Understanding life
In 2021 the Natural Science Section will celebrate the centenary of the precursor of today’s Research Institute, in which the search to understand life played a prominent part.
In 2021 it will be a hundred years since Guenther Wachsmuth and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer founded the Research Laboratory at the Goetheanum. The two scientists tried to follow Rudolf Steiner’s indication and isolate the ‘etheric’ in a vacuum bell jar. In his search for a ‘reagent’ for the etheric Ehrenfried Pfeiffer developed a sensitive method - copper chloride crystallization - that could provide answers to questions of food quality, for instance, or to questions regarding the disposition of individuals towards certain illnesses. Further development of the method revealed that life processes cannot be verified by means of a reagent but through inner observation that makes it possible to inwardly link and describe temporal developmental processes.
The biography of this laboratory will be a subject of the next Evolving Science Conference in October 2021. How have ideas and methods and the question of how to understand life changed? Goetheanism is the leading science for this and it is first and foremost a natural science. But it can help to study life and life processes of all kinds, including in the legal, economic and spiritual life.
By including the inner perspective, Goetheanism can contribute not only to an understanding of the earth and of plants and animals but it can also be used to study fourfold human nature – the physical, etheric, astral and ‘I’ organizations. Since these ‘bodies’ are both sensory and supersensory, Goetheanism can build a bridge between natural and spiritual science.