Human Freedom and the Plant

Part 1 of 3

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”

- Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Biodynamic agriculture strives to hold open spaces for universal human freedom. But to enhance human freedom, we must first ask: what is freedom? In particular, if we start with the plant, what is freedom for a plant? 

It’s often easier to see what’s wrong with a plant than what’s working correctly. In many ways, we have to approach health in a negative sense: we learn how things should work when they’re broken. We learn what health means by learning about illness. In a way, the medical field studies health in an apophatic way: we recognize health when disease is absent.  When things are going smoothly, no one notices their own bodies. But we learn more about an organism when something isn’t working correctly. 

What do we learn about a plant when things aren’t operating properly? We learn that specific conditions tend to cause disease while under other conditions, plants seem to be spared many diseases. If we fertilize with too much manure or conventional fertilizer, we get big growth but often see mushy plants and poor storage quality. Such fertilizers, if given in excess, make it difficult for the plant to express itself and overcome gravity. At the same time, a plant must remain open to the world or it would not be able to photosynthesize. Overapplication of fertilizer compromises the receptivity of the plant to the cosmos.¹

The topsoil from which a plant grows is the accumulation of dust and rotten remains of plants over countless years. But if a plant is undernourished or overfed, it becomes dulled to the meaning of what streams in from the cosmos. Without being properly informed, the plant cannot perceive all of its options: and thus the plant becomes less free. An overnourished plant does not become more receptive to the cosmos but its powers of perception become dimmed. As Steiner says, “Just as I, as a man, can pass unnoticed before some dull fellow, so can everything in the soil and above it pass unnoticed before a dull plant. The plant does not sense it and cannot make use of it for its own growth.”² A plant needs soil to grow, but if it can’t overcome its terrestrial conditions, it can’t become free to be who it wants to be either. A “dull” plant is unreceptive to the messages of the cosmos. As a plant grows in the soil it must filter the “coarser juices”³ of the soil until sweet fruits and delicate nectar emerge. So we too must be ever vigilant and overcome what is harmful about the inherited past while at the same time assimilating everything of lasting value, carrying that into the future. As gardeners and farmers, we work to hold open spaces where freedom from compulsion is possible, both for plants and also for human beings. This means sifting through the prejudices of our inherited past – evolutionary, hereditary, and biographical – and extracting the flecks of gold. 

If we trace the story of each plant, the individual plant emerges as an expression of what is contained as potential within each different seed. Yet, for a plant to “be itself” it must both connect to the inherited conditions of its environment and at the same time overcome those conditions. If a plant could not overcome its geological conditions, it would never produce sweet fruit or new seeds. One might say that a plant has its own mission. A dandelion is here to be a dandelion, and not for the sake of anything else in the world. A dandelion is not here to be a dog or a barberry or anything else. A dandelion is here to be a dandelion within itself and for itself. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a dandelion. But, as Kant suggests, every human being is an end in itself. But, more generally, because each human being may be considered more unique than any other two species, each individual may be considered a species in itself. Which is to say, one should consider each individual an end in itself because each species is an end in itself. Each species has its own particular mode of being, its particular way that it loves to be. One does not fault a dandelion for not being a rose. Trying to force a rose blossom to be a dandelion is not freedom. Freedom means to be who we are already becoming. Were a dog to be required to behave by human ethical standards, this would not only be an impossible expectation, but a category error. Likewise, happiness for another species is not the same for any other species. We are not meant to be happy animals, nor are individual human beings meant to be identical to other human beings. 

If we are to believe John Ruskin, “The flower exists for its own sake,—not for the fruit’s sake. The production of the fruit is an added honour to it—is a granted consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed,—not the seed of the flower.”⁴ In this romantic image, the seed is a means by which the plant perpetuates its legacy, but its triumph culminates in the flower, the most recent addition to plant evolution.⁵ The flower appears as differentiated from the background greenery because the flower is intended to be seen.

The “general” tendencies of the habits of the past are not what a specific organism needs for itself but the specific dynamics tailored to the requirements of its own vital organization. If a plant becomes too general, it fails to distinguish itself from the geological conditions out of which it grows. If a plant is too individuated, it suffers exclusion from what the environment has to offer and becomes “dull.”

If Goethean observation were carefully employed, one would find nitrogen behaving always in a particular way, and no two ways are completely interchangeable. The overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer has a predictable effect precisely because it overwhelms the plant and prevents each plant from expressing its inheritance of individuality. Were elements only to behave in a general way, living organisms would be unable to become themselves or show any degree of freedom from their external conditions. 

We rotate crops because plant species leave behind a sort of residue, almost like ectoplasm, that is inimical to its own life. Rotating crops allows the plants to find themselves in soil that, while not tabula rasa, is at least relatively free from its own excrement. Rotating livestock follows the same principle: animals are moved regularly so that they do not ingest the direct poisonous byproducts of their own metabolism.

Each time we save seeds, the plant has “learned” from its experience of the farm. We then rotate where we plant that seed, and it learns anew. Seed saving is a way of familiarizing the plant with your particular soil. Rotating crops prevents them from sitting in their own excrement. As Steiner says, “The plant stands in an immediate relation to earth and water.”⁶ Which is to say, plants grow in the soil in direct contact with mineral salts and water whereas animals can roam around between a mineral lick and a fresh water source. Because a plant is securely rooted in the soil, it stands in its own excreta. More specifically, the brain “is none other than the dung, which is transmuted.”⁷ As Steiner not infrequently reminds his audiences, the root is the “head” of the plant, which is to say that the root system of a plant is related to this process of excretion. Most plants do not like to grow in the decomposing remains of root systems too closely related to themselves, so we rotate them. The purpose of crop rotations is so that the plant can more freely express itself and be who it is.

As a fellow “Inkling” with J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield, Charles Williams writes in The Descent into Hell, “if the past still lives in its own present beside our present, then the momentary later inhabitants were surrounded by a greater universe. From other periods of its time other creatures could crawl out of death, and invisibly contemplate the houses and people of the rise. The amphibia of the past dwelt about, and sometimes crawled out on, the slope of this world, awaiting the hour when they should either retire to their own mists or more fully invade the place of the living.”⁸ 

As there were societies before today, there were worlds before this world: “God creates worlds and destroys them.”⁹ These prior worlds do not cease entirely but persist as tendencies, prejudices, and the realm of the subconscious. The effects of the “amphibia of the past” can be seen when “a very wet spring follows upon a very wet winter”¹⁰ wherein a plant is reminded by external conditions of prehistoric memories and the ancient past reawakens. The plant attempts to “fruit” on its leaves in much the way that ferns (Tracheophyta) produce spores on their leaves. Since in our current epoch, our garden plants do not tend to produce spores, the resurgence of anachronistic climatic qualities causes these oversaturated leaves to behave like a living substrate. “We find the strongest life force in the root nature, and there is a gradual process of devitalization from below upward.”¹¹ Or, this is how it should be in our age. After a wet winter and a wet spring, the leaves of plants in the garden are not devitalized enough. Channeling too much vitality, which they cannot contain, parasitic entities in the form of sporulating diseases like fungus and mildew gladly migrate upwards from their proper entombment within the soil. One might consider an analogy of sending too great of an electrical charge through the wrong wires. Excessive current melts the insulation around the wires and will likely cause an electrical fire. In the case of excessive “moon forces”, fire diseases arise. The excess ethericity cannot be contained by the plant and “leaks” out of the leaves. Naturally, pathogenic organisms hungry for this free vitality show up to drink it up. In our oceans, the resurgence of familiar prehistoric conditions leads to the undesirable proliferation of jellyfish.

IMAGE: Excessive ethericity cannot be “contained” by the forms of the leaves and erupts almost like invisible flames. The “scent” of the organism leaks. From these “rips” in the coherence of forms, like blood from a wound, attract thirsty entities.

I would ask a question voiced by Charles Williams, “what was all this but the infection communicated over the unpurified borders of death?”¹² Steiner suggests that we cannot really talk about plant diseases in the same way as diseases in animals. “The rather abnormal processes which occur as plant-diseases are not diseases in the same sense as in animal diseases.”¹³ Perhaps what we witness as plant diseases, in a sense, are anachronisms belonging to another time. As such, we do not wish for the destruction of pathogenic forces or malevolent elemental beings, but rather their regeneration. 

When conditions on the farm regress too much, there is a tendency for those prehistoric tendencies to resurge. When there is excessive vitality, plants do not thrive but suffer all kinds of ailments. It is our task to keep plants contemporary which is a task reverently perpetuated by indigenous growers worldwide. Each time we save seeds, we are bringing plants along with us into the future. Each time seeds are saved, they adapt and overcome the amphibia of the past. If we do not save seeds, the dead elements of the past begin to catch up with us. Life must always foster new life in others if it is to remain living. 

If a plant were to remain overburdened by the past, it would languish and fail to blossom. By holding the door open to new life, we allow change, while preserving what is valuable from the past. What does this dynamic look like for a farm (Part 2)?