Noetics of Nature by Bruce Foltz is a mind-blowing book, drawing on Heidager, nature mysticism, and theology to present a way to perceive nature in it’s original God-infused wonder. His essay on Bulgakov, the Russian Theologian of Sophia, is especially edifying, I quote from it :
Russian philosophy draws heavily upon a cosmic eschatology that sees nature as await- ing its own resurrection through the redemption of humanity—that is, through the redemption of the very agent through whom nature is fallen and the divine wisdom inherent within it becomes obscured.
He started out, however, as an economist holding a prestigious chair in agricultural economics—trying to adapt Marx to the largely agrarian economy of Russia—and as a politician who served in the second Duma, or Russian Parliament. Along with many Russian intelligentsia during the first decade of the twentieth century, Bulgakov—after publishing in 1900 a major work called Capitalism and Agriculture—became disillusioned by the inapplicability of Marxist economics to Russian reality, as well as disenchanted with the irresponsibility of the left in the 1905 Revolution and subsequently, in the Second Duma.
Eventually being ordained a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church in 1918. He was exiled from Russia by the Bolsheviks in the early twenties, and continued his academic life in Paris until 1944 when, according to some present, he died as a saint.
The book opens by acknowledging the inescapability of Marx’s central insight: the “economism” or “economic materialism,” which despite its reductionistic assumptions, has become “the reigning worldview” of our time. Bulgakov grants immediately, then, the truth of “economism,” the “profound content which shimmers through” economic materialism, its “indestructibility”— despite its one-sidedness and abstractness. Writing in 1912, he foresaw what became widely evident only later: that a central element of our current historical experience is the sense that “life is, above all, an economic process.” “Our time,” he continues, “understands, feels, experiences the world as a household—i.e., in Greek, the world in some undeniable sense now presents itself to us as ecos.”
In contrast to the later Heidegger, who recoils at the global, technological disclosure of nature as inventory (Bestand), Bulgakov grasps its inevitability and prescribes not Heidegger’s step back, the Schritt zurück, but seeks instead to tunnel into this contemporary experience—to show internally its one-sidedness and dogmatism, stating that economism should be “overcome from within,” even as he acknowledges its partial legitimacy. Indeed, he even maintains that “not to experience” this “peculiar enchantment of economic materialism” at all, “not to feel its hypnosis (even if one does not abandon oneself completely), means to have some defect of historical consciousness, to be internally alien to contemporary reality,” artificially aloof. And in contrast to the environmental purist, seeking enclaves of pristine nature unsullied by humanity, Bulgakov notes from the beginning that of course all nature has become for us today an economic product. But he goes on immediately to show that this economic status entails far more ontologically than it might appear. And thus begins a reversal from within.
So Bulgakov inaugurates The Philosophy of Economy with an understanding of economic activity that not only destabilizes the rigidity of economic materialism, but also undermines the later antinomy between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. The philosophy of economy, then, will begin from a sense of “philosophical wonder”—at the defining problem of economy: “humanity in nature—and nature in humanity,” but even more basically household life, home management, house maintenance—
Khoziaistvo- or the Greek oikos, the root for both economy and ecology.
The world is a household, and this insight opens up the philosophical perplexity that eluded Marx, preventing him from understanding the true character of economy.
Just as Heidegger, in his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” much later sought to show phenomenologically that the genuine problem of housing in post- war Germany was not primarily logistical, so Bulgakov seeks to elucidate how the economic problems of late Czarist Russia—equally concrete issues, such as land reform and peasant proprietorship— could be understood adequately only from within, through a study of the lived dimensions of economic reality, and ultimately through an ontology of economic activity that stayed close to its phenomenological moorings in the lived experience of the khoziain (the proprietor or subject of economic activity—both as individual, and more importantly as collective) interacting with nature (the object of economic activity). This interaction is what constitutes khoziaistvo—economic activity as household life.
Thus, Bulgakov rejects Marx’s scientific objectivism as dependent on Kant’s understanding of nature as object, and as leading to the view of labor as the effect of one object upon another. In contrast (and this has lent his work tremendous urgency in the reforms of post-Soviet Russia), Bulgakov insists on understanding koziaistvo (economic activity, household life, or simply housekeeping) from within the lived experience of the khoziain, the householder, the head of the household, the host (to the visitor), the proprietor in the sense of the proprietor of an inn, or as he will even call him later in the book, the world steward and even the demiurge.
The central perplexity of economy, then, is not labor, seen as the external effect of one object upon another, but something much more remarkable and perplexing and wonderful, worthy of true philosophical surprise (thaumazo ̄): It is the world as household.
Nature as a Kantian “object” is an abstraction. So too, correspondingly, the genuine “subject” is not what Bulgakov calls “the Kantian epistemological subject”—“the mind of a scientist preparing an experiment”— detached, and disembodied.
Like Heidegger, Bulgakov maintains that nature is more primor- dially encountered within practical activity (as Zuhandenheit) than in theoretical consciousness. But as Heidegger often seems to over- look, practical activity presupposes our being part of nature: “In order for economy to be possible, the subject—the world proprietor, or demiurge—must be part of the natural world, immanent in empirical reality.”
Thus Marx, and the whole tradition of materialism, and the biocentrists are all correct here: Humanity is a part of nature, humanity in nature, a housekeeper and an inhabitant. Nature is not, however, a Kantian object, but a household ripe with human meaning; it is always already in its very givenness humanized, and science is itself part of that humanization from within, not a disen- gaged mirroring from outside. Thus, the anthropocentrist and humanist are also right—and Heidegger is right—in maintaining that the dweller and householder, who alone can make the world a household, cannot be just another part of a greater totality of objects, but must somehow lend meaning to the whole.
The primary datum—both phenomenologically and ontologically—is economic activity as household life, something utterly concrete, something integral and cohesive that must yet be understood both as humanity in nature and as nature in humanity. What is needed, then, is an ontology of the economic process, understood from within the lived experience of the householder.15
“Every economic act,” Bulgakov writes, “realizes a certain fusion of subject and object, the penetration of the subject into the object, the subjectification of the object—or the subject’s exit from itself into the world of things, into the object, that is, an objectification of the subject.” Humanity in nature, and nature in humanity. Objectification of the subject and subjectification of the object.
Biocentrism and anthropocentrism. Two aspects abstracted from something concrete and integral, two faces of a single reality. Bulgakov makes explicit here his philosophical debt to Schelling’s philosophy of identity, for which “nature must be visible spirit, and spirit must be invisible nature.” The starting-point for Bulgakov, however, is not the critical idealism of Kant, but the economism that subtly underwrites modern science and advances its domination of environmental thought.
For the ground of scientific materialism, Bulgakov argues, is economic materialism.
And this economic underpinning holds for biocentrism as well, to the extent that it rests not on a vision of mystical identity—toward which deep ecology tacitly inclines—but on the results of positive science. The seemingly passive scientific subject is an expression of the active economic subject. It is not its mirroring by an epistemological subject that constitutes the reality of nature: “The entire practice of mutual interaction of I and non-I establishes the reality of the external world and fills the empty and cold realm of the non-I with strength, warmth, bodies, turning the mirage of the non-I into nature and, at the same time, placing the I within nature, organically fusing them into a single whole.” The knower is neither a mirror nor a phantom, but the subject of a mutual interpenetration of humanity and nature. But who is this subject of economic activity?
The interaction and interpenetration of humanity and nature— nature as household and ourselves as proprietors—presupposes a unitary field that must be always already in place and in play, prior to any individual engagement. Economic activity, the world as household, has a hereditary and historical, as well as a social and collective, character. “Economy as a whole,” argues Bulgakov, “is not only logically but empirically prior to separate economic acts.”
Who, then, is the subject of economy as a whole? “The single true transcendental subject of economic activity, the personification of pure economy, is not any given individual but humanity as a whole.”Ontologically, Bulgakov understands this notion of humanity as a whole, of a universal subject, in a robustly realist manner, not as an abstraction or universal, nor as a methodological device, as the transcendental subject was for Kant. For economic acts to cohere into a system—and therefore for cognitive acts to cohere as science, and for human actions to come together as history—human knowers and agents must not be impermeable to one another, but function as nodal points for humanity as a whole.
“There is one subject,” Bulgakov maintains, “and not many: the transcendental subject of knowledge, of economy, of history is clearly one and the same; it founds and objectivizes all of these processes, transforming the subjective into the transsubjective, synthesizing the fragmented actions and events that make up economy, knowledge, and history into a living whole.” (Bulgakov regards Kant’s individuation of the transcendental subject as a “mystical misstep,” an error by means of which Kant “reflects the fundamental sin of Protestantism” by positing the will and consciousness of the individual in opposition to the “supraindividual unity” of humanity.) This does not, of course, mean that individual persons are somehow unreal, but simply that when they engage in what ontologically establishes their own humanity, they do so by taking part in something shared and common: “Only one truly knows, but many engage in the process of cognition.”
This collective, universal humanity is none other than what has been called since antiquity the world-soul, and whose lineage Bulgakov traces from Plato, Plotinus, and the ancient Stoics through Sts. Dionysios, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos in the Greek East—and Scotus Erigena in the Latin West—to Böhme, von Baader, Schelling, and Soloviov in modern times. Precisely in its character of khoziain, of world proprietor, humanity is at the same time world-soul, the very eye of the world soul, the world soul become hypostatic—nature acting upon itself, recognizing and realizing itself through that agency.
And the aim of this momentous movement, the goal of that self-realization, is a permeation of nature—in all its seemingly lifeless recesses— with humanity, an infusion that is just as complete as the manner in which nature permeates humanity in all that seems most purely ideal. That reciprocal interpenetration is not just agriculture and industry. It is precisely what knowledge accomplishes. And even more importantly, it is preeminently what is undertaken by art— the perfection of economic activity understood as household life, the completed self-realization of nature in the element of beauty.
Sophia
But the highest expression of economic activity is neither factory nor farm. Bulgakov maintains that the epitome and perfection, both “the goal and limit” of economic activity—i.e., of household life—is art, through which human creativity transforms and transfigures nature by uncovering and unleashing its beauty. He even argues that “economy [as such] must return to its [Edenic] prototype, must become transformed into art.”25 Thus, those who today argue that nature is a social construction are partially right. Through art, as through science, as through traditional practice and historical experience, nature emerges transformed as a result of human labor. But to see only this is to espouse the same kind of one-sidedness as the environmental positions discussed earlier: materialism, anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and so on.
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.The 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 paint- ing. The philosophical concept of the sublime. A century and a half of nature-writing, from Chateaubriand and Bartram and Thoreau, to Dillard and Lopez. Dazzling historical accounts by amazed explorers and naturalists from Powell and Muir to the present day. Photographers such as Adams and Weston and Porter, plus a half- century of Sierra Club calendars and coffee-table books. The point is that the wild nature we find beautiful is a humanized nature, the result of economic activity, a product of human art and creativity. Nature in humanity—the object subjectivized.
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.”27 But does that mean that the result is a fiction or fab- rication—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 recip- rocally 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. The conditions for the possibility of economic activity of any kind—the ontological ground for the world as household—lie in this self-recognition of humanity in nature, and the simultaneous self-realization of nature in humanity. In economic activity, the life of the earth household, we thus find a two- fold manifestation of the world soul: as realizing the potential for collective activity of the transcendental subject, and as realizing the potential for universal life and freedom and transfiguration in the transcendental object.
Discovery and creation are not two different practices here, but aspects of a single process of self-realization—to use a term favored by Arne Naess, even as he struggles to justify it philosophically. What happens, however, if economic production is merely willful and arbitrary? What if putative creativity results not in the animation and transfiguration of nature, but in its distortion and debasement and degradation. In Blakean terms, what if a per- verse economy results not in “mountains green” and “pleasant pastures seen,” but in “clouded hills” and “dark satanic mills”? And why the earlier claim, still not justified, that nature as it is revealed by art is truer, more real, than the nature revealed by science?
First, in the Christian East, the concept of the Fall is understood to be not exclusively a fall of humanity, but of the cosmos as a whole, due to the waywardness of humanity. It is not just we ourselves that are fallen, but nature too, because of us. Accordingly, it is not only humanity that stands in need of redemption, but all of nature— whose inherent goodness and beauty has been afflicted with discord and corruption. Second, underlying the thought of cosmic fall and redemption is the concept of Sophia—the Divine Wisdom elaborated at great length in the Wisdom Books
Sophia is that element—manifested in natura naturans—through which nature in whole and part is rooted in the Divine being, and which thus provides the normative measure within nature for what it once was paradisiacally, and for what it once more must be through human creativity. And thus it provides the standard for what Bulgakov calls an Edenic economy, household life that restores and redeems and indeed transfigures cosmic nature.
And it is also, of course, Sophia that allows us to sort out what is Edenic from what is fallen— and to distinguish the Edenic economy which actualizes the latent life and beauty and goodness of nature, from an economy that Bulgakov does not hesitate to name, along with Blake, diabolical: “If [economic] creation takes matters into its own hands, seeking a model outside the divine Sophia, it shapes a shadowy, satanic world alongside the given, created one.” The Edenic economy, in contrast, he defines as “the selfless loving effort of man to apprehend and to perfect nature, to reveal its sophic character.” This corresponds to the “Edenic state” in which economic activity began, in which the household was itself Eden, and in which humanity was created to be “the living tool of the divine Sophia,” to name the birds and animals, to transform the whole world into the garden of Eden, and in the words of Genesis, “to tend it and keep it”—in which, “originally, economic activity was the harmonious interaction of man with nature.”
…these old thoughts of paradise and fall, Bulgakov draws upon not as mundane his- tory, but phenomenologically and ontologically, “according to a certain empirico-mystical geography.
Isn’t everything in nature just . . . natural? Perhaps the simplest answer is that this ancient view of nature seems not only unavoidable phenomenologically—and it seems to me that 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 on earth the ways of heaven through the recovery of human- heartedness, and for Lao Tzu the return to the way and virtue of the Tao that is both hidden and manifest in things. It was the Hindu quest to see through the veil of Maya, and the Buddhist prescription to relinquish the grasping and clinging that bring suffering into the world and sustain it.
Destined to serve as the medium through which creation itself was to become deified, fallen humanity becomes instead the bane of nature, its scourge and oppressor. Thus Edenic nature, in contrast, represents the normative “anamne ̄sis of another [mode of] being, similar to the golden dreams of childhood and most accessible to childhood . . . [proffering] distinct, palpable revelations of the world’s sophianicity in our soul.”
But why does Bulgakov propose art as the paradigm of the Edenic economy, as the vehicle to realize this eschatology? Why not, instead, science—and especially ecology—as environmentalists tacitly presuppose? Science, he 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.”
“A scientific relation to the world,” writes Bulgakov in italics, “is a relation to the world as mechanism.”
As Kant had shown long before, the truth of things is inaccessible to discursive thought. “Sophia, which establishes the ultimate connection of all things,” Bulgakov maintains, “cannot be understood through science, which only understands nature’s regularities and patterns.” Discursive knowledge fails here, because it is based on “the division of subject and object and on the disintegration of being,” and thus it finds the truth of things surrounded by cloudlike mystery and inexpressibility.
But this does consign us to either skepticism or blind belief. “Sophia can only be perceived by revelation”—not discursively, but noetically through “miraculous, intuitive ways independent of scientific cognition.” It is revealed through religious myths and symbols; revealed, he says, in the brilliant intuitions of great philosophical genius; revealed aesthetically, in modes whereby “the infinite shines through the finite”; and revealed too in the inexpressible “mysteries of personal religious life.” In each of these, “truth is a state of being” in which we “become a living member of the divine Sophia . . . become transparent and sophic” ourselves
First, in the Christian East, the concept of the Fall is understood to be not exclusively a fall of humanity, but of the cosmos as a whole, due to the waywardness of humanity. It is not just we ourselves that are fallen, but nature too, because of us. Accordingly, it is not only humanity that stands in need of redemption, but all of nature— whose inherent goodness and beauty has been afflicted with discord and corruption. Second, underlying the thought of cosmic fall and redemption is the concept of Sophia—the Divine Wisdom elaborated at great length in the Wisdom Books
Sophia is that element—manifested in natura naturans—through which nature in whole and part is rooted in the Divine being, and which thus provides the normative measure within nature for what it once was paradisiacally, and for what it once more must be through human creativity. And thus it provides the standard for what Bulgakov calls an Edenic economy, household life that restores and redeems and indeed transfigures cosmic nature.
And it is also, of course, Sophia that allows us to sort out what is Edenic from what is fallen— and to distinguish the Edenic economy which actualizes the latent life and beauty and goodness of nature, from an economy that Bulgakov does not hesitate to name, along with Blake, diabolical: “If [economic] creation takes matters into its own hands, seeking a model outside the divine Sophia, it shapes a shadowy, satanic world alongside the given, created one.” The Edenic economy, in contrast, he defines as “the selfless loving effort of man to apprehend and to perfect nature, to reveal its sophic character.” This corresponds to the “Edenic state” in which economic activity began, in which the household was itself Eden, and in which humanity was created to be “the living tool of the divine Sophia,” to name the birds and animals, to transform the whole world into the garden of Eden, and in the words of Genesis, “to tend it and keep it”—in which, “originally, economic activity was the harmonious interaction of man with nature.”
…these old thoughts of paradise and fall, Bulgakov draws upon not as mundane his- tory, but phenomenologically and ontologically, “according to a certain empirico-mystical geography.
Isn’t everything in nature just . . . natural? Perhaps the simplest answer is that this ancient view of nature seems not only unavoidable phenomenologically—and it seems to me that 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 on earth the ways of heaven through the recovery of human- heartedness, and for Lao Tzu the return to the way and virtue of the Tao that is both hidden and manifest in things. It was the Hindu quest to see through the veil of Maya, and the Buddhist prescription to relinquish the grasping and clinging that bring suffering into the world and sustain it.
Destined to serve as the medium through which creation itself was to become deified, fallen humanity becomes instead the bane of nature, its scourge and oppressor. Thus Edenic nature, in contrast, represents the normative “anamne ̄sis of another [mode of] being, similar to the golden dreams of childhood and most accessible to childhood . . . [proffering] distinct, palpable revelations of the world’s sophianicity in our soul.”
But why does Bulgakov propose art as the paradigm of the Edenic economy, as the vehicle to realize this eschatology? Why not, instead, science—and especially ecology—as environmentalists tacitly presuppose? Science, he 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.”
“A scientific relation to the world,” writes Bulgakov in italics, “is a relation to the world as mechanism.”
As Kant had shown long before, the truth of things is inaccessible to discursive thought. “Sophia, which establishes the ultimate connection of all things,” Bulgakov maintains, “cannot be understood through science, which only understands nature’s regularities and patterns.” Discursive knowledge fails here, because it is based on “the division of subject and object and on the disintegration of being,” and thus it finds the truth of things surrounded by cloudlike mystery and inexpressibility.
But this does consign us to either skepticism or blind belief. “Sophia can only be perceived by revelation”—not discursively, but noetically through “miraculous, intuitive ways independent of scientific cognition.” It is revealed through religious myths and symbols; revealed, he says, in the brilliant intuitions of great philosophical genius; revealed aesthetically, in modes whereby “the infinite shines through the finite”; and revealed too in the inexpressible “mysteries of personal religious life.” In each of these, “truth is a state of being” in which we “become a living member of the divine Sophia . . . become transparent and sophic” ourselves
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