Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word: A Response to Arne...

Deep Ecology, the Reversibility of the Flesh of the World, and the Poetic Word:

A Response to Arne Naess

Glen A. MazisProfessor of Philosophy and Humanities

Penn State [email protected]

Glen Mazis’ books include Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (Peter Lang, 1993), a cultural critique of the men’s movement, Trickster Magician and Grieving Man: Returning Men to Earth (Inner Traditions, 1994) and Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (SUNY, 2002).

This essay seeks to supplement Arnie Naess’s avowed project of replacing the often cited model of “humans and environment,” which retains a dualistic and anthropocentric connotation, with the articulation of a “relational total-field image” of human being’s insertion in the planetary field of energy and becoming. In response to the interview “Here I Stand” in which Naess rejects Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, this essay details the ways in which Merleau-Ponty provides the kind of ontology that Naess requires for his deep ecology. Naess’s use of Hindu terms and metaphysics is shown to be at odds with his descriptions of human’s relations with the world. Much of the essay critiques as well Naess’s rejection of poetic language as inadequate to the philosophical task of articulating the human-world intertwining. Using Merleau-Ponty’s work, the need for the poetic as uniquely articulating “the flesh of the world” and “reversibility” is described, hopefully showing that deep ecology’s goal of making people feel their insertion in the world’s field of becoming can only occur through inaugurating poetic uses of language.

In 1973, Arne Naess declared in “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements” that the distinction between a shallow ecology and a deep ecology is comprised importantly by “the rejection of the man-in-the-environment in favor of the relational total-field image” in our way of conceiving human being’s identity as part of this planet. This rejection is achieved by recognizing “organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations,” where “an intrinsic relation between two things A and B is such that the relation belongs to the basic constitutions of A and B, so that without the relation, A and B are no longer the same thing”(1995, 151). The insistence that humans and world are interdependent, are what I would call “intertwined” in their process of continually becoming, has been articulated by Naess throughout the decades and is at the heart of why he has rightly felt that an ecological approach that doesn’t question traditional dualisms is insufficient to give us an adequate understanding of ourselves in relation to the natural world and is also insufficient in dealing with the global crisis of planetary degradation of the natural world.

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Fall 2004 47A RESPONSE TO ARNE NAESS

Only when humanity realizes its interdependence with the natural world will it realize that the natural world has not just utilitarian value, but is integral to the vitality, meaning, and sustained quality of its own human being. As inseparable from its own being, the fate of the natural world becomes humanity’s own fate. As implied in his definition, human being has to be envisioned in an ontology different from the traditional opposition of subjects and objects, such that all that with which humans stand in relation is part of what human being is at any time and place. Only by shifting to an “ecophilosophical” perspective in which there is a new ontology is it possible to have an opportunity to work towards an “ecosophy” as a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. Furthermore, Naess adds that “the total field model dissolves not only the man-in-the environment concept,” which mandates a rethinking of how human being is related to its surround, but also that the “total field model dissolves every compact thing-in-the-milieu concept”(151) suggesting that the ontology of all things must be recast and a new ontology of their interrelations in order for there to emerge a new understanding of human being in relation to the natural world. Naess sees that an environment defined as things related to each other externally, determinate in themselves, will never yield the kind of enmeshment of fates and identities central to deep ecology. Given these concerns to articulate a new ontology of interrelation, it might appear obvious that Arne Naess would find the work of phenomenology invaluable in achieving this sort of articulation, but he does not. Hence the interesting dialogue, “Here I Stand,” we now have between Arne Naess and Christian Diehm in which Naess spells out his reservations about phenomenology. In his conversation with Diehm, Naess articulates what could be taken as a contradiction, but rather is a necessary tension in speaking one’s way through to a new ontology: he wants to insist that “to be a human being is extremely special, unique on this planet” while at the same time insisting that human being is primarily a “me-this unity,” as when he says of the tiny mountain flowers outside his hut that “we are together as one entity”(2004, 9) Humans are unique and are interdependent. Naess, like any phenomenologist, declares that “there is not a subject and an object” (9); and like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty he seeks to get “underneath the polarity between the human and the world.” (8) In the interview, Diehm is undoubtedly led to inquire about Naess’s affinity for Merleau-Ponty, when Naess begins by placing the priority on feeling in one’s emplacement within the world and the emergent sense of this relation with the world, and then adds “I think in many relations your body language is more important than verbal articulation” (7), which might seem to be a reference to the “body-subject” or later “flesh of the world” of Merleau-Ponty. Naess states that it is the inadequacy of verbal language to fully articulate this level of experience in felt relation with the world that is a problem for ecological ontology. The challenge is to articulate a new way of thinking that adequately allows the paradox of being both interdependent and unique. Given that Merleau-Ponty is the thinker who 1) takes ambiguity as a positive phenomenon, 2) announces as his project, “Let us try to see how a thing or a being begins to exist for us through desire or love and we shall thereby come to understand better how things and beings can exist in general”(1964, 154), 3) that “looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is a fact for us, before any thematization”(1962, xv) and 4) that this is to be achieved through “re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the

48 ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY Vol. 1

world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status”(vii) it would seem Naess would find Merleau-Ponty’s particular phenomenology to be his touchstone. However, Naess states in the interview, “I find that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is not adequate to deduce what I do.” (8) He says that given Merleau-Ponty’s thought, it is not possible to go from premises to the kind of conclusions he seeks. In my response to Naess, I contend that it is exactly Merleau-Ponty’s series of primary descriptions of the nature of embodiment that allows us to see the sense of the sort of conclusions that Naess wants to draw. Merleau-Ponty’s key concepts of his “indirect ontology” and his way of doing phenomenology are exactly what Naess needs to supplement his project of deep ecology. Naess also states that he feels that Merleau-Ponty’s thought doesn’t lead to action, that “one could be very close to Merleau-Ponty and then do nothing.” (7) He explains that this is because he finds Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, like other phenomenologies, to be too abstract. (8) However, this way of thinking is a possible trap for Naess that he has fallen into before. I will show that Merleau-Ponty’s sense of language and of the nature of philosophical thought in his particularly evolving notion of phenomenology is inseparable from action, or rather more particularly, inseparable from catalyzing transformations that are ecologically significant actions and also of the highest ethical import in ways important to Naess. I will also show we can think further down Merleau-Ponty’s path of insight to find new ways of expressing the kind of unities and possibilities for actions and ethics that Naess seeks from philosophy. I contend the kind of criticism that Naess aims at Merleau-Ponty is a trap for Naess when I consider what he states in his meditation, “Self Realization,” in the volume, Thinking Like a Mountain. In that piece, Naess is again attempting to show the necessity of an ecological ontology that would articulate a self that is not the traditional ego, detached from the world around it, called upon to make a “sacrifice” for something other—namely for the sake of the world or the environment—but instead is a self in and through “a process of identification” with the surround. This would mean that action on behalf of the natural world is not opposed to a self’s interest and thus is not a “sacrifice,’ but rather that the self gains as the world gains, if both are inseparable. In looking for the sense of unity with the world around it, Naess does what he proposes in the interview and turns to someone who was able to act and to act in such a manner as to augment the well-being of the whole, that is, non-violently. Furthermore, like Naess, this agent feels a unity with the world that is beyond or outside of language. Naess turns to Mahatma Gandhi as articulating a paradigm for an ethical stance which is active and yet non-moralizing that springs from a sense of unity with the world around it. Naess states of Gandhi, “For him it is the supreme or universal Self—the Atman—that is to be realized”(1988, 25). He explains that this makes it possible for Gandhi to act in a way that avoids the choice of self versus the world and of having to “sacrifice” and also necessitates nonviolence: “Through the wider Self every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequence, the practice of non-violence”(25). Although the appeal of Gandhi as a paradigm for action and non-violence is understandable, Gandhi’s notion of the non-duality of self and world and the grounds for ethical action are not the best articulation of the relational field model Naess cites, nor the best basis for an ecological ethics. Gandhi’s notion of advaita (non-duality) is in invocation of a metaphysics which subsumes the natural world and also human being as found in the unity of a Supreme Being, an absolute ground, in Brahman.


Naess makes the same shift from explaining the necessity of an ontology of “the relational field” in which the particulars’ facticity and their inseparability from the other members of the field must be asserted (1989, 55-56) to embracing as a paradigm Ghandi’s nonviolent ideal of the non-relational Self (Atman) of the Bhagavad-Gita in his Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (194). This is not the proper context to pursue a digression into Hindu metaphysics. (Hinduism does achieve an appreciation of the aesthetic dimension to which Naess appeals at the end of the interview and also of the particularity of the concrete objects of the world, but it is through a series of religious contradictions, wherein early Vedic articulations of the divinity and reality of the myriad can be subsumed alongside Upanishadic assertions of absolute Being in contradistinction to the phenomenal world.) What is important here is that Gandhi’s appeal to Brahman would not afford Naess the kind of “step by step articulation” that people could follow, as Naess mentions here (of the sort Naess finds lacking in Merleau-Ponty), nor would it afford the kind of immediate appeal to understanding he seeks, nor would it serve as an improvement over traditional Western dualistic metaphysics, since it is another schema of absolute being standing behind the natural world. As a matter of fact, the appeal to advaita is perhaps the most dualistic moment within Hindu metaphysics. Although this dualism can collapse into a sort of monism that honors all beings as ineffably contained within the Supreme Being beyond all empirical matters, it can more easily serve as a transcendence of the sort that leaves behind the plight of the myriad beings of the earth as not essential; and therefore this dualism is in direct opposition to the tenets of deep ecology. That Naess can fall into such a contradictory allusion is partly made possible, I believe, by the sort of theses he pursues in “Here I Stand” with his assertions that as deep ecologists we often have to stand on that which cannot be expressed. Naess is inconsistent when he states that what we feel in our relatedness to the world cannot be “properly verbalized” and then follows this with the statement that this feeling toward the world and other things just can’t be expressed in language or other descriptive means. (7) It is very different to assert that the kind of relationship one has with the world can’t be “wholly verbalized” and to assert this relatedness cannot be expressed at all verbally. It is this insistence that the perceptual and aesthetic experience just confronts one effulgently and is in opposition to expression and language that creates another barrier to the kind of integration Naess seeks in so many other ways. He tells the tale of his hapless graduate students who aren’t able to pause and open themselves up to the voices of the landscape, to take enough time to hearken (11), but he has helped to create this situation by the way he contextualizes the encounter. The same is true for his delight that with the groups he has had silently dwell with the environment in his workshops in Japan that maybe 10 percent “get it” (11). If he were to take a different stand towards the relationship of language and perception, of language and feeling, and of language and the “existing unity” (9) with the natural world, Naess might see that more people can augment both their expressive capabilities and their experiential capacity “to dwell” with the natural world. Merleau-Ponty begins his Phenomenology of Perception with insights about the relationship of the possibilities for expression in language of perceptual experience and the role of philosophy as phenomenology to arrive at adequate descriptions of the natural and social world as prereflectively experienced. Even though Merleau-Ponty agrees with Naess


that the job of philosophy is “reachieving a direct and primitive contact with the world” and “it is a matter of describing, not of explaining anything”(1962, vii), he configures differently the problem of expression, as well as the relationship among language, perception, and philosophy: “The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”(xx). Perception is an interaction of the perceiver and the perceived, a movement. In attempting to articulate the nature of the perceived, there is no “going back” to an origin, to a static and separable state of affairs that could be “fixed” and so “adequately described” by comparing the assertion with the state-of-affairs that would have endured obdurate to the process of perception and to its temporal span of transformation and appear as if seen from some “outside” or “God’s eye” perspective. The correspondence notion of truth cannot be invoked once, like Naess, we see the “me-this” unity of the perceptual or “relational field”—as he calls it—or “gestalt” (another term he invokes)—notions which deny that any such separation is possible. There is no such separation of perceiver and perceived to be grasped in their identities and then brought into demonstrable adequation with each other. Yet, Naess continues to hold to epistemological standards of this model when he states that insofar as “there is not a subject and an object,” then “there is an existence you do not adequately describe” (2004, 9), as if this were a defect or a problem to be overcome. By the “laying down of being,” Merleau-Ponty means that the philosopher’s articulations usher forth an opening up of the relatedness of human being to its surround in such a way that something that was there inherently becomes manifest and that by doing so there is a transformation of both human being and world as a network of relations, since as Naess has pointed out both are comprised internally by their sets of relations. Rather than being inadequate and thus failing to be expressible by this standard of adequacy of idea or assertion and state-of-affairs, Merleau-Ponty speaks of how being enmeshed in the network of relations transforms what we understand as description and philosophy:

We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some ‘solution,’ it is on the hither side of all solutions. True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. (1962, xx)

Rather than being reduced to silence in front of our experience—here of our “dwelling” with the natural world—Merleau-Ponty would have us see all our expressions to be such that an attempt to articulate any phenomenon is “inexhaustible”—that it always has more aspects and depths of meaning to be expressed in further articulations. Furthermore, this is an articulation that is a movement, “a laying down of being,” such that the self-world relation transforms as it becomes articulated and is opened to further becoming manifest. This surging forward


temporally into ever new interweavements or what Naess would call ever new “Gestalts” means that there is not an end. Rather the philosopher’s articulation sets up a trajectory. This commitment to unending expression is different from claiming that the significance of this relatedness is inexpressible. The fact that phenomenology has no closure—no end to description and expression—does not negate the description of the world that philosophy seeks. Merleau-Ponty characterizes the witnessing and embrace of the insertion of the human in the world of phenomenology as a “disclosure of the world,” a way “to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason,” but says that it “is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valery, or Cezanne—by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world . . . as that meaning comes into being”(xi). If this meaning is to become and the philosopher enters this process of transforming manifestation, then there are not “states-of-affairs” to be described as Naess sometimes refers to them (2004, 8). Rather for Merleau-Ponty the artist or the philosopher, attempting to enter the art of expression, is caught up in a “deflagration of being,” as he calls it in his last published essay, “Eye and Mind.” For like Naess, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the unity with the surround as a felt registration of embodiment; but for him, we must consider the body differently as “the actual body, not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions, but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement”(1964, 162). This movement is one that Merleau-Ponty describes as emerging from vision itself, as from a self that becomes through confusion, by returning to itself from the world, as being “caught up in things . . . through an inherence of sensing in the sensed” so that to articulate is to enter a process of which we are not in control and which is a taking up of the powers of embodiment:

There is a human body when, between the seeing and the seen, between touching and the touched, between a hand and a hand, a blending of some sort takes place—when the spark is lit between the sensing and the sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop burning until some accident of the body will undo what no accident would have sufficed to do. (163-164)

This articulation can only take place through a continual mutual transformation of the artist (or the philosopher who is like the artist in seeking to express the world) and the world such that he or she attempts to express by entering this process whereby the perceiver and the perceived consume each other as the separable identity each had before entering into this relationship. This process of perception and expression is a process that never knows where it is going—as Merleau-Ponty had originally declared of phenomenology two decades earlier: It is “never knowing where it is going”(1962, xxi). Merleau-Ponty’s formulations of embracing mystery, of entering a process, of laying down something that was not pre-existing means the philosopher and deep ecologist must take up a different stance towards language, one that like the artist’s allows feelings and perceptions to reverberate within their descriptive articulations, and in doing so involves them and the world in transformation. As Merleau-Ponty says of those of us who see a Van Gogh


painting, it changes both the perceiver and the perceived in such a way that the world is never as it was before encountering and entering such an expression: “Van Gogh’s paintings have their place in me for all time, a step is taken from which I cannot retreat, and, even though I retain no clear recollection of the pictures which I have seen, my whole subsequent aesthetic experience will be that of someone who has become acquainted with the painting of Van Gogh”(393). Van Gogh’s expression has enmeshed the viewer in an augmented relationship with the surround that has brought out the unique significances manifest in Van Gogh’s expression. As viewers open themselves to the manifestation of Van Gogh’s relatedness to his world, to the particular kind of understanding embodied in his perceptual communion with the world, they are changed or transformed into a new sense of the world around them and can never go back to some prior relationship to the world, pre-Van Gogh. Part of Naess’s pessimism about language and deep ecology may derive from his desire to describe directly what it is that makes up this felt relationship with the world or what comprises the strange kind of unity within difference between him and the flowers around his mountain hut. Merleau-Ponty would say this is not to understand the nature of perception or the “relational” or “total” field in which it takes place. Even in his earliest work in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty insisted that to look at an object is “to plunge oneself into it”(67). However, this description, too, could be misunderstood as aiming at some sort of coincidence with objects, a sort of becoming one with them that obliterates difference, and therefore is not the type of a “me-this unity” that both Naess and Merleau-Ponty seek to articulate—the sort of interdependence with the environment which also respects both human and environmental integrity. Merleau-Ponty describes further that this plunging into things is an “inhabitation” of them, such that it is an entering of a total relational field of the sort that Naess intuits must be present, but for which he seems to lack further description. Merleau-Ponty continues:

. . . [E]very object is the mirror of all other objects. When I look at the lamp on the table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can ‘see’: the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it ‘shows’ to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far as objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats the others round it as spectators of its hidden aspects which guarantee the permanence of these aspects by their presence. (68)

The perceiver does not “see” by himself or herself, nor does he or she “see” fully locked into a location within the perceptual field. Rather the perceiver continues to enter a relational field through perceptual exploration and is taken up into this network of relations in which all the visible objects are part of a dimension of visibility—are “seers seen,” as Merleau-Ponty will later come to call this phenomenon when he breaks more into his own language at the end of his career. But even at this earliest stage, he says in this passage that, by inhabiting the one object, the human seer inhabits all the objects with which it and the perceiver’s embodiment


are comprised through internal relations, and thus all things in the field are “abodes” for my gaze as perceiver. For Merleau-Ponty, this is how the body works: Perception is this material power of a material body to inhabit the other nodes of the field, since we are of the same stuff as the rest of the field. Merleau-Ponty can conclude, therefore, that for the objects within our perceptual field, “each is all that the others ‘see’ of it”(68-9). Not that objects literally perceive each other, but the human perceiver as embodied permeates the field in such a way that this relational sense among things is what we are given by the field. When Merleau-Ponty continued in his articulation of this sense of how we are embedded within the surround, he found that the traditional subject-object language we use both philosophically and in the vernacular could not express the “me-this” or “existing unity” to which Naess refers. The answer for Merleau-Ponty was to use language in a new way. For example, in The Visible and the Invisible, the way he articulated that we are of the same stuff as the visibles around us was to see the body as part of “the flesh of the world”: “the body belongs to the order of things as the world is universal flesh”(1968, 137). The only way to circumvent our habit of separating ourselves from the world, from the surround, as an opposing subject, was to think new categories in a different language:

The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my body is not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately, as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is it surrounded by it. A participation in and kinship with the visible, the vision neither envelops it nor is enveloped by it definitively. (138)

This idea has no real precedent in the Western philosophical vocabulary nor in its intellectual

categories as Merleau-Ponty admits of this notion of “flesh” that it is “not matter, not mind,

not substance.” Like Naess, Merleau-Ponty says:

I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity . . . so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility . . . we have previously called flesh and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it. (139)

However, for Merleau-Ponty, facing this lacuna in our language of the sort of enmeshment with the world he seeks to articulate, he proceeds to call forth names, to work outside the categories of both philosophy and traditional speech. In this way, he is willing to take up the path of poetic speech, to turn to the artist’s articulation beyond the bounds of our usual way of expression. To me the most telling moment in Naess’ interview with Diehm is at the moment when considering how one could speak of the unity with the flowers outside his hut, Naess both admits and despairs, “There is not a subject and an object. There is an existence you


do not adequately describe when you say, ‘There is Arne Naess and there are the flowers.’ Many would take it as a kind of poetry, but I think it is a description of the world” (2004, 9). In an almost offhand way, Naess has set up this opposition of poetry and description, as if the two were antithetical and as if it were obvious that poetry is mere poetry, in the sense of being something that could not be taken seriously as another way to describe, to apprehend outside the categories of the taken-for-granted, let alone perhaps a better way to approach the articulation of this unity. Naess here both despairs of description meeting this misguided test of adequacy and at the same time invalidates what I believe is the most promising path out of this impasse of having either no words to offer or misguided dualistic descriptions. For Merleau-Ponty in his later writings, he speaks of a “wild being” (l’être sauvage) taken up in perception which is “beneath” the self-reflective cogito of essences—Wesen—and of significations already articulated within language, not as if language “missed” something, but because there is always this incompleteness, this need for the circularity of being thrown back outside language as part of using language creatively. Conceived in this way, when “I make a description of the aesthesiological Einfühlung which is neither false nor ‘true’ in the absolute sense,” then the so-called “imperfection” of the ensuing description is a signal to shift to another understanding of signification where, for Merleau-Ponty, “at the level of the human body I will describe a pre-knowing; a pre-meaning, a silent knowing”(1968, 178) Again, like Arne Naess, Merleau-Ponty agrees there is a feeling in the body of the perceiver and a sense of unity with the perceived that cannot be rendered by straightforward description. This is an almost direct match with Naess’s example in the interview of the perceiver’s arm moving as part of what he has called “identification,” but not yet describable in language as “a meaningful movement, and not an act of consciousness.” Naess insists that this moment is complex, significant and “bodily”—and is outside language (2004, 12). For Merleau-Ponty, this feeling in the body full of signification leads him to find another sense of silence, one not in opposition to language. It is inseparable from what he calls the “tacit cogito” beneath the explicit cogito of the tradition. There is a level of existence that relies on language and a logic of description based on the reflective grasp of the world that is the focus of Descartes and the explicit cogito—the thinking directly and logically that grasps at the world frontally. From this vantage, silence exists as surrounding and in opposition to language. However, for Merleau-Ponty, there is another sort of silence entered into through perception: “The taking possession of the world of silence, such as the description of the human body effects it, is no longer this world of silence, it is the world articulated …--the description of a perceptual logos.” Merleau-Ponty realizes that “there would be needed a silence that envelops the speech anew” that would be different from the silence of the opposition of the thinker to the mute world around it. After asking himself how this sort of silence would be different, Merleau-Ponty answers, “this silence will not be the contrary of language”(1968, 179). In other words, there are ways of expression that carry forward into articulation the life of the body among things, insofar as they carry forward the silence within language itself on the level of signification which permeates embodiment. When we escape from the belief that “language is not simply the contrary of the truth, of coincidence, that there is or could be a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak—and this is what he seeks,” then Merleau-Ponty asserts that the philosopher can take up language no longer as its organizer and assembler, but rather as one


who enters it “through the occult trading of the metaphor—where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and exchanges”(125). This entrance into the lateral relations means that the idea of articulating the sense of being as enmeshed with things and the sense of their being as intertwined among themselves—the new sort of ecological ontology that Naess seeks—must come to language in another way. Merleau-Ponty declares “One cannot make a direct ontology. My ‘indirect’ method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being”(179). The philosopher can articulate the way in which we are interwoven with the surround, if he or she can use language to articulate significance in an indirect way, in a lateral fashion. One does this by taking seriously, as Naess does, the motion of the arm or the hand, and having the courage to use the language as the artist uses the brush, to make a new stroke, one that conforms to the logos of the density of perception, the way we live meanings in our interrelation with them. Merleau-Ponty says that then the philosopher allows “the birth of speech as bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone what is lived is lived-spoken.” Then the philosopher is able to take up

language which has no need to be translated into significations and thoughts, that language-thing which counts as arm, as action, as offence and as seduction because it brings to the surface all the deep-rooted relations of the lived experience wherein it takes form, and which is the language of life and of action, but also that of literature and poetry…. (126)

Unlike Naess, Merleau-Ponty is willing to use language in new ways, in a manner that he acknowledges is poetic, that takes the preconceived cultural and philosophical terminologies, breaks them, and leaves them behind for a hearkening to the feelings and stirrings of the hand, of the eye, and within the chest or arms in the lived relations with the surround. Rather, than have his graduate students confront in silence the landscape around them, Naess could help them to enter the perceptual thickness of their interrelationship with things by asking them to go out and feel precisely the way that they are in the blue of the sky overhead or to notice how there is a stirring within their chest of the swaying of the trees in the wind and to concentrate on putting those feelings into a poem or into statements that use words in ways which may not be logical but somehow feel like the ways their bodies are resonating to the surround. Naess might be surprised to find, as I have when I have had my students attempt to do this, that what they thought was going to be boring and impossible was discovered by almost all of them to be an intimated song ringing through their perceptual embodiment awaiting an articulation and that through the poetic articulation the feelings were focused and augmented. When given the freedom to leave behind the old categories of cultural and philosophical language use in describing our relations with the surround (which are ways of constructing a dualistic standing in opposition to the world), students and others find— just as artists have always claimed—that the perceptual has a pregnant silence that can shape expression and language in new ways. This pregnancy requires of the body a response, a


“correct focusing,” insofar as moving into the surround one has to intend a hearkening and have the perceptual faith that in the interrelation there is a meaning to be brought forth: “The body obeys the pregnancy, it ‘responds’ to it, it is what is suspended on it, flesh responding to flesh”(209). Rather than language being in opposition to mute experience, both are layers of a single insertion into this “winding around” [serpentement] one another of world and human, as Merleau-Ponty calls it. Even what might seem to be a “pure idea” is a bodily phenomenon for Merleau-Ponty: “the ‘pure’ ideality already streams forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of the sensible things, and, however new it is, it slips through ways it has not traced” and in its mysterious dimension has “been divined at the junctures of the visible world”(153). In articulating this, Merleau-Ponty couldn’t be more in accord with Naess’s statements about the meaning of the movement of arms and legs comprising a complex understanding of the interrelation. However, Merleau-Ponty differs in seeing that through giving oneself over to another kind of speech and expression there is “also a reversibility of speech and what it signifies”(154). This means we can articulate the sense of what the flowers around Naess’s hut might express about the felt unity with humanity as if we were speaking as flowers. The sensibility that could emanate from them is constitutive of our larger sense of the experience. As humans, we stay on “one side” of the reversibility and are not literally informed by flowers, but we have an indirect access to the “other side” of the perceptual enmeshment with flowers through the body and its expression. Merleau-Ponty says that to enter the landscape “and to ‘speak’ its style is on our view to form a metaphor”(155). So, far from the poetic being something dismissible as an interloper in achieving a better description of this sort of reversibility or in Naess’s words, the “me-this unity,” the poetic use of speech in the metaphor gives expression to that which permeates the identity of this relationship. For Merleau-Ponty, “style” is that sense of a being’s identity which forms what is greater than the sum of its parts, or in other words, is the Gestalt of significance of which Naess speaks—and it can be spoken, indirectly, in metaphor. Another of Naess’s reservations about phenomenology’s use of language focuses on the fact that there seems to be so many concepts and such “tremendous complexity.” In particular, Naess states that “difficult phenomenological terminology is a sign that we are going in the wrong direction.” (2004, 10) Looking at the density of texts and the vast lexicon of terms needed to make sense of much of the writing by phenomenologists, I would have to agree with Naess that this will not help deep ecology to get people to project a new ontology and to open greater intimacy with the natural world. Furthermore, it is deeply ironical that this has become the fate of a movement within philosophy whose initial rallying cry was “back to the things themselves.” The problem, however, is in most phenomenologists’ lack of the kind of courage that Merleau-Ponty exhorted in claiming expressive articulation requires launching out to speak as humans spoke “on the first day.” The poet, the artist, and the child allow themselves to be taken over by the pull of the surround within which they are enmeshed. They will body forth words in ways that break with categories, rules, established vocabularies, common sense notions, worn out phrases, and let language take on new shapes and colors, movements and connections. Most of phenomenology, like other schools of philosophy, takes such original language as spoken or written by a poetic thinker like Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger and reduces their words to fetishes that have to be repeated and explained and fit within networks of other relations with other philosophers’ words as part of an ever expanding


set of ossified terms—new word tools to be collected and memorized and hammered over the heads of readers. In writing this essay and hoping to be taken seriously by philosophers, I have had to do too much of this sort of writing myself. I believe that both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty meant for phenomenology to use words as ways of opening us to experience, to the kind of feeling to which Naess refers at the beginning of his remarks in the interview, by allowing ourselves to mouth the poetry of world as it moves through us. This means not clinging to past poetic articulations as tokens that have to be amassed and passed around to provide a currency for validated thought which paradoxically robs this originary speech of the power it once had, where such collections grow in breadth and complexity, but fail to speak spontaneously beyond what has been said previously. A thinker teaches us a path, a direction (the other meaning of “sens” [sense] in French). A philosophy should set up a trajectory to think further into its motion with the world—the motion of intertwining that leads to transformation. Its words should not be made into sacred icons to be stored on mental shelves of erudition. To speak and write spontaneously comes from a letting be of reversibility. Merleau-Ponty states:

In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valery said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voices of the things, the waves, and the forests.(1968, 155)

The artist, and each speaker or writer who for the moment enters the poetic, is an artist for that moment, hearkens to the object in such a way that what is articulated is a “middle voice” of both perceiver and perceived, their expression in and through one another. Turned toward the natural world, this is the kind of expression that deep ecology needs in order to speak the “me-this” unity of human being and world. The poetic word—the poetic text—is not complex, nor entangled in tedious terminology. It is the exact opposite. It is powerful both in breaking through the everyday global consumerist culture’s haze of words used carelessly as mere tools for manipulation and getting things done, and also for finding a path beyond the tangles of complex terminology not only of philosophy, but also biology, chemistry, economics, sociology, and the other disciplines involved in ecology, in order to displace its hearer and reader to a renewed openness to the depths of the perceived natural world. The history of what has been said or written, the cataloguing of insights, or the impulse to build systems of conceptualization, is broken through in the moments of dwelling with the world poetically. What Naess seeks for people is to experience the way in which they are caught up with the natural world ontologically—as a matter of being—and for philosophy to have a way to say this that would move them into action. Given this daunting task of seeing themselves and the world anew, most will think of this new intention in terms of a dualistic alternative. If people are to cease confronting nature as the other, they must do more than simply wait for nature to somehow


reveal itself effulgently in a new identity outside of our cultural view of it as a “reservoir of resources and raw materials.” This approach will leave most helpless, especially those previously least in tune with the natural world—the people whom Naess and all ecologists would most like to reach. Another option is to ask our students and our planetary neighbors to approach nature by asking them to become poets under the guide of a phenomenology that spoke and wrote poetically and had already started to move them in a trajectory of openness towards the “me-this unity.” That would mean they would have to hearken for a voice not altogether their own in addressing the natural world. This is a way of standing in the face of the world other than as the knower or doer who believes that interior to the person is the key to the meaningfulness of experience and the sole author of words and insights. As Merleau-Ponty phrases this point,

To criticize the ‘little man inside the man’—perception as cognition of an ob-ject—to rediscover man finally face to face with the world itself, to rediscover the pre-intentional present—is to rediscover that vision of the origins, which sees itself within us, as poetry rediscovers what articulates itself within us, unbeknown to us. (208)

If we wish to have others launch into the intention to seek their intertwinement with the landscape and if we are to articulate to them where to look within their experience for this overlap with the natural world, it will require the poetic word from us as philosophers or ecologists. Equally, it will also require ecologists and philosophers to be open to others’ poetic response. Rather than retreat to tangled systems of thought, we should expect those who hear deep ecology’s and phenomenology’s message to respond to us in describing their experience (or in sharing it with others) to do so in a new poetic way of speaking the natural world. Our words open new ways of thinking and relating to the world. For this reason, too, we cannot rely only on silent witnessing. In face with a redwood or a whale or a humble weed in a city lot, a span of sheer silence might be part of a fruitful dialogue; but finding new words, new metaphors, and suggestive phrases moves us to a new place. Gaston Bachelard’s distinction between the “formal’ imagination and the “material” imagination is vital here: “But in addition to the images of form so often used by psychologists of the imagination, there are—as I shall show—images of matter, direct images of matter. Vision names them, but the hand knows them. . . . They have a weight, they are a heart”(107). For Bachelard, like both Naess and Merleau-Ponty, the seer enters into a relationship of perception with the perceived to which both contribute. Like Merleau-Ponty, however, Bachelard believes we can hearken to the voices of the things in poetic words, but only if we abandon the “formal imagination” which represents images of the perceived according to reflective categories. The material imagination of the hand—of our embodiment—journeys within the dense sense of the things themselves in the musings of poetic reverie to evoke the poetic word. However, it takes both awareness and practice to develop the material imagination, especially for a culture which stresses the formal imagination and its greater sensual detachment. It is for this reason that I think turning to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of reversibility of the flesh of the world can be so helpful, instead of returning to formulations like Buber’s “I-Thou” that Naess cites


in the interview (14). Buber is a wonderful spirit and thinker, but again I think we have to help people replace formulations that can seem to lead towards a totalizing and disembodying spirituality and encourage them to move towards a belief in the density, depth, and spirituality of their most common and specific perceptual experiences with the natural world. If Merleau-Ponty is right, we skim over the surface of our perceptions, distorting them with the overlay of rationalized and dualistic beliefs current in our historical epoch, not realizing the layers of sense in the sensual, memorial, imaginative, intuitive and other strata of perception. To get people to pause and pay attention, to explore the ways they are enlaced with the natural surround they perceive, is a significant accomplishment that our language and concepts must explicitly bring to awareness and evoke the desire to experience. In trying to speak in poetic yet accessible ways, in my own recent practice I have stopped referring to bodies as bodies, since that implies they are mere detached objects in a surround externally related to other objects. Instead, I have begun to articulate my own understanding of embodiment by referring to our “earthbodies”—not a complex or arcane phenomenological term, but one that makes people pause and perhaps feel differently about themselves, the natural world and the planet. In my recent book, Earthbodies: Rediscovering our Planetary Senses, I tried to use phrases such as “diabolical logic,” “ceremonial time,” “emotional blind/numbness,” “ghoul intersubjectivity,” “interanimality,” “cybersentimentality,” or “earthbody ethics” and other unusual descriptions as an attempt to let my poetic muse speak in ways that would draw others into embodiment and the earth’s own indirect metaphoric whispers. When one lets speech become less standard, less part of the jargon, then one doesn’t know if the particular images or metaphors reverberate for others. But I believe that this is what we must do in trying to think with and speak with others in a way that will change our relatedness to the world and each other. However, even more than trying to say or write new names is to take up a different tone and texture in wording the intimations one feels from the surround, whether in writing or speaking. It is my intention that Earthbodies flows with a language that moves and circles, jostles and make the reader feel resonances and reverberations, as a poem takes us by the hand and walks us through landscapes and into the heart’s core; and I hope it will be shared by others in the phenomenological and deep ecological movements. The work of ecology is first of all a work of transformation of each of us into beings who hearken more to our embeddedness in the natural world. This transformation can only occur slowly by opening ourselves to the depths of embodiment which allows us to feel again the ways we are moved—the emotional connections, responses and attunement—by the surround in becoming emplaced where we are. Many within postmodern consumerist culture live much of the time in a state of disconnection and dislocation—what in Earthbodies I called the life of “vampires,” “ghouls,” and “aesthetes”(77-118)—and have little sense of where they are, what they feel and what they sense, especially not in the myriad depths and dimensions of the perceptual. It is this way of existence that makes the ethical rules and standards that we attempt to apply to restrain destructive and self-destructive behaviors become often the only line of defense against violence of various kinds and the violence against the planet itself. Those who are so out of touch cannot immediately feel the pull of the needs of others and certainly not of the natural world. As dislocated and disconnected, the ethics of rules and standards plays a vital role, but is, for me, “the ethics of the last


resort”(202). In this regard, I am in complete accord with Arne Naess when he states in the interview, “The constant need to formulate ethical norms is pointing to a weakness in us as persons”(16). Given our lack of felt experiencing of our relatedness to the planet and to its inhabitants of all sorts, we need these external rules to guide us. However, if we were more fully here, if we “rejoined the planet,”—that is to say, achieved greater presence and co-presence with the surround—there would be a lived sense of what was called for by the greater whole, what Buddhists call “spontaneous right action.” There has been a disjunction between traditional Western ethics and our being (with a few notable exceptions like Aristotle and Nietzsche), as if only the actions we take are part of an “ethos” or “way of life” that is excellent. However, we may have an obligation to be differently, to rejoin the planet, so that it can fully appear to us in our kinship with all beings and, through that felt kinship, we can register the sense of other parts of the world that are communicated to us through embodiment. As I say in Earthbodies:

A spirituality or an ethics or a psychology that is earth-centered is one that stresses an openness to being enmeshed or com-pelled (having to act in concert with other forces, in response to them) by the dynamically changing world of which we are part, naturally and culturally (a blurred, evolving, and fluid boundary). (240)

To achieve this, we need to build upon Merleau-Ponty’s notion that in sensing the world, there is an inherent “perceptual belief.” Yes, embodiment is dedicated in its quest for meaning and response to the world in perception, but culturally we are alienated from this trajectory of the body. We have to facilitate people’s faith in the depths of possible meaning to be explored in their own embodied experience and in becoming more fully co-present. Rather than a faith in some transcendent realm, this requires a faith in the cogency of our lived experience (Mazis, 213), in our embodiment and its ongoing sense of the surround, which will require of us using more expressive words, more attuned sensibilities, and a new conceptual framework of the ontology of the flesh of the world. I also agree with Naess that we will have to embrace a pluralism of differing explicit positions on various issues (23), but we will be striving to honor the felt relatedness among all humans, living, and non-living beings, such that the ensuing responsiveness to the natural world and the give and take among humans allows for the creativity of the whole to accord with the sensitivity to the whole.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. 1991. Subversive Humanist: Texts and Readings. Ed. Mary McAllester Jones. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Mazis, Glen. 2002. Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Tr. Colin Smith. New York:


The Humanities Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Tr. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Naess, Arne. 1988. “Self-Realization.” Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings. Ed. Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming and John Seed. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers.

Naess, Arne. 1989. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Ed. and tr. David Rothenberg. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Naess, Arne. 1995. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary.” Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. George Sessions. Boston: Shambhala.

Naess, Arne with Christian Diehm. 2004. “Here I Stand: An Interview with Arne Naess.” Environmental Philosophy 1:2.

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