Bruce Foltz is an astonishing thinker, an Orthodox Christian environmentalist who goes beyond Heidegger to urge us back to noetic contact with Nature, the illumined understanding of creation that follows the purification of the heart, Nature as wisdom and revelation to dwell therein poetically.
Below I simply give some exerts that truly moved my heart, to give a sense of the beauty of this book, specifically on why Foltz insists on a spiritual solution to our ecological crisis, all from his superb book The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible, found here , check it out :
"In Caring for Creation, environmental philosopher Max Oelschlaeger had concluded that among human institutions, only religions have the power to motivate human action to inaugurate the needed changes on a scale that would render them environmentally effective.
Notions of “stewardship” are tepid and quite inadequate to the task.
And the idea of some new kind of new, quasi- religious consciousness being fashioned that could somehow provide more than a superficial, emotive kind of motivation for change— something like the “secular pantheism” that Michael Cohen employs to characterize the mindset of the original Sierra Club founders—seemed even less plausible .
“The crisis that we face is—as we all know and as we all readily admit—not primarily ecological but religious; it has less to do with the environment and more to do with spiritual consciousness."
- Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
In contrast, Heidegger’s understanding of ethics as concerning settlement or inhabitation, i.e. as concerning our characteristic manner of dwelling or “being- in-the-world,” both re-captures the ancient scope of ethics and offers decisive hints for how philosophical thought could contribute toward more powerfully addressing environmental difficulties, seeing them not as resulting from incorrect moral judgments, but rather as failures in remembering what it means to dwell.
St. Athanasios, who appears in a later chapter of this book, says that idolatry begins not when we turn toward the beauty of creation—which to the pure heart everywhere sings of the beauty and goodness of the Creator—but when we turn away from it and fall instead into our own desires as if they were a cave or pit. So that climbing out, we still see them unawares, but now projected back onto creation—which by that fact becomes thick and opaque and ultimately darkened, while the gaze loses its nimbleness and lightness as it becomes congealed around some bewitching nodal point.
Below I simply give some exerts that truly moved my heart, to give a sense of the beauty of this book, specifically on why Foltz insists on a spiritual solution to our ecological crisis, all from his superb book The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible, found here , check it out :
"In Caring for Creation, environmental philosopher Max Oelschlaeger had concluded that among human institutions, only religions have the power to motivate human action to inaugurate the needed changes on a scale that would render them environmentally effective.
Notions of “stewardship” are tepid and quite inadequate to the task.
And the idea of some new kind of new, quasi- religious consciousness being fashioned that could somehow provide more than a superficial, emotive kind of motivation for change— something like the “secular pantheism” that Michael Cohen employs to characterize the mindset of the original Sierra Club founders—seemed even less plausible .
“The crisis that we face is—as we all know and as we all readily admit—not primarily ecological but religious; it has less to do with the environment and more to do with spiritual consciousness."
- Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
In contrast, Heidegger’s understanding of ethics as concerning settlement or inhabitation, i.e. as concerning our characteristic manner of dwelling or “being- in-the-world,” both re-captures the ancient scope of ethics and offers decisive hints for how philosophical thought could contribute toward more powerfully addressing environmental difficulties, seeing them not as resulting from incorrect moral judgments, but rather as failures in remembering what it means to dwell.
St. Athanasios, who appears in a later chapter of this book, says that idolatry begins not when we turn toward the beauty of creation—which to the pure heart everywhere sings of the beauty and goodness of the Creator—but when we turn away from it and fall instead into our own desires as if they were a cave or pit. So that climbing out, we still see them unawares, but now projected back onto creation—which by that fact becomes thick and opaque and ultimately darkened, while the gaze loses its nimbleness and lightness as it becomes congealed around some bewitching nodal point.
The beheld creature is uprooted from the wisdom and beauty of the Creator, even as the fading half-life of the divine glory that we have tasted and seen and that still lingers like an aura around the things of perception now persuades us that these are themselves the true objects of adoration after all—that this is what it means to be “true to the earth,” even as the earth darkens under the idolatrous gaze and each repeat performance satisfies less, making us jaded and lusting for novelty.
Before theory there was theoria - a seeing actively engaged that apprehends the rootedness of the visible in the invisible: a seeing that can rightly be called a noetics
A luminous sense still alive in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, where the “noetic” suggests “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance” that offer “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.”
The word “noetic” will be used here more in the sense of Plato’s divided line analogy, in which the visible becomes iconic, i.e., serves as an image (eiko ̄n) for the invisible, through which the visible is in turn illumined. But even more precise is the Byzantine Greek usage of the Philokalia, in which “noetic” refers to that spiritual apprehension of the invisible that can take place when the nous has returned from entanglement in passion-driven “thoughts” (logismoi) to its proper home in the heart (kardia), understood as the true center of human life, the “eye of the heart”
Thomas Carlyle offers the same insight, unhappily noting that that we now “see nothing by direct vision; but only by reflection and anatomical dismemberment.”
Seeing is replaced by calculation. Or as Hale puts it, “‘Calculation’ is the new way of seeing.” Put into Greek, noe ̄sis gets displaced by dianoia or discursive thought as the epistemic norm, which now becomes the privileged mode of contact with the world.
Siphoned of the visage of the sacred, of a holy depth that we could venerate or even respect, and to which we might respond, nature in modernity is now “ours” to do with as we please.
Indeed, as Heidegger writes in his “Letter on Humanism,” “perhaps what is distinctive about this world epoch consists in the occlusion or closure (Verschlossenheit) of the dimension of the salutary or wholesome (des Heilen). Perhaps that is the sole malignancy, the singular unholiness [Unheil].”2Heidegger’s conclusion is that a massive unholiness is enveloping our world today, as a result of the global character of technological mode of concealing that he calls Gestell. The very element of nature in its holiness (i.e., divinely beautiful nature)—nature as the beautiful unity of the infinite relation—is undergoing a global closure, an obfuscation of its beauty and integrity, yet one that is inconspicuous and entirely compatible with the preservation of “scenic landscapes.”
Florensky, then, provides an impor- tant complement and corrective to Heidegger: the closure of the salutary and integral, and of the holy and beautiful in nature, is correlative to the en-closure of the human heart in a deranged isolation that has traditionally been called “sin” and “iniquity,” and which can be overcome not by thinking and poetizing alone, but through what has traditionally been called a “change of heart.”
The surface upon which the gaze rests, that forms a mirror for the gaze and allows it to see its own reflection, is what Jean-Luc Marion has called an “idol.” But it is, he argues, the gaze that forms the idol, not the idol that shapes the gaze. The idol itself “results from the gaze that aims at it.”
A face requires an inside. A face is inside-out—is the inside facing out. From what had once been a surface alone, not yet even an exterior, now an interiority faces us. What faces us has an inside, and what has an inside is alive.
If nature faces us, addresses us, responds to us in a meaningful way, does this mean that nature is alive—not just certain “organic” entities in nature, but nature as such?
“Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by ruling over a desert. . . . We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty.” Albert Camus,
“It could even be that nature, in the face she turns towards [our] technological usurpation, is simply concealing her essence.” Martin Heidegger,
Documenting this re-sacralization, historian Peter Brown describes how through holy relics—and much more importantly in the East, the life and being of holy men and women, monastics and saints and holy fools— “paradise itself came to ooze into the world. Nature itself was redeemed. . . . The countryside found its voice again . . . in an ancient and spiritual vernacular, of the presence of the saints. Water became holy again. The hoof- print of his donkey could be seen beside a healing spring, which St. Martin had caused to gush forth from the earth . . . They brought down from heaven to earth a touch of the unshackled, vegetable energy of God’s own paradise.”
Before theory there was theoria - a seeing actively engaged that apprehends the rootedness of the visible in the invisible: a seeing that can rightly be called a noetics
A luminous sense still alive in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, where the “noetic” suggests “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance” that offer “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.”
The word “noetic” will be used here more in the sense of Plato’s divided line analogy, in which the visible becomes iconic, i.e., serves as an image (eiko ̄n) for the invisible, through which the visible is in turn illumined. But even more precise is the Byzantine Greek usage of the Philokalia, in which “noetic” refers to that spiritual apprehension of the invisible that can take place when the nous has returned from entanglement in passion-driven “thoughts” (logismoi) to its proper home in the heart (kardia), understood as the true center of human life, the “eye of the heart”
Thomas Carlyle offers the same insight, unhappily noting that that we now “see nothing by direct vision; but only by reflection and anatomical dismemberment.”
Seeing is replaced by calculation. Or as Hale puts it, “‘Calculation’ is the new way of seeing.” Put into Greek, noe ̄sis gets displaced by dianoia or discursive thought as the epistemic norm, which now becomes the privileged mode of contact with the world.
Siphoned of the visage of the sacred, of a holy depth that we could venerate or even respect, and to which we might respond, nature in modernity is now “ours” to do with as we please.
Indeed, as Heidegger writes in his “Letter on Humanism,” “perhaps what is distinctive about this world epoch consists in the occlusion or closure (Verschlossenheit) of the dimension of the salutary or wholesome (des Heilen). Perhaps that is the sole malignancy, the singular unholiness [Unheil].”2Heidegger’s conclusion is that a massive unholiness is enveloping our world today, as a result of the global character of technological mode of concealing that he calls Gestell. The very element of nature in its holiness (i.e., divinely beautiful nature)—nature as the beautiful unity of the infinite relation—is undergoing a global closure, an obfuscation of its beauty and integrity, yet one that is inconspicuous and entirely compatible with the preservation of “scenic landscapes.”
Florensky, then, provides an impor- tant complement and corrective to Heidegger: the closure of the salutary and integral, and of the holy and beautiful in nature, is correlative to the en-closure of the human heart in a deranged isolation that has traditionally been called “sin” and “iniquity,” and which can be overcome not by thinking and poetizing alone, but through what has traditionally been called a “change of heart.”
The surface upon which the gaze rests, that forms a mirror for the gaze and allows it to see its own reflection, is what Jean-Luc Marion has called an “idol.” But it is, he argues, the gaze that forms the idol, not the idol that shapes the gaze. The idol itself “results from the gaze that aims at it.”
A face requires an inside. A face is inside-out—is the inside facing out. From what had once been a surface alone, not yet even an exterior, now an interiority faces us. What faces us has an inside, and what has an inside is alive.
If nature faces us, addresses us, responds to us in a meaningful way, does this mean that nature is alive—not just certain “organic” entities in nature, but nature as such?
“Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by ruling over a desert. . . . We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty.” Albert Camus,
“It could even be that nature, in the face she turns towards [our] technological usurpation, is simply concealing her essence.” Martin Heidegger,
Documenting this re-sacralization, historian Peter Brown describes how through holy relics—and much more importantly in the East, the life and being of holy men and women, monastics and saints and holy fools— “paradise itself came to ooze into the world. Nature itself was redeemed. . . . The countryside found its voice again . . . in an ancient and spiritual vernacular, of the presence of the saints. Water became holy again. The hoof- print of his donkey could be seen beside a healing spring, which St. Martin had caused to gush forth from the earth . . . They brought down from heaven to earth a touch of the unshackled, vegetable energy of God’s own paradise.”
…..supplanting a sterile correspondence model of truth with the more ancient model of truth as disclosure, as the radiance by which the object of reflection really gives itself…Even if every religious truth comes to consciousness as a construction, a mythic, symbolic, and ritual invention….
….the ancient idea of illumination: the light of truth can be received only under the forms of a creative and poetic capacity in consciousness, perhaps, but that very capacity also already participates in Being’s light, and receives it from without.
We try to live honorably so that we can discern the inner meaning of existent things, and . . . make our way to the divine Logos in the ontological heart of things.
—Evagrios of Pontos
As Heidegger has shown, science and technology represent ways of revealing nature that are by no means neutral. To determine nature as object [Gegenstand] and resource [Bestand] is already normative and prescriptive, especially when this kind of rationally reigns unopposed.
Kohák argues brilliantly that understanding nature as it really presents itself to lived experience requires not just Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing of the natural attitude and of intellectual constructs concerning nature, but a practical epoche ̄ that would bracket the technological artifacts and systems that conceal lived nature from us, even more effectively than the conceptual constructs.
Through this twofold, radical bracketing, nature re-emerges not as dead matter, but as gift and givenness: as creation. “In lived experience,” he writes,
in the radical brackets of the embers and the stars, the presence of God is so utterly basic, the one theme never absent from all the many configurations of life’s rhythm. The most basic trait of the world that confronts a dweller in the radical brackets of the forest clearing is that it is God’s world, not “man’s,” and that here God is never far . . . Nature’s gift to humans is . . . the power and grace of God which confronts the dweller therein. That is the most basic given, the gift of the dusk.
The intellectual historian Marjorie Nicholson has shown how our appreciation of the beauty of wild landscapes is a rather recent acquisition. For example, she documents that until the last few centuries, the Alps were regarded as so repulsive in their bleak, chaotic, barren disorder that coaches traversed them with curtains drawn, to protect travelers from such a repugnant spectacle.2The wild nature we work to preserve in the harsh mountain high-country, the scoured canyons of the American Southwest, and the flooded marsh- lands and estuaries of the American Southeast is beautiful, but it is a beauty that is, in an important sense, a creative product. A product of what? Two centuries of romanticism in poetry, music, and painting.
Kohák argues brilliantly that understanding nature as it really presents itself to lived experience requires not just Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing of the natural attitude and of intellectual constructs concerning nature, but a practical epoche ̄ that would bracket the technological artifacts and systems that conceal lived nature from us, even more effectively than the conceptual constructs.
Through this twofold, radical bracketing, nature re-emerges not as dead matter, but as gift and givenness: as creation. “In lived experience,” he writes,
in the radical brackets of the embers and the stars, the presence of God is so utterly basic, the one theme never absent from all the many configurations of life’s rhythm. The most basic trait of the world that confronts a dweller in the radical brackets of the forest clearing is that it is God’s world, not “man’s,” and that here God is never far . . . Nature’s gift to humans is . . . the power and grace of God which confronts the dweller therein. That is the most basic given, the gift of the dusk.
The intellectual historian Marjorie Nicholson has shown how our appreciation of the beauty of wild landscapes is a rather recent acquisition. For example, she documents that until the last few centuries, the Alps were regarded as so repulsive in their bleak, chaotic, barren disorder that coaches traversed them with curtains drawn, to protect travelers from such a repugnant spectacle.2The wild nature we work to preserve in the harsh mountain high-country, the scoured canyons of the American Southwest, and the flooded marsh- lands and estuaries of the American Southeast is beautiful, but it is a beauty that is, in an important sense, a creative product. A product of what? Two centuries of romanticism in poetry, music, and painting.
Or as V. S. Naipaul put this, the work of the imagination “hallows it subject,” such that “landscapes do not start to be real until they have been interpreted by an artist.”But does that mean that the result is a fiction or fabrication—somehow unreal? To the contrary, it is far more real, Bulgakov argues, than the nature revealed by scientific theories from Copernicus to the present day, theories that are just as much creative products of human economy, and which are hardly invalidated by that status.
For science and art and the simplest economic activities of tool- making and agriculture all proceed from the same source: the discovery—within nature as a lifeless, mechanical collection of blind forces, an inanimate realm of brute necessity, within natura naturata—of vital interrelationships, of an unbounded field of reciprocally connected and mutually penetrating forces, a “logos of things,” which we ourselves engage as both participants and revealers. Evoking the Stoic thought of the logos spermatikos, Bulgakov later writes, “The truth is that nature is not empty, but full. It is full of logoi, ontic seeds, which pre-contain the all of cosmic being.” In short, we find everywhere incipient life, organic interactions and the palate of the beautiful, but frozen in immobility and await- ing liberation through our knowledge and creativity. That is, we find natura naturans, discovering once again the world soul—this time not in humanity as transcendental subject, but in nature as transcendental object.
Annie Dillard has made this case very strongly in her writings on nature, especially in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where a cosmic strife between harmony and disorder, between beauty and ugliness, is shown to be an inescapable element of our lived experience of nature—but also inevitable as we survey the common experience of humanity, apart from the experiment we have recently undertaken in the secularized West. It was for Confucius the need to restore .
No doubt innumerable passers-by could have seen these same things while remaining unimpressed, just as the Rublev icon could look like merely a bad portrait. Iconic seeing is not correct seeing that could result from the rendering of additional information—the knowledge, for example, that some fish are really very large, allowing the ichthyologically benighted to see the shark as fish after all—but rather engaged seeing, inspired seeing, epiphanic seeing. The noetic seeing for which the icon calls, and the seeing of divine grace and power in nature that Dillard describes here, both result from a particular kind of engagement. Iconic seeing is transactional.
Science, Bulgakov answers, can only study nature in its lifeless and mechanized, and thus its fallen, aspect. “Science throws a net of mechanism, imperceptible as are the threads of a spider web to a fly, over the entire world,” and as a result, “nature as universal organism, hen kai pan, does not yield itself alive to science.”
Nature…becomes different. Under such conditions, it is no longer iconic. It is no longer sacred.
The Icon/Earth Is Transactional
For science and art and the simplest economic activities of tool- making and agriculture all proceed from the same source: the discovery—within nature as a lifeless, mechanical collection of blind forces, an inanimate realm of brute necessity, within natura naturata—of vital interrelationships, of an unbounded field of reciprocally connected and mutually penetrating forces, a “logos of things,” which we ourselves engage as both participants and revealers. Evoking the Stoic thought of the logos spermatikos, Bulgakov later writes, “The truth is that nature is not empty, but full. It is full of logoi, ontic seeds, which pre-contain the all of cosmic being.” In short, we find everywhere incipient life, organic interactions and the palate of the beautiful, but frozen in immobility and await- ing liberation through our knowledge and creativity. That is, we find natura naturans, discovering once again the world soul—this time not in humanity as transcendental subject, but in nature as transcendental object.
Annie Dillard has made this case very strongly in her writings on nature, especially in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where a cosmic strife between harmony and disorder, between beauty and ugliness, is shown to be an inescapable element of our lived experience of nature—but also inevitable as we survey the common experience of humanity, apart from the experiment we have recently undertaken in the secularized West. It was for Confucius the need to restore .
No doubt innumerable passers-by could have seen these same things while remaining unimpressed, just as the Rublev icon could look like merely a bad portrait. Iconic seeing is not correct seeing that could result from the rendering of additional information—the knowledge, for example, that some fish are really very large, allowing the ichthyologically benighted to see the shark as fish after all—but rather engaged seeing, inspired seeing, epiphanic seeing. The noetic seeing for which the icon calls, and the seeing of divine grace and power in nature that Dillard describes here, both result from a particular kind of engagement. Iconic seeing is transactional.
Science, Bulgakov answers, can only study nature in its lifeless and mechanized, and thus its fallen, aspect. “Science throws a net of mechanism, imperceptible as are the threads of a spider web to a fly, over the entire world,” and as a result, “nature as universal organism, hen kai pan, does not yield itself alive to science.”
Nature…becomes different. Under such conditions, it is no longer iconic. It is no longer sacred.
The Icon/Earth Is Transactional
The icon is epiphanic only to the person who approaches it with piety and in the belief that it is holy. Nothing, then, could be farther from the kind of vision for which the icon calls than the “disinterested” seeing valorized in the aesthetics of Kant and Schopenhauer.
It was, then, made for use within an interactive context, indeed a trans-active context, for worship and prayer are deeply transactional in their intentionality.
The icon is understood within the context of a genuine reciprocity. That is, the act of looking is not itself a one-sided inspection.
The beauty and holiness of nature do not offer themselves to the mere spectator, to the theoretical gaze, to the inspector of scenery, but to the pilgrim, to the seeker, to the ascetic
Heidegger does better in this regard, maintaining at length the ontological legitimacy of the attribution of “face” and “moods,” and even “saying” to nature as it is disclosed poetically, but perhaps only at the risk of reducing this capacity of nature into such general characteristics of Being as, for example, Stimmung and Sagen, while evading the really interesting and important question: If it is Being that through its own Stimmungen teaches us what it means to be attuned in moods, and if it is the Logos character of Being that first teaches us about gath- ering together into coherence through its own primordial saying, doesn’t this suggest that Being itself somehow presents us with a face, and ultimately refers us not to an “itself” at all but to a “Thou” who demands that we pass from ontology and aesthetics to theology?
To regain the paradise “which lies all around us,” we must forsake our avarice for worldly gain, undergo a kind of aske ̄ sis. But at the same time, we must overcome our inability to see this sustaining, surrounding paradise,
It was, then, made for use within an interactive context, indeed a trans-active context, for worship and prayer are deeply transactional in their intentionality.
The icon is understood within the context of a genuine reciprocity. That is, the act of looking is not itself a one-sided inspection.
The beauty and holiness of nature do not offer themselves to the mere spectator, to the theoretical gaze, to the inspector of scenery, but to the pilgrim, to the seeker, to the ascetic
Heidegger does better in this regard, maintaining at length the ontological legitimacy of the attribution of “face” and “moods,” and even “saying” to nature as it is disclosed poetically, but perhaps only at the risk of reducing this capacity of nature into such general characteristics of Being as, for example, Stimmung and Sagen, while evading the really interesting and important question: If it is Being that through its own Stimmungen teaches us what it means to be attuned in moods, and if it is the Logos character of Being that first teaches us about gath- ering together into coherence through its own primordial saying, doesn’t this suggest that Being itself somehow presents us with a face, and ultimately refers us not to an “itself” at all but to a “Thou” who demands that we pass from ontology and aesthetics to theology?
To regain the paradise “which lies all around us,” we must forsake our avarice for worldly gain, undergo a kind of aske ̄ sis. But at the same time, we must overcome our inability to see this sustaining, surrounding paradise,
Seyyed Hossein Nasr have blamed our present environmental crisis on our Western establishment of the first truly secular culture the world has known. Nasr calls for a “resacralization of nature, not in the sense of bestowing sacredness upon nature, which is beyond the power of man, but of lifting aside the veils of ignorance and pride that have hidden the sacredness of nature from the view of a whole segment of humanity.”
Marcel Gauchet: “As God withdrew, the world changed from something presented to something constituted. God having become Other to the world, the world now becomes Other to humans. . . . Disentangling the visible from the invisible made it ‘inhuman’ in our minds, by reducing it to mere matter. At the same time, this made it appear capable of being wholly adapted to humans, malleable in every aspect and open to unlimited appropriation.”
Given this analysis, the fallenness of our human condition consists in the malady whereby the nous (intellectual intuition, or more loosely, consciousness) has departed from its natural seat in the heart, and gotten tangled up in dianoia, discursive rationality— i.e., it has gotten lodged in the head.
We have to psychoanalyze science, purify it. . . . Its concept of Nature is often only an idol to which the scientist makes sacrifices, the reasons for which are due more to affective motivations than to scientific givens.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Nature”
How is this thing, this Newtonian phantasm . . . this Natural Religion, this impossible absurdity?
—William Blake, “Milton”
In the seventeenth century, then, nature begins to also designate the great aggregate of what is—an ontic region, an extant being, or to use the term made fashionable during this time by Descartes, an object.
And slowly, gradually, the more things become “nature,” the more they lose their own natures: the replacement in usage corresponds to a displacement in ontology.
Thus, the triangular relation of God, consciousness, and nature that is constitutive of modernist rationality (and of metaphysics as onto- theology) is generated within a few decades of the mid-seventeenth century—complete with a newly minted lexicon. “Nature,” rather than designating a mode of being, instead becomes reified and established as an ontic region unto itself, the reified realm of all that is not conscious.
“Nature” is here, first of all, an artificial entity, the world deliberately stripped of the poetic—and if we are to use the word properly, bereft too of the symbolic, i.e., of that power that draws together (syn) into a whole (holon), and thus deprived of its beauty and coherence. Instead, this newly fabricated nature is coordinate solely to the ratio, to the calculative demands of the rational mind.”
So…HOW do we once again receive nature as revelation ? That’s the next blog post - HERE
Marcel Gauchet: “As God withdrew, the world changed from something presented to something constituted. God having become Other to the world, the world now becomes Other to humans. . . . Disentangling the visible from the invisible made it ‘inhuman’ in our minds, by reducing it to mere matter. At the same time, this made it appear capable of being wholly adapted to humans, malleable in every aspect and open to unlimited appropriation.”
Given this analysis, the fallenness of our human condition consists in the malady whereby the nous (intellectual intuition, or more loosely, consciousness) has departed from its natural seat in the heart, and gotten tangled up in dianoia, discursive rationality— i.e., it has gotten lodged in the head.
We have to psychoanalyze science, purify it. . . . Its concept of Nature is often only an idol to which the scientist makes sacrifices, the reasons for which are due more to affective motivations than to scientific givens.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Nature”
How is this thing, this Newtonian phantasm . . . this Natural Religion, this impossible absurdity?
—William Blake, “Milton”
In the seventeenth century, then, nature begins to also designate the great aggregate of what is—an ontic region, an extant being, or to use the term made fashionable during this time by Descartes, an object.
And slowly, gradually, the more things become “nature,” the more they lose their own natures: the replacement in usage corresponds to a displacement in ontology.
Thus, the triangular relation of God, consciousness, and nature that is constitutive of modernist rationality (and of metaphysics as onto- theology) is generated within a few decades of the mid-seventeenth century—complete with a newly minted lexicon. “Nature,” rather than designating a mode of being, instead becomes reified and established as an ontic region unto itself, the reified realm of all that is not conscious.
“Nature” is here, first of all, an artificial entity, the world deliberately stripped of the poetic—and if we are to use the word properly, bereft too of the symbolic, i.e., of that power that draws together (syn) into a whole (holon), and thus deprived of its beauty and coherence. Instead, this newly fabricated nature is coordinate solely to the ratio, to the calculative demands of the rational mind.”
So…HOW do we once again receive nature as revelation ? That’s the next blog post - HERE
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