75. Eurythmy Performance

Goethe undertook – if I may preface this with something seemingly theoretical, which is, however, not meant theoretically – to recognize the essence of a living being from its form. Well, more than we realize today, human knowledge will come back to this Goethean attempt at a real penetration of the essence of the living, when many prejudices will be stripped from the world view, which is still very much asserted within this world view today. What counts is simply what Goethe published in 1790 in his so vividly and profoundly significant essay, 'Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants'. I would like to emphasize only that Goethe is concerned to explain the individual leaf in its often simple, often more complicated form for the whole plant and, in turn, to explain the whole plant in its inner ideal essence only as a more complicated leaf: The plant as a kind of community of individual, visible plants, which appear as leaves and undergo transformations and metamorphoses. The petals, calyx vessels, stamens and so on are also metamorphoses of the leaf. This living contemplation of the transformation of a single organism, this beholding of the whole living being as a more complicated structure, which is already foreshadowed in the individual organs, is what will one day solve the riddle of the living, when it is further developed.