Introduction

There is a growing consensus not just within academia, but also in the general public view, that modern man is facing an ecological crisis. An agreement concerning what this “crisis” is, and what its causes or solutions are, seems to be a lacking, but most people seem to agree with the fact that something needs to be done. That modern, western man is living an unsustainable life and need to make some radical adjustments of his lifestyle will undoubtly give rise to problems that will be difficult to solve. We need, however, to draw an important line between practical problems due to this, for example questions concerning use of energy, consumption, travelling habits etc, and what we can call philosophical aspects of this crisis. These are questions concerning man’s relation to nature, but also man’s relation to himself. It is fairly easy to critizise this relation as faulty, and the usual suspects to blame for this have been Christianity, Platonism, science, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, modernism, capitalism, technology, and so on. It is possible to ask: Does our ecological situation, that is, our entire way of life, rest on a flawed dualistic ontology? I think it’s pertinent to raise such questions, and I think phenomenology is up to the task of treating these questions adequately. Eco-phenomenology is, according to Brown og Toadvine: “based on a double claim: first, that an adequate account of our ecological situation requires the methods and insights of phenomenology; and second, that phenomenology, led by its own momentum, becomes a philosophical ecology, that is, a study of the interrelationship between organisms and world in its metaphysical and axiological dimensions” (Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (ed), 2003 p. xii–xiii).

Eco-phenomenology is, however, a discipline not without problems. “Nature” is, for example, a very difficult concept to work with. How is it possible to even theorize about “nature” without projecting human values onto it? Indeed, isn’t the very idea of nature an historical one? Aware of such difficulties, it is not the aim of this article try to establish a rigid and tight definition of “eco-phenomenology”. I will focus on the claim that reflections about our ecological condition need to start not with “nature”, but with the self. My claim is that the first step of eco-phenomenology will not be reorientating our relation with the natural world, but the relation to the self, that is, how we view nature is dependent on how we view the self.

In this matter, I will examine the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche. This is because they both tried to radically reformulate the human relation to the self by making the body as the starting point: For Merleau-Ponty the human self is through its language and its breathing body deeply rooted with what he calls the “flesh of the world”; for Nietzsche the notion of will to power as physiology reveals the fundamental connectedness between man vs. world. They both question and try to overcome the view where there is an impenetrable barrier between the human and nonhuman, where the mind as pure interiority beholds nature as pure exteriority, and where the endeavor of the self is to get above the things and not into them.

The focal point of the article will be David Abram’s reading of Merleau-Ponty in his The Spell of the Sensuous.1 Here we find the claim that our ecological situation is a consequence of the literary self’s alliance with the Socratic self. This has led to a misconception of the psyche as something autonomous and wholly “internal”; thus a forgetting of the self’s reliance upon the animate earth. I will claim that this is an interesting and necessary contribution, but it can and should be complemented with Nietzsche.2 This is a different approach to the critique of Socratic thinking. With his view of the human situation as a nihilistic way of interpreting fuelled by the wish to get rid of suffering, he expands this critique to a more general critique of civilization itself. In order to replace the traditional way of thinking about the self it is necessary to see how the modern self has originated; to see how the interiorization of the psyche has consequences for the human-nature relationship resulting in ecological crisis.

Merleau-Ponty and Eco-Phenomenology

There is today a widely accepted opinion among phenomenologists that the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty not only have relevance to enviromental issues, but can serve as a core of a coherent philosophical ecology, or an eco-phenomenology (See Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (ed.), 2003, and Susanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (ed.), 2007). This is especially the “late” Merleau-Ponty which rebutted his earlier positions in the Phenomenology of Perception as being within a Cartesian mind-body framework, starting from the “consciousness” – “object” distinction. Of course, he was always true to his main thought, that perception and language always is an embodied phenomenon, but in his later works, he started developing an ontology of “flesh” (la chair) which sought to dissolve the dualism that marks humans off from other living things by maintaining the view that intentionality now can be generalized to all living organisms, and through this, to the whole of nature. True, he never uses the term “ecology”, but the concept of nature was nevertheless of great importance to him. His working notes indicate he planned to make explicit our “kinship” with animality, and to redefine the “the man-animality – relation (Merleau-Ponty, 1992, p. 168 and p. 274). I therefore think it is justified to claim that, with his notion of “flesh” and “flesh of the world”, Merleau-Ponty’s turn to ontology was at the same time a turning toward nature. This flesh is something philosophy yet haven’t fully elaborated:

“The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element”, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1992, p. 139).

The flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix which gives rise to both the perciever and percieved. Intercorporeity weaves everything together, because everything participates in the “flesh of the world”. The mutual relationship is the notion of “envelopment”, Merleau-Ponty’s “cardinal principle” as Jean-Paul Sartre once claimed (Cataldi/Hamrick (ed), 2007, p. 4). This is what Merleau-Ponty calls the “intertwining” or the “chiasm”. This reversibility, that […] “every perception is doubled with a counter-perception […] is an act with two faces, one no longer knows who speaks and listens” (Merleau-Ponty, 1992, p. 264–265). It is a “speaking-listening, seeing-being seen, percieving-being percieved circularity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1992, p. 265). In this way, perception is participatory as my hand is able to touch things only because my hand is itself a touchable thing. To touch a stone is at the same time to experience one’s own tactility, to see a tree to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. Our bodies then senses the world because it is entirely a part of the tactile world that it explores, we might even say that we are organs of this world and that the world is perceiving itself through us. A wholly immaterial mind would then neither see things nor touch things, indeed it could not experience anything at all. It is not my aim to elaborate the views of Merleau-Ponty further. We are interested in the “ecological” consequences here. We then need to raise the questions; does this “reversibility” of subject and object extend to every entity that I experience? In other words, what significance does this have to our relations to nonhuman entities; animals and the landscape? In order to answer this, we need to look at David Abram’s reading of Merleau-Ponty.

Language and Animism: Abram and Merleau-Ponty

According to Abram, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty contains a view of language where language and perception are inextricable connected to place and landscape. This connection is not obvious because it has been obscured to modern literate man, but it can be rediscovered by looking at how non-literate or indigenous people view their world. Oral peoples rarely close their thoughts off from the sensuous surroundings, and with the absence of recorded history, they remember their stories or myths through the landscape. Therefore, it is no coincidence that most non-literate cultures hold an animistic world-view.

What is animism? According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1974), animism is simply a: “belief that all objects (trees, stones, the wind, etc.) have souls”. From a modern post-cartesian, post-baconian point of view, it is usual to consider this as a silly anthropomorphism, projecting human attributes onto nature much like children do when they errouneously believe that everything has a purpose or a consciousness. Abram views this differently. For him, animism implies that we as humans participate in a community consisting of beings that are other-than-human. This does not mean that humans constitute some standard of personhood to which others must aspire, but simply that we’re all members of a larger-than-human community. Of course, Merleu-Ponty never asserted an “animistic philosophy”, but still, it’s not unthinkable that a concequence of the participatory nature of perception is that this primordial mode of perception admits of no clear distinction between that which is animate and that which is inanimate. In animistic cultures we find that language as such very often originally was a swirling garment of vapour and breath worn by the encompassing earth itself. In primordial times, animals could also speak. For these people, when man looks at the world, the world looks back, and when man speaks to the world, the world speaks back. There is no realm of the percievable world which is definitively inert or inanimate, and all things have the capacity for expression or speech. Animals, plants and the landscape are all included in what they call “language”.

This is not so strange for us moderns as it first seems. It merely rests on a supposition that there is a homology between the art of reading and the indigenous art of tracking. Why not consider the flight of swooping birds as a kind of cursive script written in the wind open for reading in order to gain knowledge about the future? Or a smell of animal urin here, a broken twig, a dump of scat here; these are all signs that need to be read. Indigenous people thus have a respectful openness towards nature. They take part in a semiotics which also includes the more-than human; the signs of nature speak to them. Another common trait among these cultures is the fact that they do not view awareness or perception as a specific human faculty. They identify it not with psyche as some sort of human interiority or inwardness, but with wind or breath. That is, “mind” is for them not a power which resides inside their heads, but, on the contrary, it is a quality that they themselves are inside of along with the plants, animals and the rest of the landscape.

Interestingly, if we take a look at the etymology of our word “psyche”, we see some striking similarities. The Greek noun psyche signified not merely the “soul” or the “mind”, but also a “breath” and a “gust of wind”. The verb psychein means “to breathe”. Another word, pneuma, signified that vital principle which in English we call “spirit”. The word “spirit” itself did not at all originally have non-sensuous and incorporeal connotations. It is directly related to the very bodily term “respiration” through their common root in the Latin word spiritus, which signified both “breath” and “wind”. And, animus, which later became “thinking substance”, is derived from the older Greek term “anemos”, meaning “wind”. Thus, as Abram points out:

“ […] A great many terms that now refer to the air as purely passive and insensate medium are clearly derived from words that once identified the air with life and awareness. And words that now seem to designate a strictly immaterial mind, or spirit, are derived from terms that once named the breath as the very substance of that mystery” (Abram, 1997, p. 238).

We now understand Anaximenes better when he states that: “As the psyche, being air, holds a man together and gives him life, so breath and air hold together the entire universe and give it life” (Abram, 1997, p. 252). However, with the emergence of formal writing systems, the human community begins to shift its awareness away from the expressive, speaking and living landscape toward letters and self-contained sign-systems. When we learn to read we need to break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain. These senses are then recoupled upon the flat surface of the book of letters. But according to Abram, this is still animism:

“As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless – as mysterious as a talking stone” (Abram, 1997, p. 131).

Written language then, is some sort of self-reflexive mode of animism, and it’s connection with a more-than human world have been obscured, but not completely severed. In fact, according to Abram’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, the denotative, conventional dimension of language can never be truly severed from the sensorial dimension of direct, affective meaning. Meaning always remains rooted in the sensory life of the body, and the body again is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in others, in things, in the encompassing earth. I think it is possible to view the underlying claim of the essay The Intertwining-The Chiasm as being that nature might be conceptualized as language. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty wrote about his phenomenology as an attempt to describe a “wave of Being” or a “wild”, “brute” Being, whose “wild meaning” reveals that: “language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests” (Merleau-Ponty, 1992, p. 155). For Merleau-Ponty, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the perceptual life-world, who elaborates itself in language. It is not the human body alone, but rather the whole of the surrounding world that provides the deep structure of language. The modern human alienation or estrangement from nature is thus an alienation within language. Symptoms of this are the belief in the immaterial “soul” or the “inner world” of our Western psychological experience, but also the belief in some sort of supernatural heaven. They both originate in the loss of our primordial reciprocity with the animate earth. We can’t follow the pursuit of the origin of heaven here. For now, let’s focus on the interiorization of the human psyche. As Abram asks: “How did the psyche get trapped inside the human skull leaving the air itself a thin and taken-for-granted presence, commonly equated, today, with mere empty space”? (Abram, 1997, p. 239).

Literacy and the Interiorization of the “Psyche”

We moderns tend to view thinking as something we do with our heads. “Use your head” we say, meaning that reason or rational-logical thinking is a separate activity which has a specific location inside the head. Could it be any different? We find this to be very intuitively, and yet, Abram claims that the experience of the psyche as something inside the head is a phenomenon created by literacy. His argument goes as follows:

We can assume that our very first writing was our own footprints or our handprints in the soil. When we discovered that animals made similar marks, we found that by copying these to certain medias we could gain a new power. We could in a way draw animals near and make them appear even when they weren’t actually present. By transferring that outline for example onto the wall of the cave we could place ourself in distant contact with the Other. A general element of most earlier writing systems are the use of pictograms, which are pictures intended to be “read”. The stylized images of sunrises, the ox or the bird in the early Sumerian cuneiform writing (from circa 3000 B.C.E.) are pictograms. Such writing systems very often also contain ideograms. An ideogram also has a pictorial character, but, unlike the pictogram it does not refer explicitly to the visible entity, but to some quality or or other phenomenon associated with it. For example, the Sumerian image of a sunrise was used to communicate the idea “day” and curvy lines or waves comminucated “water”.

According to Abram, the transition from pictographic and ideographic writing to phonetic writing can be explained by expanding the use of pictographs to be read phonetically. These symbols are referred to as “rebuses”. They come in handy when entities which do not easily correspond to sensory images are to be expressed. The Sumerian word ti, meaning “life”, was depicted by using the pictorial sign for “arrow”, which is also called ti. With such puns, as the rebuses really are, a vital difference is made. The focus is now the particular sound of the human voice which the sign refers to, not the outward reference or meaning of the sound. It is then not hard to understand how such pictograms gradually led to phonetic writing systems. Following Abram:

“In the Middle East the rebus system was eventually generalized … to cover all the common sounds of a given language. Thus, ‘syllabaries’ appeared, wherein every basic sound-syllable of the language had its own conventional notation or written character” (Abram, 1997, p. 99). We find then in the Semitic scripts around 1500 B.C.E. a notation system that would eventually give rise to the alphabet. The Semitic aleph-beth established a letter for each of the consonants. This marks a gradual shift, a new distance opens between human culture and the rest of nature. This does not mean that this distance is not present even from the beginning. Pictographic and ideographic writing do to some extent displace our sensory participation with the animate environment, but the difference is, according to Abram, “the written images themselves often related us back to the other animals and the environing earth. The pictorial glyph or character still referred, implicitly, to the animate phenomenon of which it was the static image.[…] With the phonetic aleph-beth, however, the written character no longer refers to any sensible phenomenon, but solely to a gesture made by the human mouth” (Abram, 1997, p. 100). However, in the Semitic scripts the vowels was not yet determined and needed to be chosen by the reader. Thus, these texts did not yet stand on their own feet since the reader had to fill in the vowels according to the written context in order to make the writing come alive and to speak. This process comes to an end with the Greek alphabet, where the vowels now also got their syllables. The reader must now no longer, as in the Semitic scripts, actively engage and fill in the vowels. The Greek scripts therefore had an autonomy never before seen, and relative to the Semitic text they now stood and spoke on their own. The shift from the outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image to the shape of the utterance itself, implies for Abram that the larger, more-than-human life-world in itself is no longer part of the semiotic, no longer a necessary part of the system. There is a forgetting when it comes to “the indebtedness of human language to the more-than-human perceptual field” (Abram, 1997, p. 102). Language as such becomes a self-referential system.

Interestingly, this happened in the time around Plato and Socrates. With the philosophy of Plato, there is a shift in the view of the self and in the view of nature. Abram, drawing on the works of Eric Havelock highlights the relations between the Socratic self and the literary self.

“Plato and Socrates were able to co-opt the term psyche – which for Anaximenes was fully associated with the breath and the air- employing the term now to indicate something not just invisible but utterly intangible. The Platonic psyche was not at all a part of the sensuous world, but was rather of another, utterly nonsensuous dimension. The psyche, that is, was no longer an invisible yet tangible power continually participant, by virtue of the breath, with the enveloping atmosphere, but a thoroughly abstract phenomenon now enclosed within the physical body as in a prison” (Abram, 1997, p. 253).

Compare with Havelock:

”As language became separated visually from the person who uttered it, so also the person, the source of the language, came into sharper focus and the concept of selfhood was born. […] “The “self” was a Socratic discovery, or, perhaps we should say, an invention of the Socratic vocabulary. […] The chosen symbol of selfhood became psyche, often erroneously rendered as “the soul” (Havelock, 1986, p. 113)

Writing then creates a new self that can enter into relation and examine its own formulations, and can thus reflexively interact with itself in isolation from other persons and from the surrounding environment. For Abrams, this is an effectively desacralization of not only the breath and the air, but also the earth. The soul or the psyche emigrates; either it finds its true locus within the human skull itself, or in a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world.

This is the story of the constitution of the modern self. Whereas for many indigenous people, their languages bind the people to their particular terrains, and there is a breathing boundary between human culture and the animate earth, written language has transformed this breathing boundary into an impenetrable barrier segregating a pure inside from a pure outside. The psyche has been hermetically sealed within this new interior, and experiences itself to be a private “mind” or “consciousness” unrelated to the purely “exterior” nature or the other “minds” that surround it. Abram calls this tendency “the withdrawal of mind from sensible nature and its progressive incarceration in the human skull” (Abram, 1997, p. 255). What we need to rediscover is the respiration between the inside and the outside, “between consciousness and the unconscious, between civilization and the wilderness” (Abram, 1997 p. 257).

Abram is fully aware of the fact that language is in danger of letting him down here. Raised in an alphabetic civilization, and indeed, presenting his thoughts in a book, he can only hint at how this could be done. He stays within phenomenology when he claims that our task is not to describe or speak about things, but let the things speak for themselves. An adequate eco-phenomenology then needs to contain a shift from alphabetic thinking to some sort of poetics where the sound, rhythm, and shape of the words are not separate from the bodies that bear them “whether these be human bodies, or the tensed and muscled flesh of a moose protecting her young, or the wooden walls of one’s room, or even the ambient air itself” (Abram, 2005, p. 171–190).

But does this suffice? To adress the problem of the interiorization of man we need a proper understanding of how it is carried through. Is the alphabet the whole story of it? Abram does mention that his treatment of the alphabet points to a larger problem field: “Phonetic writing was a necessary ingredient in our estrangment from the more-than-human world; but it is hardly a sufficient cause of our obliviousness” (Abram, 1997, p. 263). Abram has focused on literacy, but, as he states, “many other factors could have been chosen, for example the emergence of agriculture in the Neolithic era, formal numbering systems, and the different other technologies spawned by alphabetic civilization itself, from telephones to televisions, from automobiles to antibiotics. […] I have wished to demonstrate less a particular thesis than a particular stance, a particular way of pondering and of questioning any factor that one might choose” (Abram, 1997, p. 263–264).

Writing is perhaps the most important prerequisite for civilization, and if it simply is one of many factors pointing at “the process whereby civilization has turned in upon itself” (Abram, 1997, p. 263) it is perhaps pertinent to ask: is civilization itself the problem?

To adress the problem of interiorization of man properly then, we need to expand the analysis to a critique of civilization itself. We thus turn to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker

As for Merleau-Ponty, the body and embodiment is also a starting point for Nietzsche’s philosophy, and, his project is also directed at bridging the gap between language and the body. He famously held the view that language is fundamentally metaphorical. This view of language as metaphorical only makes sense when perception is considered as an embodied phenomenon.3 When we, for example, view love as some sort of heat (“she is a really warm person”) or difficulties as heavy weight (“his problems are weighing him down”) , it is only because we always percieve or think through the extension of our bodies, or through the territoriality of the body, or the fact that our bodies spatially manipulate objects. There is thus a systematic correlation between language/thinking and sensory-motor experiences. Conceptual language however, manages to create an illusion that it is possible to remove oneself from this bodily basis. In this way, we believe concepts or meanings are purely abstract entities or something which refers to transcendent “ideas”. Nietzsche considers concepts as Begriffs-Mumien, dry and bloodless tombs of once living metaphors. I believe Nietzsche’s maintainance of lived experience is what makes him worthwhile for phenomenology in general, and eco-phenomenology in particular. Indeed, there is a recent interest in viewing Nietzsche as an environmental thinker. The field is still undeveloped, but is gaining more and more a solid grounding.4 According to Del Caro, Nietzsche is “the West’s first major diagnostician of ecological ignorance” (Del Caro, 2004, p. x), and if we turn to Nietzsche’s texts, we soon se that this was a matter of concern for him.

”Es steht [...] nicht anders mit allen guten Dingen, auf die wir heute stolz sind; selbst noch mit dem Maasse der alten Griechen gemessen, nimmt sich unser ganzes modernes Sein, soweit es nicht Schwäche, sondern Macht und Machtbewusstsein ist, wie lauter Hybris und Gottlosigkeit aus: denn gerade die umgekehrten Dinge, als die sind, welche wir heute verehren, haben die längste Zeit das Gewissen auf ihrer Seite und Gott zu ihrem Wächter gehabt. Hybris is heute unsre ganze Stellung zur Natur, unsre Natur-Vergewaltigung mit Hülfe der Maschinen und der so unbedenklichen Techniker- und Ingenieur-Erfindsamkeit; Hybris ist unsre Stellung zu Gott, will sagen zu irgend einer angeblichen Zweck- und Sittlichkeits-Spinne hinter dem grossen Fangnetz-Gewebe der Ursächlichkeit [...]; Hybris ist unsre Stellung zu uns, - denn wir experimentiren mit uns, wie wir es uns mit keinem Thiere erlauben würden, und schlitzen uns vergnügt und neugierig die Seele bei lebendigem Leibe auf: was liegt uns noch am „Heil“ der Seele!“ (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5 p. 357)

And in his Also sprach Zarathustra we find a rather pessimistic view of man: “Die Erde […] hat eine Haut; und diese Haut hat Krankheiten. Eine dieser Krankheiten heisst zum Beispiel: ‘Mensch’ (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 4, p. 168). This is connected with one of the overall themes presented in the prologue of the book, where Zarathustra states: „Ich beschwöre euch, meine Brüder, bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden! Giftmischer sind es, ob sie es wissen oder nicht” (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 4, p.15).

It has been written extensively about Nietzsches critique of modern man infatuated by ascetic and nihilistic ideals set above life where we ceaselessly judge earthly life from the standpoint of otherworldly, metaphysical ideals, and that our values spring out from feelings of ressentiment. How we negate the earth then is also connected with how we view our bodies, not just as a prison in which the “soul” resides; even if we do not believe in an eternal soul, but we still hold the belief in an autonomous “subject” or the “psyche” as a pure mental, inward area. Nietzsche regards this as a sort of sickness, perhaps the sickness characteristic of humanity, which is connected with the triumph of reactive forces over active forces. The paradox here, for Nietzsche, is that we worship weakness, but still strive to achieve a greater power over nature and ourselves. The hubris, which is our attitude towards both nature and ourselves, makes the unrestrained desire for domination over nature into a drive to dominate ourselves, or in other words, the nature “within” us. It is therefore plausible to understand our totalitarian desire for dominating and subordinating nature as a process or we also direct onto ourselves. Nietzsche calls this a “Domestizierung” or “Zahmung” of the man-animal. I interpret this not as two parallell processes, neither as two processes simply connected, it is one and the same process. The domestication of man is the domestication of nature, and, vice versa, the domestication of nature is the domestication of man. Whereas Abram views the interiorization of the psyche as some sort of passive forgetting leading to estrangement from nature, this is for Nietzsche an active labour put upon man. Man as such is made through a “primary physis-displacement” (Pettersen, 1991, p. 19, my translation); a displacement of the forces of the body through a process of domestication. In order to better understand the pathology of the human – nature relationship according to Nietzsche, we need to take a look at the process Nietzsche calls “Verinnerlichung”.

The Domestication of Man as “Verinnerlichung”

For Nietzsche, all living organisms are constellations of either active or reactive forces.

Active forces are capable of transgressing themselves, they expand and reach out for power, whereas reactive and passive forces are constrained in their development and confined within their own borders. Nietzsche views not only the making of man as a cultural or moral being, but the making of man as a species as such as a suppression of the animal drives or forces. Man is the result of a persistent breeding, disciplining, and civilizing of the animal body.

He calls the making of man the process of “ein Thier heranzüchten, das versprechen darf” (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5 p. 291).

How do you breed forth an animal capable of making promises? This animal needs concepts, it needs a memory, and it needs to regard itself as a self-identical subject. Man is always immersed in a greater body; it is literally a member of the body of society. Socialization into a lingistic community, whether it is the primitive herd or a modern society, demands both a disciplining of the body and a disciplining of language. There is a need to establish regimes of meaning which differentiate between the “right” and “wrong” use of language in order to bind the members of society within regular patterns of behavior. Society or civilization performs a continual work on the body which organizes it and splits it up into different zones which persist through time. Society or civilization depends on bringing its members together in a common history; a memory. Nietzsche understands the phenomenon of memory as the result of an ungeheure Arbeit which has been done during man’s pre-history, and whose consequences constitute his future societal life. Whereas traditional psychology considers memory as an active and accumulating ability, and forgetting as a passive or eroding one, Nietzsche turns this upside-down when he states that: “Vergesslichkeit ist keine blosse vis inertiae, wie die Oberflächlichen glauben, sie ist vielmehr ein aktives, im strengsten Sinne positives Hemmungsvermögen” (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5 p. 357).

We see here that forgetting is an active ability comparable with digestion. It absorbs events and experiences, works them through and then breaks them down to make room for new content. Nietzsche regards it as a doorkeeper to the psychical health because it preserves the present. In order to make room for history, the forgetting needs to be impeded. The responsibility (die Verantwortlichkeit) and conscience (das Gewissen) need to be established. Man needs to be concerned about his own past and future actions. He needs to adapt to the force and brutality of the time-schedule. In this transition into a cultural being, man is being pulled out of nature, experiencing himself as separated from it, and, thus, separated from himself. According to Eric Blondel, this constitutes the “inner life” or consciousness as such.

“For Nietzsche, culture is originally established by and as a certain kind of separation (meta-phor) between the instincts (the “body”) and thought or expression […] In fact, one’s own body is not immediately present to man, but must, within the cultural economy, express itself (i.e., speak to itself) through the medium of a symptomatic language: consciousness or spirit” (Blondel, 1986, p. 151).

This “primordial physis-displacement”, where consciousness is the consequence of the becoming-reactive of man, is connected to the process of “Verinnerlichung”:

”Alle Instinkte, welche sich nicht nach Aussen entladen, wenden sich nach Innen – dies ist das, was ich die Verinnerlichung des Menschen nenne: damit wächst erst das an den Menschen heran, was man später seine „Seele“ nennt“ (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5, p. 322).

Like Freud, Nietzsche extensively borrows metaphors from the field of hydraulics in his philosophy. The body is compared to a system of pressure, forces or drives, and if these are blocked they will simply be channeled in other directions. Affections not acted out in an adequate motor response will then turn inward, creating a toxic mechanism or a physiologisches Hemmungsgefühl (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5, p. 378):

”Die ganze innere Welt, ursprünglich dünn wie zwischen zwei Häute eingespannt, ist in dem Maasse aus einander- und aufgegangen, hat Tiefe, Breite, Höhe bekommen, als die Entladung des Menschen nach Aussen gehemmt worden ist“ (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5, p. 322).

Consciousness thus arises as an inhibition of action, an inhibition which is a prerequisite for civilization as such to arise. There is a very close relationship between Nietzsche’s view of culture/civilization and his view of nihilism. Nihilism seems to stem from this Hemmungsgefühl which civilization creates. This is where a demon called Socrates enters the stage.

Unlike Plato, Socrates is not an aristocrat, but a member of the lower stratum of the Greek polis. As one of the people, he is not able to directly act out his drives and reactions. In order to get influence, Socrates invents a quite clever tool; dialectics. In one sense, Socrates only invented a new art of fencing or rivalry which the Hellenes found fascinating due to their fondness of agon. Dialectics thus becomes simply another stadium where young men can try out their skills in competition with another. But what is really going on is a deeper revolt against the noble. Dialectics is the weak man’s weapon, because his last option is to get his opponent to put his weapons aside and try to move the competition to the arena of discussion. This is an example of how values have been revaluated. The cunning of the weak is to fool the strong by changing the rules of the game, and thus the strong’s own conception of his strength. So, according to Nietzsche, Socrates did actually lead the young astray. After Socrates, the strong can no longer just command, he needs to give reasons for his actions. The immediacy of the master is now no longer given or natural, but subjected to claims of warrants from reason. This has the consequence that consciousness becomes the judge over the instincs. When this impotent position starts interpreting, life and being now becomes something which must be justified to consciousness. The thirst of knowledge sets in, and with it an optimistic hope that consciouness is able to make sense of life: not just by knowledge about life, but to correct it. This also changes how one views suffering. It is no longer something which one must endure, as tragedy teaches us, but something one seeks to overcome or exterminate through knowledge. Socrates was tired of life, and therefore made accusations against it as he tried to get out of it. This is a yearning after a position towards life which is not possible. Life is for Nietzsche always prior to valuations, and a total, all-including perspective on life is not possible, because to valuate life as such, one needs to stand outside of it. But this is exactly what Socrates wants. His weariness and discontent with life makes him want to get out of the game: he wishes to sever the embodied connectedness with the world. This is a type of thinking which places the meaning of life beyond it, either in a supersensory heaven or a theory of forms. But for Nietzsche, value judgements regarding life can never be “true” or “false”. Propositions about the value of life must be read as symptoms of the physiology behind them. From the point of view of physiology, Socrates represents a type of monoinstincualism where the solitary importance of rationality, knowledge and consciousness are symptoms of imbalance in the body. It is a form of sickness that seeks escape routs, because it is not strong enough to endure life as it is here and now. The dream of exterminating suffering as such through knowledge and science, is then also a declaration of war against the body and the senses. The domestication of man, which seeks to tame and even exterminate the drives of the body, thus leads to the world losing its value measured up against a “beyond”. Both the creation of heaven as an autonomuos static realm, and the soul/psyche as an autonomuos static entity, is a part of this complex because they both rely on an “outside” which life itself can be measured up against. If our valuations are to be brought back down to earth and become “ecological”, we then need to dissolve this. We need to start value life from within, we need to release the belief in a separate and isolated spirit; we need to see that spirit is blood.

Writing in Blood

So what does it mean to remain faithful to the earth? We have seen that the scientific drive for unity, or the metaphysical search for essences, is for Nietzsche a sort of weakness. They are strategies to escape from the body. Using concepts, philosophers have tried to freeze up the world in order to master it, and made themselves Begriffs-Krüppel along the road. What Nietzsche is seeking, is a philosophy which affirms the body without seeking protection against its chaos, flux and becoming. This is a philosophy which also embraces suffering. Nietzsche is seeking an interpretation of suffering that does not follow the escape route of redemption, but gives a tragic affirmation of it as a necessary condition of life. Without the slightest attempt to escape, Nietzsche is trying to describe the bodily connection with the animate earth as a lived experience: “Von allem Geschriebenen liebe ich nur Das, was Einer mit seinem Blute schreibt. Schreibe mit Blut: und du wirst erfahren, dass Blut Geist ist” (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 4, p. 44). The psyche is embodied, the spirit is no different from blood, but the blood is furthermore also the ink that make up the text. Nietzsche is, with his philosophy, writing down his difficult attempts to try to reconcile the splitting up between psyche/spirit, body, and language. Analyzing our ecological situation then, Nietzsche considers nihilism as some sort of sickness in language. This sickness can be spotted within European nihilism as science and philosophy: all movements which need identity and stiff metaphysical concepts to master the earth as a fixed object. In the same way as Abram, Nietzsche then is facing a problem. If man’s ecological situation can best be described as an alienation or disengagement within language, then how is it possible to communicate this? This is a challenge Nietzsche’s writing style always battles. His philosophy represents a sort of self-formation through language where the biographical, philosophical and stilistic are closely intervowen. Nietzsche’s insights are inextricably connected with their formulations, his thoughts closely tied to personal experiences, which implies that his thinking always balances on the brink of what is communicable. I believe he is fully aware of the limitations of language. Like Abram, Nietzsche’s struggle with and against language needs to take the form of a poetics. We see this clearly in his Also Sprach Zarathustra, where there is an abundance of poetic images over abstract concepts, and we must not forget that a great deal of the insights from this book does not stem from Zarathustra or any other human, but from his animals. We find in this work a very large number of animals; snakes, eagles, monkeys, dogs, wolves, lions, tigers, vultures etc. etc. It is correct to read Zarathustra’s journeys from the villages and cities to the forests, and back again, as a blurring of the traditional culture-nature relationship, and hence an oscillating movement bringing “wild wisdom” into civilization. This “wild wisdom” which permeates Nietzsche’s project can then maybe be read as: “Den Menschen nähmlich zurückübersetzen in die Natur [...] – das mag eine seltsame und tolle Aufgabe sein, aber es ist eine Aufgabe – wer wollte das leugnen!” (Nietzsche, 1967–77 Band 5 p. 169). This is not at all a Rousseau-like understanding of man as inherent good if one only removes the corrupting ties of civilization. There is no fixed “human nature” for Nietzsche. As we have seen, there is a primordial physis-displacement in the prehistory of man, but there is no going back to this lost “nature”; no regression back to the unconsciusness of the drives or some sort of spontaneous irrationalism og immoralism. However, the final outcome of this physis-displacement is not given for Nietzsche. Man’s painful openness toward Being is on one hand the soil which makes nihilistic interpretations possible, but it is also on the other the very thing that, unlike the animals, makes it possible for man to overcome itself.

In the philosophy of Nietzsche we thus get the suspicion that perhaps it is not just the civilizing of man or civilization which is the problem, as a skin-disease, perhaps man as such is the problem. An examination of the ecological condition of man may thus lead us to an abysmal challenge: what if man as such needs to be overcome? There might then be a connection between “translating man back to nature” and Nietzsche’s task of “revaluation of all values”; to create new valuations of life which do not stand outside, but inside it. But isn’t this dichotomy only apparently, because, if there is no longer any “outside”, how could there then be any “inside”?

Conclusion: Getting Down to Earth

To sum up, both Abram/Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche have two common claims:

  1. (a)

    man is in some way estranged or alienated from nature.

  2. (b)

    one of the symptoms of this pathological man – nature relationship is his “interiority”, the incarcaration of the “psyche”.

However, they seem to explain how this interiority has arisen in different ways. According to Abram, literacy is mainly responsible for man’s forgetting of his dependence upon a more-than-human world, and for Nietzsche, man’s original physis-displacement has been cemented by nihilistic, other-worldly valuations. Is a study which combines these two perspectives a possibility? I believe this would be a study which complements the two in an interesting way, covering mutual blind spots and gaps in the following way:

An important part of Nietzsche’s project is to overcome metaphysics and nihilism as a sort of sickness within language. There is, however, no reflection around literacy or the written language as a medium in his works. Maybe Abram can give a new and interesting approach to Nietzsche by illuminating that perhaps a precondition for metaphysics is literacy as a technology, that there is a connection between “alphabetic thinking” and metaphysics?

And on the other side: The phenomenology of Merleau-Pony is also a critique of the separate and disconnected self. Abram develops this further by showing that literacy has had an impact on the making of this self. But he never expands this to a larger critique of civilization. If we accept Nietzsche’s claims that the interiorization of the psyche is the result of a labour done by domesticating forces, is it then possible that literacy can be examined as a disciplining technology which has been active in constituting the modern self?

If both these can be answered with a “yes”, then this could be a study which perhaps deserve the label eco-phenomenology; ecological because an understanding of the genesis of the self is the most adequate approach to rewrite the man-nature relationship, phenomenology because it would seek to get the delusions of pure abstractness and transcendence back down to their origins; to crack open the skull and release the psyche back to the body and the breathing earth.

Notes

  1. 1

    Abram, D. 1997. The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

  2. 2

    I read Nietzsche (partly) as a phenomenologist here. For a discussion concerning this matter, read Storm Torjussen: Is Nietzsche a phenomenologist? in Tymieniecka, A-T (ed): Analecta Husserliana Vol. 103 Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, Book I. New Waves of Philosphical Inspirations, New York: Springer, 2009.

  3. 3

    For a more exhaustive treatment of this subject, see Storm Torjussen: Is Nietzsche a phenomenologist? Analecta Husserliana 2009.

  4. 4

    See especially Del Caro, A. 2004. Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric on Earth. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.