The Woods

Vladimir Bibikhin, Arch Tait

• Editore: Polity
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509525904
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Filosofia moderna

In our modern, urbanized societies, our engagement with the natural world often seems distant and superficial. Human life is now far removed from its prehistoric origins, when humans dwelt deep within the forests and depended on them for their survival.

In this important book, Vladimir Bibikhin, one of Russia's most influential twentieth-century philosophers, argues that, although most humans now live far from woods and forests, our existence remains profoundly linked to them. It was Aristotle who first appreciated their primal role, even deriving his notion of 'matter'w from the Greek words for wood and forest. As timber, the woods may be seen as inanimate material, but at the same time they also constitute a living ecosystem and the source of energy and life. By opening up this duality, the woods are transformed from simple matter to a living environment, serving as a reminder that we belong to the world of biological life to a far greater extent than we usually think.

The Woods will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone concerned with the environment and our relationship to the natural world.

Lecture 1, 2 September 1997

This autumn’s semester is a direct continuation of the spring semester course on Principles of Christianity. There we sought to show what is intimate and personal to us in faith. There is always the wretched possibility that faith will be left a notional concept of merely historical interest, a construct in the science of theology, whereas what we are interested in is a fundamental hermeneutics or phenomenology, in the sense of Husserl and Heidegger, or a grammar in the sense of Wittgenstein.¹ In order to avoid any risk of straying into mental constructs and lexical exercises, of failing to notice what we are drowning in and merely enumerating concepts, we are going to take a large step backwards to first principles, until, like the defenders of Moscow, we can retreat no further.

Those words, ‘behind us lies Moscow’, whether or not uttered in 1941, were no less applicable in 1812.² Then Moscow was captured, but it caught fire or was deliberately set ablaze. Moscow was built mainly of wood, the most readily available material, intimately familiar, particularly in those years when the forests of Russia were all but untouched. For a Russian, for a Muscovite, the burning of that wood, that ‘hyle’, was something personal. Leo Tolstoy tells us that a wooden township that has been abandoned cannot but catch fire; that is just something it will do. What is our attitude towards hyle? It continues to be very personal. Today we have a standing column of smoke over Moscow from the daily combustion of 10,000 tonnes of petroleum products. In this city alone, 30 million tonnes of fuel will be burned in a decade.

The origin of our main modern fuel is organic, mostly prehistoric ‘floating forests’, planktonic, free-floating algae, of which there were vast quantities in the water basins from 500 million years to about 30 million years ago. We heat ourselves and our homes and light our world with a bonfire of petroleum and coal; its combustion beneath pistons in cylinders moves mechanisms that catch fish for us, plough our fields, reap the harvest, and deliver the grain to our bakeries.

Just as humankind sat around a campfire in the forest in ancient times, so today it warms itself at a campfire diligently replenished (because who can bear to stand back and watch a fire go out?) with some 5 million tonnes of coal and oil, which will add up to around 15 billion tonnes in a decade. We are starkly reminded that this is necessary by the fact that thousands of people die every day from not being close enough to the fire. Humanity, the greater part of which has managed to find a place more or less near the fire, does sometimes reluctantly glance across to those hapless others, and is acutely aware of those who have failed to find a place there. It sensibly, prudently, takes special care to keep the fire fuelled.

People say humanity will find other sources of energy, but the fact remains that by far the greater part of our needs is supplied today, as in the distant past, by burning the forest: no longer the forest around us, because that was all burned long ago, but faraway forests. Faraway not in terms of space, because those forests, too, have been felled, but from far back in time, from the millions of years before humanity appeared and after it appeared. At that time the forest was still close to human beings, not only in the sense that they lived in it, but also in the fact that they were themselves covered with abundant growth, a forest of hair. The forest encroached so intimately upon them that it comprised their very skin, their very bodies. There was far less need then to burn the forest because human beings were kept warm by this fur which covered and was part of their body. Was this the only way they were related to the forest?

A close relationship with the forest seems to continue among the so-called primitive tribes who live there now and whose abhorrence of tree felling is so deeply ingrained that, even when their communal ways are taken from them, for example when they are brought into civilized society, they never become loggers, will not work with chainsaws, on trailing tractors and the like. Violation of the forest is tantamount, as far as they are concerned, to violation of their own body, although no surviving furry human beings are known to science today. The hairy yeti still stalks our minds and inhabits folklore, close to modern humans. The yeti has no place near the fire either, but his is a different kind of distance from that of the unfortunates who would be glad of a place.

Just as modern humans are almost devoid of hair, so the earth today is losing its forests. More important, though, than the visible forests for fuelling the fire humans cluster round are those invisible forests from half a billion years ago now so tangibly present in the form of coveted coal and oil. Is there not, however, another way in which the forest is even more germane to how we exist today? There is indeed, and when we recognize that, several doors immediately open. For now, we shall only peep through them while deciding which one to enter. We are in a hall of mirrors.

Let us consider a burning wood fire. In his latest, as yet unpublished, work, Andrey Lebedev examines the etymology of hyle, the word for ‘wood’, ‘forest’, in ancient Greek and concludes that fire and conflagration are inherent in it; the etymology suggests flammability and burning.³ Since the point is still under debate, let us leave it for now and pursue a different avenue of inquiry.

Besides today’s forests, which are all but exhausted, and the ancient forests, which are half-exhausted, one of the most significant sources of energy must surely be nuclear energy. Atomic energy can also be seen as a product of combustion, but of what? Even highly specialized knowledge will take us only so far here because of issues science has yet to resolve. We can, and commonly do, represent an atomic reaction as a kind of burning, an explosion, a fast-developing fire or a process of slow decay. But a burning of what? In autogenous welding, the elements of hydrogen and oxygen combust, combine, become a molecule of a different compound, water, cease to exist autonomously but remain unchanged as water. A thermonuclear reaction, too, involves elements – uranium, plutonium, hydrogen – but something transformative is done to the elements themselves. We are talking about changes not to elements but to matter itself: the transformation of matter into energy. That is, what is ‘burning’ is not wood, petroleum, or coal, not compounds of elements. In a thermonuclear reaction, what is burning is matter itself.

How curious that the original meaning of the word for ‘matter’ in ancient Greek philosophy is wood, forest. The word ‘materia’ is Latin and its original meaning is primal matter. In Cicero, it is the matter of the world, of which everything consists and in which everything exists: materia rerum ex qua et in qua sunt omnia. This Latin philosophical term is a translation of that Greek philosophical term, ὕλη, hyle, whose primary meaning is ‘wood’. It is entirely possible that the official, technical meaning of materia in Latin, then meaning ‘matter’ as it now does in Russian and English, only became primary within official culture, while in popular culture the main meaning continued to be combustible material and, more specifically, wood in the sense of fuel, firewood. That is, before it was squeezed out there, too, by the philosophical usage. In Latin, felling timber is materiam caedere. In one of the Romance languages, this expression became madeira, whose primary meaning is simply forests.

In atomic energy, then, in a thermonuclear reaction, if we want to avoid a lot of specialist terminology, we can say more or less accurately that what is being burned is actually wood.

Unexpectedly, our own philosophical language is telling us that what is burned in the promising new thermonuclear energy reactions is the matter of the world: ‘wood’. In the light of this discovery, we shall exercise caution before deciding that hyle, meaning ‘an area of land covered with trees’ or ‘timber’, should take precedence over the classical philosophical meaning of ‘matter’. Language in general does not arise from adding sememes together; its origins are as deep as dreaming. In the word ‘wood’ it refers to trees, to fuel, and to the matter of the world. Let us not, therefore, be in too much of a hurry to decide which meanings are original and which are derivative. May not the use of materia in philosophy as well be, not a departure from the original meaning of ‘wood’, but a return to it? For now it seems that, as soon as we get into the forest, we lose our way.

Let us approach the forest from a different angle. This other aspect has long been present and all we need to do is look at it attentively. There is nothing new about comparing the world to a living being. No European figure has articulated such comparisons more comprehensively and clearly than Leonardo da Vinci, whom we will need to study closely. In this simile, the forests of the earth would correspond to the hair or fur on the body of a living creature. Here is one context:

… potrem dire, la terra avere anima vegetativa e che la sua carne sia la terra; li sua ossi sieno li ordini delle collegazioni di sassi, di che si compongono le montagni … il suo sangui sono le vene dilli acque; il lago del sangui, che sta di torno al core, è il mare oceano: il suo alitare è il crescere e decrescere del sangue … e il caldo dell’ anima del mondo è il foco, ch’è infuso per la terra …

So then we may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters. The lake of the blood that lies around the heart is the ocean. Its breathing is by the increase and decrease of the blood in its pulses … and the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the earth …⁴

The human body nowadays is not completely covered with hair. I cautiously say ‘nowadays’ in order not to be drawn into the debate over whether early human beings were or were not covered with hair. For the theory of evolution, the issue is not crucial because there are other hairless animals – elephants, for example. What is phen...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Lecture 1, 2 September 1997
• Lecture 2, 9 September 1997
• Lecture 3, 23 September 1997
• Lecture 4, 30 September 1997
• Lecture 5, 7 October 1997
• Lecture 6, 14 October 1997
• Lecture 7, 21 October 1997
• Lecture 8, 28 October 1997
• Lecture 9, 4 November 1997
• Lecture 10, 11 November 1997
• Lecture 11, 18 November 1997
• Lecture 12, 25 November 1997
• Lecture 13, 2 December 1997
• Lecture 14, 9 December 1997
• Lecture 15, 16 December 1997
• Lecture 16, 23 December 1997
• Lecture 17, 10 February 1998
• Lecture 18, 17 February 1998
• Lecture 19, 24 February 1998
• Lecture 20, 3 March 1998
• Lecture 21, 10 March 1998
• Lecture 22, 17 March 1998
• Lecture 23, 24 March 1998
• Lecture 25, 7 April 1998
• Lecture 26, 14 April 1998
• Lecture 27, 21 April 1998
• Lecture 28, 28 April 1998
• Lecture 29, 5 May 1998
• Lecture 30, 12 May 1998
• Lecture 31, 19 May 1998
• Lecture 32, 26 May 1998
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement