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Overview
John Sallis dismantles the traditional conception of nature in this book of imagination and the cosmos. In the thought of Emerson, Hegel, and Schelling, Sallis discerns the seeds of an understanding of nature that goes against the modern technological assault on natural things and opens a space for a revitalized approach to the world.
He identifies two fundamental reorientations that philosophical thought is called on to address today: the turn to the elemental in nature and the turn from nature to the cosmos at large. He traces the elusive course of the imagination, as if coming from nowhere, and describes the way in which it bears on the relation of humans to nature. Sallis’s account demonstrates that a renewal of our understanding of nature is one of the prime imperatives we demand from philosophy today.
“Inspiring . . . [for] anyone looking to open up their mind to the reflection on other ways to live more closely in tune with their own nature and to the nature that is around them.” —Phenomenological Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023377 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 131 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
John Sallis is Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is author of more than 20 books, including Light Traces (IUP, 2014) and Logic of Imagination (IUP, 2012).
Read an Excerpt
The Return of Nature
On the Beyond of Sense
By John Sallis
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 John SallisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02337-7
CHAPTER 1
THE RETURN OF NATURE
Nature returns in many ways. Some ways are open for all to see; they mark returns belonging to nature itself, returns of nature to itself. Other ways are more hidden; because we humans are entwined in the provocation of these returns, because, accordingly, we lack the detachment that clear sight requires, these ways are elusive. Exceptional circumspection is needed in order to discern and retrace them.
There are no ways of return to which human senses and sensibilities are more attuned than those marked by the seasons. Unquestionably preeminent among these is nature's return to itself in spring. With the coming of spring, it is as though, having endured the dead of winter, nature were now reborn. The snow, if it still remains, begins to recede, and patches of ground appear covered with brown vegetation and soaked from the melt. The days lengthen. The chill of the winter wind is gone. One feels the warmth of the sun as its itinerary across the sky moves ever higher from the horizon. Birds return and charm us with their repertoire of songs. The advent of spring restores nature's vitality and ushers in new growth. On bare branches buds, blossoms, and tiny leaves appear, and the haze of fine, lacy green that gradually begins to form already holds out the promise of the fullness that in summer will finally return. In this sense, then, summer too marks a return of nature. It brings the full heat of the sun and the longest days of the year, the lush and varied vegetation, the profusion of flowers, the abundance of wild creatures — rabbits, squirrels, woodchucks — to be seen in the countryside, and, toward the end of the season, the nocturnal symphonies of crickets and locusts. If indeed fall and winter mark the retreat from which nature will again return, even they also signal particular kinds of return, fall the return of nature's most brilliant colors, winter the return of the stillness of snow.
Equally evocative is the return of the day, of dawn and the first rays of sunlight, which promise a new day and the possibilities it opens up. Since the lengths of day and night vary inversely in the course of the year, the cycle of day and night is entwined with that of the seasons. Both serve to measure out time, to mark its elemental advance.
The cycle of the seasons and the returns of nature bound up with it vary, of course, from one region of the earth to another. The description here is geared to temperate regions such as the United States and western and central Europe. As one approaches the equator, the differences diminish yet do not disappear entirely. As one travels to the north, the differences become greater, especially in extent as winter extends over a much larger portion of the year. The difference between the lengths of day and night reaches its extreme — in northern Canada and northern Scandinavia — with the midnight sun of midsummer and the almost total darkness of midwinter.
Nature returns also when a site once cleared by humans is abandoned. Around the ruins of an ancient castle, which, set on the mountainside, once offered the sovereign a view over the entire valley, nature has now encroached. Vines have crept over the stones that remain, and in what was once its courtyard grasses and scrub now grow freely. Around its entire perimeter the forest has advanced, returning to the site from which it was once cleared away. The view of the valley below, once enjoyed by the sovereign, is now almost completely blocked by saplings that have taken root in front of the ruins. Even from the one high wall that remains, a number of stones have fallen out and now lie on the ground, many covered with moss, all in the process of returning to nature, all caught up in the return of nature.
Nature returns also within the expanse of history. When art and thought wander too far from nature, when they come to rely too exclusively on human artifice, the call will inevitably be sounded for a return of nature and a return to nature. The nobility of a humanity unsullied by the repressive and artificial conventions of civilization will be sought. The appearance of beauty will be apprehended, not in the creations fashioned by humans, but in the exuberance of nature. The affirmation of nature will be enacted by recourse to an abode set within the things of nature. Not only the philosopher but also the artist, the poet, and the naturalist will have recourse to nature in such a way as to broach a return of nature and an affirmation of the belonging of the human to nature. In their texts and their works, each will strive to present both the beauty and the force of nature.
In certain of the ways in which nature returns, we humans cannot escape being engaged. There are occasions when nature lets its beauty appear, when it shines forth in a scene so wondrous that it draws us into a contemplative repose in which we linger before the scene, rapt in our attunement to it while borne on by the play of imagination. When it turns this aspect to us, it returns to our vision in a different guise and thus to a vision that surpasses the everyday perception that preceded it, to a vision that is evoked precisely and only by the beautiful scene. And yet, there are also occasions when the very nature in which we normally live with some contentment turns another side to us and returns in a more sinister guise so as to threaten or even assault us, replacing beauty not just with ugliness but with something of an entirely different order, with things and happenings that are threatening. We are exposed to the overwhelming force of nature, to the fury it can unleash, to the storms in which it rages. Like all animate beings, we need shelter from the elements and protection from other threatening natural forms. Whereas nature's display of beauty has the capacity to draw us beyond ourselves, to reimplace us in the ascent toward being, its turnaround serves to drive us back to our vulnerability, to our situatedness amidst things and the elements.
The advent of modern technology has opened up possibilities that, when oriented and actualized by a certain politics, have provoked a kind of return of nature that is unprecedented. Technology provides means by which nature can be rendered largely controllable and thus can be submitted to human aims, transposed into the infrastructure of the human world. At the extreme, nature suffers such destitution that it remains little more than a resource to fuel the system of market economy geared to consumption. The return that is provoked at this extreme is not one in which nature would come back to itself or in which, as itself, it would again open up to human sensibility. Rather, it returns as if from the grave, often in deadly form, like a ghost of what it once was. It returns in the form of pollutants that poison the air and water, in the ever more frequent occurrences of tornadoes, hurricanes, and other gigantic disturbances destructive of life on a vast scale, and in the form of climate change, the melting of glaciers and polar icecaps, and the chain of consequences thereof. The use of fossil fuel is only one example of the way in which the political-technological reshaping or denaturing of the total human environment produces effects that endanger the very possibility of this environment and indeed of human life itself. Even the human body becomes a site of such denaturing exchange, as the methods by which an abundance of food can be produced prove also to render many of these foods detrimental to health. It is in this situation that capitalist rhetoric adopts the cynical course of invoking nature in order to stave off the public reaction against the total industrialization of the things of everyday life: one is to purchase and consume foods that are declared to be natural even though they are often produced in quite unnatural ways and settings and in forms that have no counterpart whatsoever in nature.
Such practice is indicative of the mendaciousness that can be promoted by appeal to nature and to what is natural, by the claim that certain actions serve to restore what is natural, to return nature to itself. Such claims can serve — and indeed have, all too often, served — to conceal the wanton violence against both humanity and nature that such actions may in fact involve. Purity, uniformity, even solidarity are among the banners under which such fraudulent restorations of what is natural advance their cause.
The stakes could not be higher: in order to counter such claims and to address the denaturing effects released through a technology governed by the politics of unlimited production and consumption, the sense of nature as such must be recovered and redetermined. This task requires both retrieving antecedent senses and determinations of nature — as, for example, among the Greeks — and also thinking the sense of nature anew in a way that takes account of such distinctively modern developments as — to give a prime example — those of recent astronomy, which now reveal the expanse of the cosmos on a scale far exceeding any that could previously have been envisioned and which cannot but bring about a transformation of our conception of the place of the human. This is a task that future thinking can evade only at the greatest peril.
Both the prevalence of the cynical and empty claim to restore the natural and the ambivalence spawned by the denaturing of nature mark the retreat of nature from human sense and sensibility. The sense of nature, in every sense of sense, has withdrawn, and the capacity to abide with nature in a way that both exemplifies and discloses our genuine belonging to it risks being entirely lost. In the words of the American naturalist Henry Beston, who nurtured this capacity during his long, mostly solitary stay on the dunes of Cape Cod: "The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot." At the outermost bound where sea meets land, Beston found that "the great rhythms of nature, today so dully disregarded, wounded even, have here their spacious and primeval liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and tide, tremor of night and day."
Such writers as Beston attest that, however attenuated our comportment to nature may have become, there persists some sense of nature, some experience of its appeal. Words such as those of Beston can awaken this sense, as in his account of the sounds in nature: "The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied." He declares that "the sea has many voices." He entreats his reader: "Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds"; he concludes then with a brief catalogue of the sounds that are to be heard: "hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes," and so on.
Yet even aside from words, even in silence, in the silence that may be prompted by the presence of elemental nature, a nascent sense of nature attunes our senses to the sight and sound of ocean waves crashing against a rocky shore. One lingers there, engaged in the sight and sound, drawn to them by an interest rooted in an elemental sense of nature. One lives in the sight and sound, not for the sake of cognition, but in order to sense — and to enhance one's sense of — nature, in a sense of sense that is antecedent to the very distinction between the sense of the senses and the sense that is construed and set apart as meaning.
The irrepressible appeal that nature retains despite its vast denaturing is attested by the efforts now made to preserve some small areas of unspoiled nature. Such wilderness areas are intended to allow the sense of nature to be revivified, although a denaturing effect analogous to that of technology threatens such areas as they become overcrowded with tourists whose presence destroys the very quality they presumably seek. In any case, such wilderness areas came to be established — indeed, the very idea of wilderness gained currency — precisely as we lost to a large degree our capacity to live with the wild, with an alterity in nature that cannot be controlled by the mechanics of human culture. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the wild more directly than the sudden emergence of an animal — a deer, for instance — from the woods, an appearance that can be just as unpredictable and unaccountable as the deer's slipping away, back into the cover that the woods provide. As technology becomes ever more capable, through electronic mediation, of ensuring constant presence, indeed even of what is most remote, we risk losing entirely our sense for such slipping in and out of the limits of presence.
The withdrawal of the sense of nature is replicated at the more abstract level by uncertainty about the very meaning of the word. Both the extent of its reference and the parameters that would delimit its meaning are grasped only in the vague manner requisite for any discourse whatsoever. It is this uncertainty and lack of limits that make possible the current manipulation and inflation of the designation natural for ends that have little to do with the preservation or restoration of what is natural. There is uncertainty as to just how far nature extends. That it includes mountains, lakes, wildlife, all the things of the earth that are not made by humans, seems somewhat assured. But it is a bit less certain whether it extends also to the earth itself and the sky, along with all that happens in and comes from the sky — rain and snow, thunder and lightning, the formation and movement of clouds. There is much greater uncertainty whether nature also extends to the other planets of the solar system, and it is still more uncertain whether the billions upon billions of other stars belong to nature. Is nature to be distinguished from the cosmos at large, or are they to be identified as one and the same? There is uncertainty, too, regarding the nature that we, sharing a great deal with other animate beings, bear in ourselves. Even the artifacts that humans produce, that, according to the ancient distinction, come about by art or craft (t????) rather than by nature, consist ultimately of nothing but natural materials that have been reshaped and rearranged.
It would seem that only language and thought lie somewhat outside — or at least at the limit of — nature. For what is meant in and through a linguistic utterance is never, in principle, not just in fact, to be found among natural things. Equal sticks and stones can readily be perceived among things, but one will never find in nature equality itself as it is signified in speech. Yet, even language has its bond to nature: it is activated, it becomes actual, only in speaking or in writing. The bond of thinking to nature is more tenuous: the triangle itself (with its specific determinations) that can be an object of thought is not dependent on the visible image of it that may be sketched, though through its relation to other powers and to the human as such, even thinking is — if mediately — drawn back toward nature.
On the one hand, it seems, then, that the extension is almost unlimited, that there is little or nothing that does not somehow belong to nature. Yet, on the other hand, our sense of nature, withdrawn though it be, prompts us to resist such unlimited extension. This ambivalence is nowhere more clearly attested than in Emerson's first book, entitled simply Nature. At the outset Emerson introduces two distinct senses of nature, both of which are operative throughout his text. The sense that he designates as philosophical echoes the language and conceptuality of early German Idealism. Nature in this sense extends almost without limit: "all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the not me, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, nature." Yet from this sense Emerson distinguishes what he terms the common sense of nature: it "refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf."
Each of these senses of nature governs, respectively, certain passages in Nature. Often these passages and the sense of nature operative in them are distinct, though there are points where the two senses are brought together. The passages where such crossing of these senses occurs are especially significant.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Return of Nature by John Sallis. Copyright © 2016 John Sallis. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
1. The Return of Nature
2. The Birth of Nature
3. Return to Nature
4. Return from the Nature beyond Nature
5. The Elemental Turn
6. The Cosmological Turn
7. Coming as if from Nowhere
8. The Plurality of Nature and the Disintegration of Difference