Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/177/en

The Polarity of Industry and Agriculture

If one looks at the situation of agriculture not only across Europe, where Western-Christian farming once bore culture, but around the earth as a whole, one does not err in the judgment that it has lost its former cultural significance and has ultimately become a kind of burden upon civilizational development. An overabundance of facts bears witness to this. Agriculture, as a culture-bearing impulse that spread and lived itself forth across lands and peoples of the earth in the greatest diversity, has yielded to a civilizational uniformity. As a carrying element of culture for humanity, it has fallen subject to death. Whenever something dies, a call goes out to those who are contemporaries, to become conscious of such a death — of its circumstances, and of the possibilities of development that can emerge from this death as new seeds of life. The human being who has awakened to self-consciousness needs the experience of the threshold to death. Death alone wakens and frees the cognizing gaze for questions of what insights must be won, what conditions must be created, so that a new life and becoming — a resurrection, as it were, to a new culture-bearing — can arise.