Chapter 5 The inherent violence of western thought?

The archetypal eco-fascist?

The forest

An understanding of language as a decisive human environment also marks the arguments to which we now turn. What if it emerged that general and even commonsense assumptions and language in the West about what it means to understand, know or interpret something – anything – were implicitly violent and in some ways destructive of their object? Such a dysfunction would pervade the workings of thought, speech and practice everywhere and it would obviously form a major element in the current environmental crisis. This seems an extreme claim, but it is one made and defended by the German thinker Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the one incontestably major philosopher of the twentieth century whose work has been intimately connected with environmental thinking.

Heidegger's claim is that the course of European and increasingly global history has been largely determined as the hitherto unseen working out of utterly basic but unconsidered modes of thinking and being, dating back to ancient Greece. These are now culminating in a global techno-scientific civilisation that Heidegger saw as a threat not just to the earth itself but also to the essence of humanity, for such a ‘civilisation’ has proved perfectly capable of regarding people as merely another economic resource or even a waste product.

Heidegger traces in European civilisation's basic sense of things since Greece an intensification and hardening of ‘theoreticism’, that is, the drive towards technical, mathematically formalisable and objectifying modes of knowledge and, with it, the oblivion of premodern traditions of know-how and craftmanship: ‘the familiar and well-known has become boundless, and nothing is any longer able to withstand the business of knowing, since technical mastery over things bears itself without limit’.¹ Many intellectual positions often since labelled ‘postmodern’ inhabit the space opened up by Heidegger's attacks on the absolutism of modernity's drive to know, and his diagnoses of the troubling interconnections between dominant conceptions of what it means to ‘know’ or ‘understand’ something and modes of its control, mastery or manipulation.

What, then, is the specific feature of western thought, even two and a half millennia ago, that harbours such latent violence? Michael E. Zimmerman, glossing Heidegger, coins the invaluable phrase ‘productionist metaphysics’, metaphysics being the study of the nature of things at the most general level, and ‘productionist’ as relating to an industrial product:

The metaphysical schemes of Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger argued, were based on the view that the structure of all things is akin to the structure of products or artifacts. Aristotle's metaphysics, for example, is ‘productionist’ insofar as he conceived of all things, including animals, as ‘formed matter’. The most obvious example of such ‘formed matter’ is the work produced by an artisan who gives form to material. Plato and Aristotle seemingly projected onto all entities the structure of artifacts.²

Zimmerman's summary highlights Heidegger's basic point: the hidden anthropocentricism of western thought, its unacknowledged projection of instrumentalist or technological modes of thinking upon the cosmos as a whole. While Plato's and Aristotle's thinking still bore traces of older, non-productionist ways of thinking, this was lost as Platonism and Aristotelianism were passed down: namely, all things are held to be intelligible if analysed in terms of notions of basic designs and their copies (Platonism), or in terms of constitutive forms and the material they shape (Aristotelianism). Even medieval Christianity was productionist in its deep assumptions, for it saw the universe in terms of God as maker and the world as his created product.

Heidegger argues that we must free ourselves from ‘the technical interpretation of thinking’ whose origins ‘reach back to Plato and Aristotle’,³ the productionist notion that thinking is a kind of inner toolkit containing ‘ideas’ to be picked up and employed on ‘problems’ as occasion requires. Thinking, after Heidegger, cannot be the act of a would-be sovereign consciousness seeking the security and power of an assured and totalising system of watertight concepts. This model of thought is memorably caricatured by Heidegger as the securing of ‘booty’ from the ‘outer’ world into the stronghold of the mind.⁴ Such a mode of knowledge is linked to the instrumentalist and fundamentally aggressive project of western rationality, now in its globalising phase. Thinking for Heidegger, especially in art, need not mean the conscious positing of various representations of an object world. It must instead be a non-assertive tracing out of the measure and manner of the realm of unconcealment in which it already moves. So it is not a matter of ‘grasping’, ‘securing’, ‘making certain’ and ‘mastering’ but of ‘following’, ‘hearkening’, ‘hinting’ and ‘being guided’.

In a travelogue of his first journey to Greece in 1962, Heidegger saw an objectifying anthropocentrism in action in all the tourist cameras and video recorders at the ancient sites. Yet the ancient Greeks, he argued, had had no sense of ‘landscape’ or a ‘feeling for nature’ in any modern sense. For them, instead of everything being referred back to some central human consciousness as a spectator of some kind, the world is not an object but a continual happening, within which alone human consciousness finds itself, has an identity and picks up on things. In the hills and sea around, Greek humanity experienced itself as encompassed by a realm which its own projections or conceptualising could not ground, which thus appeared sacral.⁵

Heidegger offered a genealogy of the term nature, tracing its crucial work in helping set up many of the basic terms and culture wars of western history. He traced the term back through the Latin natura to the ancient Greek physis. Physis is often translated as ‘nature’, but more strictly names, Heidegger argues, the realm of that which arises of and from itself, whereas ‘nature’ tends now to name the natural world only in the assumed mode of objectness.⁶ In other words, Heidegger's concept of physis is close to that notion of the ‘wild’ already traced in modern environmentalist writing – that which is not a matter of human control and in which, ultimately, we are completely dependent, embedded, despite fantasies of knowledge and control.

In reducing the concept of physis to nature in the sense of objectness, modern thinking, according to Heidegger, enacts dangerous fantasies of human overlordship. A great deal of thinking since the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century has deployed a conception of the mind as essentially a spectator, an enclosed interiority facing the world in a stance of inherent opposition and appropriation, a ‘subject’ opposing an ‘object’.⁷

Some of the most challenging aspects of Heidegger's work for environmental thinking lie in his notion of the ‘earth’, which ought to be approached as a kind of technical term, not as just the name of a planet. It relates to physis at its most wild, resistant and opaque, to the fact that the inherited nexus of significances, purposes, assumptions and practices that make up a human ‘world’ does not exhaust the human environment. ‘Earth’ means not just the physical environment without which no human world would exist, but also the very resistance to understanding and knowledge inherent to the non-human. Heidegger's ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ affirmed the reserve and opacity of the earth through a meditation on the nature of rock:

The stone presses downwards and manifests its heaviness. But while this heaviness weighs down on us, at the same time, it denies any penetration into it. If we attempt such penetration by smashing the rock, then it shows us its pieces but never anything inward, anything that has been opened up. The stone has instantly withdrawn again into the same dull weight and mass of its fragments. If we try to grasp the stone's heaviness in another way, by placing it on a pair of scales, then we bring its heaviness into the calculable form of thought. This perhaps very precise determination of the stone is a number, but the heaviness of the weight has escaped us. Color shines and wants only to shine. If we try to make it comprehensible by analysing it into numbers of oscillations it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained.⁸

Heidegger recognised that no facet of the universe, no plant or animal, can even be mentioned without, by that very act, becoming part of the discriminations and significances of a human cultural world: few terms are in fact more scarred by dispute and actual violence than ‘nature’. In their beguiling otherness the forms of nature have been engaged to underwrite equally both the most self-deluding egotism or the most chastening piety of thought. Nevertheless, conceived merely in terms of its necessary otherness and resistance to human appropriation, the earth may form a kind of reserve and sometimes refuge from a world constituted by an aggressive anthropocentrism. This is how the earth is engaged in an experimental text of 1947, ‘Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens’, ‘From out of the Experience of Thinking’.⁹ This concerns Todtnauberg in southern Germany, site of Heidegger's mountain work hut. It is a place of solitude and the non-human events of time and weather, the sound of a stream at night or of a storm in the building's rafters. In its inexhaustible refusal of human meaning, the earth seems elusively self-secluding.

Heidegger's preference was for places that refused any illusion that the human world rests on foundations of its own positing, places that have – like Delphi and its mountains – the quality of stressing the relative smallness of human objects and dimensions. These are landscapes of a stark horizon in which an explicitly anthropocentric conception of the universe would be almost unimaginable, even if it is also the presence of the human that reveals that very starkness and power. In some ways what captivates Heidegger in such places is not so different from the kind of elemental quality associated with the western United States by writers in the American wilderness tradition. Heidegger's places, however, are all explicitly inhabited – the Black Forest, Athens, Delphi, the shores of the Danube, Provence. The sea, river, mountains in their inhuman grandeur make palpable the ‘exocentric’ nature of the human inhabitants. In the lectures on Hölderlin's ‘The Ister’ the path of the river Danube is said to tear ‘human beings out of the habitual midst of their lives, so that they may be in a centre outside of themselves, that is, be exocentric’.¹⁰ It is not a matter of some modern, inherently consumerist subjectivity that ‘has’ experiences but of ‘experiences’ that ‘have’ or that open a space for other, less aggressive modes of subjectivity.

The archetypal eco-fascist?

Heidegger's work, directly or more often indirectly, informs that large strain in modern thought suspicious of the deep connections between the drive to represent something in some system of knowledge and the drive to control and master it. Heidegger's difficult readings of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, from the 1930s to 1950s, remain a neglected monument of early ecocritical thinking.¹¹ Most explicit ecocritical use of Heidegger, however, picks up only the general thrust of his thinking to assimilate him to a broadly romantic reading advocating a more authentic ‘dwelling’ on the earth, one which lets things be rather than appropriating them in the grid of modern industrial rationality. Bate, for instance, sees Heidegger as offering a modern ‘inflection of High Romantic poetics’,¹² as affirming ‘human dwelling’ as distinguished by its ‘particularity – by, one might say, its cottageness’.¹³

Such romantic readings highlight the undeniable element of agrarian nostalgia in Heidegger but this also, as Bate acknowledges, relates to that element of his career that makes Heidegger such an embarrassment to enviromentalists. A petit bourgeois concern with ‘rootedness’ was also part of Heidegger's notorious period of allegiance to the Nazi party in the 1930s. This is the Heidegger who has now become a watchword for the eco-fascism latent in too hasty a rejection of enlightenment ideals of universal rationality in favour of the cultivating of a close, would-be ‘authentic’ relationship to one’s local place, traditions and dialect. Such a stance leads too easily to atavism and even, if not in Heidegger then in others, to racist conceptions of those held not to belong.

How far Heidegger sank in the 1930s is debatable. His disgrace has now become a salutary reminder of the ugly politics that may lurk in romantic idealisations of ‘closeness to one's native earth’, of belonging and non-belonging and so on. At the same time, to reduce Heidegger to an archetype of the eco-fascist is to underplay what is distinctive and challenging about his concept of nature, which he also came to affirm against the totalitarian state. This is his stress on the inherent resistance and opacity of the ‘earth’, its complete otherness to human constructions and uses of it.

The notion of the ‘earth’ was coined to displace any notion of ‘nature’ understood as foundational, that is, as some lost essence or ground of being to which the human ought to correspond, from which it has fallen or from which it can be deduced. Earth is not a ground, it has no meaning, but it ‘remains sheltered in the inapparent law of the possible which it is itself’.¹⁴ So, despite the tendency to political kitsch in Heidegger's accounts of his home region of Germany, he cannot coherently advocate a reintegration or recovery of some lost harmony with such an earth in the way still imagined by some green critics. The earth has no cultural meaning in itself, however many forms of politics – romantic, totalitarian, conservative, anarchist – may be projected upon it. To think the ‘earth’ in Heidegger's sense becomes no kind of ‘return’ to nature, but an emptying out of given concepts against the element of a chastening opacity and refusal. ‘Is there a measure on earth? There is none’ (Hölderlin).¹⁵

The forest

At this point we turn to Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests (1992),¹⁶ one of the outstanding works of ecocriticism to date. Harrison offers a broad historical, philosophical and literary study of forests as marking the ‘edge of Western civilization, in the literal as well as imaginative domains’ (247). This project rests in part on a Heideggerian argument at odds with any idealisation of agrarian rootedness.¹⁷ Harrison's study as a whole may also show how false it would be simply to identify ‘Heideggerian’ and ‘eco-fascist’.

The force of Harrison's study lies in its focus on something that is an empirical part of the natural world – the forest – and yet has also been constitutive for human self-understanding, historically, culturally and imaginatively. Harrison's subject is ‘the forest’ as it relates to a whole historical series of different ways of conceiving and inhabiting the opposition between the human and the wild. Here ‘history does not mean the grand events of the past but rather the human appropriation of the earth as a place of dwelling’ (208). Harrison’s is thus a kind of transcendental ‘“poetic history” [of the forest] which has its basis in empirical and cultural history but which cannot be reduced to either’ (93).

Harrison is not writing as a disciple of Heidegger. Nevertheless, his thought becomes explicitly Heideggerian towards the end. Put crudely, the issue is the working of the culture–nature distinction, of how human meaning emerges amid the realm of natural givenness, a ‘world’ from out of the opaque self-affirmation of ‘the earth’. The argument can be illustrated by the simplest logical point. What happens when a line is drawn transecting an otherwise undifferentiated space, like, say, a path across a forest? The mere line at once makes possible a ‘this side’ and a ‘that side’, a ‘here’ as opposed to a ‘there’, known against unknown, domesticated space against surrounding wilderness and so on. With the securing of the human space as a form of clearing, there also emerges the projection of the possibility of narrative, linear time, paths of memory and tradition, as against the non-human circular time of the forest, the undifferentiated eventhood of natural forms, the endless cycles of decay and growth.

The border between the human clearing and the forest is both an empirical one – the boundary of inhabited land – and also a mark of conceptual differentiation and definition. At different times in various ways (traced by Harrison in detail) it is implicated in such distinctions as civilised–wild, controlled–unpredictable, known–unknown, useful–useless, human–animal, legal–outlaw, secular–magical and so on.

A simple but powerful logical point differentiates this mode of thinking from green arguments in the tradition of romantic oppositionalism. For Harrison (as for Heidegger) the distinction between the human and nature is not posed as one that can or should be ‘overcome’. The gap between the human and its others is constitutive of the human: abolish it, erase the line, and the human disappears. ‘We dwell not in nature but in the relation to nature. We do not inhabit the earth but inhabit our excess of the earth. We dwell not in the forest but in an exteriority with regard to its closure’ (201).¹⁸

In the last stages of the book Heidegger's presence becomes most legible, if unacknowledged. Harrison is at his most Heideggerian in the refusal of notions of the human that look to some supposed lost unity with the natural world, neutralising or evading the definitive separateness of human beings. The least crossable border with the forest is that of human language as the space of human desire and ‘making sense’. The very fact that we feel so drawn to natural things to ask questions of their and our own significance ‘means that we have already left nature's closure behind…We long for meaning's closure, but only in our longing does the human world make any “sense”’ (230).

Harrison's ‘poetic history’ is partially indebted to another of Heidegger's major arguments. This is the understanding of art and literature as a privileged site in which fundamental assumptions about or definitions of the human and non-human and their relationship may become newly perceptible or at issue, as in Ovid's versions of classical myths of the forest as a space of metamorphosis, where distinctions made by custom, language, sanction or law may even break down. Actaeon, transformed into a stag by the Goddess Artemis, whom he has glimpsed naked in the forest, is torn to pieces by his own hunting hounds. Pentheus is killed by his own mother, who mistakes him, under the influence of Dionysos, for a lion. Harrison writes of Actaeon's fate:

The story has an unmistakable psychological effect upon the reader, for while Actaeon is literally de-anthropomorphized, the stag that he turns into becomes humanized. Now that Actaeon has become a stag we are able to suffer its fate as if it were a human being. The distinctions collapse. Like Actaeon, we are made to see that the forms of the world are transient, illusory and reversible.

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A history of ways of conceiving and treating the forest is thus one of different conceptions of being human. The forests form ‘an opaque mirror of the civilization that exists in relation to them’. Harrison writes of how the enlightenment and modern ‘reduction of the forests to the status of a material resource in need of management’ (120) also projects, as its very shadow, conceptions of the forest as the embodiment of anti-modern values, so giving thought access to ‘the shadow of Enlightenment ideology’ (108). This shadow Harrison reads in emerging ideas of the forest as both the space of the non-rational and as sanctuary, in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, or, conversely, of ‘the humanist's terror of a world that transcends human grounding’ (147), as in the famous close description of the gnarled bark of a tree in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938).

To trace the shifting demarcations of the line between human and non-human shows how those conceptions of nature that people have inhabited possess no absolute status but ‘are given by historicity’ (163). This point is central to Harrison's ironic reading of William Wordsworth's sonnet ‘The world is too much with us’ and his poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’. Harrison shows how even this definitive ‘nature poet’ already enacts an essentially urban consciousness. For it is Wordsworth's sense of ‘what man has made of man’ that both ‘divorces the poet from nature but at the same time lies at the source of his nostalgia for origins, [drawing] nature into its presence, allowing its “thousand blended notes” to sound their harmony’ (163). Such idealisations find their determining condition in what they are opposed to.

Harrison's Heideggerian reading of Thoreau's Walden also refuses the commonplaces of self-discovery through a return to nature, finding instead an anti-romantic romantic. Walden is about dis-location, literal, cultural and psychic, about the uncanniness of self-consciousness. Harrison homes in on the passage in which Thoreau turns his house, so to speak, inside out, moving all chairs, bed and bedstead out of doors so he can clean the floor. Such estrangement of the normal boundaries of dwelling enacts an anti-romantic view of nature as ‘where we go to get lost’, finding in ourselves only the truth of that estrangement. ‘[N]ature…teaches us that it cannot assume responsibility for human existence’ (227).