- Deep ecology, that branch of environmental philosophy
that most radically challenges the assumptions of
anthropocentric humanism, has recently become something
of a bête-noir within mainstream ecological
thought. Following Luc Ferry's influential linking of
deep ecology with fascism in The New Ecological
Order, many environmental thinkers have published
work criticizing the movement's anti-modernism and
potentially totalitarian holism. For example, in
"Ecofascism: An Enduring Temptation," Michael Zimmerman
identifies instances of such holism in the politics of
noted European environmentalist Dr. Walter Schoenichen
and in American environmentalist J. Baird Collicott's
early approval of deep ecology's "biocentric" philosophy.
Citing Aldus Leopold's collectivist land ethic as a major
influence upon American biocentrists, Zimmerman sums up
the threat of organic holism at work in certain branches
of deep ecological thought:
According to Leopold, 'the land' refers to the
internally related complex of organic and inorganic
elements . . . that constitute a particular biome or
bioregion. Leopold sometimes described these elements
as being analogous to the organs of an organism. To
survive, an organism's organs must cooperatively
limit their behavior in ways that serve the higher
good of the whole organism. Individual organisms
lack ethical importance, for they are temporary
instantiations of enduring species whose interlocking
relationships constitute 'the land.' (400)
If taken as a biological foundation for political
policy, it is not difficult to see how Leopold's land
ethic can lead to a form of holistic totalitarianism
wherein the rights of individuals are automatically
subordinated to the collective good. Similarly, in
Imagining Nature: Blake's Environmental
Poetics, literary critic Kevin Hutchings analyzes
the Polypus in Blake's Jerusalem as a "travesty
or parody of the holistic relationality which is a
definitive yet ultimately irreducible or undefinable
trait of Blakean 'Life'" (194). Hutchings analyzes the
Polypus as a figure whereby Blake explores the horrific
implications of a human society that has been
"overwhelmed by the 'Outside' or objective universe"
(196) to such an extent that it behaves like an
assimilating "organism" in which "the individual human
loses all autonomous identity." He goes on to link such
a totalitarian vision with Arne Naess's philosophy:
One of the founders of the 'deep ecology' movement,
Naess advocates an ethic of human 'identification'
with all life, a mode of relationship entailing
[according to critic Ralph Pite] 'an extension of
sympathy that reaches so far and becomes so constant
that the self loses any desire to differentiate
between itself and the world.' (quoted in Hutchings
197)
Far from offering a desirable alternative to
modernity's dualistic alienation of human beings from
nature as a domain to be dominated in the name of
civilization, Hutchings's deep ecological Polypus
embodies an inverse, pathological form of
identification which "entails a holistic
totalitarianism that actually forecloses ethical
possibilities" (197).
-
Such critiques are important insofar as they
identify regressive elements within the deep ecology
movement that, in the name of holism, seek to efface
différance and to deny political contingency via
recourse to specious biological determinism. The
historical consequences of such ideology in Nazi "blood
and soil" totalitarianism should serve as a powerful
reminder of the risks entailed in reactionary
dismissals of modernity and of humanism's ethical
legacy for our species. However, as Cary Wolfe and
other scholars have pointed out, traditional liberal
humanism is—in and of itself—theoretically
"impoverished" when it comes to providing
non-anthropocentric models for how to conceive the
rights of non-human species. Indeed, changes
currently underway in global ecology and in technology
indicate that non-human nature is rapidly being altered
by human culture to such an extent that any
distinguishable difference between what is "natural"
and what is artificial may soon be rendered
meaningless. Although the cultural dimension of
nature's meaning has always been a product of human
artifice, the scope of physical changes underway in
today's global weather systems, increasingly ubiquitous
genetically modified organisms, and in continually
shrinking habitat for endangered species all suggest
that nature's material "différance" is being
effaced by humanity on an unprecedented scale.
Indeed, it is the latter erasure that has led
contemporary ecologists such as Bill McKibben to
conclude that our era marks the "end of nature" and
philosophers such as Michel Serres to argue that global
culture has itself become a force of nature, the human
equivalent of plate tectonics (16). In other words, if
we continue to apply powerful technology under the
influence of a traditionally humanist mindset that
remains blind to the pitfalls of anthropocentrism,
nature as an "outside" will cease to function as a
useful counterbalance to human activity or as a domain
which provides a window onto other modes of being. In
essence, the risk of humanity being reduced to a subset
of biological nature feared by opponents of
totalitarian holism seems far less likely today than an
opposite (equally problematic) monism wherein nature is
completely subsumed by the category of the human.
-
Insofar as it attempts to inaugurate a means of
thinking alternatives to the latter dilemma, deep
ecology remains a significant facet of environmental
philosophy. Of all the major schools of ecological
thinking currently available, deep ecology addresses
most directly the problem of anthropocentrism and the
need to re-consider the status of non-human entities as
co-inhabitants of planet earth. It does so primarily
via the Deep Ecology Platform (DEP)'s recognition of
"intrinsic value" in all life forms and its assertion
that human beings have no essential "right" to reduce
the richness of biodiversity "except to satisfy vital
needs" (Naess and Sessions quoted in Deep
Ecology 70). Although the concepts of "inherent
worth" and humanity's "vital needs" are subject to
deconstruction, the platform nonetheless raises the
question of why non-human life has traditionally been
excluded from "subject" status in western thought, and
(therefore) from inclusion within the sphere of
"intrinsic value" and/or unalienable rights. Indeed,
the notion of intrinsic value, I will argue,
necessarily compliments the principle of "wide
identification" that also underwrites deep ecological
thought as an "ultimate premise" (Glasser 219). As is
illustrated in Zimmerman's and Hutchings's analysis,
the charge that deep ecology promotes totalitarian
holism hinges largely upon exclusive attention to the
"identification" principle without an acknowledgement
of the tension that is produced by deep ecology's
concurrent inclusion of the "intrinsic value"
principle. At a fundamental level, the latter
represents an attempt to acknowledge the value of both
"human and nonhuman" diversity, as reflected in the
platform's second basic principle: "richness and
diversity of life forms contribute to the realization
of [intrinsic] values" (Naess and Sessions quoted in
Deep Ecology 70). It is difficult to see
how a commitment to human diversity as a "value in
[itself]" gels with the charge of totalitarian holism
leveled by critics of deep ecology. Moreover, diverse
traditions have informed the philosophical premises of
the DEP (including Spinozan Christianity, feminism,
pre-industrial or "primal" cultures, ecological
science, contemporary physics and—particularly
significant for the present study—Romanticism and
Eastern religion).
-
The humanist tradition in Western thought enables us
to contemplate human life's "intrinsic value," arguably
one of the most important ethical achievements of this
philosophy. Although subject to the charge of logical
fallacy (it might be argued that nothing has inherent
value but that all value derives from human
attribution), the principle nonetheless possesses a
certain wisdom insofar as it guards against the
reduction of value to utility. This is why Kant's
"categorical imperative" asserts that it is wrong to
see a human being as a "means" to some end rather than
as an "end in his/herself"—i.e. to see subjects
in terms of their functional utility rather than as
entities with a value that transcends all notions of
use. Following in this tradition, Naess attempts to
extend the concept of what constitutes an "end in
itself" to non-human entities. Thus, following Tom
Regan, he defines "intrinsic value" as "the presence of
inherent value in a natural object . .
. independent of any awareness, interest, or
appreciation of it by any conscious being" (Regan
quoted in Naess 197). The humanist tradition,
however, maintains that differences in kind which exist
between humans and animals (language use, rationality,
capacity for ethical behavior) justifies their
exclusion from the domain of "intrinsic rights." For
example, Kant maintained that because animals lacked
consciousness, they could not be ends in themselves but
were mere means to human ends. Given recent discoveries
regarding animal consciousness in the field of
cognitive ethology and regarding humanity's close
genetic kinship with other animals, many of the
discriminatory markers invoked by earlier humanist
thinkers have proven to be problematic and/or not
nearly as clearly defined as was once believed. Deep
ecology challenges us to reconsider why we continue to
deny that non-human life can also be perceived as
possessing inherent worth and why, for purposes of
expediency, human beings should automatically have the
right to determine a natural entity's value, or,
conversely, to deny it. In order to consider the
possibility that non-human life forms might possess
intrinsic value, deep ecologists have had to seek
philosophical models beyond those afforded in humanism,
insights derived from non-dominant traditions within
Western thought and in Eastern traditions such as
Buddhism.
-
Humanity's ability to identify with certain
non-human life forms may at first seem to be a
sufficient basis for attributing intrinsic value to an
entity, yet in actuality identification alone in no way
ensures that an organism's right to life will be
acknowledged. For example, human beings might identify
with a tiger's strength and beauty or a wolf's
intelligence, yet this very identification contributes
to the slaughter of tigers for aphrodisiac products in
the Far East and has contributed to our competitive
drive to exterminate the wolf in the West. Likewise,
the popularity of bird feathers and furs as objects of
aesthetic admiration (human identification with the
beauty of these things) has contributed to extinction
and/or drastic reduction in the populations of other
animals. This is why "wide identification" alone is an
insufficient principle upon which to ground an
ecological philosophy that goes beyond the limitations
of traditional humanism. Conversely, if we cannot
identify with non-human life at all (seeing human
interests as being entirely distinct from the interests
of other organisms and denying the latter a capacity
for thought or feeling) then we also run the risk of
objectifying and exploiting natural entities as wholly
alien "others." In an effort to avoid either scenario,
deep ecology attempts to counterbalance "wide
identification" with an acknowledgement of all life's
"intrinsic value." The great risk of this strategy is
that, from a conventionally rational perspective, it
may appear to be incoherent. Operating from within such
a perspective, one might critique the logic of asking
human beings to identify with natural entities while
simultaneously asserting that life's value is
ultimately "independent" of any human "awareness,
interest, or appreciation" of it. From such a
standpoint, a philosophy must choose whether it bases
its ethical claims upon principles of sameness
(identification) or différance (attribution of
value to things because they resist the homogenizing
effects of identification).
-
This paper will make a case for the necessity of
deep ecology's inclusion of these apparently
contradictory (but actually complementary) principles
within its philosophical framework. Three key sources
of deep ecological thought—Romanticism, Martin
Heidegger's philosophy, and Buddhism—
collectively illustrate the importance of combining
both "wide identification" and "intrinsic value" in
one's environmental ethos. William Blake's monistic art
demonstrates the vital importance of human
identification with nature; Martin Heidegger's late
philosophy outlines the limitations of identification
and the need to acknowledge "intrinsic value" in
non-human entities; and Buddhist thought parallels both
approaches, providing a means for recognizing their
complementarity. Conceptually, this essay will revolve
around the insight suggested in Zen master
Ch'ing-Yüan's famous sermon on mountains and
waters (Sheng-yu Lai
358-359). Ch'ing-Yüan states that when he
first began to study Zen, mountains were mountains and
waters were waters, when he thought he understood Zen,
mountains were not mountains and waters were
not waters, and when he actually experienced Zen
awakening mountains were again mountains and waters
were again waters. One way to interpret this sermon is
to note that we in the West are inheritors of a
dominant mode of dualistic thinking wherein mountains
and waters appear to be objects existing "outside" the
human subject, which could be likened to the first
phases of understanding in Ch'ing-Yüan's sermon.
However, we also inherit a less dominant tradition
(Romanticism) that seeks to foster a mode of
consciousness that transforms mountains and waters into
phenomena the subject identifies with on a deeper
level. In this second phase of awareness, mountains no
longer appear to be the objects they once were, but
take on an altered phenomenological status within the
mind of the perceiver. Yet, such identification must go
a step further in order for the human subject to
achieve a truly enlightened relationship with mountains
and waters. A third phase must be achieved wherein
mountains and waters again are acknowledged as being
separable from humanity, although this insight is now
accompanied by a greater sense of compassion than was
available at the outset. Inspired by Ch'ing-Yüan's
sermon, this paper will consider whether deep
identification is a necessary prerequisite to "letting
things be," by acknowledging that such identification
does not require a one way projection of human identity
onto nature, nor an insistence that nature be
absolutely revealed to us. True identification humbly
acknowledges the limits of human understanding and
values the mystery of nature's "suchness"—its
irreducible otherness—by creating a space for
acknowledging its "intrinsic value."
-
In "Blake's Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of
Otherness," critic Mark Lussier usefully revises the
traditional characterization of Blake as an archetypal
champion of art and reviler of nature as something
hostile to the imagination. As he convincingly
illustrates, what Blake objected to was the Cartesian
construct of nature as an object domain separable from
human consciousness, a world of dead matter that could
be exploited ad infinitum to benefit humanity's estate.
In such a view, nature's unpredictability is effaced
within a mechanistic framework that characterizes it as
a machine-like system composed of discreet parts, whose
power can be harnessed by human beings. Nature remains
a material other, but one that can be controlled by
humanity. Blake's texts—perhaps more than those
of any other Romantic poet—consistently subvert
this construction of nature and the anthropocentric
subjectivity that underwrites it. This is because of
his conviction (expressed in a 1799 letter to Rev. Dr.
Trusler) that "to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination
Nature is Imagination itself" (Complete
Poetry 702). For Blake, nature and humanity
are in fact one, originally unified in Albion, the
Eternal Man. Albion's fragmentation gave rise to the
dualistic illusion that humanity is separate from
nature, but Imaginative perception—particularly
that enacted in poetic reflection—reveals the
true interconnection of all things. In order to
experience what a deep ecologist might term "wide
identification" with nature, however, Blake asserted
that we must revise our atomistic understanding of
subjectivity in order to comprehend all existence as
reflecting the Human Form Divine. Within this monistic
schema, all entities share humanity's capacity for
intellect, feeling, and "speech" because, on a deep
level, they are synonymous with the human mind or
imagination.
-
Blake realized that human identification with nature
requires an acknowledgment of how non-human entities
"signify" even though they don't literally possess
human language. This is why, in poems such as "The Book
of Thel" natural entities "speak" to Thel in the sense
that they are capable of educating her if she is
receptive to their lessons. As Lussier points out, this
poem anticipates what we would today describe as an
ecological awareness that "every thing that lives, /
Lives not alone, nor for itself" (II: 26-27)—that
although lilies, clouds, worms and human beings are (as
individuals) impermanent, they sustain wider networks
of life that do not pass away. This is why the Lilly
(Blake's spelling) of the field explains she doesn't
lament death because her life nourishes other animals
like the lamb and the bee. Likewise, a little cloud
explains that when it appears to vanish, it in fact
remains part of the water cycle that gives "tenfold
life" (II: 11) to other beings. Thel's existential
dilemma (a uniquely human dilemma) is that she cannot
accept either her mortality or her integration within
the web of life. This is why Thel fears that she
"live[s] only to be at death the food of worms," to
which the cloud replies "Then if thou art the food of
worms. O virgin of the skies, / How great thy use, how
great thy blessing" (II: 23-26). Here, the text
playfully subverts Thel's speciesist revulsion at the
prospect of becoming worm food by reversing the
anthropocentric assumption that human beings use nature
(but not vice versa) to celebrate Thel's inescapable
"purposiveness" within ongoing natural cycles. Yet, due
to a dualistic philosophy that locates subjectivity
exclusively in the individual's disembodied mind, Thel
is incapable of consciously accepting her own
impermanence, an understanding that would provide
insight into what Lussier terms "the splendors of a
complementary, undifferentiated existence" (55). As
many commentators have pointed out, an acceptance of
impermanence as an existential condition common to all
things is also a major facet of Buddhist thought, one
that implies a need for the individual ego to free
itself from a grasping mentality that would seek to
escape or avoid such a realization. D. T. Suzuki sums
up this stance succinctly: "we are all finite, we
cannot live out of time and space . . . salvation must
be sought in the finite itself . . . if you seek the
transcendental, that will cut you off from this world
of relativity, which is the same thing as annihilation
of yourself" (14).
-
Blake consistently presents "self-annihilation" an
ethical imperative that permits a fundamental
re-visioning of nature. However, as Kevin
Hutchings points out, such "annihilation" is not
synonymous with the human subject's complete loss of
identity due to its absorption into nature as an
"outside," as may be erroneously inferred from
Lussier's notion of "undifferentiated existence." On
the contrary, in Blake's schema, the atomistic
Cartesian subject is "annihilated" not by being
absorbed into nature, but instead is transformed via a
radical expansion outward so that it comes to be
perceived as encompassing both humanity and nature
within a higher "Human" identity. I would argue that
what could be termed Blake's monistic "higher humanism"
is something that distinguishes his art from both Zen
Buddhist thought and from deep ecology. However,
Blake's emphasis on phenomenological experience as a
gateway to realizing this higher state of unity is
something that also connects his thought with these
approaches, as scholars such as John G. Rudy have
noted. In poems such as Milton,
self-annihilation is not merely arrived at via abstract
contemplation, but is experienced as an ecstatic,
embodied expansion of the self outward in moments of
intense inspiration. What critic Michel Haar says of
Rilke's attempt to explore the "'unheard of center' or
'pure space' of the heart of the world that is no
longer subject or object" (130) seems equally
descriptive of Blake's project. Haar asserts that when
Rilke says "The birds fly through us" he "does not mean
our consciousness represents the flight of the birds;
not only do we experience their very flight in our
body, but it happens through our body in a sense that
is not simply a matter of perception but a fit of
passion, of an ecstatic outburst , of 'sympathy,' of a
fluttering of wings that quivers through and beyond us
in a space that gathers and envelops us" (Haar
126). Such ecstatic "sympathy" enables Blake to
experience (via his imagination) the being of other
animals and to assert that they have the ability to
"signify" through and beyond the scope of language. A
vivid instance of this occurs in Milton's famous
lark song passage:
The Lark sitting upon his earthly bed: just as the
morn
Appears; listens silent; then springing from the
waving Corn-field! loud
He leads the Choir of Day! trill, trill, trill,
trill,
Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great
Expanse:
Reechoing against the lovely blue & shining
heavenly Shell.
His little throat labours with inspiration;
everyfeather
On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the
effluence Divine
All Nature listens silent to him & the awful
Sun
Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little
Bird
With eyes of soft humility, & wonder love &
awe (II, 31:29-38)
Inspired, the lark's song moves its whole being,
makes it quake with "Divine effluence"; its whole body
"vibrates" with inspiration, just as the poem resonates
with a sound but half its own. The poet, like the bird,
"labours" to give voice to this "ecstatic outburst"
whereby the reader may experience something of the
bird's vibrant trace: "the bird flies through us" when
our bodies resonate with the text, or when we
experience the lark's song first hand. The lark
signifies as an emergent phenomenon at the juncture of
bird, text, song and consciousness, so that its voice
becomes indistinguishable from the poet's. Such
identification, whereby the bird is no longer just a
bird, nor the text just a vehicle for representation,
would be quite impossible from a dualistic perspective.
Similarly, Rudy interprets the lines "How do you know
but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/ Is an immense
world of delight, clos'd by your senses five" in
Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" as "draw[ing] the
reader meditatively into the prior oneness of text and
bird, of text and world, as the emergent base of all
reading" (102). Rudy notes that the question "How do
you arrive at the knowledge of immensity suggested
in the phrase 'immense world of delight'" meditatively
leads the reader towards the insight that "the bird is
not simply a representation of delight. It is
the realm of delight itself, requiring not simply
knowledge about but knowledge as that
which is under the pen" (104). What we see in Blake's
poetics that is common to both Zen and deep ecology is,
therefore, an emphasis on action as a form of knowledge
that compliments discourse, "a shift from saying to
doing" (100).
-
And yet, is Blake's romantic identification enough
to provide us with a blueprint for subjectivity that
moves beyond anthropocentrism to cultivate an ethos of
alterity? Given Blake's monistic position, his
belief that all things are part of a higher Human (with
a capital H) identity, one might question in what sense
his poetry permits the thinking nature's alterity as
true "otherness." It seems to me that Blake's thought
is incompatible with deep ecology's desire to recognize
nature's "inherent value" if by this we mean the
ability to acknowledge nature's worth beyond any human
"awareness, interest or appreciation" of it. Indeed,
Blake's thinking does not break with humanism's
tendency to see in man "the measure of all
things"—why else would his figure of ultimate
unification (Albion) bear a human form? From an
ecological perspective, Blake's monistic equation of
nature with Human imagination poses potential
difficulties. For example, what about the need to
protect species or landscapes with which we humans have
difficulty identifying (perhaps why there aren't more
"save the leech or swamp" campaigns)? Likewise,
as aforementioned, too much human identification with a
species can also lead to destructive ecological
practices. Still more problematic is the potential to
justify continuing radical alteration of the
environment based on the principle of identity. In
The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx explores how
the pastoral ideal guiding western cultivation of
so-called "barren" wilderness is underwritten by the
notion that all human arts (including technology) are a
product of nature, that nature evolved our tool
wielding species to permit its own transformation. In
the humanities, the equivalent of this thinking is
reflected in assertions that without art, nature would
not signify—in Heideggerian terms, that nature
requires the "clearings" of human language so that the
"truth" of its being may shine forth. The common theme
here is, to quote Blake, "where man is not, nature is
barren." Yet deep ecology seeks to balance "wide
identification" with an ability to recognize that
nature (even without humans) constitutes a richly
diverse panorama of life, much of which evolved long
before humans arrived on the scene. Is there a way to
balance identification with an acknowledgment that this
domain has inherent value, a right to exist apart from
us?
-
In order to create room for thinking the truth of
inherent value, deep ecology draws upon both
post-Romantic Western thought and insights from Eastern
philosophy, most notably from the late work of
philosopher Martin Heidegger and from Zen Buddhism. As
Bill Devall and George Sessions note in Deep
Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Heidegger
"made three contributions to the deep, long-range
ecology literature," namely: his critique of Western
philosophy's development after Plato (which "paved the
way for the technocratic mentality that espouses
domination over Nature"), his characterization of
Thinking as something "closer to the Taoist process of
contemplation than to Western analytical thinking," and
finally, an ethos that urges modern culture to develop
ways of "dwell[ing] authentically on this Earth" via
increased alertness to one's bioregion and to natural
processes (98). Despite these potentially useful ideas,
however, it must be acknowledged that Heidegger not
only remains a controversial figure due to his
allegiances with Nazi politics, but also a problematic
thinker even from an ecological perspective. For
example, in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the
Question, Jacques Derrida notes that Heidegger's
characterization of animals as "world poor" in
comparison to human beings constitutes a "discourse on
privation [that] cannot avoid a certain anthropocentric
or even humanist teleology" (55). In "Eating Well,"
Derrida even claims that Heidegger's theory of animal
privation belies a "sacrificial structure" (113) that
underwrites western culture's putting to death (in a
non-criminal manner) of not only animals but also
groups of de-humanized people. While I do not endorse
Derrida's conclusion that Heidegger's desire to deny
humanity's kinship with animals implies that human
beings do not "have a responsibility to the living in
general" (112), it is important to acknowledge
potentially destructive components in Heidegger's
thinking which tend to essentialize both human and
animal identity alike. Philosophers sympathetic to deep
ecology would do well to interrogate such flaws in
Heidegger's critique of humanism, as Michael Zimmerman
has in recent years.
-
Nevertheless, in spite of the many shortcomings in
Heidegger's work (and life), his thought does
inaugurate, in a unique manner, a way towards thinking
the underlying complimentarity of "wide identification"
and "inherent value" which is critical to the deep
ecological platform. For the sake of brevity, I will
focus on the evolving relationship of "poiesis" to
physis in Heidegger's work as an indication that
nature's "presence" or truth may not ultimately require
human artifice to be revealed. I will focus on
"The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935) and "The Thing"
(1950) as texts that reflect, in Zimmerman's words, a
turning away from an earlier anthropocentrism in
Heidegger's thought when the philosopher concluded that
"he could no longer conceive of being in terms of human
understanding, but instead had to conceive of human
understanding as an aspect of being itself"
("Heidegger" 247). That is, Heidegger's late philosophy
regarding the mutually "appropriating mirror-play"
("The Thing" 179) of the fourfold (earth, sky, mortals
and the divine) suggests that the "physis"
(self-revealing event) of natural entities constitutes
a form of value ("intrinsic value") that cannot be
reduced to the clearings afforded by western poiesis
(human facilitated modes of revealing), such as art and
technology. Heidegger's eventual turn away from formal
philosophy is sometimes attributed to his interest in
poets writing in the Romantic tradition, such as
Hölderlin and Rilke. Certainly in essays like "As
When On a Holiday…" (1939) we can see the
influence of romantic identification with nature at
work. Here, Heidegger develops his hermeneutics of
resonance, whereby the poet responds to the "call" of
nature by creating linguistic "clearings" through which
the truth of its "holy chaos" (82) can be
simultaneously revealed and concealed, or perhaps more
to the point, revealed in its concealment. But
beyond the identification that permits the poet to
respond to nature's sublimity, there is also a play in
this essay between nature's presence and absence, a
revealing and concealing flux that is not evident (or
possible) in Blake's monistic ethos. Is there another
tradition that Heidegger brings into play that enables
insight into an irreducible nothingness that is ever at
work in nature's revealing? Many scholars have
pointed to the influence of Eastern thought—and
particularly Buddhism and Taoism—on the
development of Heidegger's late work. The philosopher
was already referencing Eastern thought in his lectures
during the 1930's, worked with a Chinese scholar to
translate Lao-tzu in 1946, and, upon reading D.T.
Suzuki's Zen Buddhism in the 1950's, remarked
"[i]f I understand this man correctly, this is what I
have been trying to say in all my writings" (quoted in
Suzuki xi). As Zimmerman asserts in "Heidegger,
Buddhism and deep ecology," there is much to suggest
that Zen thinking enabled Heidegger's late philosophy
of dwelling to go beyond anthropocentric identification
in order to explore how all things (man-made and
natural entities) are at once absent and present,
gathering the world into presence by virtue of their
emptiness.
-
This shift is perhaps most evident in the different
treatment of the relationship between art and nature in
"The Origin of the Work of Art"(1935) and in "The
Thing"(1950). In the "Origin" essay, Heidegger
discusses the way a Greek temple "accomplishes" (175)
the strife between earth and world necessary for the
revealing of truth, and in doing so "acquire[s] the
shape of destiny for human being" (167). That is, the
temple both embodies occidental culture's pitting of
human history (world) against an earth that is
conceived of as being "ahistorical," and brings these
domains into an antagonistic "belonging to one
another"(174). Natural entities require the temple's
work for their "truth" to come into presence, and
historical world requires the earth as a foundation
that grounds its unfolding destiny. Through a series of
violent cuts, the temple's différance permits an
otherwise invisible earth to become visible:
Standing there, the building holds its ground against
the storm raging
above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest
in its violence . . .
The temple's firm towering makes visible the
invisible space of air . . .
Tree, grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first
enter into their
distinctive shapes and thus appear as what they are.
The Greeks early called
this emerging and rising in itself and in all things
physis. (167-68)
What is curious about the description of the
temple's poiesis—its bringing into presence of
nature—is the way in which the temple's "world"
has usurped the original meaning of physis, which is an
"emerging and rising in itself" [my emphasis].
That is, natural phenomena only become "visible" via
the temple's enframing; by implication, earthly things
cannot manifest themselves as what they truly are
without the presence of human poiesis (which originally
included both art and technology as forms of
technē). The earth's reliance upon human enframing
for its truth to appear is even more pronounced in the
world of modern (as opposed to ancient) art. In his
famous discussion of Van Gogh's painting of peasant
shoes, Heidegger analyzes the way in which the painting
reveals the truth of the shoes as equipment, which in
turn reflects the truth of the peasant's "world" and,
only indirectly, the earth's truth as part of the
peasant's world. Indeed, the earth's status in the
world revealed through this relatively modern,
representational work of art is arguably even more
removed than what we see in the Greek temple. This is
because "earth" in the painting is subject to many
layers of mediation: its traces are only indirectly
apparent by considering signs of wear upon the shoes,
the earth's significance for the (hypothetical) peasant
woman who owns the shoes, the artist Van Gogh's
interpretation of the peasant's world, the viewer's
interpretation of Van Gogh's interpretations. On the
one hand, Heidegger tells us that "in the shoes
vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift
of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal
in the fallow desolation of the wintry field" (159). On
the other hand, we are told that the shoes are a
completely de-contextualized aesthetic object: "there
is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or
to which they might belong—only an undefined
space. There are not even clods of soil from the
field or the field-path sticking to them, which would
at least hint at their use." The question therefore
arises as to how the earth can be at once present
and absent in modern representational art; a
paradox that can only be resolved by seeing the earth's
"presence" as being entirely contingent upon the
viewer's apprehension of its role in the peasant's
experience of world: "on the leather lie the dampness
and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the
loneliness of the field-path as evening falls." The
earth's physis as a mode of self-revealing is,
therefore, particularly inaccessible within the
alethias (clearings) afforded by Van Gogh's painting.
Although a trace of the earth's materiality is evident
in the ancient temple's marble and in the natural
environment which surrounds it, nature's physis is
completely subsumed in the painting by the shoes'
utility, the peasant woman's world, and the
decontextualized nature of the art object itself.
-
By 1954, however, physis makes a remarkable comeback
in "The Question Concerning Technology." There,
Heidegger claims that not only art, but physis itself
is a form of poiesis ("bringing forth"): "physis is
indeed poiēsis in the highest sense," as evident
in the "bursting of a blossom into bloom, in
itself"(10). Rather than pitting technology's poiesis
against earth's physis in an effort to alter the
latter, Heidegger suggests that technology should
ideally allow the earth's own presence to "be" instead
of transforming nature into a gigantic "standing
reserve"(17) of energy. What can account for the
dramatic shift in physis's status in this late work? I
believe a careful study of "The Thing," a text written
four years before "The Question Concerning Technology,"
suggests that concepts derived from Eastern traditions
may well have influenced this change in Heidegger's
thought. In this text, there is an attempt to re-think
the value of physis, of learning to respect what is
inherent in nature—what Zen philosophy might
refer to as nature's "suchness." Such thinking would
see humanity's identification with nature as a first
(not final) step towards granting natural entities the
right to "just be" (inherent value). Paradoxically,
deep identification entails granting non-human things a
certain distance from humanity's modes of being,
while also acknowledging that all things are
"appropriated" within the fourfold "thinging" of earth,
sky, mortals, and the divine. The former creates a
space for thinking how the physis of natural entities
constitutes a mode of poiesis, while the latter (in a
suggestive parallel with Buddhist thought) implies that
all things have "presence" by virtue of an underlying
absence (emptiness).
-
As in "The Question Concerning Technology" essay,
"The Thing" begins with a discussion of the many ways
in which contemporary technology appears to have
virtually eliminated "distances in time and space"
(165). That is, circa 1950, air travel,
telecommunications, film, and other technologies seem
to have "abolish[ed] every possibility" of temporal or
spatial "remoteness" as great distances can be overcome
with a speed that is historically unprecedented (an
abolition that is even more pronounced in the
21st Century internet era). Yet, Heidegger
argues that in spite of this "conquest of distances"
there is a "terrifying" sense in which we remain remote
from the nature of things: "the nearness of things
remains absent" (166). In the course of the essay, it
becomes clear that "things" include both man-made and
natural entities, the phenomena that constitute "being"
as a whole. Heidegger suggests that the "thingness of
things" (167) remains remote from us as long as we
conceive of things as objects: "the
thingly character of the thing does not consist in its
being a represented object, nor can it be defined in
any way in terms of objectness, the over-againstness,
of the object." That is, the essence of thing-ness does
not appear in "objective" scientific accounts of an
entity's physical composition, or in modes of enframing
which equate things merely with their utility as
man-made products. Nor do we gain insight into the
nature of things by dividing the world between
"objects" represented within the subject's
consciousness versus things-in-themselves (Kant's
account): "'Thing-in-itself,' thought in a rigorously
Kantian way, means an object that is no object for us,
because it is supposed to stand, stay put, without a
possible before: for the human representational act
that encounters it" (177). Instead of seeing things as
static objects that are "represented" within human
consciousness, Heidegger proposes that we contemplate
all things as instances of "gathering"—as
clearings that enable a bringing together of four modes
of being—earth, sky, mortals (human beings), and
the divine—that mutually appropriate (179) each
other. A thing's thing-ness therefore consists in its
"bringing near" (178) the fourfold in a way that "sets
each of the four free into its own, [yet] binds these
free ones into the simplicity of their essential being
toward one another" (179). For example, a jug "things"
insofar as it holds the "gift" of wine, and thereby
gathers the sky's water, the earth's grape, humanity's
production of wine, and the presence of gods when wine
is used in religious ceremonies (libation). Such
gatherings constitute the thingness of things,
something not only true of the products of human
poiesis, but also of the physis of natural
entities:
Inconspicuously compliant is the thing: the jug and
the bench, the footbridge and the plow. But tree and
pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its
own way. Things, each thinging from time to time in
its own way, are heron and roe, deer horse and bull.
Things, each thinging and each staying in its own
way, are mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown
and cross. (182)
Two things are striking regarding this penultimate
passage in "The Thing." First, there is an
acknowledgement here that poiesis is not the only means
whereby things come into "presence"; rather, all things
do this insofar as they gather the fourfold, "each in
[their] own way." A tree, for example, can also be said
to "gather" the fourfold insofar as it is nourished by
the earth's soil, and the sky's light can be affected
by human care and perceived as a symbol of divine
creation. Unlike what we see in the "Origin of Art"
essay, Heidegger insists here that things do not appear
as things "by means of human making," but
neither, he insists, do they appear "without the
vigilance of mortals" (181). From a human perspective,
things do not appear in their thing-ness unless we
reconsider what it means to "dwell" more responsively
in a world where we are always already part of a larger
"dance of appropria[tion]" (180) over which we cannot
exert ultimate control. In acknowledging that all
things gather the world, "each in [their] own way,"
Heidegger's thought inaugurates a way towards
understanding natural entities' "inherent value" and
challenges human beings to find ways to honor this
value in their own poiesis (technological or artistic
clearings).
-
How did Heidegger arrive at such a different
perspective on the relationship between physis and
poeisis in his later work? Scholars such as
Reinhard May and Michael Zimmerman have suggested that
Heidegger's encounters with Eastern
thought—particularly his interest in Buddhism and
Taoism—may well have influenced this shift. A
crucial step toward acknowledging humanity's
appropriation within the fourfold lies in recognizing a
deeper relationship between emptiness and form than has
traditionally been available in post-Platonic Western
philosophy—a relationship convincingly elaborated
within Eastern traditions. As Zimmerman argues, both
Heidegger and Mahayana Buddhism acknowledge "humans can
learn to 'let things be' only by gaining insight into
the nothingness that pervades all things" ("Heidegger"
240). In Mahayana Buddhism, nothingness connotes the
"emptiness" and impermanence of all things, yet is not
synonymous with formless, chaotic negativity. Rather,
the Sanksrit word for nothingness, "sunyata," is
derived from a term meaning "to swell" (quoted in
"Heidegger" 252), suggesting that emptiness can
be conceived of as a "clearing" or openness that
constitutes a generative space in which things appear.
It is no accident that Heidegger chooses a jug as the
focus of his discussion in "The Thing." A jug is an
ideal focus for critiquing of our understanding of
things as solid, discreet objects, rather than
"clearings" which gather the world. The jug's
"thing-ness" is not to be understood as synonymous with
its material composition, but is instead suggested by
its "holding" (or gathering) nature:
When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows
into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what
does the vessel's holding. The empty space, this
nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding
vessel . . . [t]he vessel's thingness does not lie at
all in the material of which it consists, but in the
void that holds. (169)
In contrast to the Greek temple in the "Origin"
essay, whose columns make the air visible, it is the
emptiness of the jug, not its form, that
constitutes its thingness. In Taoist fashion, the jug
is a clearing through which the fourfold comes to
presence, as it gathers together the earth's soil and
the sky's rain in wine that mortals pour in libation to
the gods. Indeed, as Reinhard May illustrates in
Heidegger's Hidden Sources, "The Thing's"
discussion of the jug remarkably parallels Chapt. 11 of
Lao Tzu's exploration of how "[t]he work of pitchers
consists in their nothingness" (30). Similarly,
Zimmerman discusses suggestive parallels between
Heidegger's characterization of the fourfold's mutually
appropriating "mirror-play" and insight regarding the
universe's luminosity in Mahayana Buddhism. In the most
famous expression of this insight, the universe is
conceived as the jewel net of the god Indra. All
things are analogous to "perfect gems" within this net
(or network), and their reflective light is
simultaneously produced by all the gems collectively,
"no one of which stands in a 'superior' or 'causal'
relation to the others" ("Heidegger" 253). Zimmerman
argues that "Heidegger's account of the dance of earth
and sky, gods and mortals, the dance in which things
manifest themselves in the event of mutual
appropriation, bears remarkable similarities to the
Buddhist account of the moment-by-moment coproduction
of self-luminous phenomena" (257).
-
Critics steeped within a Western tradition that
posits the human individual's dignity and "inherent
value" might find the suggestion that all things (human
and otherwise) are "empty" has troubling implications
if applied to political subjectivity, fearing that an
emptying of selves is often a prerequisite of
totalitarian political regimes or can lead to too
intense an identification with the "objective" domain.
For example, Brian Victoria's Zen War Stories
makes a compelling case for a link between the Zen
concept of "selflessness" and Japanese militarism
during World War II, and Karla Poewe's New Religions
and the Nazis similarly links the German Faith
movement, militarism and Indo-Aryan religious doctrine,
particularly Jakob Hauer's interpretation of Hindu
texts such as the Bhagavad Gita. Poewe
claims that Hauer's efforts to forge a new Indo-Aryan
religion with a fatalistic warrior code "anticipated
justification of the deeds committed by the Nazi
regime" (79). Such work, as with critiques of radical
elements within the deep ecology movement, usefully
analyzes potential effects of state-sanctioned
religious ideology, instead of maintaining that
religious discourse necessarily "transcends" politics.
As convincing as such studies are as explorations of
how Eastern thought has been appropriated by
totalitarian regimes, it is problematic to conclude
that Buddhist and/or Hindu thought is
essentially nationalistic and/or totalitarian.
To draw such a conclusion is to not only distort what
Hirata Seikō describes as "the absolute rejection
of war in ancient Indian Buddhism" (4), but also to
deny that any set of ideas is subject to variable
interpretation or, more rigorously, (re-) construction
over time. As is well known, when Chinese
scholars translated Indian Hinayanan and Mahayanan
texts, they interpreted Buddhism within the framework
of existing Taoist thought, resulting in "Cha'an"
Buddhism; likewise, Japanese monks reinterpreted these
texts to form Zen Buddhism. Any western interpreter of
Buddhism brings to the table certain cultural and/or
ideological lenses through which he or she constructs
interpretations of this thought. Concepts such as
"emptiness" are therefore not only subject to
ideological appropriation (in both a positive and
negative sense), but also to unintended distortion. As
John Rudy and other interpreters of Zen Buddhism have
pointed out, a western, dualistic tradition that
divides the world between subjects and objects can
contribute to misinterpretation of the concept of
emptiness. In Romanticism and Zen Buddhism, Rudy
points out that:
For Zen Buddhists, engaging [a] spiritual ground
[inclusive yet prior to subject-object dualities]
follows patterns of meditative emptying by which
individuals relinquish the compulsion either to
assert independence through radical emphases on
difference or to establish unity through variant
modes of bridged togetherness. The result is neither
subjective nor objective. It is, rather, an opening
process that reveals how each thing in nature is both
an autonomous unit of codependent activity and a
holistic manifestation of ultimate reality. (xiii)
Rather than underwriting identification with
"objective" or state-sanctioned structures
(totalitarian or otherwise), emptiness as Rudy
interprets it suggests an alternative to both
subjective individualism and objective obedience to
collectives. Indeed, it is such alternatives to
dualistic accounts of human subjectivity
vis-à-vis the rest of the living world that
appealed not only to Heidegger in the later stages of
his philosophy, but also continues to appeal to deep
ecologists. As "The Thing" makes clear, insight into
the self's "appropriation" within the world's mirror
play does not entail a collapsing of any one
dimension of the fourfold into the others. Human
beings still retain a unique manner of "gathering" the
world in relation to other beings: "men alone, as
mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as world"
(182)—that is, human beings alone can
self-consciously choose the mode of their dwelling and
experience the world as one of many possible worlds.
Nonetheless, other non-human beings also participate in
the fourfold, "each in its own way," and this diversity
implies the inherent value of each unique mode of
gathering. The metaphor of "mirror-play" enables
Heidegger to suggest a deep identification between
human and non-human actors in the "dance" of creation,
yet this mirroring never stabilizes into a form of
monistic holism. I would suggest that this is because,
unlike his Romantic predecessors such as William Blake,
Heidegger ultimately resists equating "nature" with a
higher Human identity, such as the Imagination.
Instead, the philosopher, like deep ecologists
influenced by his thought, challenges us to think of
identification and inherent worth as a productive
"coincidence of opposites" (in Dennis McCort's
parlance), the kind of paradoxical truth embraced by
Buddhist and Toaist traditions. If we re-conceive the
identity of all things as at once unique (having
inherent value) and empty (inescapably appropriated by
other beings), a truly non-anthropocentric
understanding of nature becomes possible.
Paradoxically, only by learning to "identify" with the
emptiness of all things while retaining a sense of our
distinctive perspective may we eventually find it in
ourselves to allow mountains to be mountains and waters
to be waters.
|
