ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(A)

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

I[1]

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you--a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free--he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will.

A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of every flower--these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.

An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest--these are _little worlds of their own within another great world_. An animalcule in a drop of water, too tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it lasts but a second and has but a corner of this drop as its field--nevertheless is _free and independent in the face of the universe_. The giant oak, upon one of whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.

Servitude and freedom--this is in last and deepest analysis the differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something more besides. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God--all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness.

The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two sheath-leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary, we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers of the cyclic and reproductive components--i.e., the plant element in the animal body--are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and _all the rest of the world_. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which the Living has appeared on this earth.

There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical world. The plant is something _cosmic_, and the animal is additionally _a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm_. When, and not until, the unit has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its eyes--our eyes--acquire meaning as “body,” and even to planets we are from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness.

All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of _periodicity_; it has “beat” (rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses _polarity_; it possesses “tension.”

We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause and effect, thing and property--each of these is a tension between discretes, and when the state pregnantly called “_détente_” appears, then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence.

Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing--from the hoof-beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick judgment of a “judge of men” which I have already, earlier in this work,[2] called physiognomic tact.

This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the waking individual’s being into the _one_ grand felt harmony. If we have ever followed the flight of a bird in the high air--how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself in the distance--we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the “it” and the “we” in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning of war-dances and love-dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a regiment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in this wise does the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a body, capable of thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely for a moment ere it falls apart again. In such cases the microcosmic wall is obliterated. _It_ jostles and threatens, _it_ pushes and pulls, _it_ flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine, feet rush, _one_ cry comes from every mouth, _one_ destiny overlies all. Out of a sum of little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.

The perception of cosmic beat we call “feel (_Fühlen_),” that of microcosmic tensions “feeling (_Empfinden_).” The ambiguity of the word “_Sinnlichkeit_” has obscured this clear difference between the general and plantlike side and the specifically animal side of life. If we say for the one race- or sex-life, and for the other sense-life, a deep connexion reveals itself between them. The former ever bears the mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony with the great cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the moon, of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists in tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition and that which is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it. Each of these sides of life has, in the more highly developed genera, taken shape in special organs, and the higher the development, the clearer the emphasis on each side. We possess _two cyclic organs of the cosmic existence_, the blood system and the sex-organ, _and two differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility_, senses and nerves. We have to assume that in its origin the _whole_ body has been both a cyclic and a tactual organ.

The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division, redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made _one moment_ into a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived, how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the maintenance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the _one_ great pulse-beat operates through all the detached souls, filling, driving, checking, and often destroying--that is the deepest of all life’s secrets, the secret that all religious mysteries and all great poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy stirred Goethe in his “_Selige Sehnsucht_” and “_Wahlverwandtschaften_,” where the child has to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of the blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.

To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to which it possesses freedom of movement _vis-à-vis_ the macrocosm) the organ “sense,” which is originally touch-sense and nothing else. Even now, at our own high level of development, we use the word “touch” quite generally of contacts by eye, by ear, and even by the understanding, for it is the simplest expression of the mobility of a living creature that needs constantly to be establishing its relation to its world-around. But to “establish” here means to fix _place_, and thus all senses, however sophisticated and remote from the primitive they may seem, are essentially _positive senses_; there are no others. Sensation of all kinds distinguishes proper and alien. And for the positional definition of the alien with respect to the proper the scent of the hound serves just as much as the hearing of the stag and the eye of the eagle. Colour, brightness, tones, odours, all conceivable modes of sensation, imply detachment, distance, extension.

Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity of sense is originally a unity. The active sense is always an understanding sense also. In these simple relations seeking and finding are one--that which we most appositely call “touch.” It is only later, in a stage wherein considerable demands are made upon developed senses, that sensation and understanding of sensation cease to be identical and the latter begins to detach itself more and more clearly from the former. In the outer sheath the critical organ separates itself from the sense-organ (as the sex-organ does from that of blood-circulation). But our use of words like “keen,” “sensitive,” “insight,” “poking our nose,” and “flair,” not to mention the terminology of logic, all taken from the visual world, shows well enough that we regard all understanding as derived from sensation, and that even in the case of man the two still work hand in hand.

We see a dog lying indifferent and then in a moment tense, listening, and scenting--what he merely senses he is seeking to understand as well. He is able, too, to reflect--that is a state in which the understanding is almost alone at work and playing upon mat sensations. The older languages very clearly expressed this graduation, sharply distinguishing each degree as an activity of a specific kind by means of a specific label--e.g., hear, listen, listen for (_lauschen_); smell, scent, sniff; see, spy, observe. In such series as these the reason-content becomes more and more important relative to the sensation-content.

Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A something in the All, which for ever remains inaccessible to our will-to-understand, evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes into existence--and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light. Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward life was embraced and taken in _through the light-world of the eye_. This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is. Only with this light-world of the eye do distances come into being as colours and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the environs of the body.

In the world of this light--not the light which science has deduced indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from visions (“theory” in the Greek sense)--it comes to pass that seeing, human herds wander upon the face of this little earth-star, and that circumstances of light--the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico, the greyness of the north--contribute to the determination of their entire life. It is for his _eye_ that man develops the magic of his architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have all arisen for light’s sake, and all differentiations reduce to the one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind’s eye that is addressed.

And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction, which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word “consciousness (_Bewusstsein_).” I distinguish _being_ or “being there” (_Dasein_) from _waking-being_ or waking-consciousness (_Wachsein_).[3] Being possesses beat and direction, while waking-consciousness is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime question is for the one “when and wherefore?” for the other “where and how?”

A plant leads an existence that is without waking-consciousness. In sleep all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the world-around is extinguished, and the beat of life goes on. A plant knows only a relation to the when and the wherefore. The upthrust of the first green shoots out of the wintry earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blooming, scent, colour glory, and ripening--all this is desire to fulfil a destiny, constant yearning towards a “when?”

“Where?” on the other hand can have no meaning for a plant existence. It is the question with which awakening man daily orients himself afresh with respect to the world. For it is only the pulse-beat of Being that endures throughout the generations, whereas waking-consciousness begins anew for each microcosm. And herein lies the distinction between procreation and birth, the first being a pledge of duration, the second a beginning. A plant, therefore, is bred, but it is not born. It “is there,” but no awakening, no birthday, expands a sense-world around it.