The purpose of this translation is to make Hans Kayser’s work accessible to the English- speaking world. Kayser, throughout his life, was first and foremost a harmonist: a scholar dedicated to the study of the fundamental laws that govern music and their applications in other disciplines. Consequently, this book should be approached above all as a harmonic work, and not as a botanical study, even though Kayser’s knowledge of the natural sciences was impressive. In the decades since this book was written, many new discoveries have been made in botany, and many changes have taken place in taxonomy. To contemporary readers versed in the corresponding subject areas, some of the botanical content of this book will appear outdated. But its harmonic content—which is what gives this book its great value—is still current. The laws of harmonics are eternal, and Kayser understood them to an unparalleled degree.
Hans Kayser was, among many other things, an accomplished graphic artist. In some of the more complex diagrams in this book, especially those showing the partial-tone coordinates, it was judged aesthetically inappropriate to convert the German names for the notes (e.g. fis for f♯, h for b) to the English names. For readers who wish to explore these diagrams in depth, we provide the following reference table:
German | ces | c | cis | des | d | dis | es | e | eis | fes | f | fis | ges | g | gis | as | a | ais | b | h | his |
English | c♭ | c | c♯ | d♭ | d | d♯ | e♭ | e | e♯ | f♭ | f | f♯ | g♭ | g | g♯ | a♭ | a | a♯ | b♭ | b | b♯ |
However, in the text of the book and in the less intricate diagrams, the note names have all been converted to English.
Ariel Godwin
Columbus, Ohio 2008
To you, dear father, I dedicate the leaves of this book. For thirty years now you have been in that world which, from here in this land of gloomy dreams, you always sought and never found, yet forever longed to reach. Music and plants—for you they were the two openings through which divine light shines into our souls. The former as the herald of eternal norms, the latter as the master of unchangeable laws in emerging life: tone and form, to you, were a guarantee that there was meaning in being a resident of this world, and that the ultimate answer to our yearning to belong could be found through listening.
So many times I went with you to look for plants, even as a small boy. Hardly a valley, peak, or cliff of this florally rich alpine corner of Germany remained unknown to us. But only sometimes—and then only in small amounts—did we bring a crop home with us. The rest remained in our heads; and even today, like treasured old paintings, the images of those countless clusters of beautiful and rare flowers, bushes, and shrubs are preserved unfading in my memory.
The nailwort clinging to the rocks, the fragrant sunroses growing beneath overhangs, the elegant lady’s slippers, the great yellow gentians and many other smaller gentians blooming on the peaks, the pasque flowers as the first sign of springtime on the ledges, the Turk’s cap lilies, the fly orchids, bee orchids, and bumblebee orchids in the clearings, with all their variations, the dozens of other orchids—I can still smell the intoxicating scent of the hyacinth—and more orchids on the valley slopes, bellflowers growing as tall as a man, foxgloves in shady hollows on the slopes of the Danube valley: these are only names, only sounds for the readers of this book—but for the boy whose youthful mind was led so wisely and lovingly toward his first sight of the eternal and beautiful in nature, they are an unforgettable and unfading experience.
And often, when we returned home tired, once you had closed down the office, another realm lay awaiting us, an inner realm, that of music. At the age of forty, in that little town so far away from all musical centers, you had learned to play the viola, and you sat me down, a ten-year-old, with the cello. With other enthusiasts, we jumped rough and ready into Haydn quartets, then played Beethoven and Schubert; and even the old stone statue by the quietly bubbling fountain in the market square in front of our house must have felt a flutter in its chest at the sound of our heart-stirring melodies. It was wonderful to me then, and still wonderful to me today!
Now, after many years of wandering, after lengthy researching, pondering, erring, seeking, and finding, having settled in a new country—now the circle is closed once again: in this book I return to you, father, and in it you come alive. It was the blue flower whose sound you taught me; may the contours of its silhouette illuminate the following pages...
Plants! In an eternal harmony, the life of the plant, and with it the primal beginning of all life, enters external existence: light, water, and earth weave the threads of the world in infinite forms.
The light brings warmth. Restoring matter to life, the intervals of its quanta vibrate through the atomic formulas of the protoplasm. It conjures the framework, the support, color and form, out of the earth into open space. It uses water for the metamorphosis, the building of the form in time. It is the tonic, the light-tonic, its partial tones forming that eternal harmony of life, and further modulations and variations are determined by the order lying within it.
These are the foundations for the “outer expressions” of the first living beings, the plants; the foundations for their growth, their materiality, their form. The way from there to the “inner expressions”—which is the harmonic way—does not require the above musical metaphors. Every perceptive person “loves” plants. This love for plants—meaning, of course, this psychical relationship with them—traverses a whole series of aspects. Not only the history of botany, but also the position of humans toward plants itself, reveals the manifold nature of this psychical relationship. Even its most external form, simple classification, comparable with naming the stars in the sky, brings us to a certain intimacy with plants. By giving them names, we learn the differences; we gain an idea of the individual, the specific, the unique, and in noting the names of the plants, we create their image within ourselves. In various ways, we can deepen and intensify this tone of the plant in us. The laws obeyed by growth, the architectonics of form, the peculiar logic of chemical structures, the miracle of the pollination mechanism, the ecology of the plant world, and many other things: even amateurs will feel deep resonances from these insights between themselves and the world of plants. And how much more of this will the scientist, the botanist, feel if he has retained the glow of enthusiasm and not hardened himself into stifling, soundless, bloodless clinicality.
Thus there are enough psychical relationships between us and plants, whether they are merely on the level of love and the ability to feel enthusiasm at the beauty of plants in general, or in the direction of an inner understanding of the countless important and interesting questions involved. Love and enthusiasm are not the only languages of the heart; the perception, researching, seeking, and solving of problems must also come from the depths of the mind, must be rooted in the soul, in the heart, if the results of research are not to turn out as a lifeless mechanism of systems, as mere mental acrobatics.
What is the position of harmonics in human perception and human knowledge?
If we answer: “Harmonics is a science that understands things with the heart and perceives them with the intellect,” then we have expressed the characteristics of the harmonic approach, namely tone-number. This approach involves perceiving and thinking, heart and intellect, tone and number, all unified, and from it the entire structure of harmonics is built. What meaning this harmonic approach has, not only in the modern world but also in earlier epochs, can be briefly expressed thus: harmonics makes at least an attempt to build a two-way bridge, a “turnpike,” a possibility for understanding on a universal human and psychical basis, in opposition to the dissociation, the individuation, indeed the sharp separation observable in all eras between human means of expression such as religion, philosophy, art, and science. But this harmonic attempt does not take place merely on the level of certain universal connections. It sounds things out by means of forms present in us, which we perceive as “correct” simultaneously with our soul and our intellect. By means of these “value-forms”—which we verify for ourselves, rather than filtering and abstracting them from an allegedly “objective” condition, external to us and fundamentally accomplishing nothing—and which are, perhaps, the only passport available for the spiritual traveler of modern times—we set forth upon the search for the sounds and melodies that we have heard within the depths of ourselves. In our wanderings we do not take possession of cities or countries, we do not impose our experiences upon anyone. But we are sure, wherever we go, that we will find, friends, brothers, and sisters of the same disposition. In this disposition, our hearts speak, and we endeavor to understand time, past, and future, and to rebuild what we have heard in ourselves according to their forms; and thus, as true humanitarians, we belong to ourselves, indeed the world belongs to us. Only then are we citizens of this world and guarantors for this world.
In observing plants, the inquiring spirit comes face to face for the first time with the powerful and enchanting, imminent and alluring question of life. From the abysmal depths of the dark and mysterious things into which we humans plunge, in which we are enmeshed at every turn, this life glows as the great puzzle whose solution has been, since ancient times, an object of human pondering. Here, we shall attempt to give an interpretation of this puzzle from a harmonic standpoint—a drop of understanding in the ocean of nescience that surrounds us.
Here we must make some introductory remarks regarding a specific topic: the characterizing of the harmonic position on biological questions in general.
In recent times, the study of life, i.e. biology, has been pervaded by a lively and sympathetic approach, whose developers (Uexküll, etc.) call “environmental theory.” This theory completely avoids “anthropomorphism,” as is stated, for example, in Brehm’s Life of Animals, and endeavors to examine the environment of a living being as much as possible from the point of view of this being itself, rather than from the point of view of our human interests. Fundamentally, this is a matter of an old tendency toward objectivization, to which the exact sciences have accustomed us for a long time: the objectivizing of optics in the “anthropomorphic” study of color and light, of chemistry in alchemy, of astronomy in astrology, and so on. Obviously, the efforts at emancipation that have emerged relatively late in biology are in a certain sense able to illustrate the question of life in a more pure, abstract way than previously, especially in the “humanizing” representations common to popular scientific literature.
Upon closer inspection, however, one must wonder whether this alleged change in human criteria and turning toward the environment of a given being can be correct in terms of the theory of perception.
The life of a certain pin-head sized tick is often cited as a borderline case of an “environment” not comparable with human conditions. It affixes itself to warm-blooded creatures; their blood gives it its ability to reproduce. Although blind and deaf, it has the instinct to climb onto flexible branches and to wait there, sometimes for as long as ten years (!), for a warm-blooded animal to brush by. What does this creature’s paltry world have in common with ours? Seemingly nothing at all. It lives in eternal darkness and eternal silence. And there it must find its way, live on, and reproduce.
And yet: this creature is alive! Only a very few factors, admittedly, determine its perception of the world. It must have a sense of warmth, since it attaches itself only to warm- blooded beasts; it must have a certain appetite, namely for blood—a sense of taste! It must be able to distinguish shrubs and grasses from hard wood—a sense of touch! And finally, it must have a goal-oriented instinct—teleology—otherwise its process of life could not take place in this manner. Not to mention its sexual activity and its other abilities and behaviors hardly even observable to us.
Now I ask: are warmth, taste, touch, and teleology qualities that have nothing to do with humans? Are they not just as “anthropomorphic,” i.e. only judgeable according to human criteria, as everything else that presents itself to our perception? Clearly, the life of this tick is absolutely pathetic compared to ours; conversely, certain animals have specific qualities (sense of direction, sense of smell, precise judgment of time, etc.) that put those of us humans to shame. But these are all qualities with which we are familiar in ourselves, and which we can only judge from within ourselves, only assimilate “anthropomorphically” in our experience.
I gave this example, which certainly says nothing new to the environmental scholar, simply because the harmonic approach is able to simplify and clarify the question of life, as it initially emerges in plants. As has been said earlier, harmonics endeavors to find definite forms and patterns in us which both our perception and our intellect perceive as correct (tone and number!), and are thus able to verify. By means of these harmonic “value-forms,” which are established and determined in us as something psychically and spiritually understandable, i.e. as a kind of human estimation according to absolute conscience, we explore the things inside and outside us. The world within us, the world of the heart, thus gains graspable patterns; the world outside us, nature in the broadest sense, gains a perceptible, psychically pulsating tectonics. It would be presumptuous to say that harmonic value-forms could solve the world’s mystery entirely; they are only capable of an interpretation. But it is not, I believe, presumptuous to say that the silent sounds of their forms find resonances in most human and non-human realms—resonances which, arranged into a unified system and world view, have the ability to reanimate the belief, or indeed the certainty, that there is a meaningful cycle, a meaningful structure for the entire mechanism of the world.
When harmonics, like the sciences, gives up a cheap, misunderstood anthropomorphism in favor of a pure exploration of the relevant factual domains on the basis of their own legitimacy, their specific “environments,” it is still with the awareness that we as humans can only measure and perceive things with human criteria, and that humans, albeit sub specie aeternitatis, are the measure of the world.
From this insight, however, the necessity arises of inspecting these human criteria anew and examining the sources from which they come. Harmonic value-forms show a new way for this.
This way is new because even though it is based on ancient traditions, it brings an entirely new perceptive approach to the modern world. In the harmonic phenomenon, tone- number, the unfortunate gap between thought and perception, between nature and psyche, is bridged a priori. Anyone who knows the history of philosophy and research over the last three hundred years will know the meaning connected with this. This bridging, however, is not a merging—as when H and O are made into H2O, i.e. something entirely new and different. In the aspect of tone-number, we have a synthesis that preserves both components. Tone and number do not “merge,” do not produce something new, but remain independent while at the same time united. Material vibrations (number) and tone perception (tone) each inherently belong to different worlds: the material and the psychical. And yet they are legitimately connected, and this legitimacy—or indeed, the fact that there is legitimacy— forms the starting point for all harmonic investigations.
The phenomenon of tone-number is the seedling from which the tree of harmonic knowledge grows. Inconspicuous, like any seedling, like any seed, its inner capabilities are not discernible. On this page before me there lies a tulip seed: a small, brown, translucent flake with a thin line, the germ, in the middle. What does this unimpressive form have in common with a tulip? If I did not know it was a tulip seed, even in my most fantastic imaginings I would not picture the miracle that this seed could produce, given fulfillment in time and space. And a microscope, even on the atomic level, would reveal nothing more than a package of molecules, giving not the slightest impression of the form and beauty of a tulip.
Just as one must give the seed the right nourishment in order for it to grow into a plant, so one must also give the correct spiritual nourishment to the harmonic seedling, the phenomenon of tone-number, if the possibilities and capabilities in it are to achieve their full development.
This analogy has brought us, unintentionally, to the periphery of the plants themselves.
In plants, as in all living beings, the psychical and the material are present in inseparable unity. Insofar as life appears for the first time in plants, the general viewpoint is that the psychical element finds its first, “lowest” realization in the phenomenon of the plant. From this point of view, the harmonic approach, in which the psychical (tone) and the material (vibration number) are united, must have special significance in the domain of plants.
The previous results of harmonic research have shown, however, that characteristic psychical forms, as we perceive them specifically in one part of the harmonic value-forms, can also be found in the inorganic, “dead” side of nature. This “animation” of the inorganic should not be taken for hylozoism, and is not an “animation of all things,” but instead only accounts for certain psychical forms in inorganic nature, so that we might say: it is not the prerogative of humans alone, much less a special peculiarity of life, to take part in psychical forms and to grow according to psychical forms—even though it may be obvious that the psychical becomes autonomous only in the phenomenon of life, and only becomes consciousness in humans.
What peculiarity and characteristic quality the psychical takes on in the phenomenon of life, and how life becomes realized and perceptible for the first time in plants—that is the subject of the following work.
Regarding the development of a harmonia plantarum, just as in any other harmonic work, various ways could be taken. Being convinced that all schematism, i.e. all uniform forcing of investigations onto a path determined for all of time, can only be detrimental to the wealth of the various domains—schematism and systems are different things!—I have arranged the following work in a specific manner.
It is divided into various problems. Each problem is first treated in general as a “theorem” (in the same sense as my book Grundriß), which means that with the help of a testable harmonic theorem, we shall search inside ourselves for the pattern that this theorem radiates and forms as an idea in our head and heart. This pattern once found, we shall search for its meaning in the lives and the domain of plants.
We do not approach plants with feeling alone—although we all do this when we give ourselves over to the beauty of plants and flowers in nature—nor with understanding, knowledge, and interest alone, as has long been the duty of science. Instead, feeling and knowledge, sensation and thought are joined in the harmonic value-form into a unified act of perception. We flock to the teachers within us, and they give us an answer to our consciousness, a promise, that we may grasp, understand, and love the silent world of plants, since it is a part of our own innermost being.