Beyond Boundaries: Thoughts on a Science of the Living
Craig Holdrege and Jon McAlice
From In Context #55 (Spring 2026) | View Article as PDF
This article grew out of our several year inquiry into “plant intelligence.” As our investigations deepened, it became increasingly clear that in order to do justice to the nature of plants we needed not only to expand our thinking more broadly into “intelligence in nature,” but had to move even beyond the boundary of “intelligence” to come to a fuller understanding of how plants, animals, and humans belong with the world, but each in their own unique manner. (1)
Earth Alive?
We typically think of life in terms of living beings — plants, microbes, animals or humans — and tend to focus our inquiries into the nature of life on organisms. This makes sense. Yet, are the boundaries of these creatures at the same time the boundaries of life? Does life stop where organisms end? And where do organisms end?2 There has been much discussion since the Gaia theory was formulated over fifty years ago whether it is justified to consider the Earth as an organism or, more broadly, the Earth as alive.
In an intriguing essay, plant ecologist Stan Rowe criticizes the view that life is “possessed” by organisms and that organisms in a sense provide the parameters within which one can speak about life. He writes:
Just as the living parts of an organism depend on the vitality of the whole [organism], so living organisms depend on the energetics of Planet Earth from which they evolved and by which they are maintained. From an ecological viewpoint Planet Earth, the inclusive supra-organic Ecosphere, is the best and most logical metaphor for “life” in its largest sense. (Rowe 2006, p. 141)
His point is that just as DNA, a neuron, or a liver cannot be considered alive without the context of a whole organism, the life of organisms is in turn wholly dependent on their ecological context. It is an abstraction to separate organisms from their contexts and to view “life” as only encapsulated within them. This leads him to say that we cannot separate the notion of life from that of the planet as a whole. And in the end, this wholeness would have to include at least the vital importance of the sun and the solar system as being part of this living Earth.
Rowe’s perspective can help us to move beyond the limitations of a habitual way of thinking that “life equals organisms and organisms equals life.” He points to the all-important insight that any time we think of an organism as enclosed and bounded, we are dealing with only a partial aspect of its reality, since every living being exists only by virtue of its relatedness to what we call its environment, or more broadly its life context.
In the early twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner outlined an approach to understanding life on Earth as a process of coevolution of the planet and the expressions of life that appear over the course of time (see, e.g., Steiner 1997). Steiner’s characterization of the primacy of relatedness throughout the universe resounds strongly with Rowe’s conception of life as a “supra-organism.” Yet, while Steiner explicitly includes the human being in the wholeness of life evolving, Rowe makes no mention of human consciousness as something integral to the ecology of life. What would a practice of science look like through which we, as thinking human beings, come to recognize and embrace our role within the context of the living world? If we attend from the outset to this relatedness, to belonging together, how does our understanding of nature, life, organisms and earth grow and deepen?
In the following, we explore different aspects of such a practice. In the first two sections, we consider ways of attending to plants and animals that are responsive to how they bring themselves to expression in the world. In the third section, we look more closely at how our experience of and desire to understand the world can be the basis of a more heightened sense of the wholeness of life of which we are part.
Belonging — Plants and Earth
Imagine a windbreak of large white pines. It was planted years ago. The trees have grown tall, their branches wide. They shade the ground beneath them and block our view of the hills beyond. While we can consider them as individual trees, each rising in its own way into the sky, we can also attend to how they are united with the earth. Their trunks broaden as they disappear into the soil where their roots extend down and out into the Earth. An uprooted tree is no longer in any essential sense a tree. It has lost its connection to the soil — to its anchoring, to the water that courses through it, to all the soil minerals and organisms that are essential to its existence. Just as trees are rooted in the soil, so also are they “rooted” in the air and light without which they could not exist. Their green leaves (needles in the case of the pines) spread out into light, take in air through pores, and form chlorophyll and carbon-based substances through the light, air (carbon dioxide), and water. Leaves, light, air, and water are inseparable. Goethe once wrote, “Were the eye not sunlike, how could we behold the light?” (2002, p. 324). (2) So too with leaves. Were they not of light, air, and water, how could they develop through light, air, and water? Just as earth is part of a plant through light, air, water, and minerals, so are plants part of earth in the mantle of unique forms and substances they create around the globe.
This plant mantle of the earth is rich, varied, and highly dynamic. In grasslands the fabric is short and dense, in a tropical rainforest voluminous and many-tiered, and in extreme deserts and high mountains it apparently disappears. Yet, if we think of the oxygen or moisture that plants release into the atmosphere as the extension of plants, then this plant mantle is nowhere bounded or interrupted. When we expand our understanding of plantness to include their activity, then as oxygen and water vapor, they circle the globe and in this respect are not limited to a specific location. Plants also take up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The high uptake of carbon dioxide by land plants in the northern hemisphere from late spring into fall can be recorded not only locally, but also in the weather stations in Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The presence of this extended plant activity is not confined to the land. Phytoplankton consists of the floating plants of the oceans and other water bodies. In the oceans they form, to the naked eye invisible, a kind of “leaf” that is much denser in certain ocean areas close to coasts and almost non-existent in mid-ocean “deserts.” The roles these tiny organisms play in the life of the earth are complex and many-faceted. We find the traces of their past activity imprinted deep in the geology of the earth and its soils. The extended plant activity is apparent as a temporal as well as a spatial reality.
In only one phase of its life does a flowering plant appear as a discrete individual entity — in the seed. Compact, dry, and usually hard-shelled, the seed contains a whole plant in its most contracted form. A small germinal primary root (radicle), cotyledons, and a growing point of the shoot (apical meristem) are all enclosed within the seed coat. They formed while the seed was developing. As long as it remains in seed form, a plant is isolated from most activity of the world surrounding it.
Depending on the species and the conditions it finds itself in, a seed can remain alive for a long time before germinating — in sacred lotus over 1000 years. Its potential comes to realization when it begins relating to specific qualities of the environment. Some seeds need to go through the cold of winter, the heat of a wildfire, or the stomach of an animal before they can germinate. Many seeds require warm, moist soil. When the conditions are right, within in a few days further development can begin. The seed takes in moisture from the soil, tissues inside swell, and the firm seed coat breaks open and the seedling grows and develops.
Its primary root grows downward — toward the centre of the Earth — while the primary shoot (stem) grows upward, away from the centre of the Earth. In taking root, the plant becomes a creature of a specific place and at the same time relates in its growth to the whole of the earth. Imagine all taproots on earth and all upright stems and tree trunks as radii of our spherical earth. It is a powerful image. We see here again the plant’s belongingness to the larger earth as home. This “Earth” includes the heavens above and the soil below. In its polar orientation of shoot and root, the plant expresses its connection to these contrasting realms.
From the perspective of a given environment, we can view the abundance of seeds each plant harbors as a potential. Most seeds do not develop into mature plants. Many decompose and become part of the soil. Seeds and seedlings feed animals. Those that germinate will often die as young plants. In these ways, plants give themselves over to the earth and its life, and in this modified form become part of, and sustain, a place and its organisms.
Typically we say: A plant grows out of the seed. We focus on the necessary presence and activity of living germinal tissue in the seed. We can follow how the seed coat breaks open, the radical emerges and grows into the soil, while the shoot and leaves grow skyward. Clearly, the plant develops out of the seed. This is a “centered” perspective — thinking from a centre outward. It honors the potency of life inherent in every seed.
Yet for the seed to swell and the substance transformations that lead to germination and initial growth, the seed must come into relation with qualities of the environment that support and in part merge into its very existence. We can, therefore, take a “peripheral” perspective — thinking from a broad life context towards a centre. This context has plant-forming potential. We can think of water, warmth, soil, light, and air as potentials that become “plant active” in the seed-environment relation. Water, in the soil, enters the seed or the roots and becomes an integral part the plant’s physiological processes, substances, and structures. From the peripheral perspective, we can justifiably say that the environment develops through the seed into the plant.
This strange formulation can help us from yet another angle to move beyond thinking of life as being enclosed within bodies. What we conceive of as life processes are thinkable only when we have in mind their fundamental belonging to qualities that we habitually picture as “outside of” and “other than” organismic life.
All other life forms — animals, humans, fungi, bacteria — weave in and through the plant mantle of the earth, each in its own way of belonging. Most all of these organisms build up their bodily substance and structures on the basis of plants. Either they feed on plants directly or they eat organisms that themselves feed on plants. (3) Fungi and bacteria are to us humans hardly visible members of Earth. They are all-important in their activity of breaking down organic substance that has been shed — think of leaf litter, dead trees, or animal and human corpses. And they are essential members of plant and animal microbiomes. Here again, we see the interpenetration of what we often consider separate organisms. In the words of early twentieth century physiologist J.S. Haldane:
Just as the life of any individual organism exists only as including within itself what are often called its physical environment, so does its life, when more widely interpreted, include within itself the lives of other organisms, so that these lives are not outside of its own life, though for practical purposes we usually regard separately what we can most readily treat as individual lives. (Haldane 1931, pp. 30–31)
Animal Belonging
When we walk here in upstate New York through a meadow — a small sea of diverse plant life — in the early morning or before dusk, we often encounter numerous white-tailed deer. They are easy to pick out as individual animals. The same holds for the swallows flying overhead and the bumble bees moving from flower to flower.
We cannot really say that we are seeing individual plants in the way we see and can count the 22 deer that are grazing on the field. The meadow’s plant life is more of a unity. Surely, we can see many individual stems with leaves and perhaps flowers, but they all emerge out of the earth. Or, for my vision, disappear into the earth. Plants appear as creatures of the earth out of which they have grown and with which they remain united. That we do not speak of herds of trees or grasses points perhaps to our subliminal awareness of plants as outgrowths of Earth.
Animals, on the other hand, have a clearly circumscribed body, and as a whole move from place to place. The deer flee, white tails raised and waving, as we approach them; the swallows swoop to and from, feeding on the insects they find in their airy world; the bumble bees fly from flower to flower sucking up nectar and gathering pollen.
The vital organs of plants (think of leaves and roots) are embedded in the world. In contrast, animals develop vital inner organs enclosed within their skin. They cannot live from air, water, light, warmth, and minerals alone as plants do. They are lacking capacities that plants have. Animals must feed on plants or other animals and breathe in oxygen. In this way the life of plants extends into animals and belongs to their life.
Animals, however, are open to the world through organs of sense and motion that mediate a new form of belonging to Earth. The internalization of vital organs goes hand in hand with what we can call animal inwardness, which comes to expression as attentiveness, sensations, and drives. This inwardness manifests in all the animal’s doings and, from this perspective, we can think of animals as centered. The deer turns its head to face us, ears upright and oriented in our direction. On the other hand, we need to ask: Where is the deer when it sees us and then bounds away? We see it looking at us — something we’d never say about the grasses and clovers in the meadow. While we cannot know exactly what it perceives as “us” with deer eyes, ears, or nose, we can know that its attention is with us. As a sentient being, an animal is as expansive as its attention reaches.
There is a quality of immediacy apparent in animal perception that is rich with significance. The deer notices us and then flees. Other deer may flee with it, not having perceived us, but rather the fleeing of their fellow. When we are distant enough and lose significance, their attention can turn again to feeding on plants, shaking their ears, scratching their body with a hoof and scattering for a moment the ever-present flies they attract.
Now think of a red fox in what for us is the “same” meadow. It trots along low to the ground. It stops for a moment at a slightly raised spot on a path that goes through the meadow, lifts its leg, and urinates. Then it moves on. It stops again, but this time very differently. It crouches and begins turning its head slightly from side to side. Then it leaps and dives nose first to the ground. Occasionally, it comes up with a vole dangling from its mouth. It moves on, carrying its prey.
The meadow has particular significance or meaning for each animal passing through or inhabiting it. Each animal extends beyond its physical boundary into its perceptual world, a world in which it is also active. We could call this behavioral world of animals a soulscape to emphasize that it is a world of specific meanings and not a world of physical things. James Hillman hints at this meaning-filled perceptual field of animals when he writes: “The oriole doesn’t see a branch, but an occasion for perching; the cat doesn’t see a thing we call an empty box, it sees safe hiding for peering. The bear doesn’t smell honeycomb, but the opportunity for delicious feeding” (Hillman 1996, p. 86). An animal’s soulscape is meaning-filled and rich. It expands and contracts, and the animal is continuously responsive to its perceived surroundings.
Each animal species develops its particular soulscape, centered in its uniquely structured organism, peripherally intersecting with the soulscapes of other animals. The more we form pictures of how different kinds of animals participate in the world, the more we gain entry into what we can call the ensouled life of the planet (see Holdrege, 2021b).
There can be weeks in the winter in upstate New York during which the ground is covered by snow. The temperature can be minus 20 degrees Celsius. The deer enter the meadow and with their hooves scratch a patch, freeing it from snow. There they find some dry grass and forbs that they feed on. They move slowly. At night they tend to congregate under red cedar trees that have a dense crown and are relatively snow-free at their base. The deer feed on their needles and on those of other conifers — plants they would not seek out during other times of the year. How these creatures simply go about their lives in what we consider such harsh conditions is impressive. We never get the sense that they are unsatisfied with their existence, jealous of the bears that are hibernating, or of the birds that flew south in the late summer. They live out their lives in their ways without striving beyond or questioning their existence. This brings us to the riddle of being human.
Human Belonging?
In a fragment penned in the 1780s, Goethe speaks of the quandary that underlies our relationship to nature.
Nature! We are surrounded by her and entwined with her — powerless to leave her, and powerless to enter her more deeply. Unasked and without warning, she takes us up in the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms. (Goethe 2002, p. 45)
Biologically, humans are nature beings. We are immersed in nature, caught up in the “whirl of her dance.” As with plants and animals, there is an immediacy in our relationship with nature. As living organisms, we are dependent on air, warmth, water, light, and on plants and animals.
As thinking beings, however, nature appears as a riddle, difficult to understand. Our way of being in nature is always accompanied by the urge to understand that of which we are a part.
Goethe’s work stands at a crossroads in humanity’s striving to understand the natural world. He believed deeply that nature had something to teach us. In his view, scientific research was not a question of finding explanatory mechanisms, but of learning from the phenomena as they present themselves to the perceiving and thinking human soul. Insight into the creative unfolding of the phenomenal world appeared as “an experience of a higher order” in which conceptual experience illuminates the perceptual in new, often unexpected, ways. What is experienced inside appears congruent with what is perceived “outside.” In the experience of congruence, the quandary arising from the dual aspects of our relationship with nature is momentarily resolved: When our thinking learns to dance nature’s dance, we become creative participants in her unfolding.
At a time when scientific understanding was turning away from the phenomena towards theoretical explanations, Goethe turned towards the phenomena. In doing so he modeled an attitude of scientific inquiry that is rooted in respect for the natural world and based on an unspoken recognition that an inherent continuity exists between human consciousness and the world of sense appearance. This attitudinal divergence — turning away from or turning towards the phenomena — is significant. It marks the emergence of a certain quality of questioning concerning the relationship of the human being and the natural world. It is a questioning that rests on the recognition of the self as a source of individual agency, at once both separate from and connected with the experienced world. In the introduction to his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling speaks of the conundrum that arises:
So long as I myself am identical with Nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life; I appreciate how this universal life of Nature reveals itself in manifold forms, in progressive developments, in gradual approximations to freedom. As soon, however, as I separate myself, and with me everything ideal, from Nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object, and I cease to comprehend how a life outside me can be possible. (Schelling 1988, p. 36)
The young Schelling (he was 22 when the first edition of the Ideas was published in 1797) recognized a relationship between an individual’s inner experience and the ability to apprehend Nature as a living whole. If this relationship is severed, the living whole is replaced by a disconnected array of dead objects. The loss of an inner sense of connectedness blinds us to the living wholeness around us of which we too are part. The Canadian philosopher, Jan Zwicky, points out that the experience of wholeness lies beyond the realm that can be communicated through language “whose aim is to block gestalt comprehension and to foster awareness of the world as a collection of discrete entities whose relations are ordered in causal and logical sequences” (Zwicky 2015, p. 252).
In a short passage from his essays on morphology, Goethe describes a further aspect of the experience of identification with nature that was later elaborated by Rudolf Steiner to provide the basis for future-oriented approaches in the natural sciences:
When we are called to lively observation and begin to hold our own in the struggle with Nature, we first feel a strong drive to master the phenomena. It does not take long, however, before they approach us with such force, that we rightly feel the need to acknowledge their power and revere their influence. As soon as we become convinced of this reciprocal effect, we become aware of a double infinity: In the phenomena, the manifold nature of being and becoming and also living, weaving relationships; in ourselves, the possibility of an infinite development, honing our sensibilities and discernment to generate ever new forms of receiving and responding. (Goethe 2002, p. 52)
In turning towards the phenomena and engaging with them, Goethe recognized a depth in the world of appearance that not only harbored unexpected qualities of living presence or beingness, but also an invitation to expand one’s own capacities of comprehension: The invitation to grow with the phenomena.
As we work to develop a Goethean approach further in the twenty-first century, we too recognize the invitation, yet time and again must acknowledge how difficult it is to take up this invitation. Intellectual thought lets the world appear to us as an aggregate of discrete entities and often overshadows our ability to sense the living relationships that exist between them and ourselves. We are forced to address the question: Does the exercise of intellectual thinking, rooted as it is in formal structures and causal relationships, remove us from an experience of the world in which life reveals itself as a fundamental aspect of reality? That by leading us to focus on what has become, it leaves us unable to grasp the qualitative gestures through which life comes into being? That by casting a stark light on the parts, it blinds us both to the presence of the whole and the role we play within it?
That the way we think about nature changes our sense of relatedness with the natural world has been recognized since the early twentieth century. Max Weber spoke of the sociological effects of the “disenchantment” of nature in 1917 (Weber 1946, pp. 129–156). Later Martin Wagenschein, the German science educator, posited that the more we know about the world scientifically, the less we feel at home in it (Wagenschein 2018). Others were more explicit. Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist, described the scientific endeavor as an alienating and uprooting experience (Weil, 2024; Roth 2014). And in the words of Hannah Arendt, “Earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science” (Arendt 1958, p. 264).
Elements of Practice
Since it is not possible to lose what one never had, the phenomenon of alienation poses the question as to the primacy of separateness or connectedness as the basis for our relationship to the natural world. Our work at The Nature Institute has increasingly been guided by the question: Is it possible to develop a thoughtful scientific relationship to nature that allows us to bring to appearance and articulate the wholeness of life in its many manifestations?
We have realized how important it is to attend to and become more clear about the nature of our lived experience in observing the natural world. This lived experience is the basis for all of our scientific pursuits, yet we hardly attend to it. This awareness is central in the approach and provides the ground for developing its practice. We must, to paraphrase Siri Hustvedt, learn to look at ourselves looking at the world (Hustvedt 2016). Consider the following.
In the middle of spring the meadow buttercups (Ranunculus acris) begin to flower. Here, on the eastern edge of the mid-Hudson Valley, they appear at roughly the same time as the dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and the birdsfoot trefoils (Lotus corniculatus), both of which also bear yellow flowers. Although each of the plants has green leaves and flowers at roughly the same time in the same place, they are easily distinguishable in the arrangement of their leaves, the form and structure of their flowers, and their growth habits. Walking along the road or the edge of the meadow, we can recognize each of them and have no doubt that the perceived characteristics — the particular hue of yellow, the form of the leaves, the growth habit — belong to the plant. We do not experience these individual characteristics as disconnected singular impressions that must be integrated to give a sense of the plant as a whole. Rather, they are different sensory expressions of the whole plant. As long as we meet the plants with full-bodied and attentive experience, we trust that our inner picture of the perceived plant corresponds with the plant itself. If we move around the plant, bend down to look at it more closely, or glimpse it from a distance, the plant shows itself differently. Depending on which perspective we take, it is apparent that our moving around the plant and varying the way we attend to it allows us to see it in new ways, or — if we take the plant’s perspective — allows the plant to show itself to us in a variety of ways.
By varying the ways in which we attend to the plants, we become aware of details we had not noticed before. Smells, textures, the feel of the stem, qualities of stiffness, flexibility, and leaf details vary between the three plants. The flowers of each invite closer attention. We can seek out the plants in different settings — at the edge of the road, amidst tall grass, at the edge of a wooded area. In each setting or habitat, their growth varies, yet each buttercup is clearly a buttercup, each trefoil a trefoil. At no point in these explorations do we have cause to question whether what we are discovering belongs to the plant or not. In fact, the more we discover, the more closely we find ourselves paying attention to the specific appearances of the plant both in space and over time.
Natural science as it has developed over the past 450 years presupposes, yet rejects as subjective, and thus inadmissible, what lies at the beginning of any striving to understand nature: our lived experience of the world. The world that arises through experience is rich with color and shape and sound. There is the smell of fresh mown hay, the taste of asparagus, birdsong before the sunrise. The earth is firm beneath our feet, the sun warm upon our faces. It is the experienced world that moves us to wonder, it is the experienced world that presents riddles and invites us to understand. What appears to be outside us comes to life in us. It moves us, awakens in us the urge to know it better, to understand. If we take the dialogue seriously that unfolds when we turn attentively towards the world, it becomes quite difficult to draw a clear boundary that separates us from the world we are growing to understand. The world we experience and engage with shapes our sense of it and informs how we relate to it going forward.
If we turn our attention to the dialogue that unfolds when we engage intentionally with nature, we discover the reciprocity inherent in it. It is in some ways like the unfolding of a friendship. If we are able to live attentively into another’s way of being in the world, it becomes possible for them to show us the essential nature of that way of being. Something similar occurs when we turn our attention to the other-than-human beings with whom we share the life of our planet. We can begin to know them in ways that bring them closer to us.
The experience of reciprocity in this dialogue — the sense of growing together with the phenomenon — is deepened through the practice of exact sensorial imagination, the conscious inner recreation of the experienced plant. In the case of the trefoil, for example, we choose a specific specimen, a trefoil we observed growing at the rambling edge of a hedgerow. It has grown quite tall, born up by the unmown grass around it. Now no longer in the presence of the plant, we give our entire attention to recalling it with as much exactitude as we can muster. In imagination, we live back into the encounter with this trefoil and picture it as vividly as possible. In doing so, we let the observed plant guide the movement of our picturing. This practice, which accompanies us at every stage of research into the nature of an organism, grows increasingly complex, multifaceted, and sculptural as familiarity and a sense of intimacy with the plant deepens. When we return to the plant, we find that we “see” it differently and, perhaps in response to the shift in our seeing, that the plant shows us things about itself that we were not able to apprehend before.
The intentional intensification of the dialogue between the trefoil and ourselves through the practice of imagination also gives birth to new questions. While some of these pertain to the nature of the plant, there are others that give rise to a growing sense of responsibility. We can begin to wonder whether the way we come to know something is of consequence to the thing that is seen and known. Whether by estranging the act of knowing from the life world, we have lost something that is essential for its wholeness and vitality. The American naturalist Barry Lopez put it this way:
The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world. (Lopez 2022, p. 70)
Thinking with Reality
Lopez’s intuitive recognition of a deep relationship between human attentiveness and the living reality of the world casts light on what is perhaps the most significant challenge in the evolution of scientific thought. The more closely we attend to expressions of inter-relatedness in the natural world and how we as living, thinking beings engage with and participate in them, the more difficult it becomes to take separateness as a fundamental aspect of reality. Earth, plant, animal, human — we are a single living whole. Each of us extends into and takes up the other in our own specific ways. It is difficult to draw the line where one ends and another begins. If we consider earth from this perspective, it is evident that she is as alive as the organisms her presence makes possible.
Rudolf Steiner was among a number of modern thinkers who questioned the validity of excluding human consciousness from an understanding of the wholeness of nature. In his autobiography he writes of the challenge of developing a practice of thinking that corresponds to reality (Steiner 2008, Chap. 22). This is an intentional practice that proceeds from turning towards the phenomena to growing with them through focused attentiveness and finally to bringing them to life within oneself through imagination. The imaginative internalization of phenomena of life awakens within us a world that is ever dynamic and in constant transformation, a world of interrelated movement rich in meaning. Our thinking begins to move with the phenomena. They in turn move us.
In upstate New York, the last of the trefoil blossoms disappear in the middle of September. Their leaves and stalks dry out and turn brown. With the coming of autumn, they disappear from our sense experience of the landscape. Yet they remain very much alive in us as a specific quality of plantness in our experience of the spring and summer. What begins as bodied experience of our natural surroundings lives on as an inner, conceptual experience. With some effort, we can bring the trefoil to life again through our imagination. We can let it grow inwardly in a variety of contexts and, guided by the trefoils we have come to know, experience how trefoil in its wholeness participates in the specific aspects of its extended life world. In this process, the concept of the trefoil takes on sculptural gestural qualities. We can experience it as generative activity.
Developing a thinking that corresponds to the reality of what is alive in the world requires a radical shift in what we might call knowledge practice. As long as we continue to approach nature as though it were “a collection of discrete entities whose relations are ordered in causal and logical sequences” (Zwicky 2015, p. 252), life will remain a riddle. Life is dynamic, responsive, flexible. It requires a thinking that, in Goethe’s words, is “as mobile and malleable as nature herself,” a thinking that does not impose itself on life, but is willing to let itself be guided by the way life manifests.
NOTES
(1) This essay was originally published as a contribution to On the Earth We Want to Live: Anthroposophy’s Contribution to SustainableDevelopment. The entire book is open access and available for use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction under the Creative Commons License.
(2) The source for all the quotations from Goethe in this chapter is one German volume that contains most of his writings on science (see Goethe, 2002, in references). All the translations from the German are ours.
(3) There are also some bacteria that can, similar to plants, create their living substances without feeding on plants, so-called autotrophic bacteria.
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