When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 1 - Waldorf Research Institute

qualities is in each case the presupposition for the realization of quite
specific super ordinate qualities.
Thus for example, the properties of pyrite can not be derived from the
properties of iron and sulfur, but the law of pyrite can only realize itself in
already existing iron and sulfur. Or, the regularity of the tertiary protein
structure can not be derived from the regularity of the primary protein
structure, but the tertiary structure can only realize itself if the primary
structure has already been realized.
One should note that the superordinate order has its own content with
respect to the subordinate and coordinated orders and that all these contents
realize themselves by going from an “ante rem” state into an “in re”
state, if the right conditions are present. Therefore: “self-organization” of
nature. Thus the actual effective cause of this self-organization is the effective
law itself. The law carrier or information carrier and the enzyme or other
necessary conditions are not an effective cause but an indispensable cause.
The term “self-organization” is justified because laws are effective realities.
It is not the task of science to reduce (as one says) the characteristics of
all organization planes to the laws or even to the substances of a single plane,
but it is its task to find the laws or contents of information in each in dividual
organizational sphere and then to further investigate the circumstances of
their subordination, superordination, or coordination to or with other
spheres. If one works in this way, then one doesn’t have to reduce (as one
does if one presupposes the central dogma) the entire, wonderful wealth of
living nature and also the inner riches of creatures endowed with soul and
spirit, to this stunted, even though marvelous DNA substance.
The insight into the reality of laws and regularities will have far reaching
consequences for the way one orients oneself in genetics and for the place of
this science within biology as a whole.
DNA has its structural laws and proteins have their structural laws.
The laws of these two groups of substances can not be derived from each
other and they both have contents which are completely their own. These
contents are only closely dependent on each other with respect to their
realization; this is, the realization of the laws of the one group depends on
whether certain laws of the other group have already been realized. In other
words, the structural or functional laws “ante rem” of the one group can
only be ac tualized “in re” if specific structural laws of the other group of
substance have already been actualized “in re,” and vice versa. In each case
one calls the still unrealized laws “information” and one calls the already
realized units of matter and form information carriers.
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