“If we want to attain a living understanding of nature, we must become as living and flexible as nature herself.”
- Goethe, 1817, from Goethe 1981, 56
“And thus as we descend the scale of being, Nature speaks to the senses-to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses: so speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer who is nowhere dead nor silent, she has even a secret agent in inflexible matter, in a metal, the smallest portions of which tell us what is passing in the entire mass."
- Goethe, Theory of Colours, preface
What we experience in the world always begins as the outermost surface of things. If it is a flower, we see the light that is rejected by the plant. If it is a green leaf, the plant itself absorbs all the red and rejects the green. We never see the plant itself with our eyes, but an appearance. Similarly, with the human being, we see skin, hair, nails, and teeth–all products that coalesced out of a formerly living process. Anything we can see with our eyes has “died” and become real—its potential has been exhausted and it has become actual. Which also means: what is most dynamically alive is invisible to the eye.
Anything we can sense with our bodies of the outer world is a product that has “fallen” out of the dynamic living world. Sugar, for example, is a bit like salt inasmuch as it belongs to a process that has condensed from subtler forms where it was not yet solidified. The ancient Greek term crystallos means ice. An ancient hypothesis about rock crystals was that they were a kind of water that had become frozen and had remained so that they would no longer thaw at ambient temperatures–considered mythologically, this is not that far from the truth.
If we take this idea seriously, it is as if green plants are red behind the green we see and only reflect green. Conversely, limestone appears white because it rejects all light which hints at its inner dark voracious character. It is as if the world we see is a sort of photonegative of the objects “in themselves.”1 Of course, plants do not exist in themselves but rather live as part of an entire web of life. The appearances of plants disclose something of what they seek to absorb and reject: their sympathies and antipathies.
If our eyes did not show sensitivity to the green light radiating from a plant, it would just pass into us as unnoticed as invisible X-rays. This sensitivity means there is a skin that is able to be stimulated, absorb, and even resist the free-flowing passage of a particular stimulus. When an object is warmed by light or a fire, it absorbs the energy — the energy does not merely pass through it without resistance. The soul, and any organism, to be sensitive to specific things must be able to resist them. If I cannot resist how I feel, I am submerged entirely by the feeling and cannot feel its shape. If I cannot resist the thoughts that bombard me, I am “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.”2 If our eyes did not have the capacity to block sunlight, the light would simply pass through them undetected.
If our eyes did not have the capacity to block sunlight, the light would simply pass through them undetected.
On a soul level, we can only perceive beings that we can resist. If we cannot resist them, we may experience various colored moods but we cannot experience any objectivity towards those moods. Instead, we will be overwhelmed in each mood like wearing tinted glasses–the entire world becomes discolored by our moods when we cannot resist them or recognize their meaning. When we can maintain a degree of objectivity towards our moods, we may find the world tinted by yellow or blue or red, but we maintain awareness that we are not seeing the objective colors in the world but rather an admixture of objective colors and our subjective mood.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Applied Biodynamics to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.