Elemental Philosophy

Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas

David Macauley

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438432465
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Bachelard called them "the hormones of the imagination." Hegel observed that, "through the four elements we have the elevation of sensuous ideas into thought." Earth, air, fire, and water are explored as both philosophical ideas and environmental issues associated with their classical and perennial conceptions. David Macauley embarks upon a wide-ranging discussion of their initial appearance in ancient Greek thought as mythic forces or scientific principles to their recent reemergence within contemporary continental philosophy as a means for understanding landscape and language, poetry and place, the body and the body politic. In so doing, he shows the importance of elemental thinking for comprehending and responding to ecological problems. In tracing changing views of the four elements through the history of ideas, Macauley generates a new vocabulary for and a fresh vision of the environment while engaging the elemental world directly with reflections on their various manifestations.

— Part I —

Elemental Encounters and Ideas

— 1 —

Philosophy's Forgotten Four

The four elements [are] the hormones of the imagination.

—Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams

Now I a fourfold vision see, / And a fourfold vision is given to me.

—William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts

Western philosophy commences as a profound, if protracted, contemplation of the natural environment in an attempt to discern the workings of the world and to reflect on its origin, constitution, and meaning. The first physiologoi, or natural philosophers, speculated not just on the human psyche (soul or mind) but also focused foremost on the vaulting sky, the flickering turns and reversals of fire, the eddies and rhythmic flows of water, and the hidden depth or silent beauty of rock and earth—in short, the four elements. By way of an engagement with the elements as well as living plants and animals, they searched for a hidden arche (ruling principle), an underlying logos (order) and a guiding telos (purpose or goal). Interrogating and building on ideas advanced by the Presocratics in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., subsequent philosophers and incipient scientists like Aristotle and Theophrastus were able to provide the underpinnings of later ecological thought by integrating close observation of the natural world with rational explanation and justification.¹

In these early historical periods, theories of nature were not yet separated sharply from or supplanted by more human-centered theories of mind, nor was philosophy itself distinguishable clearly from nascent science. This ancient thought remains relevant today not because it is empirically accurate but because it is embedded in a vision of the world much vaster than humanity alone. It also is marked frequently by a generosity of spirit, sensitivity to the subtleties of environmental change, openness to nonhuman otherness, and an ontologically egalitarian orientation. As environmental thinkers seek to “green” philosophy and to “deepen,” “widen” or even “democratize” ecology, it is vital to recall these initial and bold theoretical strides. It is equally imperative to grasp the slow departures from a philosophical perspective rooted in a vision of an intelligible, rational, and beautiful cosmos, the transitions out of myth and stories about animal figures, the increasing breaks with the organic and biological realms, and eventually the attempts to escape or transcend this world altogether. In so doing, we can benefit from an inquiry into how the elements—including matter, motion, and causality—were construed or constructed and ask how social and ecological changes involving deforestation or domestication, for example, altered these notions and allowed transformations of land, sea, sky, and fire power to proceed with little encumbered speed.²

The four elements—water, air, earth, and fire—have exercised an enormous, if often unnoticed, impact on the Occidental imagination. It may be reasonably said that they have helped to organize an influential view of the lifeworld and to frame a compelling picture of the universe. But they also served as the materia prima with which philosophy erected its founding edifices. This four unfolds—sets itself forth—into philosophical and literary history, too, where we can trace its unexpected resonances through the four ancient humors, the Pythagorean tetraktus, alchemical speculation, or the opuses of modern poets such as William Blake, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name but a few.

Nonetheless, it is an apparent, if at times unfortunate, truth of the human condition that we often only become aware of circumstances, conditions, and objects when they change suddenly, when they fail to function in predictable manners, or when they disappear inexplicably from our circadian rhythms. This is especially the case with things elemental. When a flame leaps out unexpectedly from a campfire and licks the surrounding brush or when lightning fissures a halcyon night sky, we become cognizant of the awesome and transfiguring force of fire. When a pipe bursts in the bathroom or when a river breaks its banks and floods communities, we no longer take the calm course of water for granted. When the atmosphere thins as we ascend a mountain or when the pressure in our ears pops on a plane, we sense quickly the presence of what formerly seemed to be missing entirely in the invisible air. When the ground is cleaved and wrenched open or when an avalanche of rock and snow is launched like a toboggan down a precipitous slope, we stand up and take immediate notice of the stirrings of the seemingly solid, stolid, and stable earth. In order, then, to foreground the four classical elements and place them before us from the outset—and prior to examining the theories of their emergence, transformation, and endurance—let us first meditate upon earth, air, fire, and water individually and consider some of the ways they enter into our everyday worlds so as to make their presence felt both as an ecological necessity and a robust cultural resource.

Earth

O sweet spontaneous / earth how often have / the / doting / fingers of / prurient philosophers pinched / and / poked / thee /, has the naughty thumb / of science prodded / thy / beauty … / (but … / thou answerest / them only with / spring).

—e. e. cummings, “O sweet spontaneous”

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Earth is confoundingly complex—“wild bewildering” to borrow a pregnant phrase from Edgar Allan Poe—because it is encountered and conceived in a vast variety of ways: as dirt, humus, soil, compost, stone, land, silt, mud, clay, loam, dust, sand, mineral, and excrement, among others. At the same time, we subsume these distinctions when we speak not only of earth as ground but as planetary whole—the Earth—our life-supporting home. In many of its manifestations, earth is posited as a creative matrix, material base, or generative mother for both human civilization and philosophical speculation. These associations are evident in, for example, the religious belief that we are but a handful of shaped dirt (Adam is Hebrew for red clay) that will return to the dust; in the profound cultural attachments to land and landscape; and in attempts to recycle or reuse earthy wastes.

Just as the atmospheric air is multilayered, so is earth more than monolithic. It is extremely differentiated across an ever-proliferating surface in the form of continents, bioregions, valley basins, alpine ranges, deserts, dells, fields, and forests. It is distinguished vertically as sedimented tiers ranging from the bountiful and cultivable epidermal “skin” of the topsoil to the darker subsoil to the deep and deader realms of the interior and ultimately molten center. We live on and interact not only with terra cognita but also terra incognita, both a revealed and revealing surface and a concealed and self-secluding core, or underground. It is through the earth's “held-back silence,” its “taciturn” and sequestered features, to use Rainer Rilke's words, that the fertile face of the land is held up and made manifest. As the poet asks, “Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us, invisible?”³ Reciprocally, then, the telluric sphere sinks back into the unseen insides where in withdrawal it is kept in reserve before it is ready to emerge again.⁴

However, when the “doting fingers of prurient philosophers” explore the earthiness and underworld of dream, myth, and imagination, they frequently find—in accordance with classicists—three distinguishing psychological levels of earth: first and uppermost, Demeter's green plain of growth and fertility (the topsoil); second and below, Ge, the subsoil, dark earth or underground as well as physical and psychic ground (or place) of persons and communities; and third, Chthon, the realm of depth, coldness, and the dead beneath earth as we normally speak of it. In essence, this Demeter–Ge–Chton stratification conceives a less physical or more “pure” earth beyond the ground we normally walk on.⁵ As Jung observes, when we begin to plumb the place of the unconscious, we discover invariably a vital relationship of body and earth via chthonic powers, the force of the dark and elemental, the maternal and material ground. It is this bodily belonging to earth that over time expresses our many affinities and binds our emerging identities to specific or peculiar places.

The etymologies of “earth” bespeak its multicultural manifestations and, by extension, its multinatural dimensions because the land is shaped and subsequently experienced in a variety of manners. But underlying these differences are some common connections. Our English word has cognates in many languages, including Erde in German and aarde in Dutch. It is related to ert (“ground”) in Middle Irish and ertha in Old Saxon. Semitic languages possess words for “earth” that are close to those in Indo-European tongues. One finds in Arabic, ard; in Aramaic, araa; in Akkadian, irtsitu; in Phoenician, erets; and in Hebrew arets or erets. Latin roots terr- (as in “terrestrial”) or tellur- (as in “tellurian”) also refer to the earth. The Earth has been personified widely as a deity, too, especially a goddess, as in the Greek, Gaia, or the figure of “Mother Earth” (Terra Mater or Tellus Mater). The Chinese earth goddess and embodiment of fertility is Hou-Tu, who serves in a capacity similar to Gaia. In Norse myths, Jord is the divine earth mother and the parent of Thor. An exception to these gender roles can be found in ancient Egypt, where sky in the figure of Nut is a female goddess while earth appears in the form of Geb, who is male.

The nomenclature of earth underscores its vast differentiation and heterogeneity: there are ten soil orders, more than twenty designations for soil characteristics, and more than fourteen thousand individually named soils. The storied layers of earth are known appropriately as horizons, implying both an accumulated horizontality and a demarcating liminality, a line measuring the passing sands (and soils) of time. An assembly of horizons is referred to as a profile, which bears the mark of a particular soil and is fashioned through the dynamism of earth, fire, air, and water. The relatively passive earth provides a substrate in the form of igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary rock on which water works its terra-forming and soil-building powers, sending silica, clays, aluminums, and irons into lower tellurian depths. Through chemical changes and wind transferences, air also exercises an assertive role. Carbon dioxide, for example, is pivotal in the production of calcium horizons in the soil profile. Finally, soil grows hotter as one moves deeper into the earth, and chemical reactions, in turn, increase dramatically with temperature rises, thereby providing a place for elemental fire in the process. Minerals are transformed; iron is oxidized; and acids and salts are freed to actively engage the earthen medium. Ultimately, the soiled surface—what geologists call regolith—is subject to a grand form of circulation akin to air and water cycles as it erodes, blows away, flows, and eventually sinks at a pace of more than ten tons per acre each year in the United States into the suture that recycles it toward a subterranean fire.⁶

Look closely at a handful of rich soil, and you can frequently unearth a cornucopia of delights resting in the palm of your hand: shards of marble, slivers of leaf fiber, specks of sand, fragments of roots, splinters of wood, the remains of tiny organisms. Soil derives from the Latin solium, meaning, “seat,” and it is likely related to sedere, “to sit.” In this capacity, it is the outermost earthen “stuff” and “skin” on which we position our bodies and place our cultures. In order to maintain itself, soil employs a labor force of specialists in demolition, disassembly, and regeneration, including a million and a half species of fungi and between two and three billion species of bacteria, most of them part of a silent army of the unknown.⁷ When it is fertile, soil provides the materiality of and matrix for life itself. A shortage of this substance, however, can contribute to the decline and demise of whole cultures. The Mayan, Greek, and Roman empires, for example, all eroded and fell apart from within, in part due to poor soil management, a fact to which our own society should remain alert as we consume and vanquish this invaluable resource.⁸

In his natural history of dirt—what he calls earth's “ecstatic skin”—William Bryant Logan recounts that the sea was once a kind of liquid proto-soil, a place “where Earth, air, water and the solar fire met for the first time” before life oozed onto land.⁹ Although we routinely acknowledge that larger terrestrial organisms are located mainly where the earth meets the air—where the tip of the topsoil greets the base of the sky—we may forget that the soil, too, is percolating with biological activity. Environmentalists, in fact, invoke the image of a soil pyramid and often describe the land itself as living. A rich forest soil contains as many as 5,500 individual organisms and as many as seventy different species in a single square foot, including a bevy of mites, millipedes, pill bugs, termites, earthworms, and nematodes.¹⁰ Worms are, in many respects, the embodiment of this earthy materiality—biotic citizens in the best sense—as they feast on and excrete dirt, and deposit castings that enrich the soil they inhabit. Although technically blind, they sense and “see” by way of the polarities of wet/dry and hot/cold, qualities Aristotle identified as being the essence of the four elements. As Darwin himself recognized, “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world.”¹¹

In one sense at least, we can “make” earth in a way that we cannot create water or air. The “brown gold” of compost is the result of a process whereby we speed up the decomposition of organic matter. Lawn clippings, coffee grounds, leaves, rotting wood, kitchen scraps, and animal manure can all be assembled into a warm distillate that will decay over several months through the work of bacteria. There are many ecological merits of compost that are produced largely through the contributions of its main ingredient, humus. The benefits of this “buried treasure” to the ground or garden include improving soil integrity and structure; increasing the ability of the earth to hold water for growing food; absorbing solar energy to warm the soil; breaking down organic matter through a host of microorganisms to provide plants with needed elements; and restoring to the earth chemicals removed through agriculture. For the American gardener, generating compost has been elevated to the level of a moral virtue not merely because it reinvigorates the land but because it is viewed as rekindling our humanity by reasserting our interdependence with the earth and our independence from the petrochemical industry.¹²

Earth is more resistant to the force of light and thus more opposed to displaying protean qualities than the remaining triumvirate of canonical elements. Virginia Woolf caught sight of this point when she waxed: “earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.”¹³ In the fifteenth century, Basil Valentine likewise noticed that earth is both porous and gross so that it latently “receives all that the other three project onto it.”¹⁴ Geographically, earth offers girding support for the primary dimensions of place. It is an encompassing “matrix of matrices” relative to its tendency toward downward motion, providing a region of orientation for human and nonhuman bodies.¹⁵ In landscape art, like the physical world it strives to represent, earth is routinely underlying—below water and sky—so that it both defines and delimits topographical features. As a subtending placeholder, it solicits and draws forth our beholding faculties of aesthetic appreciation.

Earth is marked more demonstrably and visibly than other elemental realms by human activity, though we can also see the signature effects of moving air, flowing water, and catalytic fire upon its surface and subsurface. “Wind and water and ice and life / have powdered our planet's obdurate skin,” John Updike rightly notices.”¹⁶ More specifically, earth is inscribed with a concatenation of anthropogenic lines: a complex skein of roads and highways, urban grids, wending fences, and twisting borders. When viewed from above, these markings assume a variety of shapes and meanings in relation to geographic and cultural place. I am often entranced, even hypnotized, when staring out the window of a plane...

Table of contents

• Series Title
• Part I Elemental Encounters and Ideas
• Part II Elemental Theories
• Part III: Elemental Worlds
• Notes