The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. The Phenomena of Life

[ 1 ] One does not arrive at an understanding of the healthy and diseased human organism if one imagines that the mode of action of some substance ingested with food is simply continued from external nature into the interior of the organism. It is not a question of such a continuation of the effect observed in the substance outside the human organism, but of overcoming it.

[ 2 ] The illusion that the substances of the outside world continue to work in the organism in their own way arises from the fact that this is how it appears to the ordinary chemical way of thinking. The latter, after its investigations, gives itself up to the belief that hydrogen, for example, is present in the organism as it is in external nature, because it is found in the food and drink consumed as nourishment, and then again in the products of excretion: Air, sweat, urine, feces and in the secretions, e.g. bile.

[ 3 ] Today we feel no need to ask what has happened to the hydrogen that appears as hydrogen before it enters the organism and after it leaves it.

[ 4 ] We do not ask: what does that which appears as hydrogen go through in the organism?

[ 5 ] When this question is raised, one is immediately urged to draw attention to the difference between the sleeping and the waking organism. In the sleeping organism, its material essence does not form a basis for the unfolding of conscious and self-conscious experiences. But it does form a basis for the unfolding of life. In this respect the sleeping organism differs from the dead organism. In the latter, the material basis is no longer a basis for life. As long as one sees this difference only in the different composition of the substances in the dead and living organism, one will not make any progress in understanding it.

[ 6 ] Almost half a century ago, the eminent physiologist Du Bois-Reymond pointed out that consciousness could never be explained by the effects of substances. He said that it would never be possible to understand why a certain number of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie, how they lay and will lie, and why they produce the sensation in man through their change of position: I see red; I smell the scent of roses. Because this is so, said Du Bois-Reymond, scientific thinking can never explain the awake person filled with sensations, but only the sleeping person.

[ 7 ] He was under an illusion with this view. He believed that the phenomena of consciousness did not result from the mode of action of substances, but those of life did. In reality, however, one must say, as Du Bois-Reymond did for the phenomena of consciousness, for those of life: Why should it be possible for a number of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms to produce the phenomenon of life by the way they lie, the way they lie, the way they will lie? Observation shows that the phenomena of life have a quite different orientation from those which take place in the inanimate. For the latter we can say that they are dominated by forces that radiate from the essence of matter, from the - relative - center to the periphery. The phenomena of life show the substance to be dominated by forces which act from the outside inwards, towards the - relative - center. In the transition to life, the substance must withdraw from the radiating forces and submit to the incoming ones.

[ 8 ] Now every earthly substance and also earthly process has its radiating forces from the earth and in communion with it. It is such a substance, as chemistry regards it, only as a component of the earth's body. When it comes to life, it must cease to be a mere part of the earth. It steps out of communion with the earth. It is included in the forces that radiate from the extraterrestrial to the earth from all sides. If one sees a substance or process unfolding as life, one must imagine that it withdraws from the forces that act upon it as if from the center of the earth, and that it enters the realm of others who have no center but a circumference.

[ 9 ] These forces, as if striving towards the center of the earth, act from all sides. They would have to dissolve the material of the earthly realm completely without form, tear it apart, if the effects of the extraterrestrial celestial bodies, which modify the dissolution, were not mixed into this force space. We can observe this in the plant. In plants, the substances of the earth are lifted out of the realm of earthly effects. They strive towards the formless. This transition into the formless is modified by the effects of the sun and the like from world space. If this does not work, or works differently, e.g. at night, then the forces that they have from the earth community are stirred up again in the substances. And from the interaction of the earthly and cosmic forces the plant being arises. If one summarizes the area of all that which the substances unfold in the effects of forces under the influence of the earth as the physical, then one will have to designate the forces of a completely different nature, which do not radiate from the earth but radiate into it, with a name that expresses the different nature. Here we find that in the human organization from another side to which we have already referred in the previous chapter. In accordance with an older usage, which has become confused under the influence of the newer, physically oriented way of thinking, we have already designated this part of the human organism as the etheric. We will have to say: the etheric reigns in the vegetable, that is, in that which appears to be alive.

[ 10 ] Inasmuch as the human being is a living being, this etheric also exists in him. But there is also a significant difference in relation to the mere phenomena of life compared to the plant. The plant allows the physical to rule in it when the etheric from the world-space no longer unfolds its effectiveness, as is the case at night when the solar ether ceases to work. The human being only allows the physical to reign in his body in death. In sleep the phenomena of consciousness and self-consciousness disappear; but the phenomena of life remain, even when the solar ether is not at work in the world-space. The plant continually absorbs the etheric forces radiating onto the earth during its life. The human being, however, already carries them within him in an individualized form from his embryonic period. What the plant thus receives from the world, the human being takes from himself during his life, because he has already received it in the womb of the mother for further development. A force that is actually originally cosmic, destined to radiate onto the earth, works out of the lungs or liver. It has undergone a metamorphosis of its direction.

[ 11 ] We will therefore have to say that man carries the etheric within himself in an individualized way. Just as he carries the physical in the individualized form of his physical body and his bodily organs, he also carries the etheric. He has his special etheric body as well as his special physical body. In sleep, this etheric body remains connected to the physical body and gives it life; only in death does it detach itself from it.