The Vacuum and the Plague: A Meditative Path into the Reality of the Moment

Everything that exists is bein: the house, the mountain, the tree, the car or the dog, as well as the fingernail of the hand; everything is being. From the most elementary to the most majestic, spiritual beings interweave themselves; they are, and they bring forth, what we call creation. For our awareness, their interconnections are conditioned by a fundamental law: a unity in the spiritual word is a multiplicity in physical existence, while a unity in the physical world is a multiplicity in the spirit. The being of the plant appears as a unity, the primal plant, and as the many differentiated plants in the physical. On the other hand, the physical plant, for example the rose bush on the roadside, appears as a unity, but as a spiritual reality it is the activity of the beings of the sun, earth, water, mineral, air, of life and so on. Given that a being is present wherever it has effects and that a being unfolds particular activity, the plant is a spiritual multiplicity, as is every particular physical appearance. Every “thing” is a spiritual multiplicity, a tapestry of activity in which no emptiness can be discovered. In other words: nothing exists that is not, and everywhere something exists, someone exists, is active, as a being. Non-existence cannot be found.

“In the house of my Father” there are no empty rooms. But what happens when a being does not unfold their activity? When a being withdraws and is inactive, and is not (there) as it should be? What happens to the horizons of activity that are left empty in creation? What are the consequences of a spiritual vacuum, or an actual spiritual emptiness? What is the reality behind the “horror vacui,” the “fear before the void,” nature’s dislike of emptiness and the need of classical artists to fill every empty space? 

Where an activity is neglected, something else unfolds. When the apartment is not cleaned, there is chaos, when the encounter does not occur, loneliness emerges, when the word is not spoken, there is silence, when thinking is not unfolded, stupidity spreads itself out. So the “horror vacui” is real; wherever an activity does not unfold, a space is made available for another being, another activity, to grow. Someone else moves into this emptied space and spreads out their life and activity in the wrong place, in an area of life where their activity is not justified. The spiritual vacuum is a beckoning temptation for other beings to expand their horizons of action so that their rightful proportions are exceeded; that which is right and good in a particular cosmic proportion becomes monstrous when it outgrows its necessary sphere of activity: it becomes a plague. The being of the plague is that activity through which a being expands beyond its justified field of existence on a catastrophic scale. The fact that the catastrophe might serve to bring back a state of balance through a dynamic process does not make a catastrophe less catastrophic.

Covid-19 is a symptom of the present catastrophe, which also permeates our connection to the world, to truth and reality, to feeling and morality; it is a reality, a specific event, a behavior, so, a being. There is no question that this being, in its differentiated activities, has a right to exist. It is also beyond doubt that it has unfolded life in excess and mass. This “Pan-ic” (Pan means the all-encompassing), this Dionysian event has so far exceeded its place in the cosmos that, not unlike the bacchanalians, it threatens to destroy everything. We stand before it, as though before a derailed train, with the certainty that it is not easy to stop it, that it must run its course. The urgent question remains: what is the vacuum that made this spiritual derailment possible, or even necessary? What essentially didn’t happen? What spiritual activity withdrew, left us, allowing the vacuum to emerge, in which the being of covid-19 had to develop on such an extraordinary scale, without proportion? 

For those who have been able to maintain some distance from the monkey dances of opinion and have been able to cultivate a deep listening to the events of the last years, it is clear that besides the painful loss of human life, truth has become the victim of this plague. Of course the truth itself cannot be harmed, only the capacity of human beings to know it, to accompany it in thought. Every day the capacity to discern between what I have come to know and what I do not know is eroding in immense proportions. With Mephistophelean cleverness, as a regressive move of counter forces within us, we have been led again into some kind of mediaeval battle of faith. It appears as if the truth is no longer accessible to the individual spirit but is a question of faith and creed. If we are proponents or opponents of vaccines, if we belong to those who believe in science or attach themselves to other theories, none of us discern anymore (or if we do only with great difficulty) between fantasies and facts, between what we know and what we believe. Of course, this process is not new, and it has been accelerating for years, but it has reached a mega-dimensionality that in its monstrosity can be characterized as Pan-epidemic. 

If I approach this state of affairs without bias I realize that, at its core, this plague without proportion is connected with the question of truth and facts, with thinking and observation. To my inner eye a multi-dimensional displacement appears, one that has been intensifying for years and is now at a climax, a displacement of thinking and observation, information and knowledge. I can experience how the pandemic is not so much connected with what we do, but rather with what, in small steps, almost without noticing, we leave undone. It is we, human beings, who have created the spiritual vacuum that forces the being I will call Covid-19 into a bloated pan-ic dimensionality. 

I can discern a displacement in human experience that has unhitched thinking and observation, leaving significant areas of daily perception categorically inaccessible to cognition. A sphere of perception has emerged with which, fundamentally, I am unable to connect through thinking. Here, where the activity of thinking should unfold, the possibility is absent, so an essential spiritual activity simply does not occur. Where this activity was to unfold one finds a spiritual vacuum. In order to understand this, a brief review of the connection we have with the world as cognitive beings is necessary. 

The world of nature and of human creations appears to us as perception through our bodily organization. However, what eludes us due to this same bodily organization are the thoughts, the essential in things, what makes them what they are, that is, their spiritual reality. We have to re-introduce or add these to perception through intuitive thinking. Our thoughts are therefore a kind of spiritual mirroring of the aspect of things that exceeds the particular momentary perception, of that which is at their core. The thoughts in our awareness are the silhouettes, or shadows, of the activity in the things out of which they arise. In other words: thoughts are in things and inseparable from them. An oak tree is what it is because the law of oak unfolds its active thought being through it - otherwise it would be a mere pile of debris. The same is true for the flower, the bus or the mountain, as well as every single mineral. It is the active being that reveals who and what it is to me through thinking. I know the world when I connect the thoughts I have achieved with observation. Cognition is the reconciliation of the connections between things that only through my restricted, sense-oriented constitution were separated in my awareness.

Whoever has never smelled the ocean will never be able to come to the salty, moist experience through an image on a screen. If I have never seen the ocean, the being of the ocean can only be approached through analogy and the comparison of various memories. If I perceive a photo, the being is inaccessible for me, or only accessible through a detour of memory (“Even though it does not breathe, this cluster of pixels on the screen reminds me of a face; it looks like…”). In experiences that are turned into linguistic or optical representations, there is always a turning away from the thing, something already analyzed and composed, something that excludes my thinking and its connection to the thing. When I am thinking about information, photos, films and descriptions I am closed in myself. I engage a logic that very well may be in harmony with itself, but I don’t progress to a connection with the world and its creative life. I see something on a photo and I can reflect on it. Then I am thinking about a photo and not a thing. The active thoughts, which are in the things, are no longer accessible to me through observation and intuition. I can analyze and explain a photo, but it never provides the certain cognition of direct experience. 

Since information is not that about which it informs me (as in, the photo of Everest is not the mountain itself), the intuitive exchange between my thinking and the world occurs either not at all, or only in reduced form. I cannot really think about the measureless information amassed before me, I can only have opinions. (“I don’t know, but I think…”). To create an opinion means that I cannot actually know, at least at the moment, and I instead provisionally form an opinion. 

If, for example, I encounter more of the world online than I actually experience, then things I am informed about quickly outgrow the body of my experience and my spiritually active thinking recedes. Instead of entering a dynamic exchange between outer and inner through thinking about the world, I start to create opinions and to connect information. This is more of a soul process involving the intellect and personality than a spiritual activity. Here, where my spirit withdraws from the inspiration and expiration of the process of cognition, emptiness emerges. 

The draw of this space and vacuum reached gigantic intensity through the flood of information, videos and images, necessitating its growth into pandemic proportions. There is so much that lives as information, beyond our direct thinking, that we are likely to inform ourselves rather than engage in the work of cognition. Every decision and statement made with experientially impoverished information is opinionated and thoughtless and contributes to the vacuum. The excess of pre-formed knowledge, as text, image or film, has banished our own acts of thought from the world, and where “I” should be detectable between ourselves and the things, an absence of spirit has emerged. The expansion of another, of a not-“I,” into this vacated space is the being of the pan-ic plague, it is the disease of relation between the outer and the inner.  


Note:

This consequential behavior of the spirit and the world intensifies with the degree that representations of the world claim to be truth. This implies that the news, documentary film and newspapers, etc. belong to a category of representation that excludes the possibility of thinking. It is this category of representations that tempt us into believing they are transparent, that essence and reality can shine through them. Entertainment films, literary texts and musical recordings are exactly what they appear to be: artificial-artistic presentations that do not correspond to the world but to themselves and their own fictional logic. This is why they can rightly be judged as they appear. It is not without reason that we are more likely to find the truth in literature and poetry than the newspapers. We are able to form a direct judgment of a recording of a musical concert even when we are aware that something is lacking as it is not live. The truth claim that accompanies any presentation is diametrically opposed to our possibility of penetrating it through thinking. This is why, for example, Rudolf Steiner insisted he had to “speak pictorially” (“pictorially” means it is not literally true). 

In any case these reflections should not lead to an alienation from technological representation. On the contrary - only when we know the rules of the game are we free to play. 

Final Report on the Current of Goodwill

a social-art project within the M.C. Richards Program


“If my Mother had four wheels and a drive shaft she would be a touring bus.” -Rudolf Steiner


Art allows us to entertain things that are “not real”, and this opportunity can inspire us to see conventions in new light. This was the idea of the Current of Goodwill, a social-art project of students from the M.C. Richards Program cohort 2020-21 and the Hudson Valley Current, that is now complete. It was not intended as a project that would demonstrate a shovel ready alternative to conventional money systems, but as a creative act that could allow new experiences and insights on money and economic exchange. In the process hundreds of moments were created when a currency evoked an act of thanks, learning about the Hudson Valley Current and Free Columbia. Through this project a group of students were introduced to monetary orientations inspired by Rudolf Steiner, in the context of Marx, Friedman and Raworth, among others. Each completed card, or unit of 50 HVCs, was ultimately directed as a grant to individuals and initiatives dedicated to the common good.

100 cards, each worth 50 HVCs (equivalent of 50 USD), were created. Assembled together they created a picture of interdependence, giving and receiving. 

In order for them to be redeemed as a grant to a local organization each card had to make a journey, which involved passing between five people and being returned by mail. Of the 100 cards that went out, 25 made the return journey. 1,250 Hudson Valley Currents were dispersed according to the choices indicated on the cards. In September of 2021 the grants were awarded.


450 was earmarked for “Arts and Education” and awarded to THE ART AFFECT

250 was earmarked for “Addiction Recovery” and awarded to SIMADHI

250 was earmarked for “First Responders” and awarded to THE PHILMONT FIRE COMPANY

150 was earmarked for “Community Centers” and awarded to TILDAS AND THE HVC

150 was earmarked for “Food Pantries” and awarded to SEASON DELICIOUS

Aesthetic Education for the Anthropocene

Aesthetic Education for the Anthropocene

By Nathaniel Williams

Maryline Robinson, Adolf Portmann and Emily Carr

Free Columbia’s M.C. Richards Program is a site of action research, a college level initiative aspiring toward aesthetic education and contemplative inquiry. It is small and as humble as one would expect, and it is a fledgling, just entering its second year. This essay is inspired by the ongoing work in the program toward a contribution to Mary Caroline Richards’ question of whether one can develop “…practices to strengthen and enliven living images, in contrast to mechanical and life-destroying images? And how may thinking itself be taught in ways that promote life, rather than estrange us from it?”. 

 Who needs aesthetic education? This archaically colored phrase could easily bring up associations of uselessness, or of the aloof enjoyments of a privileged life. It might be associated with the beauty parlor or with art appreciation seminars at liberal arts schools. Aesthetic education can be understood in a much more comprehensive way, as important for everyone. One reason aesthetic has an archaic sound is that it is derived from a term in ancient Greek. The term meant the perception of things with the senses. In the dentist’s chair and the hospital anesthetics are used to block perception and feeling. Aesthetic experience is as common as memory, dreams or thought, we all have it in some measure. It is the foundation for a trusting, open and intimate experience of life. Our ability to live with the wonderful, special forms of sensible experience, to perceive the particulars of life, is aesthetic. It is also connected to our experience of qualities, moods, and intangibles that emerge as we move through life. It is not only sense perception, but en-spirited, en-souled perception and imagination, connecting us to our natural environment and other people. Aesthetic experience unfolds when we watch a friend approach and feel how they might be doing, through how they walk or stand, how they address us with movements of their voice. Sense perception is suffused with soul and mind. We might find ourselves inadvertently staring at someone, at some feature of their face, and the slightest change in the feature suddenly ignites uneasiness as a mere what becomes a who. We look away. We see a deer, ears stretched up, erect and head alert, our presence leads to the sudden cocking of the legs, ears tilting back, breath quickening; another sentient being. Climbing a northern mountain in autumn, the forest’s bronzes and reds fade into many evergreens as do the sounds of insects and birds; bright lichens and mosses fill the forest floor. The stones are loudest in silence. Water has washed the stones clean along stream beds and white waterfalls rush, sounding like light.  

Generally speaking aesthetic education is associated with the arts and humanities today. Yet it is easy to see that aesthetic judgement is a central part of our social and political life, our relation with other beings and the various regions of the earth where we live. Our first associations are misleading. Aesthetic education is not necessarily about privilege, aloof art appreciation courses, beauty school, or even of the humanities. It is more foundational. It is connected with our ability to participate in ecological, interpersonal, social, cultural and political  life. 

Perceiving with our senses is an activity that can be strengthened or atrophied. It may seem odd to suggest that our ability to unfold rich, pictorially constituted understandings is under threat, when we are increasingly surrounded by images from digital devices and inventions. The digital revolution is a watershed that will increasingly deserve careful attention and critique, but in this essay I follow another path. 

The Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann suggested a general approach to exploring aesthetic experience that I will contribute to here. In an address he delivered on biology and aesthetic education Portmann differentiates between two core human capacities. He calls these the aesthetic function and the theoretical function. He suggests recent centuries in the Occident have “emphasized the value of scientific rationality and the valorization of the quantitative, shifting qualitative experience to the margins.” The feats of the theoretical function are all around us, they include the technological revolution we are in the midst of. They stand before us with grandeur and power. We also know they are heavily capitalized, at work defining our current lives and immediate future. In this essay the task is to look toward these powerful tendencies and achievements from a critical perspective, focusing on their anesthetic affects. The following characterizations and critiques of the functional capacity are not an argument for irrationalism, but an argument against hyper rationalism. 

Portmann characterizes the theoretical as “…{t}he activity that employs above all the capacity of rational thought, that employs and utilizes scientific analysis, and which leverages mathematics in general. This activity quickly leads the thinker beyond the immediately given world of sense experience and especially loves to dwell in the realm of numbers and quantities. This activity involves striving to transform the qualitatively given world into quantity. Once tones are traced back to vibrations and colors are traced back to wavelengths, a certain contentedness sets in, a victory has been achieved. This is said without the slightest irony, as an attempt at a sincere characterization.” 

Living into this orientation we can make some observations ourselves. In the theoretical tendency one can make out a sense for an absolute, calculable coherence. It is a kind of lawfulness that we sense as “behind” normal experience. When we turn toward this coherence, however, it is peculiar in the way it is static and immobile. We feel changes can be made to a part that superficially effect the overall frame. There is a weighted sense of sameness, and a diluted sense of particularity. Re-ordering the whole is of no significance. It is different, but the coherence is the same. The victory that Portmann characterizes above, when qualitative particulars are transformed into the calculable, culminates in a wholeness of this type. It is a certain sense of comprehensive judgment. Perhaps the most important observation we can make, however, is that we are not a unit in the equation, that we ourselves are excluded. This need not be articulated to have an effect on us. There is a widespread subtle, general cognizance of this. We feel we are privy to a phantom of wholeness. How can anything be whole that excludes our being?  This exclusion marginalizes the felt value and gravity of much of daily existence. Think of our experience of the vivid connections or tensions with people, ethical energy that animates our actions and goals, or an exquisite impression of the spiders web covered in dew, lit by the morning sun. Our theoretical function engages to transport all of these into quantitative models of coherence and pattern. Generally we sense this process of translation is the process of knowledge, and first person, qualitative judgment as rightfully marginalized along the way. But we feel on this journey of knowledge, we arrive with our theoretical vehicle but we have lost ourselves along the road. Spookily the engine of transport delivers a vehicle with an empty cockpit. Marilyne Robinson offers this characterization in The Absence of Mind, “A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires. And – an important corollary- certain well-qualified others do know them. I have spoken of the suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness and experience among us, and this is one reason it has fallen silent. We have been persuaded that it is a perjured witness.”  

The contentedness described by Portmann will be familiar to all of us. In this essay we are not focusing on the joy and achievement accompanying it, instead we can focus on this subtle lonesome hue. Its basic character tends towards defined functions and units that can never correspond with a being who is able to respond and relate to us, or a world in which we could actually live. It excludes our basic experiences of both selfhood and life. This is why there is an unconscious feeling that comprehensive translation of existence into theory of this type cannot result in reconnection. While sensing theoretical interconnection of this type on a sublime scale (say the universe) can awaken reverence and awe, this reverence is at the same time tinny, for its finitude is always only slightly veiled to the heart. 

This quasi-wholeness is an engine. If our lives are weighted toward the theoretical, the isolation it can produce makes us thirst for movement, variety and speed. It is the internal combustion of a schism. This spark can lead us to high velocity, high definition images in games, movies and series, social media, general surfing or digital sex sites. Yet in the end, we feel we are building bridges with air. The schism can also lead us to drugs and religion as pathways to escape our one-sided mental life. Drugs take us somewhere blindfolded, only to dump us out sometime later in a ditch with no idea how to make the journey again, bruised and weaker than when we set out. Religion opens up spiritual visions and images for us giving meaning to existence, and often aesthetic ritual, yet it is the rarest of occurrences to feel oneself able to travel from the alter to the forest, and certainly not to the “prestigious” halls of the university. Drugs seem to give us what we want on the terms of the loan shark, while religion often treats us as orphans, even though they cannot take full custody, nurturing us only on Sundays while demanding we renounce our natural parents, with whom we spend the rest of the week.  

Despite this discontent, we often sense that our theoretical work is objective, neither good nor bad, actually neutral. This feeling is not arbitrary. It reveals important characteristics of the theoretical function and quantification. Still, when we look at the theoretical function in context we see it is not neutral, that it does privilege certain values. The theoretical function unfolds through quantification, calculation and functional manipulation, and in turn we shape the world in this spirit. 

During our daily rounds aesthetic experience flares up, with sustenance, important  contours are washed out and alive on the edges, with fissures bubbling with interiority and life. Portmann suggests this is connected to the “… striving of many humble people toward joy and happiness. As educators we have to take most seriously that the most simple and genuine sources of joy are drying out for countless people. The natural foundation for joy, the ability for rich and spontaneous experience, is eroding.” These indigenous capacities do not require techno-prosthetics or chemical crutches. Adolf Portmann characterizes the aesthetic function as, “… leaving the primary impressions of the senses intact, retaining the original, unique, qualities of form and line, color and sound, smell and touch …  all spiritual/mental activities have their point of departure in these primary experiences. Whereas the theoretical function works to transcend these qualities and to replace them with measurable units, the aesthetic function engages these primary sources of spiritual/mental life with trust, building on them, creating images and truth.”

Acts of qualitative embodied judgment are minor miracles not based on calculation. In these judgments impulses, melodies and movements are moving. The aesthetic capacity is present in our naïve, attentive, embodied surrender to perception, feeling and understanding. It is an orientation we adopt when we listen to someone through words, tone and body language while suspending definitions. It is hospitable to surprise and revelation, it waits and listens, it anticipates singularity. A bronze rose color on a book cover opens into a space of contentment, warmth and kindness while the dark brown of the decaying black walnut shell in late August opens into a vast, sublime and earnest field. The white pine, surrounded by maples and oaks, makes an impression combining ocean spray and feathers, light and delicate, festive and noble. The Silhouette of the cedar trees in the north country suddenly reveal a gentle and introspective atmosphere set against the bodies of hemlock. These dynamic perceptions can be intensified into works of art. Charles Burchfield was want to compose word pictures on the back of his paintings. On August 12, 1917 he wrote, “THE AUGUST NORTH: In August, at the last fading of twilight, the North assumed to the child a fearful aspect (that colored his thoughts even into early manhood).  A Melancholy settles down over the child’s world; he is as if in a tomb.  He thinks all his loved ones are gone away, or dead; the ghostly white petunias droop with sadness; un-named terrors lurk in the black caverns under bushes and trees.  As the darkness settles down the pulsating chorus of night insects commences, swelling louder and louder until it resembles the heart-like beat of the interior of a black closet.”

There is something epiphanic about this form of judgment, wherein the distinct feeling of comprehension unfolds and flashes up with a sense of unbounded life. There is a tendency toward wholeness, yet one that is open and qualitatively mobile. Compared to the quasi-wholeness of the theoretical function, these strike us with life, subtle delicacy and sublime drama. Art can possess these tendencies in an intensified portion. If we are accustomed to moving through with a theoretical attitude, we pass by so many possibilities of judgment. We may, however, find ourselves deeply struck at some point by a simple work of art. Works of art have traditionally been shaped with a special care for perception and pictorial power. Images, moods and ethical movements are invited and tended to as active presences. The artist greets them with hospitality, and makes room for them. 

 
 

Kanō Tan'yū, Landscape in Moonlight 166

Water emerges, foreground, yet a movement moves from top to bottom. The light of the sky is also a broad field of moving moisture and clouds, and the moisture opens the back of the mountain that threatens to close itself off. A boat is on the water where we float. The parts of this world transform into one another, all receiving themselves from the greater whole. The parts are not strictly separated and defined, yet they are specific. They pass into one another in an imaginative circulation of transformation. When we focus on a part, it is never severed from the whole. Art, as illusion, is lifted out of the “real” yet it feels intimately connected to reality.  Cheng, the Sinologist, suggests a painting teacher leads a student to “… the creation of an organic composition in which the full embodies the substance of things and the empty the circulation of the vital forces thereby joining the finite and the infinite, as in Creation itself.” Chan art is not a definitive orientation, we can find kindred approaches in Burchfield’s practice and in the works of Cezanne and Emily Carr. These artists  participated with their living environments toward the emergence of these vital artifacts and images.

There is an epiphanic dimension to aesthetic judgment, yet images are connected through rhythms; they can make a strong impression and then recede, only to come again changed. One can feel one “knows” a work of art after one encounter, but this is a habit taken over from the theoretical attitude that possesses truth. We may dwell on a dazzling echo, but we will find that the notion of our possessing a picture empties it. This is a remarkable characteristic of being alive, of making visitations. We can think of Cezanne’s attempt to capture his living motif, which he could never capture but only encounter, leaving traces of a face as a result. 

This is all too easy with art. We need not fight to recognize these experiences. We still look at them like Nietzsche’s leafy oasis in the desert, they make life tolerable. But what of the desert? The all-powerful habits that relegate aesthetic judgment to the arts and humanities and theoretical judgment to the sciences need to be challenged. Aesthetic judgement, a misfit figure in science, has increasingly been shown the door when trying to attend the academy. Portmann describes how the naturalist who approaches the world aesthetically has come to be seen as an awkward ancestor of today’s scientist. This is deeply concerning when we think that it is the sciences that we increasingly turn toward to establish our connections to our natural environments. “The natural forms that surround us are a treasure chest of riches, yet how few sense the joy awoken by the variations of autumn’s colors, joy that can be ignited by one single maple in a city. How few know of the source of joy that is generally available in the fullness of leaf forms, of fruits, the flight of birds and their song? Who notices that every mother of pearl setting of the sun is a festival, every glance through the sunlit yellow leaves of the beech tree into the cool blue sky a drama, that from these simple joys of perception it is possible to ascend to dizzying imaginations of worldly experience?”  Do we practice science in a way that we can experience the earth as a treasure in this sense?  Or is it simply a “natural resource” to be understood and used in the spirit of calculation, control and domination? What kind of natural science might counteract this anesthetic tendency?

J.W. v. Goethe, Mary Caroline Richards and Craig Holdrege

Throughout his prolific career Portmann pioneered a research method to expand empiricism using aesthetic judgment in biology. He realized that if you are always looking for functions when you try to understand elements of an organism mysterious facets of their existence are rendered invisible. To look at the forms and movements of animals as expressive, pictorial presentation, requires suspending the functional approach and employing aesthetic apprehension. This reveals what he called the “expressive display” in nature. Aesthetic judgment reveals interiority and sentience. He articulated a distinction between the open and visible formations of the body that required this approach, as opposed to the internal and hidden, such as internal organs. This empirical approach moving between the dynamic of the physical and interiority has the effect of reclaiming a portion of those experiences that aesthetic judgment can offer us with full consciousness. The gravity and reverence of Portmann’s writings on animal’s leads to a realization that sentience is a foundational and observable mystery of our existence. Through this aesthetic method animal sentience is imbued with the gravity of the real and brought out of the epi-phenomenal shadows (or perhaps it is us who are brought out of our abstracted separation). It ushers the sentient life of animals back into the universe, and shows how mysteriously sentience is interwoven with the formation of certain facets of the physical body. 

More recently Craig Holdrege has developed filial investigations in biology, building on Goethe’s delicate empiricism. These culminate in aesthetic ties to organisms through the method of “portrayal”. Holdrege’s studies involve careful empirical tending to the parts of organisms with an eye for how they express the life of the whole. Each part is not closed off as a fixed function that is thought of as a specialized wheel in a machine, but expresses the whole in a unique way. What is remarkable in Holdrege’s work is how he turns towards parts without losing the background of context and wholeness. He shows that just as we can focus on an element in a painting, or a refrain in a piece of music, while sensing its embeddedness in a whole, there are biological research methods that attain the same. These methods are disciplined and distinct even while related to artistic appreciation and creativity. 

Both Portmann and Holdrege draw significantly from Goethe and his orientation in science. Goethe, famous for his literary achievements, saw his scientific work as more significant. He occupies an important position in the history of phenomenology. The foregoing may prepare us for a glimpse of Goethe’s importance. But we have to push back against the conventions and habits of the “two-cultures” that seem to place the natural sciences and the humanities in opposing worlds.  Without effort on our part to understand aesthetic knowledge practices in the natural sciences we are bats in the midday sun. Goethe’s work did not lead to “theoretical” explanation in the sense we have described above as theoretical, but to aesthetic theorems. His search for “primal phenomena” involved developing aesthetic judgment into scientific insight. Unlike artistic activity, Goethe’s scientific orientation involved creating long series of sense perceptible observations and experiments that culminated in phenomenal theory, or in the words of Arthur Zajonc, facts as theory. Theory’s culmination was perceptible, yet not as a case to be explained by a general rule. In physics his color theory still stands out as a watershed moment, where a science that can lead to understanding while cultivating qualitative connections to our own experience emerges. Georg Maier’s research in optics offers a more recent example of this scientific culture in physics.  

We know today that this is not only about personal joy or a “romantic” view of nature. Our moment reveals countless ways we are destroying the foundations of life and we quickly come to ask how far the ecological crisis is at root a cultural crisis? I am convinced an expanded notion and movement for aesthetic education is one part of the solution we require. I once took an undergraduate level class in Environmental Science wherein the author referred to ecology and the “Wisdom of Nature”. In the context of the textbook, that contained nothing but models of “mechanisms”, the sad impression this term made on me is unutterable. While there are obvious reasons that theoretical culture is most at home in the natural sciences there are increasingly obvious dangers to its hegemony. We understand that we are interdependent as beings and we share a moment on this planet that requires a wisdom of the particularities and existential interdependence of our existence, which our theoretical culture cannot offer. 

Aldo Leopold, of particular importance to the ecological movement in the USA, once wrote: “All I am saying is that there is also drama in every bush, if you can see it… When enough men know this, we fear no indifference to the welfare of bushes, or birds, or soil, or trees… We shall then have no need of the word conservation, for we shall have the thing itself.” Here Leopold presents the idea that our ethical action is connected to the quality of our connection to our habitats. Our awareness of our natural environment, largely informed by our theoretical culture and muted by our technological life circumstance, is knowledge numb to the terrestrial that can be held dear. In a decisive moment for our limited and interdependent planet we live in thoughts of infinite translation as calculation. We find ourselves at the peak of a legacy of a theoretical culture that can be traced back at least 500 years to the continent of Europe. It has worked for centuries to translate qualities of experience into quantitative fields of calculation, subtly tending toward domination, control and alienation. This is now our superpower, looming over our increasingly atrophied aesthetic capacity, when it is the latter we need more than ever in natural science and our practical ethical lives.   If the ecological crisis is going to be faced voluntarily and collectively, and not through ecological or public health tyrannies and dictatorships, there is a significant task at hand- The expansion of the notion of aesthetic education to include the natural sciences, and its energetic and widespread implementation.

1  Adolf Portmann, “Biologie als Aesthetische Erziehung” in Biologie und Geist. (Suhrkamp, 1968). His address has only grown in significance. In this essay I follow his lead in making a general distinction between theoretical and aesthetic capacity, though I develop this along different paths. 

2  Ibid. 250.

3  Ibid. 248.

4  Rudolf Steiner develops a powerful characterization of this unconscious feeling in an address given on January 19th, 1924, published in the collection Anthroposophy and the Inner Life: An Esoteric Introduction (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2015).

5  Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Yale University Press, 2010), 60.

6  See the first part of Hans Jonas’s Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Prentice-Hall, 1974)

7  Adolf Portmann, “Biologie als Aesthetische Erziehung”, 256.

8  Ibid. 246.

9  François Cheng, The River Below (Welcome Rain, 2000), 109.

10  Adolf Portmann, “Biologie als Aesthetische Erziehung”, 256.

11 See Craig Holdrege, “Doing Goethean Science.” Janus Head 8, no. 1 (2005): 27–52, The Flexible Giant: Seeing the Elephant Whole (Perspectives 2. Ghent, New York: The Nature Institute, 2005) and The Giraffe’s Long Neck: From Evolutionary Fable to Whole Organism (Perspectives 4. Ghent, New York: The Nature Institute, 2005). 

12  Arthur Zajonc. “Facts as Theory: Aspects of Goethe’s Science.” In Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, edited by Frederick Amrine and Francis J. Zucker, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub. Co, 1987).

13  Georg Maier, An Optics of Visual Experience (Adonis Press, Hillsdale, NY. 2011)

14  Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God: And Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 263.

An Interview with Craig Holdrege 

by Eve Hindes and Stefan Ambrose 
Lightly edited by Nathaniel and Craig. Transcribed by Stefan. This interview was conducted during Craig’s Fall course in the M.C. Richards Program and focused on the book Do Frogs Come From Tadpoles by C. Holdrege, (Evolving Science Association, 2017).

Craig, Stefan and Kai discussing animal tracks.jpg

Eve Hindes [EH]: Thank you Craig for coming to talk to us today.

Craig Holdrege [CH]: Glad to be here.

EH: You are an educator and author, phenomenologist and Goethean scientist, as well as a parent and person in wonder and awe of the world, and you can really see that in the way you’ve been teaching us about all kinds of creatures and their environments in the last couple of days, as well as this piece of writing you’ve done here. One of the first questions we have for you is: When did you first fall in love with frogs?

CH: I don’t know if I’m in love with frogs.

Stefan Ambrose [SA]: Sounds like you’re in love with frogs.

CH: I’m definitely fascinated by frogs. It’s kind of hard to say, I don’t actually know. When I was in college and had to dissect a frog, I wasn’t in love with them. I mean, I did it and I learned quite a bit about muscles, but that frog wasn’t really a frog. Later, in teaching zoology as a high school teacher, the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog became interesting to me when I realized: They don’t lose their tail, they digest their tail. I thought, okay this is strange. So it was in learning about the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog that I started to become really interested in them. Then it kind of waned; I’ve always enjoyed seeing frogs, and having moved here you have all kinds of frogs in the spring—early spring peepers and the wood frogs that are heralds of the spring. The chorus they make in the evening in March and April is amazing. I started observing more. So it was a gradual process. Not gradual, it was sporadic. I never really focused again on frogs until I started doing the research for this booklet. That was a number of years ago. Five years ago or something like that.

EH: Just for everyone here, I’m just wondering if it would be alright with you if I just give a little description of the tadpole becoming frog. And feel free to jump in at any point if I misspeak or if you think that I have left out something important.

CH: Please.

EH:  Now it is fall and the frogs are doing their thing, but in the spring, for all the people here, imagine you’re walking here in the spring, and it’s still pretty cold, and things are just starting to appear and come up from the ground, and the bodies of water are beginning to thaw. You may come across a pond at this point. When I was little, it was great fun to go to the ponds and to find these globs on the edges of the pond, there’d be these big chunks of goop, and the game was to find the biggest one. You can imagine you go to the pond, and you find one of these, and maybe you lift it out of the water, and you notice this glob is actually a lot of small orbs, and in the center of each orb is a smaller dark, almost black, orb and you’ll set it back into the water. Maybe you’ll go on another walk a couple of weeks later, and you may find the same glob, but there’s no longer the same orb in the center, but in the water you’ll see from a couple dozen to a couple hundred of these small tadpoles in the water. They are very fishlike. They have a spherical body, and a mouth and little eyes on the sides of their head and a finned tail, and they move very quickly. and they’re living into their environment and feeding on plant life. Around here I think all frogs feed on plant life, but that is not the case for some of them. As the water warms, a few months go by, and a good deal of tadpoles stay in the form of a tadpole; for some it is up to two to three years. Then the frog will begin to appear, coming out of the tadpole. And it’s amazing, because they don’t lose the tail, as you said, it gets sucked in, digested into the body, and they rebuild and recycle their entire bodies to become this frog. And the frog, as you know, makes noise, yet the tadpole doesn’t have vocal cords, and the frog will make a whole chorus of noise, so it also hears. It’s developing ears and vocal cords. The eyes become bulbous on top of the head, and they start developing hind legs, having four legs, and the tail disappears into the body. It will begin to eat things other than just plant life, like insects, and for that it will need a tongue and a whole new digestive system. Which is insane! Because the big question is, how and why does it do this? 

Towards the end of the first chapter you talk about how science tries to separate out this “activity.” They will point out that “It’s just the DNA that’s doing it” or “It’s the hormones!” But you really go into the fact that all creatures that are developing will have hormones and DNA but no tadpole will grow up to become a horse or a cow or anything like that, it’s going to become a frog, and emerge from this tadpole. So, I’m wondering, why do you think in science they separate out this activity? What is the point of trying to separate out the environment and activity, instead of viewing the frog as a being in relationship with its life process and environment?

CH: That’s an interesting question. It’s a fact that when you study biology, physiology, and developmental processes today, people raise the question—and you’re supposed to think in this way—what causes something to happen? The cause needs to be something that you can determine, that without it, the process doesn’t happen, or if you change it, the process goes differently. These are called in biology today the underlying mechanisms or a mechanistic explanation. There is an urge that has arisen in the history of science, in modern science, to look for causes in this way in biology. It’s almost taken for granted that this is what science is. It’s presupposed that if you’re doing biology, that’s what you’re doing. You’re looking for the causes, and the causes are discreet physical entities. One imagines DNA or thyroid hormone as something that is in the organism and when the genes are active in a particular way, or when the thyroid hormone is secreted, they initiate the process of metamorphosis in the frog. And, I don’t think anyone could deny that and there have been lots of experiments to show that. Scientists then talk about causes.

It’s also the case that thyroid hormone does not have the same effect in different organs of the animal. So, there is always a sort of conversation with itself, where a substance arises, and in that relationship some organs do this and some organs do that, all in relationship with the fact that this is now an organism that is in transformation. It seems to me that the search for causes limits our understanding. You’ll find interesting things, but, what one finds becomes for me part of the overall picture of how something develops. Just because you can manipulate metamorphosis by changing the hormones does not mean you understand the integrated nature of the transformation from tadpole to frog. To understand that you have to look at all the phenomena in their interrelations, otherwise, for me, it is not understanding. It is the ability to manipulate. And, those are two different things.

SA: And it sounds like it comes to being because of its relationship to the environment, naturally. Even if we can use thyroid hormone as some causal agent, to manipulate or cause transformation, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to understand how this arose through time and space, this being in relationship to its environment. 

CH: That’s right.

EH: I think you touch on that when you talk about a desert frog of some sort that has tadpoles, and some of them, from the same mother, will become carnivorous and feed on tiny shrimp.

CH: In the desert!

EH: Yeah, in the desert! There are shrimp in puddles and some of these tadpoles will become carnivorous and feed on these shrimp, and sometimes other tadpoles of the same family. And if there aren’t enough shrimp in the pond, or the body of water, that same tadpole may change its diet and go back to eating algae again.

CH: And it changes its whole form too. If they start feeding on shrimp they become different from those that start feeding on algae. It’s the same species. There is a remarkable plasticity in relation to the environment that they’re living in. That’s an extreme example of very interesting frogs that are called spadefoot toads for some reason. They live in Arizona and northern Mexico and places like that. They live at least nine months under the ground as adult frogs, usually in dry areas, and when it gets a little bit wet they come up and lay their eggs—quickly. All this happens really fast in a puddle that’s going to dry up soon. So, it’s a remarkable adaptation to circumstances.

EH: That really touches on the relationship the frog has to its environment. If you were to look at that from the perspective of hormones or DNA, there’s not really a solid explanation for that. It seems it’s really about the tadpole and frog as a being, and how it exists and will be changed at all times by its environment.

“Scientists feel that what they call “causes” are explanations of the phenomena… That’s what they call an explanation? It doesn’t satisfy me.”

CH: And certainly you could learn something by looking at the hormones, by looking at the DNA. I’m never against that kind of inquiry. Because you found x, y, or z, and you change one of those factors and the process changes, does not mean you are understanding the whole process. Scientists feel that what they call “causes” are explanations of the phenomena. For good or bad reasons, this has never made sense to me. It never made sense to me, from ninth grade on; that’s when I remember thinking about this for the first time. That’s what they call an explanation? It doesn’t satisfy me. There is an interesting issue there: What we feel to be adequate as an explanation. I speak more about understanding. It starts when I feel like I’ve entered into the web of relationships to a degree, that I get a little bit of a sense of what’s overall going on. Of course not everything, but something.

SA: Right, and this leads into the next section of the book that was for me really riveting. You give this great portrayal of the frog, which seems distinct from other kinds of literature that might analyze the frog in a reductive way, and one might think, “How have you, and others, come to this way of being in relationship to the frog, such that you begin to perceive the activity?” What are these interrelating factors that actually make a thing what it is, that create and define metamorphoses, give the ability for something to metamorphose? As opposed to saying, “The thyroid hormones have caused this.” 
You say at the end of the second chapter: “A science of beings moves beyond certain habits of mind that constrain our perception and understanding, it requires a different way of researching than is prevalent today. When nature becomes a presence and we have been touched by another being, we also honor that presence, that being. This connection forms the basis for greater insight, and importantly, for an ethical relationship to the natural world. A science of beings is a science that connects.”
I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the role, and the necessity, of this intimacy in connection to the beings that we’re studying, and especially to the 7-fold process in that chapter that you describe as a biology of being? This seems like a paradigm that has these incremental layers that bring us into this form of relationship, this form of connection. Why is that relationship and connection so important to a developing science?

CH: It’s an interesting question, and not so easy to answer. While you were speaking, I was thinking: There are people who are in one way very materialistic in thinking about things, really dedicated to seeking cause-and-effect explanations, and they have the most warm-hearted relationship to animals and plants, and are proponents of biodiversity and really good people. Right? And, sometimes I feel a little bit of a disconnect between their thoughts and their feelings. Maybe they have a greater intimacy with animals than I have, because they’re field biologists and are always out there with them, and love it, and that’s great!  On the other hand, if you ask them to explain the things, it's as if the animal turns into a complex mechanism. That discrepancy always felt wrong to me. I felt I could not see the things the way they are if I make them into a mechanism. I don’t deny that people who have the more mechanistic view can’t have a relationship. But the relationship is not enough. That’s interesting, right? It’s not enough. Certainly, it is  a presupposition to be a good person in the world—to honor the other. It is really important! But then: Can I honor it to a degree that I’m really willing to transform my way of knowing to adapt to the way the creature is showing itself? Or am I not doing that because I’m imposing a certain framework on it? I think that kind of sensitivity is what’s key. That’s why in some contexts I speak of this approach as a dialogue, as a conversation. You are listening—not literally—but you are listening to what’s trying to show itself there, and then you’re adapting your way of knowing to what you’re discovering. That’s an ongoing dialectical process that you engage in. You are becoming different, and your way of knowing is becoming different as you’re engaging. 

SA: So, maybe not step by step, but as a first principle, there’s this engagement. You are getting to know a being, you’re seeing it, you’re seeing its activity, you’re seeing its form. And then you begin to free yourself, the second principle, from the mental constraints, the boundaries, the things that we’ve predetermined, so that you can go back and engage with it again. To see more, see a little bit more. Then you begin to picture in your mind, a third principle. What is this being? So it begins to live in you, internally we start to develop, in this case, a “frogness.” So that each time we come back to this being of the frog, we get to see a little bit more because, in a way, we’re beginning to speak its language. Then we begin to compare. In this chapter you also compare the frog with the salamanders, the caecilians.

CH: The caecilians are wormlike amphibians that are quite strange, that you’ve never seen—and I’ve never seen—they are described in the literature. 

SA: I was reading this and was like: “Where do these exist, I don’t think this is real.”

CH: They’re evidently real!

SA: So you begin to compare, because by comparing the frog with other beings in the same family more and more distinctions are beginning to pile up. We’re developing this memory of what it means to be a frog. Then the fifth principle, intuition. The intuition that begins to reveal things about the animal that we couldn’t have seen if we were just studying the mechanisms.

CH: Yes.

SA: And that feels really important and related to what you were saying—that an intimacy to the frog develops, like “I love the frog!” This isn’t quite enough. When we begin to actually speak the language of the frog, and intuit the frog, we begin to know more about the frog. And that becomes a science that instead of getting deeper and deeper mechanistically into what it means to be a frog, we begin to intuit the activity, things we couldn’t have seen before. And then we have the ability to portray it, another principal, for others, so they can access these intuitions for themselves. You mention that even if we portray a being, that doesn’t mean that through a portrayal that we’re actually giving someone knowledge, or that we’re giving someone the experience of what a frog is. We’re just creating almost an architecture, or an experience, where someone can, of their own volition, of their own capacities, decide for themselves what a frog is. And you say this requires some finesse—how to portray something well. And then, we can go back—not just as scientists and people practicing this method, but also as someone who has maybe read one of your portrayals—go back to the frog again and see more and more. So this really is a developing process. It sounds like in the traditional mechanistic scientific community there are, gradually, more who are seeing the limitations of strictly reductive research, but still something is missing.

CH: Yes, and I think a lot of scientists who are doing this kind of work carry these things that I’m trying to work with in a more unconscious way. They’re synthesizing, they’re seeing relationships, they’re seeing things in a more holistic way than they are perhaps articulating—and that they’re, very frankly, allowed to articulate, right? If you want to get a scientific article published, you have to do it in a very particular way. Otherwise, you’re gone. If you’re going to be an academic, you’ve got to publish, or you will perish. And, so, you’ve got to fit a specific form.  And there are so many wonderful, really incredible people studying animals and plants around the world, that are not only full of heart, but are also full of observations, and the understanding of relationships. Unfortunately, there is a superstructure throughout the scientific community, and through what has become tradition, that everything has to be interpreted in a certain way if it is going to be accepted by the community. So there’s a certain sadness that I have about that. But I don’t want to be critical of the individuals doing that work, because they’re doing good work. I mean, you can have your questions, for example, about animal experimentation and all these kind of things. I have my big questions. You know, what are we doing to animals in laboratories to prove something, messing around with their brains, or this, or that? You can have real questions about that kind of work. 

Stefan and Criag outside the Nature Institute.jpg

EH: Why do you think it’s important for this way of viewing animals as beings to be, I guess, permeated into the world of  science, and what do you think the effects in a societal way would be if scientists were allowed to approach these matters with heart first?

“This turning towards the concrete in the world and training our capacities to be able to deal with complex, dynamic situations is, I think, where we need to go as humanity.”

CH: I think we would simply become better and better at always understanding things in their dynamic relations. That’s what it’s about. Ecology as a science is the science of relationships. And yet, it has become, for example, so data driven. Where you’re starting with such high level abstractions, and then the only things that you can say relate to data that is deemed statistically significant. So, you have a statistical analysis of something, and say, “well, that may be a trend.” A statistical trend towards this or that. You can’t say anything really about the individual case. Right? And so this turning towards the concrete in the world and training our capacities to be able to deal with complex, dynamic situations is, I think, where we need to go as humanity. And this is one way to help develop those capacities. That’s the one side. I think we just need more and more of those kinds of capacities in order to address how we are in the world, and what we’re doing with the world.

On the other side, I just think if people were learning biology more in this way there would be more of a sense of the fact that this is a planet that we should be taking care of and not exploiting. There is also a danger in environmental classes, and in schools, of focusing children too early on all the problems we’re causing rather than first letting them get a sense for the wonders of the world, to let them fall in love with the world concretely. To know the world. I think this is especially important today where we are so screen focused. That we actually have hands-on, minds-on, senses-on experiences of the natural world. So that we’re rooted in the world. In this world. Not only rooted in Google and Facebook. 

SA: This feels like the perfect transition into the last section of the book where you begin to tackle the condensation of the beings of the world into symbols, into things. For instance, the idea that we can determine or  say, “The human being comes from the chimpanzee.” Why would we say such a thing? Do we even have evidence to say something like this? You begin to look at this idea that none of the specific traits in the human, none of the activity of the human, can you actually find in the fossil record of the chimpanzee. When we look at the fossil record, the picture only grows in complexity. It doesn’t become more clear. So, why would we say something like “human beings come from chimpanzees,” or, that “the frog comes from the tadpole,” when nothing of the frog exists within the tadpole? It sounds like this condensing of the educational experience to this symbolic, data driven process, it’s almost that that’s the only option. We can only really see the physical, skeletal remains, “that’s what we must come from.”

EH: It really separates out beings themselves. If you look at a fossil, you’re just looking at it like it’s a thing, not as a unique part of history and evolution.

SA: So then you start to explore a polarity. We have evidence of the created being in the form of, for instance, a fossil, or, for instance, when looking at a tadpole and just seeing, “Okay here’s a tadpole and here’s a fog.” Just the structure and, of course, there are mechanical realities to that, and you make sure to say you’re advocating for a science that doesn’t throw out research that is looking into things like the thyroid hormone. But on the other side of this polarity, there’s what you call, a “creative being, creative activity, agency, a being at work.” And anytime you focus on the one side of this polarity you start to lose the picture of what a being really is. Could you define and contextualize what these three phrases mean—creative activity, agency, a being-at-work?

CH: No, I can’t define them.

SA: I was expecting this! Because right after he says this, he says, “well, language isn’t important!”  But, then these phrases appear over and over! They do seem indicative of a way of thinking that’s important.

“We’re forming, our bodies are forming through activity that achieves form, and the forms are always being re-formed. Every organismic process is like this.”

CH: You remember we talked about the beaver twelve days ago. I gave a portrayal of the beaver and then we looked at the teeth, the growing incisors, and how the incisors continue to grow, and at the same time they’re being worn down constantly as the animal is gnawing. I don’t remember who of you it was that realized, “the animal is a kind of activity.” It is “formed," but it’s also always “forming.” Think of what we just talked about this morning with human development in the bones, for instance the feet. We’re forming, our bodies are forming through activity that achieves form, and the forms are always being re-formed. Every organismic process is like this. The re-formation is slow, or it can be rapid, like in the development of the tadpole to the frog, where everything gets broken down and reorganized within a week. That this aquatic creature becomes that hopping creature. So this is where, if you follow the processes, you begin to see the animal is everywhere activity. It’s everywhere activity. Plants are activity in their own way too. It’s a different story, but we’re focusing on animals here. So, everywhere you can look, at every structure—as reflection of an activity. The skin is continually being replaced. We have all new red blood cells within 120 days. So, ongoing activity of the organism: that’s the one side. That’s what I’m calling agency, or using “creative activity,” which sometimes rubs people the wrong way—the creative part, I’ll come back to that in a second. 

“Being-at-work” is a translation of Aristotle. That I got from an interesting newer translation of Aristotle by a person named Joe Sachs. He translates Aristotle’s term “energeia,” (where we get “energy” from) as “being at work.” An organism is a being-at-work. A being is a doing. To be a human being is to be a doing. To be a frog is to be a doing frog. 

But, it’s also a formed frog. So, that’s what you were saying is the polarity, right? Because if I only think activity all the time, then I lose track of the fact that I wake up tomorrow and I’ve still got the same feet, I’ve got the same fingerprints. There’s something that stays somewhat the same. But, it’s staying the same, not because it’s some dead architecture, but because—not because, that’s not even the right word, it’s not a because—its “staying the same” is being continually created. And this is what Aristotle called “entelechy.” The entelechy, it’s something Sachs translates as “being-at-work-staying-itself.” It’s ingenious the way he translated this actually. It’s much more concrete than just saying “entelechy,” a term that might lead you to think of some “thing,” rather than a doing. The organism is an active being, always at work. 

Why is this important? Because in the way we look at evolution, we have always a tendency to look at it from the point of view of the past.  And also in development: “The tadpole turned into the frog” or “the ape, or monkey, turned into Ardipithecus, and  Ardipithecus turned into Australopithecus, etc.” So you’re always looking at a kind of molding from the past. When you’re looking at mechanisms, the past is always determining the present. Right? It’s always past oriented. The moment you start looking at activity, then you’re seeing—you know—the frog is something new. When something starts to walk upright and has a skeleton for uprightness, that’s new. You cannot deduce that from the past. There’s no way to get from the study alone of a creature that is not yet upright and is monkey-like to the form of the upright posture. You could not know from those early “Lucy”-type skulls (Australopithecus afarensis), what the modern human skull is going to look like. It’s not in there. So, where does it come from? Does the author answer that question? [laughing] I don’t think so.

SA: Well, I think it’s interesting. What you’re characterizing is a physical ancestor. There is something that came before us. That determined in many ways the shape we could take and the boundaries that we would meet in our development. However, there’s something else, that, as you say, did not come from what came before us. It manifested within the stream of life that we are the latest aspect of. And, that that’s a really important reframing of the process. And while the answer to that question may still be unanswered, the fact that we’re now looking at it from this new perspective, that is living, maybe we’ll start to find, within the complexity of the growing fossil record, maybe, instead of developing more confusion and making more and more theoretical claims, we’ll begin to find more and more life and meaning. We’ll begin to know ourselves a little bit more, actually. 

CH: Right. Thank you. That was nicely put.

EH: At the conclusion of the third chapter, before the acknowledgments, there’s a passage that we felt brought everything together and raised some really good questions:

“When we study evolution, we are consciously connecting with the whole of life—the life, with which we are also connected through evolution. In this sense, evolution is reflecting back on itself in the minds of human beings. But, this reflection itself is a creative activity; it is not a given. The more I study evolution, the more I see the boundaries we put in the way of an expansive and deeper understanding. But I also see that we can move beyond those boundaries. It becomes ever clearer that our understanding of evolution will evolve to the degree that we evolve in our capacity to see evolution as a creative activity.”

SA: This just feels like a mic drop statement. And also like a meditation. I’d like you to talk about it. When I first read this, I was like, “What?” Then I read it again, and I was like, “Wow.” In other words, to the extent that we’re looking at the activity in life, and not just the created being, or, for instance, the fossil record, the material mechanisms of something; to the extent that we’re recognizing the activity surrounding us in our interrelationships, we are evolution looking at itself, reflecting on itself. And that is new. This is not just for the process of developing a new “biology of beings,” or a new science, but simply to know what it means to be human. And this is a deep revelation, that could be philosophical. It could almost be borderline spiritual. To the extent that we develop a process, a lifestyle or a method of science where we see this as a concrete reality. We are evolution, the activity of evolution, looking at itself. That’s pretty wild, right? 

EH: Existential.

CH: Pretty wild.

SA: Want to say something about that? Where that came from?

CH: No! I think we’ve got three more days in our course, right? Next week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And we need to come back to this in some way, shape, or form. This little book was a breakthrough for me. I got somewhere where I hadn’t been before. I gained an orientation to questions I’d been carrying for about thirty years. I got some little openings. I’m making some statements that are new territory. 

Sculpting during class on Evolution and Morphology with Craig Holdrege.jpg

SA: Well, I love this statement, because it’s really hopeful. When I read that statement, I just feel like, “Yeah, we’re going to overcome our boundaries!” Right? The same way the frog is manifesting, overcoming, dissolving the boundaries of the tadpole. We can overcome and dissolve the boundaries we currently experience as our way of relating to the world. So, that’s really hopeful.

CH: Yes, that’s very true. We can keep going. We can become different. 

Bridgework and the Spell of Hilma af Klint’s Contemplative Botany

In the last few years, along with many others, I have had the opportunity to begin my acquaintance with Hilma af Klint. Her introduction to my life was the exhibit of her epic paintings at the Guggenheim.[1]  The scale of the venue, and some of the first paintings on display, evoked the sublime and majestic. The thoughtful curation imbued the Guggenheim with an intelligent and bright atmosphere. Many of the paintings, particularly some of the large ones, radiated a festive mood. What was intriguing, and puzzling enough for me to want to explore further, was not my experience at the exhibit but what happened in the year that followed. The most outwardly striking and, one would assume, memorable works did not stay with me. Instead, some smaller and seemingly less dazzling pieces remained in my consciousness over this last year as companions. I had the feeling I had connected with something infinitely intriguing, and somehow exquisite, in these little pieces. Looking back on the sensorial cacophony of the exhibit, it is mysterious how these little ones endured. They were a few naturalistic watercolor presentations of plants and some abstract pieces in the method of wet paint on wet paper. 

af Klint's Esoteric Botany

In the weeks that followed I read articles about her life and work and met people who had also visited the exhibit and I began to note this mysterious distillation within me. It was only later that a sharper focus came about. This happened recently when I had the chance to see some of her work exhibited in Hudson at the Lightforms Art Center, where I also attended a lecture by the art historian David Adams.[2]  Late in the lecture Adams turned to af Klint’s “Spiritual-Scientific” efforts in botany. These were presented in a notebook she dedicated to botanical studies. She developed a method consisting in a series of observational approaches to plants that resulted in detailed and elaborate visual renditions, much like those I had seen at the Guggenheim. 

As an artist, af Klint was both naturally gifted and highly trained. She was able to surrender to the detail and specificity of the external contours of the plant and turn inward and eliminate the sensorial impressions while practicing openness and receptivity. She would close down the senses while remaining receptive to sensing. In this attention, this open space, af Klint practiced observing. Obviously, she was interpreting what she encountered in this space as a revelation of the plants themselves. She was working toward a contemplative botany. Her notebooks of “Spiritual-Scientific” botanical studies contain such detailed realistic renditions, various abstract presentations, and notes expressing her experiences of the character and qualities of the individual plants. Driven, in part, perhaps, by her love of exploration and learning, she also felt these insights could be of therapeutic significance. 

Af Klint, Violets.jpg

The curators at the Guggenheim noted the significant place Rudolf Steiner played in af Klint’s life. Steiner's influence led to a shift in style and method, and, in part, to these experiments in contemplative botany. Adams pointed out that these plant studies coincided with a decade in af Klint’s life that included frequent stays at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, a kind of independent university Steiner established dedicated to the pursuit of spiritual, contemplative science. One characteristic of the contemplative path he encouraged was that clear thinking and fidelity to sensorial experience was an absolute pre-requisite to contemplative research. “The first requirement for understanding the subtle worlds is the most scrupulous veracity in regard to the experiences of the senses. Those who are not strictly accurate about these experiences can have no true understanding of the subtle worlds.”[3]  After visiting the Guggenheim I was surprised that it was the naturalistic watercolors that had most moved me. I felt somehow that they revealed an enchantment with the earth. It makes sense to me then that Steiner’s empirically oriented contemplative efforts would have rung true for af Klint.  

Lightforms+Hilme+Opening.jpg

After visiting the exhibit at Lightforms I continued to dwell on her botanical studies, both naturalistic and contemplative. I came to appreciate the dual fidelity to the earthly experience and to the more subtle, less bounded fields of consciousness. This also shed light on my experience of much of her other work. Many of the pieces resulting from her mediumistic practices were sublime, in the way I often feel about outer space. They have an airless majesty. It is the grandiose with no integration of the miniscule. It is the infinite without the exquisite. It is a cosmos with no micro-cosmos. In some strange way, they tend toward something eerie, as if they opened into a world truly separate from the earth, separate from humanity. But when she turns her attention, love, and care toward plants, I feel reassured. I sense this is connected to why her botanical studies, and the later contemplative studies, stood out to me in the Guggenheim. The Ouija board quality of much of the other work gave it something of a spooky character, something superstitious. But then, why should I feel mediumistic work to be superstition but not “esoteric botany”? Is this nothing more than a quirky prejudice on my part? Why do I feel that her esoteric botany is a kind of unconventional empiricism?

Bridges between East and West

The truth is that I find myself on a perpetual search for individuals who are attaining an integration of outer observation and contemplative experience. In this article I will call this "bridgework"—the striving to balance two poles in human nature that seem to constantly escape each other. 

Bridgework has been a central part of some of the most advanced contemporary research in cognitive science. At the Mind and Life Institute, for instance, advanced contemplatives and western neuroscientists have come together to integrate these two horizons of human experience. Evan Thompson has described how the meetings between highly trained western scientists and highly trained Tibetan Buddhists challenged both research communities to practice open mindedness. The western researchers were extremely skeptical of the possibility of body free consciousness. The Buddhists were extremely skeptical of the notion that all consciousness is dependent on a nervous system, or the physical body. The Dalai Lama, who has been centrally involved in the work of the Institute, encouraged his fellow contemplatives to suspend judgment and entertain the propositions of western science. At the same time, scientists like Arthur Zajonc argued for open-mindedness among the western scientists given what is today still an enigmatic riddle, namely the relationship between consciousness and the body.[4]  The scientists had to concede a point understood by Buddhist philosophy, namely that “consciousness has a cognitive primacy that materialism fails to see. There’s no way to step outside consciousness to measure it against something else.”[5] 

Fully aware of this insight, for centuries Tibetan contemplatives have developed a phenomenology of experience that involves subtle abilities to discern different varieties of awareness. The ultimate state of mind, the end goal of the contemplative, is a state of mind that has traditionally been associated with bodily death, or consciousness undetermined by the body. In the end, both groups worked to suspend their judgments, practicing open-mindedness toward the veracity of each perspective. And weaving between these two perspectives I sense again the intriguing character of bridgework that drew me to af Klint’s striving to unite judgments totally surrendered to the senses and contemplative experiences that can be fostered through meditation. Thompson describes the two major enemies of bridgework, regressive tendencies of our time, as religious extremism and scientific reductionism. 

Clearly, many will see contemplative botany as old wine in new bottles. We have to expect knowledge practices exploring horizons of subtle experience as participation in spiritual dimensions of the universe will be seen, by some, as hopelessly subjective. This is just an instance of perennial western fascination with exotic and unfounded beliefs from other cultures. Goethe once said that a person who only knows their mother tongue knows no language at all. More recently, Marilynne Robinson wrote that “A student of Greek or German begins to understand that languages both constrain and enable the thought of those who speak them. Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal a mystery. The one great lesson we can take from the study of any civilization is the appropriateness of reverence, of awe, and of pity, too.”[6]  

The dialogue of the Mind and Life Institute resonates with this strain. Does this not reveal something of the mutual respect between the Dalai Lama and Arthur Zajonc? The Dalai Lama, and the Tibetan people, have been such emissaries for many. This is, of course, largely through their recent tragic history. What has come to the West with the political refugees of Tibet is connected to great cultural happenings in Asia, particularly China. And, even as globalization continues to unfold, it is remarkable how shallow our understandings are of Asia, how rickety our bridgework. 

These last weeks, along with many in the world, I have been largely at home due to Covid-19. In the news I have read about how some Chinese Americans have been bullied in the USA as the virus spreads. I have read about the suppression of the free flow of inspiration and the gag orders placed on doctors in China. Few may feel awe toward the Chinese, or reverence, though perhaps pity. We should, however, remember that communism is a fruit, perhaps bitter, of European materialism. As necessary as it is to associate communism with China today, we look more deeply into a mirror than we may know when we see it in the East.  

I have discovered awe, reverence, and pity for China through one of her greatest emissaries, Francois Cheng. It is likely you have never heard of him. Cheng is at home in the western canon, as in the Chinese. While he works translating Chinese into French, his more profound, emissarial translation weaves between Chinese and Western worldviews. We have the good fortune that his publications on Chinese poetry and visual art, his novels, and his recent publications on beauty and death, are in part available in English. Cheng’s estimations of the subtle and creative horizons of experience are imbued with the same feeling of reality as rain, red oaks, and field stones. 

It is interesting to consider af Klint’s contemplative botany with Cheng looking over one’s shoulder, so to say. For Cheng it is absolutely clear that the subtle experiences of visual artists are not simply subjective fictions, but participation in spiritual fields of objective character. Through a meditation on Western experiences of Chinese composition he presents this as indigenous to Chinese experience: 

“For the Western novice, whose eye is used to regarding works in which the subjects are represented in the foreground, thus relegating the landscape to the background, this figure is completely lost, drowned in the great whole. But that is not how the Chinese mind apprehends things. The figure in the landscape is always judiciously located: he is in the process of contemplating the landscape, playing the zither, or conversing with a friend. But after a moment, if we linger on him, we cannot fail to put ourselves in his place, and we realize that he is the pivot around which the landscape is organized and turns, that it is through him we are seeing the landscape. Better yet, he is the awakened eye and the beating heart of the landscape. Once again, humans are not those external beings who build their sandcastle on a deserted beach. They are the most sensible, vital part of the living universe; it is to them that nature whispers its most constant desires, its deepest secrets. Thus a reversal in perspective is taking effect. At the same time as the human becomes the landscape’s interior, so the landscape becomes the interior of man.”
— François Cheng. The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation. [7]

Cheng writes that those who practiced calligraphy or t’ai chi did not “doubt that the breath that enlivens them, released from the blank page by the brush stroke or from thin air by the gesture, is identical to the breath that has moved the stars since the Origin.”[8] With inner agility Cheng explores Chan landscape painting doing bridgework all along. He uncovers the filial experiences of Cezanne in the landscape, quoting in turn Lao Tzu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Cheng has learned his mother tongue by learning another. His careful articulations, so sensitive to Western prejudices and insights, culminate in personal clarity. He emerges “resolutely in the order of life,” which is not an epiphenomenon, for it is “contained in the advent of the universe. And the mind, which bears this principle, is not a simple derivative of matter. It partakes in the Origin, and thus of the whole process of the appearance of life, which strikes us with its astounding complexity.”[9]  How ready we are to brush this lyricism aside with gruff gestures common on either shore of the Atlantic today! Such is our loss and short-sightedness. For even among our philosophers of science it has indeed become clear that “There’s no way to step outside consciousness to measure it against something else.” 

One characteristic feature of Cheng’s explorations of art is that they refuse to be colonized by the limited significance western thinking has granted beauty. Just as painting is connected to cosmology, it is connected to human birth and death. The Chan painter, who moves in the subtle fields of breath, directs attention to the so-called dead. The dead are the initiated who “are in a position to rethink and relive life differently, to measure life by the yardstick of eternity.” Their murmurings reach us “infinitely moving and illuminating, murmers that well up from the heart, words close to the essence, as though filtered by the great test. Because with the dead we gain by remaining all ears.”[10]  Cheng points to a part of the human constitution that does not suggest an ultimate dependence on the physical constitution. 

WANG, Meng Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains.jpg

More Bridges Needed! (Death, Consciousness, Science, Spirit)

Cheng’s meditations on Death remind me of bridgework in a very different dialect. It is the work of one of the preeminent western authorities on medical resuscitation, Sam Parnia. In 2013, when he published Erasing Death, he presented the current state of research that indicates our notion of death requires rethinking. This was largely illumined by the intensification of serious efforts and research in resuscitation that have emerged over the last fifty years. Death has traditionally been associated with the cessation of the heart. Parnia describes how the most recent science requires us to conceive of death unfolding over multiple hours, and possibly days. The cessation of brain activity, moreover, does not necessarily relate to either the end of conscious experience, or the inevitability of brain damage. There is also the puzzling fact that consciousness, and memory formation, appears to continue in countless cases after the cessation of electrical activity and what is usually considered brain function. Decades into a career studying the process of death, and actively resuscitating people, Parnia suggests the most accurate description of current Western insight into death he has found with a quote by Ostad Elahi, “When a person first dies, he is not yet dead; it is the heart that has stopped functioning. Although his physical faculties have died, the individual organs in his body (such as muscle and skin) each have their own specific powers to keep the organism alive. These powers can remain alive for up to three days, though they can also perish sooner.”[11] 

Parnia? Illustrations_to_Robert_Blair's_The_Grave_,_object_9_The_Soul_Hovering_over_the_Body.jpg

In 2013, Parnia related that his personal experience with around 500 people who had near death experiences, some during extreme resuscitations, had led him to a newly articulated inquiry into death. Parnia writes, “Today, the question of consciousness, psyche, and soul is a completely new area of discovery that, although an enigma, has thankfully become a point of major focus and interest in science. To better explain the scientific situation we find ourselves in, it is as if we have discovered a wholly new type of substance that we can neither account for nor even explain in terms of anything we have ever seen and dealt with before in science.”[12]  Here, in a Western dialect, Parnia suggests the needed openness to a “top down” approach that “considers consciousness, psyche and the soul to be a separate entity that, while undiscovered by science today, is not produced by brain cells and can itself independently modulate brain activity” beside the “down up” approach that views consciousness as a by-product of brain activity. He suggests a major challenge for scientists today, based on the results of their own findings, is to bridge the discourses of science and spiritual belief that have largely excluded one another in recent history. 

Something inside me is hungering for this bridge building: Af Klint’s esoteric botany, Zajonc’s contemplative inquiry, Cheng’s meditations, Parnia’s research. This is not only a matter of curiosity, the consumption of beauty or spiritual thoughts in hours of leisure. It is not simply privileged and idle pastime. It is connected to our immediate social, economic, and political future.

 A friend recently sent me a link to an interview between Steve Paulson and the Dutch philosopher Rob Riemen. Riemen was describing the rise of fascism the world over right now and the unfortunate inability of people to recognize it. Riemen describes how fascism comes from within society, it does not come from without. He suggests one hardly needs a doctorate to understand that the spinning of truth into perpetual propaganda, the inciting divisiveness, fear and hatred will eventually lead to the ignition of self-destruction in a society. Finally he connects fighting fascism with fighting materialism. He provocatively asks, what is truth to those living in the transatlantic countries? What is justice and beauty? What compassion and empathy? The commercial culture of these countries is mostly focused on what is efficient. It is obsessed with the value of productivity, an ongoing materialism that tries to make everything useful. This obsession with usefulness is so characteristic of our particular culture of science and knowing. He closes by stating:

“We can change things, but what we are desperately in need of is a new counterculture. Not a flower power thing [like in 1968], but it will be a culture which brings us back to the recognition of the fact that ‘man does not live by bread alone.’ What makes our life meaningful? How can we have a society which is focused on the common good for everybody, instead of a society which is only focused on what's good for me, me, me.” [13]

Marilynne Robinson recently suggested that a study of legal culture in the USA will reveal two radical theories of human nature, “man, a physical creature to be judged by effects produced in Time; or man, a spiritual creature, to be judged by the development to which he is destined” these “are at the root of all the antagonisms between the spirit of northern and southern institutions.”[14]  And she connects the intimation of the spiritual constitution of the human being with the most inspiring successes of democracy in our history. This throws an intriguing light on the fascist trends described by Riemen. Given the central role of spiritual intimations of the person have played in modern democracy we will need many more bridge builders like af Klint, Thompson, Cheng, and Parnia, especially as our inherited forms of faith and dogma no longer provide the support we require to reach them. 

How are we doing on this front? We can throw a glance toward one of the fastest growing facets of our collective lives, with its capital in Silicon Valley. What a contrasting imagination of human nature we find is being put to work there. It is drawn from behavioralist psychology. In her recent study of surveillance capitalism Shoshana Zuboff has detailed the incessant exploitation of the “consumer’s personality” in the pursuit of greater consumption and sales. That is us, and it is us thinking about us. This involves targeting human frailty in one way or another. This is, of course, being put to work in political propaganda as well. It is justified by the one-sided irrational conception of human nature put forward by the likes of B.F. Skinner, who felt it possible to uncover “computational capabilities that would perfect behavioral prediction and control, enabling perfect knowledge to supplant politics as the means of collective decision making.”[15]  It is a view of human beings that ultimately casts them as incapable of noticing the regularity of their own failures, adopting a paternalistic view. [16] 

The intimations of af Klint’s esoteric botany sent out all these golden threads of connection. Their significance reaches from the moment of death to the meeting of East and West, from shopping on amazon to the rise of fascism. I do believe that it is the need of a new culture (counter culture?) that gives these bridgeworks their particular gravity. It is her seeking the creative in the earth, and clarity in the spirit. When she turns toward the flowers with care, then turns away from them allowing their sensorial specificity to arise in the spirit, I feel the earth itself reveals its nobility. And the deeper implication is that af Klint herself, her subjective activity, participates in bringing the plants to expression in the spirit. It does not only beg the question of spiritual dimensions of the plants, it asks the same of human nature and the rights this nature can inspire in collective life. It involves cultivating intimations of the human being that inspire reverence. It involves the interpenetration of varieties of human experience that usually elide one another. It is a bridge spanning East and West.

Footnotes:

[1] Tracey Bashkoff. Hilma Af Klint: Paintings for the Future. Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018.
[2] https://www.lightformsartcenter.com/david-hilma-lecture
[3] Lecture by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, January 18, 1920, GA 196.
[4] Anne Harrington and Arthur Zajonc. The Dalai Lama at MIT. Harvard University Press, 2006.
[5] Evan Thompson. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. Columbia University Press, 2014, xxxv.
[6] Marilynne Robinson. The Givenness of Things: Essays. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 119.
[7] François Cheng. The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation. Simon and Schuster, 2009, 73.
[8] François Cheng. Five Meditations on Death. Simon and Schuster, 2016, 31.
[9] Ibid., 3.
[10] Ibid., 16.
[11] Parnia, Sam, and Josh Young. Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Harper Collins, 2013, 289.
[12] Ibid., 281.
[13] https://www.ttbook.org/interview/return-and-spread-fascism
[14] Marilynne Robinson. “Which Way to the City on a Hill?,” July 18, 2019. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/which-way-city-hill/.
[15] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 432.
[16] Ibid., 343.