Each kingdom shows its essential being at its peak: the annual plant in fertilisation, the animal beyond fertilisation, the human being in death.
The Culmination Of Plant, Animal And Man in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's criterion for reading each natural kingdom at the one point where its essential being becomes visible. He set it out in the lecture of 20 August 1921 at Dornach, printed in the cycle Humanity, World Soul and World Spirit, Part II (GA 206). The annual plant gathers its forces from seed through leaf to blossom, reaches its height in fertilisation, and from that moment descends toward decay. The animal is fertilised without withering, because it carries something beyond fertilisation and can be fertilised again. The human being overcomes what the animal overcomes and goes one step further, culminating in death, which is why death is the single outer phenomenon from which a concept of the I can be won. Steiner asked that the three markers stay mobile concepts, never hardening into definitions.
The culmination of plant, animal and man is a way of observing, not a classification table. Steiner asks where each kingdom reaches its highest point, then reads its nature backwards from that point. Plant culminates in fertilisation and falls away. Animal passes through fertilisation and carries on. The human being culminates in dying, and there finds the one place where the I can be grasped.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we seek the essence of the plant, we must search in a similar way to how we must search for the human being's sense of self in the continuous dying. We say of the human being that the death with which he first ends his physical being is actually always within him as a force. When he is born, he begins to die, begins to develop, I would say, differentials of dying; he dies continually. The dying process is within him. In the plant, that which culminates last is continually present. Just as we culminate in death, so they culminate in fertilization. Just as we grasp our inner being, our ego, in death, so we grasp the essence of the plant in fertilization. The plant comes to life in fertilization; what develops in the leaf is only a metamorphosis, only a preliminary stage of fertilization.
What it Means Today
Population biology drew a near neighbour of this line from the other side. In June 1954 the ecologist Lamont C. Cole published "The Population Consequences of Life History Phenomena" in The Quarterly Review of Biology, and gave field science a pair of words it still uses: semelparous organisms reproduce once and then die, iteroparous organisms reproduce repeatedly across a lifetime. Wheat, the agave, the Pacific salmon are semelparous. Deer, thrushes, elephants are iteroparous. Set Cole's distinction beside the Dornach lecture of 20 August 1921 and Steiner's first two steps line up almost phrase for phrase: the plant that ends in fertilisation, the animal that overcomes fertilisation and can be fertilised again. What Cole has no column for is the third step. Semelparity and iteroparity are both reproductive categories, counted in offspring, while Steiner's human being fits neither, because the human culminating point is death, and death produces no offspring at all.
Thalira synthesis: Cole gives the criterion in quantity, Steiner gives it in quality, and the human being is the case where the quantitative version runs out of vocabulary. The practical test is small. Watch one annual plant from seed to seed head across a season, then watch a returning bird across several. The third case, our own, then reads differently: dying looks less like an accident at the end and more like the condition waking consciousness draws on all along.
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