Recalling What We Have Hidden

A contemplation of Erazim Kohák’s book The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Moral Sense of Nature

Ryan Shea

From In Context #49 (Spring, 2023)

In my dining room hangs a print purchased several years ago for me by my wife. It is titled “Against Forgetting.” At first glance, it looks like a simple black and white photo of a cross-section of a tree, showing the growth rings. Closer inspection reveals that this is only half the story. The other half is a photograph of a human thumbprint, which almost perfectly mirrors the tree rings, matching them line for line. The image serves as an icon. Fingerprints and tree rings are beheld together. The holding together is accomplished with a single activity that is both seeing and remembering. I see the print with my eyes and an aspect of that seeing is re-membering humans and trees together as members of a unified whole. It is an icon “Against Forgetting.”

Samuel Johnson once wrote that “people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” Erazim Kohák’s 1987 book, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Moral Sense of Nature, (University of Chicago Press) takes up the work of reminding. Kohák (1933-2020) was a philosopher who was rigorously trained in the German phenomenological tradition focusing especially on the work of Edmund Husserl. This is a philosophical book. It is a book of deep reflection that engages with the thoughts of philosophers and scientists. The goal, however, is far from abstract argument for its own sake. He summarizes the task of his book by saying “I have not sought to ‘prove a point’ but to evoke and share a vision. Thus my primary tool has been the metaphor, not the argument, and the product of my labors is not a doctrine but an invitation to look and to see. With Husserl, I have sought not to instruct but to point out, to recall what we have forgotten.”

Kohák sought to incarnate this goal both as a professor of philosophy and as a modern-day Thoreau. During the day hours of the week, he would teach at Boston University, but on nights, weekends, and school breaks he would return to his New Hampshire homestead. Here he lived all year round without electricity in a house he had built in the middle of a clearing that he had cleared with his own axe. The titular “embers and stars” that guide his thinking are only visible to him in the New Hampshire darkness and solitude. The blare of civilized noise and the glare of civilized lights leave us deaf and blind to what shows itself in nature. Kohák went to the woods to achieve clarity of vision and to per- form his work of “recalling what we have thus hidden from ourselves.” What does Kohák think we have hidden and forgotten? How has it blocked our vision? And how might we remember?

Modern natural science strives above all else to be objective. The scientific spirit is that wherein all hints of subjectivity have been expunged. For this reason, to be anthropomorphic, that is, to attribute human attributes to natural beings, is the unforgivable sin and must be scrupulously avoided. The trouble is that human beings are subjects. Everything we experience is experienced by us as subjects. The ideal of strict objectivity requires that we forget this obvious truth. The first kind of forgetfulness is a self-forgetfulness. In this purposeful ignoring, this willful ignorance, we also forget everything that pertains to humans as subjects. Kohák gives the following list of what we lose when we forget ourselves: “value, meaning, beauty, goodness, truth, holiness.”

The amnesia does not stop at the self. Our everyday experience of the natural world is not of the dead world described by physics and chemistry, devoid of all value, meaning, beauty, goodness, truth, and holiness. As a matter of daily fact, we do not encounter our own pets as mere complex mechanisms, or our local Audubon nature preserve as so many board feet of lumber. As I sit and watch a sparrow at my bird feeder, I am struck by what Kohák calls its “integrity,” which is “not merely [its] utility but an intrinsic, absolute value ingressing in the order of time.” It is good that the sparrow is. Its existence is good as an absolute value,separate not only from any human utility, but also from the role it plays in its ecosystem. Kohák laments that when we speak of “nature” we frequently are not referring to that living reality encountered in our experience, but to the “highly sophisticated theoretical nature-construct” of the sciences, which we then mistake for reality. Our forgetfulness has spread from the self to nature and in doing so has created a problem, maybe a paradox, perhaps a contradiction.

By pursuing objectivity, the natural sciences have forgotten not only the human subject, but also the natural object. In seeking to perfect our knowledge, we have accidentally denied the existence of the knower (the scientist-as-subject) and so radically transformed the known object that it bears little resemblance to the real world we were seeking knowledge of in the first place. The “nature” on the chalkboard in a physics classroom is not what confronts us when we step out our front door. To know the former is not the same thing as to know the latter. The physicist would, no doubt, point out that Kohák is being frightfully naive and childish in preferring prescientific experience to scientific knowledge. Kohák would happily agree but say that his is “a second-order naïveté, a willed, conscious reaffirmation of the reality of meaningful lived experience, motivated by the chastened admission of the futility of cunningly devised fables.” He is naive in its original sense of “native, natural” as opposed to “alienated, artificial.” Now it becomes clear why we might need to recall what we have forgotten in order to be able to see.

For Kohák, we must seek to understand “any and all reality from within” rather than “explaining it superficially from without.” That is, we must understand a living entity “in terms of its meaningful being rather than in terms of categories arbitrarily imposed upon it from without.” The starting point is with our own primal experience, before it is siphoned through the abstractions of physics, chemistry, and biology. Kohák says that what we first encounter, if we are not blinded by our technological civilization or stupefied by our scientific theories, is a world of meaningful being.

Walk out into a forest and close your eyes. Then open them. What do you see? You do not see simply green, red, brown, and blue colors. Nor do you see merely various complex shapes. Nor do you see simply a forest, or a pine forest, or a deciduous forest. You encounter everything as tied up within the whole complex narrative of your life. For example, you are out in the woods right now in order to clear your mind for an article you are writing, or because your doctor told you to in order to get your blood pressure under control, or because you are a biologist specializing in the mating rituals of red squirrels and you are coming to collect data, or because you work for the parks service and you are clearing off the paths after a powerful wind storm. All our experiences are situated within a web of significance.

The trouble is that those meanings are often entirely human-centered (head clearing, physical health, job) rather than an authentic meaning-into the text of nature. We often read things according to our own favorite terminology, rather than working to come to terms with the other. This tendency to make everything exclusively about ourselves is, no doubt, part of the motivation for the ideal of objectivity in science. Yet, if you find that a student in ninth grade is systematically misreading texts by projecting his own interpretations and making all the books be significant only in relationship to himself, the solution is not to outright deny that the books contain any intrinsic meaning whatsoever. You do not tell him to avoid looking for meaning but show him how to find what the book itself is saying. The solution is to train him in the difficult art of interpretation. Kohák is asking that we devote at least as much thought and discipline to learning to read the intrinsic sense of a forested landscape as we do to learning how to read Shakespeare. The solution to both problems is not to deny, and thus willfully forget, meaning and sense simply because they are difficult to apprehend. The solution is to acknowledge the limits of our current understanding so that we might thereby strive to transcend our limits.

So too with the fraught relationship between humans and nature. We do not solve the practical problem of ecological catastrophe, or the theoretical problem of shallow anthropomorphic projection, by denying our humanity. We cannot hide from ourselves and should not try. Speaking of his Thoreau-like life in the woods, Kohák says: “I have come to belong in this world, not because I have become less human but because this world is far more human than I once realized. When humans surrender the arrogance of domination, they can reclaim the confidence of their humanity. Nature, freed from the constraint of mechanical nature-constructs, can accept the human as also a part of its moral order.”

The recalling, the calling-together, of humans and nature must not mean the reduction of the human being to the abstracted theoretical constructs of nature proffered by the sciences, but rather the realization that they both participate in meaning, that is, in deep interconnection at their core. To see well is not to connect things. They are always already connected. To see well is to remember that they are already connected.

In moving in the opposite direction of objectification, Kohák’s first step is to help us to see-together humans and nature. Over half of the book is concerned with healing this rift between culture and the wild. His penetrating insights in this area are worth the price of the book and the cost of a careful reading.  Yet, Kohak does not stop here. He speaks of a deeper “moral sense of nature” and writes: “The ageless boulders of the long-abandoned dam, the maple and the great birch by twilight, the chipmunk in the busyness of his days and his dying . . . have value in eternity, as witnesses to the audacious miracle of being rather than nothing . . . . The moral sense of life cannot be wholly contained in the order of time.  It must be anchored in the eternity of the good, the true, the beautiful, the holy.”

Kohák recognizes that we are here getting into deep water and that the term "eternity" does not seem to fit in well with our usual ways of thinking about nature and the environment. And yet there is the sparrow at my bird feeder, with its intrinsic “integrity” and “absolute value.”  For its value to be absolute, it must not be purely reducible to its temporal life any more than it is purely reducible to its material constitution.  Here we encounter nature in its depth and height. And it is for this reason that “to destroy heedlessly, to pluck and discard, to have and leave unused, is an act of profound disrespect to the eternal worth of nature. For nature in its integrity is not simply a reservoir of raw materials.”

Some may find the reference to eternity to be obvious, others may find it strange, and still others may find it simply confusing.  But before accepting it wholeheartedly, or rejecting it out of hand, remember that Kohák’s goal in the whole book is “not to argue but to see and to evoke a vision” and he is always “pleading with the reader to pause and ponder rather than to argue and agree.” His book provides an excellent opportunity for deep meditation and reflection. If you are like me, then you will find the work of philosophical recollection required in the act of reading allows the world to start to show back up in its depth and profundity.

The mark of a good thinker is generosity. They are not systematic in the sense of building a crystalline filing system in which everything has its own pigeon-holed place. But, rather, the generous thinker is one that joyfully welcomes any and all phenomena, does not reject, cramp, or conveniently forget and misplace those that do not fit. Kohák’s book will not explain the world. Indeed, it will not explain anything at all. For to explain is to make the object to be explained small and orderly enough to fit into its apportioned box. “There are things which it is so beside the point to explain,” he writes. “It is much more important to cherish and give thanks for the lights that enrich the night. Explaining, making, those are the priorities of the day which conceal the world around us. In the dusk of a forest clearing, other things matter — to respect first, then to understand, only then, perhaps, to explain.”  Rather than explanations and theories, Kohák can provide the reader with a practice of recollection, generosity, and appreciative wonder for the gift of the natural world. His book might then become for you an icon “Against Forgetting.”