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Earthsongs:
Ecopoetics, Heidegger and Dwelling
Michael Peters
Ruth Irwin
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
William Wordsworth
Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on this earth.
Hölderlin
Introduction
This paper
discusses the notion of ecopoetics in relation to the work of Martin Heidegger
and his concept of dwelling. Our aim, broadly stated, is to respond to the
question: “What frame of mind could bring about sustainability—and how might we
develop it?” In the first part of the paper, we comment on Jonathan Bate’s
notion of ecopoetics and his discussion of Heidegger. Crucial here is the
question of whether we can ever approach Nature in an non-ideological way or are
all attempts to capture Nature, theoretically or poetically or narratively,
nothing more than our own peculiar appropriation of it?
Ecopoetics might be conceived as a response to this question, although we
dispute Bate’s view. In the second part of the paper, following Micheal Haar’s
perceptive reading, we elaborate the four senses that Heidegger gives to Nature,
and in the third section, we make some concluding comments about the notion of
sustainability that might be explicated in relation to Heidegger’s four senses
of Nature.
Ecopoetics: Is it Sustainable?
Jonanthan Bate’s
The Song of the Earth,
as he says, is a book about, “why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new
millennium that will be ruled by technology.” He elaborates further: “It is a
book about modern Western man’s alienation from nature. It is about the capacity
of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.”
Restoring us to the earth is what good ecopoetry can do and ecopoetics (rather
than ecocriticism) is not just the pastoral theme, which Bates asserts,
following de Man, may be “in fact, the only poetic theme,” it is poetry
itself .
Ecopoetics is more phenomenological than political and while its force does not
depend upon versification or metrical form, it constitutes the most direct
return to the place of dwelling. Bate
explains:
Ecopoetics asks in
what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling
place – the prefix eco- is derived from the Greek oikos, “the home or
place of dwelling.”
And as he says
elsewhere:
I think of this
book as an “experiment in ecopoetics”. The experiment is this: to see what
happens when we regard poems as imaginary parks in which we may breath[e] an air
that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not
alienated.
When Bate uses the
concept “dwelling” he is self-consciously drawing on his earlier understanding
of Wordsworth
—for Wordsworth “remains the founding father for a thinking of poetry in
relation to place, to our dwelling on the earth”
—and running this sense of place together with the special sense that Heidegger
gives the term in two essays based on lectures delivered in the early 1950s
(“Building Dwelling Thinking,” 1950 and “…Poetically Man Dwells …,” 1951).
Indeed, there is a
peculiar set of relationships between place, poetry, and bioregion. At school,
many New Zealand children found Wordsworth fanciful, though they were forced to
read and rote memorize his poetry as part of the curriculum. They did not
understand his poetry because they did not appreciate the local topography and
landscape of the Lake District, which is much more manicured, man-made over many
generations, and “tame” compared to the relatively wild and uninhabited New
Zealand land and seascapes. Clearly, the set of relationships between place,
poetry, and region generates a further set of questions about the construction
of the canon and the curriculum, the role and representation of Nature in the
formation of national and cultural identity—in defining a people through
representing their relationship to the (home)land—and pedagogy.
Within this set of relationships it is easy to see how a particular
representation of Nature became mainstream. Romanticism depends upon the
assumption in the west of the separation of nature and culture, for before it
can contemplate any spiritual union or sacred reunification, separation is
required. Thus, Romanticism, developed through a series of
associations—intuition over rationality, feelings over beliefs, with a sense of
mysticism and oneness with Nature—as though it was possible to overcome the
alienation and reification that had emerged with capitalism, industrialization,
and urbanization. Nature was often pictured by the Romantics as the garden, the
landscape, the village, or the earth that conjured up an idealized pastoral
space—a paradisical Eden—which constituted the natural habitat for the soul. In
the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth suggests that poetry is
“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,”
but also “emotion recollected in tranquillity” leading to the creation of a new
emotion in the mind.
The creative nature of poetic act is said to be the ability to be affected by
“absent things as if they were present” and to express “thoughts and feelings”
that arise “without immediate external excitement.”
Yet what really distinguished Wordsworth from other poets belonging to the
Romantic Movement was his “view of nature as having palpable moral
significance.”
Yet, as David S.
Miall
argues, historicist readings of “Tintern Abbey” focusing on the precise
locations of the poem, reveal that Wordsworth strategically suppressed an
awareness of aspects of the Wye Valley that contaminated his idealized view of
Nature, including scenes of industrial activity (iron furnaces), the busy river
traffic, and the beggars lurking in the ruins. These historicist readings
confirm our postmodern sensibilities of the social and ideological construction
of our own representations. Miall quotes Anthony Easthope
“Nature exists as we appropriate it.” As Maill himself argues, “Nature can never
be known directly” and “Thus Wordsworth is deceiving himself (and his readers)
in claiming that here he felt a spirit that rolls through everything.” Maill
himself goes on to argue that the precise location for the poem is central to
Wordsworth’s intentions and makes a specific contribution to Wordsworth’s view
of our community with nature.
Bate,
as a latter-day green Romantic, explains that what he calls the “greening of
culture” has lagged behind the other cultural revolutions that occurred since
the late 1960s, including the growth of feminism and of women’s, gay and ethnic
rights. While we have feminist history, philosophy, and literary theory, there
is no equivalence promoting environmentalism, no ecocriticism or ecopoetics. In
the 1970s and 1980s there was no text of ecological literary criticism and
certainly nothing resembling a tradition. And he argues the case for theory
(against activism alone) by suggesting that, “Before you can change policies,
you must changes attitudes.”
He writes: “a green reading of history—and literary history and philosophy and
every other humanistic field—is a necessary precondition for a deeper
understanding of our environmental crisis.”
Green cultural
studies were slow to develop because “environmentalism does not conform to the
model of “identity politics.” In other words, “The ecocritical project always
involves speaking for its subject rather than speaking as its
subject: a critic may speak as a woman or as a person of colour, but cannot
speak as a tree.”
Environmentalists must speak on behalf of the non-human Other, of which we are
part. While Bate
criticises the “postmodern self-indulgence of the Parisian gurus” against the
grounded work of Raymond Williams and others, nevertheless, he turns to
Heidegger (we might say, one of the forefathers of poststructuralism) to
explicate the claim that “Poetry is the song of the earth.”
In this regard he traces the interconnections between three questions that
occupied Heidegger in his later years: What are poets for? What does it mean to
dwell upon the earth? and, What is the essence of technology?
Bate proceeds to
give an account, somewhat truncated but largely accurate, of Heidegger’s view of
technology as a mode of revealing and the distinctive form it takes in the
modern era, where “enframing” conceals the truth of things. Referring to
Heidegger’s discussion of original Greek sense of techne, and poiesis
as a bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful, Bate arrives at the
proposition that “poetry is our way of stepping outside the frame of the
technological, of reawakening the momentary wonder of unconcealment.”
Poetry, when we allow it to act on us, can “conjure up conditions such as
dwelling and alienation in their very essence, not just in their
linguistic particulars.”
Thus, “Poetry is the original admission of dwelling”
and dwelling is an authentic form of being, which avoids Cartesian dualism and
subjective idealism. These are the conceptual connections that Bate makes in
order to arrive at his conception of ecopoetics.
In Bate’s terms,
ecopoetics is experiential rather than descriptive, based as it is on the poet’s
articulation of the relations between the environment and humankind. A green
poem is a revelation of dwelling rather than a narrative of dwelling; it is
“phenomenological before it is political.”
Ecopoetics is pre-political in the sense that it is “a Rousseauesque story about
imagining a state of nature prior to the fall into property, into inequality and
into the city.”
For this reason, “ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness,” and when
it comes to politics or practice we have to speak in other discourses.
Bate argues, “The dilemma of Green reading is that it must, yet it cannot,
separate ecopoetics from ecopolitics”—the very problem that besets Martin
Heidegger himself, and typifies the connections between deep ecology and
fascism. One cannot consistently derive a Green politics from ecopoetics, just
as one cannot derive a Green politics from scientific ecology. Bate consolidates
this position by arguing: “Green has no place in the traditional political
spectrum …”
and, “Nature is so various that no consistent political principles can be
derived from it.”
Thus, for Bate: “the very conception of a ‘politics of nature’ is
self-contradictory: politics is what you get when you fall from nature. That is
the point of Rousseau’s second Discourse.”
He allegedly avoids
“Heidegger’s dilemma” (if we can use this shorthand to stand for the problem of
whether Heidegger’s Nazism arises out of his philosophy) by insisting on the
radical separation of discourses—theoretical/practical, poetic/political—and by
suggesting that while “[h]istories, theories, political systems are all
enframings,”
“[e]copoetics renounces the mastery of enframing knowledge and listens instead
to the voice of art.”
As he suggests: “To read ecopoetically is … to find ‘clearings’ or
‘unconcealments.’”
This enables him the Heideggerian parting conclusion:
If mortals dwell in
that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling,
then poetry is the place where we save the earth.
To read Heidegger
this way (non-ecopoetically!) is to seal off what Heidegger had to say about
poetry and technology from the expression of his Nazi politics; it is also, from
Bate’s viewpoint, to be able [to] borrow Heidegger’s ecophilosophy without his
ecopolitics. Yet, clearly, this will not do. It will not do for a variety of
reasons to which we now turn briefly. First, Bate’s account is dependent on a
theory of language as discourse that neatly and exclusively seals off one
language-game from another, for example, poetry from politics and from
narrative. Yet there is no logic prescribing genres or literary forms or
discourses; they are simply contingent developments which are open to change and
individual forms may yet come into existence, mutate, or disappear. Is there no
politics of ecopoetics or poetics of ecopolitics? Second, to insist on the
separation, especially in relation to Heidegger, is to ignore the organicity (a
good ecological concept) of his thought and its relationship to its environment.
In particular, it is to ignore the “ideas environment” that accounts for
Heidegger’s politics and the reactionary side of his ecology and to
misunderstand the sources of his anti-modernism.
Third, Bate’s account misunderstands the nature of politics and the politics of
nature: he bases a spurious separation on Rousseau and the essence of the
polis (of the city). Yet we may talk of “first nature,” “second nature,” and
“third nature” (see Mackenzie Wark), and, clearly, there is a sense wherein we
can talk unambiguously of a politics of nature that comes into being at the
point when human beings become aware, simultaneously, of the adverse ecoeffects
of industrial and capitalist practices and, collectively, of their power to
reverse these effects. Fourth, it is to take Heidegger on trust, so to speak,
accepting his ontology and the postulations of essences, rather than say,
with Foucault, naturalizing or, better, historicizing questions of ontology.
Four
Senses of Nature
There is a sense
that we are already moving on from the question of sustainability. Arguably, it
has already become integral to the enframing of technology, and is no longer a
notion on the fringe of politics and radical consciousness.
The question of how
to change people’s consciousness in regard to sustainability is almost an
historical issue. It has always had an element of historical reckoning. The
question invoked by Heidegger and his Earthsong commentators—Bate and Haar—is
whether there has been, or can be, any agency involved, or if the change in
public awareness arises “of its own accord.”?
In any regard, the
projection of sustainability into the future may have some surprizing
directions. Obviously, sustainability has been made an issue of consumerism and
a topic that capitalism must address. Many people have relied rather lazily upon
the possibility of the technological fix to environmental problems. Indeed
technology may fix sustainability, not heal it, but rather fix in the sense of
make static, retain, position, conserve, regenerate, and nourish the resource
base of capitalism. This is the eschatological trajectory of technological
enframing. The “end of history” with the calculable technicity of supreme
rationality and the relegation of Earth to a recyclable, renewable, and,
ultimately, replaceable resource. It is no longer an issue of how to convince
people to accept and promote sustainability, but of whether human control, often
in the guise of liberal rationalism, will ever again ascertain an earthly wonder
last promoted by the Romantics. Or, if the demise of romanticism in the
proliferation of corny paintings and films of the last frontier, will only be
refound in new frontiers, new planets, new solar systems to terra-form in
exchange for the homely, if exhausted, ground of this one.
Earth
The Earth has been
traditionally associated with the physiological source or substructure of the
human animal; biology as the substratum upon which human animals build a
superstructure of social relations, knowledges, politics, and technology.
Equipment
In Heidegger’s
text, Being and Time, the substrata of Nature is not exactly inverted,
but his concept of being in-the-world places primary emphasis on equipment
rather than physiology. The initial relationship between humanity and
environment is in relationships of utility and potential resource. Nature is
instrumentalized. The forest is a place to exercise and a reserve of building
materials and paper, rather than an autonomous sublime landscape.
In fact, he argues
that the presence of “pure nature” is derived as an abstraction from the
ready-at-hand (Zuhandenheit) of the relational field of equipment.
Present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) is a secondary concept rather than a
metaphysical ground.
Both of these
relationships with nature are oblivious to its raw power or autonomous force.
The (romantic) nature “which overwhelms us and enthrals us as landscape”
is neither derivative nor reducible to Zuhandenheit or Vorhandenheit.
This hidden aspect of nature is present but unexplored in early Heidegger.
Heidegger is
interested in where the Idealist separation of subjectivity from nature is
imposed and if, where, and how it is transgressed. The “world” is a network of
interdependent relations at a variety of levels; equipment, politics, morality,
and so forth. The “world” of relations conceptualized in human terms limits our
ability to comprehend natural earthliness. Or put in Heidegger’s words, “All
that we will ever be able to say, or think or experience of supposedly natural
phenomena is necessarily situated within the world.” Somehow, despite his notion
of humans “being-in-the-world,” dissolving the separation between subject and
object that was posed by Descartes, Heidegger retains a sense of the Idealist
separation between nature and humanity. The “world” is a different conceptual
space to the “earth.”
Physis and Aletheia
During the 1930s,
Heidegger’s thought took an acclaimed turn when he developed another approach to
nature. In An Introduction to Metaphysics and The Origin of the Work
of Art, he rejuvenated two related Greek terms, physis and
aletheia. This new conceptualization reinstates the independence of nature,
“(What does “physis” mean? It means that which arises on its own)”
but it also struggles to transgress the rupture posed by idealism. “The world is
founded on the Earth and the Earth thrusts up in the world.
Physis
began to stand in sometimes for Earth, sometimes for Nature, and sometimes for
Being. In a variety of texts, Heidegger wrote: “This appearing and arising
itself and on the whole was early on called physis by the Greeks. In a
single stroke, this name clarifies that upon which and in which man grounds his
abode. We name it Earth.”
“Physis is Being itself”
and also “The inaugural arising of what is present in all being, but also falls
askew, even falls into oblivion: Nature (physis).”
There arises a
complex set of relations and important distinctions between Being, aletheia,
physis, and Earth. While at times Physis takes the title of Earth or
Nature or Being, each of these is different. Haar “… if the Earth appears,
manifests itself in the world, it must enter into being. But it does not stem
from Being; it does not identify with Being. If the Earth is neither the
appearance of Being nor, as Heidegger will make clear, the name of its
withdrawal, then does not its proper, autonomous power remain unthought?”
Crucially,
physis does not rely on the materiality of the planet, but rather on its
dynamic of obscurity and emergence into the light of truth, aletheia. Physis
is, at once, aspects of the earth coming forth and at the same time,
necessarily, retaining a hidden element. “More precisely,” Haar explains, “Earth
belongs to the dimension of withdrawal, of concealing (lethe) which holds
sway in un-concealment, in a-letheia.”
Earth is not exclusively a secret, or a hiddenness, or even the “unthought.” It
is always both: impenetrable, hiding elements of itself and
allowing aspects of its being to show forth. Dissecting the flower and mapping
its veins, cells, and photo-chemical processes in minute detail cannot ascertain
the texture, delicacy, smell, or imperfections of its flowerness. The flower
is. Heidegger explains, “Earth is the spontaneous arising of what is
continually self-secluding.” To comprehend the Being of the flower we are better
served by poetry than rationality. Aletheia is the process of
physis. The concealing or revealing is directed towards an audience—they who
care, Dasein.
We would be
overstating the case to say that aletheia and physis seals the
rupture of idealism. Earth is arising into the world, and this projection
constitutes an upheaval that is never satisfactory. Movement is not quite the
right word, but Haar is on to something when he writes, because the Earth keeps
its own depths hidden, “Being essentially this movement of again taking up and
going back into itself, it makes this covering rise up and visibly appear in the
very midst of the world.”
The Earth exudes with fundamental familiarity, something that is undiscoverable
and incalculable in rational, or even worldly terms. But Heidegger wants to say
something further, and that is that the “Earth cannot renounce the Open of the
world if it is itself to appear as Earth.”
Poetry is one of
the best ways that people have to bring the Earthly into language. This does not
occur through an apparent representation but through a truth factor that is
irreducible to the calculus of science or governmentality. Poetry is not
a-political but a principle of politics. This means it might be held and
contested by a variety of political spectrums. What gets argued is, for example,
whether sustaining capitalism is authentic eco-politics and ultimately true to
ecopoesis.
Heidegger puts
together nature, truth and human agency in an integral whole:
Earth cannot do
without the Open of the world if it is itself to appear as Earth in the free
thrust of its self-concealing. On the other hand, the world cannot soar above
the Earth if, as the prevailing breadth and course of all that has the essential
character of the Geschick, it is to be grounded on something decisive.
The decision—this
is the point of interest to educators! The decision is the principle of action.
It is the guide and reference point to all our interactions, both with each
other and in relation to nature. The decision is what political activism is
motivated by, and what it works to change. It is what teaching is aimed at.
Green consciousness is a decision.
The concepts of
physis and aletheia radically challenge metaphysics and the guiding
principles of modernity and the Enlightenment. Truth and knowledge are not a
superlative add-on to the fundamental structure of material physiology but are
essential to nature itself. Understanding Nature via a first premise such as
equipment or instrumentality is no longer the initial focus.
Animalness: the Status of Humanity
Physis
and aletheia integrate the human need to seek truth in the ground of
Being. Poetry is a potent force for surmounting the Idealist principles that
have separated human society from Nature. Earthsongs promoted by Bate and Haar
lead to a post-modern principle that dissolves modern and Enlightenment
distinctions between subject and object and should democratize the Great Chain
of Being. But when it comes to the status of humanity in relation to other forms
of life, Heidegger retains the prejudices of his times. Although nobody wants to
associate with his politics, this prejudice based on the Christian hierarchy is
accepted by most Heideggerians, including Bate and Haar. Humans are superior
because they are capable of poetic insights. Animals on the other hand, are
restricted to unreflective absorption in their environment.
Animals are unable
to discern beings as beings. They are totally engrossed in their form of
environment.
One might say—although Heidegger never would—that animals are completely
engrossed in their world of equipment “only as non-isolable elements of its
environment.”
Heidegger is happy
to acknowledge that humanity has little insight into the essence of life itself.
It “does not mean that life is of less value or of an inferior degree compared
to human existence. Rather, life is a domain which possesses a rich openness (Offensein)
the likes of which the human world perhaps knows nothing.”
Animals are not
seen in honourable terms of alternative worlds, which we have little access to,
but in terms of an impoverished world.
Furthermore, to envisage a rich animal world is anthropocentric. Haar agrees
with Heidegger’s stance, “We much too quickly shift animals into a genuine
world, forgetting that an animal lives in the limited space of an environment.”
Animals are firstly organisms, from which the root word organ, which describes
the physiological means of carrying out the will of the faculties, that is, a
tool.
Heidegger also
makes a distinction between animal behaviour and human conduct.
Behaviour is limited to operating in an environment in an absorbed and
self-referential manner. The utter absorption in the lived environment (often
called instinct) is a compulsion that excludes awareness and agency. Heidegger
regards it as closed and captured by existence. Conduct, on the other hand, is
the openness to the manifest experience of things in the “Open of the world.”
Although, of course, on a larger scale Heidegger’s notion of the epoch and the
Enframing of technology is just such a finite and totalizing system and subsumes
agency in a similar manner.
The third vital
difference that Heidegger wants to posit between humans and animals is their
differing attitudes towards death. Anxiety towards death is a crucial part of
Heidegger’s philosophy in Being and Time. It forms the framework for his concept
of time and history. Humans always conceive of their lives as finite and thus it
is possible for the blink of the present moment to contain the entirety of the
past and a projection in the knowledge of this inevitable future endpoint.
Holding this entirety together lends a perspective on the life we lead that is,
he would argue, unavailable to animals. He writes:
And thus, just as
it remains questionable to speak of an organism as a historical (geschlichtlich)
or even historiological being, it is questionable whether death for man and
death for an animal are the same, even though physio-chemical, physiological
correlations can be ascertained.
History
Again harking back
to the tradition of philosophy which assumes that a teleological process guides
history, Heidegger posits that there are underlying laws and a telos or destiny
to history. Haar regards Heidegger’s theory as an inversion of the telos of
Hegelianism. Although Haar is not arguing that the destiny of Being is in any
way a dialectical process. Destiny (Geschick) holds within it all the
potential possibilities of history. Resonating, not with Hegel we would argue,
but with Aristotle’s notion of the essence as a seed that defines the potential
pattern of growth. This is why the “commencement” is so important to Heidegger.
The sending of destiny (Geschick) is held in its commencement. We merely
note aspects of the essence that has already unfolded.
Heidegger’s
teleology does not reach towards a heavenly otherworldliness, or a technological
and social utopia. He pessimistically characterises the evolution of the world
as an ever-increasing fall from grace. “The History of Being is the history of
the increasing oblivion of Being.”
This process is not a logical inevitability, nor does it follow a law of
causality that, to some extent following Nietzsche, Heidegger rejects. He
explains that, “Between the epochal metamorphoses of being & the withdrawal one
can perceive a relation, which nevertheless has nothing to do with a relation of
causality. One can say that the further away one is from the dawn of western
thinking and from aletheia, the greater is the oblivion into which it
falls, the clearer is the manner in which knowledge and consciousness break into
the open, and the manner in which being thus withdraws.”
Heidegger believes
each epochal manifestation of Being has a finitude that excludes it from being
able to comprehend dimensions other than its own disclosure. The destiny of
Being has reached its closure with the technological apprehension of everything
as resource. But Haar says:
Final totalization
does not mean that History is a total unveiling. What could the term Geschick
mean if not that being gives itself, “sends itself” (schicken), gathers
itself at each moment into a domain of unity (Ge-)? This unity is that of
an epoch. But each epoch is completely closed and blind to what does not enter
into it. There is a radical finitude to an epoch and to all epochs. Every epoch
of History is epoché, which means a “holding itself back,”
“self-suspension,” or “withdrawal,” of being which goes hand in hand with its
manifestation. The epochal or historical as such is deployed on the basis of a
free emergence closed in itself.
The (unlooked for)
defining principles make an enclosed, finite epochal period, and the inhabitants
of any epoch are not in the position to be able to activate pathways or even see
outside it. The enclosure or Enframing; in our case of Technology, limits the
field of agency.
Openness to beings
as Being, the role of agency, creative conscience, and responsibility
seem to form the critical differences between animals and humans, between
existence and Dasein. Our world of equipment is more encompassing, and has with
it a greater responsibility for damage control. The epoch, though, is a
peculiarly human example of worldliness, and while we imagine that it is
superior to the worlds of other animals or beings, we will be incapable of
calling forth, in poetry or otherwise, a decision to care (which is the very
motif of Dasein) in a manner that will guide politics and science from mere
calculative rationality to a honouring and revealing of Being in its primary
form.
Associated with his
epistemic turn in the 1930s, Heidegger began to think that technology was both
the danger in terms of human obliviousness to Being and also the saving power.
The destiny of Being has metamorphosed into an epoch inescapably enframed by
technology. The spark of life that is humanity is beginning to envisage itself
more positively than as the polluter of the Earth. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Mars trilogy, terraforming other planets was both the possibility and the
result of the political and ecological mess produced by consumer capitalism and
technology. In Sam Neil’s televised series on astronomy, terra-forming is
imagined because the solar system will age and gradually heat up, making Earth
unearthly. Technological creativity makes it possible to take all life
elsewhere in a fast forward version of evolution. The spark of life, Neil
states, quite possibly only exists on this planet, in the billions of stars and
solar systems of the universe. Safe-guarding, nurturing, and regenerating it is
the potential and responsibility of technology and humanity.
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- Michael Peters is Research Professor of
Education at the University of Glasgow and holds a personal chair in
Education at the University of Auckland. He is the author of many books
exploring the relations between philosophy and education, including work
on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and contemporary French and
German thought. His most recent book are Poststructuralism, Marxism
and Neoliberalism: Between Politics and Theory (2001), Richard
Rorty: Education, Philosophy and Politics (Eds.) (2001), and
Heidegger, Education and Modernity (Ed.) (2002).
- Ruth Irwin is a Bright Futures and Ryoichi Sasakawa Scholar
from New Zealand/Aotearoa. She has contributed chapters in two books and
authored several journal articles. Presently she is completing her PhD
at the University of Glasgow on a philosophical and educational enquiry
into the technological relationship between the environment and
humanity.
- Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the
Banks of the Wye during a tour, July, 1798, The Works of William
Wordsworth, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1994: p. 207.
- As cited in “…Poetically Man
Dwells …” (Heidegger 1975).
- Of course, the capitalization of Nature is, in itself, part of this
appropriation.
- Bate attributes the phrase “song of the
earth” to Heidegger. Michael Haar (1992) in his book on Heidegger
attributes it to Heraclitus.
- See Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental
Tradition, 1991.
- We based this remark on the experience
of one of the authors (Michael Peters) who taught English in New Zealand
secondary schools for seven years. This was also his experience of
reading and being forced to read Wordsworth as a New Zealand pupil,
although on his first visit to the Lake District earlier this year this
reading prejudice fell away after visiting Ryal Mount and Dove Cottage,
listening to some of the recorded poems spoken aloud, reading some of
his letters, and viewing portraits of Wordsworth and his family, and
landscapes paintings of the Lake District. More importantly, walking
through Wordsworth”s gardens and travelling through the Lake District,
motivated him to re-read Wordsworth’s poetry and to appreciate it for
the first time as an effect of place or location. In visiting the Lake
District, he would like to acknowledge the kindness and hospitality of
Professor Maria Slowey.
- Wordsworth and Coleridge 1798, 143.
- Till 1994, vi (our emphasis). The moral
significance of nature is evident in many of Wordsworth’s poems. As he
says, condensing his moral philosophy of Nature into a single stanza:
One impulse from a venal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
The relationship between humankind and Nature, conceived of as “the
land,” “the trees” or “forests,” “the sea,” and “the sky,” is often
imbued with moral significance in religious mythologies of native
peoples (as it is, for instance, with Maori—native peoples of
Aotearoa/New Zealand) and taken up later by poets and artists (as it is,
for example, by the modernist New Zealand painter, Colin McCann).
- Maill investigates three representative interpretive issues raised by
the poem (Wordsworth’s style of landscape description, his relation to
the picturesque tradition, and the iconic role of landscape and human
figures in the poem), before suggesting a precise location at Symonds
Yat, where the particular configuration of landscape (“the river unites
both the pastoral farms and the cliffs and cataract”) forced on
Wordsworth “a trope for what is natural in the human mind.” As he
writes: “A green reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’ argues that the mind is
rooted in and shaped by the same underlying processes that can be
identified in nature.”
- Heidegger, cited by Bate 2000, 261.
- Peters (2001), in a separate paper inspired by the same seminar
question, investigates Guattari’s ecosophical approach as a means to
understand the recent so-called anti-globalization protests.
- Heidegger, in Haar, 1993: 11
- Heidegger Holzwege, 1979: 37 in
Haar, 1993: 13
- Heidegger Holzwege, 1979: 31 in
Haar, 1993: 11
- Heidegger, An Introduction to
Metaphysics, 1953: 11 in Haar, 1993: 11.
- Heidegger, Elucidations of
Hölderin's Poetry, 1951: 64-65 in Haar, 1993: 12.
- Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderin's Poetry, 1951: 38 in Haar,
1993: 57.
- Heidegger, Elucidations of
Hölderin's Poetry, 1951: 38 in Haar, 1993: 8.
- [add] cf. R. Irwin, 2002, "Nietzsche
and Heidegger; Nihilism and the Question of Value in relation to
education" in Heidegger, Modernity and Education, M.A. Peters
(ed.).
- Heidegger, The Ground of
Metaphysics, 1975: 371-372 in Haar, 1993: 26.
- Heidegger, The Ground of
Metaphysics, 1975: 274-275 in Haar, 1993: 12.
- Haar 1993, 26. Furthermore, Heidegger
believes that there is an abyss between humans and animals deeper than
that between us and the divine. Cf. “Humaninsmusbrief” from p. 313.
- Heidegger, The Ground of Metaphysics, 1975: 388 in Haar, 1993:
8.
- What is Called Thinking?
1969: 56 in Haar, 1993: 73.
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