Perceiving Plants: Experiencing Elemental Beings

This title by R. van Romunde is a small booklet and a best seller possibly because it requires less work than the author’s “About Formative Forces in the Plant World” book. Perceiving Plants was originally written as a forward to the Dutch version of Rudolf Steiner’s “Man as Symphony of the Creative Word.”

About two hundred years ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed our attention to the attributes and secrets of outwardly perceptible nature. He told us about “the universally open holy secrets of nature that reveal themselves in the world of the sense-perceptible phenomenon if you know how to look.” Early in the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner connected this outwardly perceptible, visible world with the invisible world, saying they belong together and should be taken as a whole. In the book Perceiving Experiencing Elemental Beings, Dick van Romunde describes the gesture language of the plant world as he understands it from Goethe. This gesture language can be observed when we consider how the plant grows in the four elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Pointing out the limitations of natural science based only on mechanical principles, he focuses the reader’s attention on the need to employ a way of thinking and an appropriate methodology that does not limit a true understanding of the subject under investigation. The book combines the spatial, sense-perceptible world of Goetheanistic natural science with the non-spatial world of feelings, thoughts, and will impulses found in anthroposophical spiritual science. Through Goetheanistic natural science, we can accumulate the spiritual forces necessary to understand the gesture language of nature. To accomplish this, we must develop non-judgmental memory pictures of our perceptions, the ability to concentrate on the pure image of perception, and strengthened thinking that leads us to a perceptive faculty of higher judgment. Rudolf Steiner describes the activity and gestures of four groups of elemental beings connected with the world of plants and animals and characterizes them as the dynamics of the four elements.