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

Goethe’s work was later misunderstood, and little further experimental
work has been done with his method because one was taken in by Kantian
nominalism, and one directed one’s gaze one-sidedly to organic material
and one therefore increasingly lost sight of the organic form, which is an
equally justified object of science. One result of this development was the
central dogma of genetics around the middle of the 20th Century by which
all organic processes are ascribed to matter or to the genetic material.
Through genetics biology has again become aware of certain connections
between matter and form. Biological information is nothing else than real
formative principles, structural laws, or functional laws which are in-“form”-
ed or imprinted into matter.
It is necessary today to see that information has an ideal character and
that this ideal is not just something subjective, because it can be thought in
me, but that it is something objective, and that matter outside is actually
ordered by it. If one also sees that these ordering principles obviously have
the power to realize themselves in matter, if conditions permit, then one
has ar rived at an insight into the effective nature of these objective, ideal
elements. Then one realizes that all of these laws accessible to scientific
cognition which actually work in nature and order it and shape it in such a
wonder fully complex way, are ideal and real elements, which are a spiritually
real something which underlies matter as form. And therewith one has gone
over to a modern natural scientific law-realism.
This law-realism or idea-realism is the only thing which will make it
possible to pursue modern biology in a satisfactory way. What is unsatisfactory
about biology today is its fluctuation between an unnecessary
materialism and an unjustified spiritualism which is hostile to science.
Some people obstinately want to explain life from matter with the aid
of specula tive ideas about chance, and others who are dissatisfied with
spiritless reductionism want to explain life in a new way with some kind
of transcendental principles which are supposedly inaccessible to scientific
cognition. 28 But in the future it will be necessary to steer between this
Scylla and Charybdis of scientific thinking: This is only possible if the exact
investigation of organic forms which was inaugurated by Goethe is extended
in har mony with the investigation of organic matter which has developed in
such a marvelous way since.
This is the result of a more encompassing thinking about the central
dogma of genetics which has long since been refuted by the facts.
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