Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/245/en

Despite all the genuinely admirable achievements of modernity, we must not close our eyes to the fact: we stand on a heap of rubble of the Western-Christian agricultural culture. The usurpation by industrial methods of production has broken its culture-bearing force and since the 1960s of the twentieth century has dug its grave. Yet every death also harbours the seed of a new becoming. This can be grasped when one becomes conscious of the deeper becoming-impulses of the past. A statement of the «Doctor Angelicus», Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), runs: past and future time has, but not the present. — One can plumb this statement further in thought. In the present, both streams of time meet and extinguish one another. The stream of the past dies into form, into the sense-perceptible event. In this form, however, the stream of time from the future quickens as seed. The plant seed makes this event visible. It carries within itself, congealed into the form of the genome, the imprint-stamp of the past. This «geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt» («form imprinted, that living forward develops»), contains a seed that has the potency to open itself to the stream of time from the future. Thus one can say: in the objectification of what appears to the senses lies the moment of death in which the time of the past turns toward the future. Future is past in transformation.

84