Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/782/en

Taking up the derivation of the concepts "agricultural organism" and "farm individuality" (cf. pp. 88 ff.), the dimension becomes clear into which reality of being the farmer is actually working. All the arable and horticultural measures he takes set their point of engagement at the middle member of the "farm individuality" — the soil, whose function, viewed macrocosmically, is comparable to the human diaphragm (Figure 5, p. 90). Just as the diaphragm stands in its rhythmic dynamic in relation to the pulse of the heart and the breathing of the lungs, so too do the soil processes answer to the rhythms that have their origin in the movement-relations of earth and cosmos. Just as the rhythm of day and night lays itself out microcosmically into the polar states of waking and sleeping, so too does the world of nature beings working in concealment experience polar states — on one hand, of being held fast in the fullness of forms as a summer sleep, and on the other, in the passing away of these forms, of being released and becoming self-sufficient as a winter waking. In like manner, the transitions in spring signify a falling asleep and in autumn an awakening. Into this steady transformation in the course of the year the farmer intervenes — with the consequence that no measure resembles another. The continuum within the changing of appearances, to which all cultural measures relate, is the soil and its education toward enduring fertility.