Humans are just one sort of being among a multiplicity of beings Ross. In an ontological sense we are of this world in the same way moss or beetles are of this world. This doesn't mean we are devoid of special talents and significance. Only that our talents are generated and enacted within a complex but thoroughly natural matrix of extensive and intensive properties. We are amazing animals, no doubt about it. But just because we have developed frontal lobes, social techne and symbol manipulating capacities doesn't mean we are ontologically different.This is your typical anti-anthropocentric fare. Humans are just one sort of being amongst a multiplicity of beings, etc. Fairly predictable. But just how comprehensive is this “wilderness”? What exactly can it be said to “contain”? What constitutes its “parts”? [source]
The sort of ‘wilderness thinking’ I support is not simply based on metaphors but evokes and enacts the literal and empirical sense of the term. Our planet is a vast ecological niche with wild (untamable) processes and entities. And as we emerge from this generative matrix of material-energetic (ecological) potencies we find ourselves thrown into a dark and tangled reality. This sometimes obscure, sometimes illuminated field of possibilities is literally a wilderness full of objects, flows, agencies, complexes and differential powers. And we are literally animals coping and adapting to these ‘forces’ through whatever means available. We are, as it were, necessary explorers in the wilderness of being. That is to say, being as such – as the totality of distributed beings and the possibility spaces between them - is fundamentally ecological.
For me, this is not an ontological-metaphysical (onto-theological) statement; it is an ontic statement subject to empirical investigation. For me, metaphysics is a purely speculative project secondary to the more pragmatic practice of investigating the actual conditions of human praxis. And so I think ‘wilderness thinking’ can bring us down to earth (and out from within the fog of our various transcendentalist and metaphysical fantasies) and compel us to stop merely interpreting and reifying the dynamic character of nature and start living it.
To be sure, the nature/culture binary is illusory – a heuristic couplet that obscures the cosmological character of things. It is part of a pre-modernist schema predicated on the solipsistic fantasies of a species that believed itself to be the offspring of Gods, and then later reconfigured by proto-modernists as part of self-validating ‘humanism’.
What could possibly be outside of nature? Can we identity one tangible aspect of human life that is entirely or purely cultural? I strongly doubt it. Every-thing, every experience, every utterance, every symbol is composed of the same cosmological properties which occasion reality. Thus, all consequential and therefore meaningful action takes place on the same plane of immanence.
And so if I choose to operationalize the notion of wilderness in order to frame my ontographic endeavors I do so because for pragmatic and poetic reasons (listed above).
Like Dante stopping at the cusp of a dark forest, I seek to orient myself to the reality in which I find myself as a means of engaging the all too human tasks I have chosen.
In the same post Ross then comments on my associating wilderness ontology with Heidegger’s early work:
The idea of a “wilderness-ontology,” Heidegger’s pathways leading from his hut up in the Black Forest out into thick of the woods, from which he could always search for “the clearing” in which beings disclose themselves — all these metaphors can be very easily traced to Nazi ecological thought. Knowing fully well the dangers of such accusations, I say this with complete seriousness. The Germanic naturalist fetishization of nature, the Nazi concept of the perpetual forest Dauerwald as the sort of Ursprung of the Teutonic spirit, this is the source for Heidegger’s early “fundamental ontology.”
Heidegger was indeed a Nazi. And his philosophy, arguably, does have affinities with fascist modes of thinking. But these facts do not define the totality of his thought and conceptual achievements. As discerning thinkers we can take what is of value in Heidegger and discard the rest. It’s never an all or nothing affair.
Were Sartre and Merleau-Ponty fascists? No. They were communists. But they were also heavily influenced by Heidegger. Same goes with Derrida, Dreyfus, and countless others: influenced by Heidegger without being nazis. And Heidegger is a major influence on my thought but I’m not a fascist, or at least I don’t think I am. (Alternatively, were Emerson or Thoreau fascists? Nope. But they were quintessential wilderness thinkers.)
Were Sartre and Merleau-Ponty fascists? No. They were communists. But they were also heavily influenced by Heidegger. Same goes with Derrida, Dreyfus, and countless others: influenced by Heidegger without being nazis. And Heidegger is a major influence on my thought but I’m not a fascist, or at least I don’t think I am. (Alternatively, were Emerson or Thoreau fascists? Nope. But they were quintessential wilderness thinkers.)
The link between fascist thought and ecological thought is not causal but incidental. It is just as easy to suggest socialist affinities in nature viz. ants and other social animals. Truly realist ecological thinking flows from the confluence of embodied experience and the methods, conceptual resources and insights of particular sciences and humanities – if it is ever generated at all.
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http://clemson.academia.edu/AllenThompson/Papers
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/82/142
Thanks D.
I forgot to copy you on my response to this over at my blog:
Michael,
1. I’ve said this elsewhere, in various places, but I reject ontological thinking (especially in the vein inspired by Heidegger) as unhistorical. Its concept of “historicity” attempts to freeze the inherent fluidity of historical time by assimilating its to the existential structures of presentistic being, and thus dilutes the richer and more dynamic understanding of the world as historical and the qualitative changes brought upon by the forces of world-history.
In terms of our connection to nature, no one will deny humanity’s origins in the natural world, out of a long evolutionary process of biology. Yet the reason why I say that the nature/culture split is real is that it has become real, through a process of historical alienation. The moment that humanity becomes self-conscious, achieves systematic thought, and instrumental rationality — as well as begins to repress its more natural instinctual drives — humanity begins to differentiate itself from nature. At first this alienation is minimal, as even in primitive agricultural societies one remains tied quite immediately to the natural rhythms and cycles of existence.
Once human society becomes increasingly denaturalized, once its interaction with the nature from whence it sprang becomes more and more mediated through social processes and the built environment of towns and cities (artifice), the alienation rises to the level of consciousness. I believe that historically this took place most noticeably after the Scientific Revolution and capitalist rationality/intellectualization began to disenchant nature of its mysterious properties, such that the early Romantics began to feel a profound sense of estrangement and distancing from nature. Since then, this consciousness has gone through a variety of ideological mutations, all the way into the present.
That is why I affirm the division between nature and culture, not as an absolute, insurmountable opposition, but as one which has arisen historically and might be historically overcome. Human beings themselves cannot be called wholly “unnatural.” Our bodies are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of natural biological evolution. But the world which we create for ourselves, and with which we are more immediately familiar than “original” nature, cannot be said to be entirely “natural.” There is something about a skyscraper that is profoundly unnatural, with its ferro-concrete frame and huge glass facades. The anthills and honeycombs of Levi’s example pale in comparison to these designed artifacts, being as they are the creations of the unconscious social instincts of ants and bees.
2. I agree that the world is composed of a variety of distributed forces, entities, networks, energies, and existential spontaneity. There are, of course, regularities and rhythms to this distributions that can be understood, whether as the “natural laws” of physics or as biospheric tendencies. Within this sublime order of calm predictability, there are of course also countervailing forces that are extremely chaotic, disruptive, and destructive, abiding by their own sets of laws, which can radically reshape the distribution of natural entities. It is not, of course, this fragile equilibrium hanging delicately in the balance. If that were the case, species extinction and environmental transformations would be impossible.
(continued) Nevertheless, human society has displayed an increasingly marked ability to affect the total environment of the Earth. While every biological organism seeks to exploit its environment in order to survive and perpetuate itself, humanity is able to do so on an unparalleled level. Particularly following the advent of capitalism, the rate of revolutionary technological innovations has accelerated at an astonishing pace. Our ability to extract natural resources, whether from the bottom of the ocean or buried beneath layers of Siberian permafrost, is astounding. We can shear off the sides of mountains with dynamite, drill tunnels and subterranean underpasses, redirect the course of rivers, and create artificial lakes. And while this happens in a hyperexploitative, individual, and anarchistic fashion under capitalism, such monumental forces of production and environmental transformation could be directed to literally reshape the globe according to human need and taste. Humanity would have to attain a more complete mastery over its own form of social organization, such that it could self-consciously exert its energies in the most sustainable, and yet efficient, ways. I dare say that we could even enhance nature, not only for our own sake, but for nature’s sake as well.
3. I agree that Heidegger’s thought has many facets and that one cannot uniformly label them all as fascist. I believe that much of his romantic emphasis on the “poetry” of being, “pathways” through the forest searching for “the clearing” in which beings unconceal themselves, these concepts have dangerously völkisch undertones. The simplicity of wisdom, Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism, setting itself apart from the “idle talk” of the “they” (those alien, overly-verbose Jewish cosmopolitan types), all this is extremely problematic. The problem is that many of his successors, even if they espoused different political ideologies, carried over these mute fascisms from Heidegger’s unique spin on phenomenological thought. The concept of a “wilderness” in which all beings are entangled, bound up, and which through struggle manifest themselves, this bears too much similarity to the kinds of speeches he delivered to young Nazi volunteers during his (brief) career as the rector of Freiburg.
@Ross - my answer to your comments is here.
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