Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/742/en

In intimate connection with the spiritual-cultural initiatives that radiate from biodynamic farms stands practice-near research. After both — teaching and research — gradually detached themselves from agriculture over two hundred years and became academised, agriculture submitted itself to a scientifically-technological progress that directed it from without, losing in the process the self-governance rooted in instinctive folk wisdom. Running counter to this, out of the practice of biodynamic farming there has grown from the very beginning a researching attitude and inner disposition that takes up the traditional methods, transforms them, and makes them the foundation of its further-reaching spiritual aims. This inner disposition cannot content itself with the causal-analytical, quantitative-reductionist methodology of academic research. The research endeavours extend themselves instead onto the qualitative side of perceiving and thinking — namely onto the question of what deeper cognitions are to be gained when the researching gaze turns toward the wholeness of the farm, its members, and all that develops there in living and soul-bearing self-life. Wherever the eye turns, it never sees an isolated thing — it always sees a context in which that thing appears. Only the intellect abstracts from the context the isolated thing and places it before itself in conceptual form. The context grows pale in the process, or falls entirely out of view. That marks the causal-analytical procedure.