Human Freedom and the Farm Individuality
Part 2 of 3
Read Part 1 here.
“Man is free in so far as he is able to obey himself in every moment of his life. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called a free one in this sense. We have here considered what conditions are required for an intentional action to be felt as a free one; how this purely ethically understood idea of freedom comes to realization in the being of man will be shown in what follows.” - R. Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, GA4
As an eye must have inner darkness to perceive the light, the plant must encounter the sunlight with a kind of emptiness – a receptivity to the cosmos. A house is only functional for its inhabitants because of its emptiness. Similarly, a farm often emerges first as a clearing.
The first stage of creation according to kabbalah is called tzimtzum (צמצום) which is a contraction, the establishment of an emptiness. As the eye sees light because of its empty darkness, the cosmos was formed as a hollowing out from a field of limitless light. Out of the wild, space must be formed – not completely disconnected, but distinguished enough to develop its own microclimate. Out of the field of universal Oneness, an empty space had to be opened so that a world could exist. Out of the prevailing environment, a space must be cleared in which our food crops can grow. The open field with healthy transitional zones and buffer strips maintains a relationship both with the greater cosmos as well as with the surrounding environment. A farm organism is not completely severed from the cosmos (in which case nothing would grow) nor completely cut off from the surrounding environment (in which case it would be dead for another reason). Even plants grown in artificial situations require the energy of the sun channeled in through wires.
Image: Left, the cosmos as a lattice of infinite light; Right, out of this grid of light, a void is formed into which a single ray of light shines and from which all colors burst. The cosmos as a perceiving eye.
If we were to approximate Hegel’s conception of freedom, freedom means that something is free in itself and for itself. This idea is close to the basis of the biodynamic farm as an “individuality.” Each farm shares a common mission, namely the support of human flourishing, but the way in which this is accomplished is necessarily different in each environment. In Steiner’s words, “everything that is needed to bring forth agricultural products should be supplied by the farm itself.”1 Ideally, a farm should strive to produce as much of its own fertility needs in itself and for itself, from within the limits of the farm to supply its energy requirements. Not only is this more ecologically sound, but this is also more economically sound. The general concept of a self-sufficient farm, as an ideal applied in different regions, manifests in distinct ways.
For example, if you wish to grow healthy tomatoes in the humid eastern United States, in the arid southwest, or in the Pacific Northwest, the plant may be genetically identical and the goal of that perfect vine-ripened tomato remains the same, but the approach to that must be individualized for each region. To create a healthy tomato in a desert requires different techniques than to produce a healthy tomato in a swamp. Likewise, each biodynamic farm must be a unique articulation of shared aspirations. The possibility of freedom at all means standing on the shoulders of history. From the earthly field of action, we become free inasmuch as we are not compelled by biological compulsion, family prejudices, or the burden of trauma. We are here to be free for the sake of the fullest expression of the human being. Because new concepts evolve, the horizon of freedom is ever receding and we continue to seek to improve the freedom of ourselves and others.
To love your neighbor as yourself doesn’t mean merely loving neighbors as a concept but this particular neighbor right in front of you. General programs of human wellness are not enough if we don’t participate in building bridges person-to-person regardless of our differences. As Dostoyevsky writes, “The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.”2 To love the general category, or the statistical average, is to love the vague idea of forests but care nothing about particular tree species. One hears popular environmental slogans in favor of planting more trees: but what kind of trees? And where? And in preparation for what kind of changing climate?
It’s not enough to exist for isolated self-sufficiency or generalizations. We are participants in the world of life around us. As plants must overcome their conditions yet maintain openness to fruitful changes, so a farm must maintain a space as an open individuality, able to maintain a space for unfolding possibilities of freedom. The biodynamic impulse is never antisocial, or it is missing the point. We are not seeking to sever ourselves from society, but rather trying to hold the door open to freedom – even if it is just a crack – for the rest of our human family.
A farm, as an abstract ideal, is empty and lacks content, but each particular real farm always has its own distinguishing features just as the native soil has its own particular character, its own terroir. Each farm is individualized if it is to be real. But if local food is valued in part because it is an expression of the outstanding qualities belonging to the region, how does local food relate to freedom?
By eating local food, we take into ourselves something that has experienced the same geological conditions, the same atmospheric conditions – and has overcome them all to be itself. When we consume food from many different locations, it requires more from us to organize the discordant signatures of each food. Rudolf Steiner might suggest that when we travel from one place to another, our “etheric body” stays behind. If I travel from New York to Rome, the rhythm of my living body remains on New York time and I experience this as “jet lag.” If I consume food from countless locations, my living rhythmic organization must sacrifice enormous energy reserves to accommodate so many “time zones” within my single organization. Thus, the consumption of local food, which carries within it a resonant biorhythm, requires less from us and, so to speak, harmonizes with our own organism. The freeing up of energy by eating local food means a liberating of resources for the human being. As such, food produced in the area offers a greater tendency towards the free expression of human beings. Eating mostly according to the seasons and within the limits of a local diet has a marvelous effect on the human organism. That not enough food is produced within an area or that people are unable to buy such food only reinforces the relationship between human freedom and food quality.
As we awake with the consequences of yesterday (whether or not we remember what we did), these “karmic” effects frame the possibility of freedom today. The limits of conditions today provide the basis of our freedom. Without the resistance of gravity, we would not be able to walk. Without the continuity of causality from the past, we would neither be restrained by our past nor would we have the freedom to act at all. The question, then, becomes: How do we foster conditions that provide a proper ground for future human activity without denying the past and without choking the future?
On this point, Steiner originally focused on spiritual exercises and a renewal of the life of the imagination and intuition. But with the failure of some initiatives, he seems to have come to see that there was a more fundamental dilemma. “This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is to-day does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.”3 Steiner saw that people had become so materialistic that they could think and only think, devoid of feeling or imagination and thus unable to translate thoughts into heartfelt activity. Abstract generalizations are only so useful – they must be reshaped to fit particular circumstances, and this always involves a compromise with real-world conditions as well as rich adaptive artistic feeling. Practical thinking must be clear and particularized for the demands of each situation. Steiner says, “[W]hat makes thought impractical is the tendency to ignore details when observing a sequence of events in the world and to retain but a vague, general impression of them.”4 For ideas to be relevant, “consequential thinking must be carried down into all the details of life.”5 But if people are not habituated to thinking with consequences, they must be shown something they can emulate. In The Face of the Earth, Pfeiffer suggests a partial solution to this problem when he says that people these days tend to need to see something with their own eyes in order to copy it. One of the most important things we can do is provide demonstration gardens and farms so people can easily emulate what they have witnessed.
Freedom is contagious. By showing people what unnecessary creativity looks like, their own capacities can be awakened from dead habits. The striving of a living being is to overcome the dead inertia of inherited existence, to separate in each generation the wheat from the chaff. The dead weight of the past is part of why we pray for the dead: not merely for their own sake, but for the sake of freedom of the living: so that the shells of the past– the ghostly habits of the departed – do not obsess the living. A spirit may shed a ghost of its unresolved baggage when it departs.6 If a dog dies infested with fleas, the fleas do not suddenly go away: they jump to the nearest new host organism. If we have not prepared ourselves properly and made ourselves inhospitable to the negative habits of our predecessors, these can easily jump to us as the “next of kin.”
What one might call “ghosts” are almost like a carbon copy left when you write an invoice: they resemble what was once there but as a patchy and distant echo without coherence.7 A material analogy might be like data on a hard drive: when you “erase” information on a hard drive, it doesn’t go anywhere at all. In fact, with the right techniques, “erased” data can be recovered easily. Deleted information remains on the hard drive until it has been overwritten so many times the original signature of the past becomes indistinguishable. But it is not merely binary information surrounding our soul life. We are permeated by thoughts, feelings, and imaginations. We are influenced by the impressions of the shells of the past that exist alongside us. In our daily struggle for freedom, we seek to prevent ourselves from being swallowed up by the regressive habits of the all-too-familiar past.
As an unknown author asserts rather boldly, “Ghosts exist. This is not a question of belief; it is a matter of fact.”8 We can see ghostly habits accumulate in people and institutions: the inevitable negative unintended consequences of otherwise noble actions accumulate. People within an institution itself may even come to identify with the shell rather than the living kernel of the movement. Loyalty to the mere letter of the law while losing sight of the spirit of the law is becoming a partisan of a somnambulatory society. As Steiner says, “The ‘hard of heart’ will resist this Grace, saying: Go back to the Bible, to the literal text of the Bible, for that alone is true. This is a disavowal of the words which in Christianity itself kindle light, words which we will take into our hearts: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.’”9 But, as part of this openness to the future, we must always remember that what someone has done does not contain the fullness of who they are becoming. For our hearts to become fixated on where we have been is to be turned into a pillar of salt. We must remain open to others becoming more than they have been.
We should treat Steiner’s unedited words10 with a soft gaze, understanding that he could not share everything there was to disclose. In his own words, he warns us, “We shall have to attempt to put into aphoristic form some of the Spiritual Scientific conceptions.”11 He continues, “these matters can only be studied in concrete cases; they must be dealt with specifically; there is little that can be said in a general way.”12 Knowing that Steiner himself considers what he shares in the Agriculture Course to be aphorisms, we know that what he is sharing is not systematic, nor something that can be systematized without killing it. He intends to offer an image true enough to be immediately useful for practical farmers so that they and the world both benefit.
When a human movement cannot overcome such accumulations, it becomes like a city without a way of disposing of its sewage: disease and parasites proliferate. When merely affirmative belief supersedes genuine selfless love, one is witnessing a disease of the soul where individuals mistake the hardened skeleton for true living faith. In medicine, no reasonable physician would identify the living aspect of a patient with their bones but rather with their heart (or perhaps their mind). Yet, when it comes to religion, both religious fundamentalists and their anti-religious counterparts tend to mistake calcified doctrine for spiritual life. An atheist might say that it’s ridiculous to believe in a bearded man floating in the sky, and they would be quite right – but living spiritual experience does not tend to believe that either.
In contrast to rigid fundamentalism, the so-called “new age” movement exhibits a strong tendency to oppose almost any degree of firmness, to such a point that they seem to wish to obliterate any non-negotiable principles beyond blind questioning. If we were to choose between dissolution or calcification, we’d have to say that excessive softness is better than excessive rigidity, since sclerosis is death itself. While we might concede that osteoporosis is better than arteriosclerosis, neither is something we desire.
The bones of our bodies are an inheritance, but they do not simply inhibit our freedom. Bones provide resistance which facilitates our movement. Our muscles require scaffolding to hold onto. Even if we wish to modify our fleshy forms, few people wish to modify the bones of a healthy skeleton. The inherited conclusions of thought need not be emulsified, but rather connected to life. This requires the feeling heart to adapt artistically to the present moment. Through the use of muscles, bones are strengthened. Consider an astronaut whose bone density has decreased from lack of resistance: we are not made to float in space but to move on earth.
A farm as an individuality has many possibilities, but considered as a whole, the farm organism, ideally, has the ability to incubate aspiring farmers as apprentices and to nurture them to go forth and establish their own spaces of human freedom, their own farms. If freedom does not liberate others, is it really freedom? If knowledge doesn’t educate others, is it really knowledge? It is not enough to understand what a “farm” as an abstraction is if we cannot reconcile it to the real-world conditions around us. For example, “justice” as an abstract ideal might in theory remain the same, but because society is constantly changing and its injustices undergoing new permutations our approach to justice cannot merely recite a recipe from a previous time. To copy rigidly what belongs to the past without adapting it to the present leads to innumerable sclerotic conditions. In the garden, refusing to rotate one’s crops leads to the proliferation of diseases and pests.13
Holding a space of openness, the farm comes to serve as a higher organ of perception for the Earth and holds open a space for human freedom. With open space and leisure time, the human being is given the opportunity to blossom in artistic expression, the culmination of free activity. As a plant overcomes its conditions but remains open to the future, the farm follows a similar pattern. What does freedom look like for the human being in a space held for freedom – what does freedom look like for the artisan (Part 3)?
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course (GA327, 10 June 1924, Koberwitz)
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Rudolf Steiner as quoted by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer in the introduction to The Agriculture Course (1958)
R. Steiner, Practical Training in Thought (GA108, 18 January 1909, Carlsruhe)
R. Steiner, The Threefold Order of the Body Social, (GA335, 15 September 1920, Stuttgart)
One might that it is only the realized saints who do not leave behind such a shell.
As the character Cookie says in Reservation Dogs, “Always listen to spirits, but never listen to ghosts. Ghosts are dumb.”
Meditations on the Tarot, pg. 388.
R. Steiner, The Concepts of Original Sin and Grace (GA127, 3 May 1911, Munich)
Most of Steiner’s lectures were not proofed or edited by Steiner, and cannot be considered with the same weight as his carefully revised books.
R. Steiner, The Agriculture Course (GA327, 14 June 1924, Koberwitz)
Ibid.
Rudolf Steiner offers the exception of tomatoes, who, according to him, love growing in the same place every year out of their own remains. He refers to this plant as being “antisocial.”