The Embers and the Stars

Erazim Kohák

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226191324
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

"It is hard to put this profound book into a category. Despite the author's criticisms of Thoreau, it is more like Walden than any other book I have read.... The book makes great strides toward bringing the best insights from medieval philosophy and from contemporary environmental ethics together. Anyone interested in both of these areas must read this book."—Daniel A. Dombrowski, The Thomist "Those who share Kohák's concern to understand nature as other than a mere resource or matter in motion will find his temporally oriented interpretation of nature instructive. It is here in particular that Kohák turns moments of experience to account philosophically, turning what we habitually overlook or avoid into an opportunity and basis for self-knowledge. This is an impassioned attempt to see the vital order of nature and the moral order of our humanity as one."— Ethics

1. Theoria

When, in 1928, Martin Heidegger described the human as a sheer “presence,”¹ contingently thrown into an alien context which constantly threatens to engulf him with its instrumentality, he appeared, to many of his contemporaries, to be doing no more than acknowledging an evident truth. Certainly, Heidegger was not speaking in a vacuum. For a century or more, Europeans and their cultural heirs in Russia and America had thought of themselves as privileged beings, persons in an impersonal, material world—and had acted accordingly. Western science described the world in ever more mechanistic, “value-free” terms, wholly alien to a moral subject,² while industry ruthlessly exploited the world so described as no more than a reserve of raw materials for human gratification. Still, the impact of Heidegger served notice that, at mid-century, the heirs of Europe’s personalistic cultural heritage had come to perceive themselves as absurd aliens in a dead, meaningless world.

Ironically, Heidegger himself may not have intended to present the image of the human as the embattled outsider. Though admittedly diverging from the moral personalism of his two great predecessors, Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler,³ Heidegger, already in the introduction to his Sein und Zeit, insisted that the question he was posing was one of Being as such, to which the being of humans is to serve but as a clue.⁴ In his postwar works, the continuity of Being and being-human does stand out prominently and the emphasis shifts: the fourfold presence of Being here becomes a clue to the understanding of being human.⁵ In the phenomenology of Sein und Zeit, however, the discontinuity of humans and their world is no less present, and it was the discontinuity on which most of Heidegger’s readers seized: the emphasis on the Entschlossenheit, the resoluteness of humans as Dasein, the presence standing out or “ek-sisting” from the tool-system of reality in a defiant self-assertion.

Whether or not such was indeed Heidegger’s intent, that was the theme his successors derived from his work and elaborated for some three decades. In the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and of the thinkers who took their cue from him, notably Albert Camus, the nonhuman appears as also inhuman, absurd and nauseating. Here the descriptions of the natural world, as of the gnarled roots of an old tree or of the protagonist’s own hand in Nausea, stress its repugnant absurdity. The human finds himself a stranger in that natural world, a nothingness, an outburst of an infinitely lonely freedom in The Flies, who exits, followed by the Furies. In the less fanciful categories of L’Être et le néant—literally the being and the nihilating, that which is and that which negates, not just the “Being and Nothingness” of the English title—the human is l’être-pour-soi, the intentional, meaning-creating project wholly discontinuous from and in a fundamental conflict with the sheer, meaningless mass of what simply is, as l’être-en-soi,⁶ The human as a moral subject—“man,” in the terminology of the age—is said to have no “nature”: the ideas of “humanity” and “freedom” and the idea of “nature” appear fundamentally contradictory. The human here is a nothingness, a “godlike,” arbitrary freedom to whom—or to which—nature, dead, meaningless, material, is at best irrelevant and typically threatening, to be conquered by an act of the will. In Sartre’s rather infelicitous phrase, “existence precedes essence”: the human simply is; only retrospectively, in terms of what he has been, can he be said to have been something in particular.⁷

Whatever the value of “existentialism” as a philosophy, it is a powerful testimony to the intellectual climate of the West at a certain time. The vision of the human which appeared evident to some of the foremost thinkers of the age—those, at least, who refused to abandon the conception of the human as a moral subject in favor of the human as a particularly complex robot and so continuous with a mechanistically conceived nature—was one of a lonely, arbitrary freedom defying the absurd orderliness of a dead, meaningless reality. The immense popular appeal of existentialist writings testifies to a moment of recognition: the humans of the West in the mid-twentieth century indeed perceived themselves in a great part as perplexed, perhaps defiant aliens in a strange, meaningless universe. Two generations earlier, Nietzsche had proclaimed that God is dead. By mid-century, to a great many Westerners, nature seemed no less dead, and the human, a lonely survivor, himself an endangered species.

That progression is not accidental. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra presented the death of God as great good news: though Dostoevsky was clearly mistaken in supposing that if there were no God, everything would be permitted, it did seem that, in that case, nothing would be prohibited. The true implication, however, is deeper. If there is no God, then nature is not a creation, lovingly crafted and endowed with purpose and value by its Creator. It can be only a cosmic accident, dead matter contingently propelled by blind force, ordered by efficient causality. In such a context, a moral subject, living his life in terms of value and purpose, would indeed be an anomaly, precariously rising above it in a moment of Promethean defiance only to sink again into the absurdity from which he rose. If God were dead, so would nature be—and humans could be no more than embattled strangers, doomed to defeat, as we have largely convinced ourselves we in fact are.

That the notion of a fundamental discontinuity between humans and their natural world should have come to appear evident is itself a curious phenomenon. That notion is, primordially, radically counterintuitive. Humans, notoriously, live their lives in and as their bodies whose rhythm is integrated with the rhythm of nature. The cycle of vigor and fatigue echoes that of the day and night, the rhythm of the new moon and the full moon has its counterpart in the rhythm of a woman’s body and, less obviously, a man’s body as well. The cycle of the seasons harmonizes with the cycle of human life. In the quest for sustenance and shelter, for the sharing of lives and the care of the young, in the eagerness of youth and the fullness of age, the lives of humans intermesh with those of all animate beings. Drawing water at dawn, making ready to break fast, I watch the woodchuck at his grazing: I can sense with all the evidence of primordial awareness that he and I are kin. Resting before the house at dusk, I can see the porcupines with their young beneath the boulders on the opposite bank venture forth: even so I had once led my children on their discovery of the world. Hoeing the beans, I watch their tendrils groping for the strings I stretched for them—so I, too, have groped for support. I can understand the old age of my apple trees, living past their time: perhaps that, too, will be my lot.

I sense my own place in the rhythm of the seasons, from seed time to harvest, the falling leaves and the stillness of winter. Some tasks are, perhaps, uniquely mine, not shared by other dwellers of the field and the forest. I can cherish the fragile beauty of the first trillium against the dark moss, and I can mourn its passing. I can know the truth of nature and serve its good, as a faithful steward. I can be still before the mystery of the holy, the vastness of the starry heavens and the grandeur of the moral law. That task may be uniquely mine. Yet even the bee, pollinating the cucumber blossoms, has its own humble, unique task. Though distinct in my own way, I yet belong, deeply, within the harmony of nature. There is no experiential given more primordial than that.

Sensing the life of the forest around me, I think only a person wholly blinded and deafened, rendered insensitive by the glare and the blare of his own devices, could write off that primordial awareness of the human’s integral place in the cosmos as mere poetic imagination or as “merely subjective.” The opposite seems far closer to the truth. It is what we are accustomed to treating as “objective reality”—the conception of nature as a system of dead matter propelled by blind force—that is in truth the product of a subject’s purposeful and strenuous activity, a construct built up in the course of an extended, highly sophisticated abstraction. It is, undeniably, a highly useful construct for accomplishing a whole range of legitimate tasks. Still, it is a construct, not an experiential given. Humans must suspend lived experience to produce the “scientific world view” of physics.⁸ Our direct awareness of nature as the meaningful context of our lives, by contrast, presents itself spontaneously, without a subject’s effort. If anything, it requires the very opposite: to suspend effort, to let be and listen, letting nature speak. In a real, though not a customary sense, it is what we mislabel “poetic imagination” that is, “objective,” a spontaneous experiential given. It is our image of nature as dead and mechanical—and the image of the human as either a robot or a rebel—that is “subjective,” a product of the subject’s active imagination rather than a given of lived experience—and actually quite counterintuitive.⁹

The image of the human as a stranger contingently thrown into an alien context is as alien to the spirit of Western thought through history as it is to experience. Through its three recorded millennia, Western thought has been consistently personalistic and specifically naturalistic, at least in the generic sense of that term, understanding humans as continuous with and at home in nature.

That generic sense of the term “naturalism” is not, admittedly, readily accessible to our age. As commonly used, the term “naturalism” reflects the late mediaeval division of reality into two realms, conceived of as almost two distinct natures, one “natural,” the other “supernatural.” Within this bifurcated conception of nature and presupposing it, “naturalism” came to describe the claim that the “natural” component is both self-contained and self-sufficient, perhaps even alone real, so that the human, his works, and his world are to be understood without recourse to the resources of the putative “supernatural” realm. How narrowly or how broadly that exclusion was to be conceived—whether, for instance, it excluded only references to God and “miracles” or whether it precluded all reference to intentional objects, purposes, values, or meanings—would then depend on whether the investigator opted for a “rich” or an “austere” ontology.¹⁰ Thus “naturalism” came to mean a philosophy which accepted as normative of “reality” the reality construct of the science favored by a given “naturalistic”’ thinker, as, in random instances, vitalistic biology in the case of a Driesch or a Dewey, biophysics in the case of Schrödinger, or a rather simplistic mechanics of action and reaction in the case of a Hobbes or a Watson.

So interpreted, however, the term is not overly useful. For one, the division of reality into a “supernatural” and plain “natural” realm was a rather short-lived, fortuitous product of a highly specific historical situation. Saint Augustine knew nothing of it, and even Saint Thomas, though in fusing Aristotle with Augustine he was led to distinguish two realms of discourse, prefers to speak of them as philosophical and theological. Only the Averroist thinkers of a century later, most notably William of Occam, introduced a conception of a bifurcated reality, of two truths and two natures, one “natural,” the other “supernatural.” In the nineteenth century, that distinction came into common use by both Catholic and Protestant thinkers struggling to preserve the autonomy of the spirit against the reductivist science of their time. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the distinction had all but disappeared from philosophical usage. Those Catholic and Anglican writers who, for reasons of tradition, continue to speak of the “supernatural,” use the term, somewhat misleadingly, to indicate the dimension of the sacred in a unitary reality and experience, not a second, superior “nature.” A philosophy contingent on the bifurcated conception of reality, affirming one of its halves against the other, would be as dated as that conception itself.

Then, too, making our philosophic conception of reality contingent not on lived experience but on the reality construct used by a particular natural science is intrinsically problematic. Even a philosophy of science, if it is not to become a sterile, self-confirming dogmatism locked within a wholly formal system of its axioms and their implications, must retain an independent access to the primordially given nature of lived experience in terms of which it can evaluate the adequacy of the reality construct assumed and used by a particular science. If we were to take “naturalism” to mean—as in fact it has often meant—a philosophy which takes a particular science as definitive of reality, the term could claim only a limited descriptive accuracy, not a philosophical significance.

For the purposes of our reflections, a generic rather than a historical idea of naturalism seems more relevant. By speaking of “naturalism” in a generic sense, which includes but is not restricted to its historical instances, we shall mean any philosophy which recognizes the being of humans as integrally linked to the being of nature, however conceived, treating humans as distinctive only as much as any distinct species is that, but as fundamentally at home in the cosmos, not “contingently thrown” into it as into an alien context and “ek-sisting” from it in an act of Promethean defiance. By “nature” in a similarly generic sense we shall mean the nature presented in lived experience, the primordially given cosmic context in which humans find themselves and to which they themselves belong in their bodies and minds, as humans are in fact aware of it, whether thematically or not, in their daily lived experience, not as it appears in the theoretic nature-constructs which seek to capture it. What is at issue between naturalism so conceived and its denial is not the nature of “nature” but rather the place of the human in the cosmos: whether we shall conceive of ourselves as integrally continuous with the world about us or as contingently thrown into it as strangers into an alien medium.

It is in this generic sense that we can speak of Western thought as basically “naturalistic.” The conflicts within it hinge, for the most part, on how nature is to be conceived; that humans are a part of its order seemed beyond question. That is certainly true of the pre-Socratics. For them, the crucial dividing line, if we can speak of one at all, would run not between humans and nature but between all that is natural, a part of nature as physis, the living, meaningfully ordered web of purpose within which each being, humans no less than the stars and all in between, has its appointed task, and, on the other hand, the realm of artifacts, devoid of a life and an entelechy of their own. The order which for, say, an Anaximander governs the life of the cosmos is indistinguishably both vital and moral.

That continuity of the vital and the moral order becomes explicit in Aristotle, as, for instance, in the familiar Book I of his Politics. Here Aristotle explicitly equates the moral order with the natural order. The moral order is distinctive only inasmuch humans, unlike their fellow animals, must grasp the order of the cosmos through an operation of the intellect and choose to honor it in an act of the will. While for beings endowed with instinct the operation of the law of nature is automatic, vital, for beings endowed with reason it is voluntary and, in that specific sense, moral rather than vital. Its contents, however, remain largely constant: it is the one order which appears either as vital or as moral; it is, in both cases, the “natural” which appears as good and the disruptive or “violent” which appears as evil.

Saint Thomas was able to take over that conception without undue difficulty. Natural law, as he conceives of it, is not the law of some “human condition” or a law specifically invented for humans. It is the law with which the Creator endows all of his creation. The analogies between human and animal societies, which sound so strained to a contemporary reader, seemed entirely legitimate to Saint Thomas and the medievals. The natural and moral “laws” of marriage and marital fidelity, of the love of a homeland, of the rhythm of aging and renewal, all are natural patterns of behavior which we can detect among most animals and which can serve as clues to the natural order of human life as well. Humans are distinctive only in their freedom to know and obey (or ignore and disobey) that natural law—and in their ability to discern, beyond that law, as the idea of the Good, the overarching virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the “theological” virtues which later Scholastics were wont to designate as “supernatural,” with unfortunate results.

The vision of the integral unity of the being of humans and that of the cosmos is no less present in the other great tradition of Western thought, which we can trace from Socratic moral philosophy through Plato and the Stoics down to the Renaissance. Socrates shocks younger readers today by his scornful insistence that he has nothing to learn from trees. Surrounded by artifacts which indeed can teach us nothing but what we have programmed into them, we are just beginning to realize that it is precisely the living, growing nature that Socrates scorns that can teach us. Similarly, Plato, Socrates’ star pupil, rejects this world, presumably including physis, as a cave of shadows in the Republic and as a world running backwards in the Statesman. It is not difficult to read into Socrates and Plato a fundamental opposition between humans and nature and to re-present them as the ancestors of existentialism in a sense as generic as that in which we are using the term naturalism.

Before we do that, however, we might do well to look again. Neither Socrates nor Plato rejects the idea of a natural order in the name of the sovereignty of an arbitrary human will arrogating unto itself either the powers of creation or those of determining good and evil. The opposition, as becomes clear in Plato’s exercise in designing an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prolegomenon
• 1. Theoria
• 2. Physis
• 3. Humanitas
• 4. Skepsis
• 5. Credo
• Postscriptum
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Topics