Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1523/en

as it were the idea of a comprehensive sense organ that plunges into the sense-darkness of metabolism, withdrawn from consciousness. The concept "mesentery" — which finds mention in the fifth lecture of the Agriculture Course — means something specific, a functional field on which the general translates into a highly specific activity: precisely one that is found in this completed form only in the digestive tract. Its uniqueness arises from the intimate connection with the "I-disposition" discussed in the chapter "The Cow" (pp. 146 ff.). This I-disposition's predisposition within the cow is prefigured in the long path of intensive digestive activity, culminating in rumination. The result of this digesting unlocking of substance is perceived by the serous peritoneum of the mesentery. It radiates as an astral force into the interior of the body and into the bloodstream, and is carried by this stream up into the nerve-sense pole of the head and into the horns set upon it, where it is dammed back. This triggers anew, at a higher level, a consciousness-impulse whose result in turn radiates back into the body cavity and communicates itself, through both serous lamellae of the mesentery, to the contents of the intestine. These contents are now pervaded by forces that have found their way from the cow's current life-activity to its supersensible reality of being. With excretion, this force-potential — the "I-disposition" — enters the outer world. It lends to cattle manure its uniquely enduring fertilising force. This occurrence, arising from the higher being of the cow, may count as a further indication that the peritoneum represents something "general," while the double-lamellar peritoneum of the mesentery is something specific. The latter fulfils, in that "inner heaven" — in the encircled cosmos turned inward — the core task: to mediate the digestive activity of the ruminant to the organism, and from the organism back again to the digestive system, which then becomes manure.