But the philosophy of deep ecology is something altogether different.  This is, I believe, something much more specific than the movement, something less recognized, less well-understood.1  Deep ecology as philosophy is the attempt to articulate a new relationship between humanity and nature, one that does not accept familiar divisions between the subjective and the objective, or between the natural and the human.  It is a direction for ontology to progress, not a perspective that has been fully or even tentatively outlined.  Deep ecology as philosophy suggests that humanity is not only part of nature, but intertwined with nature, as idea and fact, connected to our surroundings in a way that our language is not prepared to let us speak.  Our language and categories of thought are questioned in order that we may develop new ways to speak the world into existence (in Heidegger’s words,) changing logic, syntax, and conception.  This is the most radical kind of ecological thinking, and this is the hardest to engage in or to explain.

Arne Naess’s particular articulation of the philosophy of deep ecology depends on a human ability to directly apprehend the qualities of nature.  This borrows from phenomenology but does not use the terminology of phenomenology.  In this paper I intend to explore Naess’s terminology of concrete contents, which builds on a rejection of Galileo’s distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities and posits instead a way of understanding where we apprehend the qualities of things only through their relation with each other.  Naess rejects the notion of ‘quality’ and comes up instead with the word ‘contents’ and calls these contents ‘concrete’ because they are directly apprehended reality, not structures invoked to explain reality.

Naess then sidesteps the phenomenological tradition, with its subject experiencing the world, and hints instead at a world that as a whole experiences itself, with no primary subjects or objects, but instead a web of relations.  I say “hints” because the philosophy of deep ecology has always, in its radical break with tradition, seemed by nature to be preliminary.2   How to develop it further?  I suggest that Naess is trying to push philosophy in a direction toward poetry, using a series of resonating examples from Italian writer Italo Calvino, a film by John Sayles, and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.  For philosophy to redefine itself, it sometimes needs to find inspiration outside its borders.  

 

The Relational and the Real

Naess rides the train to the mountains—he sees birches smiling, firs weeping.  He wants us to believe that these smiles and tears come before we see trees themselves, and are not a projection from human moods or glances.  These emotional parts of reality he calls the concrete contents of reality.  We see the world first as relations between us and it.  Smiles and cries are actually there, they are the fabric of the world, the threads of nature and the foundations of the universe.  He doesn’t want to call them human appearances, but natural appearances.  Not human experience but simply experience, the world experiencing itself in surges of emotion, sparkles of light.  We need to wake up and perceive the world as alive, dancing upon itself, wondrous and self-aware.

With this idea of the content of reality as concrete, Naess is reaching for a name to mark out an area of existence, and giving it greater weight by saying it is real.  In his drive to make up these phrases and hope they will stick, I see him striving for a peculiar kind of logical poetry, trying out a metaphor to see if it will catch on, a gentle jab to consider the pieces of experience and wonder what would happen if we were to put them back together another way. 

It is my intention here to investigate what it would mean to see the world this other way—how the primacy of all qualities might make things recede and relations come into prominence, how it might be the birth of a less arrogant way of placing human beings into an equally experiencing surrounding, also a subject, not only an object.  And the announcement that the emotions we sense there in nature are not mere projections, or whims of different perspectives, but an actuality which can’t be denied. 

Leave your left hand out in the cold winter air, keep the right one cozy inside a mitten.  Then stick both inside a pot of room-temperature water.   The left one feels warm.  The right one feels cold.  Is the water warm or cold?  Galileo says neither warm nor cold.  These are secondary qualities, subjective, in the hand of the beholder.  To be distinguished from primary, objective qualities like volume and shape, what he would have called properties of the water and the pot itself, wholly contained and clear in the object. 

Presocratic Protagoras has already disagreed, two thousand years earlier.  According to Sextus Empiricus, he would have said the water is both warm and cold.  “Water has all kinds of qualities, but a sensitive being is only able to experience a limited number of them.”3  We feel different aspects of the water in different relations to it, but the water still contains these different aspects since as water it is defined in terms of its relations with the world.  Naess goes on to find support for this view in the following ancient Sanskrit formula: sarvam dharmam nihsvabhavam—Every element is without self-existence.  Things exist only linked to each other, caught in the web of the world.

But subjects and objects are primary categories in most of Western philosophy.  When Naess tries to go beyond these divisions, he is led, like other philosophers of this century, to create his own language to describe the way he sees things.  And all is not equal in this view: feelings of water as well as the rootedness of sense of place are contents of reality, because they are there in the sea we swim in or the place with which we identify.  But there is a level of understanding that takes a step back from the immediacy of relating with the world: deciding how much land is worth in monetary terms, or discovering the chemical formula that constitutes soil or the cell structure of wood.  These are abstract structures, once removed from the concrete relational contents of the nature that includes our ability to know it.

The implications of this view for tactical, pragmatic environmentalism are clear: if a defender of a mountain sees it as beneficent, glorious, sublime, then that value is as primary as the value of the mineral deposit that might lie beneath the summit, ready to be excavated and converted into cash, even though it is harder to quantify.  Beauty in nature is not subjective (used by the ‘rational’ as a pejorative term) and therefore possible to dismiss as sentimentalism.  The full range of qualities latent in the Earth come from there, belong there, and we should ensure that they stay there.   

 

Phenomenology Minus the Subject

What is different in this world of concrete contents from the world as described or wished for by the phenomenologists?  These are the philosophers, inspired by Husserl and Heidegger, who want to present to us things as they are meant to be seen, before any forms of theory or explanation.  While a promising goal, their approach too often seems mired in obscure terminology, clearly representative of a very specific theory of just the type they want to strip away.  And, it is always a human view that they see, not a world in itself, or seen from the things themselves.  The things themselves are always seen from a human view—they remain inside the bounds of description, and phenomenology promises us that we will be able to explain things.  It does not want to admit the unknown, or the unknowable, which is the ridge crest always one range beyond the vantage of any philosophy.

The truest, purest phenomenology is an exact delight in the reverberations of the environment around them.  It throws its own terminology out the window, and instead might describe those who look at the sky and cannot help but shout “Blue!”  One who catches the afternoon winter light on a wall of a concrete building and is amazed by the tactile surface of light: “Orange!”  “Gold!”  The names are nothing—they are symbols of the exclamations of wonder.  Let the Earth see us before we see it, and the encounter will shake us to the core.  There will be no things in themselves, only presences, light, shapes, movements now perceptible and strange.

To feel the freshness of the wind, the smile of the aspen, the tear of the willow, and not to denigrate these discoveries in the name of narrow human imagination.  The emotions are of this world!  We are here first to see them, and then to make sure they still will be seen for many generations to come.  The philosopher of nature must learn to be a witness for wonder, and to teach others what is necessary to keep this wonder visible and free.

Now Arne Naess comes to these problems from the guarded perspective of the analytic philosopher.  He is an expert in the invention and refinement of linguistic concepts, of names for the irascible and the fleeting.  That leaf winked at us, didn’t you see?  Rather than delve into this experience, it is enough for Naess to defend the fact that it is there.  This is the direction logic implores us.  Argument leads to dialogues, and here is an excerpt from one of his written but unpublished dialogues: 

A:  The birch is smiling!

B:  Not really smiling.

A:  Yes, really smiling.  I describe experienced reality as best as I can.  I do not make inferences.

B:  I propose a test.  Ask why it smiles—does it answer?

A:  No.  But from ‘x is really smiling’ it does not follow that ‘x answers or can answer questions’.  Reality is not that simple.  I describe contents, not abstract structures.4   

A did not imagine the smile, but considers it a concrete content of reality.  Where Naess differs from the phenomenologist is when he says not just a human reality, a human experience, but reality as a whole, the experience of the world, a fact that contains value, ephemeral but essential to be marked and noticed for its worth.

The phenomenologist still perceives the world from an aspect, seeing from somewhere, grasping a part of the universe, never a whole.  Naess wants to claim something more: that the world-in-itself is attainable by the human being who listens, watches, learns from the feelings sensed out there, beyond the mind’s narrow confines.  It is not a mystic’s oneness with the universe but a rousing sense of the Earth’s importance, grasped by feeling its inanimate parts to be as emotional and sensate as we are.

I climb a mountain in the fresh snow and try to grasp what this would mean.  Ascending into the woods, in crisp and cold morning sun, I see the branches straining to bear the weight of a cool but still heavy overnight snowfall.  Dare I say they suffer?  The burden is clear, but does it hurt them?  The insight is poetic, not commonsensical, something Naess might not at first admit.  The Romantic writes, “The birch laughed with the light easy laugh of all birches.”  This quote is from poet Henrik Wergeland, not from any scientist or systematizer.  To avoid anthropocentrism we must maintain that the trees’ laugh is not a human laugh, though it is a laugh nonetheless.  This commonality is the kind of relation that keeps us tied to nature. 

The kind of inspiration that Naess’s world of concrete contents suggests to me is the notion that nature might be primarily constituted out of different categories than we presently admit.  Why start with trees, then count them up into a forest, and then see the whole hillside blanketed with snow?  Instead start with laughter, and see it on the sloping Earth everywhere, a first look before the objects coalesce apart from one another?  Expression in the growth and fall of the universe, before things are demarcated and named.  Seeing the sparkle when the light hits the white place, before we then decide it is a patch of newfallen snow.  The wind as a song before it moves through the air, lifting flakes, forming clouds, transforming water into darkness and action. 

The Earth is alive before we can stop it.  Processes in the midst of change before we can freeze them.  These contents of experience come first preceding humanization, first before anyone claims them or attaches them as qualities to things.  This is no Platonic form of “laughter” like a thing held invisibly behind the desert of the tactile.  This is an emotion expressed not at the edge, but out from the core of possibility, touching us not uniquely but in the same way any other being might choose to grasp it.

You see it when you’re out on a winter afternoon, the sun low, soon to disappear.  Perhaps your on a north slope and already in the shadow, gazing across the valley to a glowing mountain or hill.  The light comes first, the reflective sheen of the Earth, before you see a mountain or a slope of trees.  Why search to name, pick a piece of the land?  Begin with light, grasp the particular hue, the crystal tone.  We might call the winter light crisp, exact, hard-edged, overdefined, precise like the extra-sharp world seen through amber sunglasses, the kind worn by hunters and pilots to make sure their targets are clear.  Whatever words we use to name this light seem like just ways the hues appear to us as we see them, just then, just there.  But in the world of concrete contents, they are at least as real as any calculations we may come up with to explain why winter light is so much tighter, noting down wavelengths, showing the fine outlines produced by a sun low in the sky.  The feel of the light is as primal as any other quality.  It is originary, initial, the first ray that strikes us as the planet turns toward the sun at the start of the day. 

From Philosophy to Poetry

Phenomenology wants to get philosophy back to the things themselves, but it does so still from the view of the subject.  Naess wants to break qualities down to the relationships themselves.  Whose terminology best suits the task?  It is almost as if the moment these things are named and given categories, their fluidity is lost.  Our philosophical language is so used to breaking things into parts that it is hard to use precise language to explain how the world flows together, where ‘things’ dissolve in a torrent of relationships in which we spin and are spun, dashed down and upstream, through the rocks and into the mud. 

Poet William Carlos Williams demanded “no ideas but in things!” wishing poetry to be concrete in the same way Naess wants philosophy to be.  But his disciple A.R. Ammons twisted the demands around, calling for “no things but in ideas!  No ideas but in ideas!  No things but in things!”  A true attentiveness to relationship must dissolve demands into their opposites.

Must it as well dissolve philosophy into poetry?  In general, I think not, but in the case of Arne Naess, I believe there is a yearning toward poetry that he has steadfastly resisted all his life.  Naess is an associative thinker: he jumps from one rock to the next as nimbly as anyone as he tries to cross the stream of discourse en route to the other side: reaching fact from value, skepticism from cynicism, joy from doubt.  He has always stood up for intuition as the foundation of his deep ecology, and prefers that the reader share his innate trust in a human place in nature than provide elaborate justification for why nature has value in itself, apart from the service to humanity.  His ecophilosophy is an environmental ontology, not an environmental ethic.

Naess appeals to us to accept all perceived qualities in nature as concrete, but he doesn’t always have the language to do so.  “There is a certain kind of poetic philosophizing,” he has told me, “That I detest.”  Yet his finest examples, (like Kant’s of the sublime: “bold, overhanging rocks, volcanoes, etc.”) come from poetry, or expressive language and metaphor.  It is my belief that the vision of a world of concrete contents can best be strengthened by reference to literature, art, and the poetic that may run through all of these.  Following are a series of examples that I hope will enrich and explain the core of Naess’s view with image, not argument.  I believe this is the kind of deepening of ecology that Naess would welcome, not reject.

First is a recent literary essay by the late Italian writer Italo Calvino, “From the Opaque,” which is phenomenology in action as an experiment with metaphors, placing the human observer at the edge of experience, poised between a mountain of precipitous memory and a deep seacliff of unknown chances: 

Obviously to describe the shape of the world the first thing to do is to establish my position, I don’t mean my location but my orientation, because the world I am talking about differs from other possible worlds in this sense: that whatever the time of day or night one always knows where east and west are, and thus I shall begin by saying that I am looking southwards, which is the same as saying that I have my face towards the sea, which is the same as saying that I have my back to the mountain, because this is the position in which I usually surprise that self that dwells within myself, even when my external self is orientated in a completely different fashion…5  

Now Naess is less concerned with this initial positioning, so sure is he that what he perceives of the natural world is actually part of that world, not part of his relation to that world.  Here he does not differ so much from the natural scientist, or at least the traditional naturalist, observing living beings, drawing conclusions about them, sure about the concrete (if not objective) aspects of what is seen, felt, and heard.  There is a certain human hubris he admits in ascertaining that he can know when the trees are smiling, the rocks crying, the birds conferring on the future of the planet. 

David Abram calls this an awareness of the “more than human world,” and he finds it part of most oral cultures of present and previous times.6  Many cultures identify themselves as being part of groups and gatherings named from the animal world.  Still, to me it involves a certain arrogance.  I can call myself a member of the turtle clan, but is it fair if I haven’t asked the turtles whether they’ll accept me or not?  I might want to be a turtle.  I would like to be a turtle; I see the world differently if I imagine myself a turtle, but it is as much human metaphor as any other—this is part of knowing nature that the phenomenologists want to stress, to show how a human view on things need not be a human-centered view of things.

I remain divided on this point: it seems to be both arrogant and humble to feel that nature wants us.  Is it more sensible to admit that nature does not care?  In either case, it seems prudent to protect the world and its wildness, rather than destroy it without knowing what we kill. 

Yet is it arrogance of humanism to imagine that we know how nature feels, that the wholes we observe—be they of living entities, inevitably mechanical “systems,” or amorphous shapes of feeling that hold together in our field of view—are parts of the world as it actually is, apart from the human gaze?  Naess tells me in Is It Painful to Think? that he is happy to speak of “experience” as long as the word “human” is not applied to it to narrow the word’s relevance.7  This is a clear divergence from traditional phenomenology.  The vision of a world of concrete contents is as much a plea to step outside of the perspective that has been “handed” us and take the chance that we could actually see more.

The test, of course, is if this other way of seeing nature really looks different.  I think Naess would smile at the trouble Calvino has with being more than a spectator as he writes his explanation of a world unfurling from the point where he can reckon exactly his geographical position, presumably anywhere on Earth.  For how do we participate in a world we are incessantly looking at, describing, trying to frame within a window or a proscenium arch.  Here’s Calvino’s struggle of nature with culture: 

I’ve gone back to using metaphors that have to do with the theater. Although in my thoughts of that time I couldn’t have associated the theater and its velvets with that world of grasses and winds, and although even now the image that the theater tends to bring to mind is of an interior that claims to contain within itself the exterior world, the piazza the fête the garden the wood the pier the war, is the exact opposite of what I am describing, that is an exterior that excludes every kind of interior.8  

Calvino is after words out of doors, flung from the confines of paragraphs, streams of thought that first flutter in the breezes and then alight in the buoyancy of the air.  In subject matter there is no division here between the natural and the human, but more between inside and outside, between the bounded conditions of literature, words on a page, held down in a book, carefully considered, bound and printed, and the open trace of philosophy, ideas on the world that cannot quite be set solidly in words.  The first step then in deepening deep ecological philosophy is perhaps an instruction on how not to read it: throw out the idea.  Choose to imagine how the new conception would change the appearance of the world. 

What about the easy romanticizing of the world through language?  Naess, and especially Calvino, here look beyond language creating the world to say it evokes the world in a powerful way different from logic, different from representation.  To say humanity constructs our world through language is not, as Joel Kovel would have it, to irrevocably separate us from nature.9  We live according to natural rhythms and constraints, being born, surviving, eating, and dying not so much differently from other animals, but we also reflect, and only admit that other humans reflect.  So we are destined to understand only our own kind.  This can be a relief, or a sadness.  Naess and Calvino take it as a challenge.  They want to explore with words, and to look beyond the despair.

Know that language cannot yet describe the world of concrete contents.  Think what could happen if it could.  Perhaps the whole thing might look like this, the phrases that come out of Calvino when he discards the metaphors of the theater once again: 

…we are in a world that stretches and twists like a lizard so as to offer the largest possible surface area to the sun, opening up the fan of its suction-cup feet on a wall that’s growing wary, its tail retreating with threadlike jerks from the imperceptible advance of the shade, eager to have the sunny coincide with the existence of the world…10  

This to me is a wise picture of the world of concrete contents in full force, an Earth becoming an animal, moving slowly and methodically out into the light, a place envisioned not how it might look to a lizard, but as a lizard, say, a huge land iguana on the Galapagos Island of Fernandina, a huge volcanic caldera that erupts every few years still, where the large, ever smiling beasts have no shortage of sun to identify with as the world.11  The world is doing the slithering, meandering, maneuvering itself towards the light, swishing, leaving a trace, adjusting its angles into curves in this strange image, taking only the strange prisoners of memory and account, choosing to look like this, to remember like this, to test out this lizard picture as a new alternative to the many others that abound.  It’s not an obvious or clear picture, but it doesn’t have to be to be right.  For the universe must be somewhat opaque in order to catch our attentions.  And we ourselves are then caught in the midst of the opacity: 

From the opaque, from the depths of the opaque I write, reconstructing the map of a sunniness that is only an unverifiable postulate for the computations of the memory, the geometrical location of the ego, of a self which the self needs to know that it is itself, the ego whose only function is that the world may continually receive news of the existence of the world, a contrivance at the service of the world for knowing if it exists.12 

And this is an interesting justification for having a self; Heideggerian in the sense that we humans are here on the planet to “speak the Earth into Being.”  That is a literary calling, a purpose in the biosphere to speak up and give names to things that otherwise would be voiceless.  This opaque and beautifully articulated phenomenology of Calvino is convincing in that it does not hold on too tightly to the notion of a self, it does not sound subject-centered, but genuinely searching for a voice of the world. 

The notion of the self has always been problematic for deep ecology in general, and for Arne Naess in particular.  Enough weight is laid on the concept that the whole philosophical perspective has been criticized for being individually centered, impossibly distant from the nets of relation that make up the world, far, far from the home that tempers the hubris of individuals claiming their own paths through experience and into nature.  The image of the deep ecologist, only encouraged by the literature, is of a solitary traveler contemplating the wilderness, identifying with the world of patterns she finds there, taking care not to feel part of the spectacular, but looking for commonality with the tiny and the overlooked instances of life.  We become closer to nature when we identify with things radically inhuman, far from our immediate and bodily scale of experience.  The gestalts of nature welcome us, for they are patterns that can include a human who cares to notice them. 

But how far can the self go?  Naess likes to add a capital “S” to imply a Self that is larger than the ego, still an enveloping identity where individuality is not lost.  There isn’t much of a picture of shared reality, but rather the solo participant in a world that embraces the thinker who also chooses to act, and recognizes their part in the biological and cultural ecology of relationships that defines us. 

When Naess chooses to get more specific on just what counts as a gestalt and what does not, he unfortunately reverts to the style of philosophical writing that he learned as a young man:  “A definite waterfall at a definite time, including its music with modifications due to winds, has gestalt character, but is neither a thing nor a state of affairs.  But we may say that the content of reality is all that is the case.”13  This seems to be an allusion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus factual world of all that is the case.  Naess’s world is instead a place of grouped impressions, not an amalgamation of truths.  There is a poetic quality to this observation, and that is why I have endeavored to point out similar thoughts so colorfully explored by Calvino above and Tranströmer below.  Walking this way through nature you will step through a series of patterns, not looping Venn diagrams of set theory, but nets of relations, ordered places in which the human traveler also has a location and a part.  The truth is never only that appearance that all who gaze on a natural gestalt can agree upon.  The aspen quaking in the wind can be both happy and sad—what is important is that it contains within itself qualities that are both fleeting and deep.  Poetry is true—to be open to it, the rules of experience must constantly be questioned.

Wittgenstein did not think human beings could see a color called reddish-green.  Indeed, our very rules for how colors are to be measured on the spectrum or mixed in the palette of paint or light seems to indicate that these hues do not go gently together.  Yet anyone who has walked through an autumn New England forest will know immediately that the woods can shimmer with the bright changeling color of reddish-green.  Simply hold up a transitory turning maple or oak blade, and you will see at once an image of green becoming red, and the leaf as a whole speaks of red mixed with green more than anything else.  It is a tone that exists clearly as a quality of something simple that we uncertainly try to describe, tossing out a question to our rules of the spectrum, to our sense of how the eye tends to demarcate such things.  The content of this natural reality throws a monkey-wrench into the neat theory of color wavelengths and scales. 

So what then of the human and more-than-human shapes that we see looming in mountains and in rocks?  These must also be taken more seriously than as simile:

In a famous painting by Kittelsen the mountain Andersnatten is presented as a huge troll.  There are trees on the top on the mountain and the same holds for the troll.  The trees are the hair of the troll.  Those who rally find the presentation of the mountain as a troll meaningful and adequate—somehow.  The conception of a troll clarifies what they experience when looking at the mountain.  Asked for word characterizing the mountain and connecting it with a troll, people offer expressions like: uncanny, mysterious.14   

The mountain after the painting is heretofore seen a new way.  Is this way invented or discovered?  There is a larger richness to nature if the troll is found there, not invented.  There is a more outward arcing sense of humanity if the notion of “mountain” is a category of thought, that includes the lean of ascent, the picture of trolls, as much as it names a feature of the landscape.15  Perhaps the greatest richness is found not in saying the troll-mountain is out in nature, or in humanity, but in some ineffable but most real and honest gestalt connecting the two. 

True relational thinking will need to dissolve the poles of the entities doing the relating.  There will no longer be a humanity, or a nature, but a continuum of connection that is the primal asking force.  In this way a particular mood can cast a bright or dark shadow across an observation of a movement or yearning that seems to be nature’s, seems to be affected by ours, and is concretely belonging to no one, poised as it is as the link between who sees and who is seen:  

Suppose my pleasant work at a certain place requires me to repeatedly pass a mat of flowers of a certain kind.  I notice that they turn toward the sun, pointing in a different direction as the sun moves.  The process of identification with the flowers makes us see them as seeking and appreciating the rays and warmth of the sun, and being at work to satisfy a vital need.  Being myself pleasantly at work, the total situation is that of working together.

But suppose my work is unpleasant and hard.  The usual way of talking is to say that the mat of flowers as part of reality is the same, but our subjective impressions and experiences are different because we feel different under the strain of the unpleasant work.  We never escape from our world of subjective feelings, it is said, but science and common sense can teach us about objective reality, a reality where trees are neither joyful nor sad!  There is, I would say, both a common sense and a common lack of sense.16 

The flower is only knowable if we admit that it can be both joyful and sad, never a gray or colorless object.  That would not be a flower.  The qualities are primary, long before the object has been set aside with the grace of a name.  For seeing, as artist Robert Irwin has written, “is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”17  His work consists of building sculptures in the environment that subtly change the way we experience the space around us.  His 1995 exhibit in New York18 consisted of a series of translucent cloth dividers, in between which the public could walk, seeing each other and the room between varying layers of half-invisible walls.  The piece made visitors more conscious of the way people walk through space, and the ways our world is divided in rectilinear ways.  What is the name of what we see?  Not an object, not space itself, but the way we walk among these names and among each other.

In the world of concrete contents our familiar ways of naming things will have little use.  The qualities that present things will be so immediate and vibrant that they will overshadow the identities of the objects that hold them. 

What Naess is asking for here is something beyond altruism, far past caring about nature for its own sake.  Is it a sign of appreciation that we admit that the tree is really laughing?  Not at all—it is a conceptual choice.  It is a question of looking and thinking outward, not hoarding emotions for humanity or the sentient alone.  It is about drinking for the water, thinking for the spirit, laughing for those who already laugh, but do not know it.  The late Emmanuel Levinas speaks of the same condition, with his own choice of language: 

…When one smells a flower, it is the smell that limits the finality of the act. To stroll is to enjoy the fresh air, not for the health but for the air.  These are the nourishments characteristic of our existence in the world.  It is an ecstatic existence—being outside oneself…19 

This kind of phenomenology enjoys the world, potent with a jouissance of experience, not because the world presents itself as being useful in a kind of Heideggerian tool-presence, but because it is a place we can care about by identifying with, by loving it, conjuring our language into its terms and its emotions into ours.  Naess, like Levinas, wants to loosen us into the world.  Who then listens to the songs we sing of it? 

 

The Truth of Fantasy 

Consider the recent and remarkable film of Irish island life, The Secret of Roan Inish, directed by John Sayles.  Known most for his eclectic and socialist-inspired tales of the American working class, here Sayles tackles a delicate if somewhat sentimental story of myth and magic by the blue waters of the Old Country.  The frame of the story is familiar: the new generation has had to move the family off the pristine remote island home of Roan Inish, first to the mainland, then to the city.  Little Fiona, age seven or so, can’t take Dublin life, so she is sent back to Grandma and Grandpa, who dream of returning to the remote island, but can’t imagine how to survive a life so hard.  There is also the family tragedy to reckon with—Fiona’s little brother Jimmy was lost in a storm when his cradle, with him in it, drifted wantonly out to sea.

Where is the magic of nature in this tale?  (I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for sentimentality when it comes to myth and nature.)  It turns out the birds and the seals took little Jimmy away, as punishment because the Kinnealy family had left the island.  The animals wanted the people with them!  They were angry that their human kin were leaving, and had to conspire to bring them back.  Why?  Turns out the whole family is part seal, as a great-great-grandmother was a silkie—half woman, half seal.  The yearning of the sea runs deep in the family’s blood.  Every generation there is one dark one among the brothers and sisters.  They are each a little distant, a little fishy, a little too quick to dive into the foaming icy waters and disappear—for hours, for days, for years.

The film is remarkable in the way we viewers are convinced that the animals are watching, that they too believe the myths, that they also yearn to be close to us and our world.  And if the emotions of the more-than-human are told and retold across generations, the world of concrete contents tells us not necessarily that we must be sure these ancient tales are true, but that we need to realize the animals too need their stories—they imagine a way closer to humanity.  Just as we talk to our dogs and cats, they try to talk to us, in their languages, understanding as much, or as little, as we do. 

The point is not getting the message across, but the reach outward and the grasp for interspecies understanding, identifying with a smile, or a cry, wanting desperately to know what it means.  The suspiciously intelligent whale song, and the chillingly human whelp of the coyote, what then is out there, our selves, our images, or something radically different that we are actually able to understand?  The world of concrete contents suggests that the song comes first; the call linking howler and listener, performer and audience, speaker and spoken to.  This is how things are connected.  This is how we reach out to the mysteries that surround. 

 

His Life and His Labyrinth

In the end, we witness the world as a real, but changing foil to the way we see things.  What about conflicts in experience?  I have asked Naess about this in Is It Painful to Think?, and he maintains that the experience of a pristine lake is better than zooming across the lake on a speedboat.  Why?  His answer does express a distate for the noise and the velocity in the still open country.20  But some people do need the whoosh of the machine to feel they are really living.  How will Naess dissuade them?  Their enjoyment and link to the place wastes too much energy.  It destroys an inherent quality of the beautiful place as it enjoys.  Naess has been chided often enough for dismissing the existence of conflict between opposing views.  I believe he would say that his way of sensing, naming, and relating to nature is a view that is open to other forms of description and love, but only as long as those other forms do not destroy the context they inhabit.  What is concrete in that context are just those qualities that must be recognized and preserved if the place is to retain any original identity at all.  Perhaps that is why the birches are smiling—even when we choose to look away.

The concrete poetry of nature itself remains confusing.  The rhythm and verse shift from moment to moment.  But we are never alone in determining the qualities of what we see.  We want to see structure, and decide it is there.  When we’re looking, the world offers order to us. We do not choose our habitat.  It permits us to thrive inside it. 

The end of  Tomas Tranströmer’s long poem “The Gallery” provides an image that may stand for Arne Naess confronting the tangible world, looking for meaning with the step by step re-framing of a mystical logic: 

He stands full length in front of a mountain.

It’s more a snail shell than a mountain.

It’s more a house than a snail shell.

It isn’t a house but has many rooms.

It’s indistinct but overwhelming.

He grows from it and it from him.

It is his life, it is his labyrinth.21 

A character tries to explain the shape of his world.  First it’s something he appears before.  Then it curves around us, spiraling away.  Then it seems like a home.  Then it is no longer a home but it has many parts, impossible to pin down.  Who belongs to who when the world is finally understood?  We’ll never know.  The poetic world of concrete contents can only be found if we attune ourselves to the sheer richness of real qualities that define themselves through relations to us.  There will be no division between the human and the nonhuman, because relations will be the first level of facts that hold this world together.  That’s why it doesn’t fall apart.  That’s why humanity is necessary to save it.