Form, Life, & Consciousness

Form, Life and Consciousness: An Introduction to Anthroposophic Medicine and the Study of the Human Being, by Armin J. Husemann; transl. by Catherine Creeger; Foreword by Prof. Peter Heusser; SteinerBooks (2019); 360 pp.

by C.T. Roszell

Anthroposophy begs to be lived out in confidence and beauty. Where it does, it convinces, and becomes a force of healing and new creation. Form, Life and Consciousness is such an example. It expresses the harvest of a lifetime, illustration by illustration, and discovery after discovery. An imminently readable book, it will fascinate anyone interested in the riddles of the human mind, body, and spirit. It is a must-read for anthroposophic doctors, and a copy belongs in every Steiner School library for science classes. Indeed, the world would be a very different place if it were a resource tool in general education.

Husemann’s latest work has been happily translated at full-length and great cost for good reason. Together with its companion volume, The Harmony of the Human Body: Musical Principles in Human Physiology, the book allows the one who takes it in hand the opportunity to realize how seemingly impossible, invisible principles can become palpable realities, and to taste the reality of the spirit in motion on paths of the structure and movement of the far reaches of creation in the marvel of human body. Starting from natural phenomena perceived through sensory observation and basic scientific research, the reader is invited to participate with the author in discovering—proceeding the way harmonics of a note rise into ever higher ethereal regions—the spiritual organizing principles of what anthroposophy refers to as the realms of the etheric, the astral, and beyond.

A Taste of the Journey: from one of the routes one can take in the book

Husemann’s focus is one of delicately careful scientific delineation together with nuanced experience of organizing principles—a process that leads to the heightened artistic sensibilities required to articulate them. Organizing emergent principles familiarly characterized in anthroposophy such as the etheric and life-spirit, astral, and spiritself—such words fall away in the doing of them together, the way individuals like Steiner, Goethe, or Husemann exercise and experience them. We can allow ourselves— and it is so refreshing and such a delight to do this!—to set aside everything we think we know about anthroposophy, and discover it afresh from the ground up. Here is the right place for the reviewer to stand aside, and to let readers taste and glimpse what such an exercise can bring, with any of the many expositions the book affords.

A very striking opening into the author’s theme is the graphic below that shows the interplay of musical tone, movement of the human sheaths, and phases of development in the brain ventricles and flow of the cerebrospinal fluid from the companion volume, Harmony of the Human Body.

Fig. 1. From the left, the four topmost images show the development of the brain ventricles, followed by the flow of the cerebrospinal fluid in the images top right. The complete progression is an image of a process of inversion by which the etheric organization separates from the fluid physical form and unites with the astral, penetrating the cerebrospinal fluid during respiration. Harmony of the Human Body, p. 74.

In the new book’s chapter “Clinical Pictures and Disease Patterns,” the author builds further on this dynamic. He contrasts seven stages of development of cells from the perspective of their passive degeneration into the cancerous stages promoted by the passively mechanical environs of our time, with their sevenfold trajectory where active artistic thinking holds sway. Minerality becomes plantlike in the living cell, reaches the animal stage in bloodnerve organization, and in the refinements of cellular support for thinking, speaking, and walking, it begins to manifest human being, the fourth stage.

Opposing trajectories arise, from there on, into stages five, six, and seven—either one that is destructively regressive or spiritually ascending. Passive, artlessly mechanical lifestyles promote regression backwards through animal, plant, and mineral principles of exostosis (cellular deformation), osteoma (benign tumor), and mineral (fully manifested osteosarcoma and cell death). These stages five, six, and seven are the counter images of human telos, of human destiny as it begs to unfold.

The author proceeds to explore these sevenfold resonances in the human body and human being on the example of what happens in the body through the spiritually ascending vibration of actively created, artistic musical tones—building on the exposition to the figure shown above from the companion volume.

We live in a time most conducive to appreciating the fourth interval in the scale in its depths, in our own I, and only begin to access the fifth through actively artistic cognition going back out into the world in a deeper connection with it. “In the unstable fifth, we are touched by something that wafts towards us from the world, like a wisp of air touching our skin,” Husemann observes; “this is why Rudolf Steiner sometimes described the fifth as the interval of the skin or sensory surfaces.” The author implies that a counterforce is thus achieved against the deformation on the human cellular level which he has delineated as the downward trajectory of cell organization fifth stage. Its measurement would be invisible to our clumsy mechanical tools, other than to note that the the cell has remained cohesive, healthy, as opposed to degraded. The author continues:

“We feel the gesture of the major sixth as moving away from ourselves toward something we aspire to and desire in the world. For this reason, the sixth is considered the interval of love in many places on the earth. In the major or minor sixth, our sixth, our connection to what we perceive in the world is either sympathetic or tinged with pain.”

“In the seventh, we begin to move in a way that breaks through the boundary between ourselves and the world and transform it; we act. The result of this action, the accomplished deed, gives rise to a feeling that corresponds to the octave.”

The author intimates that the active artistic engagements required for the fifth, sixth, and seventh intervals of authentic musical experience enhance our humanity at the cellular level as a side-effect of something completely immeasurable: spiritual growth.

The author takes this progression further to reveal a deep mystery of our incarnation into the physical human body, in his study of the ear and skull in relation to the larynx and music and eurythmy. “The ear shares [a] temporal gesture of rapid development and early aging with the nervous system. The larynx is very different.“ Husemann then shows how the musculature of the laryngeal inlet, developed in tandem with the embodiment of vowel formation, hints at new powers the human being promises to incarnate in the future.

In the occiput [the back part of the skull] and in the ear organization…the old human being confronts the nascent human being of the larynx. …These “organs of music” embody the time body’s musical structure as developed above [the aberrant cell development stages five through seven we just explored above] in connection with cancer.

Fig. 109 at the left, from p. 238 of the new book, juxtaposes the two cosmic structures. From the curve of the back of the head looking forward and down through the spine and extending out again into the rib cages stands the old. The new is all that, inverted and smaller: the larynx appears with its curve looking back and upward, as if as a baby to its mother, with its own set of smaller ribs of the same. Medicine, music, and eurythmy, moving together as the three Graces, through all the chapters of this splendid book!

Figure 109: Metamorphosis of the occiput muscle and vibration, doing and larynx (after a sketch by Rudolf Steiner.)

Rudolf Steiner from Hour One: original impulses coalesce over the generations in a Stuttgart family

The context needs to be set for how this book could happen. The capabilities, interests and studies of a remarkable family have coalesced in Armin Husemann and his brothers. Armin was born into a family gifted to unfold three arts from the beginnings of anthroposophy: medicine, music and eurythmy weave through and inspire his work at every turn. The story is significant and relevant to his book, and can be told readily; it is the story of Rudolf Steiner and three brothers, Friedrich, Gottfried, and Gisbert Husemann.

Friedrich Husemann (1887-1959) lost his mother to tuberculosis at the age of ten; he was moved by the riddle of life and death to travel to Berlin to hear Rudolf Steiner’s architecture lectures in 1910. Out of inner existential need, he took up Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, and introduced his younger brother Gottfried (1900-1972) to Steiner in 1919.

Gottfried, a gifted pianist who also trained in theology and chemistry, went on to become one of Steiner’s closest working partners, and one of the founders of the Christian Community. Friedrich, the first in a line of doctors in the family, married one of the first eurythmists, and in his first book, Goethe and the Healing Arts, carried Goethe’s accomplishments on to Steiner, setting the mark for generations to come.

Friedrich and Gottfried’s youngest brother, Gisbert (1907-1997), Armin’s father, won over the testing committee for his exam showing how Goethe reconciles nature with art; he went on to help found the Association of Anthroposophic Doctors in Germany. Born twenty years after Friedrich and seven years after Gottfried, Gisbert barely missed meeting Rudolf Steiner in life. The loss was made good: Armin’s brother Friedwart wrote memorial words for their father’s direct spiritual encounter with the figure of Rudolf Steiner. This took place after a near fatal motorcycle accident, and a shoulder injury doctors thought could never heal. In Gisbert’s vivid night experience, Rudolf Steiner appeared to retrain the shoulder. Over the years, a metamorphosis took place both in the shoulder and Gisbert’s soul-life, and he went on to be recognized by those who heard him as one of the most moving and articulate speakers to ever take the floor in the cause of anthroposophy.

The die was cast. Every motif of this family’s recounting is a fiber of Armin’s life’s inspiration, and reflected in this book—a victory of the spirit by means of the three arts. These weave through the principle themes, which are chapter headings:

1. Form and Life

2. Life and Consciousness: From Amphibians to Reptiles

3. Humans and Animals

4. The Human Being and the Processes of Nature

5. Clinical Pictures and Disease Patterns

6. Working Principles of Therapeutic Eurthymy

7. Medical Thinking and Moral Practice

8. Goethe’s Thinking Applied to the Physician’s Path of Training.

Science of Emergence: the wide significance of this book for our time

The following words, from the foreword to Husemann’s book by Prof. Peter Heusser of Witten-Herdecke University, frame and focus it in relation to the specific spiritual challenge of our time:

Medical Etudes is the title Armin Husemann would have preferred for the studies published here, and rightly so. In this book, Husemann—anthroposophic physician, Goethean researcher, teacher, and head of the Eugen Kolisko Academy at the Filder Clinic in Filderstadt (near Stuttgart)—develops a medical perspective on the human being that infuses the often highly abstract scientific foundations of medicine with artistic sensibility. The result is a new, supple form of medical thinking that might be called “medical science through art,” to use an expression coined by Husemann himself.

Heusser goes on to articulate how Goethe’s approach to nature, waiting in the wings, has come to fruition in the best science works of emergence theory in our time. Emergence is essentially Goethe’s methodology, breaking through before our eyes. Friedrich Schiller enunciated Goethean science with these words in a letter to the great genius:

You take all of Nature together to shed light on individual details; in the totality of her phenomena you seek to explain the individual. From simple levels of organization you ascend to the more complex, ultimately assembling the most complex of all—the human being.

Breathtaking advances in what science can now observe in the molecular and atomic fields have facilitated the new science of emergence: the extended ranges of what can be detected have only heightened the riddle of organizing principles at every level.

Reductionist science theory registers the detailed new vistas of data, but fails to make sense of them, to appreciate the source of the emergent organizing principles at work. In Heusser’s words, “no emergent level can be derived from the one before it— each emergent level bears its own effective causes within itself.” World class researchers such as professor of physics Arthur Zajonc (Amherst) and Frederick Amrine in philosophy and literature (University of Michigan), or James Dyson, MD, in mental health and social therapy, have moved forward, articulating how the truths and powers of Rudolf Steiner’s research and creativity are percolating to the surface in the emergence science of our time.

A Barrier falls in our Time: Nicanor Perlas, Peter Heusser and Armin Husemann

Unnoticed to many, anthroposophy has passed a crucial barrier in 2019. The world may not seem yet as changed as it in fact is. “Alternate Nobel Prize” laureate Nicanor Perlas gave the lead address in Stuttgart for the hundred year anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s Threefold Order, in the city where the movement began. From there he launched a nine-city speaking tour around his 2019 book Humanity’s Last Stand, to articulate the defining challenge of our time that cannot be met without anthroposophy. That challenge is the lure of artificial intelligence allied to materialist, threefold-less economy.

In Humanity’s Last Stand Perlas, too, builds on the epistemology and science foundations of Prof. Heusser, whose work has created inroads at leading universities to begin to realize the full force of Rudolf Steiner’s achievement for our time, before it can devolve into mere New Age fragments of itself. Heusser’s book, Anthroposophy and Science, is groundbreaking—it is in the process of establishing authentic spiritual science in dialogue with leading scientists, researchers, and global leadership initiatives world-wide, and new research positions and fields at elite universities.

Fittingly, 2019 is also the year Prof. Heusser’s introduction appears to Husemann’s seminal work, Form, Life and Consciousness. The book is a series of vivid realizations of the many things Prof. Heusser has elucidated in new light. The consonance and dynamic expressed through these three individuals is a clear sign that a long standing barrier has fallen.

Readers are encouraged to watch for updates at www.anthroposophy.org/calendar for possible special events with Nicanor Perlas and Peter Heusser on The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence and the Sciences in Relation to Experiencing the Spiritual Nature of Human Intelligence, during the first weekend of May, 2020.

References

Armin J. Husemann, MD, The Harmony of the Human Body: Musical Principles in Human Physiology, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1994

Prof. Peter Heusser, MD, Anthroposophy and Science: An Introduction, Peter Lang, New York,2016

Friedwart Husemann on Friedrich Husemann and Gisbert Husemann: Rudolf F. Gedeke/ Hans Werner-Schroeder on Gottfried Husemann; in Forschungsstelle Kulturimpuls, http://biographien.kulturimpuls.org/

Heinz Herbert Schöffler, for Friedrich Husemann on Gottfried Husemann in Das Wirken Rudolf Steiner 1917-1925, Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach, 1964

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962, 1970

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY, 1966 Frederick Amrine, Thresholds, Keryx, Ann Arbor, 2019

C.T. Roszell (croszell@wccnet.edu) teaches German at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is currently developing a multi-media German language course based on poetry, story-telling and guitar. In spring 2019 he spoke Forum3 in Stuttgart on “The Future Has Arrived Early: Risks and Opportunities in the Far West.”