, both of which, as the expression of a state of affairs, should certainly not be doubted by us? We believe that we can deduce the character of a certain species from the external conditions in which it lives, just as we can deduce the warming of a body from the conspicuous rays of the sun. One completely forgets that one can never show that character according to its substantive determinations as a consequence of these conditions; the conditions may have a determining influence, but they are not a producing cause. We are well able to say: Under the impression of this or that fact, a species had to develop in such a way that this or that organ developed in a special way; but the content, the specific organic, cannot be derived from external conditions. An organic being would have the essential characteristics abc; now it has developed under the influence of certain external conditions. Therefore its properties have taken on the particular form a' b' c' . If we take these influences into consideration, we will realize that a has developed in the form of a', b into b', c into c'. But the specific nature of a, b and c can never be revealed to us as the result of external conditions.

[ 13 ] First of all, we must focus our thinking on this: where do we get the content of the general, as the special case of which we regard the individual organic being? We know quite well that specialization comes from external influence, but we must derive the specialized form itself from an inner principle. The fact that this particular form has developed is revealed to us when we study the environment of a being. But this particular form is something in and of itself; we see it with certain characteristics. We see what is important. The external appearance is confronted with a content that is formed in itself, which provides us with what we need to derive those properties. In inorganic nature we perceive one fact, and in order to explain it we seek a second, a third, and so on; and the result is that the first appears to us as the necessary consequence of the latter. It is not so in the organic world. Here we need one more factor besides the facts. We must base the effects of external circumstances on something that cannot be passively determined by them, but is actively determined by itself under their influence.

[ 14 ] But what is this basis? It can be nothing but that which appears in the particular in the form of the generality. But a specific organism always appears in the particular. That basis is therefore an organism in the form of generality. A general image of the organism that encompasses all of its particular forms.

[ 15 ] We want to call this general organism type, following Goethe's example. Whatever else the word type may mean according to its linguistic development; we use it in this Goethean sense and never think of anything other than what is indicated. This type is not developed in any individual organism in all its perfection. Only our rational thinking is capable of appropriating it by extracting it as a general image from the phenomena. The type is thus the idea of the organism: the animal in the animal, the general plant in the particular.

[ 16 ] We must not imagine anything fixed under this type. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what Agassiz, Darwin's most important opponent, called an "embodied idea of God's creation". The type is something quite fluid, from which all particular species and genera, which can be regarded as subtypes, specialized types, can be derived. The type does not exclude the theory of descent. It does not contradict the fact that organic forms develop apart. It is only the rational protest against the fact that organic development is purely absorbed in the successively occurring, actual (sensually perceptible) forms. It is that which underlies this whole development. It is he who establishes the connection in this infinite multiplicity. It is the inner aspect of what we experience as the external forms of living beings. The Darwinian theory presupposes the type.

[ 17 ] The type is the true primordial organism; depending on whether it is ideally specialized: Primal plant or primal animal. It cannot be a single, sensually real living being. What Haeckel or other naturalists regard as the primal form is already a special form; it is precisely the simplest form of the type. The fact that it appears first in time in the simplest form does not mean that the forms that follow in time arise as a consequence of the forms that precede them in time. All forms arise as sequences of the type, the first as well as the last are manifestations of the same. We must take this as the basis of a true organic system and not simply want to separate the individual animal and plant species. The type runs like a red thread through all developmental stages of the organic world. We must hold on to it and then walk with it through this great, diverse realm. Then it becomes comprehensible to us. Otherwise, like the rest of the world of experience, it disintegrates into an incoherent mass of details. Indeed, even if we believe that we can trace something later, more complicated and more complex back to a former simpler form and that we have an original in the latter, we are mistaken, for we have only derived special form from special form.

[ 18 ] Friedrich Theodor Vischer once expressed the view with regard to Darwin's theory that it necessitated a revision of our concept of time. We have arrived at a point here that makes it clear to us in what sense such a revision would have to take place. It would have to show that the derivation of a later from an earlier is not an explanation, that the first in time is not a first in principle. All derivation has to take place from a principle and, at most, it would have to show which factors were effective in causing one kind of being to develop temporally before the other.

[ 19 ] The type plays the same role in the organic world as the law of nature does in the inorganic world. Just as the latter enables us to recognize each individual event as a member of a larger whole, the type enables us to view the individual organism as a particular form of the primordial form.

[ 20 ] We have already indicated that the type is not a closed, frozen conceptual form, but that it is fluid, that it can take on the most diverse forms; the number of these forms is infinite, because that by which the archetypal form is a single, particular one has no meaning for the archetypal form itself. It is just as a law of nature regulates an infinite number of individual phenomena, because the particular determinations that occur in the individual case have nothing to do with the law.

[ 21 ] However, we are dealing with something essentially different from inorganic nature. There it was a question of showing that a certain sensible fact can take place in this way and not otherwise, because this or that law of nature exists. That fact and the law stand opposite each other as two separate factors, and no further mental work is required than that, when we become aware of a fact, we remember the law that is decisive. It is different with a living being and its phenomena. Here it is a question of developing the individual form that appears in our experience out of the type that we must have grasped. We must carry out a spiritual process of an essentially different kind. We must not simply juxtapose the type with the individual phenomenon as something finished, like the law of nature.

[ 22 ] That every body, if it is not hindered by any incidental circumstances, falls to earth in such a way that the paths traversed in successive times behave like 1 :3:5:7 etc., is a once-finished, definite law. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs when two masses (earth, bodies on it) enter into a mutual relationship. If a special case enters the field of our observation to which this law applies, we need only consider the sensually observable facts in the relationship that the law provides, and we will find it confirmed. We trace the individual case back to the law. The law of nature expresses the connection between the facts separated in the world of the senses; but it remains as such in relation to the individual phenomenon. In the case of the type, we must develop the particular case before us from the original form. We must not contrast the type with the individual form in order to see how it governs the latter; we must let it emerge from the same. The law governs the appearance as something above it; the type flows into the individual living being; it identifies itself with it.

[ 23 ] An organic science must therefore, if it wants to be a science in the sense that mechanics or physics is, show the type as the most general form and then also in various special ideal forms. Mechanics is, after all, also a compilation of the various laws of nature, whereby the real conditions are assumed hypothetically throughout. It should be no different in organics. Here, too, one would have to hypothetically assume certain forms in which the type develops if one wanted to have a rational science. One would then have to show how these hypothetical forms can always be brought to a certain form available to our observation.

[ 24 ] As in the inorganic we trace a phenomenon back to a law, so here we develop a special form from the original form. Organic science does not come about through the external juxtaposition of the general and the particular, but through the development of one form from the other.

[ 25 ] Just as mechanics is a system of natural laws, so organic science should be a sequence of developmental forms of the type. Only that there we assemble the individual laws and organize them into a whole, whereas here we must allow the individual forms to emerge vividly from one another.

[ 26 ] There is one possible objection. If the typical form is something quite fluid, how is it at all possible to set up a chain of particular types strung together as the content of an organic? One can well imagine that one recognizes a special form of the type in every particular case that one observes, but one cannot merely collect such really observed cases for the purpose of science.

[ 27 ] But one can do something else. You can let the type run through its series of possibilities and then always hold on to this or that form (hypothetically). In this way, one obtains a series of forms derived mentally from the type as the content of a rational organicism.

[ 28 ] An organic is possible that is science in the strictest sense like mechanics. Its method is just different. The method of mechanics is the method of proof. Every proof is based on a certain rule. There is always a certain presupposition (i.e. possible conditions are given) and then it is determined what happens when these presuppositions are fulfilled. We then understand an individual phenomenon on the basis of the law. We think thus: under these conditions a phenomenon occurs; the conditions are there, therefore the phenomenon must occur. This is our thought process when we approach an event in the inorganic world in order to explain it. This is the evidential method. It is scientific because it completely imbues a phenomenon with the concept, because through it perception and thought coincide.

[ 29 ] But we can do nothing with this method of proof in the science of the organic. The type does not determine that a certain phenomenon occurs under certain conditions; it does not establish anything about a relationship between members that are alien to each other, externally opposed. It only determines the regularity of its own parts. Like natural law, it does not point beyond itself. The particular organic forms can therefore only be developed out of the general type-form, and the organic beings that appear in experience must coincide with some such derivative form of the type. The method of proof must here be replaced by the method of development. It is not established here that the external conditions interact in this way and therefore have a definite result, but that under certain external conditions a particular form has emerged from the type. This is the fundamental difference between inorganic and organic science. No method of research is based on it as consistently as Goethe's. No one has recognized as Goethe did that an organic science must be possible without all dark mysticism, without teleology, without the assumption of special ideas of creation. No one, however, has more definitely rejected the imposition of using the methods of inorganic natural science here.^{a7In my writings you will find various kinds of talk about "mysticism" and "mysticism". That there is no contradiction between these different kinds, as one has tried to fantasize, can be seen each time from the context. One can form a general concept of "mysticism". According to this, it is the extent of what one can experience of the world through inner, spiritual experience. This concept is not to be contested at first. For such an experience does exist. And it not only reveals something about the human inner being, but about the world. One must have eyes in which processes take place in order to experience something about the realm of colors. But you don't just learn about the eye, you learn about the world. One must have an inner soul organ in order to experience certain things of the world.
But one must bring full conceptual clarity into the experiences of the mystical organ if knowledge is to arise. But there are people who want to flee into the "inner" in order to escape conceptual clarity. They call "mysticism" what wants to lead knowledge from the light of ideas into the darkness of the emotional world - the emotional world not illuminated by ideas. Against this mysticism my writings speak everywhere; for the mysticism which holds the clarity of ideas in thought and makes the mystical sense into an organ of perception of the soul, which is active in the same region of the human being where otherwise the dark feelings rule, is written on every page of my books. This sense is completely equivalent for the spiritual to the eye or ear for the physical.}

[ 30 ] The type is, as we have seen, a fuller scientific form than the primordial phenomenon. It also presupposes a more intensive activity of our mind than the latter. In thinking about the things of inorganic nature, the perception of the senses provides us with the content. It is our sensory organization that provides us with what we receive in the organic only through the mind. To perceive sweet, sour, warmth, cold, light, color, etc., we only need healthy senses. In thinking we only have to find the form for the substance. In the type, however, content and form are closely linked. That is why the type does not determine the content purely formally like the law, but permeates it vividly, from within, as its own. Our mind is faced with the task of participating productively in the creation of content at the same time as the formal.

[ 31 ] A way of thinking in which the content appears to be directly related to the formal has always been called intuitive.

[ 32 ] Intuition repeatedly appears as a scientific principle. The English philosopher Reid calls it an intuition that from the perception of external phenomena (sensory impressions) we simultaneously draw the conviction of the being of the same. Jacobi believed that in our feeling of God we are not only given this itself, but also the guarantee that God is. This judgment is also called intuitive. The characteristic, as we see, is always that more is always supposed to be given in the content than this itself, that one knows of a mental determination without proof, merely through immediate conviction. One believes that one does not have to prove the mental determinations "being" etc. of the perceptual substance, but that one possesses them in undivided unity with the content.

[ 33 ] But this is really the case with the type. Therefore, it cannot provide a means of proof, but merely the possibility of developing each particular form from itself. Our mind must therefore work much more intensively in grasping the type than in grasping the law of nature. It must produce the content with the form. It must take upon itself an activity which in inorganic natural science is performed by the senses and which we call contemplation. At this higher level, therefore, the spirit itself must be contemplative. Our power of judgment must look thinking and think contemplating. We are dealing here, as Goethe explained for the first time, with a contemplative power of judgment. Goethe has thus demonstrated that as a necessary form of perception in the human mind of which Kant wanted to prove that it is not inherent in man as a whole.

[ 34 ] If the type in organic nature represents the natural law (primordial phenomenon) of inorganic nature, then intuition (contemplative power of judgment) represents the proving (reflective) power of judgment. Just as it was believed that the same laws could be applied to organic nature that are decisive for a lower level of cognition, it was also believed that the same method applied here as there. Both are a mistake.

[ 35 ] Intuition has often been treated with great disdain in science. It has been considered a shortcoming of Goethe's mind that he wanted to achieve scientific truths through intuition. What is achieved by intuitive means is considered by many to be very important when it is a matter of scientific discovery. They say that an intuition often leads further than methodically trained thinking. After all, it is often called intuition when someone hits on the right thing by chance, the truth of which the researcher only becomes convinced of in a roundabout way. However, it is always denied that intuition itself can be a principle of science. What falls under intuition must first be proven afterwards - so the thinking goes - if it is to have scientific value.

[ 36 ] Thus, Goethe's scientific achievements were also considered to be ingenious ideas that were only later authenticated by rigorous science.

[ 37 ] However, intuition is the correct method for organic science. From what we have said, we think it is quite clear that Goethe's mind found the right path in organic science precisely because it was based on intuition. The method inherent in organicism coincided with the constitution of his mind. This made it all the clearer to him how it differs from inorganic natural science. The one became clear to him from the other. He therefore also drew the essence of the inorganic with sharp strokes.

[ 38 ] The contemptuous way in which intuition is treated is due in no small part to the fact that people do not believe they can attach the same degree of credibility to its achievements as to those of the proving sciences. One often calls only what one has proven knowledge, all the rest belief.

[ 39 ] It must be remembered that intuition means something quite different within our scientific direction, which is convinced that we essentially grasp the core of the world in thinking, and that which relocates the latter to a beyond that is inscrutable to us. Whoever sees in the world before us, insofar as we either experience it or penetrate it with our thinking, nothing more than a reflection, an image of something beyond, something unknown, something active, which remains hidden behind this shell not only for the first glance but despite all scientific research, can only see in the method of proof a substitute for the lack of insight into the being of things. Since he does not penetrate to the view that a thought connection comes about directly through the being content given in the thought, i.e. through the thing itself, he believes he can only support it by the fact that it is in agreement with some basic convictions (axioms) that are so simple that they are neither capable of nor in need of proof. If then a scientific assertion is given to him without proof, indeed one which by its very nature excludes the method of proof, it appears to him as imposed from without; a truth approaches him without his recognizing the grounds of its validity. He believes that he has no knowledge, no insight into the matter, he believes that he can only surrender to a belief that some grounds for its validity exist outside his faculty of thought.

[ 40 ] Our view of the world is not exposed to the danger that it must regard the limits of the evidential method as the limits of scientific conviction. It has led us to the view that the core of the world flows into our thinking, that we not only think about the essence of the world, but that thinking is a merging with the essence of reality. Intuition does not impose a truth on us from outside, because for our point of view there is no outside and inside in the way that the scientific direction we have just characterized, which is opposite to our own, assumes. For us, intuition is a direct inner being, a penetration into the truth that gives us everything that comes into consideration with regard to it. It is completely absorbed in what is given to us in our intuitive judgment. The characteristic that is important in belief, that we are given only the finished truth and not the reasons, and that we lack the penetrating insight into the matter under consideration, is completely absent here. The insight gained through intuition is just as scientific as the proven insight.

[ 41 ] Each individual organism is the manifestation of the type in a particular form. It is an individuality that regulates and determines itself from a center. It is a self-contained whole, which in inorganic nature is only the cosmos.

[ 42 ] The ideal of inorganic science is to grasp the totality of all phenomena as a unified system, so that we face each individual phenomenon with the awareness that we recognize it as a member of the cosmos. In organic science, on the other hand, the ideal must be to have in the type and its manifestations that which we see developing in the series of individual beings in the greatest possible perfection. The implementation of the type through all phenomena is the decisive factor here. In inorganic science there is the system, in organic science the comparison (of each individual form with the type).

[ 43 ] Spectral analysis and the perfection of astronomy extend the truths gained in the limited field of the earthly to the world as a whole. This brings them closer to the first ideal. The second will be fulfilled when the comparative method used by Goethe is recognized in its scope.