Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/259/en

The organism—with its centre and periphery—as a fundamental formative principle in agriculture, grew out of the naturally given biotopes, the «organisms in natural growth», from the seventh century A.D. onwards. From place to place, it bore a thoroughly individual character. It was an instinctively inspired growth out of the Christianised folk-cultures. With their decline in the course of the Age of the Consciousness Soul, the spiritually impelling force was also lost. The theory of farm management in the 20th century did indeed recognise the meaningful interplay of the farm's different branches into a whole, and called it the farm organism. What the «essential nature» of this whole might be was not questioned. The concept was too powerless to halt the cultural decline of agriculture. Even the ecological movement that emerged in the 1970s, and with it organic farming, could not reawaken the concept of the farm organism to new life. A key to understanding the organism can only be sought in the agent, as a being, that brings it to appearance in bodily self-containment and lives itself forth within this. In the animal, this agent is the animal soul; in the human being, it is the spirit-soul. The animal soul is body-bound; the human spirit-soul has the power, through the three soul activities of thinking, feeling, and willing, to lift itself more and more out of this bondage, to free itself from it. Through this, the ability grows in it to become conscious of itself, to grasp itself in self-knowledge as a creatively active spiritual being, as the self-realising I. In the I, the human being as microcosm bears the spirit-germ within. Through this, he can not only cognise himself and the essential nature of his bodily organism, but also, in this cognition, know himself to be connected with that which partakes of being, which is supersensibly active in nature and the cosmos.