by Paul A. Lee
When I started to take an interest in botany and the plant kingdom, a friend introduced me to the botanical writings of Goethe, after Alan Chadwick had made me aware of the Vitalist tradition in horticulture, in particular the biodynamic system developed by Rudolf Steiner. My friend gave me a copy of Agnes Arber’s edition of Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants, which was to open the theme of metamorphoses, of changes, as though the main text for botany were the I Ching. I read Goethe’s essay and did not understand it. I read Rudolf Steiner on Goethe (he was the editor of Goethe’s scientific writings at the Weimar Archive) and did not understand him. But I plugged along. As the pieces began to fall into place, where fragments never became the larger design continued to shift and never knew exactly how to put it until I found the key: Physicalism versus Vitalism![i]
I was aware of the implications of this larger design for the philosophy of science and the theme of the structure of scientific revolutions. Although Thomas Kuhn (1962) the proponent of the theme, could assume the structure of Physicalism as the structure of scientific revolutions and write a purely formalistic account of the revolution, as though the Physicalist camp were all there was, I had picked up the Vitalist thread, the defeated point of view, the refutation of which defined Physicalism. It was a negative definition: you are defined by what you reject. The rejection of Vitalism by Physicalism thus became, for me, a key to our culture.
While I was studying philosophy and theology at Harvard, Paul Tillich introduced me to a theology of culture and prepared the way for my intellectual path. He gave me the definition of industrial society as “a world above the given world of nature,” where I came to see how the “above” was brought about through “artificial synthesis,” as in the isolation of active ingredients and their synthetic counterparts. The role of synthetics in industrial society was comparable to the role of plastics and the emphasis on simulation. All this took on an ersatz odor for me, thanks to the teaching of my German-born theologian. In the tradition of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, Tillich (1975) was looking for the means to do philosophy of nature again. He tried, in his Systematic Theology, to work out a philosophy of life (following Nietzsche), but the transmission from Schelling never seemed to find expression. Tillich’s most important paper on Schelling still remains untranslated, although his two early works, expounding Schelling’s theory of guilt and of religious symbolism in antiquity, are now in English.
I began to think of Schelling (one of the most neglected of all the major Western philosophers) as the key to the last century and a half, so much so, that I toyed with the notion of being in some strange relation with him. I thought that to me had fallen the opportunity to discuss the theory of vital roots and their replanting as a new hope for the philosophy of nature especially in this late stage of the self-destructive tendency of our industrial society.
Neo-Vitalism is not a term I should like to live with, but it expresses the resurgence of movements and forces (since 1970 and the Earth Day Celebration) which were thought to be dead and buried after 1828 and the artificial synthesis of urea by Friedrich Wohler, one of the fathers of organic chemistry.
The Physicalist-Vitalist conflict is the deepest conflict in our culture. It is now possible to delineate it because we are now able to grasp its history, thanks to the resurgence of the Vitalist point of view in the form of the environmental and ecology movements. I cling to the notion that the clarity with which we can grasp this past struggle indicates our distance from it, even though we continue to read its truth every day in countless guises.
The theatre of ideas I have called into play is determined by two masks-the Vitalist Smile and the Physicalist Frown: it is the comic and tragic together. Why they are split apart in science, as in drama, I do not know; all I know is the expression on the masks.
These expressions are paradigm features-they define the point of view. From these central masks, countless other masks may be assumed. Actors can even change places, representing now one, now the other point of view. But the fixity and precision of the initial determination remain. The Physicalist and Vitalist shall come to center stage and state their views. In our effort to develop a leading metaphor for consciousness, we shall see that the Vitalist Smile takes us back to “vital roots.”
The Kantian Recoil from Vital Roots
Issac Newton and Goethe are the supreme embodiment of the Physicalist and the Vitalist, even though Newton kept cabbalistic esoterica locked in a trunk (as though his Vitalist side could not come out of the closet) and Goethe carried on his exacting experiments in the development of his theory of color for the express purpose of refuting Newton’s Optics. Everything follows from these two in terms of characterizing the victory of one trend over another. In order to add to the symmetry, we will give Kant to Newton and Schelling to Goethe.
Kant knew what was coming. Perhaps it was Kant whom Goethe had in mind as the figure for Faust. Then the pact with the Devil becomes the sin against the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the vital root of existence. The quandary over whether existence is a predicate, a technical problem in philosophy which Kant decided in the negative, comes in here. It is the background for the plight of existence in industrial society and the origins of existentialism as the protest against industrial society.
Kant decided against existence as a predicate, and, if we are to follow Heidegger on Kant, this was because of the Kantian recoil from the unknown root of existence. Kant betrayed the existential root. It was the price he had to pay for his “Copernican Revolution” and accommodation of philosophy to the protocols of a physicalistically oriented natural science. From Kant onward, German philosophers tried to find the root again, and failed. The leading theme of German philosophy became the “prison of finitude” as an expression of life in industrial society.
Martin Heidegger inherited this Kantian recoil from “vital roots,” arecoil necessary for the development of industrial society as a world “above” nature and therefore devoid of vital roots. This recoil is the Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Kuhn’s book on the structure of scientific revolution is an effort to make us feel comfortable about the “recoil.” The recoil is the revulsion of the mind over its own unknown root. As Heidegger (1962a) puts it-it is more familiar to us than we are to ourselves:
This fundamental constitution of the essence of man, “rooted” in the transcendental imagination, is the “unknown” of which Kant must have had an intimation when he spoke of “the root unknown to us”; for the unknown is not that of which we know absolutely nothing but that of which the knowledge makes us uneasy. However, Kant did not carry out the primordial interpretation of the transcendental imagination; indeed, he did not even make the attempt despite the clear indications he gave us concerning such an analytic . .. Kant recoiled from this unknown root. (Heidegger, 1962a, pp. 166, 167) It is the flight from our own ground!
Heidegger retired to the Black Forest, in a forester’s hut. with his water spout of pure mountain water dripping into its trough, walking the path back to the vital root. From Goethe’s journey to Italy to Heidegger in his woods, from the journey to the Ur-plant to the path to the vital root, we have the hidden movement of Vitalism in a world determined by the Physicalist victory. This impulse-to find the root again-was shared by Alan Chadwick and myself, when we started the Student Garden Project at the University of California in Santa Cruz. In order to find it, we had to “double dig. ”
The Renewal of the Philosophy of Nature
Double digging is a horticultural technique practiced by Chadwick. It is clearly set forth in John Jeavon’s How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine, and Tom Cuthbertson’s Alan Chadwick’s Enchanted Garden.
We would also like to use “double digging” metaphorically. The upper crust is not all there is; like Ahab, we have to go to a little lower layer. This opening of the subsoil, for roots, is the basis for a renewed philosophy of nature, The linkage, for me, has been something like this: Schelling represents the breaking point in the defense against the rise of industrial society. Countless critics and witnesses inveigh against it. One of the most powerful, Simone Weil, who was drawn to work in a Renault factory as a missionary to some heathen tribe, wrote the central meditation on this revolt: The Need for Roots (Weil, 1979).
Schelling is the breaking point because of his turn from Naturphilosophie, and his alliance with Hegel, to existentialism (in his Berlin Lectures of 1841-1842), where the audience seemed to sense that a historic move was being made, initiating a philosophical position for the coming century and a half-so much excitement was there in the packed classroom, with Kierkegaard taking notes.[ii]
This breaking point was to continue until the rejected forces could resummon themselves in trying to put things right, when the “unforeseen” consequences of industrial society would provoke the environmental movement. For historical dating purposes, existentialism plays the role of chief mourner for defeated Vitalism (and Natiirphilosophie) until the Earth Day Celebration in April of 1970. This past decade has seen the groundwork for a renewed philosophy of nature, now that science has actually succeeded in unveiling nature’s mysteries in the DNA code of the double helix and in the structure of the atom. Nature’s mysteries were turned into scientific problems to be solved. The mystery became a secret. Those who penetrate to the secret receive Nobel prizes (the story is begun by Watson, 1968, and told in full by Judson, 1979).
The breaking point, represented in the turn of Schelling, is only shared by those who, so far, assume a minority view in their reaction against the pursuit of science under Physicalist protocols defined by the rejection and elimination of Vitalism.
The environmental and ecology movements are contemporaneous with the penetration to the secret of life. Think of the moment when Francis Crick, in a loud voice in a pub near Cambridge University, announced that he had solved the secret of life. Given the forces that are ranged against them, the ecology and environmental movements have achieved only partial toeholds. Look at the Environmental Studies Program at your local university-they are beleaguered enclaves in the midst of a hostile, science-determined organization of knowledge whose purpose is to train servants of industrial society.
However, all the signs are clear about our being in an advanced stage of the self-destruction of industrial society, as we know it. The economy of the United States is a symptom of this self-destruction. The organized system of industrial society is best expressed on the faces of unemployed blacks in the inner city in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Once having driven through these areas, replicated in every major industrial city in the United States, one never forgets it. It is like escaping from an armed camp.
For this reason, we have tried to elucidate the metaphor-vital roots-as a leading metaphor of consciousness, and we have moved from applying the metaphor in a critique of industrial society to an uncovering of the metaphor in the origins of our culture in ancient Greece. It should be obvious that this metaphor was discovered in the actual development of a university garden project where countless students rediscovered their roots. In this sense, horticulture and agriculture, seen in the light of the ecology movement, are prerequisites for the development of any culture worthy of the name. Industrial society alienates us from this ground and provokes in us the longing for roots. Only in a discussion of the metaphors of consciousness do such considerations take on the meaning they deserve.
The Metaphors: “Vital Roots” and “Thymos” According to Freud, the metaphor for consciousness is the neurone, an electrical charge along a nerve pathway. In order to distinguish the neurones appropriate to consciousness, Freud tried to postulate a qualitative charge in the neurone, but it did not work, and he sent his famous “Project for A Scientific Psychology” off to his cohort-Wilhelm Fliessand never asked for it back. It was found among Fliess’s papers, and came to light only a few decades ago in the publication of the Freud-Fliess correspondence as the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1954).
Freud would have done better with a metaphor like “vital root” rather than “neurone,” but his Physicalist training under Ernst Briicke prevented him from using a vitalist metaphor. Why? Because Physicalism in alliance with positivism eschewed terms with a metaphysical ring. Neurone is a nice empirical word; “vital root” is a metaphysical metaphor.
I have been working with the metaphor, as a metaphor for consciousness, ever since teaming up with a man who assumed responsibility for replanting it-Alan Chadwick, sometimes referred to as the world’s greatest living gardener. When we started the Student Garden Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1967, I witnessed Alan Chadwick’s Singular devotion to creating a garden, working fifteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, without a break. I had to think of some way of putting it. The formulation appropriate to the phenomenon was to say that Alan Chadwick had been uniquely appointed to replant the vital root of existence. The supposition was that if it could happen somewhere, and it had to happen somewhere in order to prove that it was possible in a world where vital roots were endangered and in jeopardy, then it could happen elsewhere, as has been the case, given the thousands of students who have been trained in the methods and systems devoted to the replanting of the vital root, practiced by Chadwick, the French Intensive and Biodynamic. I came to appreciate that these were more than names for styles of hand-intensive systems of horticulture and agriculture, they were forms for the replanting of what industrial society had uprooted.
In fact, they were new forms for the supplanting of industrial society! We had joined a revolutionary movement which erupted nationally in 1970, on a given weekend, when countless Americans celebrated Earth Day I-April 22, 1970. We were ready for it in our garden in Santa Cruz.
After 1970, prompted by the inspiration of Earth Day, I started to think through what historical forces we were opposing in order to get a clear view of what we were up against. It became a marvelous detective story as I began to unravel the clues. Now that I have it mostly figured out, I can see that it has given me the central metaphor for consciousness in the notion of the “vital roots” of consciousness.
Here is how it goes: the ancient Greek term for the “vital root” is thymos, a Homeric word meaning vitality, courage, or spirit. There is now a fairly extensive philological and philosophical literature on thymos, but no one has fully elucidated its philosophical significance, although there have been a number of good attempts, beginning with Tillich (1952), Ricoeur (1965), and Strasser (1977). A new contribution was added by Jutian Jaynes (1977) in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He utilized what was well known to anyone interested in classical philology, namely, the work of Bruno Snell and the linguistic approach to Homeric anthropology through the analysis of the metaphors for consciousness in the Iliad and Odyssey. Snell found that all the words for consciousness were words that referred to organs or quasi-organs-they had a material ring to them that had to be appreciated in order not to read back into them the subsequent linguistic elaborations of the terminology for consciousness. When Homer said “psyche” he meant the breath, consciousness was “breathing” in the sense of “one gasped one’s last,” the literal meaning of consciousness or “psyche.” Consciousness {“psyche”} is only mentioned in reference to death; there is no “psyche” but this “last gasp.” By the time we get to Plato, “psyche” is the name for a structured consciousness with three parts-the rational, the vital, and the appetitive. Plato’s words are nous, thyoas, and epithymia.
So from Homer to Plato we can catch the growing density in the linguistic evolution of rational self-consciousness-from “vital breath” (in the moment of death, as in, “he blew his life away”), to a structured self-consciousness ruled by reason. The carriers of this development are the pre-Socratic philosophers, about twenty of them, who prepared the way to Socrates as if he was what they meant. I like this existential reference. It has been immortalized in the syllogism:
All men are mortal Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
The second line in the syllogism is called an enthymeme, when it is understood, in which case the syllogism would read:
All men are mortal Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
An enthymeme, derived from thymos, is in the middle. In principle, we take it for granted. I have come to develop a whole philosophy out of it. I have moved from thinking of thymos as in the middle to thinking of thymos as “vital root.” I had my metaphor for consciousness.
In order to develop a metaphor for consciousness, it is good practice to go back to Homer, where all the terms are metaphors, because Homeric culture is an oral culture, preliterate, and preconceptual. The Homeric metaphors for consciousness are phrenes, thymos, psyche, and nous, etc. They can be considered protoconcepts, or the metaphorical roots of concepts, in the sense that these metaphors for consciousness, based on organs in the body, become the concepts of Plato with no bodily references.
The key metaphor in Homer is thymos, the most widely used term in the Iliad. Imagine my delight when I began to excavate this central term, rather like Schliemann digging up Troy. Forgotten and buried under the successive layers of language, representing the linguistic evolution of rational self-consciousness, thymos was waiting to be found. I was able to dig down to the vital root of consciousness.
When I saw the book by Jaynes (1977), one day as I walked through a local bookstore, I thought-“oh-oh”-somebody got there before me. I saw from the index a number of entries on thymos. I held my breath.
When I got to his definition of thymos, I exhaled. He had missed it by a step. He calls thymos the adrenalin-based reaction to an emergency situation, which is not bad for defining vitality, but more appropriate to epithymia, or the “lesser thymos,” the region of longing-drives, desires, and appetites, below the region of “spirit.” What step had Jaynes missed? No one in the area of classics had made the obvious connection between the word and the bodily organ, even though Snell had specified the relation between psyche and breath, phrenes and liver, etc. Even Snell had missed the obvious. Thymos is the thymus gland. I had found the vital root of consciousness in the thymus gland.
The thymus, therefore, is what Homer referred to when he used the word thymos. This is the hypothesis for unravelling the mystery of the vital root. Although the gland was formally named by Rufus of Ephesus (c. 100 A.D.), the correlation, in Homeric terms, between thymos and thymus carries through the principle of organs, or quasi-organs, as the basis for words for consciousness.
My speculative faculty was set into play when I went on to make the connection with the herb thyme, also derived from thymos. Now I really had a connection with vital roots, although the thymus, as the center of the immune system, was vital root enough.
The herb grows wild all over Greece, and its highly volatile essential oil makes it one of the great germicidal and antiseptic herbs. Therefore, its vital function. Like the thymus, it is a guardian of vitality in the defense against disease and illness. In this role, thyme has always been associated with courage.
The more this configuration of ideas came into focus, the more I was convinced that I had lucked into a key to the riddle of “vital roots” as the leading metaphor for consciousness where thymos was the root. I knew I had to extend the work of Tillich, Ricoeur, Strasser, and Jaynes into further areas of exploration in order to develop a Thymos Doctrine, drawing, as well, from the work of classical philologists-Snel1, Onions, Havelock, Dodds, and Adkins.
Origin of the Word Thymos
Thymos is a Greek word meaning the raising of the soul, passion, courage, spirit. Its origin should be found in the Indo-European root dheu-to rise in a cloud, as dust, vapor or smoke (relation with breath). In Sanskrit, dhumah (dhumo-) means smoke or vapor, giving in Latin “fumus,” in English “fume,” “fumigate,” “perfume.” There is also the idea of undulation, waving, and ebullition. In Irish, dumhach means foggy. In Sanskrit, dhulih (dhuli) means dust or dusty soil or pollen. In middle Irish, duil means desire, movement of the soul. The root dheu (dheua) has the connotation of “being animated by swift movements,” to swirl or whirl. In Sanskrit, dhutah means shaken. In Greek, thuella means storm, whirlwind; thuein: to sacrifice; thuas: incense for sacrifice; thumas: soul, courage, anger. Some authors think that dheues (dhes) belongs to the same root; it became in Greek, theas: God, and theian: smoke or sulfur. Thua originally denotes a violent movement of air, water, the ground, animals, or men. From the sense of “to well up,” “to boil up,” it went to “to smoke” then “to cause to go up in smoke,” “to sacrifice.” Thumas is “that which is moved and which moves,” “vital force”! The meaning of thumos is quite extensive: desire, impulse, inclination, consideration. Later on, thumas took the meaning of “wrath,” particularly in the New Testament.
The Continuing Struggle between Physicalism and Vitalism
The vital root of consciousness is more than the elucidation of a word, although even that is a prodigious task and beyond any single effort. Tillich’s Courage to Be begins the work in his masterful elucidation of the meaning of thymos in Plato, the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, etc. It is as though Tillich was able to carry through Kant’s failed attempt at developing the transcendental imagination. As we mentioned, according to Heidegger, something happened to Kant to make him recoil from carrying through his interest in the vital root of consciousness in the constitution of the transcendental imagination.
If the problem is the vital root, then we can understand why metaphysics was abandoned and even rejected by the Physicalist trend in the system of the sciences, as if the best way to deal with a problem one has renounced the language for formulating is to bracket it and hope it goes away, as in the Positivist and Linguistic revision of language for the purpose of excluding such issues as “pseudoproblems.” If Kant intuited this and recoiled from it, if Kant saw what was coming-industrial society-and that philosophy would have to accommodate itself to it, then Kant is part of the problem.
When I found the passage in Heidegger, I thought it was too good to be true. Here was Heidegger (1962a), as though complaining about himself and his inability to carry through the project of Being and Time, Heidegger (1962b) isolating the moment in Kant where the recoil from the unknown root occurred-a recoil he was to inherit. It is a commentary, buried in philosophy, of the uprooting of our modem period as a result of the rise and triumph of industrial society. It is the story of how our “courage to be” was undermined and eroded as a result of losing touch with “vital roots.”
So our metaphor for consciousness is indicative of the deepest perplexity in the depths of our culture. We are all worried to death about the outcome of this revived debate, thought settled in 1828 when Physicalism defeated Vitalism (a view repeated throughout the literature, as though a war had been fought to decide the issue). This assumption reigned supreme for a century and a half. Should you look up any references to Vitalism in the literature, including references to philosophy of life (Nietzsche) and philosophy of nature (Schelling), they will uniformly refer to names of defeated points of view-with existentialism inheriting the defeat and presiding over the last rites.
No one could have predicted the reemergence, historically, of defeated Vitalism in the celebration of Earth Day. It is the historical end of existentialism as chief mourner for defeated Vitalism. Even though the nails may not have given way, the coffin came unglued, and we witnessed the return of a point of view thought dead and buried.
This neo-Vitalist resurgence in the environmental and ecology movements reenjoined the debate. It has lead to the realization of the Thymos as Biopsycltological Metaphor necessity for dismantling industrial society in order to minimize the damage due to its self destruction. What we need now is the amplification of this renewal in a new view of consciousness. For our own point of view, by renewal we mean discovering your thymus gland as the biological basis of your spirit, and we mean discovering the medicinal properties of herbs, as in the herb thyme. These two roots, glandular and herbal, will put you in touch with thymos, the vital root of consciousness. I can sum it up in a parable:
Once upon a time, a famous poet and man of letters, who was also an accomplished scientist, particularly in botany, dropped out of German society to take a long walk as though he went in search of something as profound as the vital root of existence, although he was not able to put his longing into words, He went south, to Italy, as though in search of cultural roots, mindful of the danger they were in which he foresaw. Based on his botanical studies, he was actually in search of his own version of the vital root-what he called the Ur~plant. He had formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis based on the relation of leaf to stem. He had envisaged a primal plant exemplifying his theory, a plant that would be the morphological prototype of all possible plant development. He wanted to find one.
When he entered the oldest botanical garden in the Western world, in Padua, founded in 1545, he sensed that h.is quest was realized.
When he gazed upon the palm growing in the middle of the garden Chaemerops humilis-he designated it the Ur-plant.
To commemorate the finding of the Ur-plant in their garden, the Paduans built a glass case to cover it. They called it “Goethe’s Palm,”
The vital root of existence in the form of the Ur-plant was squirreled away under glass in the oldest botanical garden in the Western world to wait out the triumphant rise and self-destructive demise of industrial society as a world above the given world of nature and therefore devoid of vital roots,
The vital root is alive and well in Padua.
The Pysicalist-Vitalist Conflict in Pschology[iii]
The physicalist-vitalist conflict also pervades the discipline of psychology. On the one hand, we find the “hardheaded” and natural science-inspired approaches in psychology (e.g., physiological psychology, behaviorism, and cognitive psychology), which follow the strictly experimental approach of rigorous scientific causal analysis. This approach seeks to uncover the roots of behavior in the prepersonal terms of physiological and psychological functions, without appeal to the experienced reality of consciousness and personal self-agency. In this view, behavior is a consequence of antecedent reinforcement and situational manipulation circumventing the awareness and choice of the participants; action is the result of the operation of certain information processing loops steered by feedback. The physicalistic-positivistic approach is the serious attempt to simulate man as an assembly of variables and response tendencies with a general information-processing capability of an “artificial” intelligence with emergent properties. The ideal of the Physicalist view is the complete simulation of man, the creation of the android under scientific management and control.
On the other side of the psychological spectrum, there are the “soft” humanistic and existential approaches which insist on the reality of selfhood, self-realization, and self-agency, and which emphasize the importance of personal consciousness, of meaning and values. The activities of each human individual require an “intentional analysis” and interpretational reading, a Uhermeneutics of existence,” rather than a causal analysis. Human reality is preinterpreted reality; people act on the meanings they perceive the situation to have. Action implies choices between alternatives, choices of direction leading into the future and ultimately to the creation of a way of life. The Vitalist emphasis in psychology stresses the reality of embodiment, meaningfulness and intensity of experience. It is thus sympathetic with both the human-potential movement in humanistic psychology and its emphasis on the experience of the body, and transpersonal psychology, which retains an appreciation for man’s vital connectedness with the realities of the spirit, of values, and ultimately with the realm of the Divine. The existential emphasis on authenticity, on the right relationship of the person to others and to his/her world, also represents the Vitalist position of insistence on quality, on will, and on commitment, on the courage to be, the courage to incarnate values.
Methodologically the humanistic and existential approaches emphasize case studies, descriptions of experiences, and personal stories, working directly on one’s involvement and experiences in the sense of a spiritual and psychological praxis. The expression of experience becomes important; the use of personal testimony, of symbols and metaphors, is seen as helping the interpretation and serving as guiding images and is favored over conceptual classification, measurement, and the expression of knowledge as cognitive objects.
Although the natural scientific approach moves in a denotative way, using specified operational definitions, the humanistic-existential approach favors connotative ways, which are suggestive, which invite participation, and which emphasize the plurality of meanings that symbols can carry. Although the physicalist-positivist psychologies aim for mastery and control by a professional scientific elite (e.g., computer diagnostics), the vitalist psychologies seem to favor and further emancipation, self development, and taking matters in one’s own hands. The search for the appropriate metaphor and symbol to live by and the task to embody spiritual insight, wisdom, and knowledge in a viable and responsible assembly of activities and in collaboration with a social ensemble, defines the vitalist task in psychology: to create an optimal way of life together, on Earth, from within the conditions in which we find ourselves. In this day and age, the issues are defined by the limits to technological carrying capacity in a limited earth-resource environment, a historical development that has brought our very rootedness in the land, in our body, and in our spirit (as the source of illumination as to the right way on earth) into question and existential jeopardy.
The journey and account of one person through this complex interdisciplinary terrain of issues and ruling metaphors, and his discovery of a root of renewed existence in “double digging” (the biodynamic French intensive mode of horticulture), in the ecology movement, in the Greek word thymos, in the herb thyme, and in the human thymus gland, offers a Vitalist testimonial and a summons to everyone to become involved with roots again. The story of the journey evokes our personal and collective existence in its unfolding. Thymos is a vital reality and a biopsychological metaphor that may keep us on the right track by calling us to our roots and to the sources of our vitality, to the ground of our life-making.
References Cassirer, E. The problem of knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Cuthbertson, T. Alan Chadwick’s enchanted garden. New York: Dutton, 1978. Freud, S. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. In M. Bonaparte, A. Freud, & E. Kris (Eds.), Origins of Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1954. Heidegger, M. Kant and the problem of metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. (a) Heidegger, M. Being and time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. (b) Jaynes, J. The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bialmeral mind. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977. leavon, J. How to grow more vegetables than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine. Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1979. Judson, H. The eighth day of creation: The makers of revolution in biology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Kuhn, T. H. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Merz, J. History of European thought in the nineteenth century. Darby, Penna.: Arden Library, 1978. Ricoeur, P. Fallible man. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965. Strasser, S. Phenomenology affeeling. Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Duquesne University Press, 1977. Tillich, P. The courage to be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. Tillich, P. Systematic theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Watson, J. D. The double helix. New York: New American Library, 1968. Weil., S. The need for roots. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Additional Reference For the best introduction to the botanical origins of modem science, see: Annytage, W. H. The rise of the technocrats, a social history. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965.
[i] The best introduction to this conflict is E. Cassirers (1950) The Problem of Knawledge, J. Men’s (1978) A History a/European Scientific Thought in the Nineteenth Century, and T. Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
[ii] Kierkegaard’s notes are contained in his Papers and Diaries (an unpublished manuscript amounting to some 75 pages in Danish). For other references to his attendance at Schel· ling’s lectures, see the last volume of his papers, translated by Howard and Edna Hong. Paul Tillich calls these notes the “Ur·text of Existentialism.”
[iii] The remainder of this chapter was written by Rolf von Eckartsberg, and is included with the author’s permission and approval.-Eds.
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