The commission instituted by the princely government of Anhalt-Lippe1 to research the current state of agriculture has submitted its report. The head of the commission, Comrade Prof. Dr. rer. Nat. Dr. h.c. Danton Friedemann, summarized the topic of “artificial fertilizer” as follows:

Whether we fertilize naturally or artificially depends on our definition of nature and art.2 We started with the most obvious one. Art is every phenomenon that bears traces of human information. By elimination, all remaining phenomena are to be viewed as nature. Unfortunately, we came to the conclusion that there can be no nature under such a definition. Not only would all human beings be artificial creatures because all hold inherited as well as acquired information and are thus cultural factors—except our noble Prince Eberhard XC, whom no one can accuse of cultural infection. In addition, all presumably natural factors would prove to be artificial ones. Even the moon shows traces of the cosmonauts’ soles. If the governing party of the Fundamentalist Greens wanted to act in accordance with its program and allow only nature to exist—they would have to remove the moon, which is as of now beyond the capabilities of the principality. And so we saw ourselves obliged to look for another definition of nature and art.

For this purpose, we consulted a foreigner’s body of thought, the Breisgau native Martin Heidegger. This approach showed that “everything that has its origin in itself is natural. Everything else is to be called artificial.” Yet, even this excursion into the (admittedly diseased) Black Forest proved to be unproductive. In our critical analysis of the man from Breisgau we were forced to admit that “being” (sein) is a verb, with a future tense of “that which is present to us” (das uns Anwesende), with a present tense of “our being here” (unser Anwesen; also: our property), and with a past tense of “that which is done being” (das Verwesene; also: that which is decayed). We also realize that nature is all that which presents itself to us decayed from the core (das uns ursprünglich anwest). We may conclude that nature is just one possibility, a kind of wind blowing at us, and that we, whatever it is we do, are digging around in that which decays, in trash, in the dirt: in short, in art. We couldn’t ever decide to do that, especially since we learned in the Black Forest what was meant by “deciding,” namely to come to an end, to deteriorate.

We have now adopted the following definition as a working hypothesis: “Nature is everything that occupies the natural sciences, the rest is to be called art.” The upside of this definition is that if we seek to return to nature we only have to ban everything that does not belong to the natural sciences. However, we also had to acknowledge two things. First, that we owe artificial fertilizer to the natural sciences. If we only acknowledged the natural sciences, we could only permit the use of artificial fertilizer, and not natural. Second, that the natural sciences are relatively young disciplines. If we work with this definition, then nature appears to be a relatively young phenomenon—an unsettling conclusion we considered in detail:

From the beginning of humankind up to the pre-Socratic thinkers, the entire world (stones, trees, springs, clouds, rain, day and night, stars, animals, and human beings) was a context with which we could—and had to—talk. We had to pray to the phenomena, appease them, negotiate with them, that is, recognize or respect them. Ever since the pre-Socratics, however, we no longer want to recognize or acknowledge phenomena, we want to differentiate or know them, one after the other (first the stars, culminating in human beings). This made talking with phenomena both impossible and unnecessary (first with the stars, and in the end with human beings). This progressive trend toward differentiation and knowing, and the no-longer-having-to-recognize-or-acknowledge, represents the progress of discourse achieved in the natural sciences. Nature, therefore, is all that which we can differentiate without having to acknowledge it. From this we may conclude that nature is a subdivision of the world progressively and artificially extracted from art. We may anticipate that, over time, the entire world will belong to this subdivision. In short: Nature is to be considered the result of an artificial intervention in the world.

From the perspective of the governing party, our alarming discovery might be deemed positive. Instead of proclaiming “Back to Nature,” based on the party’s motto, it can advocate “Forward toward Nature.” Everything that is artificial, every attempt to acknowledge anything can be vilified as reactionary. The opposition, however, could take the opportunity to turn the slogan on its head, since it demands that we advance from within art into nature artificially. It would therefore seem wise to fall back on the tradition of the dialectic, and to aver that nature is the nullification of art because of art’s own internal contradiction. But now let’s turn to the problem of fertilizer.

The natural sciences supply us with artificial fertilizer that facilitates superartificial natural growth, including superartificial hybrids, and therefore natural plants, thanks to the aforementioned dialectical contradiction. Because it has been differentiated and manipulated by the methods of natural science, we must concede that agriculture using artificial fertilizer is in fact natural agriculture. All so-called natural fertilization hence represents a reversion to prenatural, magical-mythical conditions. The Fundamental Green Party must therefore ban natural fertilization.

Assuming that the population-at-large is unable to follow our dialectical reasoning, we propose that the government again propound the slogan of our beloved fatherland: “Zip your lips!” (Anhalt den Lippen).