On Dwelling: Poetry, Place, and Politics (Toposophia: Thinking Place/Making Space) 9781666918281, 9781666918298, 1666918288

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On Dwelling

TOPOSOPHIA Thinking Place/Making Space This series, dedicated to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of place, will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields, especially those in philosophy, geography, political theory, architecture, landscape design, history, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, media, and the creative arts. As the combination of topos and sophia in the series title suggests, the aim is to engage with issues of place and space (geographical, architectural, environmental, political, aesthetic, virtual) in a questioning and reflective (broadly “philosophical”) fashion. However, the series is not restrictive in the range of disciplines included nor in the ways in which place and space might be taken up. Series Editors: Jessica Dubow (University of Sheffield) and Jeff Malpas (University of Tasmania) Editorial Board: Edmunds Bunkse, Nader El-Bizri, Matti Itkonen, Eduardo Mendieta, John Murungi, John Pickles, Beata Sirowy, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Dennis Skocz Books in the Series: On Dwelling: Poetry, Place, and Politics, by Dennis E. Skocz American Camino: Walking as Spiritual Practice on the Appalachian Trail, by Kip Redick The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power, by Akel Isma’il Kahera Toward a Directionalist Theory of Space: On Going Nowhere, by H. Scott Hestevold Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong: Two Systems, One City, by Shu-Mei Huang Mapping and Charting in Early Modern England and France: Power, Patronage, and Production, by Christine Petto Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship between Memory and Place, by Janet Donohoe Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago, by Charlie Hailey Reading the Islamic City: Discursive Practices and Legal Judgment, by Akel Isma’il Kahera Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter after Noah, Edited by Ralph R. Acampora The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events, by Theodore R. Schatzki Environmental Dilemmas: Ethical Decision Making, by Robert Mugerauer and Lynne Manzo

On Dwelling Poetry, Place, and Politics Dennis E. Skocz

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Skocz, Dennis, author. Title: On dwelling : poetry, place, and politics / Dennis E. Skocz.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Toposophia: thinking place/ making space | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023034521 (print) | LCCN 2023034522 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666918281 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666918298 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Communities. | Place attachment. Classification: LCC HM756 .S56 2024  (print) | LCC HM756  (ebook) | DDC 307–dc23/ eng/20230811 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034521 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034522 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction

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PART I: DWELLING: THE TESTIMONY OF POETS Chapter 1: Prairie and City: The Poetry of Carl Sandburg Chapter 2: Property and the Land: Xenophon and Frost



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Chapter 3: Nature and Democracy:  Whitman’s New World Metaphysics 47 PART II: PHENOMENOLOGIES OF PLACE Chapter 4: Property and Home: Mine and Thine



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Chapter 5: On the Road with Herodotus: The Strange, the Familiar, and the Earthbound Chapter 6: Nature and the Wild

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PART III: THE POLITICS OF PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT

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Chapter 7: The Perils of Comfortable Estrangement: A Micro-Phenomenology 127 Chapter 8: Whose Land Is It Anyway? Xenophobe and Alien Foe Chapter 9: Wall Street and Main Street in Schutzian Perspective

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PART IV: THE “BIG PICTURE”: A WHOLE-EARTH VIEW

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Chapter 10: From Marketplace to “Marketspace”

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Contents

Chapter 11: Body Mapping and the Anthropocene



Chapter 12: Earthling or Cosmopolitan? The Limits and Prospects of Interlocution Bibliography Index

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About the Author



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Introduction

The aim of this undertaking is to unfold the meaning of dwelling to that being whose very being is a being-in-the-world and on-the-earth with others. The book amounts to a self-reflection: as dwellers, we seek to understand who and what we are, and so we step back from our everyday engagement with things and other dwellers, not to retreat from the world into a solitary selfconfinement, but rather to take stock of our coexistence. In coming to know our dwelling selves better, we inevitably come to understand more deeply the places that afford dwelling to us. We may say that dwelling and place inform and remake each other. The book is no mere academic exercise. We put questions to places and modes of dwelling that arise from the encounters and tasks that address us— individually and together; locally, in those places where we live out our daily lives, and at a whole-earth level, where challenges on the horizon become more and more imminent. The manifold studies in the book offer the reader a reflection on dwelling that deploys the notion of place as a “place-holder” for dwelling, such that place becomes literally the very ground of our being on the earth and in the world. The approach here is topological, i.e., deploying a logos or language of place (topos) that embraces the discourses of poetry, philosophy, and politics. It is one that draws upon twelve studies that address places of dwelling: from the intimate space of the home to “marketspace” (said to create a borderless world) to the planet we “earthlings” have come to transform in the epoch called the Anthropocene. The reflection aims for a coherent and cumulative narrative of how we have come to find ourselves “here and now” with just those issues (environmental, economic, and political) that confront us—hoping that this effort will throw light on the way ahead. Of necessity, the approach here is layered and perspectival. It is layered because the scope of the places it studies expands as the narrative-reflection progresses. It ranges from a place on the earth where an individual prairie 1

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Introduction

dweller begins and each day’s work in its poetic embrace, to the planet itself, imperiled by humanity’s demands upon it. The approach is also perspectival: sometimes hermeneutic, reading between the lines of a poem, to capture a sensibility that matter-of-fact prose misses; at other times, historical in the study of grand narratives, tapping into undercurrents that portend the future and confront us all with questions that have come to be called “existential.” The sheer aggregation of data as collected and sifted for patterns and correlations by the empirical sciences, natural and human, afford a perspective as well. An overview of the chapter titles will suggest that the approach taken here is cross-disciplinary. A careful reading will confirm that impression. Economics, jurisprudence, political science, ethology, geophysics, anthropology—all of these and other disciplines are invoked to round out and fill in our understanding of the phenomena in play. In this sense, they are among the perspectives cited above. The author is not an expert or even a practitioner in any of these many fields. Nor is the reader expected to be. The point is not to make arguments and prove points using the distinctive methods of a science in the debates that rise within a discipline. Rather, the intent is to see each discipline as a perspective on a phenomenon which empowers our understanding of the whole, an understanding that behooves the attention of a philosopher looking to grasp the “essential” and a citizen obliged to take his or her part in a discourse that would collectively address the issues imperiling dwelling and troubling contested places. Phenomenology is well suited to propel and underpin a cross-disciplinary approach. Seen here, phenomenology deploys a cluster of interrelated concepts of methodological import for achieving insight into what is “essential” in an investigation. It is not a formula or recipe for demonstrating or proving theses. Phenomenology begins with a first-person experiential sense of what gives itself to us in reflection and—this author would say—with the hints provided by notions like intentionality, temporality, horizon, lifeworld, constitution, and essential insight—endeavors to articulate with evidential clarity the matter at hand. Phenomenologists from Edmund Husserl though Martin Heidegger to Jean-Paul Sartre are, as it were, “called to give phenomenological testimony” to the matters of interest in this study. This does not imply that what they say directly addresses the particular matters at hand. They are brought into the conversation with the expectation that even oblique and analogical applications of their thought, their brands of phenomenology, can drive the narrative laid out in this book. They can uncover embedded meanings and build upon layers of meaning to work together toward a cohesive narrative of far-reaching phenomena—one that affords essential insight into the issues

Introduction

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of dwelling and place, our being-in-the-world and the being-of-the earth in this our time. On Dwelling addresses place at a time when the very place all humans call home has never been more imperiled; at a time when many are driven from the their homelands and look to find a place among strangers, a place they may, in time, call home; at a time when most, if not all, inhabitants on earth make their living in largely anonymous interaction with others around the world in a globalized “marketspace”—this with disparate results on one’s standard of living and quality of life; and, at a time when we look for intimacy, repair, and “ownness” in a “place of our own” that arguably first and best defines home and dwelling itself. Each place named above presents an issue—environmental degradation, migration, economic growth and justice, privacy and identity—issues that come to find their place, as Hannah Arendt would have it, in the polis, a “space of appearance” defined by “speech and action” and marked by “contestation”: a public realm that draws us from the shadows of the private domain into the public sphere where great deeds are done, human excellence shows forth, and human life flourishes—or, so we would hope. On Dwelling culminates in reflecting on the kind of political space required to address the pressing issues of place at a time when time itself seems to be running out. Two challenges arise with respect to defining a political space adequate to addressing the aforementioned issues. The first is philosophical. It has to do with the nature, shape, and design of such a space. Traditional political philosophy and conventional political science furnish a starting point. The diverse political systems existing all over the world today have been the theme of reflection since the days of Plato and Aristotle and are the subject of extensive empirical research in today’s political science. The second challenge—the very scale and ambition of the undertaking—drives and complicates the first. A whole-earth politics with the distinctive task of caring for the earth itself must do its work on a planet rife with conflicts among existing states, extreme polarization within many polities, and a number of failed states and ungoverned territories. To be sure, whole-earth phenomena have arisen in the past—one might include here global capitalism, viruses, and what geophysicists call the epoch of the Anthropocene. When this has happened, it has not been the result of collective human negotiation, consensus, and design. It is this collective and mindful address that identifies the political task. There is no exaggerating the enormity of the political challenge and this book does not attempt to offer a scheme for the kind of political space required. At best, it can identify and warn of counterproductive approaches—ones rooted in premises antithetical a planetary effort to care for the planet. In a more hopeful vein, however, it can also identify human resources like sustainable human modes of

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Introduction

habitation—e.g., those of many indigenous peoples—and promising experimental approaches and “out of the box” thinking. ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS: GUIDE TO THE NARRATIVE The is, at one level, is a compendium of this author’s work comprised of conference papers, academic journal articles, and papers appearing for the first time here. The book is by no means a “Summa Topologica.” Where chapters are modifications of journal articles, that is noted and the journals credited and any permissions cited. This book does not cover everything, or even much of the material addressing dwelling, even as delimited by the definition used in this book. The chapters sound recurring leitmotifs and the book is cast as a narrative. This Guide to the Narrative is meant to help the reader track developing threads of thought in the book and navigate the narrative. Hopefully, the material not covered in a broader treatment will spur questions and prompt further investigation along the lines here. Perhaps too, the methodology and approach taken to what is covered herein will be useful to others interested in the field and its thematic. The aim of the book, again, is to unfold the meaning and import of dwelling to those beings who dwell in the world and on the earth with the hope of addressing those threats that imperil our cohabitation of the earth and the earth itself. The project proceeds by way of an argument/narrative that extends through four parts of three chapters each. The four parts of the book—and three chapters within each—serve as steps in the narrative that fill out and concretize aspects of dwelling so that a coherent and unified understanding of dwelling emerges at the end. On the theme of dwelling, Part I entertains the “testimony” of poets; Part II deploys phenomenological method; Part III articulates the issues that imperil our dwelling and dwelling places; and Part IV offers a “Big Picture”/Whole-Earth view of dwelling that enables a mindful discussion of dwelling issues confronting us all. PART I. DWELLING: THE TESTIMONY OF POETS Poetry offers a starting point for thought. The German poet of the early nineteenth century Friedrich Hölderlin has captured the attention of many by way of the reading the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, has given

Introduction

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him. Heidegger famously calls out what Hölderlin writes in this line from his work “poetically does the human dwell upon the earth.” All three interrelated themes—humanity, dwelling, and earth—are gathered together in the works of Sandburg (chapter 1), Xenophon and Frost (chapter 2), and Whitman (chapter 3). Chapter 1: Prairie and City: The Poetry of Carl Sandburg The preamble is an interrogative reflection on the meaning of dwelling with respect to poetry. It surveys the range of uses for the term “dwelling,” identifies those pertinent to the book, distinguishes them from each other, and, then, reflects on how it can be said, in the words of the German poet, Hölderlin, that the human dwells poetically on the earth. This reflection is set within chapter 1 of Part I to guide the interpretation of Sandburg and the succeeding poets. Chapter I inaugurates the interpretation of selected poetry in Part I with that of American mid-twentieth-century poet Carl Sandburg. Sandburg’s work here addresses the two overarching themes of the book well. Prairie and City in the chapter title figure in the poems of the first chapter and serve well as icons for Earth and World respectively. These two key terms go together to make up the “working definition” of dwelling used in this book, namely, being-in-the-world with others on the earth. Prairie refers to the earth; imagery and text from poems about the prairie suggest its importance in grounding human identity and putting humans in close relationship to the earth. The City (Chicago) is a vivid symbol of being-in-world with others—being-withothers in its fullest and most diverse way. Having set the stage in poetic terms with both principal dimensions of dwelling, Xenophon and Frost will focus on agriculture as a way of deepening the human-earth relationship. Chapter 2. Property and the Land: Xenophon and Frost Robert Frost, a poet-farmer, joins the gentleman-farmer and historian Xenophon to articulate a relationship to the land by way of cultivation. For Xenophon, farming is an untroubled and idyllic occupation. Frost speaks for the hardscrabble farmer of the Great Depression who struggles to care for the land he owns and farms, facing the pressures of the market and possible bank foreclosures. For both Xenophon and Frost, dwelling is cultivation, and cultivation involves a relationship to things that live and grow under a watchful and caring stewardship. For Frost, however, economic threats loom large, and political issues imperil the land and those who care for it. In a polemical poem

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Introduction

with theatrical elements, Frost will foreshadow economic issues—property and the market—that later chapters will spotlight.1 Chapter 3. Nature and Democracy: Whitman’s New World Metaphysics In chapter 3, place is continental in size and a dwelling place of individuals and peoples whose settlement in different parts of the country shapes their respective modes of being-in-the-world even as their lifeworlds give regions of the country a different look. Whitman addresses the democratic ambition of these peoples, in the “united States (sic)” At once, his is a discourse of poetry, place, and politics where the politics is one of democracy and e pluribus unum. The essayist Whitman links the virtues of nature itself to those needed by peoples seeking to forge a democracy of continental scope. As a poet, Whitman’s discourse is performative, a first-person call to the scattered and diverse folk of a nation that is a “work in progress.” In so doing, he demonstrates an explicit and key role for a type of poet he calls a literatus—a figure we might refer to as a “nation-builder.” Chapter 3 concludes Part I of the book. Dwelling finds metaphorical expression in icons like Prairie and City. Agriculture’s bond to the earth is given both lyrical and polemical expression, and Whitman envisions a “political space” based on democracy and pluralism grafted to the American continent. PART II. PHENOMENOLOGIES OF PLACE From Part I to II, we shift from poetry to phenonmenology and expand the scale of place under investigation from property conceived as a “zone of ownness” to a concept of nature that leaves nothing outside the natural order. Chapter 4 begins with a minimalist concept of home and property but fills out it out with the phenomena of attachment and neighborliness. Culture is wedded to geography in chapter 5 and an ethic of hospitality and justice is seen to prevail over a clash of values between cultures. And, in chapter 6, the Wild is understood less as an uninhabited geography than as modality of being with many specifications and habitats. Chapter 4. Property and Home: Mine and Thine In this chapter, a pre-juridical sense of property and ownership is sought in a phenomenological reduction that would uncover a “zone of ownness” constituted in a withdrawal from the “natural attitude,” our everyday occupation with the things and people about us. From this withdrawal, the shared-space

Introduction

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of our being-in-world-with-others divides into “the mine” and “the thine”— however vague these might be in any codified configuration. Step-by-step, the “zone” fills out by way of attachment to things in one’s near-world. Then, as the self ventures forth, it comes to encompass wider interests and cares, in the neighborhood, city, and beyond. Looking ahead to what is said in “Wall Street and Main Street,” chapter 9, and later “From Marketplace to Marketspace,” chapter 10, we see that the happy idyll of ownership suggested here is not left undisturbed by future place-related phenomena. Chapter 5. On the Road with Herodotus: The Strange, the Familiar, and the Earthbound Herodotus invites a reflection on the strange and familiar in what he writes about in chapter 5. Crossing borders in much of the known world in his time, Herodotus inaugurates a cultural geography that connects peoples and the lands they inhabit. Place is linked to who we are as a people and the groundwork is laid for reflections on coexistence. The options of being-with-others emerge: as neighbor, stranger, foe. The chapter suggests that Herodotus offers an “ethics of welcome” that exemplifies the virtues of hospitality accompanied by the application of justice across borders, to all peoples. This chapter on Herodotus derives from an article by this author in an anthology published by Lexington Books with articles on similar themes and approach to this one.2 Chapter 6. Nature and the Wild Chapter 6 calls into question the idea of the wilderness as a “mappable” space. It shifts focus from wilderness and the wild as places to a modality of being. This shift does not dislocate nature. To the contrary, it situates it all the more. Four case studies are made to “tease out” the essence of the wild in the human relationships to different kinds of “wild life-forms.” The wild being, like any natural life-form, has the source of its being within itself as Aristotle and the Greeks understood it. When it is cultivated, tamed, domesticated, or hunted, it is not imprinted with order by humans, but rather its natural powers and tendencies are enlisted by humans into a kind of symbiotic coexistence with them.3 PART III. THE POLITICS OF PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT Alienation and contestation mark the troubled domains under examination in the chapters of this section. In chapter 7, comfortably being-at-home, in a

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Introduction

climate-controlled environment, is precisely the problem. Such emplacement estranges the dweller from the material conditions of its domestic life and the costs it imposes on the natural environment outside the home. In chapter 8, a hypertrophic attachment to one’s homeland fosters a xenophobia grounded in a Self-Other philosophy that rules out the very idea of a shared-beingin-the-world. Chapter 9 begins at home on “Main Street” and follows the transformation of a dwelling place into a financial product on “Wall Street” that can untermine the foundational sense of dwelling embodied in the home. Political issues of environment, migration, and economic well-being arise from the analyss carried out in this section. These issues will be addressed at the whole-earth level in the fourth and final part of this book. Chapter 7. The Perils of Comfortable Estrangement: A Micro-Phenomenology The powerful resources of Husserlian phenomenology show well in this chapter. Two scenarios are imagined to show the essential nature of the relationship of the self and its immediate surroundings, a dwelling place in this case. These two are varied so that one (that which Husserl describes in his work, is heated by a coal stove; the other scenario is altered (by this author) to be heated by unobtrusive climate-control technology. The case is made that the technology deployed in the second scenario alienates the inhabitants from the wider-world outside—indeed, from the natural environment as such. The dwelling mode of most inhabitants of the developed world works to desensitize them from the perilous condition of the environment engendered by their domestic living technology. Arguably, a descriptive phenomenology of the self-world can lead to a consciousness-raising of political import. Chapter 8. Whose Land Is It Anyway? Xenophobe and Alien Foe Chapter 8 endeavors to address the experience of xenophobia and hostility to immigration as deriving from more than a cost-benefit analysis of what migrants contribute and what they draw from a country’s tax revenues or its gross domestic product. The self-other polarity of existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre—not intended to frame a description of xenophobia—nonetheless, gives a striking description of same. This author complicates the analysis by introducing racism to the description, and then analyzing the effect of the migrant’s speaking a “foreign” language not understood by the xenophobic native. Phenomenology is deployed to elucidate possibilities of being-in-theworld-with others that avoid a xenophobic hostility.

Introduction

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Chapter 9. Wall Street and Main Street in Schutzian Perspective Austrian philosopher and banker Alfred Schutz began to address a lacuna in the phenomenology of the economic and everyday being-in-the-world with the signature concepts of his social phenomenology in the twentieth century. This chapter offers philosophy a set of conceptual tools and terminology, adapted from Schutz, to enrich understanding of everyday life experience in the economic domain and carry out a critique of economic practice that bears on public policy. The economic space—wherein most of us in the developed world spend most of our lives—impacts people around the world and the earth itself. Part IV will pick up where chapter 9 leaves off and take up the political/public policy issues raised in here and earlier in the book.4 PART IV. THE “BIG PICTURE”: A WHOLE-EARTH VIEW This part recounts three sweeping grand narratives with worldwide, whole-earth scope: the first is an economic narrative describing and grounding the phenomenon of globalization; another narrative, bio-geophysical, announces the arrival of the Anthropocene and articulates its defining features; and, a third narrative, political, looks back to the Enlightenment and possibly to the future under the ideal of cosmopolitanism. This discussion carries forward the political critique began in Part III, giving it not only wider scope but also added urgency. Perhaps with the exception of the final chapter on “Cosmopolis,” the first two chapters are, this author believes, anchored in the sobering “facts of life” related to globalization and global climate change. None of the chapters, however, are aggregations of data. Rather, all endeavor to grasp the essential dynamics of developments that bring humanity and the earth to its current state. In the concluding chapter, the options for caring for earth and those who dwell on it are sketched out. Chapter 10. From Marketplace to Marketspace This chapter “goes global” with the analysis of the market begun in chapter 9. The neologism “marketspace” defines and describes a ubiquitous unlocalized domain that governs the flow of goods, services, and, perhaps most important, labor and capital back and forth across the globe through the semi-anonymous “agency” of the price mechanism. The chapter is brief to keep the lines of analysis clear and the direction of the narrative in view. A process that favors what Karl Marx might call a “commodification” of the earth is less to be seen as the conscious and deliberate design of individuals

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Introduction

ready to assume all the costs to planet and others to benefit themselves, than the outcome and aggregate of day-to-day choices by anonymous individuals in markets around the world. They are buying goods and services and financial securities, making individual decisions on individual criteria. The market is essentially a price mechanism that acts as a signal system guiding decisions toward “the best deal.” The anonymous agency outlined in the chapter points in the direction of a political space where all stakeholders can frame collective and deliberative judgments for matters like the environment whose value does not reflect itself in the price mechanism. The “case for” such a “political space” arises in the next chapter on the Anthropocene. Chapter 11. Body Mapping and the Anthropocene The chapter attempts to account for an age where human activity has become the dominant influence on the bio-geophysical state of the earth. The newest named bio-geophysical epoch is called the Anthropocene. The chapter looks to account for this Age of the Human that would reflect the biological and the reasoning dimensions of its being. This author proposes a neologism and process paradigm called body mapping. Humans map or imprint themselves to the earth with their bodies by way of population growth. Driven by hunger and sexual desire (leading to reproduction), humans attach themselves to the earth by way of agriculture and spread out over the planet via population growth. Malthus inspires the idea with his writings on population in the eighteenth century. A full account of the human impact on the planet requires one say something about the reasoning/language/speaking dimension of the human species. And, this comes in the chapter with concept of the “pollical space,” which again, as in the previous chapter, looks to the future and with the question of how to assume collective responsibility for a planet to which we humans acquired de facto ownership. Chapter 12. Earthling or Cosmopolitan? The Limits and Prospects of Interlocution This final chapter assesses the prospects for interlocution between “earthlings” (like indigenous peoples) and cosmopolitans to promote the well-being of the earth and its dwellers. The cosmopolitan ideal advanced by philosopher Immanuel Kant is found deficient and problematic: for giving scant attention to nature (organic being)—notwithstanding Kant’s recurring use of the word “nature”; and, for advocating a statist solution to governance implying a domination of nature understood as a human construct. The political space sketched in the chapter would develop from the interlocution and collaboration of cosmopolitans and earthlings—altogether, among a wide and open

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range of stakeholders and dwellers on the earth. This kind of collaboration is a “work already in progress”; examples are and have been operative for some decades. This concluding chapter of the book takes us back to its theme of dwelling with the cumulative “findings” and insights from all the preceding chapters on board. It would be delinquent not to suggest, as done here, a way to address the issues raised. It would, however, be unrealistic to suggest that both the work of reflection and the work of problem solving are well along the way. With respect to philosophy, what has been left unthought or unsaid about dwelling in this project remains matter for thought for further reflection in other fora. NOTES 1. Excerpts from “Build Soil” by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost, copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved. 2. Skocz, Dennis, “Herodotus and the Origins and Geography: The Strange, the Familiar, and the Earthbound,” Earth Ways, Framing Geogaphical Meanings, ed. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004) 3. This chapter was originally published as Skocz, Dennis, “Wilderness, the Wild and Nature Made Homely,” in Call to Earth 4, no. 1 (March 2003): 19–24. The journal grants permission for authors to “reuse their articles in other publications.” 4. In this chapter, I draw from Skocz, Dennis E., “Wall Street and Main Street on Schutzian Perspective,” in Schutzian Research 3 (2011): 165–82. © 2011 The copyrights to the essays in this volume belong to the authors.

PART I

Dwelling The Testimony of Poets

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Chapter 1

Prairie and City The Poetry of Carl Sandburg

PREAMBLE ON DWELLING AND POETRY Our book-length exploration of dwelling begins, through the language of poetry, in this and the next two chapters. The terms in play are dwelling, the earth, and the human being as these find expression in a line from a poem by Friedrich Hölderin, a nineteenth-century German romantic poet. The interpretation of poetry to illuminate the meaning of human dwelling may seem strange to some, but more peculiar to Hölderlin’s work is attributing poetry to human dwelling itself. As noted in the Introduction, poetry is not just the way the poet writes about and describes dwelling. More than that, it is how the human dweller dwells. To quote Hölderlin, as cited in the “Introduction”: “Poetically does the human dwell upon this earth.”1 The choice of Hölderlin to define the working terms and style of interrogation for the first three chapters is not intended to confine the interrogation here to German literary scholarship nor limit the meanings of dwelling, earth, and the human. Quite to the contrary, the possibilities for delving deeply and ranging widely on dwelling are arguably greater. Precisely because Hölderlin asserts that human dwelling itself is itself poetic, ordinary preconceptions of dwelling, human being, and the earth are challenged. We are compelled to think more deeply about each term and its relationship with the others. Let us begin with a “plain language talk-through” of the terms themselves. Let us note where the terms lead us, what may be missing to fill out their sense, and what questions they pose for Carl Sandburg and the other poets coming up. Dwelling is presumably what humans do and is said by Hölderlin to be poetic. It involves many humans and takes place on the earth. It locates us in a place where we find ourselves initially when and where we are born. If we are raised where we are born, we often say we are from that place. Date and 15

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place of birth are often used in legal documents to identify us. To be sure, dwelling anywhere does not confine us to a spot but rather becomes the point from which we look out and about and from which we move to other places. Making a living may necessitate moving elsewhere, and circumstances or others may displace us from where we make our home. Wherever we find ourselves, we situate ourselves from a place on the earth and under the sky. If, over time, we settle in a place, it becomes familiar and may come to feel like home. What is strange is what lies beyond the horizon of the familiar. The earth comes to divide into the familiar and the strange, the domestic and the foreign. How, then, does dwelling become poetical? Perhaps when it ceases to be merely prosaic. Prosaic here would represent the everyday, the taken-for-granted, making a living. Here is where Hölderlin suggests the sense of the poetic by way of contrast to the task of work. Hölderlin distinguishes the poet from those whose lot and care (Sorge) is to fend for themselves, make a living, in one’s home and under the sky. The poet, by contrast, is one who recognizes the powers of heaven and earth and gives thanks for them and what they do for us. Unlike the unthankful—the greedy ones who waste and misuse what is given to them—the poetic individual will never bring wide-ranging power to bear against heaven and earth to have his way nor will he think himself too wise (zu weise zu seyn) in contrast to them.2 Another poem sees the human being as a child of the Earth who would be like her but runs afoul of arrogance and a desire for more and more. In a poem called “Heimath,” Hölderlin addresses the riverbanks and woods that sustained him and offered him peace as a child and from which he now seeks a happy return to his home.3 In poems too numerous to cite and summarize here and now, dwelling poetically on the earth comes to signify a relationship to the earth that comprises gratitude for all it gives us humans, a filial love and relationship to it, an attentiveness to what it communicates, dialogue, as between family members, and scorn for arrogance toward it, its abuse, waste, and pillage. Underlying the human-earth relationship is a mindfulness or wonder tantamount to poetry itself. In this sense, poetry is a mode of reflection, quite something more than literary adornment to mute objects, ready-tohand for exploitation. With all this in mind, we may now turn to the poetry of Carl Sandburg. THE PRAIRIE IN CORNHUSKERS The working hypothesis of this book—notably, in the first three chapters—is that poets can tell us something important about nature. This is not to say that “all poets agree that . . . ” In various styles, idioms, and genres, however,

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one is likely to find resonances among poets, including those from different times and places. With the hints and provocative questions implied by Hölderlin in his poetry, we turn now to the twentieth-century American poet Carl Sandburg. Sandburg’s poem “Prairie,” from Cornhuskers, commands our attention from early on by framing itself in a pair of explicit grammatical first-person declarations.4 The first declaration is: “I am born of the prairie.” It is spoken by a son of the prairie who loses no time to “sing” with evident gratitude of the “milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, [and] eyes of its women.” The prairie embraces the dweller through the course of the day. The prairie’s dweller says much when he discloses: “The prairies sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.” The second first-person declaration comes from the prairie itself. “I am the prairie . . . ” Speaking of the prairie, the prairie calls herself “mother of the men.” “They are mine . . . They are mine,” she repeats as if to insist. They, her children, include: • “the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.” • “the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence . . . ” • “the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges.” (It is not too soon into the poem to note that being-on-the earth is being-in-the-world as a being-with other humans—working together, eating together, listening to one of the group, and pairing off in romance. “On the earth” and “with others” are not separate elements of dwelling just in the concept of this book, but rather they are actively integral in dwelling itself. We shall come to this point again later on.) By now, it should be clear that for Sandburg, dwelling is deeply and intrinsically relational. It implies, at the very least, a tie between the prairie and the prairie dweller. That tie is close and filial and plainly declared for all to hear. But, there is more. Each also addresses the other in a second-person encounter—intimately, warmly, even ardently. For its part, the prairie addresses a lonely prairie girl to console her at a time of evident disappointment in love, “O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting—your lover comes—your child comes . . . the years creep . . . ” The following stanzas suggest how the address of the prairie might be consoling. In the “voice” of the prairie, the poem compares the singing of the lover with its promise of abiding love disappointed, with “songs” of the

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prairie, recurring and long-lasting. The prairie defines itself as an enduring and truly abiding presence. One might see it, and the earth by extension, as a sure and comforting dwelling place for we humans who might otherwise inhabit the earth in only a matter-of-fact or prosaic way. O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back— There is a song deep as the fall time redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.5

For his part, a prairie son—“I am one of your boys”—addresses the prairie mother to confess his love and express a wish. I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot-full of pain over love. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.6

The prairie does not respond to its “boy” following right after the above stanza. But, it replies in various ways throughout the poem. The prairie averts to the night skies and dawns it brings. Here it replies in the second-person to all: Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?7

Throughout the poem, the prairie gives witness to the sounds and sights, feelings and recurring events that the prairie dweller loves and “hankers after.” There is the “early in the year the call of the wild duck in green and purple . . . a wagon load of radishes on a summer morning . . . dew on the crimson purple balls . . . November sunset” and more. Mindful human dwelling on the prairie or any other stretch of the earth requires an attentiveness to the ways of the earth, its timing, the hints it gives in response to our questions and prodding. Affectively predisposed by gratitude to nature, we may not only demonstrate commendable human virtue but calculate better our own welfare over the long term as well as do a favor for nature. The question then is: how can we humans take the measure of the earth, our place on it, and attain a poetic dwelling on it? We have come to understand a poetic dwelling to signify a thoughtful one, mindful, deferential, grateful. Such a posture eschews hybris, greed, and exploitation of nature, as

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brief reflection on the poetry of Hõlderlin intimated at the start of this chapter. How can we break free from the prosaic, understood as just “making a living” dictated by our individual cares and concerns? How might that make space for thoughtful dwelling on the earth? On the Porch Sandburg offers an example of mindful attentiveness to nature in the prairie all around us in an extended stanza from the poem, “Prairie.” Old men (likely farmers) gather at night in the summer on the front porch, presumably after work, to talk and wonder about “phantoms”—“shapes” or animals that are “gone” (presumably their days’ activities are over). Nonetheless, they “are here,” an old man on the porch affirms; they have “come into the talk and wonder” of the people on the porch. The stanza is worth quoting as a whole and then considering what it might say about dwelling. The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight. The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail around a corncrib, The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in Spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall, These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of the people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights. The shapes that are gone are here,” says an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.8

The account of a quiet night, resting on a porch with others serves well as an icon of poetic dwelling. The folks on the porch have left their work and its concerns to the daytime—or concerns of struggling for a living. They rest, they contemplate, they talk. They contemplate and talk about a busy prairie replete not only with many kinds of animals, but also with many different kinds of animal habitats within the prairie. The “talkers” are attentive to the looks, sounds, behaviors, and territories of the phantoms—animals understood in their respective lifeworlds. They are “gone”; the animals’ days are over. Perhaps that is why they are called phantoms. But, they are there on the porch, the old man seems to insist. Most likely the “phantoms” are not illusions, phantasies, or shapes invented by the talkers on the porch; they

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once lived and carried on. More likely they are recollected in their respective doings and behaviors after they have left the scene of their activity. We are told they “come into” the talk of the people dwelling at night on the porch. Like ghosts, the phantoms present themselves to the wonderment of the porch people. The stanza is not just a part of a poem about the prairie. It evokes an instance of humans dwelling poetically on the earth, on the prairie. How do humans then dwell on the earth? Just as the porch folk do, perhaps. They step back from making a living on and from the prairie itself to bear witness with astonishment to the lives of its other inhabitants. They do not do this with concern for reaping higher yields on farmland or controlling bothersome pests. (One may ask whether dwelling poetically is any better than living pragmatically and successfully on one’s own terms? At this point in the book, when we call upon poetry to illuminate our place on the earth, it would be best to let Sandburg, later Frost and Whitman, engage our thought and challenge our concepts regarding the essentials in question, and suspend our conclusions regarding the import of their contributions until their testimony is joined with that of philosophy and other disciplines in later in the book.) In the Cornfield This treatment of dwelling leaves many questions unanswered, but they will occupy our thought throughout the book. Before leaving Sandburg’s prairie there are additional insights to be drawn about the earth and nature. Our interpretation of the previous stanza made implicit use of the concept of habitat—specifically the habitats of specific species. The implication is that the prairie is not just an empty space defined like a map by its coordinates. Nor is it just a topography that would include its geological base and its soils and perhaps its plant life. For the poet Sandburg, the prairie includes the life of the prairie, not just its life-forms (species) but their distinctive forms of life. These integrally include those behaviors that play out within a space called a habitat or a territory or ecological niche. Ethology calls such a space an Umwelt or surrounding world. If the prairie taken whole can be called a world, then it is a world of worlds in which humans, nonhuman animals, and plants dwell together. Sandburg’s poetic attunement to nature and vision sees these different worlds as living together in countless interactions and ways—harmony, conflict, indifference, and exploitation. Is it not exploitation when farmers butcher hogs and we humans eat them? Or likewise when farmers work horses to plow fields? When woodpeekers drum on hickory stumps, “Let the red head drum and drum,” Sandburg suggests. Same advice when crows “caw

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and caw” the “midnights of coal mines somewhere?9 Coexistence as benign neglect? Are hunting dogs destined for conflict with muskrats?10 Is the wolf, with its flesh-tearing fangs, designed for violence?11 Conflict between species, maybe instigated by the transgression of species’ territories? Might cornhusking offer a model of interspecies harmony? (Note that cornhusking refers to everything from growing and harvesting corn to simply removing the husks to a social event among neighbors to remove the husks. Husking can also be done by machine if the tops have been lopped from their stalks—and the machines can do that too.) In Sandberg’s poem, without a labor agreement among them, cornhuskers (a nickname for farmers who grow corn) and the “ecosystem” of corn (this author’s name for the natural process that works together to grow the corn, namely the sun, the wind, rain and the corn itself, i.e, the elements named by Sandburg) seem to get the job done among them. Should we count this as an icon of harmony? The corn is husked and “laughing.” The farmer and his wife are talking about fixing their farmhouse. Does the harvesting of corn point to the happy outcome of a collaborative process? The full story/poetic expose of husking follows in this poem “Laughing Corn” from Cornhuskers. (Emphasis added by this author.) There was a high majestic fooling Day before yesterday in the yellow corn And day after tomorrow in the yellow corn There will be high majestic fooling. The ears ripen in the late summer And come on with conquering laughter, Come on with a high and conquering laugher. The long-tailed blackbirds are hoarse. One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk And I never heard its name in my life. Some of the ears are bursting. A white juice works inside. Cornsilk seeps in the end and dangles in the wind. Always—I never knew it any other way— The wind and the corn talk things over together, And the rain and corn and sun and the corn Talk things over together. Over the road is the farm house. The siding is white and a green blind is slung loose. It will not be fixed till the corn is husked. The farmer and his wife talk things over together.12

There is plenty of evidence in the poem above of nature’s preeminence in the work and “business” of agriculture and of the collaboration among the

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powers of nature in the “production” and harvesting of corn. At the start, the reader is reminded that “grow” is an intransitive verb. Corn grows. Before farmers can be said to grow, i.e., raise, corn, the corn itself and from itself must grow. Sandburg comes upon the scene in the cornfield well into the natural process, at a point near the end of that process. The corn is ripening. Within the corn itself a white juice works. Nothing outside the corn itself— no external agency, no worker—is acting on the corn to produce the juice. “Some of the ears are bursting.” They are not impelled to split open by force, by an external agency intent on bringing their growth to a violent end. The bursting open is a natural process that happens in due course, in nature’s time, at the end of summer—not according to a production schedule. Corn silk too appears in its time: un-hastened, it “seeps” and then “dangles in the wind” from the end of an ear. Dangling seems to serve no purpose. And, the wind here appears to have no function. Flags blow in the wind, and one may note that flags are signals and symbols. In the poetic narrative, perhaps the flapping strands of corn silk are flags that signal the conclusion of a process; the corn has come to the end of its growth. It has finished “its job,” reached its maturity—may we say, come into being? This dramatization of its growth may warrant the unusual expression “majestic fooling” at the beginning of the poem. The “majestic fooling” refers to what the corn does in the final days of late summer. It is what the poet celebrates in the poem. In the first instance, the natural collaborators in the corn’s growth and ripening are reported to be celebrating. They “come on with a high and conquering laughter.” The laughter is so full and continuing that its makes the “chittering” blackbirds perched about the cornfield “hoarse.” “Conquering” signifies a great achievement. The triumphal achievement can only be credited to nature—not only the corn but to the sun, the wind, the rain, and the seasons of the earth. Sandburg describes the collaboration as a dialogue or conversation: the wind, the rain, sun, and the corn “talk things over.” “Speaking of things speaking” is, perhaps, a strange notion that some may regard as decorative discourse, poetic license and excess. However, if we work to draw substantive meaning in talk of natural things talking here, we may derive an important understanding of nature and the human-nature relationship with poetry. Do not living things generally talk to us in the way our bodies tell us something about ourselves, e.g., our health, safety? Earth phenomena like weather warns us of trouble to come. Rock strata “tell a story,” a natural history, of landscape formation. Human conversance in these languages requires listening with expectation we may learn something. Sandburg is not an agronomist, but with a poet’s attentiveness to the nuance of words and the phenomena they disclose, Sandburg does not need to aggregate data and follow the canons of science. His art, carefully read, is enough

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to remind us of essential matters that may get lost in the haste of meeting basic needs or maximizing short-term material gains. With the preceding in mind, note that the talk/conversation in the poem is among the natural things and phenomena. The paragraph above has been human “eavesdropping” on ‘performative talk’ among natural collaborators in the growth of corn. The collaborators in growing corn are said to have done it through “talking things over together.” This envisions a communication, back and forth, that is presumably nonverbal and nonlinear, a way of working together that does not imply a degree of command and control. There is not the time here and now in this book for a long discourse on philosophy of science, but one can point as far back to Aristotle, in the Politics (book I, chapter 1), for a paradigm of communication short of human speech (logos) that is social and task-oriented that he exemplified in “gregarious” animals like bees, communication that Edward O. Wilson closely studied and brilliant described in the social insects.13 To be sure, hive and mound life has a hierarchical structure implying a manner of command and control, but the semiotics of nature are at work in these cases and in meteorology nonlinear logic is the “go-to” method. The power of Sandburg’s poetry is not of mathematical-empirical science. It lies in a holistic insight that challenges preconceptions and suggests possibilities of reconfiguring our view of things. It undercuts human hybris in hastily taking command of nature and making profit from the earth without heed to human limits and nature’s powers. When “conquering laughter” comes up in the poem, it refers to that of the natural actors in the growth of corn. Nature accomplishes the task of bringing forth a crop of corn at the end of summer. Indeed, nature is this bringing forth. More commonly perhaps, the conquest of nature has come to signify the subjugation of nature by humans for the purposes set out by humans. Here, nature is the doer, maker, actor, agent, subject—the one that deploys itself to the task, i.e., bringing corn to be. The previous comment casts attention on the farm couple in the last stanza. There is, as mentioned at the outset, plenty said about the growth of corn and collaboration among the powers of nature in its growth. But nothing is said about farming or famers or how humans relate to nature and dwell on the prairie to “grow” corn. Farms, farmers, and farming are not mentioned or alluded to until the last stanza. Farmers are not part of the “talking among things” in the previous stanzas. For its part, the talking between the farming couple does not include corn and the other collaborators in corn’s ecological niche. Nature is not an interlocutor in the couple’s conversation about selling the corn—once harvested, husked, and busheled for delivery to market. That is a conversation about generating funds to improve the farmhouse.

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The harmony among the powers of nature described in the penultimate stanzas does not seem to include the couple. They are, however, players in the bigger picture, within a broader mode of dwelling that joins two important scenes of everyday human life, poles of economic activity: the farm and the marketplace. The genius of the poet Sandburg in this brief poem and others is bringing to vivid and subtle vision crosscutting modalities of inhabiting the earth. We come to see the prairie/earth as a world of worlds. Human dwelling can entail an intimate, filial, and wondrous tie to the earth or a utilitarian exploitation of it as a resource. Sandburg offers a brief and unambiguous judgment regarding humans/ farmers in growing things, what we humans call by the name of a human science, agronomy or agribusiness, the business of agriculture, now increasingly industrialized. Keep in mind that cornhusking comes to stand for growing corn or raising corn, right to the very end when it is harvested and husked. In a brief self-standing poem about cornhusking, Sandburg sums things up. The frost loosens cornhusks. The sun, the rain, the wind Loosen cornhusks. The men and the women are helpers. They are all cornhuskers together. I see them late in the western evening. In a smoke-red dust.14

Humans and the powers of nature dwell together on the earth and collaborate in a task like growing food, but in bringing forth a crop, nature has the upper hand in the poet’s appraisal. If humans take the product from the farm to market—“truck and bargain”—the product takes on a different character and receives a different appraisal. And, the dwelling of humans with others comes into the spotlight. With that shift, we move into another topology and another poetics. THE CHICAGO POEMS The focus now shifts from the Prairie to City; from being-on-the earth to being-in-the-world with others. Both are aspects of dwelling, as framed in this book, and the poet Sandburg has as much to say about the latter as the former. Sandburg’s Chicago Poems is the source for this reflection on being-in-the-world with others.

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The Chicago Poems delve much deeper into the humans who are said to dwell in a world with others of their kind. To be sure, humans were not absent from the prairie in the poems of Sandburg’s Cornhuskers, but they were, by and large, taken as “earthlings”—children of the prairie. The narrative, from poem to poem in the Cornhuskers, was largely that of the self in relation to the earth. The Chicago Poems introduces the reader to humans in many roles, in prosaic everyday life, acting and interacting with each other “in the world.” “World” is as much a place term as “earth.” If earth is taken as the natural environment, then world is a built environment. The earth is a kind of material a priori. It comes first, as our first home, the ground on which we make our dwelling. By contrast, the world is a work in progress. We humans make our world/s. It is where our individual, shared, and essentially human cares play out over time, where we live, work and dwell. Sandburg’s Chicagoans line up, one by one, by role, in the environs of a city Sandburg famously describes as: Hog Butcher for the World Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Handler Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of Big Shoulders . . .15

A list of Chicagoans begins with the next line: “painted women under gas lamps luring the farm boys” and continues throughout Chicago Poems, generally with more description and often with a poem for each. These include: the shovel man, the teamster, the policeman, a fish crier, muckers, the blacklisted, a multimillionaire, stockyards sweeper, a cripple, working girls, salesgirls, police reporter, journeymen undertakers, the has-been, dynamiter, ice handler, “contemporary bunkshooter, gypsy woman.” This is just a representative sample.16 The humans who dwell together in Chicago are concrete individuals. The concreteness derives from the everydayness of their situations as described. They have roles that sort them into categories, mostly as workers of some sort, but more than that, each has a story which makes him or her one of a kind. Moreover, each inhabits “a place of one’s own”—albeit not necessarily titled property. In any case, each claims, a world within the larger world of Chicago. We will dip into their stories to visit their worlds. All of the three poems or stories below attest to being-in-the world as something singular and unique. Each, however, expands and deepens the sense of human being-in-the-world as such, i.e., going beyond the way it’s been defined and described so far. There is the “Fish Crier.”

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I know a Jew fish crier on Maxwell Street with a voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in January. He dangles herring before prospective customers-evincing joy identical with that of Pavlova dancing. His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, terribly glad That God made fish, and customers to whom he may call his wares from a pushcart.17

Consider the case of the Fish Crier. One could rightly locate the center of the crier’s world on Maxwell Street. It becomes not just a market but, more than that, a performance stage. Likewise, selling is not just a commercial transaction but a linguistic and embodied performance that gives voice to the crier’s joy and “evinces” that joy by way of dance as well as song. World—and therewith the embodied self which steps forth into it—is affectively charged, a place where feeling and mood reveal themselves. “I know him for a shovel man,” the poet says. If the Fish Crier appears center stage as the ‘sole proprietor” of a “place of his own,” a piece of street in a public space, then the Shovel Man and his woman-love share a world divided by two continents and an ocean. On the street Slung on his shoulder is a handle half way across, Tied in a big knot on the scoop of cast iron Are the overalls faded from sun and rain in the ditches And flimsy shirt open on the at the throat Spatter of dry clay sticking yellow on this left sleeve And a flimsy shirt open at the throat I know him for a shovel man, a dago working for a dollar six bits a day A dark-eyed woman in the old country dreams of him for one of the world’s ready men with a pair of fresh lips and a kiss better than all the wild grapes that ever grew in Tuscany.18

Being-in-the-world with others is here made more concrete by situating that of the worker on the street, in his work-world, and on the earth by way of his exposure to the elements. Having said this much, his lifeworld is not confined by his work to “make a living” in Chicago but reaches far beyond Chicago as defined for his care and concerns, indeed, by his love for the “dark-eyed” woman in Tuscany. Likewise, her lifeworld is defined by dreams of his “red lips” and kiss better than any Tuscan grapes. All in all, we may speak here of

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two worlds divided by geographic locations but one world of shared concern embodied in their love for each other. “Onion Days” is about a farmworker, Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti, and her boss the farm owner Mr. Jasper.19 The locus of their day-to-day activities (“Onion Days”) is the same, the seven-hundred-acre farm of Mr. Jasper, thinking always how he can make it produce more effectively. Situated at the same place during the workday, Jasper’s and Giovannitti’s concerns put them in different worlds. Jaspers is clearly in charge and lays out the options of for work each morning. For Mrs. Giovannitti the choice is “take it or leave it.” To be sure, Jaspers has the upper hand, but one might well say that that both are beholden to “the word for the day,” the cost of farm labor on the market. The marketplace is a place where no one dwells, nothing is made, and no one ostensibly calls the shots. Nonetheless, the market will affect who does what and when and where and how and for whom. So, might one read Sandburg’s parable of “Onion Days.” But, then neither does Jaspers nor Mrs. Giovannatti live full-time in the world of economics, Jaspers attends and guides his church on Sundays, and Mrs. Giovannatti looks forward to a child she will deliver—“will come to her”—in three months. With just these three brief poems, one sees being-in-the-world as signifying a way of dwelling that is concrete, singular, and embodied. One’s own world can be experienced as identifying oneself and conferring a sense of proprietorship. Think of the Fish Crier and Maxwell Street. To be sure, a place of one’s one situates one in a particular time and place but does not fix one there. As a manifestation of one’s cares and concerns, one’s world may overlap with the world of another, that of a Shovel Man in Chicago and a Tuscan woman he loves in Italy. Finally, being-in-the-world may encompass a large set of individuals whose common concern derives from a particular finite function—nothing so broad as life itself, but potentially coming to bear on many and perhaps all aspects of life. Such is the day-to-day world of Mrs. Giovannitti and the farmworkers in “Onion Days” and, in its way, that of the owner Mr. Jaspers. Nonetheless, however confining the world we find ourselves in, it does not necessarily define us. At least, that is the human world in which our lives play out—in this very limited sample of Sandberg’s Chicagoans. There is yet more to say about being-with that has only been foreshadowed in the preceding. Sandburg affords his readers insight into a kind of anonymous human amalgam that virtually eschews individual expression and steps on to the world stage as a unitary and productive force, represented by the workingman and inventor, Lincoln and Napoleon. “I Am the People,” the people says of itself. It identifies itself in three words: the mob, the crowd, and the mass.

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How different this amalgam is from the individual working people listed at the very beginning of The Chicago Poems! How does it all fit together? Continuing in the first person singular, the People continues with its confrontational—in-your-face—introduction of itself or the People. From the beginning: I AM the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the working man, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and and Lincolns. I am the seed ground, I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out And wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget. Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few drops for history to remember. Then—I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robed me last year, who played me for the fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.20

This is a wonderfully puzzling poem. Words like those in the last line— mob, crowd, and mass—suggest a threatening presence. Perhaps, the People implied by these terms is on the verge of a violent revolution and when it remembers “who robbed [it]” it will go after [them] to avenge the crime.” But then maybe it’s not so threatening. “I . . . the people . . .” suggests, “We, the people. . . .” The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution recalls a hallowed act of lawmaking, not a mob run amok. Indeed, much if not most of the body of the poem is about the “the great work of the world.” The people called a “mob” are credited the great achievements of history, indeed, with nothing less than the work of civilization itself. To be sure, the sense of revolution in the poem is not erasable, however, allowing for the the credit it is due, there are other meanings in the poem that are central to the overriding questions of this book. How do we humans

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interact as individuals and how do we behave en masse toward ourselves and the earth? It is one thing to flesh out the concept of being-in-the-world in individual terms and quite another to consider it in aggregate or collective terms. One talks of the People when they act as a whole or as the human species and to describe its “great work” as a collective achievement. None of new terms introduced here is quite right. “Whole” suggests something more integral and definable than a mass or mob. “Species” suggests something biological, perhaps evolved. These attributes do not emerge from the poem’s language. “Collective” would imply work undertaken together deliberately. Speaking of the aggregate achievement of humanity suggests adding up what individuals and groups have done, i.e., the cumulative product of many over time. That does not quite describe Sandurg’s People. The key to understanding the force of the poem may lie between what is forgotten and what is remembered. Halfway through the poem, while recounting instances of all the great work done through the people/mass/crowd/mob—e.g., unmentioned inventions, growing food, making clothes, raising up great historical figures, plowing the prairies, spilling blood for noble causes (presumably)—the narrator, the People, pauses four times to say “I forgot.” This is to say that no lasting account of the deeds just cited was made. Neither the accomplishment nor its doer was acknowledged. Remembrance, reflection, and agency were effectively absent from the world. At the beginning of the present section of chapter 1, on being-in-the-world, “world” was characterized as a built environment, and a human world at any scale consisted of things humans care about. For the human mass to do something unreflectively and carelessly forget about it is tantamount, paradoxically, to “not make [anything] of” the many things it has made! What would be left “unmade” here is precisely a world, a place and time of abiding care. Remembering makes the difference. In the penultimate stanza of the poem, the People says, “when I, the People, learn to remember . . . [and] . . . use the lessons of yesterday,” then “will no speaker in all the world say ‘The People’ with a . . . sneer . . . or derision.” The sequence, then, is recalling, reflecting, owning to the constitution of the world, and then taking it into one’s care and possession. These last thoughts suggest the import of an authentic being-in-the-world, one that not only speaks of dwelling together, but also doing so with others on the earth. In the first part of this chapter, Carl Sandburg presents the earth as a kind of material a priori. It predates human existence and literally grounds our being-on-the-world. It is the natural environment that sets that stage for the dwelling place we make with others wherever we settle down on the planet. The poems selected in this latter half of this chapter accents human agency and responsibility for the world we humans create over time. The first half

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stressed human indebtedness to nature and the earth. Sandburg personifies the prairie to have it claim us as its children. It takes the upper hand in our relations to it. Sandburg uses the resources of poetic discourse to describe what poetic dwelling on the earth might consist in for dwellers on the earth— poets or not. The “the takeaway” from the poetry readings in Cornhuskers suggested that poetic dwelling is thoughtful, abiding, and deferential living in proximity to the earth. It requires standing back from full-throttle pursuit of individual and collective projects that either takes nature for granted or exploits and degrades it—to its detriment and ours. The poetic dweller abides in a listening mode and takes it from there. Analogous to poetic dwelling on the earth, one might speak of authentic being-in-the-world. The German for authenticity is Eigentlichkeit. Eigen suggests, one’s own, and so Eigentum means property, something that is one’s own. Owning up to an action is taking responsibility for it and often taking it into one’s own care. The very last poem of this chapter can be said to describe an authentic being-in-the-world. The People are nothing more than a mass, a crowd, or a mob whenever they mindlessly construct the world they live in and evade or “forget” what they have built. This world they build can be good or bad or both. The vignettes in the Chicago Poems include many of destitution, exploitation, racism, and degradation. The hero-worker receives prominent billing in Sandburg’s poems, but there are vivid and searing accounts of the dark side of Chicago throughout. The bottom line of The People is that The People need to remember and take ownership of the world it has created—in terms of the poem itself, that means to reclaim what has been stolen from it. The logic of responsibility implied here operates to redress wrongs already done and give attention to getting things right in the first place. The conclusion of this first poetic exploration of the notion of dwelling not only prepares the way for the two that follow, but frames the entire book with its reflections on earth and world. In moving now to chapter 2, recall that Sandburg’s prairie dweller in the poems just read was, by and large, a farmer. Sandburg offered readers vivid cameos of a farmer’s life. The second chapter goes further than the first and undertakes a reading of Greek historian—and farmer—Xenophon and American poet—and farmer—Robert Frost and seeks to describe and detail the ways in which farming can create a special closeness and bond to the land. NOTES 1. Hölderlin, Friedrich, “In Lieblicher Bläue”: Gedichtung (Stuttgart: Verlag von Friedrich, 1823) 1808. Translated from the German by this author.

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2. Author’s precis of the German poem, “Dichtersberuf,” in Hölderlin, Friedrich, Gesammelte Werke (Hrsg. von Wilhelm Bohm, Jena, 1921). See also Hölderlin, Friedrich, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin Books, 1966). 3. Author’s precise of the German poem “Heimath” in Hölderlin, Friedrich, Gesammelte Werke (Hrsg. von Wilhelm Bohm, Jena, 1921). See also Hölderlin, Friedrich, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin Books, 1966). 4. Sandburg, Carl, “Prairie,” Cornhuskers, in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandurg (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 79. 5. Sandburg, “Prairie,” 85. 6. Sandburg, “Prairie,” 86. 7. Sandburg, “Prairie,” 80. 8. Sandburg, “Prairie,” 84. 9. Sandburg, “River Roads,” Cornhuskers. 10. Sandburg, “Prairie,” 84. 11. Sandburg, “Wilderness,” Cornhuskers, 100. 12. Sandburg, “Laughing Corn,” Cornhuskers, 87. 13. Wilson, Edward O., The Insect Societies (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1971). 14. Sandburg, “Prairie,” 84. 15. Sandburg, Carl. “Chicago,” Chicago Poems in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, Brace. Jovanowich, Inc., 1969) 16. Sandburg, The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, 1–76. 17. Sandburg, “Fish Crier,” Chicago Poems, 9. 18. Sandburg, “Shovel Man,” Chicago Poems, 9. 19. Sandburg, “Onion Days,” Chicago Poems, 14. 20. Sandburg, “I Am the People, Mob,” Chicago Poems, 71.

Chapter 2

Property and the Land Xenophon and Frost

Chapter 1 identified deference as naming the relationship of the prairie dweller to the land. Carl Sandburg offers vivid vignettes of Midwestern American farm life in Cornhuskers and testimony to the strong affective and even filial bond between nature and those who inhabit and work the earth. This chapter ventures beyond the first to examine a kind of dialogic relationship between the farmer and the land that unfolds in the hands-on cultivation of the land, in growing crops and raising livestock. The gentlemanfarmer Xenophon and poet-farmer Robert Frost attest to a connection to the earth absent in the industrialized farming of our time. Both Xenophon and Frost describe a give-and-take between the earth and the one who farms it. Agriculture, before the advent of large-scale mechanized farming, becomes the site of a cultivation that pays heed to the “instructions” (Xenophon) that nature offers the farmer and pays respect to land itself and what it yields (Frost). Xenophon and Frost also discuss agriculture within the context of property, specifically landed property. At the beginning of his Oeconomicus, a treatise on estate management, Xenophon defines the estate or household as consisting in a house, landed property outside the house, and the family that lives on and owns the estate.1 For his part, Frost does not use the term “property.” Nevertheless, he writes of a relationship between the farmer and the land that connects the land to the farmer and, more notably, binds the farmer to the land. To our modern ears, the word “property,” and landed property in particular, connotes real estate, a commercial and legal concept that seems out of place, indeed, a gross misnomer for the stewardship that better suits the ideas and practice of Xenophon and Frost. Readers will recognize that property and environmentalism are often regarded as opposing principles. Property is said to encroach on the wild. It divides, dominates, and commodifies nature. It fences off and confines what should be free and open. The enclosure movement in seventeenth- and 33

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eighteenth-century England is often characterized as a triumph for unrestrained profit-seeking capitalism and a tragic defeat for the commons, land at the edge of wild that is shared and used in way that does not tax and exploit the resources of nature, a space where human and nonhuman animals coexist in a happy ecological balance. Reference to premodern ideas of property will clarify the sense of property examined here. By way of an historical aside, let it be noted that Karl Marx, as well as anyone, understood a kind of ownership, predating modernity and perhaps for him best expressed in feudalism, in which the owner—a family, for generations—is so attached to the land that one might better say that the proprietor belongs to the land than that the land belongs to the proprietor.2 Property is inalienable: it cannot be bought and sold, mortgaged and traded. From a perspective well outside Marx’s, the French historian Fustel de Coulange comes to the same conclusion as Marx, albeit with respect to ancient ownership in the West. Under the sanctions of ancient religion and law, the alienation of property through sale is greatly restricted. Per Coulange, ownership confers identity on the family, a stable and enduring place on the earth that it can call its own.3 This paragraph, a parenthesis in our examination of cultivation, is meant to prepare the ground for the discussion in Frost’s “Political Pastoral,” examined in this chapter, which speaks to threats that the marketplace and banks pose not only to a farmer’s title to the land, but more specifically, to the special relationship to the earth and the soil involved in growing crops and raising animals on one’s land. This aside also anticipates the discussion of property in chapter 4 of the book, where, inter alia, ownership, identity, and a place of one’s own enter into the trajectory of the book as it explores manifold understandings of dwelling. For its part, this chapter undertakes to think through the concept of property by examining the proprietary relationship in a way that suggests that it is not, or need not be, opposed to the kind of stewardship that environmentalism prizes. Indeed, the chapter suggests that caring for the land is a primordial sense of proprietorship and other senses of property are less offshoots of the notion than 180-degree reversals of its root sense. The chapter proceeds by way of a hermeneutical analysis of landownership, which sees it as a distinctive abiding-with and attunement to the earth that, in Xenophon, works to reveal the earth in its fertility and abundance as it enhances the well-being of the landed household. The hermeneutic begins in a reading of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and continues with an interpretation of “Build Soil—A Political Pastoral” by the American poet/farmer Robert Frost. Frost complements the sense of attunement articulated by Xenophon with a notion of caring for the land that goes beyond Xenophon’s and includes resisting its sale and takeover by uncaring owners and fighting for the preservation of the land itself by “building soil.”

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XENOPHON’S “OIKOS-NOMICS” “Economics” and “ecology” both have their roots in the Greek word oikos, which means household and estate. Well before economics becomes the science of the marketplace, it is, in the “oikos-nomics” of Xenophon and Aristotelian philosophy, a description of the nomos (custom or law) of the oikos (the household), the principles and practices required for a happy or successful life on the estate. A reading of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus will serve to enrich a phenomenological consideration of what it means to be a proprietor. No doubt, the description that Xenophon gives in this work is idealized and has qualified historiographic value. Nonetheless, it serves to flesh out concretely the understanding—in the West, at least—of a “commerce” with things that predates the production-exchange-consumption paradigm that governs present-day historical being-in-the world. As such, it offers a way of recovering a possibility of being that is arguably of value for an environmental thinking that seeks insight into our relationship to the land and what that might mean for the future of being human with others on the earth. The starting point for Xenophon’s oiko-nomics is the estate. The estate (oikos) is defined as a house and the property that one has outside the house. It also covers the family, “household,” we might say. The definition defines the condition of those who live outside the city, whose property includes land for cultivation. In this abbreviated summary of points made dialogically (Oeconomicus is cast as a dialogue between Socrates and a Critobulus), a connection is made quickly between the household or estate and the land. Almost just as quickly, land is linked to wealth. Land is not property, something of value, unless it results in wealth (kremata, something acquired) and wealth is a good thing (agathon). So far, the sense of stewardship that we want to draw from the dialogue is absent. Even when wealth is identified as “utility” (this author’s word) and distinguished from wealth derived from the sale of land or its products, i.e., money, the attention of the interlocutors is upon what the land offers, its good for those who own it.4 While Socrates problematizes the value of money-wealth, the conversation does not appear to reach a final judgment or agreement on its status. Rather, the interlocutors turn to the management of property. Whether an owner seeks the profitable use of something or hopes to exchange it for money, the owner will need to know how to manage (epistaito chresthai) the land and its resources.5 A first principle of management science per Xenophon’s Socrates is to ensure that one’s things are “in the proper place, not just anywhere.”6 The first order of business, then, is to ensure that things are so ordered that they will be there when needed, accessible, at hand. This may seem a small point, but it is about place, which has a special, foundational significance for the project of this

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book. It is place where dwelling “takes place.” Note that place, described just above, is an ordered space. It is things (plural) that are ordered, movable property that will be made immobile for a while in order to be use it when needed. One could think of it as a well-ordered store or stock of things deployable “on command.” With the “first principle” noted above, two senses of proprietorship come into play: (1) ownership as command, ordering and governing what one owns; and, (2) stewardship, mentioned and featured at the beginning of this chapter but yet to be articulated fully, as caring for and attentive to what it owns. The conversation takes an interesting turn when Socrates holds up the king of Persia as a model of “husbandry” (georgia), first by way of aligning husbandry with warfare among a king’s priority functions and then directly by describing the king’s attention to agriculture.7 With respect to his army, the king “annually reviews the mercenaries and all the other troops ordered to be under arms.” This review includes assembling them in a place of muster. As for the country (farmland), it too comes under the watchful eye of the king, who, so far as possible, “personally examines so much of it as he sees in the course of his progress through it.”8 Turning now to husbandry as such, Socrates says: “in all the districts he resides in and visits he takes care that there are “paradises” [paradeisoi] as they call them, full of all the good and beautiful things that the soil will produce and in this he himself spends most of time, except when the season precludes it.9 Socrates goes on to claim that the Persian king, Cyrus, actually planted things on this land and asserts that “even the wealthiest cannot hold aloof from husbandry.”10 Ownership is governing in the way of King Cyrus. He is a king who understands the soil. It is the soil that will do the growing but it will require the owner’s attention and time so that the soil can do its work. By way of this allusion to Cyrus, warrior-farmer, Xenophon’s Socrates highlights the mindfulness and embodied involvement of the ruler-proprietor with respect to the land or the earth. What follows immediately upon this is an ode-like tribute to the earth. It is worth quoting intact: The earth yields to cultivators the food by which men live; she yields besides the luxuries they enjoy. Secondly, she supplies all the things with which they decorate altars and statues and themselves, along with the most pleasant and sights and scents. Thirdly, she produces or feeds the ingredients of many delicious dishes; for the art of breeding stock is closely linked with husbandry; so that men have victims for propitiating the gods with sacrifice and cattle for their own use. And though she supplies good things in abundance, she suffers them not to be won without toil, but accustoms men to endure winter’s cold and summer’s heat.11

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To be sure, this is not a tract for deep ecology. The earth is esteemed for enabling the good life, not in virtue of its intrinsic worth. (Note, however, that the good life described here is good, in large measure, as it sensuously manifests the virtues of earthborn things.) On the other hand, what I have called an ode is not an apologia for modern-day agribusiness. The earth lauded here gives forth in abundance from out of itself on the condition of toil, i.e., to the extent that cultivators discipline themselves to the earth’s requirements. Indeed, it is this discipline that gives increased strength to workers and hardens overseers [to a demanding routine]. “What art,” Socrates exclaims, “produces better runners, throwers, and jumpers than husbandry?”12 The point made here is not that the cultivated earth of Xenophon is the “standing reserve” provoked to yield its energy within the “enframing” of modern technology; to be sure, Xenophon’s cultivated earth is not the earth depicted in the dystopic scenario of Heidegger’s The Question of Technology.13 Nonetheless, the allusion to Heidegger foreshadows the whole-earth issues that the concluding chapters this book raise: in the Age of the Anthropocene has not the earth been reduced to a resource for human exploitation? Has its transformation not only harmed the earth but the human beings dwelling on the earth? Xenophon’s earth is hardly a pliant matter that submits to any and every human demand: It makes its own demands and gives back distinctly earthly resistance to human designs on it. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s concept of the “standing reserve” does seem to apply to Xenophon’s first principle of estate management, the ordering of things, movable property, so as to be available on demand when needed. Along with stewardship, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus introduces a concept of ownership that prefigures natural things as movable property and the earth itself, as constituting a kind of standing reserve. Xenophon’s formulation does not have the planetary scope of Heidegger’s, but it raises the question of how it differs. And, perhaps, Xenophon offers a way to care for earth and benefit from its abundance: a question to hold in abeyance until the concluding chapters bring whole-earth issues into focus. So far, our reading of Xenophon has focused on his Oikos-Nomics or household management, as often translated into English. It is a far stretch from market economics as it is known in our time, and more like business management at the household level, where the house or the estate is less seen as a dwelling than a place where a family makes a living. It could be seen as offering Xenophon’s “prosaic” view of being-in-the-world with others. What follows is the more poetic rendition of dwelling in terms unfolding how closeness and affective attachment to nature is made possible by way of agriculture. Stewardship is used to describe a care of the earth, and the bond in this chapter is seen as dialogic.

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The reflection now leads one to inquire still more closely about the meaning of cultivation for Xenophon. Through the middle section of the Oeconomicus, Xenophon discusses the management of the estate house proper. The estate itself, however, has inner and outer dimensions. Inside wealth is stored, organized, and dispensed. Outside, on the land and from the land, wealth is generated through cultivation. Agriculture is an open-air labor, taking place under the sky and carried out by farmers close to the land and attendant to its potentials and limits. Throughout the account of cultivation, which occupies the last third of the book, Xenophon shows deference to the earth. The first rule for successful agriculture is to know the nature of the soil. Such knowledge will determine what to plant and what to sow.14 The land is said to prefer certain crops and trees. The land declares its own capabilities. Even land that lies waste reveals its nature. Along these lines, Ischomachus, who speaks for Xenophon in this portion of the dialogue, notes that there is more knowledge, pertinent to cultivation, to be gained from inspecting a neighbor’s plot than in asking the neighboring proprietor.15 Within such attentiveness to the earth, Ischomachus offers his interlocutor Socrates concrete advice on questions of farming. Over the course of many exchanges, the interlocutors discuss hoeing and sowing, planting and weeding and reaping, the cycle of the seasons as it bears on agriculture, and depredations of nature, like flooding. In all of this, the bodily engagement of the cultivator with the land is implicit. As if to underscore the importance of bodily proximity to the land, however, Ischomachus says to Socrates, “I presume you know as well as I that the seed must be cast by hand.16 Farming, at the ground level, is a firsthand hands-on experience. It inserts one “into the field (literally) of ground operations,” to use a military metaphor to suggest the place where the “action” takes place, namely growth. Later on in the dialogue and in the same vein, Ischomachus says, “You can distinguish between dry and wet ground by using your eyes.”17 The cultivator is not only fully engaged in his task but also embedded in his natural surroundings. The work requires not only fixing on the task but orienting the body to the vagaries of earth and sky. Ischomachus asks Socrates, “Are you for standing with your back to wind when you cut corn, or facing it?” Socrates replies, “Not facing it, no! I think it is irritating both to the eyes and to the hands to reap with cornstalks and spikes blowing in your face.18 In this brief exchange it is clear that the cultivation of which Xenophon writes fully situates the cultivator, as a bodily being, within a natural environment that is lived and experienced at first hand as well as one that is ready-to-hand, although not easily manipulated. The land will yield its product, but the cultivator must expect challenges from nature, assaults of the wind and a volley of wheat particles in one’s face. As the dialogue between Socrates and Ischomachus unfolds, it becomes clear that cultivation itself is a dialogue between the earth and the cultivator.

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In the relationship of land and cultivator, the land is neither a mere resource nor a silent business partner. The earth speaks and instructs throughout the cycle of cultivation and it behooves the cultivator to listen. Another ode-like text vividly makes these points: The vine climbs the nearest tree, and so teaches you that she wants support. And when her clusters are yet tender, she spreads her leaves about them, and teaches you to shade the exposed parts from the sun’s rays during that period. But when it is now time for her grapes to be sweetened by the sun, she sheds her leaves, teaching you to strip her and ripen her fruit. And thanks to her teeming fertility, she shows some mellow clusters while she carries others yet sour, so saying to you: “Pluck my grapes as men pluck figs—choose the luscious ones as they come.19

By this point in the chapter, Xenophon’s sense of proprietorship as caring for and deferring to the land has been well-articulated. In Xenophon’s world—as described in the Oeconomicus—the proprietor is a cultivator and cultivation is a dialogic relationship with the land. The cultivator defers to the land, is mindful of its potential, its limits, its needs. The cultivator, fully situated upon the earth and under the sky, adjusts to the vagaries of nature, the cycle of the seasons, the idiosyncrasies of place and plot. Ownership owes to the land the wealth it gleans and then only on the condition of intimate knowledge of and respect for the land. The proprietor is steward. One might easily complain that Xenophon’s account is highly idealized and covers over much, from slavery and absentee gentleman farmers to speculation in commodities and the power-politics of the trade-based imperium of Athens. There are hints of a world outside the boundaries of the estate where caring for the land is beset with other cares. At the beginning of his Oeconomicus, Xenophon makes it clear that the estate, the land it includes, a horse, and a flute are all forms of wealth, and wealth is a good thing only so much as it is profitable. Profitable things, like a flute, are such if they can be used or sold. “Sold” implies a marketplace, a space with different norms and concerns. Historians tells us that in the early fifth century BC the oikos is the building block of Athenian society, but by the next century, when Xenophon’s Oeconomicus was written, crops were grown for sale and other goods were produced commercially outside the oikos. A fuller historiographic response to these matters lies well beyond the scope of this brief chapter. For this book, this reading of Xenophon is meant to describe a mode of ownership and property grounded in stewardship of the land. That discussion of stewardship, seen as a dialogic relationship, builds on the chapter 1 notion of what it means to dwell on the earth. What Xenophon’s

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description of agriculture leaves out, however, is the other aspect of dwelling developed in this book, being-in-the-world with others. Xenophon’s discussion of family relations and the master-slave relationship in the Oeconomicus does treat—for better or worse—these limited relationships within a limited space. Outside the oikos, there is the polis, and outside both is the marketplace. Neither the political space nor the marketplace are dwellings as such. Nor do they directly address what being on the earth means. Both, however, will profoundly affect what the combined and holistic sense of dwelling the book endeavors to elucidate: being-in-the-world with others and on the earth. For this reason, it would be “profitable” to explore, schematically at least, some the earliest views of the market place and its development in ancient Greek civilization. Scholars, including the banker-classicist Edward E. Cohen, trace a development of the marketplace, money, and finance from the time of Xenophon to that of Aristotle, from the Oeconomicus to Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics. Quite significantly, Cohen describes a change in Xenophon’s views from lauding the oikos as a “potential solution for to all of Hellas’ contemporary problems” to Xenophon’s proposals for financial incentives to encourage economically useful immigration and increasing the money supply. By the time of Aristotle, thriving markets and banking function in the everyday lives of people across class levels.20 In the Politics, Aristotle provides an account of the genesis of money from marketplace transactions, and a comparison of the natural acquisition of wealth within the oikos to acquisition of wealth (money) by means of money. In such acquisition, viz. by commerce with money, Aristotle notes critically, there is no limit.21 In Book V of the Nichomachaen Ethics, on justice, Aristotle defines voluntary compensatory justice by way of a marketplace transaction (barter) to then note that money supplants barter explaining how the terms of trade, the ratio of goods to goods or money to goods, is established (per demand and then agreed upon.)22 Aristotle’s ethical concern may show more clearly in his discussion of liberality in Book IV, taking from whatever sources and all one can.23 Now, one can see how the art of acquisition of money, an art unlimited in what it seeks, can be seen to fuel greed and come under moral censure. Not until chapters 9 and 10 will we examine the role of markets as a site for everyday being-in-world with others and the impact of markets, in particular global financial markets, on our being-on-the earth and the being-of-the earth itself. The brief historical sketch above suggests that from early on, in the West, over several centuries of ancient Greek historical experience, markets, money, and finance transformed the relationship Xenophon articulated in the Oeconomicus—a transformation that Aristotle viewed pejoratively. As we now move to consider Robert Frost and his sense of the relationship of the farmer to the land, we should take on board Xenophon’s articulation

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of cultivation and stewardship. Although it may have been undermined in his own day by developments outside the estate, it yet remains a model of human dwelling on the earth as that dwelling becomes a whole-of-earth issue. It is unlikely that many farmers can live the idyll that Xenophon bespeaks. Frost will, inter alia, describe the struggle of the hardscrabble farmer/herder in his day to maintain a close relationship to the soil in view of just those forces— the marketplace and banks—that threatened stewardship in Xenophon’s time. Nonetheless, the notion of stewardship in Xenophon and Frost may be the very kind of relationship needed for a sustainable and flourishing mode of dwelling together on the earth. FROST AND BUILDING SOIL Frost may connect better with present-day farmers than Xenophon. To be sure, it is not the case that many of us are farmers. Most of us live apart from the land. Most of us live in cities or suburbs. Our lives are influenced by the behavior of markets—markets we depend upon for the goods and services we consume; financial markets that determine the value of our property. Only a small fraction of us in developed countries are farmers. And, cultivation and husbandry have changed radically too. So those who have been “left behind” to farm may not live a life remotely resembling the idyllic existence described by the gentleman farmer Xenophon. For these reasons, we need to consider what becomes of the land and our relationship to it in light of these “facts.” Frost writes about forces in play that have only grown more powerful since his time in affecting and threatening the ownership of the land. Robert Frost forcefully addresses the difference between land that is cultivated and cared for and land that is exploited and commodified. Frost’s poetry holds open the possibility of being in a relationship to land that is proprietary and nonexploitative—notwithstanding the pressures to produce for the market. As such, it serves to suggest a possibility of “living poetically on the earth” (to use another poet’s expression) that recognizes the challenges arrayed against such dwelling. Frost’s “Build Soil—a Political Pastoral” will serve as a text for reflecting on the difference between land that is cultivated and cared for and land that is commodified.24 The poem is cast as a dialogue between potato-man Meliboeus and the farm-poet Tityrus. Meliboeus tells Tityrus, “hard times have struck me and I’m on the move.” Meliboeus has bought a “mountain farm” where he will raise sheep. He declares, “I’m done forever with potato crops/At thirty cents a bushel.” As for Tityrus, Meliboeus describes him as one who lives on a farm and writes poems about farming and “calls that

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farming.” By his own account, Tityrus has “half a mind/to take a writing hand in politics”—evidently influenced by the depression and depressionera politics. The “pastoral” is not an untroubled celebration of farming. For Meliboeus, farming on his terms requires a degree of defiance, eschewing commercial farming and separating himself from “exchange” and “encounter” in order to live close to the land, raising sheep and building soil. Frost confronts the issue of agriculture at a critical historical moment, in a time of crisis that served to raise the very meaning of agriculture and the relationship of farmers to the land. Meliboeus’s pain from the dispossession of a farm he had owned and the prospect of a new chance for him to connect to recently purchased land make for concrete poetic thinking about what it means to own and cultivate the land and, more broadly, contesting visions of our relationship to nature.25 There is bitterness toward farming as production for the market. Meliboeus has evidently lost his potato farm because market prices were not adequate to cover his costs. He suggests sarcastically that Tityrus write poems to “Advertise our farms to city buyers” or “to improve food prices.” Leaving aside irony, Meliboeus says that on his new farm, the mountain farm where he will raise sheep, he will not take goods to market. Expressing defiance, Meliboeus says, “Give me sheep/I know wool’s down to seven cents a pound. /But I don’t calculate to sell my wool./I didn’t my potatoes. I consumed them./I’ll dress up in sheep’s clothing and eat sheep.” In a more reflective mood, Frost, speaking through Meliboeus questions the very value of commercial farming: “Sometimes I’m perplexed myself/To find the good of commerce. Why should I/Have to sell you my apples and buy yours?” The poet’s bitterness and musings turn to rage, however, when he considers not just the unhappy consequences of hard times for farmers, but the threat that farming for the market poses to the land itself. In Tityrus’s voice, Frost says that taking farm goods to market is one thing, but some things should not be marketed at all. “To market ‘tis our destiny to go./But much as in the end we bring for sale there/There is still more we never bring or should bring.” What should never go to market is the land itself, the soil. “More that should be kept back—the soil for instance/In my opinion,/ . . . To sell the hay off, let alone the soil,/Is an unpardonable sin in farming. / The moral is, make a late start to market.” Deference to the land itself, to the soil, is the point. The issue is obviously ethical for him as the expression “unpardonable sin” implies. The land has inherent worth, and its owners are obliged to keep it out of trade—at least for as long as possible—“make a late start to market.”26 Why exclude the land from goods in trade? Part of the answer must lie in what is implied in the poem. The land offers a life of independence to the cultivator—albeit one that may well be had at

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the cost of isolation and a lower “standard of living.” Close reading, however, shows that the relentless exploitation of the land leads to its impoverishment. It is not just the sale of land as such, but uninterrupted production of goods grown on the land that evokes Frost’s rage—hence, in the first instance, the sale of hay is called an “unpardonable sin.” The vocation of the farmer is to “build soil” and to nourish the soil with its own products. . . . Plant, breed, produce But what you raise or grow, why feed it out, . . . Eat it or plow it under where it stands . . . To build the soil. For what is more accursed Than an impoverished soil plane and metallic?27

To be sure, building soil will lead to a more abundant output later. Build soil. Turn the farm in upon itself Until it can contain itself no more, But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.28

The “argument” might then seem to be one of prudence, guidance from a USDA conservation officer. I suggest, however, that more is involved. The outrage reflected in the expression “unpardonable sin” recognizes an ethical claim to respect the soil for itself. It is not just a bad idea or imprudent to exploit the soil. It is wrong. Tityrus, who proposes the soil building “agenda”—as perhaps an experiment in taking a “writing hand in politics”— makes it clear that for the poet and the farmer alike, making and doing, not the product so much, is the point: “product and food product are to me/Nothing compared to the producing of them.” Tityrus recognizes that for a farmer like Meliboeus, agriculture does not take its meaning in agricultural “output” for trade. Rather it is the farming itself and the relationship to the land that goes with it that counts. Tityrus says, “Let those possess the land and only those,/ Who love it with love so strong and stupid/That they may be abused and taken advantage of.”29 Not unlike the juridical sense of property, implying a domain set apart from the rest of the world, marked by boundaries, and entailing the right to exclude trespassers, Frost’s notion of property is like that articulated in chapter 4. It serves to mark the earth with boundaries, divide the world into what is mine and what is thine, and to withdraw the land from the free use of anyone or the control of others. Frost does not address trespass in the “Pastoral,” but he does so expressly in a poem entitled Trespass.30 Boundaries there are, whether physical or legally recognized and effectual. The zoning of space that property entails, however, is notably different for Frost. It is not justified

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by deduction from the concept of will and its free exercise—as is the case with Immanuel Kant. Rather, the land’s protection against degradation, its sustainability, obliges the farmer/owner to resist its sale even at the cost of his separation from the farmers engagement with others (be “out” with others, in the market place, buying and selling the yield of the land). At present from a cosmical dilation We’re so much out that the odds are against Our ever getting inside in again.31

In addition to separating “mine” and “thine,” property as cultivation divides the world (“cosmical[ly]”) into an “out” and an “in,” according to Frost. The farmer/owner’s task is to “go out to my run-out social mind/and be as unsocial with it as I can.” We [farmers], he says are “too much out.” Being in means holding the soil back, building the soil back by turning it over and back on itself to farmer’s limits.” He says, “I will turn it [the soil] under. . . . and so on to the limit of my nature.”32 It’s an austere and fiercely independent notion of ownership and farming, arguably excessive and combative. Not the stuff of a practical policy as such. Nonetheless, it articulates a sense of the earth, land, and soil that describes a way of being-on-the-earth that offers an alternative to unrestricted exploitation of the earth grounded in a prevailing concept of ownership largely left unchallenged as to its deepest ontological roots. Frost voices the meaning of land, cultivation, and property in a different register than Xenophon responding to issues of a different time and from a different position in society. Moreover, he has a somewhat different take on the value of the land and the cultivator’s relationship to it. Nonetheless, Frost and Xenophon share a deference and a respect for the earth that is grounded in the relationship of the farmer-proprietor to his piece of the earth. If Frost takes a step or two beyond Xenophon, it may lie in his acknowledging the cultivator’s obligation to enable nature’s self-replenishment as well as attend to its instruction. Both Frost and Xenophon address the condition of proprietors. The land that grounds Xenophon’s reflection is the outside part of his estate. There is nothing said about his proprietary rights, and a good deal that is said about caring for the land. As for Frost, the farm that belongs to the imagined Meliboeus is not just something bought and paid for; it is rather a domain held outside and apart from the exigencies of the market. In both cases, property in land entails a close relationship to what is owned. The emphasis in this chapter has been on that relationship and not so much on conventional ideas of ownership. It describes the elements of an attuned and caring relationship to the earth, hopefully of value to all of us in our encounters with nature.

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Not property as such, I would argue, but rather its transformation by way of commodification is often the basis for the rank exploitation of nature’s abundance that disturbs many an environmental conscience. Often, it is the case that the unowned spaces of the earth, open and unprotected, are the problem. The sea may offer the most vivid example of an unbounded natural environment vulnerable to pillaging; one thinks of ocean fish-habitats exploited by industrial fishing vessels—perhaps better described as floating food-processing factories. Policies to address such issues lie outside the scope or method of this brief chapter. Nonetheless, whether on the land or the sea, a proprietary relationship—not unlike that adumbrated through Xenophon and Frost—may work to the benefit of the earth and our long-term human well-being. Where does all this put us in relation to the book project which addresses two aspects of dwelling: being-on-the-earth and being-in-the-world-with-others? Clearly the chapter addresses being-on-the-earth with a robust exposition of the elements of stewardship. Being-in-the-world-with-others, however, comes across in Frost as largely opposed to the cultivation of the land he describes—although Frost’s Pastoral is “Political.” Tityrus tells Meliboeus that he has “half a mind to taking a writing hand to politics and is “keep[ing] an eye on Congress as being in the best position to “know if something is very wrong.”33 Clearly, this chapter does not raise all the questions the book project raises. Nor, does it have the final say on the themes that it focuses on. It surely expands on the human-earth relationship developed in chapter 1. It also introduces an idea of property and proprietorship that sets the table for the discussion of these themes in chapter 4. Frost’s vigorous critique of the market shows how contentious a place like the marketplace can be as to its meaning and import. The marketplace will receive a thoroughgoing examination in chapters 9 and 10—a treatment outside the scope and resources of this chapter. In the next chapter, a poet, Walt Whitman, will advance the book project a step further by enlarging the scale of our reflection to a country, the “united States of America” (sic), which, at the time of Whitman’s writing, was in the middle of an expansion that would give it a continental span. Key ideas— ones essential to the book project (nature, politics)—will also undergo fuller articulation, as will the chief theme of the book, namely, dwelling. NOTES 1. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, trans, O. J. Todd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 365.

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2. Marx, Karl, Early Writings: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, T. S. Bottomore, ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 114. 3. Coulange, Fustel de, trans. Willard Small, The Ancient City, A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton Kent & Co., 1916), 76–92. 4. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 365. 5. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 379. 6. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 383. 7. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 391–93. 8. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 393. 9. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 397. 10. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 401. 11. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 401. 12. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 403. 13. Heidegger, Martin, trans. Willliam Lovitt, The Question of Technology and Other Essays, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 15–16. 14. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 483. 15. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 485. 16. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 491. 17. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 503 18. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 497 19. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 509. Emphasis added. 20. Cohen, Edward E., Athenian Economy and Society, A Banking Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 7. 21. Aristotle, trans. H. Backham, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 43–45. 22. Aristotle, trans. H. Backham, The Nichomachaen Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 287–91. 23. Aristotle, The Nichomachaen Ethics, 203. 24. Excerpts from “Build Soil” by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost, copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved. 25. Frost, “Build Soil,” first stanza, 421. 26. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 20–21, 426–27. 27. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 24, upper, 428. 28. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 24, lower, 428. 29. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 22, 427. 30. Frost, “Trespass,” 503. 31. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 19, 425. 32. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 24, 429. 33. Frost, “Build Soil,” stanza 2, stanza 5, 421, 422.

Chapter 3

Nature and Democracy  Whitman’s New World Metaphysics

Whitman is the third of three poets who open the discussion of dwelling in this book. The poets preceding Whitman—Sandburg and Frost—offer versions of dwelling that fill out and enrich what is now still its working definition: being-in-the-world with others and on the earth. Whitman will do the same. His contribution to the discussion, in both poetry and prose, will, however, resist ready or easy interpretation. Whitman introduces a new term, “democracy” to our discussion; focuses on a specific place, “united States of America” at a time when it was growing to span a continent; and, he envisions a role for the poet, beyond the deferential regard and kinship to nature of Sandburg and the advocacy reflected in Frost’s “Political Pastoral” on “building soil.” Unpacking Whitman’s vision and its relevance to this book will entail immersing ourselves in Whitman’s universe of discourse to grasp his meaning and then rigorously, albeit not hostilely, questioning its relevance to a multiverse people inhabiting a continental-size state within a political space called “democracy.” NATURE AND DEMOCRACY: AN “ODD COUPLE”? Whitman makes an odd pairing of nature and democracy at the very end of Specimen Days—or rather, it seems peculiar to a casual reader of Whitman.1 He says, in part: “Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as Art is.” How are we to understand this “affiliation”? Is Nature’s openness meant as a symbol for a healthy and well-functioning democracy? Whitman, is, after all, a poet and poets have license to speak in images, metaphorically, and thus what is concrete (“open . . . sunny . . . hardy . . . sane) may very well stand for what is abstract (free and open exchange of ideas, vigorous expression, 47

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commonsense thinking). Then again, Specimen Days, autobiographical and, for the most part, matter-of-fact in tone, lacks the transcendental exuberance and onto-poetical sweep of Leaves of Grass.2 The sentence cited above, conformed to the style of the rest of Specimen Days, could just mean that hiking in the woods or strolling a quiet beach provides a healthy antidote to the stress and furor of democratic politics. On this interpretation, “open air” means open air, and sunny, hardy, and sane are literally the symptoms of a healthy citizen, i.e., one who punctuates political engagement with outdoor activity in the wild. The nature of the problem, the relation, is such that one must ask about democracy and nature as each functions within the body of Whitman’s work and his life. Is democracy understood as a form of government? an affirmation of equality? freedom? the dignity of the “common man”? the collective wisdom of the people? And what about nature? Is it synonymous with reality as a whole? Does it mean the physical universe? Living being? Is it best understood by way of “laws of nature” or as a primal force? And, as bodily beings, what relation do we humans have to nature? Since it is a poet whose understanding of nature is of interest, then surely it is germane to ask whether the poet has a special relationship to nature or whether poetry itself names a relationship to nature. Successfully determining Whitman’s views of nature and democracy is no small task, not to mention the question of their relation. Fortunately, Whitman brings nature into relation with democracy in the compass of an extended essay, “Democratic Vistas.” It will not be sufficient to confine these reflections to what Whitman writes in the essay, but the clues given there will guide investigation of Whitman’s conjunction—even as new issues and questions follow on the heels of textual answers to the questions raised by the cited passage. A quick and all too concise sketch of the path of thought in that piece follows. DEMOCRACY AND THE NEW WORLD METAPHYSICS AND POLITICS “Democratic Vistas” is Whitman’s argument for a poet of the American democratic experience.3 The New World cannot borrow the poetry or culture of the Old World. It is a modern world, a democratic world, a world that is not just determined by the novel constitutional arrangements of government or its vast material wealth. The ultimate success of the democratic experiment will require that it be reflected in art, especially literature, especially poetry.

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The bonds that hold a people together, that make them a people are created in poetry and literature and art. The “literatus” has a special task in any nation to recall and celebrate the spirit of the people.4 The distinctive task of the poet that Whitman calls for in “Democratic Vistas” is to bespeak the democratic solidarity of the Americans. What is the role of nature in all this? The answer lies in the central and mediating work of the poet and poetry. The same “new Literature” and “new Metaphysics” that are the “only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy” must “tally and express Nature, and the spirit of Nature.” Whitman asserts that “a fitly born and bred race, growing up in the right conditions of outdoor as much as indoor harmony . . . would in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, etc., . . . discover and achieve happiness—with Being suffused night and day by wholesome extasy [sic].”5 Whitman is not fastidious in his logic, but the thrust of his vision is discernable. The poetry that joins Americans together in a democratic society unites them as well with the American landscape, with nature as it discloses itself in the united States [sic]. “In the prophetic literature of these States . . . Nature, true Nature, and the true idea of Nature, long absent, must, above all become fully restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading atmosphere to poems.” Nature, he notes, does not mean “smooth walks, trimm’d hedges, poseys, and [the] nightingales of the English poets.” By nature, he rather has in mind “the whole orb . . . carrying fire and snow, that rolls through illimitable areas, light as feather, though weighing billions of tons.”6 A robust and pervasive sense of nature will, then, provide the milieu for a vigorous democratic American polity and the Being of Nature will ensure the well-being of those who dwell in “affiliation” with it. It is not just the case that Nature offers the milieu for Democracy. Nature is first tutor and type. Democracy, Whitman tells us, is the “younger brother” of Nature. Democracy can learn from nature, its older sibling, can follow its example. And what does nature teach? Its lesson is “the quality of Being” Whitman writes in “Democratic Vistas.” Nature is being in, of, and from itself: “in the object’s self, according to its central idea and purpose . . . growing there-from and thereto.”7 Nature, so understood, recalls physis, the being of that which has the source of its being within itself. It hearkens back in meaning to the earliest thought of nature in Greek philosophy and poetry. It is archaic, too, recalling the Greek notion of arche as governing, specifically, self-governing. A passage, from the semi-autobiographical “Specimen Days,” called “The Lesson of the Tree,” commends the vitality, strength, and endurance of a ninety-foot poplar, “four-feet at the butt,” which Whitman encounters on a walk in the woods. Its lesson is taught in silence. “It is, yet says nothing,” Whitman writes. For all of its stoic silence—Whitman calls it “dumbly eloquent”—it nonetheless “rebukes by its tough and equable

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serenity all weathers,” shaming “the gusty-tempered little wiffet man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow.” The lesson of nature, given in this case by “affiliating” with this poplar is one of “inherency” of keeping to “what is” and eschewing what “seems.” In its own laconic nonspeech, the tree advises those attentive to its counsel to avoid working themselves into a state of “morbid trouble” over the likes and dislikes, comments and suppositions of the onlooker critic.8 The democratic individual, who learns from Nature, one gathers, is independent, almost to the point of insouciance. If he or she is ready to learn—“cull, gather, and absorb”—from others, including those of the Old World, this should not be at the expense of his “precious idiocrasy” [sic] and “special nativity.” For its part, Nature does not look to culture for its standards but shows itself in a “healthy rudeness, savage virtue, justification of what one has in one’s self.”9 Clearly, the nature that Whitman writes of here is not the source of the natural law that the founders of American democracy had in mind. Its lessons are not derived from a reflection on the natural order and the nature of the human being. Rather, its lessons come from a quiet communing, “affiliation,” with nature, and its counsels are not narrowly political; they have more to do with qualities of a democratic character—independence, individualism, toughness, endurance—than the rights and duties of a citizen. There is more that Nature has to tell us about democracy. Whitman finds in Nature as well as in Democracy or “New World politics and progress” the “lessons of variety and freedom.”10 Whitman’s poetry is famous for its celebration of the sweep and diversity of the American continental landscape and the vibrant and variegated life of American society, but individuality, whether of place or person, is not lost in the magnitude of the land nor the multitude of its peoples. Whitman is the poet of e pluribus unum and the unity that gathers the many is both natural and political. The poet, Whitman writes, “incarnates . . . the geography [of America] and [its] natural life and rivers and lakes . . . [the] Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes . . . [the] beautiful masculine Hudson … and the blue breadth over” a number of water ways and water bodies inland and off-shore—an allusion to the Big Sky that overarches the waters and lands of the country11 All readers of Whitman’s poetry are familiar with his celebratory litanies of individuals from every walk of life and may know of his characterization of America as a “race of races.” We shall quote at length just a few of the many litanies of America’s peoples and places. In prose discourse, Whitman refers to the “all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of individuality” which forms the counterpoint [this author’s expression] for the “all-leveling aggregate of democracy.” The “framework” that reconciles the multitude and the individual is one that offers an openended equality to both “farmer and mechanic” and to “male and female” and the possibility of “towering selfhood . . . possessing the idea of the infinite.”12

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Along with variety, nature gives “lessons” in freedom. Among the features of America’s landscape, the prairie, vast and unbounded, comparable to the “grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven and the ocean with its waters,” arguably best gives expression to freedom. In a short speech he prepared but never gave to a community group in Topeka, Kansas, Whitman writes of “the broad expanses of living green in every direction” and says that he has been impressed in his travels through the Midwest and will ever remain impressed with “the topography of your Western central world—that vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which is there in these prairies.” He remarks “how freeing, soothing, [and] nourishing they are to the soul.” The would-be epic-poet/metaphysician of the New World, not known for a want of words, writes, “under these [prairie] skies resplendent in September beauty . . . these interminable and stately prairies—in the freedom and vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect western air and autumn sunshine—it seems to me a poem would be almost an impertinence.” In the words he does find for his experience of the prairie, Whitman includes those which bespeak freedom: unbounded, unconfined, freeing.13 In another passage, Whitman imagines the prairies “fused in the alembic of a perfect poem . . . entirely western, fresh, and limitless.”14 He entertains the thought that they might be “North America’s characteristic landscape.”15 Whitman explicitly connects the Nature of the prairies with Democracy: “No one, I discover, begins to know the real geographic, democratic, indissoluble American Union in the present, or suspect it in the future, until he explores these Central States, and dwells awhile observantly on their prairies, or amid their busy towns, and the mighty father of waters.”16 LEAVES OF GRASS: EPIC AND OPERA It is not enough to think of nature as modeling democratic virtues to the citizens of the New World. Nor is Nature limited to offering analogues of diversity and freedom as they manifest themselves in the American polity. Whitman’s epic poetic masterwork, “Leaves of Grass,” is one he invites us to read performatively as an enactment or invocation of both nature and polity, a gathering of the American people and their vast and variegated land in the word and song of his verse. Whitman himself answers the “casting call” for the American literatus that he describes in “Democratic Vistas.” (Does anyone doubt that he wrote “the part” for himself?) He will, or at least would, become the site wherein the very truth of the American democratic soul becomes incarnate in a multitude that is not an aggregate, a people of singular individuals who range across the sweep of the American landscape. The democratic nature that emerges in Whitman’s incantation, his song—“A

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Song of Myself”—is a poetized nature.17 To say “poetized” here is not to suggest the embellishment of a prosaic description of the American people and their land. The poet sings and summons, names and calls. The grammar of the verse is addressive as a shaman’s chant is addressive. Spirits—not ancestors but fellow travelers and citizens—are made to assemble in the open where they work and dwell and wander. Whitman’s song is of himself, a “Song of Myself,” and this all too readily suggests an overweening ego—and, nothing more to some. It is true such language draws attention to the poet, but it is only on the foundation of the grammatical first-person, that the poet can do what must be done in the poem and only thus can he make happen the event of democracy and nature in its words. As an “I,” Whitman can address a score of “you[s].” In the very first section of “Leaves of Grass” called “Inscriptions,” Whitman calls out to enlist support for his project. Those addressed by way of individual poem titles are poets, intellectuals, those who fought for the cause of democracy and freedom, strangers and the readers of “Leaves of Grass.” Following are the addressees with indications of what their role might be in helping Whitman, the literatus, to call American democracy into being: • “To Foreign Lands” presumably foreign sympathizers with American democracy who might help “to define America, her athletic democracy”; • “To the Old Cause,” the cause is freedom and independence for which “a strange, sad war [was fought].” Whitman’s “chants for thee [the Old Cause], the eternal march of thee” Presumably the hope is that the beneficiaries of the cause that others fought for will contribute to the “march” of freedom and democracy into the future. • “Poets to Come”: “orators, singers, musicians to come . . . Arouse! For you will justify me.” One hears in this the hope that future poets will take up Whitman’s ambition. • “To a Historian”: “I project the history of the future.” Whitman appears to be inviting the historian to go beyond recording the past and recognize the historical import of the future of democracy. • “To You, Stranger”: “should you not speak to me? . . . should I not speak to you?” Might this not be the paradigm for a dialogic, democratic discourse. • “Thou Reader”: “throbbest (sic) life and pride and love the same as I.” Comrades in the cause of democracy need to possess more than an intellectual commitment to it.18 Having called up and assembled a diverse group of individuals who arguably share in Whitman’s devotion to democracy—can we call them disciples?—Whitman now calls out to diverse individuals across the country

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to draw them together in fraternity under the aegis of American democracy. They are not already assembled in a place or time and they are not a crowd or a mass. They are scattered about the land, over a continent, and it is by way of litany—many litanies over the course of the epic poem—that they become one: e pluribus unum. Section 16 of “Song of Myself” seems nothing more than a listing of individuals from many walks of life and different parts of the country. A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch, Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,) Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat, A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.19 [In this and other quotations of poetry, emphasis is that of this author.]

Listing has its rationale; it is a message of equality. The list has no apparent ordering principle. The individuals do not form a system. There is no hierarchy among them. Each “entry” to the list has more or less the same form or style. Listing has a function as well. The people come together in calling them out, equal in importance, one people in the song that celebrates them. Key terms in the poem above are italicized by this author. “At home” can only signal that the places listed are dwelling places. Place and person are affiliated in one’s making oneself at home in living out one’s life in everyday workaday engagement. With “Comrade,” Whitman identifies himself with those he calls out. Comradeship, we shall see, will serve as the empathetic bond which unites a diversity of individuals and peoples with each other. It

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makes possible the lived and affective democratic whole that Whitman envisions. More on this later. Just as Whitman assembles the people, creating the vision of a polity united and equal, so too does he gather the diverse geographies of the continental-scale country, calling his readers, Americans, to “behold” their land in Section 8 of “Song of the Exposition.” With “Thou,” Whitman addresses the country and its lands as an interlocutor with him in a conversation. With “behold,” he defers to what the lands comprising America will show of themselves to the readers of Leaves. (Instances of the word “thy” are italicized to by this author as indicating ownership of America. Although, ownership is ambiguous: is it ownership of the land by its people or that of people by the land?) And thou America, . . . Thee, ever thee, I sing. Thou, also thou, a World, With all thy wide geographies, manifold, different, distant, Rounded by thee in one—one common orbic language, One common indivisible destiny for All. . . . Behold, America! (and thou, ineffable guest and sister!) For thee come trooping up thy waters and thy lands; Behold! thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains, As in procession coming. Behold, the sea itself, And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships; See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the green and blue, See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port, See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke. Behold, in Oregon, far in the north and west, Or in Maine, far in the north and east, thy cheerful axemen, Wielding all day their axes. Behold, on the lakes, thy pilots at their wheels, thy oarsmen, How the ash writhes under those muscular arms! There by the furnace, and there by the anvil, Behold thy sturdy blacksmiths swinging their sledges, Overhand so steady, overhand they turn and fall with joyous clank, Like a tumult of laughter. Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents, Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising, See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream. Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South, Thy wealthy daughter-states, Eastern and Western,

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The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas, and the rest, Thy limitless crops, grass, wheat, sugar, oil, corn, rice, hemp, hops, Thy barns all fill’d, the endless freight-train and the bulging store-house, The grapes that ripen on thy vines, the apples in thy orchards, Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes, thy coal, thy gold and silver, The inexhaustible iron in thy mines. All thine O sacred Union! Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines, City and State, North, South, item and aggregate, We dedicate, dread Mother, all to thee! Protectress absolute, thou! bulwark of all! For well we know that while thou givest each and all, (generous as God,) Without thee neither all nor each, nor land, home, Nor ship, nor mine, nor any here this day secure, Nor aught, nor any day secure.20

Again, a list does its work. This is no surveyor’s ordering of entries into a land record. No mere cartographer’s map of the land can embrace as well as this poem the many distinctive and individually named lands in the list. This is performative and addressive discourse. One is reminded of a teacher calling roll—or better, calling out the winners of awards. Or, again, Adam naming the living but nonhuman inhabitants of Paradise under the dominion given to Adam by God—except that “dominion” is not the right word here. If Adamic naming is illuminating here, it is because with such naming the named comes into its distinctive being and takes its place on the earth. It is enough and more to list and name, to bring the scattered lands to presence, to gather them together, arrayed in their diversity and individuality. Second-person address makes possible the repeated use of the second-person possessive pronoun “thy.” Applied to the land and its products, “thy” gives ownership of the earth to the earth itself. The second-person possessive preempts a claim by humans to domination and control of the earth. Notably, the lands hailed here are not wilderness areas. They are occupied, built environments. One might well perceive the coal mines and factories and blast furnaces as ravaging the earth, as exploiting the earth of its resources and leaving it barren. It’s an open question, outside the context of Whitman’s thought, whether, mining and manufacturing, to name just two technologies, essentially reduces the earth to an exploitable resource. But, here’s the point Whitman seems to be making. The fruits of human labor—farming most evidently—are fruits of the earth! Now, does this raise a legal question of ownership? Whose earth is it anyway?

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Not at all a facetious question. It will come up for close reflection in chapters of this book to come. Before leaving this poem, however, consider what the last quoted stanza has to say about the thinking that underpins the poetry. Isn’t it a thinking which is a thanking? Isn’t gratitude the appropriate response for an earth that shares itself so generously? PRELUDE TO WHITMAN’S SONG In the above-quoted poems in Leaves, presence or bringing to presence is the task of the poet. And for this reason, the poet himself must body forth into the land, witness its grandeur, embrace its people, hearken to their song. “I hear America Singing,” occurs in the Book of Leaves that Whitman calls a “Song of Myself.” If as suggested earlier in this chapter, one must adopt the first-person posture to engage in a second-person dialogue with the people and land of America—and, more than that—if Whitman is to sing of America and its people, then he must know that of which he sings. This means that Whitman must put his ear to the ground, attend to what America is singing of itself. He must gather songs for his epic/lyric/operatic song so that we who have been gathered to the event of Whitman’s poem can hear the singing that rises from America itself. Whitman’s poem, “I Hear America Singing” is, we may say, a report of what he has heard. I Hear America Singing I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.21

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The singing “recorded” in this poem has no lyrics or melodies we hear. Whitman’s is obviously not a kind of Library of Congress project to record folk and popular song from around the country before it dies out. Nor are the songs characterized as providing the “soundtrack” of people’s lives at certain times in their lives. The poetic conceit here, it seems, is to align singing to everyday occupations, to everyday being-in-the-world. If this interpretation makes sense, then what this aligning does is to redirect attention from the task of making a living or perhaps the study of workforce composition in an economic history of America entering the industrial age. Is it a stretch to say that it distills what is happening when working one’s job is part of dwelling in a time and place, a way of being-in-the-world and on the earth? Let us continue with Whitman’s preparation for Leaves, his epic/lyrical/ operatic work. To accomplish his task, Whitman must witness as well as hear that which he poetizes. He must see for himself and then, in Leaves, he must see for us his readers. This is arguably what he does in Section 18 of “Starting from Paumonok.” See, steamers steaming through my poems, See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing, See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village, See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores, See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, animals wild and tame—see, beyond the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo feeding on short curly grass, See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce, See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press—see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent, See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return’d, See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle, See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, miners digging mines—see, the numberless factories, See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools—see from among them superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, drest in working dresses, See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me well-belov’d, close-held by day and night, Hear the loud echoes of my songs there—read the hints come at last.22

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“See . . . See . . . [and] See” again. Whitman is no hostile witness in a court of law. “Do you see what I see,” is his refrain. Leaves is a vision as well as a song. The vision and song are meant to do nothing less that gather a diverse people and it various lands into a democracy that signifies a way of life. The formulation attests to the poet’s having seen for himself what is there, invokes its presence in words, and then invites our witness to it as well. In his own words, the task of the poet is, most ambitiously, to “incarnate the geography” of America, as he says in “Democratic Vistas,” and thereby to make it palpably present to those attending to the poem. RECAPITULATION ON THE THEMES OF DEMOCRACY AND NATURE What has Whitman brought to the project of this book? What contribution to the understanding of dwelling? It is time to distill what Whitman has about the new idea he inserted in this book’s narrative, namely, Democracy. And time to assess the Whitmans’s slant on Nature. Among the new ideas introduced by Whitman is democracy—a political space modeling the virtues of nature that will nurture and support the achievement of democracy. Among these virtues, are freedom, independence, and openness. It remains to say more about what Whitman means by democracy. Clearly, there is nothing conventionally political in Whitman’s concept of democracy, nothing about the form and functioning of a democratic government. For Whitman, democracy is a way of life. As a way of life, it has special relevance to this project on dwelling, in both senses given to dwelling in this book: being-in-the-world with others and dwelling on the earth. In this treatment of democracy as a way of life, Whitman takes an approach much like that of Tocqueville in Volume II of Democracy in America. There Tocqueville describes the impact of democratic ideas on the beliefs, feelings, attitudes, manners, interpersonal relations, and practices of Americans and how these in turn affect political institutions and life. Tocqueville’s approach, we might say, is sociological. Thematically speaking, so is Whitman’s. Like Tocqueville, Whitman is concerned with democracy as a lived experience, i.e., how democracy is lived outside the chambers and halls of government. Whitman’s approach differs from Tocqueville’s in being more affective and aspirational. Whereas Tocqueville is the third person observer and witness to democratic life in America, Whitman, the poet, sees himself as a pro-active force in amplifying and realizing what he sees as he walks the roads of America and what he hears when he puts his ears to the ground and attends to what Americans are “Singing.” More than Tocqueville, and much more than any phenomenologist of the lifeworld, from Husserl to Heidegger

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and beyond, Whitman perceives and appreciates how much of everyday being-in-world is taken up with work, labor, trade craft and trading, industrial production as well as farming the land and tending livestock. All are called out in Whitman’s litanies. The vision of hardworking individuals inhabiting and building a country growing ever larger in extent is not in itself, however, a description of a democratic polity. Perhaps one word, “comradeship,” best describes what being with others signifies for Whitman and what binds individuals across the land into a democracy. This affective dimension of Whitman’s “politics” has a classical antecedent in Aristotle when Aristotle favorably notes how legislators have valued friendship, philia, and its concomitant, solidarity, over justice (dike) in constituting polities. (See Book VIII, i, 4 of the Nichomachean Ethics, on Friendship.) Consider now what Whitman himself says explicitly—and poetically— about democracy in this poem from Leaves. For You, O Democracy Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon, I will make divine magnetic lands, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of comrades. I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades. For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme! For you, for you I am trilling these songs.23

We noted earlier in one of the poems of Leaves, the recurrence of “comrades” and allusion to the role of comradeship in bonding the self-reliant and freestanding individuals of the country into unity. The language is aspirational, to be sure, but quite understandable. The practical effect and benefit of achieving unity, a citizenry of one heart and mind, especially when preexisting divisions run deep, needs little justification. When it happens, however, it is often the result of existential crises. It is less likely, one thinks, that a poet, novelist, actor, performing artist, or singer can rally a people to make good on the promise of democracy as lived out in the ethos of a people. The role of the poet, of arts and artists generally understood, will focus our attention in the last section of this chapter.

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To be sure, later in this book, democracy and political space will come to have other and diverse settings and meanings than those expressed here by Whitman. Nevertheless, Whitman speaks well here of what dwelling as being-in-the-world with others can mean from a political standpoint. To be sure, there is idealization in Whitman’s e pluribus unum. Notwithstanding his idealization, Whitman cannot be charged with having been disconnected from the deep divisions among people in his life experience. Whitman’s work covers a time before, during, and after the highly divisive Civil War took place and left its scars and, may we say, unhealed wounds on the body politic. Whitman nursed wounded Civil War soldiers and could not be said to have been removed from realities of American political life. We shall have to come back to how useful Whitman’s vision might be in framing a notion of dwelling addressing the issues of cohabiting a planet at risk and a world as divided as ever. As for nature, what can one take away from Whitman regarding the other aspect of our working definition of dwelling, viz., dwelling “on the earth”? How does nature stand in Whitman’s estimate? From what he says in Specimen Days about the ninety-foot poplar tree, it is clear that Whitman respects nature as a being-unto-itself, surviving, perduring, with lessons for us humans that it speaks to us with a “dumb eloquence.” So, nature is not a human construct or nothing more than matter waiting to be imprinted with meaning and value by humans. In speaking of the prairies in Democratic Vistas, he exalts the limitless expanse of the land. The open expanse of the prairies exceeds their being expressed in poetry—it would be an “impertinence” to make a poem of them.24 So, there is deference and respect to nature here. It exceeds our capacity to express its grandeur in words. It in fact, speaks to us humans about how we might manage our worldly affairs within the democratic polity. Having said as much, the American landscape of Whitman is not a wilderness, left untouched by human occupation and development. It is not off-limits to settlement, cultivation, mining, the rise of great cities, bridges, roads, docks, steamships—all the transforming effects of industrialization and trade. House-building, measuring, sawing the boards, Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing, shingle-dressing, Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of sidewalks by flaggers, The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brickkiln,

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Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness, echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts looking through smutch’d faces, Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains or by river-banks, men around feeling the melt with huge crowbars, lumps of ore, the due combining of ore, limestone, coal, The blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the bottom of the melt at last, the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars of pig-iron, the strong clean-shaped Trail for railroads, Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house, steam-saws, the great mills and factories . . .25

Earlier in the chapter we took note of Whitman’s celebration of industry—of factories, coal-mines and blast furnaces. He credited these phenomena to the generous abundance of the earth. He conceded these human works to earth’s generosity, but as the project in this book comes to consider the Age of the Antropocene, which bears geophysical and biological witness to the indelible imprint and harmful impact of the human on the planet, we will need to dwell more deeply on how our dwelling on the earth has transformed the being of the earth and our being on the earth. With respect to Whitman, the overriding and recurrent point made about American geography is its diversity. America is a place of many places. For the purposes of this book, the salient points with respect to the America landscape—that apply mutatis mutandis to earth as a whole—are these: it is a variegated whole; and, it is, for the most part, occupied. If there is more than some idealization of humans uniting as comrades in the American polity, there is, on the contrary, a kind of realism in the description of American geography—and arguably the geography of the earth. What follows from the notion of a planet of differing topographies, climates, population density, levels and types of human occupation and developments—and, let’s add, different cultures (see chapter 5)? At the very least, this mix of conditions imposes a special challenge: to address perils that fall differently in different earth geographies with a collective human effort in a world at best divided. Obviously, there is more to be said about the challenge and possible responses. WHAT IS A POET TO DO? In the litanies of the people, there is implicit and often explicit allusion to the localities from which they come; localities define the work of their inhabitants and arguably who they are, their identities. Likewise, the many lands

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or localities that comprise the natural geography of the nation often bear the names of states and are rarely described without reference to human dwelling or significance. The two-way relationship of America’s people and lands, one might say, antedates the poem, but, for Whitman, the relationship of Democracy and Nature is the outcome of the poetizing. If the poet is successful, the democratic epic and its staging on the American landscape unfolds in the poem. Democracy and Nature both imply a plurality in unity, equality, independence, and freedom together. If poetry works in the way Whitman describes, then these qualities and virtues are sung, celebrated, and poetically achieved in Whitman’s work. “Poetically achieved” says much, perhaps, reaches too far. We shall have to scrutinize the ambition and ask just how much can any poet actualize or even assist in actualizing a political vision. Whitman’s ambition to be a kind of poet laureate for a New World Metaphysics which would not only envision but also help achieve a democratic society in America seems overweening. Perhaps one should simply concede that it is. Nonetheless, within his poetry and his prose, his idealization and realism, his New Metaphysics and his democratic politics, there is a rhetoric, at least implicit, that suggests how he, Whitman, thought a literatus, might address the challenges created by his ambition. Circle back to what was said about Whitman’s “rollout” of Leaves of Grass. The poem is a kind of performative discourse (meant to do something with its words). It largely takes the form of second-person address. And, at the beginning some half dozen groups of people are addressed in poems whose titles begin expressly with “To.” The addressees include: foreigners sympathetic of American democracy; long-time supporters for the cause of democracy and freedom; poets who will carry on Whitman’s work: historians who might come to understand what writing the “history of the future” might be; strangers ready for dialogue; and the readers of Leaves. The place and composition of this list in Leaves suggest that among all the addressees in Leaves, these are ones who might have a prior interest in taking up the call that Whitman sounds to Americans of whom and to whom he speaks in Leaves. There is this sequence in the rollout of Leaves: Whitman hears America Singing, he witnesses the lives of individuals across the span of a diverse American landscape, and he takes to the road to meet up his fellow/comrade Americans, dwelling for a while with them not just to record information but rather to form bonds of friendship. With his itinerary laid out above, it is not a stretch to say that Whitman invites those who might be expected to take up the call, to do likewise. “Likewise,” would mean hearing what the land tells us about itself and what those who live on it have to say about their situation, meeting with them and “dwelling for a while” in their company, and then, with a sense of the kind

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of “ground truth” that emerges this way—and, perhaps only with this learning—work together at the challenges facing their country. It is not a sure bet, by any means, that a Whitmanesque vision of unity and diversity, freedom and collaboration, respecting the earth but drawing from it to sustain human life and flourish will prevail in the political space where we meet and on the geography of the planet we occupy. But might it not be the case that being friends with each other and friends of the earth are necessary conditions for coexistence in the most literal and prosaic sense of the term? NOTES 1. Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1995). 2. Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959). 3. Whitman, Walt, “Democratic Vistas” in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959). 4. Whitman, “Vistas,” 493, 497, 498. 5. Whitman, “Vistas,” 494. 6. Whitman, “Vistas,” 494. 7. Whitman, “Vistas,” 478. 8. Whitman, “Specimen,” 123. 9. Whitman, “Vistas,” 478. 10. Whitman, “Vistas,” 455. 11. Whitman, “Preface to 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass,” 412. 12. Whitman, “Vistas,” 494. 13. Whitman, “Specimen,” 191–92. 14. Whitman, “Specimen,” 202. 15. Whitman, “Specimen,” 203. 16. Whitman, “Specimen,” 211. 17. Whitman, Leaves/“Song of Myself,” 25–68. 18. Whitman, Leaves, 6–7, 13–14. 19. Whitman, Leaves, 36. 20. Whitman, Leaves, 148. 21. Whitman, Leaves, 12. 22. Whitman, Leaves, 23. 23. Whitman, Leaves, 87. 24. Whitman, Specimen, 191–92. 25. Whitman, Leaves, 158–59.

PART II

Phenomenologies of Place

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Property and Home Mine and Thine

With the present chapter on dwelling, we turn from the testimony of poets to the scrutiny of philosophers. Whitman, the last of the poets to testify on dwelling, presented an expansive and deeply rooted notion of dwelling, one based on bonds of comradeship holding together a polity of continental scale. This chapter, which initiates a philosophical reflection on dwelling cannot simply appropriate as such the content of Whitman’s vision and build from that. The approaches of poetry and philosophy differ. The philosophical approach that drives reflection in this and the following two chapters sets aside what we know and believe of a subject matter. Outside any pre-given theoretical framework and beginning from our lived experience of that subject and how it presents itself to us in our thinking, feeling, or acting on it, the approach aims to distill its essential meaning. So, in this chapter, our focus is on property. We say that something is “mine.” What do we mean when we say something is my property? What is essential to its being mine? What follows from that? Our starting point is neither the earth as humankind’s one and only dwelling nor the America sung by Whitman. Here we begin with the place of dwelling that arguably comes to mind when most people think about dwelling, namely, one’s dwelling place, one’s home, where one lives, what is one’s own, what one owns. Even at that, the reflection, initiated here, guided by Husserlian phenomenology, begins with a still narrower and more concentrated focus in order to locate the least freighted and theoretically overlaid sense of “ownness”: the ownness of perceptions we regard as our own. The reflection that begins here does not end here. From the “zero-point of consciousness” and the initially rarified ”zone of ownness” around it, we move on. The elements of ownness identified in a reflection thereupon are applied analogically to things we call more broadly our own, our property. Even then, we stop short of applying juridical and economic predicates until the full sense of what the 67

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possessive adjectives—“mine” and “thine”—and the simple but powerful apostrophe become clear. The insights gained from the poets—Sandburg, Frost, Whitman, and, let’s add the rather lyrical writer Xenophon—will not go forgotten as we move through this and next two chapters. In chapter 5, ideas regarding the relationship of differing geographies and the peoples who inhabit them will resonate with what Whitman called out and celebrated in Leaves of Grass. Chapter 6 on “Nature and the Wild” will take up the nature of nature (recall Sandburg and Frost), and address the issue of respecting its independence and drawing upon its resources (raised by Whitman). The sections of this chapter trace the pathway of thinking taken here: first philosophical antecedents to Husserlian phenomenology; then, the demarcation of a zone of ownness and an analogical expansion of it; and finally the implications for dwelling in and beyond the home-space described in this chapter. PRELUDE AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS The awareness of property and the difference of the “mine” and “thine” can come with a shock at the border between them. Consider this imaginative variation per Husserl or thought experiment as Anglo-American philosophy might call it. The sign reads, “No Trespass!” The trespasser knows that the sign has been posted by a proprietor, understands proprietorship, and, in a sense, acknowledges ownership even as she might ignore or challenge it. A trespasser crosses the line that divides mine from thine and understands implicitly “mineness,” the space inscribed from the center of my self-space outward and about me and proscribed to others: “No Trespass!” The prohibition speaks out with categorical force, as a categorical imperative, a categorical prohibition, a negation, a thou-shalt-not addressed to any and every thou, directed to every approach, every approximation to my self-space, to what is mine and what belongs to me. The prohibition can be so forbidding and negative that it masks what is positive and constitutive to property. Exclusion is not an afterthought to proprietorship. It is not an application of a right to ownership established before the exclusionary moment. It is not a subsequent choice to bar and exclude the other from my self-space grounded in an institution of ownership that would be all affirmation and positivity. Exclusion is not just a collateral benefit or subsidiary right that follows upon the establishment of ownership; it is not simply derived from ownership. Exclusion, withdrawal, prohibition is “present at creation.” It is an arche, a governing principle at the origin of property. It is constitutive of property. To

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say “mine” is to say “not thine.” “Mine” is a performative utterance that institutes and creates the mine as it sets it off from “the thine.” The mine and thine are as co-primordial as I and Thou. The relata are a product of the relation: the relata—mine; thine—are adjectival to the relation. There is not “first” a mine that asserts, posits, acquires, or suffers a relation to a thine. It is out of and from the relation that mine and thine have their meaning. Moreover, the relation is not a mere representational relation but an instituted or constituted relation, a spacing, a diaeresis that posits a relation of difference: autonomy and difference and relation, at once. This first scenario or imaginative variation envisions an encounter of the mine and thine that strongly exhibits the negative or exclusionary character that goes toward defining the difference of mine and thine. The scenario does not say much, if anything, for the value of the exclusionary moment implicit here in the concept of ownership. On the contrary, it seems to valorize the unsociability of those who appear to want to isolate themselves from the outside world and others. It bespeaks the hermetic gated community and the paranoia of gun laws that tend to legitimize shooting intruders. Consider, then, the following, second variation. A law-abiding citizen has settled down for night in her home and without warning or so much as a knock on the door, uniformed police barge into her home brandishing guns seeking to make an arrest and find evidence of wrongdoing. In this scenario, as in the first, the exclusionary sense of ownership is understood, via negativum, in its transgression. The worth or value of that exclusionary dimension of ownership, however, is more strongly manifest. Historically and juridically speaking, the value of exclusion is embodied in the Four Amendment to the Bill of Right of the U.S. Constitution. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things.1

Both variations offer stark testimony to the meaning and import of ownership in a key constitutive aspect of its nature. They are, however, limited in their contribution to a fuller and more rounded sense of property and ownership for a reflection, like this one, that examines the mine and thine within the much broader context of dwelling with others upon the earth. The strength of the two scenarios turns out to be their weakness in the context of this book’s project. The layerings of meaning in both—social, economic, political, and juridical—but especially the second scenario, pull thought in too many directions and, at the same time, leave out lifeworld contexts of being-at-home that invite and require reflection. To securely build toward that understanding of

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dwelling, this chapter will start afresh with the most primitive sense of ownership—that coming from a reflection on perception—and systemically build upon that concept a phenomenological understanding of same that better supports the ambition of the book. Before delving into a Husserlian reflection on “the sphere of ownness,” we will trace philosophical antecedents on the theme of property that in one or more ways contribute to our phenomenological examination of ownness that explicitly starts with Husserl. First, a “Walk in the Woods with Locke.” Locke is famous for relating labor and property, for seeming to construe taking-ownership as investiture: things become mine via my investment of labor in them. The property, “mineness,”accrues to the thing by my adding labor to things. Ownership is conferred upon things in a positive act, a practice: specifically, in production, the imposition of form upon matter. This imposition, one is given to think, not only marks the thing with the specific character which the form, e.g., chair, leaves impressed on the matter, e.g., wood, but also with the character “mine.” The agent-cause acquires ownership through its agency, paradoxically giving being to something other than itself, something seemingly independent and other than self, but retaining claim to it, holding on to it, as something it would understand as belonging to oneself, namely as a dependent being. I do not mean to dismiss this understanding of Locke’s. I do, however, want to call attention to another “earlier” description of taking ownership in Locke that necessitates our “strolling” with him for a moment in the woods. Locke or the owner-to-be sees an acorn on the forest floor, picks it up, takes it for his own, and then does what he wants with it (eats it). Here, just assuredly, something becomes mine. And yet, I do not change it, transform it, labor over it or invest effort in it. If I eat it, then, of course, it is not left as I found it, but, in this case, it is not so much transformed into something with an ambiguous independence but is utterly destroyed and disappears from view in act of consumption, a nihilation of the thing. Locke’s diction in the acorn narrative, but also elsewhere in his discussion of property, evinces an understanding of what I wish to construe as the negative, withdrawing, and excluding moment of appropriation. I do not mean to say that appropriation—as the beginning of proprietorship—is exclusively exclusive; I only wish to have it counted as a key principle, a constitutive or defining moment in proprietorship.2 Locke offers testimony to this point. In the common space of the state of nature things are accessible, present-to-hand, to all; when I take something in hand, make it mine, and then do with it what I will, I withdraw it from the commons. I effect a spatial reconfiguration. The thing becomes inaccessible to others and, at the same time, it enters into a kind of self-space, however transient, wherein its significance is determined within the scope of my needs and my will. I want to call attention here to the spatial drama enacted here

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and to the lead role in that drama given to the thing-to-be-item-of-property: as the thing becomes property, a zone of ownness opens up as well. My thing and a space of mineness, thing and world, emerge together. Whatever other attributes my world or my space comes to have, its emergence and its character as mine includes exclusion. To be mine, not only my thing but also the space that supports it, holds itself apart from the larger public space or other private spaces. Readers of Locke might well protest that nothing has been said here about his “labor theory of ownership,” i.e., the idea that in applying labor to the land in agriculture, for example, I leave an imprint on the land that makes it mine or constitutes a claim to ownership in it. The idea merits the consideration that it has had over centuries. Later in the book, we will want to come back to it in chapters dealing with the human relationship to the earth and the Anthropocene. At this point, consideration of the Lockean theory of labor will be suspended. His theory has more to do with the acquisition of property and claim to it than with dwelling upon or with property, however acquired. “Our Next Witness: Kant.” Kant’s philosophy of property is illuminating in many ways. Here, I call to attention his recognition that property is essentially private property. The privacy of private property derives from depriving the other of its use. To be sure, Kant deduces the right to property from the notion of will. To be a being-of-will will means precisely to hold sway over things. Imagine a will without anything to lord over and you are left with an empty concept, Kant implies. Ownership or property signifies a domain within which the will may play out as will, exercise itself as will over something. Ownership, thus far, is understood as deriving from a positive determination of will. Kant does not give himself the option of saying that physical possession of the thing amounts to proprietorship. One may be in de facto possession of something and not own it; conversely, one might own something but not have physical possession of it. At a deeper level, Kant does not want to found a metaphysics of justice on a purely empirical or de facto basis. And so, he looks to the will itself—to what it wills, and from what it withholds its consent—to ground his notion of property. In this regard, he writes that what is mine, property for me, is something, whose use by others without my permission, would be an injury to me. It is only a small, inferential step from this idea to the notion that property is mine, i.e., is private, inasmuch as I can deny or allow its access to others. Two related points need to be distinguished and made: more evidently, if something is mine, I may allow or forbid the other the use of it; less evidently but more fundamentally, something is mine in the first place, if I have already removed it from public domain and brought it under my control (and, this appropriation is recognized and legitimated by others in law, it should be added).3

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Proprietorship already always presupposes having removed something from the commons, the realm or space which it is accessible to all. There is, of course, much more that could be said about the ideas sketched out here and Kant’s broader notions of property and right. For present purposes, I wish only to accentuate the moment of exclusion—i.e., forbidding or allowing in Kant’s theory of property. The exclusionary moment is less concrete, is more abstract and juridical. So too, the space of ownness and possession, i.e., not necessarily for Kant a particular or even unique place, is not significantly a geographical location with perhaps an abundance of personal and significant relations acquired over time, but rather a domain in which the will has its way or holds sway. It is not so much a matter of how we live within the domain we have but rather how we govern and rule within it. “Hegel and the Privacy of Private Property.” Hegel most clearly affirms the privacy of private property but not in terms of the removal of a thing from the reach of others. Rather, property is always private because an individual subject always appropriates an individual thing. Hegel says this, almost as an aside, after having laid out his notion of property as the first emergence of the subject into objective reality, indeed, into history. The subject, which otherwise would be abstract and infinite self-relation, becomes itself in its property. Property is, as it were, a category of manifestation, self-manifestation, exteriorization: not a withdrawal and removal of things from a public space into a private self-space, but rather a movement of the self from itself into the public realm, a self-manifestation announced concretely by its ownership of things.4 So summarized, Hegel’s approach seems fundamentally at odds with that taken here. Two points, however, need to be made. First, the approach here points to a moment of exclusion as one aspect of appropriation and proprietorship; Hegel, points to another aspect. Together, withdrawal and manifestation, can be seen as two moments of a greater phenomenon. The second point: the particularity of the particular thing that is mine vis-à-vis the particularity of the things of others implies qualitative and substantive differences among properties. Mine and thine are not fully or even essentially defined by the sheer opposition of each to its other but rather by the substantive and qualitative differences evident in their individual property holdings. Property embodies and concretizes one, the owner. It is not so much the fortress estate or the gated community which serves as icon for the society of property holders, but rather the show of individuality made by a diversity of properties—perhaps the Rennaisance town of merchants and princes with its town houses of diverse facades competing for attention.5

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HUSSERL AND THE “SPHERE OF OWNNESS” A modest phenomenological reflection on perception will perhaps serve to concentrate focus on the meaning of ownness and possibly capture and ground the insights gathered up in the just-concluded sweep of the tradition. Arguably, our first sense of ownness or mineness is that which we have with respect to our own perceptions. In the natural attitude, perception is oriented outward, to the world and the things in it. For a perceiver fully engaged in perceiving, perception itself goes unnoticed. In perceiving, I am not explicitly aware of perceiving and I do not think about “my” perceptions as mine.6 Rather, I am absorbed in the perceived object, the object of perception. It is only when I direct my attention to the act of perceiving, i.e., when I half-withdraw from perceiving, that I experience my perceptions as mine.7 Likewise, I come to speak of my perceptions when another’s perception of a thing is said to be different than mine. In either case, a kind of double reference in perception comes to the fore: on one hand, there is a reference in the act of perception or perception as lived-out to the thing perception perceives; and, on the other hand, there is a reference “back” from the perception and its object to the one who perceives, i.e., the one to whom the perception “belongs.” The sense of perceptions as mine—or, thine, for that matter—requires that I disengage from normal, everyday perception, that I draw back or withdraw attention from the world of perceived things. In the “naive” and pre-reflective orientation, perceptions not only orient themselves to the object of perception but go together to give us an ever better perception of the thing. One might say that the perceptions flow on, but one should not imagine they flow past to no effect or that one ordinarily attends to any such flow. It is rather the case that through perceptions, themselves unnoticed individually or en masse, the perceived thing is ever more fully perceived. In reflection on the act of perception, the perceptions, come together in another way: again, not just flowing by indifferently but rather gathering to form the psychic history of the perceiver—at least, the perceptual “content” of that biography.8 What the sketch tells us is that a sense of self, of what is mine, of what belongs to me, develops in disengagement, when I withdraw myself from the world and gather up my perceptions about me, noting how they come together—ultimately in memory—to constitute the stuff of my personal history. Husserl refers to a “sphere of ownness” as the product of a reflectiveabstraction from straightforward perception and its engagement with its objects. Within this sphere of ownness, which is “peculiarly my own,” any alien character that the world as perceived might have had is negated so as to appear not-strange, familiar, ultimately, of me or mine.

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How might this brief reflection on perception apply to the matter of property? Reflection on perception enacts a “double withdrawal”: not only a disengagement of self from straightforward participation in perception of the “bigger world” outside but also a withdrawal and gathering of perceptions within the zone of ownness that describes the subject’s self-space. Applying the sense of double withdrawal to the domain of practical action, appropriation would come to be understood as such a double withdrawal: of things and space itself as well from the commons or the public sphere: and of the self as it draws back to constitute its sphere of ownness. This sphere of ownness would, following the indications of the analogy, serve as the locus and horizon for a developing personal (or family) history. There is, in Husserl’s spare phrase, “sphere of ownness,” a linking of the notion of personal identity— coming to a sense of ownness—and space. This suggests, when applied to the practical life, that outside the public sphere and within the privacy of a sphere of ownness, the self and its own might find not just a store of resources to sustain life on a physical level but a place of repair, retreat, and recollection. It is too much to ask more of Husserl’s phrase. I have probably stretched it too far already. But let me suggest here and develop otherwise the positive content of a notion of property as space of withdrawal. IMPLICATIONS FOR DWELLING To sum up the results of the reflection so far: Property or, more precisely, appropriation, involves exclusion and the constitution of a space or zone of ownness. These are not separate moments or aspects of property; rather, as I, the would-be proprietor remove myself and my would-be possessions from general accessibility and circulation, I constitute about myself a space or zone of ownness. Moreover, the space is and continues as mine as it continues to exclude others—except on my invitation or permission. This much one may gather from the preceding. It does not, however, present an “attractive” image of property. Quite literally, property is repelling! Having said this, there is a case to be made for the withdrawal from others that ownership and a sphere of ownness entail. The Greek word for property, ousia, becomes the name for permanent and abiding presence, for what is translated as substantia or substance. For its part, substance means what stands under or underlies and gives standing to things and to change. Ousia and substantia refer to what persists and endures and thus gives more than a fleeting existence to things. A man of substance is a man of property and Virginia Wolfe knew this and took the point because she argued—with a full appreciation of the importance of place—for a space of ownness, for

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A Room of One’s Own. Substance also stands for what stands on its own, for what is self-standing and independent. Acquiring a room of her own meant withdrawing from the demands of everyday all the better to observe and write about the full sweep of human life. More specifically, for women at the time, Wolfe and her contemporaries, a place of one’s own meant escaping from the subservience of living and working within a common room of a household, a place where a woman at the time would be expected to attend to the domestic functions that were hers to care for. And, time comes into the picture again, because as Wolfe says, “if a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room” and then quoting a woman writer by the name of Nightingale, “women [have] half an hour . . . that they can call their own.” “She was always interrupted, Wolfe continues. To have a place of one’s own means having time to oneself.”9 Notwithstanding the arguable benefits of exclusion of others and the withdrawal of oneself as described in the case of Virginia Woolf, the task of the chapter, within the context of a book on dwelling, is to show how property is important to humans as spatial beings; that it works to secure and enhance their being-in-the-world as beings-with-a-world. I hope to show before the conclusion of this chapter that the zone of exclusion—not unimportant as such—becomes a space of enjoyment and that enjoyment grounds a truly human attachment to and dwelling upon the earth. “Social Contract.” A first paradox arises at this point. Property as “mine,” a mineness that, as such, excludes the other, nonetheless depends on the other if it is to be secure. I can count on the untroubled enjoyment of a sphere of ownness only to the extent that others at least implicitly grant me the same. The self-space of private property—the secure possession of a space of my own— is conditional on public acceptance and recognition of a zone from which others are prohibited. The sense of the social contract explains this: each accords to the other his or her freedom—and therewith space of freedom—in return for a like recognition of one’s own space of freedom. All of this is important because the positive value of this space derives from its security, i.e., its affording a place for the untroubled enjoyment of life in the company of my own. The notion of a social contract is well known to Anglo-American philosophy. Hobbes and Locke come immediately to mind. Rousseau, of course, offers his variation on the theme. Thomas Jefferson expresses still another version in the Declaration of Independence.10 Generally, social contracts envision a kind of quid pro quo, grounded in self-interest. It serves mutual interests. Collaterally, it brings about the rule of law and the elements of government. The point made here is that social contracts agree to the preconditions for and not specific terms of the good life—i.e., leave to each to decide those terms for him or herself.

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By contrast with the social contract construct, Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations, offers an ontological grounding for a “community of monads,” free egos, each autonomous in its sphere of ownness, who nonetheless recognize each other empathetically (able to “put oneself in the other’s shoes”) and co-constitute a world that is “there for all”—precisely from the ground of their respective self-worlds. Within his phenomenologically constituted community, Husserl has nothing to say about government, property, or law. The value of what Husserl does say about a “community of monads” and a reciprocal recognition of egos, however, does afford a deeper “ontological” grounding for any social contract theory that expresses mutual regard of each for all others and equal standing of autonomous individuals within a community. As social contract theory generally seeks to ground society in a mutual recognition of rights that codifies and secures those rights in the body of law and legitimacy of government, so does Husserl endeavor to understand the individual as such, the human community itself, and the public and objective world that is there for all as grounding contractarian principles and as co-constituting the world as the scene for communal existence and common action. Husserl’s reflections in the Cartesian Meditations take him, take us, from a sphere of ownness understood as what is “non-alien, not other.11 Nonetheless, it is not just ‘a private synthetic formation’ of a single, isolated ego, but rather one in which the self and others are both ‘in’ the world” like objects, but also “subjects for the world.”12 The character of “my own” is initially negative as it experiences itself as not-the-other. But then, the ego sees its other as an “alter ego,” i.e., one “mirroring” oneself,13 and opening up on a common world, and indeed, with all others constituting that common world as a “community of monads” (egos). “Constituting” here does not mean creating and agreeing on a fiction, but rather coming to see that common or objective world as intelligible, as there-for-all, precisely because each of us, in principle, can put itself in the place of any others to perceive the world as others do.14 What is said above is fine perhaps for setting the conceptual framework for a relationship of self to self, and self to world, but how is it concretely that having retreated to one‘s self-space, one actually comes to develop an attachment to the world and others? What concrete and positive value does property—as a sphere of ownness— have for being-at-home in the world with others on the earth? The remainder of the chapter will endeavor to address and answer these paired questions.

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ATTACHMENT AND NEARNESS Let us look first to David Hume to account for the bonding that develops between the self, the world, and others within the sphere of ownness. Kant had described the space of property as something constituted by will: proprietorship is having my way with things. David Hume, who will guide this reflection now, directs us to enjoyment as the name for proprietorship. The defining image for Hume is not the sovereign, watchful and ruling from his castle, but the squire and his associates at leisure on the estate, reflectively enjoying the good life, to include the good things of life. Property is a relation, a relation of sentiment, one that builds over time. Long association with something, gives one a feeling for it, a preference for it over other things outside one’s purview—all of this gives one the sense of ownership—indeed, Hume says, “conveys a title to any object.”15 It is not stretching things to hear in this a phenomenological testimony (unintended as such by Hume) linking proximity, continuity, enjoyment, and possession. The long and untroubled enjoyment of things within our surrounding world—“what has long lain under our eye”—gives us an “affection for it it and makes us prefer it to other objects.” Enjoyment means becoming accustomed to things that one is “unwilling” to part with them.16 The sphere of ownness—initially understood as negative, empty, and forbidding—becomes the surrounding world (“what has long lain under our eye”) in which, over time, our attachment and relationship to things, a bond of affection and sentiment, develops and strengthens. In the preceding narrative are the essential elements accounting for the attachment that develops between the owner and what has been gathered into the sphere of ownness. To what are we attached? Property, understood here, includes my surrounding world and the things which I come to enjoy within that world. In more prosaic terms, “property” (as used here) refers to a home and its contents. The lived meaning of ownership consists in an enduring relationship, affectively grounded, within a world [mine] and with the things of that [near] world. The owner is a “vain man,” one who feels pride for his possessions and believes them to be the best. Everything belonging to a vain man is the best anywhere to be found. His house, equipage, furniture, hounds, excel all others in his conceit. . . . His wine, if you’ll believe him has a finer flavour than any other; his cookery is more exquisite; his table more orderly; his servants more expert . . . [and then this] the air, in which he lives, more healthful; the soil he cultivates more fertile; his fruit s ripen earlier and to greater perfection.17

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The empty and detached zone of ownness is no longer empty as its habitant reaches out to take possession of the things of the world and the earth itself! To be sure, the deference to nature and the earth shown by the poets in earlier chapters is a very different sort of relationship. But the one invoked here is no less affective in nature and creates a strong bond, so strong as to prompt owners to identify with their things. The concrete and lived sense of world employed here implies that my surrounding world is upon the earth and that the things near to me within that world are ultimately of the earth. Ownership, then, means having a place of one’s own, a piece of the planet, a space within which I may come to dwell or abide. Such a dwelling or abiding is never detached from what is nearby but is always an abiding “in and among.” The human importance of ownership lies in a zone of ownness that grounds one’s being in the world. My identity as the placial being that I am is supported and developed in a sphere of ownness, which is not exclusively exclusive but rather gathers and collects the makings of a rooted human existence. How does attachment attach? Attachment is notably affective in nature. And in Hume’s unintentionally phenomenological description it is experienced in a preferential regard for things that are my own, things that I have gathered within my—or a family’s—self-space. They bring enjoyment and that enjoyment is not a momentary pleasure that comes in consuming them. It is a pleasure in regarding them, in averting one’s regard from time to time over a period of time in which they abide within the home, one’s self-space, one’s dwelling place. The being-with of enjoyment is unhurried, abiding, un-clocked. It folds the past of past enjoyment and the anticipation of future enjoyment into the continuing carnal knowledge of the enjoyed in the dilated presence of the now. We may carry forward the influence of time on attachment that Hume introduces in his discussion of property beyond his discussion to widen beyond the home and family to suggest the connectedness of the private world to a public world beyond it. Antique dealers speak of the provenance of an object—how it was acquired, its significance for the one who has it. So, a Purple Heart award to a veteran soldier injured in World War II has a personal meaning and history that, at once, fuses with the life history of the soldier and his or her comrades who lived through the wartime event that caused the injury. From the time the Purple Heart is awarded, it traces a history from when it is presented to the time it spends in a special place within the living room where it will remind guests and family of the sacrifice of the soldier awarded it; or, perhaps, when it is kept in a drawer, tucked way, and forgotten about, suggesting the modesty of the awardee or the pain of remembrance. And, consider this as well: the purple heart also retains and reflects a part of public history, pointing to a fateful historical war and struggle whose outcome continues to

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shape the lives of many inside and outside the household. Circling back to the sense of attachment as being over time, the time that effects attachment is not just clock time, but signifies the historicity or lived time of those beings, human beings, whose very being-human is historical, i.e., living from a past into a future from by way of a presence in the world that shapes the world and the concrete lives of its inhabits, those who dwell in the world and on the earth with others. Attachment extends to one’s dwelling place as well as possessions therein. When one first acquires a home or a possession, one removes it from a public history of one sort or another or from the history it has acquired as belonging to someone else. A new home, just built and available to any buyer, is more than a possession. It does not just enter into a sphere of ownness; it becomes a sphere of ownness itself. With time the attachment to it grows stronger, and both the owner/s and the owned acquire a history. The home records the life of those who live in it, often by virtue of the wear and tear and signs of use that become embedded in its materiality. At the same time, the home imprints its character as a share spaced on the family as a group and upon its individual members. Attachment and ownness within the compass of this reflection can only be more fully understood in terms of identity, as it comes into play. Ownership and ownness signify a kind of belonging. Things I own, belong to me. I am the owner, their owner. In a way less obvious way—intimated in the premodern sense of property discussed in chapter 2—I the owner belong to the things I own. We cannot say this if ownership is seen exclusively as a matter of will, governance, control, and disposition. In a more Humean way and by virtue of what enjoyment implies affectively, the thing I own or space that is mine has a hold on me. The prospect or reality of being separated from it, Hume observes, is one that brings on a condition of suffering. Such a condition is analogous to that which describes the separation of lovers. Less dramatic, but arguably just as indicative is the suffering incurred when an owner experiences the loss of his or her property. The feeling is that one has lost a part of one’s self. How often, for example, when a hurricane or flood has destroyed one’s home, including one’s “keepsakes,” photographs, memorabilia, the victim will express the loss as being that of one’s very life—one’s past, at the very least. “There goes my life. Everything we’ve worked for. The place of goods times and bad. We’re going to have to pick up the pieces and start all over again.” With this scenario in mind, one can understand what Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness,18 describes as an identity of the subject and object in the relationship of having. This fusion of place and person, property and proprietor marks, for Sartre, an ontological condition. In Being and Nothingness, Having is a way of Being. In particular, our being—what constitutes us as

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the beings we are—includes what we have come to have and keep near us. Referring to the work of cross-cultural anthropology, Sartre says that one might say that the home is “haunted” by those who dwell there and the objects owned are “possessed” in a totemic sort of way. In the same vein, one might offer the following phenomenological reflection to underscore the identity of owner and owned. One who unintentionally intrudes into the office or bedroom of another may feel a kind of embarrassment at having violated the self-space, even intimacy, of the one living there. Likewise, in having something stolen from oneself, one may not only bristle at the financial loss and denial of the use of thing for a time, but also feel “taken” in having lost of piece of oneself: “I’ve been had.” What about the other? The bonding of owner and owned within the sphere of ownness has gotten extensive treatment. But, have we gotten only a little beyond the home as a castle—forbidding to outsiders and shut off from the rest of the world? “Host and Guest and Gift.” The relation of self and other takes concrete form in inviting others into one’s own space, dwelling for a time together in the host’s home. Can there be a proper sharing and giving of what is one’s own, an exchange of gifts in an anonymous space, a public space? Surely, one might say, one can socialize over dinner in a restaurant, in an office, a theater, a stadium. What role does intimacy play in all of this? In placial terms, intimacy intimates nearness, proximity. Its gathering things into the proximity of one’s sphere of onwnness is just that which goes to make them one’s own. If one invites another into one’s home, does that not make for a special closeness with the other as it brings the other into proximity to what is dearest to oneself? The idea is that in sharing one’s self-space and the things that one has gathered into that place, one is sharing one’s very self with another. In sharing the things that are dearest to one within the ambience of one’s home, one is sharing the “stuff of one’s life.” If our phenomenological description is illuminative of what happens in the scenarios above and it captures what happens in coming to have something, in an essential way, then what belongs to one self, as Sartre suggests, becomes a part of oneself. This means that sharing my space and what belongs to that space and to me, is tantamount to sharing one’s self, one’s life, one’s very being in the world with others. Consider this scene from Hume: We enter, I shall suppose, into a convenient, warm, well-contrived apartment: We necessarily receive a pleasure from its very survey; because it presents us with the pleasing ideas of ease, satisfaction, and enjoyment. The hospitable, good-humored, humane landlord appears. The circumstance surely must embellish the whole; nor can we easily forbear reflecting, with pleasure, on the satisfaction which results in every one from his intercourse and good-offices.

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His whole family, by the freedom, ease, confidence, and calm enjoyment, difused over their countenances, sufficiently express their happiness.19

The sphere of ownnesss, then, is not an isolation cell impeding being-in-the-world with others, but rather a kind of starting point in the constitution of a shared world anchored concretely and affectively in the proximity of a one-to-one or small group experience. Arguably, any sharing or even any interpersonal communication presupposes having at least three terms in play: two or more sharing or communicating individuals and then something that is communicated or shared between them. It must be granted that not all efforts at communication are successful, nor are all efforts at sharing time with others in one’s home. Nor, is it the case that welcoming the other into one’s home is the only way to develop a common life with others. Hume goes on to show how a theater may serve as a gathering space and a play can afford a shared experience for the audience. Nonetheless, one’s dwelling place arguably has a primal significance in socializing for those who not only dwell together for a time but especially for a family that lives there permanently or on an ongoing basis. “Home and Family: the Primary Ethical Substance.” It is not a stretch to understand Hegel’s characterization of the family as the primary ethical substance, this is to say an ethos or way of life among individuals that develops within the space of family life. Further, the primacy of that family life or dwelling together, implies that it is just the first stage of the being-in-the-world together—first, not only chronologically for the most part, but first as well in serving as a “training ground” for ever-broader modes of shared-existence. To be sure, there are dysfunctional families and family life experiences and practices that breed what sociologists call familialism, a valorization of the family above any other form of social life. But, the term “dysfunctional” for a family life that veers off course and “goes bad” already presupposes some notion of positive family life that accomplishes a distinctive social function. As to familialism, it presents the paradox of socialization: building social capital and then stopping at the boundaries of family life—forgoing social competence in the greater domain of society and public life. Consider now a trajectory of human life that begins with a sphere of ownness and develops into a mode of being-in-the-world with others that ultimately defines and describes humanity’s dwelling on the earth. Where might such an ever-broader scope of dwelling together outside the home begin so as to lead to a sense of the earth as our dwelling place? “Who is my neighbor?” Maybe our starting point is the ‘hood.” From the threshold of one’s home, one steps into one’s neighborhood, a place of neighbors or those nearby. At minimum, it is a shared space that affords a way to navigate between the separate and private dwellings that make up

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the neighborhood. Already we see here something of a placial hybrid: a kind of public place whose demographic/cartographic representation is mostly private dwelling places. To be sure, the neighborhood may seem a disappointment to one looking to escape the confinement of home life. The neighborhood does not afford a platform for achieving great things and making one’s place in the “bigger world.” The case for neighborhoods, however, is well made by Jane Jacobs, who saw in her works, especially The Death and Life of American Cities, the need for a transition space between one’s home and the daunting space of a large metropolitan city like New York.20 The notion of “navigating” between privately owned dwellings—and, businesses—is critical to the significance and function of the urban neighborhood that Jacobs focuses on. It points to how essential the sidewalk, specifically, sidewalk life, is to the life of the neighborhood. The sidewalk integrates the residents of the neighbor, encourages interaction among people (trivial, perhaps, but in sum, crucial for encouraging a community identity), and integrates the numerous strangers one finds in a big city. By virtue of the sidewalk, and the buildings and therewith services accessible along the sidewalks, as well as, the unobtrusive day-to-day mixing of people on the sidewalk, a neighborhood acquires a sense of community that, for example, is empowered in a de facto way to represent the neighborhood’s interests at the higher level of the city. To be sure, not all neighbors are urban neighborhoods as described by Jacobs. Suburban neighborhoods, much less densely settled and often without sidewalks, could not be expected to work the way that Jacobs describes. Nevertheless, however attenuated the life of other types of neighborhoods may be, they are, even at a minimalist level, intermediate social spaces between the private space of the home and an encompassing and overarching space like the city. Whether moribund, never emergent, or undeveloped, whether informal or institutionalized, the neighborhood is a mode of social being between one’s dwelling and the greater social aggregate, It remains a possibly of being, at the very edge of the threshold to one’s home, that can ease the transition to broader forms of social aggregation. Works like those of Jacobs provide qualitative investigations of neighborhood life useful to phenomenology in identifying and helping to articulate essential aspects of home life vis-à-vis life outside one’s home. Likewise empirical cases of neighborhood life, and statistical data that looks for patterns correlating home life, work, and recreation or correlations of neighborhood settlement and identity (ethnic, religious, political, etc.) can raise questions for philosophical consideration or point to aspects of neighborhood life outside the lived experience of a phenomenologist. One thinks here of Ta Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me. It is an open letter to his teenage son about the ever-present sense of peril that black persons can

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expect on the streets of an urban neighborhood, but it also serves as a segue into the lived experience of a world inaccessible to many others. WORLDS BEYOND MY OWN Before concluding this chapter, it would be useful to the overall project of the book to schematize the pathway from a sphere of ownness to a whole-earth understanding of dwelling, one that applies to the earth and to humanity as whole. Inasmuch as Heidegger’s sense of being-in-the-world has influenced the conceptualization of phenomena relevant to this book’s notion of dwelling, a threefold distinction of being-in-the-world that appears in his writing before Being and Time should serve well to lay out the pathway in question In Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle], Heidegger distinguishes three ways of being-in-the-world. These are one’s own world (die Selbstwelt), shared world (die Mitwelt), and surrounding world (die Umwelt).21 One’s own or self-world is not, Heidegger says, a product of an explicit reflection, not a psychic experience, but rather a way of engaging and being engaged in the course of customary, factical life. The shared world—world shared with others—is not set off from one’s self-world but one that is a part of it and delimited by cares that are shared so that Heidegger refers to it as a “world of care”—indeed, “their world of care.” The surrounding world “has no set boundaries.” It is a “field of ‘things that press upon us” as they are factically encountered in our caring about them. These cares, he adds, “are constitutive of the ontological sense of this ‘there.’” Two themes are notable about this brief but dense and phenomenologically informative text. First, care is determinative in the way that one is drawn into these worlds. Second, care is not imposed upon those things encountered within the respective fields of these worlds. The “allurements” of those things that emerge within these worlds “press upon us.” Caring is an “inclined caring . . . that “receives a commission . . . a pull stemming from life itself.” The meaning and import of all this for unfolding the widening sense of dwelling in this book is that it reaches back to earlier chapters attentive to the testimony of the poets and ahead to chapters that will expand the scope of dwelling to include living together in cultures and finding one’s place in a homeland. Looking back to earlier chapters, Sandburg spoke to the factical, prosaic concerns of everyday life on the prairie but especially in his Chicago Poems. The diverse characters of his poems evoke our care for their lives lived on the land or on the streets of Chicago. As for the farmers, Xenophon and Frost

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spoke lyrically and assertively of their care for land. Lastly, Whitman’s epic was unlike its historical antecedents in embracing the factical life of working Americans dispersed across a continent fully engaged in their respective lifeworlds. In upcoming chapters, we will extend our attention to places well beyond our homes and neighborhoods. In the very next chapter, we will cross borders to explore, with the Ancient Greek historiographer and geographer Herodotus, ways of being-together with others who include neighbors, strangers, and foes. Conventionally, investigations of culture and political differences are undertaken under the concept of values—cultural mores or political ideologies. Values are thought to based on value judgments that, by definition, cannot be founded in factual claims. The Heideggerian notion of care articulated above suggests a more fruitful approach in seeing a basis for the relationality in being–with-others in the facticality of everyday being-in-the world. The shared cares or concerns will undoubtedly express themselves in value judgments but the cares themselves are already founded in a shared-life in which those living together encounter challenges and possibilities of being that emerge from the factical circumstances of life itself. As to property, later in the book (see chapter 9), we will examine threats to property. If property is important to the human then what threatens it is a matter of existential concern. Theft, expropriation, search and seizure, surveillance which violates the limits of what is mine, trespass in its many forms threaten property. But there is a threat less evident and more peculiar, “one from inside.” Property which is secured by an implicit social contract— already itself a paradox—has arguably most to fear from contract. Contract becomes the means of alienating what is mine from me. Contract, written or spoken; explicit or assumed, names the quid pro quo of exchange, sale, alienation. Early in its history, property was thought to be inalienable: owners were as bound to property as property was subject to its owner. Alienation was literally unthinkable— until it came to be thought, and then property passed into exchange as commodity. At this time, a new temporality arises and comes to define the nature of property so as to threaten the temporality of that property whose importance it is to secure and enhance my being in the world as a worldly, earthy being. The off-putting and repelling character of ownership had its substantive justification is making space for enjoyment, an abiding relationship to things in the proximity of my surrounding world. From the moment when property becomes commodity its distinctive temporality is at risk. Its future as a commodity among commodities in a market which confers an exchange value upon it stands ready to supplant its worth as an enduring presence grounding my being in the world. There is nothing merely speculative and metaphysical about this risk. In times of economic boom and bust, the ground beneath me and the roof above are enlisted in a

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transvaluation of values that undermines dwelling and its enduring relationship to the proximate. The prospect of financial gain on what comes to be regarded as a financial asset removes me, in mind and perhaps in fact, from the here-and-now lived experience of the near-at-hand within the place of my dwelling; likewise, the fear of a decline in value might actually threaten my title to what I own on mortgage and remove me physically and by court order from my home, terminating the continuing and enduring relationship to things within the surrounding world I had called mine. Ownership—for those who own a home with a mortgage—has for a long time had the form of a shared fiction: the bank which holds the title and has legal claim to the home does not occupy it and has no interest in doing so; on the other hand, I who own the place, dwell in it, enjoy ownership in a concrete and lived sense of the term, have, at best a conditional legal claim to it—I will own it when I have satisfied the loan on it. The shared fiction offers mutual and reciprocal benefit. My liability is the lender’s asset. The creditor’s interest in the property gives me effective use and ownership of the thing. The arrangement is useful in stable economic times. As the borrower-owner, I can defer any thought of the future as it relates to my property and dwell, as owner-occupier-user in the present. When great financial gain or loss appears in the offing, the ontological and material conditions of my being in the world can change abruptly. Now the future looms, intrudes on the present, and troubles the present. I may either be forcibly displaced from the home I have called my own upon foreclosure. Conversely, the prospect of sale for profit may transform my home with its comfortable idiosyncrasies and tolerable faults into a marketing project aimed at making my home into a “hot property.” In either case, the transformation in the ontological status of the property, its transfiguration into a commodity, threatens the very relationship and condition which makes property of importance as a being whose being secures a stable underpinning for untroubled being-in-the-world. In the hard-times scenario, property again entails No Trespass. It is again a forbidden space, but is so with bitter irony and a cold and negative logic such that it does not afford a space of dwelling for an individual or family. No Trespass is posted on foreclosed property. It forbids occupation and dwelling precisely to those who had enjoyed the property as their own, as the visible and tangible space and bounds of their being-in-the-world. In better times, the “off-limits” of the forbidden space of private property made for an abiding place by way of the lived experience of dwelling within its boundaries. In hard times, foreclosure and its “forbidding” points to a future clouded by uncertainty and a present that is lived in the shadow of the foreboding. Dwelling is tantamount to our being-in-the-world with others and on the earth, but places of dwelling are not always available. There are the homeless. Peoples forced from their homelands. Troubled and contested places.

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And, places of dwelling, to include the earth itself, are in peril. In the chapters to come these issues of place and displacement, dwelling and exclusion will come up for examination. In the very next chapter, however we will accompany Herodotus in border-crossings and look beyond the horizon of the familiar to what is strange and perhaps hostile. NOTES 1. Constitution of the United States, with all Amendments, US Government PDF,CDOC-112HDOC129.pdf, www​.govinfo​.gov. 2. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690, recovered in entirety in John Locke Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. McPherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), Section 27, Section 45. Quoted text is copyright free. 3. Kant, Immanuel, trans. John Ladd, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 51. 4. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, trans. T. M. Knox, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), Sec 41. 5. Hegel Right, Sec 51. 6. Husserl, Edmund, trans F. Kersten, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), para 27. 7. Husserl, Ideas, First Book, para 32. 8. Husserl, Ideas, First Book, para 34, esp., 68–69. 9. Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929, 1957) 66, 113–14. 10. Declaration of Independence, National Archives, www​.archives​.gov. Jefferson was a principal drafter. The notion of social contract is implicit in the concept of consent: “to secure these right . . . governments are instituted . . . with consent of the governed.” 11. Husserl, Edmund, trans. Dorion Cairns, Cartesian Meditations, An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), para 46. 12. Husserl, Cartesian, para 43, see esp. page 91. 13. Husserl, Cartesian, para 44, see esp. page 94. 14. Husserl, Cartesian, para 54, see esp. page 117. 15. Hume, David, ed. L. A. Selbey-Bigge, Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 509. 16. Hume, Treatise, 503. 17. Hume, Treatise, 310 18. Sartre, trans. Hazel Barnes, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophial Librargy, 1956) 587–90. 19. Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (LaSalle: Open Court, 1966)

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20. Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) 21. Heidegger, Martin, trans., Richard Rojcewicz, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Invitation into Phenomenological Research (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 72.

Chapter 5

On the Road with Herodotus The Strange, the Familiar, and the Earthbound

Chapter 4, the previous chapter, initiated a discussion of being-in-the-world with others by addressing the dwelling place we call home. Being-in-the-world came to be understood as being-at-home. The phenomenological nucleus of reflection that lead us to being-at-home was the spare and highly reduced phenomenon of a sphere of ownness, a term taken from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. A deliberately primitive notion of ownness—one stripped of any layering of meaning acquired over time and embedded in usages of the concept in legal, political, and economics contexts—was intended as the starting point. And so the essential character of ownness was sought in a reflection on perception and what it might mean to speak of perceptions as mine. With a “purified” understanding of mineness localized in a sphere of ownness, the scope, content, and import of ownness was deepened and expanded to include a concept of property applicable to one’s home and personal possessions. Appropriating “unintentionally phenomenological” observations of philosopher David Hume in the reflection, the apparent withdrawal and self-isolation suggested by the term “sphere of ownness” was complemented by an attachment to things and shared life with others arising over time from out of one’s home, itself one’s own place on the earth. The trajectory from sphere of ownness to home led next to one’s neighborhood and then to the city. At that point, we looked ahead still further to a shared life in a culture and coexistence in a homeland. The thematic focus of this chapter will be the differing cultures of various peoples across the earth. Heidegger’s differentiation of self-world, shared-world, and surrounding world from his work prior to Being and Time and sketched in the concluding part of chapter 4 will serve to illuminate the nature of culture as such and connect culture to place. The Greek historian 89

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and geographer, Herodotus will be our guide in peripatetic philosophy of boundary crossing. The start-up questions are then: What is culture? How do we experience it and know it? What connection does it have to place and to the earth in particular? What does the phenomenon of a culture, a shared-world, contribute to the notion of dwelling that informs the project of this book? What might the experience of different cultures’ relations with earth have to suggest for a sustainable way for humans as a whole to live on the earth as whole? Let us begin with a history of the concept of culture. The word “ethics” itself translates the Greek ethos, a synonym for the customs of a people (ethnos=a people accustomed to . . .). The word “culture” derives from the Latin word for cultivation, colere. Scholarship indicates that the term “culture” itself first appears among scholars in eighteenth-century Europe bearing two meanings: one for the level of civilization acquired over centuries; and, the other for the customs of distinct peoples. The latter meaning is one that has, more or less, been used by anthropology to this day and is one of two meanings for nomos, which as translates law or custom.1 To elucidate the ancient Greek sense of culture, we turn to Sextus Empiricus whose writings appear some 400 hundred years after Herodotus’s. The virtue and the failing of Sextus is to isolate culture from place. That we will leave to Herodotus when we come to examine his cultural geography or earthbound culture. Students of the history of philosophy identify Sextus as a proponent of skepticism. And, that he was. Sextus and skeptics like him, present a fundamental challenge to any kind of knowledge or truth, including ethical truth, which he deals with in “Mode Ten” of Outlines of Pyrrhonism.2 The intent in this chapter, however, is not to argue against skepticism. Let us suspend that issue. The “Tenth Mode” of Sextus offers two elements pertinent to the argument of this chapter: (a) one is a working definition of culture; (b) the other consists of numerous illustrations or examples of differences and divisions among peoples on issues of culture. As to (a), it is useful to analyze the components that go to make up culture for Sextus—bearing in mind that his word that comes closest to culture as most understand it today is ethos. Ethos referred to character, either the character of an individual or that of a people “accustomed to living together,” an ethnos. Arguably, then, the ethics of Sextus provides us with the elements of a culture (customs of a distinct people, per Kroeber et. al.) or a shared-world or Umwelt, per Heidegger, i.e., a people defined by shared concerns or cares. His definitions of rules of conduct, persuasions, legendary beliefs, and dogmatic conceptions do not so obviously count as nomoi. Nonetheless, all the definitions proceed from “explicit adoption” or implicit “acceptance of” practices or beliefs by individuals or peoples. From “Mode Ten” of his cited work:

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Ethics, being based on rules of conduct, habits, laws, legendary beliefs, and dogmatic conceptions [includes]:

1.  A rule of conduct is a choice of a way of life, or of a particular action, adopted by one person or many—by Diogenes, for instance, or the Laconians. 2.  A law is a written contract among the members of a state, the transgressor of which is punished. 3.  A habit or custom (the terms are equivalent) is the joint adoption of a certain kind of action by a number of men, the transgressor of which is not actually punished; for example, the law proscribes adultery, and custom with us forbids intercourse with a woman in public. 4.  Legendary belief is the acceptance of unhistorical and fictitious events, such as, among others, the legends about Cronos; for these stories win credence with many. 5.  Dogmatic conception is the acceptance of a fact which seems to be established by analogy or some form of demonstration, as, for example, that atoms are the elements of existing things, or homoeomeries, or minima, or something else. In all the elements above, the defining genus terms refer to the individual or collective choice/acceptance of a practice, belief, school of thought (dogmatic conception); or legendary belief (religion, perhaps?). As such, this is not problematic. Cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists commonly focus on the belief systems or worldviews of a society. Greek philosophers, historians, dramatists, statesmen, and other ancient writers would have these elements in mind in referring to the ethos or an ethnos or the nomoi of a people. For the purposes of this chapter and the book on dwelling, the view of Sextus provides a clear contrast to that of Herodotus. We will see how Herodotus fills in what is missing in Sextus to provide a more earth-grounded understanding of culture that, inter alia, illuminates the issues of our time: migration, ethnic conflict, global climate change, etc. Before assessing Sextus and pointing to the cultural geography of Herodotus, let us look to the examples of ethical conflict in Sextus. With reference to (b), examples of cultural differences, Sextus offers more than a score in which a law observed by one people differs and conflicts with, let’s say, a custom of another. One striking, but not atypical juxtaposition has it that among the Greeks marriage of one’s sister is prohibited by law, but is the [customary] practice of Egyptian men. The lack of any explanation or contextualization of differing practices and customs in notable in Mode Ten—but then Sextus wants to make the point that there is no basis for the beliefs in question. He is not an anthropologist or historian or geographer. We

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have no evidence that he came to the examples firsthand. In fact, he may only be dealing with second- or thirdhand stories or stereotypes circulating in his day—or, in the time of Pyrrho, whose work some seven hundred years before, Sextus was collecting, recording, and editing. Sextus is a philosopher who, as a skeptic, takes aim at other schools of philosophy which presume to expound truths across the branches of philosophical investigation, not just ethics. To be sure, debate about the skeptical method and the results of its application go on. The intent of this chapter is to assess the value of Sextus’s conception of culture for the purposes of enriching the notion of dwelling explored in this book. At this point, let us take note of what is missing in Sextus and offered by Herodotus. The virtues of a Herodutan geography will be indicated briefly in the next paragraphs of this “preamble” but then occupy our attention in the remainder of the chapter where we will make a “deep dive” in the Histories of Herodotus and the Mediterranean world of his time. What is missing in Sextus and so clearly abundant in Herodotus is an earthbound or place-based notion and description of culture. To be sure, in his examples, Sextus connects “values” to places—like Greece, Rome, Egypt, India, and Scythia, to mention a few. The connection, however, offers nothing by way of grounding or contextualizing the opposing views. His objective is epistemological and his method is skeptical so he does not want to ground either of the opposing beliefs. In fact, he wants us to conclude that there is no ground truth about ethics to begin with. Of course, ancients, moderns, and postmodernists see much to debate in the skeptical position but if one wants to hold out for the possibility of reconciling opposing groups of people and avoiding conflict or understanding misunderstood views or rallying to the cause of justice, it does not help to “suspend judgment”—the only “conclusion” Sextus makes or says that any of us can make. With the ambition of enriching the notion of dwelling understood as being-in-the-world and on the earth with others, Sextus does not offer a great deal, except perhaps to demonstrate how unbridgeable the gaps between opposing views may be. Modern-day counterparts like Graham Summer, a pioneer in the field of cultural anthropology and sociology in the nineteenth century, juxtaposes scores of beliefs and practices, folkways, in a way that may undermine belief in universal ethical principles, applicable if not practiced among the peoples of the earth. Nonetheless, he suggests how, in fact the material circumstances of peoples may result in behaviors that seem to warrant moral censure. Such a grounding counts as explanation if not justification. It allows for an openended empirical approach for a discipline that seeks to account for folkways in the material circumstances of everyday life. In line with this, Sumner’s approach also suggests a missing element in the components of culture or a people’s ethos, namely, the economic circumstances of people and how these reverberate and affect their world views. Heidegger, in a far different tonal

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register and starting from a very different presuppositions and intentions, makes a similar point about cares or concerns arising from the everyday “facitical” life and circumstances of a shared-world. All of this is to say that Herodotus offers something missing in Sextus’s account of the nomoi, mores, beliefs, and practices that have come to be described as culture. Herodotus goes beyond juxtaposing the views of different culture and endeavors to bridge the differences between the familiar and the strange. He undertakes a hermeneutic effort for cross-cultural understanding. Herodotus speaks with a deep curiosity and critical reflection on what he observes firsthand or hears from others taken to be knowledgeable and credible while “on the road.” And, he literally grounds culture in place, in a specific geography of the earth with its distinctive soil, topography, climate, flora, and fauna. His numerous observations of human-earth interaction by various peoples may offer instruction on how best we might approach nature as a species seeking a sustainable lifestyle with an attentiveness to nature. BORDER CROSSINGS: FROM THE FAMILIAR TO THE STRANGE Tradition calls Herodotus the “father of history,” but very arguably he has equal claim to the title “father of geography.” His inquiry, historein, is marked by an infectious and insatiable curiosity about the other. Herodotan geography—a situated, ecumenical inquiry into the “many-worlded” world of his time—would seem to have special pertinence to our own world—one transformed by unrelenting globalization and far-flung diaspora. For Herodotus geography begins in travel. Classicist Edith Hamilton called Herodotus “the first sight-seer in the world.”3 According to traditional scholarship, “at the most moderate estimate, his travels covered a space of thirty one degrees of longitude, or 1700 miles, and twenty four of latitude, or nearly the same distance.” The famous eleventh Britianica tells us: He traversed Asia Minor and European Greece probably more than once; he visited all the most important islands of the Archipelago-Rhodes, Cyprus, Delos, Paros, Thasos, Samothrace, Crete, Samos, Cythera and Aegina . . . Sardis . . . the Persian capital Susa, . . . Babylon, Colchis, and the western shores of the Black Sea as far as the estuary of the Dnieper; he travelled in Scythia and in Thrace, visited Zante and Magna Graecia, and explored the antiquities of Tyre, coasted along the shores of Palestine . . . and made a long stay in Egypt.4

Travel, then, is essential to the Herodotan geographical project. For this kind of geography, travel can be taken as translation in two senses.

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Translation is first movement from one place to another. “Translate” derives from the Latin “translatus,” the past participle of “transfere,” which means “to carry or bear across.” The first definition of “translate” is: “to bear, remove, or change from one place or condition to another.”5 Travel, as translation or movement across the earth over time, as exploration, is critical to geography as Herodotus practiced it. But, translation has another sense. Translation is also interpretation, of one idiom into another. This too is central to the Herodotan undertaking. Travel, of the kind that Herodotus describes, is a translation or movement from the familiar into the strange. Travel makes one a stranger in a strange place. It both necessitates and makes possible interpretation. The transposition from the familiar into the strange can yield knowledge of the strange, but the traveler must avoid two extremes. In one case, the strange is taken as the exotic. The strange remains strange and is prized as such. The traveler would rather delight in the bizarre than come to understand what is other. In this posture, the stranger never understands that he/she is the stranger or “other of the other” and that what is strange for him/her is the familiar to the other. The traveler becomes the collector of curiosities, the spinner of tall tales. The transposition into a new and strange world does not become the occasion for knowledge. This is because the traveler enjoys the aura of strangeness and prefers to remain in aesthetic suspension at the margins of the other’s world rather than risk losing the “feel” of the exotic by crossing the threshold of the other’s world with the intent of understanding it. Herodotus often falls prey to this—or seems to. On a first reading, one is struck by the Herodotan bestiary: the flying snakes of Arabia,6 the sheep with tails 4½ ft. long (for whom the shepherds make carts fixed to the tails so they do not drag) or sheep whose tails are eighteen inches wide,7 and the ants as big as foxes; in Western Libya, Herodotus relays reports of “horned asses, dog-headed men, headless men with eyes in their breasts (‘don’t vouch for this, but merely repeat what the Libyans say’) and small snakes with a single horn.”8 The other extreme is “going native.” One assimilates the lifestyle of the other, becomes absorbed in the world of the other so that it becomes fully familiar. There is nothing objectionable or wrong in this, but the assimilation into the world of the other, such that the strange becomes utterly familiar, diminishes the motive for exploring the strangeness in a way that deepens one’s understanding of the familiar. The familiar is taken for granted. Indeed, it is the-taken-for-granted. Being taken for granted defines the familiar, and the familiar constitutes the context in which we live. As such, it is not that about which we think but the implicit understanding within which we think, act, believe, judge, feel—in a word, live. The traveler, as alien, is privileged to know the familiar in a way the

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inhabitant, as inhabitant, cannot. Herodotus, for example, notices that Persian names which denote magnificence or physical qualities end in the letter “s.” This is a fact of which the Persians themselves are “unaware”; “inquiry,” Herodotus says, “will prove this in every case without exception.”9 For the alien, “the familiar” is not familiar; thus, it is not taken for granted: it can become questionable, and its questionability can provoke inquiry leading to a knowledge foreclosed to that taking-for-granted of the familiar. HERODOTAN HERMEUTICS: TRANSPOSITION AND UNDERSTANDING Border crossing describes the method of Herodotan geography and the philosophical ambition of this book on dwelling. In dwelling one both inscribes and then transcends borders. What we know of the other we come to know, as Husserl suggests, from what we know of ourselves within the sphere of our ownness. By a kind of analogy to our own self-knowledge that Husserl calls “apperception,” we come to see the other as an alter ego. A transposition from where I am to where the other is and that looks out from the point of view of the other, translates to a shared perception of what is out there for all and the makings of a community. The preceding recapitulates what was said at the beginning and sets the stage for community. It seems rather skeletal and abstract in its schematization of the self-other relationship, that’s because it is. Inserting the schema within the Herodatan geographic project serves two purposes. It serves to flesh out the path from dwelling in one’s own place to dwelling together in the world at large. The philosophical project presents itself, then, as one of encounter and reflection lived out over a lifetime. Pairing Husserl and Herodutus also sensitizes one to just how hermeneutic Herodotan geography is. To be sure, the travelogue is first rate. The story-telling, delightfully mischievous. Underneath all this, there is a genuine need to know the other and the earth in all its diversity. The hermeneutic or interpretative dimension of the knowledge of the other comes into play in the practice of putting oneself into the “shoes of the other.” Therewith, one can translate and interpret what the others says and does. The translation that happens is hermeneutics or interpretation. And, arguably it permits us to communicate and live better with others. Herodotus gives an apt example of “translation” as facilitating cross-cultural understanding in the following. Frequently Herodotus describes foreign gods by analogy to the Greek gods. Comparing Greek to Scythian gods, he says, “Hestia is Tabiti, Zeus (very properly, in my opinion) Papaeus, Earth Api, Apollo Oetosyrus, Aphrodite Argimpasa, Poseidon Thagimasadas.”10 Thus is the strange made [more] familiar. This is not so different from word-for-word translation. How

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else is one to begin to understand a strange phenomenon except by finding a word that denotes a near equivalent in one’s own language? To criticize the interpreter for using the medium of a familiar language to understand a strange entity or term is to suggest that either we can enjoy an unmediated access to the strange or that we should simply abandon the effort to make the strange, to some extent at least, familiar. If we want to understand the strange, then we must make it familiar with what is already familiar to us. How might Herodotus have better described the strange hippopotamus (river-horse, by its Greek roots), than by successive analogies?11 This is the good excuse for analogizing. And, Herodotus shows us how to analogize well. Herodotus analogizes without privileging the analogue. In referring to the Egyptian gods, Herodotus does not assume that the Greek names are prior to the Egyptian. In the order of knowledge, his knowledge, the Greek gods are first, i.e., known before the Egyptian. If that were not the case, they would not serve as analogues for understanding the Egyptian. But, in the order of being or in point of historical fact, at least according to Herodotus, the Egyptian names precede the Greek.12 For Herodotus, analogizing interpretation serves as a first approximation to, not the final word for, the phenomenon. Understanding the other is an iterative process. One only begins that process by comparing the strange with something familiar; the comparison is and remains open to correction and precising over time. There is a testing and verification to see if the analogy holds up. Analogizing is more than a onetime, one-on-one comparison. Already in the notion of analogy other terms are implied — A:B:: C:D. Analogy is not just the comparison of two terms, A and B, but rather the comparison of two relations: that of A (the iconography of Io) and B (the iconography of Isis) with that of C (ritual of Io) and D (the ritual of Isis). The utility of a comparison between Io and Isis proves itself when we compare the myths and liturgy of Io with those of Isis. The iconography of both is similar; both are female figures represented with cow horns, but, while Io may receive the sacrifice of cows, Io may not. The analogy only goes so far. The same is true of the Greek Zeus and his Egyptian counterpart Amun. They are much alike in their core identities and place in the pantheon. Yet in pursuing the analogy beyond initial similarities, distinguishing differences emerge. Ritual specifies the sacrifice of sheep to Zeus and goats for Amun, the Theban Zeus; mythology explains why.13 These examples from Herodotus’s long and painstaking comparison of Greek and Egyptian gods points to another apt use of analogizing: to expose difference as well as identity. The failure of the analogy, Io to Isis, to hold up in the area of liturgical sacrifice serves to underscore what is different and distinctive about Isis and Egyptian religious belief more broadly. Isis rejects the sacrifice of cows; cows are sacred to the Egyptians. Analogizing may be

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more useful to understanding the other on its own terms when analogy breaks down” than when it “succeeds.” The strange is and appears strange because it is not immediately familiar to us. It is likely as well that it is not entirely like anything we already know. If that is the case, then a process that ultimately leads to defining a difference that “spoils” any simple coincidence of meaning may be more meaningful for our purposes than one that finds “identity at first sight.” HERODOTAN GEOGRAPHY; AREAL, IDIOGRAPHIC, CRITICAL In the 1930s American geographers debated the nature of their discipline and Richard Hartshorne, a key interlocutor, argued that geography distinguishes itself from geophysics and earth science by its “areal” (i.e. area-oriented) approach to the earth. Hartshorne writes: The existence of geography as a field of study rests on the general human interest in the different character of different parts of the world . . . this [geography] asks us to describe and explain . . . all the features of a particular part of the world which are distinctive of that part in contrast with others. Geography has, therefore, imposed upon it from the start, the difficult—in a complete sense one may say impossible—task of integrating many kinds of phenomena found in areas. [Except for “all,” emphasis added.]14

By practice, Herodotus is an “area-list.” His area-lity and insistence on firsthand knowledge or “lived experience” of earth and “other” immunizes him—not completely but substantially—from the “apriorism” of a Hegel, for whom the character of the separate continents and their respective races was deduced from the “general planetary life of the nature-governed mind.” For Hegel the differences among the continents were “necessary” and not contingent, and the differences among races “go together with these [continental] differences.” Hegel parses continents as though they were concepts. There is first the difference between the Old World and the New World. The New World “exhibits only the general difference of the north and the south” whereas the Old World is “sundered into specific differences,” viz. the three continent of Asia, Africa, and Europe. These three form a neat dialectic. Africa represents “undifferentiated unity”; Asia, “unmediated antithesis.” Europe incorporates the best of both and “reveals the unity” of the other two continents of the Old World, since “mountain and valley are not juxtaposed as two great halves of the continent as in Asia, but everywhere penetrate each

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other.” Thus, do topographical features serve as thesis and antithesis for the purposes of sustaining a system. Local geography is made to fit a universal conceptual scheme.15 The upshot of this dislocated approach—the knower (Hegel) stands outside the place known, has no immediate knowledge of it—in a geography which ignores, dismisses, and simplifies the physical and cultural diversity of the earth. In Hegel’s case, it leads to a blatant racism as peoples and their regions are ranked within his geo-cultural order. Hegel’s racism and its relation to his geography is easily the subject of a separate reflection, but its underlying “logic” is adumbrated in a passage where Hegel relates what he takes to be a “dormant mentality” characterizing the African to the “compact, differenceless mass of the African continent.” For Hegel, differentiation and mentality go hand in hand. For Herodotus the earth is not an ideal whole whose parts (continents) express essential moments or aspects of that whole. Herodotus derides the “a priori geography” of many mapmakers of his day. “I cannot help laughing at the absurdity of all the map-makers—there are plenty of them—who show Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth, with Asia and Europe of the same size.” Herodotus proceeds to describe the location and size of the continents, reasoning from what was known at the time and referring at length to reported explorations to circumnavigate Africa. Concerning the latter, the unsuccessful attempt of a certain Sataspes, commissioned by the Persians, is more believable than the Phoenician-manned party sent by Egyptian king Necos. Even if both accounts are bogus, however, it is significant that Herodotus refers to what reported explorers have to say about the size and shape of landmasses. Empirical knowledge and not a tradition which held for map symmetry is important. For Herodotus, one could speak knowledgeably about Asia since “the greater part of Asia was discovered by Darius”; “with Europe, however, the case is different; for no one has ever determined whether or not there is sea either to the east or north of it.” Again, the point is not whether Herodotus had correct knowledge or even whether he drew valid inferences from data. In these cases the relevant fact is that he looked to what could be known by discovery to determine geographical truth. Herodotan geography is painstakingly pieced together over time from the in situ experiences of one who travels, who traverses the earth and traces its contours. Herodotus’s method is discovery, not deduction. Differences are not fodder for a general theory; they make up a diversity which resists categorization or subsumption in a dialectic. Herodotus sometimes compares cultures (Egyptians and the “rest of mankind”; Greeks and Persians) and frequently relates peoples to their local geographies. His observations, however, are not adduced as evidence for a law or principle, nor do they establish ranking or hierarchy.

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We have already noted that Herodotus eschews a universalizing apriorism that sees each culture as instantiating some law of human nature or some necessary relationship between place and culture. In contrast to the nomothetic approach of the social sciences which seek to uncover correlations between factors like income level and church attendance, Herodotus’s geography is idiographic. He approaches each phenomenon in its singularity and wholeness, i.e., each culture holistically and in its own time and place. Herodotus not only avoids Hegel’s racism—not a necessary correlate of an a priori perspective, but, in his case, inextricably bound up with it—but also the loss of distinctive difference and individuality that an approach whose aim is universal truth risks losing. Herodotus, we have seen, unfolds a truth about culture rooted in locality. But how useful is such a truth in a world of displaced peoples? There seem to be two ways of answering this question. First, one who would know another who has been separated from his/her locality can analogously and imaginatively transport him/herself into the other’s world—accomplishing by imagination what Herodotus could do with the firsthand experience he had of the other in his/her world. Herodotus’s insertion into the earthbound world of the other was immediate and served to check his understanding of the other. To be sure, displacement, as we have described it, denies us the immediacy which Herodotus enjoyed. For the most part, the other comes to us without his/her world and earth-point-oforigin. Our effort to understand must rely on information and imagination. Information here signifies either first-person accounts by the very “others” we would know or firsthand reports by observers of the world of the other. By itself, however, just having information from either source falls short of the mark. Imagination is needed to transform this “data about . . . ” into an “as-ifthere” reenactment of the other’s lived world. To inform our imaginations, we come back to the necessity of a geographic understanding of the type which Herodotus pioneered. This is a geography ideographic and areal, one that, of course, begins with the earth, but focuses on a region and its singularity rather than the whole earth and its laws. This geography is ecumenical in a root sense of the word: earth is home and habitat, or more precisely, many homes to many cultures. Although we may not be able to undertake the kind of geographic exploration and inquiry which Herodotus demonstrates, we may yet compensate for our own lack of firsthand knowledge of the other in situ through an informed and vicarious transposition into the other’s world. Secondly, even though the other comes to us “dis-located,” we can apply the essential thrust of “local truth” to our understanding. What remains of Herodotus’s areal and earthbound understanding of the other after one subtracts access to the other in situ is an approach which (a) valorizes knowledge that arises from encounter and which (b) takes the other within the context

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of his/her world. We need not cite the many passages in which Herodotus affirms the value of immediate knowledge of either the lands or peoples he describes. What needs to be added is that even as the other appears outside his/her locality of origin and habitation, the other carries with him/her the world that took form in that locality. The Scythian removed from the steppes over which he/she ranges on horseback would presumably, for a time at least, bear the world of the steppes, one which prizes mobility and a fierce independence. The Geloni built Greek-style temples to Greek gods, long after they departed Greek shores to live in forests of the Caucasus with the Budini.16 Within the idiographic perspective of Herodotus, our task would be to ground our knowledge of the other in direct encounter and to endeavor to situate the other within the other’s world, even if that world becomes detached from its geographic setting. Herodotan geography is distinguished by a historein, inquiry, a questioning that first sees the taken-for-granted as questionable and pursues it with the aim of giving account for it, explaining its “cause.” The paradigm case is Herodotus’s effort to understand the annual flooding of the Nile. For the inhabitants of Egypt—the “gift of the Nile”—there is nothing at all strange or questionable about the flooding phenomenon. It is part of the setting within which they live. It is familiar, taken for granted. Herodotus is amazed that the Egyptians do not see the flooding as questionable, do not seek to find its cause. “About why the Nile behaves precisely as it does I could get no information from the priests or anyone else, “Herodotus writes. “Nobody in Egypt could give me any explanation of this in spite of my constant attempts to find out what was the peculiar property which made the Nile behave in the opposite way to other rivers” [emphasis added].17 It takes the stranger to see the familiar as questionable and to begin an inquiry to render the phenomenon intelligible with respect to its origin and cause. “Certain Greeks,” Herodotus continues, “hoping to advertise how clever they are, have tried to account for the flooding of the Nile in three different ways.” Strangers, not natives, venture explanations.18 Herodotus joins other Greeks in offering an explanation. To be sure, Herodotus is wrong—“to put the whole thing in the fewest words . . . during winter the sun is driven out of his course by storms toward the upper parts of Libya”—and his science strikes us as bizarre, but if we go beyond first impression and understand the “natural philosophy” of his day, we see the workings of a methodical mind, a reasoning that systematically explores alternatives and “tests” hypotheses. His practice offers a marvelous example of the privilege of the stranger to take the familiar of the other as strange, i.e., questionable, and then to render the questionable intelligible.19 In this “paradigm” case, Herodotus explores a natural phenomenon both “wondrous” and related to the lived world of the Egyptians for whom annual

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flooding was/is the material basis of their lives. Additionally, Herodotus’s foray into geophysics is thoroughly “areal.” He is not seeking universal principles of meteorology and using Nile flooding as evidence but just the opposite. With what he already takes to be general principles of meteorology and “physics” he seeks to give account of a singular phenomenon peculiar to a particular place—a phenomenon which “determines” the lifeworld of its inhabitants. Herodotan geography is areal; his earth, a habitat for humans. BACK TO EARTH AND ON THE ROAD As movement, travel unfolds in time. Distances in space are measured by the times needed for a traveler to traverse them. Thus, for Herodotus, the greatest breadth of Egypt is a “two months’ journey.” Or again, he writes, “Above Heliopolis, for a distance of a four days’ voyage up the river, Egypt is narrow.” One more example: “From Heliopolis to Thebes is a nine days’ voyage up the Nile.”20 The earth as scene of travel is not given all at once in its entirety but rather landscape by landscape. Herodotus’s account builds as a narrative. His geographic exposition proceeds from one place to another contiguous to it or next in the circuit of a trip. Libyan tribes of the “sandbelt” are thus described in sequence starting from Egypt and going West.21 The temporality of his inquiry into places points to the fact that his geography is a situated investigation that draws on the lived experience of what are lived spaces, on what unfolds and presents itself to observation over time. Such an investigation can offer an integral description of each area in its distinctiveness but is ever incomplete and open-ended. Some scholars accuse Herodotus of inventing most or all of his travels but, according to contemporary scholar James Romm, these scholars are a “small minority” and the countries which Herodotus claims to have visited would not have been “terribly difficult for a well-to-do fifth-century Hellene to visit.”22 Travel launches Herodotus on his exploration. It inserts him into the physical settings that become fields for exploration. Travel also puts him into proximity to the other, the foreign, and makes possible his inquiry into the relationship between a people and its land. For Herodotus the earth is never an abstraction and is nearly always considered a human habitat, or rather the setting of numerous such habitats, each to be taken on its own terms. Disputing the Ionian claim with respect to extent of the territory of Egypt, Herodotus declares, “Egypt, I consider, is the whole extent of territory inhabited by Egyptians, just as Cilicia is the country occupied by Cilicians or Assyria the country occupied by Assyrians” [emphasis added].23

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Firsthand experience, his own or that of other eyewitnesses, is the foundation for understanding the earth and its peoples. One scholar counts over a thousand uses of the pronoun “I” by Herodotus. The usage does not reflect “ego.” On occasion it signals an opinion on its way, but usually it attests to “his having observed for himself” or the effort to obtain first-person experience of something. Herodotus the geographer is on scene but keeps out of the picture. Regarding the Nile and the “great changes” it works on the landscape, Herodotus writes, I have observed for myself that Egypt at the Nile Delta projects into the sea beyond the coast on either side; I have seen shells on the hills and noticed how salt exudes from the soil to such an extent that it affects even the pyramids; I have noticed, too, that the only hill where there is sand is the hill above Memphis, and—a further point—that the soil of Egypt does not resemble that of the neighboring country of Arabia, or of Libya, or even of Syria, but is black and friable.24

THE OTHER’S PLACE The habitat-humanity or earth-to-culture relationship becomes the explicit theme of many Herodotan “ethnographies”—ethnographies which are as much geographies by virtue of their grounding of culture in place, their giving an earthbound account of other lifeworlds. • Herodotus describes how the natural environment, its flora, and cycles affect everyday life for the Egyptians of the marsh country who, bake loaves from the dried poppy-head of the indigenous lotus blossom and consume papyrus from the marshes or perhaps “nothing but the abundant fish of the area,” dried in the sun upon being caught.25 • Likewise, the Indians who live in marsh country eat raw fish caught from boats made of reeds that grow in the waters; clothes are made from a rush that that is beaten and then woven into a matting suitable for breastplates.26 • The influence of land, water, and climate extends beyond food and dress. Scythian life, by Herodotus’s account, owes as much to the river Borysthenes as Egyptian life owes to the Nile. It supports “the finest and most abundant pasture,” the “best sorts of fish,” and “excellent water for drinking.” Warfare and, one may infer, a warrior religion derive from the lifestyle which the land supports. “They have been helped in this [escaping destruction by the conquest of others] by the nature of their country,” Herodotus writes. Nomads who raise cattle and move on horseback, the

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Scythians frustrate would-be conquerors for whom they offer no fixed settlements to attack; invaders must reckon with a people who can fight on horseback with bows and arrows and whose swift maneuver tactics undoubtedly benefit from a life on the move. It is no wonder that the Scythians sacrifice to only one god, Ares, the god of war, that the horse is the preferred and most common victim and, given the lack of wood in their grasslands home, the Scythians do not burn their offerings but strangle their animal victims and boil their flesh over a bone fire.27 Outside the “cameo ethnographies” that abound in the text, Herodotus shows his attentiveness to the influence of local geography on the material culture of a people. • Nile boats, he observes, are built of the acantha wood of the area, “caulked from inside with the indigenous reed papyrus,” and powered with aid of sails of papyrus.28 • In the marsh country of Egypt a prolific and pungent plant, the Kiki, is sown along the river and shores of lakes so that the fruit can be pressed and boiled down to produce an oil for burning in lamps—“though the smell is unpleasant.”29 • Herodotus notes that the rainfall of Assyria is very slight—sufficient only to “burst the seed and start the root growing”—and so “artificial irrigation” is used and “the whole country is intersected by dykes.”30 • Herodotus tells us about the salt block houses of Libya which testify not only to the abundance of the material, both white and purple, but also to the absence of rain in the desert environment, for “if there were [rain], the salt walls would collapse.”31 In all of the above examples we see the workings of an earthbound understanding of culture. It is precisely this earthbound sense of culture alluded to at the beginning of the chapter that gives Herodotus the advantage over Sextus Empiricus in understanding and dealing with cultural and moral differences between peoples. Generally, the effect of such a “cultural geography” is to humanize others obliquely. It may not seem so. Indeed, it may seem biological and Darwinian to take such an environmental view of culture. Notably, the first definition of “habitat” is “the place where a plant or animal species naturally lives and grows.” According to Webster’s, “habitare,” the root word, is the initial word in Latin descriptions of species of flora and fauna in old natural histories. But if the problem we have identified lies in reducing other cultures to curiosities of an alien observer, then situating the other culture within a local geography approaches that other culture on its own terms, i.e., terms specific to its situation, including its “placial,” earthbound setting.

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Food, shelter, clothing, social practices, and even religious beliefs are seen to have a basis in the local environment. Smelly lamps and houses built of salt, which might otherwise seem exotic and odd, are understood in terms of the local geography. The other is understood “at home” in his/her world, on his/ her own turf, rather than as a colorful oddity in an alien’s travelogue. It is well to point out here that Herodotus is not purveying a geographical determinism. More often than not, he describes cultures apart from their relations to local geography, notably, for example, the Persian and Babylonian. Moreover, he is adept at tracing historical as well as geographical/environmental influences as both become relevant to our understanding a people. Recall the case of the Geloni, for example, originally Greeks, but came to build temples in the Greek style to gods whom Herodotus calls by Greek names but constructed and furnished the temples with statues and altars entirely of wood as they were now living among the Budini in country forested with “trees of all sorts.”32 THE OTHER “OUT OF PLACE” Earlier we noted that the other’s earth-boundedness, when understood, helped to protect others from becoming exotica in a travelogue. What happens when the other is not encountered on his or her own “turf"? Globalization and diaspora have resettled millions in strange lands, far from home—far from the place that goes to constitute so much of their cultural being. In such a case— i.e., the situation of our time—cross-cultural understanding is handicapped. The opportunity of grounding understanding of the other on the other’s ground is lacking. The other is and appears dislocated: no longer at the center of the cultural world that has gone to make up his/her being; but at the margins of the world of that self for whom the other “shows up.” In such a case, one should expect that the other will be understood—initially at least—in terms of the categories of the self who encounters the other. Those categories could be specific stereotypes of the group to which the other belongs or a benign (at least, benignly intended) concept of humanity which discounts for individual and cultural differences and “accepts each as an equal member of the human race.” In either case, the other is seen and understood—again initially—from the point of view of the self into whose world the other “intrudes.” But, the problem today goes beyond the handicap that we have considered so far. It is not just that one civilization meets another across a gap of ignorance but rather along a divide marked by misunderstanding, resentment, fear, and hostility. In such a clash of civilizations, the religious affiliation/belief of the other often appears to be a principal cause of conflict. In such a world, the benign neutrality of the cosmopolitan observer, one who is impelled by curiosity, falls short of offering what is needed both to understand and to

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deal with the contemporary situation. It is not the point of this chapter that Herodotus’s approach is ultimately one of cultural relativism. To be sure, much of his “geography,” including what we have focused on, may suggest that. We shall see, however, the resources within Herodotan thinking for transcending cultural relativism and addressing the distinctive nature of today’s “many-worlded-world.” Thus far, Herodotus seems to have given us an approach for understanding other cultures based on firsthand lived experience of the other in situ aided by an implicit methodology of pairing, reciprocity, and analogy. None of this needs to be abandoned as we consider the specific challenges presented by displacement, religious fervor, and civilizational conflict. Herodotus’s response to these challenges shall have already been addressed in part by way of is his idiographic focus. We will now see how his sense of justice and hospitality apply. JUSTICE AND HOSPITALITY The story of Paris, Helen, and King Proteus of Egypt, as told by Herodotus, is a parable of hospitality and justice. It suggests that there is a right and wrong that transcends the mores of individual cultures and peoples and a regard for the other that goes beyond the quid pro quo of reciprocity33 Paris and Helen are the very same individuals who figure in Homer’s epic. They have come to Egypt, forced ashore by a storm. The Egyptians welcome them and the Greek slaves who were onthe ship are given sanctuary—and therewith freedom—at a temple to Heracles where custom dictates such a practice. The slaves tell the priests that Paris has abducted Helen, and word reaches the king, who then chastises Paris, keeps Helen, and instead of sentencing Paris to death, banishes him from Egypt. The story gives pause to one who might think that morals and mores are the same for Herodotus or that simple reciprocity governs relations between natives and strangers. The abduction is described as an “abominable crime.” The turpitude of Paris expands to include seductionas-betrayal since Helen’s husband [Menelaus of Sparta] is a friend of Paris and left with Helen’s husband’s goods. On top of all of this, Paris exploits the passion between Helen and himself to make her an accomplice in his crime. Nothing in the story qualifies the deeds as mere violations of local customs. Proteus, for his part, says, “no matter who it is that has committed this crime against his friend, arrest him and send him to me so that I may hear what he can say for himself.” These are not behaviors that might be excused depending on the station or nationality of the presumed offender. Anyone, “no matter who,” is a criminal if he/she acts as Paris was accused. Paris, for

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his part, does not question the jurisdiction of Proteus but puts up a defense, albeit ineffectual. Proteus finds Paris guilty and gives him three days to leave Egypt; after this he will be considered an enemy. This last point is telling. It implies that what Proteus has done toward Paris is not in the nature of an attack on a foe or revenge by someone who himself has been wronged. Proteus, as the expression goes, “has no dog in the fight” In that sense, his action is disinterested. His invocation of rules (albeit his own) which govern such situations and prescribe consequences, including rules with respect to foreign offenders, tell us that Proteus is acting in the name of justice. Herodotus tells us he is relating what the Egyptian priests told him but there is every reason to read the account as representing Herodotus’s ethical stance. He says he agrees with the Egyptians that Helen was in Egypt, not in Troy, during the Trojan War. More to the point, Herodotus presents an admirable portrait of Proteus, who comes across as generous, deliberative, and just. If the appearance of these qualities in the account owes entirely to what the Egyptian priests told him, Herodotus does not choose to diminish at all the favorable light in which Proteus shines. At the conclusion of the whole account he draws this moral from Homer’s Illiad, “sin is always visited by condign punishment at the hands of God. That, at least, is my own belief.”34 Herodotus, who has earlier shown his talent for matter-of-fact description of humanity’s diversity, now contrasts perfidy (Paris) and virtue (Proteus) unqualified by place-bound standards, neither concealing his own indignation at the crimes of Paris nor admiration for the virtues of Proteus. There is another thread which runs through the story. Again and again, the stranger and hospitality are privileged. We read first of a Temple to Aphrodite as “the stranger”—a unique holy place which honors the outsider. Another temple, this to Heracles, is the place of sanctuary to which Paris’s slaves go, finding refuge and welcome.35 When Proteus first characterizes Paris’s crime it is as a “crime against his friend,” Menelaus. When it comes time to “sentence” Paris, Proteus refers to his practice of never putting a foreigner to death, in particular one forced by bad weather to seek refuge in Egypt. Proteus feels compelled to punish Paris “for the sake of your Greek host.” [Emphasis added.] The three days he gives Paris and friends to leave Egypt is apparently calculated to allow them to find anchorage elsewhere.36 Putting all of this together it is hard to avoid the impression that the other, the stranger, is elevated above the native. Reciprocity and the equality it implied are fine for cross-cultural understanding, but when it comes to cross-cultural encounters and dealings, Herodotus privileges action founded on the presumption of hospitality. Side by side with a justice that cuts across boundaries and brings anyone, “no matter who,” to task for his/her crimes, there is a concept of hospitality at play. Taken together justice and hospitality would seem to stand

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as two overarching principles which govern the encounters, between natives and strangers. Our present-day global scenario is riven by conflicts between cultures. Might the hospitality and justice exhibited in the Paris/Proteus story provide a pertinent Herodotan response? Readers must decide for themselves how pertinent these virtues are to our world. For its part, hospitality offers an alternative to a dynamic of distrust, suspicion, fear, and antagonism that might easily arise between native and foreigner. The hospitality of the host puts the guest-foreigner at ease. The alien is made to feel less alien and more at home. The divide between the foreign and familiar becomes a threshold across which one may move. With some risk and much trust, the host opens his world to the stranger so that the stranger responds and reposes trust in the host. In the Herodotan scheme, justice complements hospitality. One who violates the special trust that hospitality extends and builds—“no matter who . . .”—puts himself outside the pale of society—but, not beyond redemption: Paris is banished from Egypt and has time to seek refuge in another port.37 Justice recognizes and punishes injustice but keeps its bond of hospitality. In these concluding reflections on morality, hospitality, and justice, we may have seemed to have strayed some distance from the domain of geography. It appears that we have shifted from geography to history, from description to prescription, and from the customs of particular cultures to universal ethical standards. Perhaps, in some sense, we have shifted attention. The boundaries these distinctions imply, however, need not confine our thinking and did not seem to have hampered Herodotan inquiry. For him, the earth is ever the setting and stage for the dramas that play out in history and engage one’s sense of right and wrong. History “takes place.” Just as the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis are shaped by the singular topographies to which the place names refer, so too, issues of hospitality and justice presuppose an encounter in time and place between native and stranger. Moreover, the difference which separates and distinguishes native and stranger is one of place. To be sure, place-bound mores have an immediately understood geographic sense. Nonetheless, the shared worlds and spaces that “map” such localities open into an unrestricted horizon where all meet up. And, there lie the challenges awaiting us in abiding together on the planet. NOTES 1. Kroeber, A. L. and Clyde Kluckohn, A Critical Review of the Concept and Definitions (New York, Vintage Books, 1952).

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2. Sextus Empiricus, trans. R. G. Bury, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), Tenth Mode. 3. Hamilton, Edith, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), 120. 4. Entry on Herodotus from The Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1911). 5. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1966). 6. Herodotus, trans. Aubrey de Selinourt, The Histories (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), 219. 7. Herodotus, Histories, 221. 8. Herodotus, Histories, 306. 9. Herodotus, Histories, 71. 10. Herodotus, Histories, 260. 11. Herodotus, Histories, 129, 12. Herodotus, Histories, 122. 13. Herodotus, Histories, 118–19. 14. Hartshorne, Richard, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 19, Numbers 3 and 4 (Lancaster: The Association of American Geographers, 1939), 463. 15. Hegel, G. W. F., trans. William Wallace, Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971), Sections 394–95, 40–45, 51. 16. Herodotus, Histories, 277. 17. Herodotus, Histories, 18. Herodotus, Histories, 109. 19. Herodotus, Histories. 110. 20. Herodotus, Histories, 105. 21. Herodotus, Histories, 299. 22. Romm, James, Herodotus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 50–51. 23. Herodotus, Histories, 108. 24. Herodotus, Histories, 106. Emphasis added. 25. Herodotus, Histories, 135. 26. Herodotus, Histories, 217. 27. Herodotus, Histories, 257–61. 28. Herodotus, Histories, 137. 29. Herodotus, Histories, 136. 30. Herodotus, Histories, 91. 31. Herodotus, Histories, 304. 32. Herodotus, Histories, 277. 33. Herodotus, Histories, 143–47. 34. Herodotus, Histories, 147. 35. Herodotus, Histories, 143. 36. Herodotus, Histories, 144. 37. Herodotus, Histories, 144,

Chapter 6

Nature and the Wild

Is there a place for humankind in the Wild? A provocative question to be sure, but one that our reflection on dwelling leads us to.1 In more recent times, the notion of wilderness itself—as a pristine environment, a place inviolate, unspoiled by human activity—has become problematic and the subject of “deconstruction” and criticism. One line of critique, predating “deconstruction,” holds that no such place is to be found, that in some way and to some degree every place on earth has been affected by human activity.2 Another line of critique holds that, from the very beginning, wilderness is nothing more than a cultural artifact whose lineage can be traced back to romanticism.3 In repairing to the wilderness, we are only communing with a product of our wish to escape the confines of modern life. Simply put, the idea is that wilderness is a notion that derives from the late-eighteenth-century concept of the sublime and/or the nineteenth-century vision of the frontier.4 In each case, humankind constructs, imagines, or projects a notion of nature/wilderness which expresses a historically rooted ideal. The notion is not descriptive or empirical. It expresses a given zeitgeist and the perceptions and attitudes of the culture in which it originates. The notion of wilderness reflects, inter alia, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury visions of nature and the wild, but tracing its origins and development in the history of ideas or evolution of culture does not deny its intentional reference to what is “out there.” These visions, or others, may not be adequate representations of wilderness or nature itself. Although the mode of consciousness with which we approach any object already always prefigures the way in which it will emerge and present itself, nonetheless, consciousness has its object and expression has the task of “filling-out” its meaning-content as something of a certain kind upon a fundamentum in re. A broader survey of the concepts of wilderness presents a range of differing and often conflicting meanings. Whether Adam emerged from Paradise into a wilderness or Homo sapiens left the Paleolithic world of the hunter roaming the wilderness to take up gardening, humankind’s notions of wilderness have 109

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varied from the time humans first thought about it. Dense, void, threatening, mysterious, sublime, chaotic, alien, vast, violent and violated, protective and protected, disappearing, gone, place of origin, never more than an idea— these and other predicates have been used to describe the wilderness. DEFINING WILDERNESS Let us move from this array of descriptors to some common notions of wilderness. First, the wilderness is conceived in opposition to humankind. In one version, wilderness threatens and confounds humans. A variant holds that if humanity is distinguished by civilization, then it measures itself by the distance it puts between the civilized and the wild. Even reverence for the wilderness is thought to require keeping it unspoiled by human intervention. Wilderness, in short, is where humankind is not. With this last notion, we elide into the next point. Second, wilderness is characterized negatively. It seen as a territory uncultivated, undeveloped, untapped. Its vast expanse—e.g., the desert wilderness—is defined as an emptiness. Often, when wilderness is prized, it is for its purity, i.e., for what it is not: not contaminated or spoiled or altered; pristine. All of this elides into the third conception. Third, the wilderness is uniformly undetermined, undifferentiated. This characteristic comes out in the notion of the sublime landscape, a wild expanse that does not absorb us in its details nor present itself as complex in any way, but rather overwhelms us with its grandeur, its sweeping vistas. In this aspect, it can become a cipher of the infinite. The intent of this chapter and the book is not to enter into an extended debate regarding the meanings of wilderness. It is, rather, to examine the possibility-of-dwelling on the earth and specifically dwelling “in the Wild.” Each of the above definitions suggests, however, that dwelling in the wilderness is not an option. Under the first notion, humanity and wilderness are notionally and practically incompatible. Either human intrusion into wild spaces contaminates and despoils them or the wilderness assaults and threatens human life and well-being. If, as Aristotle says, the human being is a zoon politikon, a living being who dwells in the polis, in the city among other humans, then living in the wilderness essentially diminishes humans who abandon life with others in the city for the wilderness. So it would seem. Under the second notion, the wilderness simply lacks the material conditions for human habitation at more than a minimal, mere subsistence level.

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Under the third notion, the wilderness is uniform and unvariegated. These are seen as virtues contributing to its sublimity. The intrusion of humans per se would introduce a difference not there to begin with; and then, human activity would “pockmark” the sweep and grandeur of the wild vista. The approach taken here does not so much dismiss the properties and definitions set forth above in a one-on-one rebuttal. Rather, it makes the case that a kind of dialogic relationship between humanity and wilderness (understood more deeply and fruitfully as nature) allows each to “come out ahead.” Each will be better for their “cohabitation,” a kind of coexistence premised on an ontological relationship which implies their mutual envelopment and connectedness. THE WILD AS NATURE In the comments above, the wild emerges, inter alia, as the untamed and the uncultivated. To be sure, with the approach taken here the wild seems yet to be set in opposition to the human, specifically the human activities of cultivation and domestication. In the following discussion, at least three characteristics distinguish the wild as delineated below: a.  The wild, as untamed/uncultivated, has a positive determination, as nature, i.e., as that which has the principle or source of its growth and being in itself. b.  The human activities in question do not negate but rather sublate the wild; although the wild is tamed, its positive character as the natural, continues to determine it fundamentally. c.  The relationship of the human and the wild-become-natural in cultivation and domestication is one in which each affects and determines the other—not one of radical separation, opposition, or unilateral determination (e.g., as when the human effects or produces a simulacrum of the natural). The conceptual transition effected in the above-three moves, is one from the concept of the wild (expressed in a multitude of forms, many contradictory to each other) to a concept of nature, defined as that which has the source of its being in itself, Aristotle’s physis. Aristotle distinguishes the natural from the product of craft, “the man-made” (as we used to say). Unlike the natural (ta physica), the product of craft has “no innate impulse to change.” In such things, the principle (arche) of what comes to be, “comes from outside, and it is within other things.”5 The ontological outcome of this transition is to stake the claims of the wild to independence and self-governance in the

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arche, i.e., principle and origin, of natural movement, kinesis, i.e., movement or, more broadly, coming forth or being. The wild, so thought as the natural, is not “an-archic,” but rather, originally “archic.” And, here archic or original does refer to what it was and, perhaps, has ceased to be, but rather to what governs and determines the future (telos) of natural thing: “nature as applied to coming to be, is really a road towards nature.”6 In earlier parts of the book, nature was said to be something that: merited contemplation, attentive regard, and listening (Sandburg, chapter I,); had something to give forth of itself and tell us about itself (Xenophon, chapter 2); or could even be a model for the virtues of democracy (Whitman, chapter 3). None of these characterizations make any sense whatsoever if nature is whatever we humans make of it, a product of our craft. Nor does something like a governing principle make sense if nature is understood as a wild, undirected force. Dwelling in the wild or elsewhere on the earth—as understood here—is dwelling with nature and with deference to the “nature of nature.” The relationship of nature and humans will be conceived here as dialogic. The more implicit shift made in the transition from the wild to wild-become-nature is to direct focus from the wilderness as vast and conceived without variegation, to a “many-worlded-world” of animal and plant habitats and ecologies. In the prospectus of the reflection to follow, one cannot think of the wilderness as a space without its living inhabitants. And, those living beings, plants and animals, are not just aggregated within the outer boundaries of the wilderness, but rather collocated by species into their own respective territories. The issue for human would-be dwellers in the “wild reaches” of the earth is whether they can dwell in such places without derogation to their humanity or to the places where they would live. Zoologist Dr. H. Hediger, an ethologist known for his work in accommodating “wild” animals to zoos, takes issue with the notion that the wild animal is one who roams freely and at will across a vast and unbounded landscape.7 “The traditional idea of the wild animal roaming more or less aimlessly and at random about the world,” Hediger writes, “is far from the truth.”8 As early as 1909, Hediger points out, naturalist E. T. Seton wrote; “No wild animal roams at random over the country.”9 In a formulation that Hediger himself calls paradoxical, he writes, “the free animal does not live in freedom: neither in space nor as regards its behavior towards others animals.”10 “Cosmopolitans” or creatures like the brown rat or the house mouse which have been “artificially transplanted by man” do not “’enjoy the run’ of their enormous territory in the sense that they travel from end to end of it.”11 “Vagrants” like migratory birds are not “carefree wanderers”; their range is “peculiarly limited in space and time.”12 Not only is geography or space generally—nature or the wilderness—differentiated by species of animals (as to where they do or do not live), but the

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geography of an individual animal, its territory, is differentiated within itself. Hediger writes, “The animal’s personal living space or territory is seen as a system of biologically significant points connected in a characteristic manner by means of definite tracks or beats.”13 At the center is the home (nest, cave, lair, etc.) where it retires from danger, rests, and gives birth and rears its young in infancy.14 The space-time system of the territory also includes special locations and times for feeding,15 excretion,16 and breeding,17 to name three significant life functions. Home, for “them,” as for “us,” is site of everyday life and place for meeting basic needs. The parallel of this many-worlded-world of nonhuman animals to the multicultural world of humans, also earthbound and variegated, is striking and unavoidable. For the time being, one can only note that dwelling—for us and the animals who share the earth with us—is not just earthbound, but geo-local and that the “sphere of ownness” we call home (chapter 4) has its analogue throughout the animal kingdom. It would be unrealistic, myopic, not to see that issues of coexistence, contested territory, dis-placement, and basic needs “go with the territory”: they are challenging aspects of living together with others on this planet. CASE STUDIES AND VARIATIONS How then to proceed? What is the method or approach is best for going from the wild to nature and seeing the relationship of the human and nature as dialogic? The method used in this chapter is to process the data of natural history, ethology, geophysics, cultural anthropology, zoology, and other life sciences and articulate its meaning by way of pertinent applications of phenomenological concepts and methods. The sense of phenomenology will hopefully show itself as we proceed, but, in brief, it is a way of starting with everyday lifeworld experiences as experienced “in the moment” in order to identify what essentially constitutes the objects and relationships embedded in those experiences. In capturing lived experience, first-person narratives, how one feels about the circumstances unfolding, emotions affecting one’s perceptions of and relationships with others, the sense of time and place shaping one’s surrounding world and its past, present, and future—all of these are useful for phenomenology and intended to lead to insight into what is essential to something under investigation—in this case, nature and humankind’s relationship to nature in various forms. This kind of phenomenology will work on five “cases” in turn: hunting a “man-eating tiger,” Neolithic cultivation, training dogs, and the breaking of broncos. A fifth case, a confrontation with inorganic nature, concludes the

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chapter and highlights the importance of living nature to human being. In each of the cultivation/domestication cases, the three above-mentioned characteristics of the wild-become-nature are elaborated. Taken together, these five cases illustrate another phenomenological application, namely, imaginative variation, a way of teasing out what is essential in a phenomenon or idea. In this case, we are looking for what is essential to the human-nature relationship considering variations of nature thematically addressed in the case studies. The variations are imaginative not as fantasies or pure fictions but rather as possible ways in which nature exhibits itself, shows forth in different living things located in different lifeworlds and geographies. Case 1, Hunting Hunting, for some, typifies humankind’s (perhaps in this case we can say “man’s”) relationship to nature. The hunter literally attacks and kills wild beasts, negating, indeed annihilating the wild and demonstrating human ascendancy over the natural. Or, so it seems. The simple fact that the predator-prey relationship is not peculiar to the human animal should give pause to any who would distinguish human hunting by way of such ascendancy. Nonetheless, we should grant that hunting manifests a different character when it is the human who hunts, whether one averts to the idea that human beings are “universal predators” or one looks to the way in which the human conducts the business of the hunt. Perhaps more telling for our purposes is the lived experience of the hunt and how the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, the human being and the wild beast, manifests itself in that experience. We have, of course, no written accounts of hunting in prehistoric times. Anthropologists can infer from natural and artifactual evidence how hunting may have been conducted. They—and we—may speculate too about how the earliest hunters experienced the hunt. For a firsthand account of a hunt as experienced we will turn to the story of a “white hunter’s” stalking and killing of a Bengal tiger that had been menacing villages in India.18 The story is replete with the tropes and clichés one might expect to find in an anthology titled Man Against Nature. The book comprises magazine-length stories in which men conquer nature: hunt down-many eating tigers, kill savage buffalo, make perilous climbs to the summits of treacherous mountains, sail through life-threatening sea passages, and “break broncos”—to name just a few of the adventures. One might expect an action-adventure story like the one discussed here, “The Champawat Man-Eater,” to celebrate the cunning and overweening power of the hunter. Indeed, the hunt ends with grateful villagers forming a torchlit procession to lay the “man-eater” tigress at the feet of its slayer, the white hunter.19 In fact, both cunning and power are attributed to the tiger and a commentator on the

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story notes a kind of role reversal: the human becomes more bestial and the beast seems to reveal human attributes.20 May we “get Hegelian” here and say that the hunted becomes the hunter of the hunter and the hunter, the hunted of the hunted? The “cat and mouse” game that consumes much of the hunter’s story bespeaks a parity between the contestants. Inter alia, guns and bullets will not give the hunter a decisive advantage over the tiger. Nor will human intelligence guarantee a victory for the hunter. Again and again the hunter, notes “smart” moves on the part of the hunted. The tiger, ever watchful of the hunter, readily anticipates the hunter’s moves and reacts to these before the hunter can react to the tiger’s reaction. In the hunter’s account, the reader senses a kind of “respect” for tiger. To be sure, this respect does not include sympathy or sorrow for the tiger and a concomitant lack of these for the tiger’s human victims. Respect is not the sort that philosopher Immanuel Kant makes the foundation of his ethics. It is not founded on personhood, nor does it result in moral imperatives. Respect for the tiger is much like that encompassed by the feeling of sublimity that, in the classic accounts, goes hand in hand with fear for the threatening but awesome power of nature—revealed, for example, in raging storms. Another analogue might be the favorable regard which warring military commanders might have for their counterparts’ strategies, operations, and tactics that show an exceptional battlespace logic—and it’s the latter, not savagery or mindless killing that may draw positive attention. (Note further that such attention may only come in lessons-learned discussions and classes long after combat.) The hunting experience, in which we would least expect to find a relationship other than domination, reflects a more ambivalent relationship. The vulnerability of the hunter, almost at all times when he is anywhere near the prey, is part of the lived experience of the hunt. Although, the villagers are dominated by their fear of the beast and want their revenge and celebration of triumph, namely, the killing of the tiger, for his part, the hunter, who leads volunteers on the hunt-operation, has what might be called empathy towards his foe, seeing things through the eyes of his prey. This is not just a tactical empathy—i.e., “know one’s enemy and be wary”—but includes an understanding of what might have motivated the tiger’s rampage in the first place. After killing the tigress and looking into her mouth, the hunter noticed an earlier gunshot wound had permanently damaged her teeth, making the tiger’s hunt for normal prey impossible and necessitating her search for human flesh to eat. With dentures so weakened, the tigress lacked the bite to kill and then consume other than humans. Generally speaking, over the course of the hunt, “intimate encounters” put hunter and hunted almost eye to eye and on an equal footing with respect to the danger each presents to the other. The upshot of this first of five case studies in this chapter is to describe the features of a human to nature relationship that is not one of domination on

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the part of humanity. Looking back to earlier chapters, the notion of attentiveness to the earth and nature evident in the poet Sandburg or regard for nature in the attentive farming practice of Xenophon shows in the hunter’s case as well, albeit in a very different tonal register. Neither Xenophon nor Frost did battle with nature nor exploit the land for all it could give. The point that can be made with the case of hunting examined just now is that nature is not just quiescent and bountiful. It can be menacing to the point of being threatening to human life itself. The hunting case study developed in this chapter, challenges us intellectually to consider if and under what conditions, nature affords a suitable dwelling place for humans. The hunting case suggests that even in cases where nature is threatening, a due regard for its power, that principle or arche which accounts for its very being, self-governance and independence, serves human dwellers on the earth well. Absent a realistic and mindful regard for nature “on its own terms” we are left to follow the counsel of human hybris, imagine we are in charge, and find ourselves scrambling to accommodate to nature’s ways when it might be too late. The word “accommodate” here is meant to recall those distinctive ethnogeographies that Herodotus describes in the Mediterranean of his day. The various peoples cited were successfully connected to the earth by way of material cultures which adapted their lifeworlds to the opportunities and challenges of the places where they settled. Likewise, the hunting-case suggests, somewhat indirectly perhaps, that adapting to nature, i.e., to the animal life of a region in this case, makes for a lasting and sustainable dwelling on the earth with other living beings. To be sure, it may require killing life-forms that threaten our lives, but, even doing that will require an attentive regard for nature and those very living things themselves that threaten us. Case 2, Cultivation We turn now to the cultivation of plants for food—to farming in its Neolithic origins. One cannot exaggerate the significance of the agricultural revolution, but one can mischaracterize it. In some accounts the start of farming represents humanity’s triumph over nature. Humankind frees itself from the limitations of a fickle nature, takes control of the material conditions of its existence, and imposes its design on the landscape.21 This is not Heidegger describing modern agribusiness in the age of modern technology, but a composite of anthropological description of the Neolithic revolution. Closer reflection on the facts, as we know them, will call this interpretation into question. Even leaving aside the “hype,” the historic moment and planetary significance of the agricultural revolution are plainly evident in transformations brought on by farming: larger and more complex societies, the rise of the great river-valley civilizations, population growth and concentration, technological

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advances, the rise of the state and empire. The list of historical-cultural changes goes on.22 The earth changes radically too. Wilderness shrinks. Rivers are harnessed. Land is furrowed. Plant life itself changes. New species emerge. Old, wild strains decline.23 Even with this more sober enumeration of changes, can we possibly avoid speaking of humankind’s triumph over nature? Here closer reflection will reveal a much different picture, one in line with the three characteristics noted above. The wild is not subdued, but asserts itself and determines the course and limits of cultivation. The first clue to the primacy of the wild is the derivation of cultivated varieties of plants, in particular grains, from wild plants and grasses.24 Cultivation is not manufacture—not even primitive manufacture—whose oldest paradigm is arguably the forming of a clay pot. In cultivation it is not as though a pre-given design were impressed upon formless matter. The “matter” here (wild plants) prefigures the possibilities of cultivation.25 Human agency is limited to observing the natural properties of plants and seeds, selecting from what is given in a locale those most suitable to human purposes, sowing seed, and then nurturing and protecting the plants through their life cycle. Some anthropologists speak of early humans experimenting, and rightly so, but experiment does not have the post-Galilean sense of constraining nature to yield to human interrogation.26 It does not mean building models in advance and then testing them against a set of experiences engineered to give results intended to confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis. Experiment here is trial and error. It has the sense of the Spanish, “experimentar,” which means “experience” as in “taste this gazpacho and see if you like it.” In this kind of experimentation, attentiveness to sensible qualities of the immediately given counts. Experimentation, if not the enterprise of cultivation itself, lies midway between the aggressive intervention of modern practice and a purely passive relation to nature. It means an intimacy with the thing or matter under consideration and a readiness to let it disclose itself to the “experimenter” in a sensory-motor probing.27 Cultivation establishes a mutual dependence between cultivater and cultivated. The fate of a planting obviously depends on the care of the cultivator. But cultivation renders humans dependent as well.28 It ties human beings to the land—more specifically, to that locale that supports the plants which a given people cultivate. Most Indo-European words for farmer underscore the farmer’s tie, even subservience, to the land.29 The sedentary existence which establishes “food security” and makes civilization possible also puts to an end not only to the necessity for but also to the freedom of a nomadic hunting life. After cultivation continues for a while, original wild varieties disappear; new varieties, hybrids spread. Vegetation patterns change en masse as a result of human cultivation. We should not assume, however, that the appearance

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and eventual dominance of hybrids signal that nature relinquishes control to humankind. The mutations which lead to hybrids are natural. That hybrids and new varieties supplant original wild varieties owes as much to the playing out of nature, as it replicates and mutates, as it does to the limited and, at times, accidental intervention of humankind.30 The wild then is not annihilated but forms the “material apriori” of cultivated life-forms as well as the culture that derives from agriculture. The wild, then, is not that which is cleared away or beaten down. Rather it is the matrix from which the cultivated grows. Its inherent properties and powers inform the life forms which come later. To call the wild “uncultivated” stops short of giving a full account, for it is just the wild that comes to be cultivated, and, in a sense, becomes the cultivated. Case 3, Domestication A comparable “thick dialectic” applies to the domestication of animals as to the cultivation of plants. This is to say that in the taming of animals the tamer does not subdue the wild animal to create something of human design. To be sure human purpose motivates the engagement, but human purposes will be frustrated if the tamer/trainer does not attend to inherent potentialities of animal.31 These prefigure what will become of the animal whose pre-given “wild” instincts live on in the aptitudes and behaviors selected and nurtured in domestication. We begin with “man’s best friend.” The case of dogs is an apt one to focus on. Not only is the dog-human relationship ancient but in the Neolithic age humans enlisted dogs in the “exploitation” of other animals, not only in the hunt but in domestication tasks like herding. Animal (specifically dog) intelligence is a complicated matter. One author distinguishes between several related varieties of intelligence, but points to an instinctive or inherited intelligence which subtends the other varieties and whose varieties—to a greater or lesser extent—determine behavioral distinctions among breeds of dogs.32 Some dogs are instinctively suited to be watch dogs or hunting dogs or companions. Others are not. The dog is not “raw” and indifferent animal matter waiting to receive from the human animal its determinative formation.33 The human tamer/trainer must attend to the specific nature of the dog in training for a given task—or court failure. The dog which, to the uneducated eye, appears to be fully obedient to its master’s direction is the one who masterfully performs the functions it is naturally suited to carry out. The master who is truly master of the animal is the one who pays heed to the animal “servant’s” natural endowment. We must talk of a partnership in which the wild aptitude of a breed survives and indeed thrives within the focus and compass of “trained” behavior.

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The case of the herding dog in instructive. Coren tells us that dogs “inherited their herding ability from wolves and other wild canids that hunt in packs.” He identifies and describes “five genetically programmed instructions”—related to the hunting of wild animals by other wild animals, i.e., dogs’ ancestors—which account for dogs’ success in herding. Perhaps the most telling instinct is that of a pack of wolves to follow the lead of an “alpha” wolf. The “alpha” wolf is a “leader [who] initiates and controls the various movements of the pack.” The others in the pack attend to him carefully and follow his lead. Given the “advance programming” of dog breeds suited to herding, the shepherd needs only about a dozen commands to a sheepdog to maintain full control of a herd. The word “commands” misdirects us, however. What is truly revelatory in all this is that “for his sheepdog, the shepherd is the alpha wolf.” There is an already existing order to the wild to which the human must conform in order to take charge.34 Case 4, Breaking Broncos Now let us consider a difficult case—the breaking of a bronco, the taming of wild horses. The iconography of taming horses—with bridles, bits, ropes, and nooses restraining the wild fury of the untamed horse—suggests an archetypal contest of wills between the human and the wild. Domestication of the horse is a narrative which culminates in the defeat of animal spirit and the triumph of human will.35 But, this narrative begins late and ends early. It describes the taming of a horse long after the horse’s birth. Indeed, it describes the domestication of horses in our own historical time and not in the prehistory when the taming of horses first took place. It ends with the saddling of the horse and does not go on to describe the relationship between horse and human for which taming and training are preparatory. It ends describing a triumph of will because it presupposes from the outset that the taming and training are about will-on-will and does not consider that the appropriate hermeneutic context may be one of language and communication. Expert trainers speak of an “equine nature.” Leaving aside anthropomorphism and sentimentality and attending closely to the horse itself, one can describe the sensory-motor workings of the horse, its needs, fears, and predilections.36 The wild horse is not an inchoate quantum of “unbridled” energy. The fury evident in breaking a horse likely points to several species-related fears rather than manifesting an original, defining wildness.37 Many natural givens determine what a horse may become. All these communicate themselves to the trainer and rider in a vocal but mostly bodily manner.38 Training need not entail coercion of the horse. Indeed, it is arguably more successful for the trainer to insert him/herself into a foal’s life

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alongside its mother from the earliest days, adjusting one’s training routine to the expressed needs, developing aptitudes, and limits of the growing horse— and with unfailing regard for the mother/mare whose relationship to the foal must never be challenged.39 Here we can draw a parallel to the way in which a shepherd “takes charge” by inserting him/herself into the sheepdog’s social world. Training the young horse requires a similar conformation of the human to animal society. Heeding to the animal from the outset best ensures that the animal will heed more and more to the human as time goes on. It is not necessary for the imposition of a saddle to be a traumatic event; it can come as an unremarkable part of grooming.40 When it comes to training the horse beyond wearing a saddle and accepting a rider, the case for a close relationship between the horse and rider/trainer becomes still stronger. The horse communicates through a range of bodily attitudes, gestures, movements and vocalizations—snorting, whinnying, and the like. The rider/trainer is most successful in leading the horse when he/she follows closely and continuously the signals which the horse communicates in its behavior.41 Horsemanship is “horse-[hu]manship,” a relationship between horse and human that amounts to a natural cybernetics. Feedback loops explain more than reigns. The “cash value” of knowing all this—we borrow a phrase from James and the pragmatists—comes out at the racetrack where the savvy handicapper can read the body language of the horse to pick a winner.42 We come back to the concept of the wild as nature, that which has the principle of its being within itself. The wild, in the case of a horse tamed and trained, is not an original chaos subdued but a natural power given play. The domesticated or tamed horse is not one that has been reigned in but rather one whose natural potential has been given reign. The relationship of the tamer and the tamed, the human and the wild is not a contest but a communication. WHERE IS HOME? We conclude with a case somewhat different than the rest, a confrontation with inorganic nature. This last case sparks a reflection which suggests that living nature is home to humankind. Charles Nieder, the editor of an early 1950s anthology of “true life” adventure yarns called Man Against Nature, describes his experience atop Mt. Etna. “For the first time in my life I was in an entirely inorganic world, without life or souvenir of life: a moon world, barren, pitted, inhospitable to man.” It was, he said, “a new experience of the awesome loneliness of man in the inorganic universe.”43 We are prompted by the description to think that if immersion in an inorganic world prompts a sense of alienation, then it is in the living world that we belong; the living world is our home. Nieder’s description goes on to confirm what we are led to

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infer. Right after identifying the awesome loneliness of man in the inorganic universe, he writes “I felt a close kinship with every form of life I could imagine, however lowly or primitive.” Now, one more inferential leap: if the effect of modern science is to render inorganic the nature it studies and to insert us somehow within an “inorganic universe,” and if modern technology, which gives practical effect to the vision of modern science, fills our surrounding world with inorganic objects, then perhaps the widespread desire to repair to the wilderness is a wanting to “go home” impelled by a world become alien through science and technology. But where would that wilderness home be if bulldozers destroy and postmodernism deconstructs wilderness? The results of our reflection suggest an answer. If the wild is less a place than a modality of being, then perhaps the wild that we seek in wilderness is as close as an animal companion or the weed patch we call our garden. It cannot have escaped the reader that our refection on the wild finds the being of the wild to lie in a notion of life that hearkens back to the ancient Greek understanding of nature or physis. And, life, as Vladimir Vernadsky tells us, is the ubiquitous stuff of the biosphere, the earth as we know it, the earth as we inhabit it.44 If life harbors the wild and life is ubiquitous to our home, the earth, then, in principle, each of us may have a proximate relationship to the wild. In the course of a “wilderness experience” in Wyoming, naturalist John Hanson Mitchell writes, “I wanted a glimpse of the old gods of nature, the Great God Pan and his demon counterparts, and I was beginning to suspect that you can find Pan anywhere, even in the woodlots of suburbia.”45 What do these reflections on the wild and the wilderness offer to a book-length reflection on dwelling, in particular on dwelling upon earth? If the issue were cast in the most literal terms, one might simply conclude that unless one removes oneself permanently from the surface of the earth itself, then one has no choice but to live on the earth. Clearly the issue speaks of dwelling and the earth in other than this empty and literal way. Modality offers the seguey to the issue at hand. Modality refers to the way which we humans live in relationship to nature and others of our kind on the earth as home—and, not just a one-size-fits-all habitat, but rather a habit of habitats, and a many-worlded-world. Modality does not abandon the notion or reality of a space like wilderness or the earth—notwithstanding the effort to reduce wilderness to a “cultural artifact” in the name of a misdirected constructivism. Wilderness remains “out there” however much it might be diminished in scale and scattered with settlements. And, the earth, for its part, is not a lyrical figment of a romantic imagination. Wilderness areas, the earth as a whole, and other places in this extended reflection on dwelling must disclose how we humans take up our defining being-the-world in this or that place on the earth—including everything from a high-rise in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to a

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refugee camp in Turkey, or an island sinking below sea level from the melting of polar ice. In all of these places, a relationship to nature and living things has bearing on how we dwell and where we live. In this chapter, Aristotle’s definition of nature offered a basis for describing a dialogic relationship between humans, the earth, and the living things we share the earth-space with—both flora and fauna. In the cases examined— hunting, agriculture, and the domestication of animals—the relationship, in each case, was not that of one-sided mastery and control in which the inherent powers of natural things were ignored and displaced by demands from humans that nature conform to our external purposes. In such a scheme, natural things would effectively become “man-made” objects. Again, we can revert to Aristotle’s definitions physis and techne in the Physics. The thick dialectic or dialogue coined to name the relationship showed how a working proximity to the land and animals, wild beasts and grains, unlocks powers to serve human needs as well as evoke respect and alarm when nature threatens us (as in the story of the hunter and tiger above). A lesson from the accounts of nature in this chapter and others is not meant to cover over the brutal and fearsome side of nature. Some may do this by imagining nature as an unqualified good; others by pretending that anything nature may throw our way can be overcome by technology. From the start of the book, and effort was made to disclose the nature of nature and the human-nature relationship. Sandburg’s poetry in chapter 1 offered the beginning of a way to understanding dwelling on the earth poetically. Like the poet, we can approach the earth in a way that is receptive and mindful of it. The farmer-poets who appeared in chapter 2 introduced a reciprocity operative in the kind of hands-on agriculture they described, introducing what is called here a dialogic or a thick dialectic and applied to agriculture and domestication. One might think, to this point in the book, that we are turning a blind eye to what is happening in the name of agribusiness, the manufacture of meat products, and, all-in-all, to the devastation of the earth and its climate in a geo-physical age called the Anthropocene. This Age of the Human is a designation by no means meant to exalt the deep and pervasive transformation of the earth and biosphere caused by human activities. Quite to the contrary, it presents a grim picture of life on earth in a matter of decades if little is accomplished in undoing the harmful consequences of human changes to the biosphere. Setting forth an ideal of what might be a way of dwelling that fits with our being on the earth and the earth’s own way of being will serve to show what is missing and perilous about the condition of the planet as documented in the research of scientists addressing the transformations and harms of the Anthropocene. Asking reflectively what might be a more sustainable and

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fitting way of dwelling on the earth might open up a political space for deliberation on the problems and viable approaches to a solutions. The last chapters of the book will take up these issues in light of the matters addressed so far. In the next three chapters, however, we will turn attention to another dimension of dwelling—being-in-the-world with others. And, in these chapters, the political issues dealing with place and coexistence will hold our attention. Note that the next three chapters are not a detour from but a prelude to the last three, which hopefully will culminate this reflection on earth and dwelling in ways that extend it widely and delve deeply. NOTES 1. This chapter was originally published as Skocz, Dennis, “Wilderness, the Wild and Nature Made Homely,” in Call to Earth, a journal of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy 4, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 19–24. The journal grants permission for authors to “reuse their articles in other publications.” 2. McKibben, Bill, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 47–49. 3. Cronon, William “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Out of the Woods, Essays in Environmental History, ed. Char Miller and Hal Rothman (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 32 4. Cronon, Woods, p. 31. 5. For the reader’s convenience, references to Aristitotle’s Physics in this paragraph are to the Jeffrey Henderson translation, The Physics, Books I–V, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), Book II, chapter I, 192b. Standard pagination per the Greek source text. 6. Aristotle, Physics, II, 1, 193b. 7. H. Hediger, Wild Animals in Captivity, An Outline of the Biology of Zoological Gardens, trans. G. Sircom (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1964). The Dover edition is an unabridged republication of an English translation issued by Butterworths Scientific Publications Limited in 1950. The original German text was published by Benno Schwabe & Co. of Basle, Switzerland. To this author’s knowledge, Dr. Hediger does not use his first name. 8. Hediger, Wild, 12. 9. Hediger, Wild, 12. 10. Hediger, Wild, 4. 11. Hediger, Wild, 5. 12. Hediger, Wild, 5. 13. Hediger, Wild, 13. 14. Hediger, Wild, 13. 15. Hediger, Wild, 124–26. 16. Hediger, Wild, 136–37. 17. Hediger, Wild, 38.

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18. Corbett, Jim, The Champawat Man-Eater,” Man Against Nature: Tales of Adventure and Exploration, ed. Charles Neider (New York:Harper & Brothers, 1954). 19. Corbett, “Man-Eater,” 148. 20. Re: Corbett, Man-Eater, Man Against Nature, comment, editor Charles Neider, xvii. 21. Childe, V. Gordon, Man Makes Himself (New York: The New American Library, 1951), 59–60. 22. Farb, Peter, Humankind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978), 126–27. 23. Darlington, C. D. (New York: The Evolution of Man and Society, 1969), 84–87. 24. Childe, Man, 60–66. 25. Darlington, Evolution, 75. 26. Farb, Humankind, 109–10. 27. Farb, Humankind, 118–19. 28. Darlington, Evolution, 79. 29. Buck, Carl Darling, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 486–88. 30. Darlington, Evolution, 73–74. 31. Childe, Man, 68. 32. Coren, Stanley, The Intelligence of Dogs, Canine Consciousness and Capabilities (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 125. 33. Coren, Dogs, chapter 8. 34. Coren, Dogs, 151–54. 35. Hough, Emerson, “Man Against Bronco,” Man Against Nature, ed. Charles Nieder, 277. 36. Ainslie, Tom, and Ledbetter, Bonnie, The Body Language of Horses (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.), 1980. 37. Ainslie, Horses, 46. 38. Ainslie, Horses, 8. 39. Ainslie, Horses, chapter 5. 40. Ainslie, Horses, 136–38. 41. Ainslie, Horses, chapter 3. 42. Ainslie, Horses, chapter 7. 43. Nieder, Charles, “Introduction,” Man Against Nature, Tales of Adventure and Exploration, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), xvi. 44. Vernadskky, Vladimir I., trans. David B. Langmuir, The Biosphere (New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1998), 59. 45. Mitchell, John Hanson, The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness (Washington, DC: A Merloyd Lawrence Book, 2001), 8–9.

PART III

The Politics of Place and Displacement

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The Perils of Comfortable Estrangement A Micro-Phenomenology

The present chapter is the first of three addressing issues of place and displacement. The “Perils” alluded to in the chapter title derive ironically from the enjoyment of a place of one’s own, described in chapter 4 as a “sphere of ownness,” i.e., one’s property. The initial withdrawal from everyday engagement in the broader lifeworld outside the zone was valued for itself as creating a focal point of self-awareness but then serving to ground a reach outward to others who are invited to join the company of household members, thereby creating a more expansive and inclusive being-in-the-world. Having said all this, the zone of ownness can become a comfort zone in a way that bodes ill for the natural environment. We now address how a secure and comfortable attachment to a place of one’s own can unintentionally estrange oneself from—and put at risk—the natural world outside one’s home. Husserlian phenomenology will be called upon once again—this time to trace the path to estrangement. In this deployment of phenomenology, a scenario from Ideas II, will be articulated and then varied to carry out the task. Thus, what is originally a reflection by Husserl on one’s Umwelt (surrounding world) is imagined and then reimagined to show how the environment of things near at hand can undermine the state of the wider environment beyond. VARIATION 1: COAL-FIRED WARMTH It is easy to imagine Husserl sitting at his desk in his study on winter’s day, toasty warm and comfortable from the heat of a porcelain stove in a corner of the room, a stove fired by coal. Husserl makes it possible for us readers to imagine him in this setting by what he writes in Ideas II concerning 127

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the surrounding world that extends outward from all persons.1 The imagery emerges from the text of Section 50 of Ideas II: “The person as the center of a surrounding world.” And, what a vivid image of egoic-bodily centrality it is! This is not the ego-center from which rays of consciousness radiate to illuminate the immediate landscape of the self’s emplacement. Nor, is it the zero-point of consciousness “holding sway” though its body over its environs, an ego that we meet in the Cartesian Meditations. This ego-body—just as central as the others—is consumed in its thought, passive and comfortable, absorbing the warmth emitted by the coal in a stove in the room. The warmth is a function of the heat released by coal that has been set on fire, a heat which radiates from the coal and suffuses the room. In this reflective scenario, the coal enjoys its own centrality in the room in relation to the warm and reflective ego.2 Between the two, the coal and the ego, sender and receiver, the object and the subject serve to define the phenomenon addressed in the scenario; they describe the beginning and end of the event and the experience which “fires” Husserl’s reflection and will fuel the reflection ventured here. This reflection will alter the scenario in keeping with our contemporary life-situation in a postindustrial world. It will endeavor to anticipate and ponder the consequences of changing the scenario even as the underlying phenomenological structures which govern our experience of near and distant worlds continue to hold sway. The reflection ventured here takes the following steps: 1.  A reprise of Husserl’s account of the Umwelt via his analysis of “being-at-home” [this author’s language] in a room heated with coal. 2.  An imaginative variation of that Umwelt scenario in which key phenomenological structures illuminated in Husserl’s account are not in play. The variation will envision a surrounding world—a climate-controlled environment—not unlike that created by domestic technology in use throughout much of the developed world. 3.  A phenomenologically guided speculation about the implications for the broader natural environment of lives lived in a surrounding self-world made increasingly hermetic. The reflection I propose will draw implications from distinctions implicit or operative in Husserl’s account, namely between natural and built environments, causal and intentional linkages, and the relationship of Welt and Umwelt, World and Surrounding World. Between the coal and the person it warms is a heated room, a room suffused with heat. One could begin to unfold the brief narrative of hot coal and warmed thinker with the coal. Ignited, it burns; burning, it emits heat throughout the room; with the spread of the heat, the thinker comes to feel

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warm. Herewith, an objective, cause-effect sequence, starting with the first cause and ending with its most remote effect. Alternatively, one might begin at the end of the causal sequence. I feel warm; I relate my warmth to the heat of the room; the heat is perceived to radiate from the coal in the stove. With the latter, a subjective sequence unfolds, starting with what one feels and regressing back to the perceived cause of that feeling. From object to subject or from subject to object, the internal logic of the phenomenon, differently regarded, prevails. The brief schematization given here, however, oversimplifies. It misses the nuance and subtlety of the Husserlian account. I would suggest that one might usefully begin with the heated room. It is after all the site of the phenomenon in question and the setting of the scenario, but more importantly, in the context of Ideas II, it is an Umwelt, a surrounding world or environment, and that is the explicit object of investigation in Section 50. The environment of the room lies between the coal and its warm occupant. It is “the between” that merits the most careful attention because this “between,” the surrounding world, the world that surrounds the ego is not just an adventitious concomitant of the ego. The ego is inseparably related to the surrounding world. The ego is as the subject of the surrounding world.3 With this understanding of surrounding world, what may one say of the room, the environing world in question? Obviously, this environment is heated. As a surrounding world, its being heated is known in and through the experience of warmth, my warmth. The surrounding world is not a world in itself but rather a world as given for me in experience.4 The analysis might end in the subjective experience of warmth, but warmth is not defined by some kind of subjective interiority. My warmth is a function of my position in the room.5 It rises or falls in relation to my proximity to the coal, which I identify as the source of heat in the room, the heat that I experience as warmth. In moving toward and away from the hot coal, several distinctions and relationships come into play. Heat and warmth are correlative but not identical. If my experience of warmth were radically subjective and interior, it would not vary with my position in the room. There is more. The heat (experienced as warmth) appears to emanate from the coal6 and experience, aided by memory, confirms that the heat is an attribute of the burning coal7 so that now the heat that manifests as warmth to a subject comes to be understood as a property of an object. Husserl is quite clear here: the heat in the room is an objective property of the coal and it issues from the coal: both that objective property (heat) and its propagation through the room are experienced phenomenon8 Thus, heat is both an objective property of the coal and an experienced [subjectivie] phenomenon of which, when burning, coal is a cause. The causal connection between firing the coal and releasing its heat is also experienced and founds [establishes] the objective determination “combustible” which, in the end and

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without reflection, gives itself immediately to experience as a property of the coal.9 Combustibility, moreover, is a link in the chain from coal through combustibility to utility/comfort.10 Value, like other determinations, is an attribute of the object (coal) but has its experiential basis in the subject’s value perception—“I apprehend it [the coal] from this point of view [i.e., that of value or utility]: I ‘can use it for that,’ it is useful to me for that.”11 Well outside the immediate environment of the room, the value of the coal (as a utility to chilled thinkers seeking warmth) acquires commodity value in trade and commerce.12 Thus, the founded use-value of the coal serves to found the exchange-value it will have in the market for combustibles. Within the short space of his “coal-fired phenomenology,” Husserl elides from founding to founded experiences and objects, and he rises from the base experience of warmth and comfort to the threshold of the greater social-world horizon of the market. Back and forth, up and down, following the intentional references implicit in phenomena to trace the genesis of structures like cause and utility—with the worlds of science and commerce in the offing— Husserl’s reflection moves. All the while and thereby, he roots the most distant and complex and expansive worlds in the nearest world, the immediately surrounding world that defines the self. Let me recount the results of this reflection as it bears on what is to come. The room-environment is warm and inviting and comfortable. Its occupants might well enjoy their time in the room without a thought that goes beyond the comfort which the heat affords. From time to time, however, they will get up from their seats in the room to move closer and farther away from the hot coals in the stove13 As soon as they do, the play of founded and founding experiences begins. Occupants are reminded that their warmth is a function of the heat in the room which in turn is function of the coal burning in the stove. The heat in the room which they had unthinkingly enjoyed as warmth, without further ado, is now understood as an effect of burning coal. For its part, the coal is then imbued with efficacy and utility. Moreover, because the coal—as combustible and useful—is present in my immediate environment and is experienced in its combustibility and utility, occupants are left to infer that their immediate condition as warm and comfortable is not self-contained and hermetic. They see the cause of their happy state burning in a stove in a corner of the room. It is perceived as a necessary condition of their animal comfort. It may even occur to them that if the fire goes out and the coal is used up or if they go so far from the burning coal as to leave the room, they will likely or possibly be left cold. The self-evidence of their predicament is entailed by the self-evident causality and utility of the coal. That the coal makes them warm is perceived as a property of the coal. That the coal is instrumental to their comfort is perceived within the ambit of the world around them, in the room.

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The environment that Husserl describes is largely a built environment, yet it is one in which the natural world and its causal laws is “represented” by the coal and the effects of its burning. The coal, by virtue of its objective properties (combustibility) will produce heat in the room, an effect. Herewith, we see a cause-effect relationship. All these physical properties—the combustibility of the coal, the heat of the room, and the cause-effect nexus itself—are all experienced. That all of these objective conditions of everyday life are actually experienced in this first scenario will be important in second scenario when these “material conditions of every day life” varnish from the scene (e.g., combustion of coal or fossil fuel). Likewise, the exchange value of coal derives from it its utility which originates in the pleasurable warm it gives within the home, but the machinations of economics re utility and exchange do not themselves play out within the comfort of the scenario. In the second scenario, we shall see the peril that arises when residents consume energy with in microenvironments disengaged from the greater natural environment outside. VARIATION 2: CLIMATE-CONTROLLED COMFORT The environment I will now imagine will at once seem familiar and descriptive of the world that a great many in the developed world inhabit, and it will be found to be quite opposite to the one described by Husserl. Let us now vary the scenario. The room is again a study and is again toasty warm and comfortable. But no coal burns in a stove in a corner of the room. The room is evenly heated. The diffusion of heat throughout the room is, for the most part, constant. It does not readily appear to emanate from one spot or several discrete openings or points of origin. For all intents and purposes, my warmth and the heat of the room are indistinguishable. There is no perceptible causal source of warmth and comfort; for their part, warmth and comfort are not perceived as the effect of anything (e.g., combustion of some material). They simply are experienced phenomena without a history or an anchor in anything outside themselves. Obviously, my warmth does depend on the heat in the room and the heat comes from a source (outside the room) and through conduits (all around the room). The point, however, is that neither the ultimate source of the heat, nor its propagation through the room is a distinct, easily perceived phenomenon. My situation in the room—my being-in-the-room—is holistically experienced but not objectified. It is not experienced as a discrete phenomenon or object which might itself stand in relations of causality and utility to other phenomena or objects. So long as I experientially remain within the immediacy of my situation in the room—a room which does not itself contain the material conditions of my comfortable

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existence as perceived phenomena—I am oblivious to the empirical or experiential underpinnings of my well-being. This scenario is not a figment of pure fantasy. It is approximately descriptive of living conditions in dwellings throughout the developed world. Whole-house heating-and-air-conditioning names the domestic infrastructure which underlies the scenario. My point in turning phenomenological reflection upon the experience of warmth in the immediate environment created by whole-house systems is not to evoke nostalgia for less sophisticated systems or to make a pitch for “worry-free” life with central heating. Rather, the intent is to examine how the material conditions of domestic living and well-being shape our perception of energy, the larger natural environment, and, with recursive irony, our relationship to the material conditions of our existence themselves. A comparison of the two scenarios will disclose implications for broader energy and environment issues. The occupant of Husserl’s study is recurrently, if not constantly, educated in energy-dependency. She is reminded with sensory-motor evidence that her animal well-being is bound up with the consumption of energy sources. Regulating heating conditions in Husserl’s study requires deliberate firsthand intervention by the occupant. By way of contrast, the homeostatic regulation of room climate minimizes the occupant’s involvement with ensuring her well-being. In the second scenario, one may, without contradiction from any lived experience in one’s lifeworld, ignore one’s link and dependency on the natural world. In the coal-heated room, however, one is experientially reminded of the natural and material underpinnings of our lifeworld. It is possible but arguably more difficult to ignore that life in a comfortable but coal-heated room is tied to nature and the earth. The coal is a product of the earth, a veritable piece of the earth. Its burning is a natural cause-effect process evident to us in our occupation of the room. To be sure, the lifeworld “education” in energy and environment described here may not lead to green convictions. Coal-burning makes heat which affords warmth and gives comfort. Such a chain of reasoning and concatenation of causes and effects—experientially evident—could invest coal with a positive value that predisposes social-policy judgment in its favor, notwithstanding the environmental harms from mining, digging, and burning coal. On the other hand, the first-hand use of coal also makes evident its downsides—smoke, soot, odor, grime, and not-so-remote damage to property and health. The occupant of a room with central heating, a controlled environment, is isolated—as a matter of lifeworld knowledge—not only from a vivid awareness of dependency on energy but also any first-hand experience of the harms of her energy consumption.

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Firsthand experience or lifeworld awareness of nature does not necessarily translate into a green agenda or knowledge useful to environmental protection. Arguments have been made with Husserlian phenomenology enlisted in support, that long-term environmental change and the operation of causes with delayed effects escapes the temporal horizon of immediate experience arising in the surrounding world. Global climate change, Jarrod Diamond points out, eludes close-to-the-earth local knowledge. The suggestion made here is that firsthand, surrounding-world experience of the kind that Husserl’s original scenario describes in experiential terms and on a microcosmic level mediates our relationship to nature at a macrocosmic level. It bears notice that Husserl’s room is not a natural environment but it parallels a surrounding environment in which the burning of coal is experienced through a relatively primitive technological process. It is not likely the developed world will revert to an earlier lifestyle. Husserl’s coal-fired phenomenology points to a nexus of relationships that gets forgotten in a postindustrial world which makes the material conditions of everyday existence (e.g., the lived awareness of the burning of coal and other fossil fuels) remote from that experience. The two scenarios present two very different surrounding worlds, but both describe a relation—or perhaps in the case of the second a non-relation—to the greater world outside and beyond the room. In going from the first to the second scenario, global climate awareness emerges as an issue. In the climate-controlled environment the microclimate is never an issue or concern so long as the autoregulation of room temperature and humidity functions without a hitch. The technologically mediated surrounding world not only works to alienate occupants from the climate outside the room but also suggests that climate is a human artifact, manageable and conformable to our “settings.” To be sure, I am not imprisoned for life in artifactual climate-controlled environments. I venture forth to experience the vagaries of weather outside. Yet, for the time that I am inside, in climate-controlled environments, I am “taught” that climate is not an issue and is controllable. The language of conditions teaching us something alluded to here is not at all remote from Husserlian notions. He might speak of expectations as meaning intentions being continuously fulfilled so as to fuse in a judgment that says “thus it is.” Stated conversely, so long as my expectations of continuous warmth (or cooling comfort) are not disappointed I take it for granted that the microclimate of the room—and by extension the macro-climate of the world as such—is adjustable to my liking. There is an element of falsification to the experience of climate generally that derives from the experience of the artificial microclimate of the climatecontrolled room. To the degree that climate manifests itself in lived experience, it is lived in the experience of weather as encompassing. Often it goes unnoticed but then it can unexpectedly become intrusive, problematic, and

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variable. Weather is not a controllable object within my surrounding world but the pervasive element within which I live and move and feel. I can only accommodate to the vagaries of weather. Because it lays siege on me and my fellow humans—attacks from all sides and does not present an object that I can grasp and dominate—it has something of the quality of destiny or fate. I have, in the preceding used “weather” and “climate” interchangeably. One may object that weather is not climate. And, the point is well taken. The experiential or phenomenological manifestations of weather, nonetheless, do apply to climate. However remote and abstract the concept of climate and climate change is, that concept has its experiential basis in our sufferings of and dealings with weather. Like weather, climate is encompassing, even more so. The future climate conditions that only scientific investigation and causal method can predict are conditions that will be experienced as weather. With appropriate adjustments in temporal and spatial scale, weather experience fills in with sensible content the “big picture” effects of climate change. So when the climate-controlled microenvironment alienates us from weather conditions, it diminishes our awareness of climate. The microclimate can falsify our experience of climate because it presents itself ambiguously. Inside the room, the controlled climate is the element within which I move. It has the property of climate or weather—when weather/climate “is well-behaved”—as the encompassing and unnoticed. If some small variation in room conditions arises to call some attention to it, then through the mediation of thermostatic regulation, I can adjust it (room climate) to me and my specifications. Thus, the microclimate manifests both as the encompassing element within which I move and act and feel and the “encompassed” and controlled object of my actions. As “the element” it is largely unnoticed and unobtrusive, unproblematic. Its manipulation via the thermostat cancels that feature of the encompassing weather or climate which presents itself as beyond immediate control. The climate-controlled habitat then supports and reinforces a habitus (prevailing way of experiencing) of desensitization to climate and climate change and a sense that climate is easily within the control of technology. Revisiting Husserl’s room might help to make points about climate awareness. In the Husserl scenario or the microenvironment he describes, the roomclimate is an encompassing element but one that is by no means uniform in our experience. Adjusting it to our needs is an elusive goal and strategies for dealing with the vagaries and variations of the microclimate include moving about and adjusting my behavior and location to conditions in the room rather than trusting to a preexisting technology to ensure that every position in the room is equally suitable for my comfort while dwelling there. The point is not to install coal stoves and fireplaces in our homes. The point of the scenario is to raise awareness as to how lived proximity to the material conditions of

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our everyday being-in-the-world informs us of dangers to the earth as a whole and, conversely living in a technologically created comfort zone can estrange us from conditions outside the “bubble.” The speculations ventured here are not predictions of what might happen regarding energy availability or climate change. The speculations are phenomenologically inspired and guided. This is to say that they deal with awareness and the lack of awareness of what lies in our surrounding world and the greater world beyond. Awareness, of course, can lead to needed action and lack of awareness to unhappy surprises. The reflections ventured here suggest that the built-configuration of the immediate lifeworld can bode ill for an awareness of emergent problems, reinforcing habits of mind that foster an unawareness of problems or a false sense of control over the material conditions of our existence. A reflection which exposes the structures of lived-experience that foster indifference and false security is—need one say it?—the first step to addressing issues that are “there” but “below the radar.” Perhaps in the style of the analysis undertaken here, one can see a role for phenomenology in environmental consciousness-raising. Or perhaps, the likely outcome is more modest: an explanation of how we come by our unawareness and indifference. HUSSERL’S NATURE AND DWELLING ON THE EARTH Before closing this chapter, let us take the opportunity presented by this analysis to address a recurring question at the heart of the interrogation that motivates the book, namely, how is nature to be understood, in this case, by Husserl? Put more specifically, how is nature to be understood in relation to human dwelling as being-in-the-world with others and on the earth? From many of the same Husserlian sources used to support analyses in this chapter, one can identify and define how Husserl sees nature itself. Very clearly, Husserl understands that nature must be understood in terms of the causal nexus, the relationship of physical cause and effect. Again and again, in Ideas II, the phrase “causal nexus,” occurs and Husserl emphasizes that it does not somehow lie outside the pale of phenomenological interest. One might think that it does in view, for example, of what Husserl says about naturalism in Ideas I or what he writes much later in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcental Phenomenolgy. In the first work, Husserl may appear to regard the natural attitude, i.e., standpoint of the material sciences, as an impediment to acquiring a starting point for doing phenomenology, inasmuch he speaks of bracketing the “thesis of natural attitude,” the taken-for-granted premise of the sciences.14 In the Crisis, Husserl’s critique seems to disparage the natural sciences for having lost their foundation in the

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lifeworld, the domain of everyday lived experience.15 In either case, it appears that Husserl has little to say about the natural world as understood by the sciences, i.e., in virtue of the causal nexus. In both cases, however, the impressions is mistaken and a careful reading of the two sources would show that. For the purposes of this book, it would be fruitful to identify what Husserl says of nature in Ideas II. There one may discern these three concepts of nature, all of them meriting our positive regard: 1.  the nature of the natural sciences;16 2.  nature in an everyday, lifeworld perspective;17; and, 3.  an “ensouled nature”18 (organic, living nature, biotic vs. abiotic). This is a meaning of nature we will be unable to cover, as such, in this book. To this point in the book, nature and earth have been understood as having a primacy and independence that merits human attentiveness to them. From the mindful regard of the poet Sandburg in chapter 1 to the “the dialogic relation” of humans to nature in the case studies of the previous chapter, chapter 6, nature and earth have been understood as other than a human artefact. In positive terms, nature has shown itself in the Greek sense articulated ontologically by Aristotle as that which has the source of its being within itself. Re Concept 1 above. Husserlian phenomenology now adds to that Aristotelian notion the sense of natural being, seeing it reflected in a causal nexus undergirding the universal laws of natural science. The nature of natural science enjoys ontological independence, notwithstanding the fact that it is constituted or brought to light by theoretical reason. This is already implicit in the notion of a causality immanent in the natural order itself: natural things within nature have a being in relation to each other, i.e., quite apart from what we might want them to be or purposes to which we might want to put them. Arguably, environmentalism does well to affirm such an objective and independent nature. From the standpoint of an environmentalism that seeks to foster a sustainable human being-on-the earth and the well-being of the earth itself, the nature of the natural sciences encourages a mindful and cautious approach by humans. It sets limits to excessive demands on nature and expectations as to what technology can and cannot do. Re Concept 2. Husserl uses the term “earth-basis” to describe the way the earth shows itself in lived experience.19 As embodied beings we come to be in the world via our bodies. As embodied beings we look out at the world and operate upon and within the world from a center that our bodily location determines. I am always at the center of my world. What the earth-basis adds to this well-known idea of centrality is a second center or ec-centric grounding (author’s term) in/upon the earth. In his discussion of the earth-basis, Husserl describes the earth as a kind of material a priori, perhaps even a

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second body. As experienced, the earth, itself is neither moving or at rest; rather, it becomes that in virtue of which any movement or rest becomes knowable as such. It also serves to ground the being together of humans, including human communities which commonly occupy a territory or piece of the earth. Ultimately, the earth-basis grounds all of humanity, for whom the earth is home. Husserl insists that the earth is not a dispensable object to which we just happen to find ourselves linked. On the contrary, no being in the world is conceivable apart from an original grounding in/upon the earth. “Earth-basis” operates as a way of saying “home” to us humans, deepening our identity as placial beings—shall we say earthlings?—dwelling upon the earth as our first, founding and lasting home. This completes our micro-phenomenology of built space and the impact of its configuration on our everyday lived awareness of larger environmental conditions outside our homes—as well as contributions to Husserlian phenomenology to environmental science and thinking. Before we move to the whole-earth issues that occupy the last three chapters of the book, our attention will turn, in chapters 8 and 9, to the other issues of place and displacement, specifically addressing xenophobia and the challenges to everyday life on Main Street posed by Wall Street. NOTES 1. Husserl, Edmund, trans. By R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 194–99. [Commonly referred to as Ideas II.] 2. Husserl, Ideas, Second, page 197, line 30. 3. Husserl, Ideas, Second, page 195, lines 6–11. 4. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 196, 3–9. 5. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 26–27. 6. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 22–24. 7. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 20–22. 8. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 22–24. 9. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 29–31. 10. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 25–35. 11. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 35–36. 12. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 197, 35–198, 2. 13. Husserl, Ideas, Second, 26–27. 14. Husserl, Edmund, trans. F. Kersten, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology an to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983) 24–32. [Commonly referred to as Ideas I.]

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15. Husserl, Edmund, trans. David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970) Sec 9(h). 16. Husserl, Ideas, Second. Sec 15(c) 45; Sec 18(b) 67; Sec 18(g) 89. 17. Husserl, Ideas, Second. Sec 49(e), 191–93. 18. Husserl, Ideas, Second, Sec 19–21. 19. Husserl, Edmund, trans. Fred Kersten, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origins of the Spatiality of Nature,” Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), see esp. 227, 230.

Chapter 8

Whose Land Is It Anyway? Xenophobe and Alien Foe

Chapter 4 endeavored to give a phenomenological account of how a space becomes a “place of one’s own.” The seeds of contestation may appear to be sown already in the action by which a place of one’s own arises as such when it is withdrawn from the earth at large and borders come to define and distinguish “the mine” from “the thine.” To speak of contestation over what is mine and thine or ours and yours is not to abandon the analysis carried out in chapter 4 as to the meaning and import of a “sphere of ownness.” The intent of this chapter is not to revisit the foundational questions treated earlier regarding property but rather to take up and address a phenomenon related to migration, i.e., when individuals or peoples depart from countries where they have lived and then come to settle in a new and, for them, foreign country. The phenomenon of encounter broadly intended here has many dimensions—some of them considered in the discussion of the strange and familiar in chapter 5. There, place and culture were related in the inquiries of the Greek historian and “ethnogeographer” Herodotus to explain, if not resolve, differences that could lead to conflict. Readers will recall that cultures were said to be earthbound and that affected being-together-with-others in a culture or between cultures. In this chapter, the encounter of foreigners (migrants) with the people of a receiving country, in particular the xenophobia of people in that receiving country, is the subject of our inquiry. Xenophobia is not a necessary and universal reaction to foreigners coming to dwell in one’s homeland. The historical and social conditions that account for rise and prevalence of xenophobia is a task for various social sciences. The task here is to examine xenophobia itself as a placial encounter, i.e., one related to the experience of place. Is there something about the way in which self and other take their place within the world that gives rise to the fear and hostility of xenophobia? Chapter 8 endeavors to address the experience of xenophobia and hostility to immigration as deriving from more than a cost-benefit analysis of what 139

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migrants contribute and what they draw from a country’s tax revenues or its Gross Domestic Product. The analysis used here, Sartre’s Self-Other phenomenology—far too narrow and negative to serve Sartre’s own broad ontological ambition in this author’s view—is nonetheless “spot on ” to unpack the mind of the xenophobe. The reflection undertaken here finds the Other [read “foreigner”] the object of a phobia literally grounded on the ground the xenophobe takes to be exclusively its own. In the case of the xenophobe, the Other’s very entry into and crossing over of one’s “self-space” is viewed as trespass. This author continues in a phenomenological vein (his own) to articulate a conundrum whereby foreign speakers reinforce xenophobia by speaking their own, foreign, language. Looking for a “way out” of this and other problems, the author looks to Husserlian phenomenology from the Cartesian Meditations which, provides, the author suggests, if not an antidote to xenophobia, then an expansive intersubjective framework for Self-Other coexistence and an alternative to the anomie of the Self and exclusion of the Other that go with xenophobia. HOME AND HOMELAND There is no spatial environment more “taken for granted” and familiar than home. Arguably, it defines part of the very spatiality of inconspicuous everydayness. This chapter explores the impact of migration on being-at-home with a focus on a perceived displacement experienced by many in the receiving country. Migration, the reflection undertaken here suggests, creates two “dis-placed” populations. On arrival in the receiving country, immigrants find themselves out of their element and removed from the sending country, the place which likely afforded them a sense of home before arrival. Migrant dislocation seems obvious and has been the subject of much study. The less apparent displacement is that perceived in the receiving population. The latter is the subject of this phenomenological sketch—phenomenological, because it ventures a first-person, up-close, man-in-the-street view of immigration. How do people in their neighborhoods experience a growing “alien” presence in their lifeworld? Arguably, much of the resistance to large-scale immigration in a receiving country is affective, if not visceral, and subtends the attention to any adverse impacts on the economy or social infrastructure attributed to immigration. The phenomenon explored here is the feeling of many in a receiving country that their space is being violated, that migration is something like an invasion, that aliens are “moving in, pushing me out, and taking over.” Note, the chapter endeavors to understand and describe a form of alienation and is not an apology for xenophobia. Quite to the contrary, if

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anything, exhibiting the structures which underlie the phenomenon of xenophobia may point to ways of addressing it on its own terms. The premise of this reflection is that phenomenology is well suited to elucidating the nature of xenophobia. Phenomenology reflects on lived experience, the first-person experience of embodied and situated selves who find themselves already always in-the-world-with-others. The phenomenological concept of lifeworld points to the importance of my everyday surrounding world to my self-sense. My world is not just a geographic location where I happen to find myself. It is as much a part of me—of who I am—as my body, my thoughts, my feelings. My body “bodies forth” into this special place. My thoughts englobe it. My feelings and moods open it up and cover it over. These “unsubstantiated” assertions lay out the terms of reference for the reflection undertaken here, a reflection on the space I call home—a home outside my house, the greater home I call a homeland. Here is where I live out my life, a space I call my own but share with others—from those most intimate to others most alien. Nothing in this abbreviated description of being-in-the-world-with-others points to xenophobia. The description hearkens back in fact to the Heideggerian description and distinction of “worlds” predating his early magnum opus, Being and Time, where he describes and distinguishes: the “shared-world” (can we say “homeland”?) beyond my “self-world (home?) that functions within the horizon of the world-at-large.1 In both the self-world and shared-world, the concern which defines being-in-the-world as such is operative. In both worlds, I am vested in concerns which define my selfworld and the shared-world in which I participate. This is arguably a good thing as the alternative is an anomie and alienation which undercuts the selfdirection and connection with others we value as human beings. Having said all this, how do we get to xenophobia? Is it an exclusionary and hypertrophic sense of ownership that sees the very bodily presence of others, foreigners, as a hostile takeover of ground, a zero-sum game in which the other’s gain is my loss? (The language of gain and loss here is meant to go beyond any utilitarian calculus and, as a place-based phenomenon, xenophobia has more to do with the kind of territoriality that ethology describes in animal habitation and behavior. See chapter 6). We might well continue to explore how, within a given community, the foreigner can take up a place within the greater place that defines communal bounds evoking neither fear nor hostility from the “native.” Husserl, for example, eschews the kind of language that Sartre uses for the Other. Husserl’s Other, although never the object of immanent knowledge—never as well known to me as myself—is intelligible as another self by way of pairing, apperception, and analogizing. Like behaviors, for example, are paired with mine and I implicitly (apperceptively) analogize a subjective experience on

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the part of the Other correlative to that I give for a behavior or bodily attitude or expression of my own.2 Husserl’s phenomenology of the Other, however, does not take into account cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial differences and works within a rather bare schematic of interpretation. If Husserl’s Other does not excite fear or appear to pose a threat, it may owe to the fact that Husserl does not address self-other understanding across the divides mentioned above. The analogizing which performs successfully to posit another self may fall short of understanding the other self in its singular and racially specific concreteness. Into the void of such a concrete understanding, the imagination feels free to project its fears. A PIVOT TO SARTRE The analysis initiated in the preceding paragraphs could be carried forward to see how the very presence of the other on the scene might develop into an experience of xenophobia but—unintentionally, no doubt—Sartre “hit upon” a description of xenophobia with stunning fidelity to the express attitudes of xenophobes. Referring to the Other, any Other, in its relation to any Self, Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, describes the experience of the Other as he appears within range of the Self’s vision. The Other is a man in the park, not far from me. He does not address me and I do not address him. How, Sartre asks, does he appear as both an object and as a man? As an object, Sartre says, the man fits in with other objects, which objects, in turn, have their relation to me as a center from which they have their significance. The man, as an object, and other things in my surrounding world are, Sartre writes, “grouped and synthesized from my point of view into instrumental complexes.”3 Regarded as a human being, as another self or as an Other, the man’s relationship to other objects in my surrounding world and his relationship to me changes profoundly. Now that man becomes a center around which things organize themselves—just as they organize themselves around me. Things—in my surrounding world—no longer organize themselves around me but around him in a spatiality which is “not my spatiality.” Sartre continues, “instead of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me.” [Emphasis in this and the following quotes is this author’s.] The Other, without actually intending to do harm to me or without necessarily taking any note of me, effects what amounts to a constitutional change in the organization of my world. The transfiguration of my life-space comes about by way of the Other’s “innocent” [this author’s word] being about his own business, living out his relationship to things in proximity to him. The “kicker” is this: “There is a total space which is grouped around the Other and this space is made with my space.”4 It is not stretching things to

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read between the lines the sense that the Other has invaded my space. Sartre refers to a “disintegration of the universe” effectuated by the Other’s appearance on “my turf.” The Other has appeared “suddenly and has stolen the world from me.” Sartre does not shy from making his point strongly: “The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting.”5 Time to take note that although Sartre’s analysis laid out above is meant as a general phenomenology of Self-Other relations, it captures much better the phenomenon of xenophobia. Sartre goes on to elaborate the Other by way of an analysis of the stare, the Other’s visual address to me given in his Look, a Look which at once would fix me as an object for him and attest to his being a subject. Arguably, the Sartrean stare-phenomenology has eclipsed what Sartre offers by way of a spatial analysis of two subjects indifferently reorganizing each other’s worlds. It is this lifeworld-spatial phenomenology, however, which serves to unfold the xenophobia which forms the theme of this reflection. The Sartrean analysis seems all too perfectly suited to describe a paranoiac/ xenophobic reaction to a growing immigrant population. A critical pause and interlude is called for. Sartre has gone beyond an analytic and dispassionate treatment of the phenomenon of the Other with a sense of threat and ontological demise and disintegration that is not a necessary consequence of self-other copresence in the world. With Husserl, by comparison with Sartre, the Other, after a fashion, also falls within the scope of one’s experience. While the Other remains something of an enigma for Husserl, it does not constitute a threat to one’s self-sense and self-being. Indeed, Husserl’s take on objects within one’s surrounding world attests to the Self and Other being part of a greater world, a common objective world on to which the world of the Self and the world of the Other open, so that one could say that rather than disintegrating my world, the Other works (without realizing it) to integrate it within a greater world, the Other enlarges my world experience. So then, how does an immigrant manage to find herself the target of the language which Sartre uses for the Other as such? The text suggests that the immigrant fits the description because, like Sartre’s Other, the immigrant hovers on the margins of a “native’s” self-world and does not participate in a common project or generalized lifestyle which would redirect self and other from each other to a common overarching purpose or project or absorb both in the modality and flow of a shared lifestyle. (Husserl prepares the groundwork a shared life and world with common projects inasmuch as he envisions a community of “monads”/selves, each of which is “an absolutely separate unity,” but nonetheless has a “unique connectedness” with others by way of an “intentional communion with something else that exists.”6 The Other that Sartre describes moves through the park and the self’s surrounding world

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absorbed in his own concerns. Visible but silent, the Other’s actual perception of the world is inaccessible to me although inspection of his actions tells me that his presence inserts a competing world into the lived space I take for my own. Visibility of the immigrant ensures that the immigrant stands out and is noticed. Silence ensures that his specific purposes and perceptions exceed my grasp and what remains hidden nourishes misperceptions and fears. RACE AND PLACE Not only does the immigrant often not blend or fall into the common projects and rhythms which go to make up a shared world but she stands out visibly and perceptually among others in one’s surrounding world by virtue of her race. Per our description of xenophobia, the immigrant stands out as conspicuous and unfamiliar in the purview of the native. As such, she upsets the inconspicuous and familiar “look and feel” that go with everyday being-in-the-world. What philosopher Martin Heidegger says about the inconspicuous and fear has relevance here. In Being and Time, Heidegger has described being-in-the-world as marked by two qualities, familiarity and inconspicuousness.7 My everyday world is, as such, taken for granted. If familiarity and inconspicuousness are constitutive characteristics of my world and the things in it, then whatever intervenes to make my world strange and things in that world conspicuous undermines the mineness of that world and my being its center. A foreigner or immigrant of a race other than that of most natives is conspicuous in a visible and bodily way by virtue of such characteristics as skin color, facial features, hair type, etc. Let us be clear. Heidegger does not address xenophobia. The latter is a fear, however, and one that arguably begins to move toward a Heideggerian anxiety (Angst) that seemingly comes “out of nowhere” and causes one to feel that the world and one’s life as whole is slipping away from one. Heideggerian Angst and xenophobia as described here, are placial phenomena with a globalizing/holistic impact. Heideggerian anxiety (Angst) represents an extreme case of the world slipping away from one. In both, one’s world, once inconspicuous and familiar, is rendered strange, conspicuously different, and unsettling. To be sure, there is this difference. In Heideggerian Angst, it’s the prospect of death which engenders the displacement and estrangement one experiences. In xenophobia, it works differently. The immigrant’s “invasion” of native space and its subsequent loss of familiarity and inconspicuousness to natives engenders the feeling of xenophobia. Heideggerian Angst “causes” displacement and a sense of estrangement. In xenophobia, a perceived displacement of natives by strangers engenders/causes a fear by natives that their world is threatened.

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Back to the question of race. The coupling of xenophobia with race can be so compelling that racism by itself could be taken as virtually equivalent to xenophobia. The fact that xenophobia can be correlated with religion, class, and culture, apart from racial difference, bears mentioning. More pertinent from the standpoint of a placial phenomenology of xenophobia is the critical role that being present bodily in a time and place plays in understanding xenophobia—if not in all cases, then essentially in many. With respect to immigrants, xenophobia is triggered by perceived “invasions,” of the natives’ place. Segregation and apartheid are ways in which xenophobes put distance between themselves and the feared or detested others. Place may not be the whole story, but, in such cases, it cannot be left out of account. EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION: “YOUR LAND, MY LAND, OUR LAND” Bracketing race for the moment, what other factors bear on estrangement and, conversely inclusion in placial phenomena like xenophobia? Embedded in Sartre’s account is an Other whose activity and relation to things in my surrounding world follows its own course. The Other establishes her own instrumental relationship to things. Things come to have their rival center and convergence in her project. Things are, as it were, torn by allegiance to her and to me. Now imagine that the Other is perceived as conforming to a larger, shared project, a generalized common project that is so generalized as to constitute a style more than a strategic undertaking, one to which I and most others in my surrounding world opt into and out of seamlessly and inconspicuously. In such a case, a clash of two self-worlds would not afford a faithful phenomenological paradigm of such coexistence. One would have to speak of a shared world in which objects organized themselves not so much around an individual personal center but rather in virtue of a shared, less specific telos. In such a shared world, the Other would blend in, not threaten the self-world of its Other because both self and other would be participants in a shared world. The upshot of this imaginative variation is that the Other described by Sartre need not prescribe all self-other relations. To this point, the Other or migrant has appeared visibly and silent on the margins of the native’s surrounding world. Visibility, following Sartre, delivers the Other as an intrusive presence into my self-world. Silence, for its part, invites analogizing which affords evidence of the Other as an Other Self but may stop far short of the mark in understanding that Other Self in its individual and socio-cultural concreteness. All too easily the unknown can become the threatening.

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It is time to turn to language. Language would presumably assert and underscore the selfhood of the Other and resist a tendency to its objectification (that Sartre alludes to as a possibility). Moreover, language, as Habermas and others have shown, works, as communication, to create a common world among interlocutors and therewith to create a social bond among them as well.8 Language, then, seems to offer a way around the divisive effect of the Other’s emergence into my self-space described so forcibly by Sartre. What happens when the language of the Other is a foreign language, not my own language, not a language I understand or speak? Heidegger has the phenomenology right on this point. When I hear a foreign language, I do not hear sounds without meanings; rather, I hear sounds with meanings I do not understand.9 Let me extend the phenomenology a step or two beyond this highly significant and pregnant observation. The experiential result for one who overhears a foreign language, not understood, can be profound frustration. Any spoken discourse addresses its intended addressees or interlocutors with explicit intent but obliquely goes out to call attention to itself to anyone within earshot. Having gotten the attention of listeners, speech redirects attention to the subject of discourse. Not only is the possibility of eavesdropping a function of this phenomenon but the work of any spoken language at the outset of a discourse is to call attention to itself so that it may relay that attention to the matter spoken of. The “addressive two-step” identified here has to be understood as a general structure of speech. For its part, foreign speech, like any other, calls attention to itself but then fails to deliver its proto-audience (nonspeakers of the language within earshot) over to its subject and what is said about its subject. The effect is frustration in the most elemental sense of the term; I do not achieve what the spoken addressive gesture promises: delivery over to the matter under discussion. At the same time my attention is fixed on the speech, where the frustration is “looped” so long as the audible gesturing to “I do not know what” compels my attention. There is more. When I overhear a conversation among those whose language I do not understand, I may observe the solidarity among interlocutors that develops as the conversation progresses. This social-bonding effected in communication is, I would suggest, among those generic or formal structures which the pairingapperceptive-analogizing operation (per Husserl) gives me access to, allows me to perceive. To see this bonding at work, however, is not to be admitted to the micro-society it gives rise to. I am left outside the circle of communication. The shared-world that opens up among the interlocutors is not one to which I am admitted. Thus, within my personal audible space another space, a shared socia space emerges, one to which “access denied” applies to me. A rough parallel to the situation Sartre describes arises. Within my surrounding world, Others speaking with each other in a foreign tongue constitute a new, alternative, and competing space and vortex of meaning. I am displaced

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from the center of my surrounding world because now, evidently and audibly, another kind of meaning space is welling up and while I can know that much, I cannot discern the content of that new constellation of meaning. I am able to attain to the general sense of what is happening as a human-meaning event but an “inside-out understanding” of the matter discussed and participation in the communicative event is foreclosed to me. Much as in the case of silence, I am left to speculate about what is spoken of and what is said about it. Fear may easily insinuate itself when understanding is wanting, and innocent conversation among fellow speakers of a foreign language can seem an exclusive communication, a rebuff to outsiders, even a “trafficking in secrets” among coconspirators. The more extreme possibilities are not inevitable outcomes of the basic speech event described here. It is important to understand, however, how the more phobic reactions find support in the simple elements of the dynamic. Language has not ameliorated but arguably exacerbated the effect of an Other passing through my visual space. Now Others-Like-EachOther have colonized, for a time, a portion of what I had regarded (taken for granted) as familiar self-space. Paradoxes—not just academic or speculative—abound. One of these paradoxes has just been sketched: language, the great social-bonder, operates to divide; the medium of understanding invites misunderstanding; the vehicle of communication becomes a barrier to communication. Going back a step in this reflection, the displacement of migration which encourages migrants who speak a common language to join in conversation with each other creates a condition with a displacement effect for the native. Phenomenologically, one looks to one’s surrounding world as a sphere of ownness so that there I have a concrete, if fuzzy-at-the-edges, sense of belonging. I belong in this “near-world” and it, in a way that is as deeply rooted as it is indefinite, belongs to me. My self-sense elides into a being-with-others in language so that venturing into a social space means joining a conversation. To be sure, participating in a common project may serve to unite my work with that of others but then perhaps only as parts of an overarching social mechanism or division of labor; I may just a well experience alienation as solidarity. Arguably, communicative action, as Habermas would call it, trumps strategic endeavor and instrumental reason. Nonetheless, as shown above, language may divide even as it unites. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? The reflections undertaken here do not translate immediately into policy options. In this regard, this chapter begs the policy issues which situate and motivate it. This essay stops short of addressing “What is to be done?” Its

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intended value lies elsewhere. Arguably, it serves to enlarge the problematic of self and other as it bears on the global phenomenon of transnational migration. By way of applied phenomenology, it calls attention to the lived experience of my near-world, shared-world, and the social-experiential dimension of language. Within its approach, it raises issues that are arguably as important as they are relatively unthought and unaddressed in the public debates and neighborly discussions of migration. Utilitarian trade-offs that might presumably lead to “the greatest good for the greatest number”—however useful they might be in any overall approach to resolving migration issues—fall short of the task, if the preceding analysis has merit and is taken in its meaning and import. Deeply rooted considerations of self and collective identity and, therewith, connections to the places where we humans dwell, interact, and make our lives together, present the most difficult issues. This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of xenophobia, but it is not a paradigm of Self-Other relations across the board. That point is made repeatedly in this chapter. And, therein lies the promise of finding the conditions for amicable being-in-the-world with others on the planet. In that regard, the preceding chapters and those to come are meant to augment and deepen our understanding of human connection to the earth as this impacts our dwelling together with each other. The following chapter considers everyday economic life, perhaps intruding on the domain of economics but insisting on grounding the theory, policy, and practice of economics in the concerns of what arguably counts as the greater part of our day-to-day life with each other and the place wherein we address the material conditions of our existence. NOTES 1. Heidegger, Martin, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Invitation into Phenomenological Research (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 72. 2. Husserl, Edmund, trans. Dorian Cairns, Cartesian Meditations, An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), Paragraphs 50–55. 3. Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. Hazel Barnes, Being and Nothingness, An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1956), 254–55. 4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255. 5. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255. 6. Husserl, Meditations, Paragraph 56, 129. 7. Heidegger, Martin, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962), The everyday self 167; dispersed in “the they” 308; individualized in death, 180–82.

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8. Habermas, Jürgen, trans. Thomas McCarthy, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 139. 9. Heidegger, Being and Time, 207.

Chapter 9

Wall Street and Main Street in Schutzian Perspective

Earlier in the book (chapter 4), we located human dwelling in a “sphere of ownness” or a place of one’s own. With that phenomenologically grounded place, the basis for a primitive notion of property emerged—and, therewith, the world divided between the mine and thine. With this chapter, we go beyond the threshold of a sphere of ownness to the close-by, the neighborhood, the street where we live—let’s call it Main Street, but allow that Main Street is an icon that represents an idea that could as well be signified by a range of images around the world representing everyday living arrangements with others. And in this context, the intention is to focus on what, for most individuals and peoples, is arguably the most predominant portion of everyday being-in-the-world, i.e., that concerned with making a living, the domain of economics.1 Parallel with the move outside the home, there is engagement with others that involves a reciprocal interaction denominated here as exchange. Along with this activity a new kind of place arises called a marketplace, a place defined precisely as a place of exchange. Although this kind of place is not a dwelling place in the ordinary and more restricted sense that refers to one’s home, it does go to comprise dwelling in a more expansive way as what people do when they live out the day, work, recreate, celebrate, and, among many other things, buy and sell or exchange, in one way or another. The marketplace and exchange that plays out in everyday life on Main Street, comes to develop into something beyond that, something that yet affords a medium of exchange but differs in distinctive ways as a market. It will go by the name Wall Street, where occur exchanges one or more orders removed from those in marketplaces for goods and services of the kind familiar to Main Street. Here one deals with markets in financial products and services tied to and grounded on goods and services but moving within markets of a far different description and dynamic. 151

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As the final chapter in the segment addressing issues of place and dwelling on the earth, this chapter will direct its investigations in economics and markets to consider problems created by markets—and, specifically global financial markets—to our being-the-world together on the earth and to the well-being of the earth itself. The last set of issues regarding the earth as such will find is fullest exposition in the next chapter which inaugurates the fourth and final section of the book, one distinctive in addressing place issues planetwide. Nonetheless, what is said here will lay the groundwork for that global discussion. Wall Street and Main Street became opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in the rituals of Wall Street. Metaphors can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. A WORD ON METHOLOGY In this chapter, the suggestion is that Schutzian phenomenology affords a way of understanding the lifeworld of Main Street—in particular, the lived experience of the economic. Moreover, the chapter hopes to show that Schutzian social concepts offer one way to understand the connection of the two Streets and the economic meltdown of 2008 and like threats to our material and general well-being. There is also material in this story of the boom and the bust and others like it for developing a range of types—of the kind Schutz discussed—to go along with the spaces and worlds signified by Main Street and Wall Street. Would the proverbial man-in-the-street, for example, serve to name the type who inhabits Main Street, recast in its specifically economic terms? Can homo economicus be taken as a Schutzian type, and is it the type that typifies financial “market makers”? The chapter makes use of key notions from Schutz’s discussion of types to describe, but steers clear of the scholarly debates regarding typology as such. Hopefully, the use of type-concepts here will serve to illuminate the phenomena and reflect what the types cast here intend to mean. Lastly, this chapter is not conceived primarily as a contribution to Schutzian scholarship. It calls upon Schutz as a witness to basic phenomena that arguably serve to ground and clarify the particular economic phenomena in question. To change metaphors, the investigation undertaken

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in this chapter mines Schutzian texts to glean phenomenological evidence leading to insight regarding the economic things themselves. TWO STREETS, TWO WORLDS The chapter begins with a description of the two worlds, Main Street and Wall Street. It then shows how each represents—at an epistemic and ontological level—a different way of knowing and relating to individuals and things in the phenomenon of exchange, which is taken as the defining phenomenon of the economic domain. Lastly, this chapter sketches an explanation of how Main Street became implicated in Wall Street and how the connection proved to be disastrous. We begin with a general comparison of the two worlds with a focus on social interaction around the practice of exchange, taken as the defining phenomenon of economics. Main Street represents a world of embodied subjects who inhabit a common space in real time and engage in face-to-face encounters and communication.2 Its discourse is addressive. A grammatical first-person I addresses a second-person you in a three-way dialogue that includes, at-hand and between the interlocutors, the concrete thing which both address in the back-and-forth of their conversation.3 The interlocutors bring their “because-of” motives, deriving from their respective biographical situations, to the site of their encounter.4 Likewise, both have their “in-order-to” projects whose demands and requirements frame their actions and inter-actions with others.5 When two projects intersect at the site of a thing of common interest and utility—when, in other words, the thing at hand is relevant to both—then their discourse will be directed to finding a way in which each can proceed with her project in a way that is agreeable to the other. Negotiators will assess each other looking for ways in which their respective projects intersect or overlap.6 By contrast with Main Street, Wall Street is populated by anonymous “ones”—buyers, sellers, traders, brokers, investors, speculators, bankers— distinctively not present “in the flesh” and out of the reach of each other through defining moments of their interaction. Communication between key actors is indirect. It occurs through real-life actors who serve as representatives and are defined by their functions of intermediation, e.g., market-makers. Communication is carried by information, understood as signs that point to the aggregate of decisions made by others—others at a distance from those reading the signs, others whose motives and objectives can only be inferred. To be sure, traders will want to know what “the market” is “saying” about the economy generally or a new product or commercial venture.7 But this kind of

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reading entails a very different kind of assessment that does not address the flesh-and-blood other present in real-time and a shared-space. If the partners are not present to each other, neither is the good to be exchanged concretely at hand between them. The product—stocks, bonds, derivatives of many kinds—are abstractions and tokens often many times removed from the concrete objects of lived experience to which they ultimately refer. Wall Street is a mode of far-flung and complex interactions, an ongoing exchange which paradoxically unites a fluctuating number of players who do not and need not come together, face-to-face, in their myriad deals— all of this over products which do not make a concrete appearance and have only an attenuated connection to material reality. On Main Street occasional trading interrupts a life history defined by projects that include much more than exchange. On Wall Street, exchange is the project. IMMEDIATE SOCIAL [INTER]ACTION ON MAIN STREET Readers of Schutz undoubtedly recognize how much his phenomenology informs the descriptive comparison of Main Street and Wall Street sketched above. It is time now to more explicitly invoke Schutzian concepts, beginning with the distinction between immediate and mediate social action, to illuminate the different perspectives on exchange that characterize the two worlds. Let us begin by describing a negotiation relevant to an exchange on Main Street. Exchange is taken as the base economic phenomenon, but when we speak of Main Street here, we are talking about a certain kind of economic world, that of the individual whose working raison d’être is not exchange or “truck and barter” but who, nevertheless, finds herself at key junctures in her life engaged in a negotiation pursuant to an exchange, e.g., in purchasing a car or a home. Let us fix on the house as the object at hand and under negotiation. Main Street, of course, is lined with homes where families live their lives. One leaves from home for work. One returns home after work. Home is at the margins of economic activity, except in buying or selling it, and then it is dead center, it is that very thing that makes a trader of those not otherwise so engaged. A fuller sense of the exchange phenomenon is coming up. For now, we should note that the buyer and the seller “eyeball” each other at the site of the house. They may be neighbors or otherwise already known to each other. Much of their respective biographic situations may already be known or inferred by questions and answers that form the content of their discussion. Each will endeavor to see the house and the deal over the house from the perspective of the other—not necessarily out of any sympathy for the wellbeing of the other but surely to guide their bids and offers toward mutually

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agreeable terms of sale, most notably toward a purchase price. When the deal is made, if it is, one will move out of the house and the other into it. The latter will live there, to make the house a home. Each will go about producing and consuming—and hopefully doing other things that fall out of the purview of economics—leaving the epicenter of economic reality, the domain of exchange or “the market,” to professional traders for whom the things in trade are throughput and the “name of the game” is turnover. Having noted the limited role of exchange on Main Street, however, it remains a task for reflective description to understand the phenomenon of exchange as it plays out—when it does—in the world of Main Street. Schutz comes very close to describing the kind of Main Street negotiating or bargaining intended in this chapter under the heading of “Reciprocal Immediate Action.”8 Schutz defines and distinguishes reciprocal immediateand reciprocal mediate-action. Both types involve interaction of one person with another in a project. In immediate reciprocal action the person to whom the action/project is directed is within reach; in mediate, that person is beyond reach.9 Immediate social [inter]action, then, implies that each actor involved in what Schutz will describe as a reciprocal relation shares a common space and time with the other. There is, of course, more to the relation. Each is aware of the other and takes the other into account in moving forward with his or her own project. Generally, Schutz notes that as a social actor, each puts itself in the place of the other, to include envisioning how the other envisions its own project. Referring to immediate reciprocal action more specifically, he writes: Based on . . . interests . . . overarching plans, and estimation of the existing situation, . . . [A] compares B’s envisioned operation with other possibilities of operating or not . . . on B’s part . . . and decides on one of the possibilities. Then he ponders the steps that he, A, would have to undertake . . . to provoke that operation on B’s part. . . . he puts himself in B’s position.10

In the text above, Schutz describes A’s taking into account B’s plans. In text following it, he describes how A not only considers B’s plans but also B reads of A’s plans.11 The preceding quotations are part of a long discussion of immediate reciprocity that opens the reader’s eyes to just how complex this kind of interpersonal relation is. It is not possible here to explore fully the complexities of the relationship. An example, however, might show how the analysis applies to a trade on Main Street. In negotiating the sale of a used car, the potential buyer might review the would-be seller’s options for lowering the asking price without losing interest in the deal. The buyer might then consider how to act to motivate the buyer to drop her price. The next step is for the buyer to

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ponder the reaction of the seller to the move the buyer is considering—what would the seller say and do if I, the potential buyer, called attention to worn tires and an oil leak?” What the example is meant to show is how the counterparts in a negotiated deal, in the context of an immediate social relation, advance the transaction by transposing themselves into the other’s position. The description carried out by Schutz in these and surrounding texts from the The Structures of the Life-World are not addressed to a negotiation or exchange, i.e., they are not limited to that phenomenon. As this author reads it, reciprocal immediate social action is broad enough to include: a situation in which B is compelled to adjust her actions to an initiative on A’s part (A is planning an addition to the side of her house that faces B’s house); or A and B have decided to collaborate on a common project (e.g., refurbishing a neighborhood park); or—as in the present case—A and B meet to explore a transaction that will transfer property from one to the other. In all these cases, there is reciprocal assessment of the other’s perspective on an object and a project which figures in each actor’s ongoing lifeworld project; they differ in how one project comes to affect another and what outcomes may result from reciprocal action. All in all, as a more general description of reciprocal social interaction the analysis does illuminate the interpersonal dynamic of negotiated exchange. Arguably, in a negotiated exchange the role and the utility of reciprocity is heightened by the fact that in principle A and B face each other with complementary projects. If the exchange is successful—i.e., if the terms of the exchange are satisfying and acceptable (the “price is right” for both)—each partner in the exchange “gets [more or less] what she wants.” I am thinking here of a used-car purchase from which the buyer and seller seem equally happy with the outcome and remain so well after the transaction. (This compares to a neighborhood project in which neighbors settle on plan but each may compromise considerably on desired features and no one ends up unreservedly pleased with the outcome.) While reciprocity of perspectives is involved in a Main Street exchange, by itself, such reciprocity is only part of a fuller account. How do the partners in a Main Street exchange come to know and assess each other in a way that is relevant to an exchange? On this point, the role of the embodied subject sharing a common place and time with a counterpart comes into play. Schutz describes the body as a site for the disclosure of feelings, intentions, and projects on the part of an individual in the surrounding world: In the common surrounding world, A’s animate organism is a rich field of expression . . . [By] means of this field of expression, B experiences and encounters A’s “inner life,” his moods, intentions, etc.—even if A does “nothing in particular.” At the same time, B apprehends A’s animate organism, his feet,

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hands, knees, elbows, head, face, sexual organs as that . . . whereby he [A] realizes his projects.12

The play of emotion on a face or the movement of a body toward or away from an object or another person informs another regarding a person’s projects and assessment of various options in negotiating a transaction. To be sure, it can also raise doubts and mislead. Very often, however, there is little room for doubting what is meant by an action. Schutz describes the behavior of someone cutting down a tree. The behavior is readily understood as carrying out a work project. Based on the observer’s past experience, he discerns the in-order-to of a project in the action of one’s cutting down the tree. The observer will construe the cutter’s because-of motive and get ready to pay the cutter if the observer, and now contractor in the scenario, averts to his having hired the cutter to do the work. Schutz goes on to imagine that the cutter “changes his facial expression, moves his arms, sneezes, [and] falls down.” Now it is not clear what the meaning of these behaviors is. Numerous interpretations suggest themselves.13 Schutz elaborates at length the possibilities. We need not consider them all. For the purposes of this analysis, it suffices to note that in reciprocal interaction at the immediate level—a Main Street negotiated exchange—the phenomenological resources are at hand and time is available to assess and reassess the counterpart’s perspective on a desired transaction. The “animated organism” of the other is there for me in a shared space. Intended and unintended indications of purpose and attitude continue to unfold in our shared experience. If there is a problem in interpreting the perspective of the other, it arguably owes from the surplus of meanings issuing from my partner in the negotiated transaction rather than from the abstract, vague, and conflicting “market signals” which the Wall Street trader must work with. Of course, since the focus here is on a linguistically mediated transaction, one has all the resources of language—including real-time questions and answers—to discern the chances for effecting an exchange. Before turning to social interaction and knowledge on Wall Street, let me briefly summarize what has been elaborated above with regard to Main Street. Exchange does not occupy a dominating or defining position in the everyday world of Main Street. Nonetheless, when negotiated exchanges of the type described here occur, they draw upon the all the complex and rich structures of everyday life as lived with others. Embodied subjects come to the site of exchange in real time with life histories and future projects and must exercise the full range of interpersonal skills and means for intersubjective knowledge to function successfully within the economic domain defined by exchange. While the scope of one-on-one and face-to-face economic practice is limited, it remains anchored in the concrete realities of the surrounding world, a world

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of shared experience. While such a world is never isolated and immune to perturbations from beyond its horizons, its social relations and knowledge offers a concrete milieu for conducting our business with others. MEDIATE SOCIAL [INTER]ACTION ON WALL STREET Having examined immediate social action on Main Street, we may now look to mediate social action on Wall Street. Wall Street, of course, is not lined with homes. People do, of course, live in the Wall Street area of New York and presumably carry on the range of activities that make up dwelling there or anywhere. But Wall Street is not known as a residential community and does not symbolize anything like the life lived on Main Street. While it is a world and referred to here as such, one hesitates to use the term “lifeworld” for it. To be sure, embodied subjects report to work on Wall Street. They interact on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They meet in the offices and board rooms of investment banks. There is an ethos and a culture that describes life on Wall Street. In this sense, there is “a” Wall Street lifeworld, but it is not “the” lifeworld as Husserl first and other phenomenologists after him might describe it, i.e., that holistic complex of structures which shapes a shared and lived experience and grounds “higher order” forms of knowledge and action. If Wall Street is “a” lifeworld, its defining features are in marked contrast to those of the lifeworld writ large. It is, of course, a real place in New York City, but that place and the object of the metaphor are both described by an activity that could just as well “take place” in the servers of the NASDAQ or somewhere in cyberspace. Wall Street is “wherever” financial products are traded. Trading and exchange define Wall Street. They are not occasional and episodic, as on Main Street. In many ways, Wall Street is defined by its “nots.” The ultimate buyers and sellers do not meet in face-to-face encounters. They do not meet in Wall Street. The traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange stand in for others who are not there. The investors and speculators who place orders to sell on the exchange are not known to those who end up buying their securities. For the purposes of “making a market” in securities, it is immaterial whether those offering to sell an issue know or address those offering to buy. These buyers and sellers are anonymous players in locations remote from the site of exchange. The players in the financial market are related in what Schutz calls mediate social action, where the actors are outside each other’s reach. They are contemporaries of each other if not a concrete other, but in an “anonymous operational context, the action is mediated.14

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The stock exchange and financial markets connect their actors, buyers and sellers, but not as three-dimensional human beings with motives and projects that are of interest to each other or relevant to the transfer that the market will serve to effect between them. Together they are not a “we”; nor is each an “I” that addresses the other as a “you.” They are the “theys” that Schutz refers to in his discussions of social relations among contemporaries, those who share a common stretch of time but not a face-to-face relationship in a common space. Schutz tells us that the “they-orientation” refers to the way one apprehends the conscious experiences of contemporaries. “They” are anonymous entities defined by their functions. “When I am They-oriented,” Schutz writes, “I have ‘types’ for partners.”15 On Wall Street, the exchange of they-partners is mediated in several ways. Brokers and market-makers on the floor of the exchange may serve as human intermediaries. Asking and offering are not situated negotiating gestures by the ultimate buyers and sellers but rather are mediated by asking and offering prices which are framed by other asking and offering prices. Neither buyer nor seller can scrutinize the body language of embodied interlocutors for signs of resistance or acquiescence to a negotiating strategy. Nor can they frame their counterparts’ motives or projects to press harder for a lower price, knowing, for example, the seller is anxious to unload his stock. The back-and-forth described here obviously does not represent a single trade made by a buyer and seller on the New York Stock Exchange or over the NASDAQ, but it does capture the linkage of buyers and sellers over the course of a trading day in which earlier trades become input for later trades and a feedback loop, positive or negative, develops over time. Reciprocity between buyers and sellers is aggregate, indirect, and asynchronous. All of this raises the question: how do actors in financial markets know what to make of the market? How do they read it, i.e., how do they interpret the aggregate meaning of all the anonymous others who make up the market? Schutz explicitly refers to the economic domain as one in which prices serve as signs, thus mediating the interaction of they-partners: Take as an example modern economics. Is it not the “behavior of prices” rather than the behavior of men in the market situation which is studied by the economist, the “shape of demand curves” rather than the anticipation of economic subjects symbolized by such curves? Does not the economist investigate . . . matters such as “savings,” “capital,” “business cycle,” “wages” and “unemployment,” and “monopoly” as if these . . . were entirely detached from any activity of the economic subjects, without entering into the . . . live meaning . . . such activities may have for them?16

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Signaling, as described, effects the social interaction on Wall Street. The demand for a stock, bond, or other security issue is represented by the movement, up and down, of prices previously paid for it. One infers from the price data what anonymous others might be willing to pay for a financial product. The financial product, for its part, is no-thing at hand. It is an abstraction of nominal worth, i.e., lacking intrinsic value; although it is a token of something with real value, use value, utility. Not a concrete thing of enduring presence, the financial product is a legal fiction, a promissory note, a claim to a share of the proceeds derived from the partial ownership of something that one may never see or even know about. The ownership that gives one a claim to a share of the proceeds derived from the thing owned is itself just this claim. The signing or signaling that enables interaction on or through the market can also be understood as defining the nature of the market as an information domain, a medium in and through which actors in the market—and, nonparticipant observers as well—can assess the relative worth of the things in trade and, perhaps indirectly, of the things which those things in trade represent. But, this last suggestion points ahead to the concluding section of this chapter; its explication will have to wait until that part of the chapter. Before going further, let me summarize the analysis to this point. On Main Street, exchange, as described, is an infrequent event, and the object traded becomes something actually used in everyday life, e.g., a car, or even something one inhabits, e.g., a home. The object takes up a role in the life history of its user.17 This is to say, perhaps somewhat picturesquely, that the traded thing disappears as such and enters into narratives and worlds of little or no commercial interest. The world of Main Street embraces the full breadth of lived experience, not just exchange—nor, just other economic phenomena like production, consumption, savings, and investment. Main Streeters are embodied and biographically situated cohabitants. Their cohabitation means living out much of their lives as a “we”: “growing old together for a time,” as Schutz so aptly expresses the condition of those who share experience and a world.18 For better and worse, the world of Main Street is defined by what lies within the reach of its inhabitants. Being within reach describes, in good measure, the immediacy of immediate social action. Being within reach both enriches and limits the knowing that belongs to that mode of action and being. Wall Street is all about trade. Functionally considered, Wall Street is narrowly focused. It is not just a world in which trade occurs, it is a world of trade, a world defined by trade. Financial products exist to be traded. They do not take a linear, end-use directed path from exchange to consumer and consumption, but indefinitely circulate and change invisible “hands” in the perpetual motion machine that is the financial market. When one “cashes out” of a security, it moves, again through the market, to someone else who only holds it for a future trade. As for Wall Streeters, they are better described

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as actors and players in a never-ending game rather than as inhabitants of a “full-service” world. Within their game-world, they operate in roles as types. They connect, rather than meet, to effect a trade. Personal relationships either serve the imperatives of exchange or are simply marginal. Before going further in the analysis, some qualifications are in order. The two worlds, described here, are etched in sharp relief so as to indicate their distinguishing attributes and to serve the purposes of this particular analysis. For the sake of fidelity to the phenomena discussed, however, the “property lines” delimiting the two worlds need to be blurred a little. It may be more obvious how Main Street sociability intrudes on Wall Street than how Wall Street insinuates itself on Main Street, so I will begin by acknowledging the elements of face-to-face relations on Wall Street. These, of course, are not absent, notwithstanding all that has been stated about anonymous others in the analysis so far. Earlier in the chapter, reference is made to the role of intermediaries, e.g., brokers and traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Such intermediaries obviously have real-time and embodied relations with each other and with other actors in the market. A fuller phenomenological description than that undertaken here, would want to consider these relations closely. Additionally, investment banking, as may be judged by an ever-growing confessional and exposé-style literature on it, is personality driven. Many deals are one-on-one affairs involving bankers and clients who come to know each other well over time; if the deals are not concluded in person, they are nonetheless made in real time over the telephone. A micro-phenomenological analysis of the investment-banking world would, I believe, yield a high return in experientially grounded insight. The relationships mentioned here and the phenomena which make for a Wall Street ethnography, however, do not undermine the description of Wall Street carried out so far. Intermediaries, as the name itself suggests, already figure in the description of mediate social action appropriated from Schutz in this analysis. A closer examination of investment banking would show that the banker-sellers are intermediaries in one way or another, selling a financial product for others to their clients. The remaining portion of the chapter, which distinguishes problematic and open possibility and identifies the perspective of rational economic man, will underscore Wall Street’s distinctive approach to the world we all inhabit, and will serve to clarify, from a phenomenological standpoint, how the meltdown came about. It is not just the social interaction of individuals that defines the respective streets, but the things in trade and the way in which those things are framed and regarded. Both will be addressed in greater depth. As to Main Street, its exchanges do not occur in isolation from the larger market of anonymous buyers and sellers. While the close description of face-to-face trading within the Schutzian frame of immediate social action

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captures essential features of the phenomenon, it does not provide an exhaustive description of it. A fuller phenomenology of exchange—let’s take again a negotiation over a house as an example—would take into account the deferral of the buyer and the seller to prevailing prices for homes in the local housing market—or, for that matter, the availability of mortgage financing and its costs (interest rates and terms of financing). A kind of polythetic or multi-directed intentionality plays across the field of choice. Even as the buyer and seller size up each other and regard or frame the house between them, their choices will take into account what other houses like the one before them “have gone for.” Thus, will anonymous others, previous homebuyers and sellers, “appear” on the margins of the present case, manifesting themselves in the terms of trade concluded in earlier negotiations, outside the purview and the reach of the negotiation in progress. Does this supplement to the analysis of the deal detract from its distinctive features as a case of immediate social action? To the contrary, undoubtedly, these further phenomena enrich the description; the immediate elements, for their part, remain distinct. There is a way in which the greater market beyond the site of a present exchange not only influences the outcome of the exchange, but can influence the scope and impact of exchange itself in the world of Main Street. If, for example, the market for homes shows a steady and significant appreciation in home values reflected in ever-rising prices obtained in sales—this, of course, is just the situation observed in the United States prior to 2007—buyers and sellers may come to see homes not simply as dwelling places but as financial assets, or, not only in terms of use-value, but additionally and even primarily in terms of exchange-value. In the recent vernacular, homes became “ATMs” (money dispensers or assets from which monetary value can be drawn). One makes no novel claims in suggesting that the scenario sketched here had its part to play in the bubble and bust in the housing market. Alluding to the phenomenon at this point in the chapter serves a phenomenological purpose: it focuses on the intersection between immediate and mediate social action and shows how the former is, in some way, “nested” in the latter, and how the latter can come to influence and even “colonize” the former. In terms of illuminating the 2008 meltdown, the scenario goes toward suggesting how Main Street can be said to have been complicit in the meltdown and recession. From this intermediate summary, it can be said that Main Street and Wall Street are distinct worlds but not ones that function in isolation from each other. It remains to deepen the analysis of the two worlds by turning to the dynamics of choice as disclosed through the distinction between problematic and open possibility.

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PROBLEMATIC POSSIBILITY AND THE “VIS-À-VIS” Main Street and Wall Street, then, represent two very different worlds. In both, exchange is a defining economic phenomenon although one with very different meanings for work and life in both spheres. Ultimately, the difference between both worlds is epistemic and ontological. It is rooted in a distinction that Alfred Schutz takes over from Edmund Husserl: that between problematic and open possibilities. I want to suggest that problematic possibility guides the choices of those on Main Street and that it undergirds the kind of negotiation and exchange that has been described above. We will see here how open possibility describes the field of choice for an actor on Wall Street. The first order of business is to distinguish the two possibilities. Husserl describes how in doubt the knowing subject oscillates between alternatives before judging that one is true and the other not, thus resolving or deciding what is the case. In what this author will call the “vis-à-vis,” the subject is addressed by “enticing possibilities” from the side of the contending options—which are also compared to witnesses in court offering testimony first this way and then that.19 One point is that in the pre-predicative situation, i.e., before judgment or predication resolves the matter, what is judged is not an inert matter on which the subject arbitrarily imposes a judgment. Rather, it is the knowing subject, the judge, who is passive and the possibilities which assert their claims upon subject. It is not hard to see how the situation described here can serve as a model for decision-making and choice. This is precisely how Schutz takes the description: namely, as describing ways in which the acting subject wavers before concrete and competing alternatives or possibilities before resolving in favor of one over the other. He begins by describing a choice between two objects, rather than one between two projects: [In choosing] between two objects, A and B, both actually and equally within my reach. I oscillate between A and B as between two equally available possibilities. A as well as B has a certain appeal to me. I am now inclined to take A, which inclination is then over-powered by an inclination to take B, this is again replaced by the first one, which finally prevails: I decide to take A and to leave B.20

Choosing between two objects is more similar to the scenario described by Husserl. While Husserl, however, introduces the concept of problematic possibility to account for resolving doubt on the way to judgments, Schutz elaborates the account in a way that enhances its value for understanding

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practical action, choosing between alternatives in a decision to act on one over the other. In his “new and improved” version, Schutz describes each alternative as a project so that the competing possibilities are not just simple objects asserting their respective claims upon a purely passive subject but rather competing projects. The subject actively imagines how the options serve the interests of the subject: “The mind by its phantasizing acts creates in succession in inner time the various projects, dropping one in favor of the other and returning to, or more precisely, recreating the first.”21 In choosing between two projects, Schutz says, there are not two already constituted objects, that, so to speak, reach out and appeal to me, but rather two different courses of action, which have to be fleshed out in the mind before I can choose one over the other. Schutz distinguishes his approach from Husserl’s, saying that anything put up for choice as an alternative is “produced” by the acting/choosing subject and is subject to its modification.22 The oscillation which describes the choosing of objects is also characteristic of the choosing between projects. In the latter case, however, we are not wavering between the appeal of inherent features of objects as we successively entertain them. Rather, the issue is how the projects serve to advance “our pre-experience of [a] higher organization of projects which is the foundation of the problematic possibilities standing to choice.”23 For the purposes of this chapter, neither the choice-between-objects model nor the choice-of-projects model is suitable by itself for describing the deliberation and estimation of alternatives that enter into an economic exchange as it occurs on Main Street. Rather, both together serve to describe the field of choice and what we are calling here the “vis-à-vis.” Exchange and economic choice take many forms, and one should not be surprised if a model that hopes to do justice to describing this field of choice will need to adapt to various kinds of choice: apples over oranges for the lunch pail; a used or a new car; working for the government or a nonprofit organization. One can add to the list and vary it at will. The choice-between-objects model recognizes the role played by the inherent and competing qualities or properties of the objects in consideration. In choosing between foodstuffs or clothing, for example, the sensuous properties of the alternatives—taste and all its components in the case of food; fit, feel, comfort, look, in the case of clothing—are not insignificant; they may be decisive. Even in choosing between cars, with their instrumental value, the qualitative properties—the “driving feel” and sex appeal—of the competing choices comes into play. On the other hand, the choice-of-projects model recognizes that even when we are choosing between two objects, we consider them in light of a project. A choice between cars may be framed by the in-order-to motive of getting to work each day. A diet— which would certainly count as an overriding long-term project—would

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intervene in the choice between yoghurt and ice cream, i.e., in a choice that might be decided by the qualities of the foods in competition, absent the diet. A choice of jobs might seem better described by the choice-of-projects model, but then when one imagines what it would be like—how it would “feel” to be working in the field as a forest ranger rather than at headquarters compiling reports, is it obvious that the choice of objects model has no role to play? OPEN POSSIBILITY: ALL OPTIONS ON THE TABLE However one construes the field of choice represented by problematic possibility, it will be seen to differ from that of open possibility. Open possibility offers the knowing or acting subject a frame of indeterminate possibilities: no possibility “weighs” more heavily than another—whether weight is understood in terms of the competing appeals of objects offering themselves to choice or weight is understood as relevance to a higher order project. Following Husserl, as interpreted by Schutz, all possibilities are equally possible for the knowing subject. “None of the open possibilities has any weight whatsoever, they are all equally possible. There is no alternative pre-constituted, but within a frame of generality all possible specifications are equally open. Nothing speaks for one which would speak against another.24 Speaking for himself, Schutz uses open possibility to describe the world “as taken for granted” by an indifferent knowing subject who has no reason to question one thing more than another. Open possibility is not, in this conception, a description of a framework of choice for an acting subject. Once an acting subject brings its “biographically determined situation” to bear upon the world, open possibilities become problematic possibilities. “It is the selection made from things taken for granted . . . [in one’s] biographically determined situation that transforms a selected set of open possibilities into problematic ones which stand from now on to choice: each of them has its weight, requires its fair trial, shows . . . conflicting tendencies.”25 Take away the biographically situated subject and there are no problematic possibilities, no field of choice with conflicting options. It is only when an actor brings its life history to bear on matters that relevance comes into play, it makes sense to speak of options, and decisions can be made. Schutz does not regard open possibility as describing a field of choice. That function is left to problematic possibility. Notwithstanding Schutz’s approach on this, the argument here is that open possibility can be used to describe the peculiar field of choice and perspective of an actor-trader in a financial market. The thesis is this: security trades are not framed by alternative projects that claim attention at the outset and none have lifeworld relevance. The trader does not bring his or her biographically situated self with

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its individual because-of and in-order-to motives to the market. To be sure, one could say that I come to the market with the overriding project of making money, enhancing wealth, maximizing my asset holdings. With that in mind, I evaluate purchases or sales of securities that will best realize my goal. This interpretation unravels, however, when pushed further. Whatever it means, a biographically situated self cannot be reduced to a single and abstract in-order-to motive without because-of motives to shape it or other in-order-to motives to limit it. With only a single goal of maximizing gains brought to bear upon countless investment opportunities the emergence of conflicting options, pairs or sets of alternatives would not emerge. In the description of open possibility, it is clear that all possibilities are equally possible. There are none that carry greater weight than others, at least, not initially. One might go a bit beyond this and say that possibilities in the financial market are all equally subject to an axiology which enjoins the trader to maximize gains and minimize losses. In this conception, all possibilities are equal in weight and none has special relevance at the outset, because all stand as opportunities for enhancing monetary gain. Only in the application of a rule for calculating and comparing value would alternative trading options arise. A vis-à-vis of sorts is still in operation, only now neither the intrinsic merits of the alternative options or possibilities matters nor the relevance of an option in the life project of the chooser-trader. One could describe the trader as a homo economicus if that “type” is defined by a rule of choice that directs that all trades be governed solely by nominal or monetized loss or gain. The move that I make here is to construe open possibility—a concept which, in its Husserlian origins, describes the field of possible knowledge before the emergence of doubt—as describing a particular field of choice, viz., that presented by a financial market before any trades are framed as options. In so doing, I suggest that the relationship of the trader to the open possibilities of the financial market can be understood still more specifically as that between homo economicus, as a habitual type, and the market as a social collectivity—both of these latter terms understood in their Schutzian senses. What Schutz says about the habitual type can be applied to homo economicus. The habitual type is defined by its function. Schutz offers the example of a postal clerk who, as an abstract type, is defined by forwarding the mail. The habitual type is essentially anonymous and can vanish into a course-of-action type (mail delivery), i.e., I need not make reference at all to the habitual type, “the” mail carrier, in entrusting a letter to the mail system. I can simply avert to the course-of-action type, mail delivery.26 The habitual type is contrasted with the characterological type, whose typicality, as suggested by the word “characterological,” is based on a defining character trait. The character type might be the indecisive individual (Hamlet as a type

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beyond the character in the play) or the great-souled individual described in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. The anonymity of the characterological type owes to its generality and abstractness rather than its functional sense. In speaking of the magnanimous person, we are not referring to any specific individual but to a “one” whose magnanimity serves to distinguish it. With the distinction of types in mind, a fine point can be made about homo economicus. The one meant by this designation is not the greedy individual or, for that matter, the prudent spender or investor. Greed and prudence are both character traits and the functional type, homo economicus, can dispense with character traits and be defined by a function, trading, and, I would add, a rule that specifies that function, i.e., maximize gains/minimize losses. In the construction suggested here, homo economicus, faces and operates in the domain of a social collectivity, the financial market. Beyond the habitual type, and even more anonymous, is the social collectivity. Social collectivities include such things as the state, the press, and the people. The economy and the working class are also mentioned as social collectivities. Anonymity is even greater in the case of these types. They are constituted [Schutz quoting Weber] as “the resultants and particular modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons.” This language arguably points to what happens in a market, where there is a certain mode of organization which includes those practices that allow, inter alia, for the making of offers and bids, executing transactions, and posting results. Operating within a given market structure (“mode of organization), individual buyers and sellers make trades (“the particular acts of individual persons”) with the result that securities change ownership at certain prices (“the resultants”). The market, to apply Weber’s definition, can be described as the specific trading structure (e.g., that of the New Stock Exchange versus the Chicago Board of Trade) and the aggregate of the trades carried out, as reflected in the trading prices. The no longer existing market for pork-belly futures, for example, was the result of numerous trades by anonymous buyers and sellers operating within the constitutive rules of the Chicago Board of Trade. To be sure, Weber’s notion of social collectivity covers other social collectivities and so it does not say everything a phenomenology of the market would need to. Nonetheless, it does enrich the analysis undertaken in this chapter, indicating, among other things, how the market, as a social collectivity, constitutes itself in and through the numerous individual trades of buyers and sellers operating within the market structure. If we may construe the relation of a trader to the market as that between a habitual type (homo economicus) and a social collectivity (the financial market), then the situation is fundamentally one in which anonymity meets anonymity. The point must be made that the traders are not only anonymous because they are distant from each other—out of reach—but also because

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they operate without reference to their own biographical situations and the totality of their because-of and in-order-to motives. If homo economicus is a fair approximation of Wall Street traders, then it is not simply the case that lifeworld concerns of other trading partners are not known to oneself as a trader. Rather, in the case of each trader, its own lifeworld relevancies are not brought into play. Each for his or her own part does not operate from the basis of projects that make for a life history in progress, but in virtue of a principle of maximization that defines each as homo economicus. Even with all of the market signals crisscrossing the space of the market, much is concealed. Moreover, yet another factor operates to render the exchange blind. Implicit in the discussion of problematic possibility is the understanding that objects considered for choice are “within reach.” Only on this premise, can the choosing subject be influenced by their competing qualities as that competition has been described. In a financial market, the products in trade are not concrete objects to begin with. It is not just the case that concrete objects in trade are out of sight and reach. The financial product itself is not a concrete object. Even in a commodities future market like the Chicago Board of Trade, the product in trade is not lean hogs but rather lean hog futures, a right to buy lean hogs in the future at a price agreed upon today. When one considers the combined effect of mediated social action, carried out from the perspective of habitual types, operating on financial products with only a distant relationship to concrete realties, the opacity of financial exchange, ironically, becomes transparent. Whether one chooses to apply the notions of open possibility, habitual type, and social collectivity, to the trader-chooser and financial markets or not, it is clear that the trader’s field of choice is very different from that of the occasional trader-exchanger on Main Street. On Main Street, lifeworld relevance and intrinsic worth count. For the Wall Street trader, the bottom line is the bottom line. Having said this, some qualifications are in order. Homo economicus is an ideal type and actual behavior, even on a stock market, only rarely conforms entirely to its economic value optimization proposition. Psychologistic factors—“animal spirits” per Keynes or “irrational exuberance” in recent parlance—can be cited to counter the model. Better, I think, is a phenomenological consideration which challenges the assumptions of the model itself and introduces as well the inherent uncertainty of the future as an essential feature of the horizon of choice. Risk and uncertainty undermine the calculative premises of the model and “problematize” possibilities in their own way. In the end, however, traders worried about the “real” value of their securities and fretting over risk are still far removed from the Main Street parameters of lifeworld and life-history relevance. Moreover, it is argued elsewhere here that the very opacity of the market creates a milieu which aids and abets irrational exuberance and panic. When communication is indirect, judgments

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inferential, and concrete economic realities are out of sight and reach, are these not conditions conducive to unrestrained speculation? FROM MAIN STREET TO MELTDOWN AND BACK We now come to the culmination of the analysis ventured in this chapter. To this point, Schutzian concepts have been used to illuminate distinct worlds, Main Street and Wall Street. The analysis has largely been static and references to real-world economic events has been minimal. In this concluding section, economic developments leading to financial meltdown will move into the foreground and phenomenological concepts developed so far will form the background of what phenomenologically oriented readers will recognize as a kind of genetic analysis. The value of applying phenomenological thinking to economic realities will, one hopes, become evident in this concluding section. Here the question is: How does the fate of Main Street get tied to the practices of Wall Street? Let us trace the sale of a home on Main Street to trading in mortgage securities and other “derivatives” on Wall Street. As we move from face-to-face negotiation and trading of concrete properties to ever more abstract financial instruments and products removed from their underlying assets, the real worth of properties becomes harder to assess as does the ability of borrowers to meet their obligations. Surrogate indices of value and ratings of risk replace firsthand valuation of properties and personal assessments of trustworthiness. The sheer complexity of the financial products operates to obscure and conceal the Main Street people whose properties and promises serve as the foundation for the many financial products layered and leveraged upon them. A mortgage-based security represents—at some distance—a house, a place of one’s own in a larger geographic place. As the financial meltdown of fall 2008 showed, the mortgage securities that were traded on the market were already many degrees removed from the houses they financed. Mortgages were bundled into securities and these were then divided into more affordable and marketable pieces/tranches/strips that were traded in financial markets. A mortgage contract will identify a property and name a buyer and a lender, but the mortgage is already one degree removed from the things themselves and is a result of a transaction (loan) founded on a transaction (purchase of a home) that occurs in the housing market. For most individual homeowners, the housing market is much like the traditional open-air market for other goods, although the product is costlier and houses for sale are not trucked to a site where they compete for a buyer’s attention.

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In any case, when a group of mortgages is bundled and securitized, yet another set of transactions in yet another market (where mortgages are bought and sold) is added on top of original transaction in the housing market. The buyer and holder of a mortgage security or a piece thereof will have no idea of the names of the principals involved in the purchase of the houses and locations of the properties, let alone know firsthand the individuals named and their properties. The estimations of the worth of things and trustworthiness of individuals that are part of deliberation and negotiation leading to the purchase of a house are not and cannot be a part of judgment that operates in a mortgage security market. The original value of the security will be based on a rating that an analyst or broker will assign to the mortgages without firsthand knowledge of the properties or the borrowers and lenders. Once the securities are put up for sale, their value will be as much a function of financial market dynamics as the behavior of housing prices on the housing market and indexes relevant to the mortgage market (interest rates, defaults, lending-bank profitability, etc.).27 The homes represented by the mortgages, represented by the mortgage securities, represented by the tranches/strips of mortgage securities became overvalued in the housing market. The creditworthiness of buyers is seen to be overestimated by the lending bank eager to “close a deal,” collect its fees and then sell the mortgage to another bank. When owners can’t make their payments (often because they borrowed on adjustable-rate loans whose interest rates automatically adjusted up after a fixed period of time) and housing becomes unaffordable, credit disappears, and banks holding the debt are immobilized. The problem is systemic. Only a few financial institutions get by. And, as the history shows, the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008 was the Great Recession of 2009. The “real economy,” as economists call it—Main Street, here—took a hit, one that lasted for years. Main Street feels the impact of such financial market phenomena, in many ways. In terms of the focus of this chapter and this book, namely, on dwelling, many lose “a place of their own.” With sad irony the “sphere of ownness” was a place defined initially by the owner’s right to exclude others from ingress. Into that home, once the owner’s, the former owner is barred. Moreover, property as a place that literally grounds one’s being in the world is transformed into a commodity and abstraction; a debt obligation that comes due, can’t be paid and causes a foreclosue on a property that had been home to an “owner.” The careful reader or student of Schutz will recognize the utility of his concepts to the very brief sketch of the meltdown given here—one that focuses on housing finance. To be sure, one cannot do justice to the meltdown or to Schutz in such a brief sketch. The analysis ventured in this concluding section of the chapter is indicative rather than demonstrative. It is by no

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means the last word on the subject but rather makes a “down payment” on further investigations and opens up what is arguably a promising field of phenomenological investigation. Having said as much, one should highlight a key insight that one hopes emerges from even such a cursory economic narrative when viewed against the Schutzian notions elaborated at some length earlier. The move to securitization effected in financial markets creates a mediated social relation far removed from the immediate social relation that plays out in the negotiation and sale of houses on Main Street. In the move from the real-world “truck and barter” of Main Street to the often split-second exchange of financial assets on Wall Street, a whole domain of knowledge falls out of account—the knowledge deriving from the lived experience of material objects and embodied others. To be sure, a financial market is saturated with information. It is shown here to be an information domain. Nevertheless, in financial markets, traders are dependent on indirect indicators of the worth of collateral and the creditworthiness of debtors; they are “flying blind” or partly so and it should not be surprising that they are blindsided in the end. Markets have work-arounds to compensate for the lack of knowledge identified here; traders have ways of assessing value and creditworthiness. It is not the aim of this chapter to suggest a phenomenological investment strategy. What should appear from the analysis is an indication of vulnerabilities in the very constitution of financial markets, insofar as these are regarded as fields of social action and choice. There is an echo of Husserl in all of this from the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. There, Husserl traced the mathematization of the natural sciences, the “technization” of their meaning, and their disconnection from the matrix of their meaning and foundation in lived experienced. Husserl argued that when the meaning fundament of a theoretical endeavor, like the natural sciences, is obscured and then forgotten, the value of the entire construct is in jeopardy. When systems lose sight of their foundations, then presumably the Husserlian rallying call is apropos: “back to the things themselves!” For Alfred Schutz, the relevance of social science and social action meant recourse to the “paramount reality” of the “working world.” In that world, Main Street projects confer relevance and value on lifeworld objects, like homes. As recent history shows, when those objects become assets underlying the financial products of Wall Street and their value becomes increasingly indiscernible, then the real-world consequences can be devastating. However persuasive the preceding analysis may have been in the case study undertaken in this chapter, there is much left to do. Much had to be omitted or condensed to render the sweep of the narrative intelligible and cohesive; the rationale of financial markets needs to be examined more deeply; and, the scope and range of the economic issues systemic to market

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dynamics needs to made planetary as we move to the fourth and final section of the book, where our human dwelling on the earth and the being of the earth itself are addressed. The tasks articulated above will be work of the next chapter which takes a whole-earth perspective under the aegis of global financial markets. How do markets—those in goods and services as well as financial markets come to have a global reach? What impact does this have on humanity and the earth as a whole? Consistent with the overall methodological approach of the book, the resources of phenomenology will be tapped to bring lifeworld experience to bear on issues. How else could that be, given that the theme of the book is dwelling? But that does not make things easier. Arguably, the task becomes harder when the methodological “zone” of reflection goes well beyond the lived experience of individuals in everyday real-time face-to-face encounters with others. Schutz offers a pathway to dealing with social relations that go beyond the immediate and involve mediated relationships within social collectivities. But, an additional challenge derives from understanding the transformative impact on the earth itself. That challenge awaits us in the next chapter and final segment of the book. NOTES 1. In this chapter, I draw from Skocz, Dennis E., “Wall Street and Main Street on Schutzian Perspective,” in Schutzian Research 3 (2011): 165–82. © 2011 The copyrights to the essays in this volume belong to the authors. 2. Schutz, Alfred, trans. Maurice Natason, The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1962), 15–19. 3. Schutz, Alfred, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 170–71. 4. Schutz, Social Reality, 70. 5. Schutz, Social World, 130. 6. Schutz, Social Reality, 31–32. 7. Schutz, Social Reality, 34–35. 8. Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann, Richard M. Zaner, and David J. Parent, The Structures of the Life-World, Volume II (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989) 76. 9. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, II, 70–71. 10. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, II, 84. 11. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, II, 85. 12. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, II, 79. 13. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, II, 81. 14. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, II, 71. 15. Schutz, Social World, 183–85.

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16. Schutz, Social Reality, 34–35. 17. Schutz and Luckman, Life-World, I, 58. 18. Schutz, Social World, 166. 19. Husserl, Edmund, trans. Anthony Steinbock, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Lectures on Transcendental Logic, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,s Nijoff, 2001), 8. 20. Schutz, Social Reality, 83. 21. Schutz, Social Reality, 83–85. 22. Schutz, Social Reality, 84. 23. Schutz, Social Reality, 93–94. 24. Schutz, Social Reality, 81–82. 25. Schutz, Social Reality, 82. 26. Schutz, Social World, 197. 27. Grant, James, Mr. Market Miscalculates, The Bubble Years and Beyond (Mt. Jackson: Axios Press, 2008). See especially chapters 5, 6, and 7. The near-contemporaneous analyses of the evolution of the mortgage security market give a very detailed account of the complexity and progressive alienation [my expression] of the financial products from the assets (homes) on which they were based. Grant was an investment adviser who was among those who foresaw the bust as the bubble expanded.

PART IV

The “Big Picture” A Whole-Earth View

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From Marketplace to “Marketspace”

This chapter carries forward the discussion of the marketplace that began in the last chapter and it circles back to the dwelling place we call home to enlarge on that concept introduced as oikos by Xenophon in chapter 2. In the previous chapter, the risk to homeownership presented by the 2008 meltdown of financial markets in the United States and elsewhere was discussed. The workings of Wall Street or capital markets had become so alienated from everyday life on Main Street that many found themselves displaced from the place they called home. The transformation of the home from dwelling place to financial commodity was addressed in a step-by-step phenomenological account drawing upon the work of Alfred Schutz. In the present chapter, our attention takes on a whole-earth outlook. The globalization of markets—in particular financial markets—comes to describe the transformation of the marketplace into a “marketspace,” a neologism used here to describe a worldwide market, one essentially untethered from particular geographical locations, but nonetheless, enabling and instigating profound and sweeping changes to the earth and human dwelling on the earth.1 Economic discourse here is driven by the phenomenological intent to get to the essence of things themselves and ultimately root practices and institutions in everyday economic life as lived by people engaged in making a living but not exhaustively defined by such. This chapter launches the fourth and final section of the book—one that looks at the worldwide situation of being-in-the-world with others and dwelling upon the earth. One should not expect to read a happy account of things or an upbeat assessment of the prospects for dwelling in a fully human way on the planet. On the contrary, challenges of an ontological order will surface and form the agenda for a way ahead in the twelfth and final chapter of the book. It is hoped that at end of this reflection on dwelling the cumulative 177

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insights gathered from this undertaking will afford the resources for a variety of approaches attuned to a range of concerns and a common sense of urgency. THE GIST OF THE “ARGUMENT” We begin with an “argument” in the form of an interpretive narrative. Initially, the market place as a geographical location is a material a priori for exchange, but not initially a “power” in its own right, i.e., something Marx, in the conceptuality of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, might call an “alien being,” a force driving production, consumption, the use (exploitation) of labor, and determining the shape of society as well as the conduct of politics.2 Later, the marketplace becomes a “marketspace”—not merely a place that serves to make possible a praxis (exchange), but a domain (informational and virtual) which guides and directs praxis over time (via prices)—an “invisible hand” or directive force vs. a geographic reality and the locus of a practice. Geography initially determines the emergence of marketplaces; a certain topography favors the gathering of buyers and sellers which forms the market “community.” And so, a sea harbor or riverine location or stop along the way between two or more large populations might afford a locus for trade.3 As markets function and develop, however, they operate to reconfigure inhabited space outside the marketplace and, where the marketplace has been surpassed by the market as an informational/virtual domain, the market works ultimately to reshape the earth as a whole, motivating the transfiguration of the landscape and reforming lifestyles and sociation within the human habitat. This happens especially when the market in question is a financial market and merits designation as a marketspace, an information domain that need not anchor itself in a geographic location and where the exchange is one of financial products and traders need not bring the goods in trade to a location nor showcase the goods for sale. The marketspace can operate to homogenize and devalue the lived space of the earth by conflating its domain of exchange value with the lived world as such. Ultimately, however, the domain of exchange does not coincide with the limits of the lived world and the market need not be taken as an alien being outside the purview of human beings. In principle, it is the prerogative of those who operate within the market—all of us—to stand outside the market and attend to what “it” has to say. To be sure, we should understand that what “it” says is what “we” as individuals, taken in the aggregate, have said. In what sounds like a marketing slogan, “the market is us” and it behooves us to attend to its signals.

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As citizens, however, we can collectively and explicitly decide whether we will ratify or contradict the implicit evaluation of things we make as individuals operating as individuals. THE UNABRIDGED STORY The story that runs from the emergence of markets to the global marketspace, begins with the oikos, the estate or household. Oikos enters into the word “economics”—etymologically defined, the law (nomos) of the household (oikos). It is ironic that economics should be a namesake of the oikos for reasons that will become more evident as this account unfolds. Nonetheless, it is from the management of the oikos that economics takes its name and it is visà-vis the oikos that the distinctive nature of the market becomes perspicuous. The oikos (household, estate) is an Urplatz, a Gestalt of human dwelling upon the earth from which diverse spheres of human concernful dealing with things and being-with-others will emerge but from which many practices will then develop in relative autonomy from the dwelling place and from each other. Production, consumption, sociation, ruling-over, the division of labor and the division of “spoils”—all take place originally within the lived space of the oikos and under the guiding hand of the head of the household. Aristotle and Xenophon both write an “economics” text, but arguably Xenophon’s, which comes first, offers a more concrete and even somewhat poetic description of what happens on and within the household estate. According to Xenophon, the nomos of the oikos or the management of the household takes place under the watchful eye of the master of the household who, like the king in a state or empire, is in charge. Production, per Xenophon’s examples, is an outdoor activity that includes farming, sowing seeds, grazing sheep, herding livestock, and gathering the wealth educed from earth and storing it in the safekeeping of household storage places. From the residence of the master, the division of labor is made and praise and punishment for workers (including slaves) is meted out. The hand that directs it all is not invisible. The decision on what is to be done is the master’s, who, as owner of the estate, is the owner of what it produces and, therefore, in charge of what the estate produces under his careful supervision. Production, consumption, accumulation, distribution and management—all these key functions defining economics today were in Xenophon’s time the defining elements of economics as well, albeit as household management.4 Later, these functions will “outsource themselves,” leave the confines of the estate and separate from each other. Subtending these practices or functions is the phenomenon of dwelling as such, i.e., having and maintaining one’s place of origin, repose, and, very important, identity within the world and upon the earth. Oikos is a lived

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space or place, i.e., lived in the deepest (although not broadest) sense of human life. Life has its ground literally on ground of the oikos. As a sphere of ownness, as discussed in chapter 4, the home and property that goes with it has an ontological dimension. It is part and parcel of what it means to be a being-in-the-world with others and upon the earth. One’s dwelling place or home-become-household takes on new functions and comes to embrace the prosaic everyday activities of production, consumption, accumulation, and distribution that are the component elements of economics. As such, these functions do not leave the purview of philosophy, phenomenologically conceived, but enrich and expand the circumspection of everyday being-in-theworld. They add amplitude and concreteness to human being-in. Directing our attention now to the market, we note that the marketplace is a peculiar and exceptional place, a place outside the ur-place of the household. It is defined in large measure by what does not take place in its space: not production, not consumption, not ruling (personified and extrinsic), not sociation (in the fullest sense), and not dwelling. It is not hierarchical and, as such with no supplement, not governed by a personal power external to it. It is a place of exchange: a. face-to-face encounter; b. negotiation; and, c. transfer (movement) of goods. These elements are aspects of exchange and trade. They were described with subtlety and precision in the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, whose work was applied in chapter 9 to elucidate everyday economic life on “Main Street,” exemplified in negotiating and selling a used car or a house. The marketplace that emerges as more than an occasional and ad hoc site of exchange is a matrix for the emergence of value = exchange value = price. The trades that take place in the market result in ratios of exchange. These equate to prices denominated in units of currency, in money. The story would end here except that prices acquire (or seem to acquire) a life of their own. New trades refer back to old prices. New buyers try to take advantage of low prices; new sellers, high prices. The fluctuation of prices over time, a “movement” itself, “moves” buyers and sellers in and out of the market, “moves” goods and services from place to place, and ultimately determines the optimal places of production and consumption across the globe. In spatiotemporal terms, the marketplace, ontologically significant as a spatial phenomenon, gives rise to the marketspace, as a temporal medium within which market prices trace a path of fluctuation like the notes in a [quasi] atonal musical text. What is important for the functioning of a market is that trades and prices are generally known and come to be recorded, reported, and recalled by present traders whose future trades will be informed and influenced by the movement and trajectory of preceding trades. Why do markets as described above come about in the first place? And what is the deeper significance of the “price mechanism”?

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“Economics 101” provides a generic answer to the first question. People exchange goods and services because they cannot produce everything they want by themselves. Or, put another way, scarcity is the incentive to trade: individual demand for goods and services exceeds the quantity of goods and services available to an individual household from its own labor and resources. To be sure, this account is rather skeletal and begs empirical-historical fleshing out. Nonetheless, the framework for economic theory is expanded on the premises laid out here. If there is to be exchange, then a ratio between goods exchanged in barter needs to be established between individuals. Following—explicitly or not, Aristotle’s concept of voluntary compensatory justice from Book 5 of the Nichomachean Ethics—that ratio is agreed upon by the individuals effecting the trade.5 Money enters as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, and so instead of trading so many pots for so many tables, the buyer and seller trade whatever number of goods for so many units of silver, gold, greenbacks, or non-paper currency.6 Since we have alluded to Aristotle here, we might do well to refer to the period of Greek history when the household became less and less the hub of economic activity and became implicated in market-centered activity (see chapter 2, regarding the development of trade within the lifetime of Xenophon). Economic history on the transition from subsistence economies to trade-based economies is voluminous and includes an ever-expanding literature on the development of economic institutions and practices spanning the globe and over many centuries. This brief and admittedly bare account of theory is largely meant to provide a segue to the “semiotic hermeneutics” of price movements or the “price mechanism” sketched in the following paragraphs. The price mechanism becomes the effective substitute for the marketplace. A geographically rooted place concedes its functions to a semiotic or sign-driven domain. We left our traders having agreed to ratio of exchange, denominated in currency, let’s say 5 drachmae for a pair of sandals. That’s the price for sandals of a certain type, at a given place and time. The price mechanism kicks in after a day of trading on many commodities. As the prices for various goods and services come to be known and are recorded, a “market” for different goods develops, and that market is defined by the movement of prices, up and down, over time. As these markets function over time, they acquire a power to direct the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services. The Austrian economist F. A. von Hayek speaks of the price mechanism as a “communications system.”7 The prices are data, generated and distributed throughout the market to all participating in its transactions. As data they have both a representative and performative function. They report the terms of trade=ratios of exchange=exchange-value of commodities in trade. And, they also “do” something, in fact, they perform a number of functions, particularly as they rise and fall. So, then a rise in the price of gasoline

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disincentivizes consumption of gasoline. It incentivizes the production of gasoline. It rewards those who produce gasoline. It encourages many to look for substitutes for gasoline and to invest in alternative fuel sources. And, it shifts the overall distribution of income within an economy according to the work people do and the investments people make. To be sure, the conditions on which these correlations take place include those for a free market. The point made here is that the market, or the price mechanism, has a directive function without there being a person or institution that sets prices, wages, investment, employment, and incomes. For better or worse, the functions are carried out anonymously via the aggregated, not collective, actions of many individuals. The importance of this point will come up later in this chapter and in chapter 11 (on the Anthropocene) and chapter 12 (re Cosmopolis). As the oikos is the ur-place of the market (as well as of the factory, storehouse, nation, and state), so too is the market place a matrix from which the marketspace emerges. The functions which the geographic locus of the marketplace makes possible eventually free themselves from the gravity of the location where they occur. The functions—face-to-face encounter; negotiation; and actual transfer of goods—is replaced by functions that do not need a a specific geographic emplacement. Real-time encounter of traders in the flesh becomes an asynchronous signaling of intentions between buyers and sellers who are anonymous to each other (e.g., the placing of bids and offers for stocks on the NASDAQ). Negotiation is replaced individual calculations of value based on personal metrics. Actual transfer of goods and performance of services take place outside the time and place of a geographical market place, a locus for the parties involved in trade to gather and do business from start to finish: eyeball the good for sale, assess the how much the buyer is willing to pay/the seller is will take in payment, and cart the purchase home or hold on to it until it sells. The change from marketplace as a mere meeting place for trade to an abstract functional domain governed by the movement of prices is a story of displacement, replacement, diffusion, and placial reconfiguration. The narrative of the change is long and varied. Its details are recorded in economic history and its impacts are traced via the cartography of economic geography. What each of these empirical disciplines illustrate, however, are ontological transformations with profound implications for human being-in-the-world upon the earth. The key transformations bearing on the earth and human being in the world will occupy our attention in this and the following chapters. One more development, however, remains to be addressed before assessing impacts, namely financial markets. Again, why do they arise? And what makes them distinctive? Let us imagine that markets for goods and services are functioning and therewith the price mechanism is performing its tasks. These markets may be

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signaling demand for new products that producers may not be able to meet via production from their existing factories. New and additional machinery may be required: goods to produce other goods or capital in its primary sense. To furnish themselves with the necessary capital, the producers will need capital, in its other sense as funds necessary to acquire capital goods. Capital funds, generally speaking, are acquired though loans and sale of equity (stock) and these come to be “bought and sold”/traded in capital markets which operate per the price mechanism. These markets are the least tethered to a place. Digitized they can be said to exist and operate in cyberspace. Nonetheless, capital or financial markets arguably have the greatest impact on places around world and the topography of the earth. Here we need to bring into the discussion the eighteenth-century economist David Ricado, in particular, his take on the factors of production and the types of income they generate.8 The factors are land, labor, and capital. The factors are needed to produce goods for consumption. The factors must be bought and paid for. They generate income for those who sell or rent them. Land yields rent; labor, wages; and capital, profits.9 Readers will note, even with this brief account of Ricardo’s key concepts regarding the factors of production, a kind of commodification of the factors has taken place. What will especially concern us who are pursuing this book is the factor of land. The meaning of the earth and the nature of nature has been the recurring topic of reflection from chapter 1 and through all succeeding chapters. Ricardo captures the idea that land is a resource and a resource that is traded in a market, a commodity. Land with its “fertility,” as Ricardo refers to its productivity—even land with ores that are mined are said to fertile—has its exchange value and comes to be bought or rented via the price mechanism, its valuation appraised vis-à-vis other suitable parcels of land.10 Capital goods will “go” to productive farms, mining sites, or factory locations enabling the production of profitable goods, as those goods are identified in markets for goods and services. Capital funds invested in capital goods applied to productive parcels of land will generate attractive profits. Enough said so far to underscore the inter-connectedness of market behaviors. The hypothetical scenario imagined here makes this point, but also the following. The economic model elaborated here embeds an ontological premise with respect to meaning of the factors of production. Our focus, land, is already delimited as to its ontological status by calling it a factor of production.” As such, it functions in terms of exchange value and is governed within financial markets whose efficiency in finding the best choice for land investment is optimized if the market’s reach is global. It is no accident that financial markets tend to be global in reach. Optimizing return on financial products is best assured by bringing real properties under the global circumspection of exchange value.

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The social-phenomenological grounding for this is substantially found within the analysis of Alfred Schutz in chapter 9, especially in his discussion of the functionally driven type of social agent/actor (in the field of economics) as the homo economicus. This is the actor or player in mediated social [inter] action governed by one task, namely to maximize gains and minimize losses. Readers will recall that chapter 9 was focused on financial markets (symbolized by Wall Street). The chapter suggested that Wall Street had become so alienated from Main Street (everyday economic activity as lived out by individuals and families not defined exclusively by economics) that homes were lost through foreclosure when mortgage derivatives lost market value. There may be a rough analogy with financializing properties around the world inasmuch as the intrinsic worth and noneconomic character of the earth is essentially reduced to that of a resource, with adverse consequences to the being of the earth itself and to our dwelling on the earth. Displacement is not just an episodic consequence of bad deals on financial markets. It serves as a metaphor for the successive ontological transformations that mark economic history. The natural thing in its natural place becomes the produced thing. It is literally displaced from its natural home. But in a conceptual sense, the natural thing is displaced by the product. The matter or elements of nature are transformed by labor into a product. First released from the captivity of nature and then from the “hand” of the producer, what is now the product becomes the commodity. By way of exchange, then, the commodity displaces product and, thereupon, the product moves from factory and into the trajectory of commerce, whereupon, it is consumed. Upon sale, the commodity ultimately comes to rest, comes home in the household of the consumer, where it becomes a thing of use and/or enjoyment. It finds a resting place. Marx was among the first to perceive and trace the ontological history of the thing transformed by the capitalist economic dynamic: ontology as onto-metamorphosis. Individual commodities begin their individual life histories in/on the earth and return to the earth in a home.11 This account simplifies things, but the point is not so much to stop where we have. Rather, the point is to turn, as Marx did, to illuminate the “money-commoditymoney” circle, a kind of “roundelay” depicting the circulation of money and commodities within financial markets. For the trader/financier, the point is not to stop the circulation—cash in and release the commodity from trade to consume it. Rather, the idea is to keep the circulation going on to maximize monetary gains through repeated profitable exchanges.12 How does this activity playing out in global financial market markets transform the way the earth is conceived and configured?

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ONTO-EPISTEMELOGICAL OUTCOMES Our analysis will suggest that a common ontology (way of being) and epistemology (way of knowing) underlie the marketspace as driving change in our planetary life-space today. We will distinguish two forces at work in re-spatializing the globe. One is the nullification of placial differences across the globe, a horizontal erasure. The other is a vertical conflation of the difference between territories we inhabit and the “maps” (the economic overlays) we use to conduct our days’ business. How does the market specifically bring about this erasure and conflation? Erasure and conflation are not independent phenomena. Our reflection will suggest how horizontal erasure works along with vertical conflation to radically transform our life space on earth. The two phenomena work closely together and it may help to start with conflation and end with erasure. What counts as an object within the “space” of the market (a space of exchange) is the thing as a commodity. In the market, the independent, self-subsistent thing (and the ground we inhabit as well) with all of its various qualities, utilities and properties “becomes” a commodity: it is conflated with its representation as an economic construct defined by exchange value.13 With this conflation of the difference between thing and commodity, there is a horizontal erasure of difference: one commodified thing is essentially the same as any other—fungibility trumps uniqueness. In consequence of commodification, the spaces from which commodities emerge from production or withdraw for consumption are reconfigured in function of the market.14 Production and consumption are defined by their relation to market-exchange. Things are produced for the market; consumables are acquired on the market. Any self-subsistent being which these things and places have is inconsequential within the larger, homogenizing space of exchange. All places are equally places of production or consumption or exchange and so the earth as a place of all places is reduced to a site of commodification. Notwithstanding the re-spatialization described above, things in their dumb solidity do not vanish and places remain physically intact. The global market is such that it does not literally annihilate the earth beneath our feet or abolish our lived relationship to our surroundings and others we meet in them. Conflation and erasure name onto-epistemological phenomena: they describe how things come to appear to us in virtue of certain technological and conceptual constructs. Together, conflation and erasure can be called eclipse phenomena. The peculiar nature of a medium is to operate with such fidelity to what it represents or with such efficacy in what it effects that it covers over or hides the independent reality of the things which it operates on. E-trading offers an example. Here the first-person sense of effecting a trade simulates

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the experience of marketplace exchange with such a high degree of fidelity that what is missing from the experience of exchange is relegated to the background, i.e., “eclipsed.” Effecting an exchange, in and through the medium of the internet, does in fact “seal the deal” but the very sense of accomplishment—task undertaken, task completed—leaves out of the picture the ponderous, earthbound reality of actually producing and moving commodities around the world. Moreover, in the case of the financial/capital markets, the traders are anonymous, the stakeholders in the trade are unrepresented, and the ground-truth consequences of “the deals” appear after the fact. Even before internet trading, the efficacy of the market in satisfying buyers and sellers gave it primacy as a site of happening or bringing about. Linking a buyer and a seller through the medium of price operates with such anonymous efficiency that it serves to conflate the transaction with a fuller sense of exchange which might not truly embrace the “life cycle of a thing” that contributes to the well being of the earth and the quality of human life. The “backstory” of the “real life” journey of a commodified object from nature to home might well include exogoneous damages to land brought into production, uncompensated costs of labor, and collateral damages to air and sea environments incurred in its delivery across the globe to its delivery to a consumer household. The preceding affords a fictional but arguably credible illustration of the eclipse phenonema: how conflation of an economic construct and its empirical referents can obscure ground truth. Let us consider two recognizable types of consequences arising from the eclipse phenomenon. One is geo-shock as geo-ecological-economic shock: “the earth is finite and material.” Another is geo-political shock: location counts; identity and place drives politics. Both shocks occur when the ponderous and friction-filled world of things asserts itself against the virtual world of market value. The depletion of a natural resource (e.g., species of fish) regarded only as a resource in view of its exchange value can serve as a shock to a market system—skyrocketing prices of the commodity in question. The market, whose strength is in “delivering the goods” within the bounds of long-term price equilibrium, is not dysfunctional. It serves to send an economic message, reminding us that a singular regard for things as commodities can undercut their very availability as commodities in the near term. Moreover, in the first place, it points to an ecological phenomenon, the depletion of a “resource” or evacuation of an ecological niche. Such a geoecological-economic shock uncomfortably affirms the reality of things as other than mere commodities. It affirms the existence of a real place outside the domain of the marketspace. Consider now a geopolitical shock. A sudden and drastic cut in the availability of a commodity (e.g., oil) by a nation-state reminds us that not only is there is a world of things out there (i.e., beyond the market) but also a

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world of actors and places called states (other than buyers and sellers) with agendas other than economic. Drastic cuts in supply by political actors can disrupt the day-to-day efficiency of markets with such violence that any normal confidence in the market medium to carry out its work of mediation is severely undermined. For better or worse, it may evoke supervening political responses. For the purposes of this analysis, it introduces explicitly the challenges of being-in-the-world and on the earth with others, collective others, states, with geopolitical objectives and strategies that go beyond maxi/min rationality of efficient [free] market theory. The role of politics in planetary cohabitation and coexistence is the focus of chapter 12, the concluding and culminating chapter of this book. It is not the argument here that the market fails as a medium of exchange or distribution of goods and services. Rather, exchange value fails to account for the full reality and worth of things. If anything, the “shock-response of the market” suggests its value to signal, alert, and warn of conditions outside the orbit of conventional economic phenomena. The market itself is a resource that indicates where, for example, the likely environmental stress points, fault lines, and imperiled zones are likely to be found. An informed environmentalist, for example, might see an approaching threat to a coastal area in the appreciation of real estate in that area. Likewise, a rise in the price of a prized commodity (e.g. sea bass) might indicate diminishing stocks of it. It is not a simple matter to read the market for what it says about the world outside its domain, especially if we assume that its domain is the world! This is not however to discount what the market has to say. The reality of everyday life is one in which we both operate within the market as buyers and sellers and where we stand outside of the market as citizens. In our collective judgment as citizens we may observe and act upon the valuations we make individually-in-aggregate in the market. The market derives its power from our complicity in “its” valuations. But, if ecological or political facts of life may awaken us from a market-induced stupor, the resulting economic facts of life may well shock us into sobriety when it comes to collective political and environmental ambitions. In the next chapter, we will look to a new geo-biophysical epoch called the Anthropocene. It is the “Age of the Human,” one in which human habitation of the planet has come to impact the earth as a whole, largely adversely. Within the exploration of the anthropic transformation, globalization, in the sense discussed in this chapter, has been seen, or suggested to be, a major phenomenon imprinting the planet with the look and impact of human activity. It will be left to the following chapter to draw the link between globalization and the advent of the Antropocene. In so doing, we will endeavor to trace

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the narrative thread of globalization explored in this chapter into an overlapping narrative leading to the Age of the Human. NOTES 1. Lefebvre, Henri, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1991), 35, 350. 2. Marx, Karl, trans. Martin Milligan, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964). 3. Lopez, Robert S., The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chapters 3, 4. 4. Xenophon, trans. E. C. Marchant, The Oeconomicus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923), Books VII, VIII, and IX. 5. Aristotle, trans. H. Rackham, The Nichomachean Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), Book V. 6. Aristotle, trans. H. Rackham, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I, 1932), Book I, Chapter 3, lines 10–16. 7. Hayek, Friedrich A., “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The Essence of Hayek (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), 219–20. 8. Ricardo, David, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1911), chapter 3. 9. Lefebvre, Space, 228. 10. Ricardo, Principles, 33, 46. 11. Marx, Karl, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital, Volume 1, A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 119–200. 12. Marx, Capital, I, 250–57. 13. Marx, Capital, I, 217f. 14. Lefebvre, Space, 350–51.

Chapter 11

Body Mapping and the Anthropocene

The question raised in this chapter could be put as follows: Who is the “Anthropos” in the Antropocene? The Anthropocene is defined as a geo-biophysical epoch in which human activity has been the predominant influence on climate, the environment, and ecological systems. This chapter represents an effort to think what it is about being-human that accounts for the impacts on the earth and the biosphere observed in the Anthropocene. The Aristotelean definition of the human as a zoon echon logos implies that the human is a living being (zoon) or animal that has speech or reason (logos). The definition suggests that the human impact on the earth might owe to those two qualities that constitute us as a species: embodied being as an animal and “having” speech or reason. The chapter will proceed first by examining the sciences of the Anthropocene and asking how they address activity specific to humans, i.e., distinctly human activity. The interrogation of the chapter then focuses on the “logic” of human bios and deploys “body mapping” as the way in which the human species, in aggregate, connects to the earth such as to have the impact documented in those sciences. From bios and Body Mappping, the narrative turns to logos and the Body Politic. With the latter, the interrogation considers how logos, manifest as both speech and reason in the polis, or in the Body Politic, might enable us to hold humans accountable for the Anthropocene and indicate an approach to preventing the harms and mitigating the effects of the Anthropocene. Such a result might effect a sustainable relationship between humanity and the earth and suggest an answer to the question posed by the book: what does it mean concretely to dwell “poetically” on the earth? Within the compass of this book, the fuller response to the question will have to wait the cumulative reflections of the concluding chapter. That is one addressed to “earthlings” on the prospects of a “cosmopolitan political space.” 189

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As noted above, the bio-geophysical conception of the Anthropocene points to material changes in the landscape of the earth and the biosphere, changes that span the globe and raise the question: to what extent does human activity change the very nature of the physical reality of the earth?1 Again, alluding to Aristotle, this time to his distinction between physis (nature) and teche/poieisis (art/production), do humans/does humanity enact a material change in the being of the earth?2 Is there a change in the “nature of nature” from what has the source of its being within itself (physis) to that whose origin and being is exterior to itself in activity of humans (teche/poieisis)? “Antropocene” derives from two roots, anthropos (ancient Greek for human), and “-cene” or “Age.” Anthropocene is, then, the Age of the Human. Coined some decades ago, the term Anthropocene has come into wider and more frequent use in recent years. It indicates an era in human history as well as natural history. The beginnings of the era are set differently. Some put the start around 4000 BCE (the Neolithic age and the beginnings of large-scale agriculture); others, at the beginning of the industrial revolution.3 The issue behind the dating of the Anthropocene is: what makes any dramatic transformation of the earth and biosphere, attributable to humanity, properly human? What aspects of human being become evident in the Anthropocene such that we call it the Age of the Human? Again, to put the issue more dramatically: Who is the Anthropos in the Anthropocene? By way of an outline, this chapter looks at the different approaches taken by the sciences of the Anthropocene. First, there is physics, for studying what is, importantly, a geophysical age. Scientists in disciplines like geology and geophysics document changes to the earth’s surface looking for evidence of human impact. Biology comes into play next, and the biosphere becomes the site for evidence of human-made changes in the “physiology” of earth, air, water and living things. Then the chapter moves toward the perspective of the human sciences—economics and political science. Before that move, however, the chapter explores a notion of Body Mapping, noted above, to seek a deeper, ontological, understanding of how the human species becomes implicated in a relationship with nature that leads to the emergence of the Anthropocene. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the Body Politic, defined as a common meeting space for addressing the problems of the commons. The end of this chapter will serve as a prelude to the next and last chapter exploring the challenges and prospects for a cosmopolitan politics. In the present chapter, a cross-disciplinary investigation is guided by an onto-epistemological interrogation driven by a phenomenology of human existence or being-in-the-world that seeks to show a modality of human being-in-the-world as the source and driving force of the Anthropocene.

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THE EARTH SCIENCES AND THE ANTHROPOCENE Let us begin our search for the Anthropocene with a hermeneutic of the geophysical approach. Cleary, Anthropocene science aspires to be a hard science of material reality. The Anthropocene itself is not intended to be understood as something existing in the eye of the beholder. No. The truth is “out there” in the world and things around us. The geophysical approach comes closest to realizing that ambition. The earth is a material body that has undergone substantive, material transformation; new material substances have entered the “natural” environment in great mass. Think not only of recent synthetics like polymers and latter-day ceramics but old synthetics that mark the earliest days of the Anthropocene—steel, for example. New objects, “man-made,” have been embedded in the landscape. They have grown as human population itself has grown, exponentially. Geophysics We begin our survey of earth sciences with geophysics which, for starters, can precisely map the physical changes correlated with human endeavors of various kinds.4 One can certainly and precisely measure and record the expansion of “man-made” structures on the earth, the number and extent of urban complexes, physical infrastructure, land under cultivation, levels of pollution and the physical effects thereof, changing climate patterns, the condition of soils impacted by human activity, and the list goes on. The geophysical changes can be correlated with human activities, but the question is what is distinctively human in those activities. Physical forces themselves impact on other physical objects and make for change. A meteor and a cannonball operate on the axioms of motion articulated by Galileo and Newton. Carbon dioxide will have a measurable and predictable impact on the retention of heat on the planet, but can the physics employed to measure, track, and predict the impact of one physical phenomenon on another ultimately explain what “motivates” the changes that are attributed to humans and their activities. The Anthropocene describes a physical world evidently and visibly transformed and reconfigured. The transformation occurring in the Anthropocene means something like a natural world, the earth as a whole, is remade in the image and likeness of humans. Physical changes are attributed, in some sense, to humans. Can this happen if abiotic matter is “left to its own devices?” Geology bears the imprint of human activity and chemistry tracks the composition and decomposition of material substances. Production, within the concept of the Antropocene, must be understood as a material process,

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but, at the same time, it must be distinctively human. What accounts for its human aspect? Why do we attribute the changes to the human species? One might want to employ nothing more than Newtonian axioms of movement and mechanical causality to physical changes, but the Anthropocene repeatedly refers to the “human footprint” on the earth and increasing traces of human production and evidence of human transformation of the materiality of the planet. Having mentioned production, one may note the productive transformation of the natural environment—indeed, the creation of built environments that serves as dwellings, work places, and infrastructures for collective species’ projects—is not a uniquely human phenomenon. Beavers build dams, birds build nests, bees build hives, and ants build mounds. Moreover, as thinkers from Aristotle to E. O. Wilson have said and described, the social insects not only build things and then inhabit their built environments but they work and communicate by way of signaling. After a fashion, they communicate.5 Moreover, theirs is a socially constructed environment, a work-world and living space semiotically constituted and sustained. Given all of this, geophysics needs to move from an abiotic nature and a mechanical causality to a biogeophysical nature and a biological semiotics that explains, at the very least, the biological sciences that may contribute to explaining what makes the Anthropocene anthropic. Biology, Biochemistry, and the Biosphere Biology has an uncontested place in geophysics, earth science. Our planetary biological starting point will be the earth understood as biosphere.6 Happily for natural science, the notion of an energy system writ large that the biosphere denotes offers a complex of physical processes amenable to measurement, calculation, and prediction—even as it offers an undergirding for the spread of humans all over the earth. In the Anthropocene narrative, the growth of the human population correlates with the human transformation of the globe. But what is distinctively human about the findings of this science of life and the planet? To be sure, the human is an animal, an organism. Does the human animal impact or steer bio-physical change in a way that no other animal or organism does? The earth is not a dead rock. The defining energy system of the biosphere is critical and is affected by the spread of a species over the planet and the destruction and disappearance of other species. It might seem that biology offers abundant evidence of the impact of humans on the biosphere. But is that impact distinctively human? Is it not the case that the human impact on the biosphere is not specifically human but rather applies to animal and plant species generally?

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Aristotle offers the first clue to understanding the “biophysics” of the Anthropocene. Plants and animals share the “power” of growing and seek nourishment.7 Every living thing grows by virtue of a defining possibility-of-being that depends on nourishment from outside itself. Biological science comes to understand nutrition and growth biochemically as a transfer of energy (e.g., via photosynthesis) and exchange of gases (e.g., oxygen and carbon dioxide).8 These processes complement one another in the biosphere and sustain the biomass within it. Malthus now enters into our account. What is distinctive about his theory is linking the growth of the human population to the growth of food sources to nourish the human animal species. (The contribution of Malthus to this biological account of the Anthropocene will be treated in depth under the concept of Body Mapping introduced later into the chapter.) For now, one must ask again what makes the human-animal contribution to the Anthropocene unique? Cows produce a lot more greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than do humans. Any animal, not just humans, exhales carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in their energy- and life-sustaining exchange within the biosphere. To be sure, one might respond that the cows emitting methane in such great quantities as to harm the balance of the biosphere are one’s raised as livestock by humans for the sake of a human diet appealing to humans and chosen by humans as such. For their part, the breeders of cows and food processors of cow meat and milk who produce these for human consumption are—need we say?—humans pursuing profit from sale of these food products from cows raised, milked, and slaughtered for human nourishment, consumption, and profit. All of this, is a human contribution, no doubt. Does it not, however, point, more deeply, to the way humans account for the Anthropocene, for the age that bears their name? Might the defining driving force of the Age be the human as homo economicus? Just these last, brief notes regarding the effect of biology suggest that the discipline of biology provides at least a necessary basis accounting for Anthropocene phenomena. Although the science of biology identifies biological factors that correlate with the bio-sphere changes within the scoped of the Anthropocene, does it succeed in fully and finally attributing the Age to the human inasmuch as human choices enable biological phenomena to have their effect? To be sure, the natural scientists retain the warrant to speak of the Anthropocene as an epoch of natural history, but it is not just a natural history, and it begs the question of why it is called the Age of the Human. This might be regarded as a semantic quibble except that the data that the scientists are gathering raise the prospects of great risks and perils of concern to humans. In that light, one may ask more deeply the meaning of attribution when we correlate the phenomena to human presence and behavior. Is

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correlation causation? Does attribution of the effects to humans entail human responsibility for those effects? If so, what is to be done? The reasoning from correlation to causation and therefrom to attribution and responsibility suggest that the “humanity” implied in the Age of the Human is better sought out in the human sciences and humanities which investigate and evaluate the deliberate human action—individual and social. Before moving on to the human sciences, however, the chapter will give play to the concept of Body Mapping. MAPPING THE ANTHROPOCENE Body mapping comes into play at the point where biology and the biosphere take into account embodied humanity in the advent of the Anthropocene. Body mapping is a concept introduced by this author, based on the ideas of Thomas Malthus, economist and demographer. The body mapping envisioned here is quite different from that defined by the theory and practice of “body mapping” employed in wide-ranging research and types of therapy. Body mapping, in the conventional sense, signifies making a map of the body.9 Like any map, a body map represents the body in one or more aspects. Symbols on the map have a one-to-one correspondence to pertinent bodily features or processes. An isomorphic relationship obtains between the map and the body. The body map might be a static representation of body structures or a dynamic representation of body functions. The body map is made consciously and deliberately by a mapmaker and made with the mapmaker’s interests and objectives in mind, perhaps therapeutic, e.g., how might a map of body locate the effects of type 2 diabetes? The kind of mapping considered in this chapter is the result of a thought experiment made here in which the human body is thought to map itself on the earth. In this conception, the body is the mapper. Its map is no mere representation of itself or the earth. Mapping is not about representing. The body, here conceived, “imprints” and transforms the earth, changes the earth geophysically as well as the biosphere. The body map and the earth it maps exhibit—as does any map and the territory it maps—an isomorphism. In this case, however, the map “comes first” and imprints its bodily behaviors to the earth’s surface where it, the body, makes contact with the earth. And, it does this over time as the “body mapping” moves over the earth’s surface. The mapping reconfigures the earth itself, materially changes it. The human body that maps itself in this way is the biomass of the human species deployed in the biological functions of movement, growth, and human reproduction. The body maps itself to the earth by way of population growth and spread. Thereby—and not just thereby—the earth itself becomes a map of the body

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and maps of the earth come to show where “the species-body” has settled. Arguably, Thomas Malthus reconceived the species-being of the human in a way that linked the body to the earth such that the future of human reproduction was tied to the plant and animal life of the planet. A fuller connection of Malthus to the Anthropocene, as conceived here, will follow the analysis of the three conceptual reconfigurations Malthus introduces to describe the human-earth relationship. The ratio of food growth to human population growth that Malthus posited and the predictions he drew from that did not hold quite as he anticipated.10 Population did not outstrip food production grosso modo. And, population was not limited by arable land but spread to territories all around the world and not just naturally hospitable places. Moreover, technology has come to tax the earth in ways Malthus could not imagine. The point that this analysis takes from Malthus and relates to the Anthropocene is this: the adverse human imprint on the earth revealed in the Anthropocene is literally “grounded” by a body mapping that constitutes and reveals the fundamental embodied connectivity to and dependence of the human species on the earth (by way of soil to grow food to support human nourishment). Returning again to its very conception, the Anthropocene invites an image of the earth as bearing the traces of the human—one might imagine human footprints on the surface of the planet or a face staring back at us humans from the earth as a kind of spherical mirror or human presence reflecting itself back to us humans. All of this is metaphorical but arguably insinuated by the language of the Anthropocene. I am not suggesting that the human being shows up, even in imagination, as something like the Man in the Moon, but rather in the traces of our activity (footprints?) or in the species-body itself spread across the globe and evident at ground level to a fellow species spectator or interlocutor. Consider the press of flesh in a crowded city or slum or subway. Or, migrating desert nomads in the most unexpected places, whose unexpected presence only testifies to the spread of our species-fellows. The empirical “purchase” of the species-body concept concretely unfolds if we unpack the Malthusian conceptual breakthrough and apply the notion of body mapping. The Malthusian breakthrough goes deeper than his mathematics of population growth vs. growth of food sources. Underlying his well-known calculations and the conclusions he draws from them are three re-conceptualizations of great moment in themselves, ones involving the human species, the body, and our way of being on the earth.

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Human Species-being Aristotle, as noted earlier in the chapter, famously defined the human as a zoon echon logos, poorly translated as a rational animal.11 More deeply and richly one might define the human as a living being having speech. Speech encompasses rationality but much more. Aristotle’s own philosophical anthropology hangs together a lot better on the terms of this translation. But, this is an aside. The point is that Malthus defines our species with a whole different logic, no matter how one translates Aristotle. Definitions of the classical sort consist of a genus and differentiae. The genus to which human species belongs is animal or living being. The distinguishing and defining difference is rationality or speech. When Malthus writes about the species, he is talking about all of the members of the species, or what logicians call the extension of the term. Moreover, Malthus counts the members of that set, as zoological units. So, for starters, it is not “the” human being he means to speak of, but rather human beings in the plural, all of them, the sum total of them, as biological units. Moreover, his arithmetic is about keeping count over time. One can see where this going. Malthus shifts the focus to our fleshy biological bodily being from all that speech encompasses and he reconceives it with a notion of population. Population The word derives from the Latin for “people” as in the Roman phrase, “Senatus populusque Romane: the ‘Senate and People of Rome.” The sense of the term is political, and counting people is about estimating political power. When the counting is done and the votes are cast, one gets a “head count.” In the Renaissance cities of Italy, counting and population therewith come to connote still something else. Heads are counted for taxation and money is counted for trade, exchange, and banking.12 With Malthus, one counts biological units. These are defined by the powers of growth and reproduction. And, what is decisive for his purposes is the growth of these “bio-atoms” in aggregate. Not the growth of a single living thing.13 Aristotle was a close observer of living things and in De Anima worked hard at distinguishing the various powers that differentiated plants from animals and from the human animal—at the apex of living things. By contrast, two powers entered into the Malthusian calculus: growth and survival coming from self-nourishment and reproduction. The human species—not unlike the plants and animals that nourish it—is an aggregate of biotic units that is, at the same time, a biomass that imprints itself, maps itself, on the earth. And, that leads to the third conceptual innovation of Malthus.

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A Biomass in the Biosphere Neither term, of course, appears in Malthus. Quite arguably however, no one else thought our human being-on-the-earth in quite the way he did and with greater consequence for the being-of-the-earth or our being-on-the-earth. Connectedness to the earth affects our very survival as a species, now and into the future, and, that same connection draws energy and sustenance from the planet as it transforms the landscape and look of earth. Imprinting—as defined in this chapter by way of body mapping—occurs and makes an early contribution to the advent of the Anthropocene in a way that goes beyond what geophysical “laws” can account for of themselves. The mapping also determines changes that operate with a kind of mute force that trumps the rational and language-meditated efforts by humans to map the world in ways more favorable to both humans and the earth at large. It remains to show the ontological significance of body mapping. This entails articulating the human-earth relationship that develops by virtue of such mapping. That relationship can be stated clearly. It is one of connectedness. The very existence of the human species depends upon the resources of the earth. To nourish and grow, humans require the resources the earth provides. The expansion and continuation of the species involves biological reproduction and space for a growing population to live and labor. The functions of self-nutrition and reproduction are those of the biological unit that makes up the human population conceived in Malthusian terms. The connection is more than the product of empirical, third-person observation. In each case, that of the human and that of the earth, the bond goes to define what it is to be that being. Without the bond to the earth, the human, whose genus is animal fails to count as a kind of living being that takes in nourishment of a certain kind and reproduces in a certain, defining, way. Even before considering the essential difference, logos, that distinguishes the human animal as human from all other animals in the genus, the being in question is “out of the running” if its animality is ignored. As for the earth, its nature is understood in relation to humanity. How it discloses itself will depend upon that being to whom beings and the being of beings disclose themselves. The language used here is familiar to readers of Heidegger but it should not be necessary to take a long side road in Heideggerian thought to the make the essential point here. In thought and in practice, the way the earth shows itself is shown to that being, human being, which can be said to be the “staging ground” for the ways the earth manifests itself. So, for example, in the human activity of farming the earth reveals itself as a resource, something ready-to-hand to serve a purpose given to it by humans. In a raging thunderstorm, the earth (taken here to include the skies and sea) demonstrates a power that issues from itself with overriding force on humans. None of the many ways in which

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the earth presents itself to human-being-in-the world is an arbitrary construct or a human fiction overlaid on a mute presence. The ontological point made here is not that of German idealism crudely conceived. Beings of many kinds exist before the appearance of humans on the earth. The relevant point is that how those beings stand out (or withdraw) from the site of their actuality is dependent upon human inter-face with them. No less the earth. It, we might say, comes into its own in face of the human. Body mapping, then, is seen as a modality of the human-earth bond inasmuch as it inserts humans into a relationship to earth in which humans as a biomass operate as biological units to carry out the functions of self-nutrition and reproduction, thereby imprinting the image of human occupation on the earth. This occupation in its visibility and concrete effects is driven by biological imperatives that motivate human behaviors that transform the earth and give rise to an epochal event called the Anthropocene. “Motivate,” however, is meant to suggest a defining and beneficent ambiguity in the way that humans embark on their occupation of the earth. Like other animals, humans function within the domain of instincts and ethology articulates instinctive patterns of behavior from birth that guide if not determine certain behaviors.14 These patterns are reinforced and supplemented by behaviors said to be imprinted by parents on new born and developing offspring, constituting learned behavior. In the case of humans, instinctual behavior does not strictly determine behavior outcomes. Human instincts operate within a field of choice in which possibilities of being solicit desirable outcomes or purposeful means-to-end courses of action.15 Motivation indicates a pre-given disposition that need not engage active, fully conscious, and deliberate acts. At the same time, motivated action does not lead automatically to predictable outcomes. Other courses of action are possible from the motives that form our approach to choice. Conversely several different motivations may lead to a certain outcome. Motivations building upon an instinctual base tend to govern the biotic units of the biomass—as these terms are used here—in a way that leaves aside, for the most part, calculation or, still more, reflection and deliberation, either on the individual level or the collective level. HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS PREDICAMENT, AND HOW DO WE GET OUT OF IT? These last points are critical for understanding the way that body mapping brings the species into the predicament of the Anthropocene. The dynamic described above puts the human species on autopilot. The result is driven by bio-functions like nourishment and reproduction that are not collectively

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determined, but rather play out at the level of the individual biotic unit. The outcome of unit-expressed and driven functions adds up to an overall outcome that is the sum of the behaviors of its parts. If it leads to consequences that adversely affect the future of the species, these are not consciously prefigured in the single or one-to-one “choices” made at the unit level. A means-end logic (e.g., on how best to nourish oneself) or a one-on-one “negotiation” on reproduction, for example, figure above the level of brute instinct but not at the level of broad and regular group discussion and collective decision-making, least of all, if ever decisively, at a whole-of-the-earth level. The anthropos in the Anthropocene does not show itself fully in body mapping. Body mapping, however, does put the human into play in generating behaviors which put a “human stamp” on the earth. Body mapping is a necessary if not sufficient condition for calling the Anthropocene the Age of the Human. To this point, however, one might call it the Age of an Invasive Species in which any number of species might give their name to the Age. Economics: Theory and Practice Before we get to the discussion, of logos and the Body Politic, as hinted in the layout of the chapter narrative, the role of economics comes into play. Here we draw upon the discussion of marketplace in the last chapter. The market, we saw, is a domain not especially tethered to specific geographical locations but better described as a “price mechanism”—a dynamic that has enormous influence on the look and figuration of the earth and rise of the Anthropocene as it guides “consumers” of earth resources (food and more) to their households. As a price mechanism, the market operates as a data communication system guiding the actions of buyers, sellers, investors, workers—the majority of us humans who, in living our lives as we would like, spend a good deal of time “making a living.” Between the biomass of us body mapping ourselves over the earth, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the body politic (We, the people”), there is another Anthropos: the homo economicus whose modus operandi is calculation, as Max Weber described it. Calculation goes beyond the need and instinct-driven process of body mapping, but falls short of the collective and deliberative decision-marking defining the body politic, as used here. Like body mapping, the market steers humans to seek their well-being largely at the individual level. As such, the market is a powerful vehicle alongside body mapping. Since the advent of the modern marketplace and the Age of Commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, human beings, in the aggregate and on average produce and consume and accumulate on a scale unprecedented in human history.16 Combined with technology, informed by techno-science, market power has narrowed the gap between

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population growth and resources to feed that population, especially if one looks at aggregate totals and averages and discounts or minimizes disparities in the distribution of income and wealth. The achievement of scale has kept Malthusian fears at bay, but, in the meantime, the earth has been depleted of resources and the biosphere seriously damaged by the great “engine of growth” unleashed by the market. The collective harms documented by the sciences of the Anthropocene have escaped notice as we have operated within paradigms premised on individual outlook, motivation, and calculation. Notwithstanding that, the costs of damage to the earth commons are making themselves known with ever more alarming events and trends. All this then brings one to look to political space as a site for assessing the harms and taking collective action, as a species, as earthlings, and doing something to mitigate and forestall greater harms. The great “Who” question that opens this chapter—“Who is the Anthropos in the Anthropocene?”—seems to have found its answer. As the unintended consequences and exogenous costs of unhappy human interaction with earth become increasingly evident to more and more of the speaking species—now listening to what the earth has to say for itself. We can attribute the harms of the Anthropocene to human behaviors. Moreover, we can take responsibility for them. What is distinctly human about the Anthropocene is its namesake’s being able to take account of the harm, assess the damages, and hold itself accountable. Cognition, reflection, and responsibility—hallmarks of human being, make the Age of Human a fitting name for it. The breakthrough recognition of the predicament of the Age came as the its harms, threats, and challenges presented a compelling collective, whole-of-the-earth aspect. And, that is why the mode of response appears to require a holistic and collective approach. That would be one that points to the space of politics configured as common meeting place to address common issues. Here, that place is called the body politic. The exposition of the concept of a worldwide polity waits to the concluding chapter of the book, coming next. For now, we might briefly survey the heritage of political theory that has grown up with population growth and dispersal, the market, and the elements of the Anthropocene itself. This survey can only sketch the background of some of the political ideas that have shaped human governance of world and relationship to the earth. Nonetheless, it can serve as a prelude to the enviro-political issues at the end while the antecedents for them are still fresh in mind. Political Theory It may seem arbitrary to focus on Locke and entirely skip others outside his orbit. Arguably, however, Locke and the classical economists introduce a

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cluster of ideas that move the notion of the Anthropocene into their bailiwick—notwithstanding the fact that the term is a decade of so old and Locke is some centuries behind us. The Lockean narrative imagines a moment in human history when humans emerge from the chaotic liberty of the state of nature into the ordered space of civil society. From that point we may trace the path from labor to property, product, exchange, and then commodity—all of this leading to the global transformation that prompts some present-day Marxists to suggest that the Anthropocene should be called the capital-cene. But we move too fast. Returning to Locke, the space of civil society, not only defines itself vis-à-vis its other, the state of nature, but is itself a space divided by the mine and thine, i.e., private property. Surely, now, one might think, we have the distinctly, indeed exclusively, human phenomena that warrant calling a geophysical era the Antropocene, Age of the Human. Birds and bees may build things and create products, but do not exchange what is theirs for what is another’s. More than that, other animal species do not enter into social contracts that establish the bounds of freedom and sovereignty. Are not market exchange and political contestation and consensus distinctly human and do these activities not affect the planet and the biosphere as a whole? Generally, Locke sounds a positive note when he points to political space as the site for taking measure of a human domain. “Political” space, is, on the one hand, outside “the state of nature” and yet, on the other hand, inevitably on the earth. As such, politics is situated to view matters from a distance and consider the general welfare, but close enough to the matters at hand to weigh the issues and consider competing interests. The “catch” is this: the polity that Locke envisions is founded on a contract less to promote the common good than to protect personal freedom and self-interests. On his own terms, Malthus seems to come out better. In aggregate, food and other resources for human sustenance and growth have kept pace with population increases, but the techno-economic nexus to achieve that have created a dominion of the earth that imperils the earth and its human inhabitants. The upshot of this brief chapter is to underscore the importance of thinking in tandem and reciprocally our being-on-the earth and the well-being of the earth. Body Mapping thinks a primary material connection of humans and the planet. But, it remains for us humans to whom the Anthropocene gives de facto ownership to earth to care for it. Such care would fall to humans acting together. It would count as a being-in-the-world with others. And, it would effect a way of dwelling on the earth that moves toward unfolding the sense of dwelling in its broadest scope. The next and concluding chapter will endeavor to assess the challenges and prospects for such dwelling.

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NOTES 1. Kress, W. John, and Jeffrey K. Stine, eds., “Introduction,” Living in the Anthropocene (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2017), 1. 2. Aristotle, trans. Philip H. Wiksteed and Francis M. Cornford, The Physics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), Book II, chapter 1, lines 8–30. 3. McNeill, J. R., “The Advent of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene, 15. 4. Wing, Scott L., Thinking Like a Mountain in the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene, 20. 5. Wilson, Edward O., The Insect Societies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 6. Vernadsky, Vladimir I., trans. David B. Langmuir, The Biosphere (New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1998). 112. 7. Aristotle, trans. W. S. Hett, On the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), Book II, chapters 2, 3. 8. Vernadsky, Biosphere, 42, 46 9. Entering the search term “body mapping” into a search engine will identify clear definitions and numerous examples of same from the Web. 10. Malthus, Thomas, On the Principle of Population, Volume I (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1914), Book I, chapter 1. 11. Aristotle, trans. H. R. Backham, Nichomachaen Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), I, xiii. 12. Poovy, Mary, The History of the Modern Fact, Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7–9. 13. Poovy, Fact, 285–86. 14. Lorenz, Konrad, Studies in Human and Animal Behavior, Volume I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 116–17. 15. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckman, The Structures of the Life World, Volume II (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989) 33. 16. McNeill, J. R., Anthropocene, 10–17.

Chapter 12

Earthling or Cosmopolitan? The Limits and Prospects of Interlocution

Dwelling is the question. From the first to this concluding chapter of the book, dwelling has been the theme of the reflections carried out here. In what sense, however, is dwelling a question? Without sounding facetious, the question in not whether to dwell or not to dwell; inevitably we find ourselves already always dwelling somewhere and we come to ask about where and how we dwell. Dwelling places include a “place of one’s own” or home, a homeland, place of refuge, land of opportunity, an escape from heat and cold or into the wild. Places are where dwelling takes place. And, on and within those places we connect or disconnect from the earth and dwell alongside others who may be strangers, neighbors, or foes. This brings us to the “how” of dwelling. How do we and how should we dwell? The “how” here may sound the note of a how-to book, from the shelves of self- or home-improvement reading. Here, the concern is with the way we humans live our lives on the earth with other humans. Following on the thought of the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the very being of human beings is a being-in-the-world with others. In each case, that way of being is jemeinig, distinctly mine. So, we find ourselves cohabiting the earth with others both like and unlike ourselves. Human cohabitation of the earth at whole-of-the-earth level is a daunting task. Our lives are rooted in different “soils” of the earth and often when we meet on common ground to interact we come from different lifeworlds. This holds true at the nation-state level. And, even at that level, success does not come easily. The task at hand in this concluding chapter, however, requires us to look to farthest horizons of the earth and seek terms of reference for coexistence and collaboration across the planet. 203

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The virtues of the “earthling” (to be defined more precisely later in the chapter, but someone closely attached to the earth by way of occupation or commitment) and the cosmopolitan would seem well suited to the task and complementary to each other. But then the title expresses an “either/or” choice that might seem curious, if not outrageous. Why should the “earthling” (as intimated) and the cosmopolitan be at odds? Is not the present-day internationalist, by definition, someone with a “whole-earth” perspective? Internationalist C. Maxwell Stanley, speaking for his foundation, asserted the indispensable need for a global effort to deal with threats to the biosphere decades before the current mounting concerns regarding global climate change.1 Far from being opposed, should not the respective outlooks of cosmopolitan and earthling be seen as mutually supportive? A BRIEF HISTORY OF COSMOPOLITANISM To be sure, we must define our terms. Cosmopolitanism has a long history. The word itself combines two Greek terms: cosmos, meaning natural order; polis, (=citadel, city) signifying sociopolitical or man-made order. Following Stephen Toulmin, cosmopolis “fuses” the two orders, natural and political, producing the “philosophical idea that the structure of nature reinforces a rational social order.”2 The Stoics first effected this fusion of orders. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic writer, concludes his Meditations with a reference to citizenship in the “world-city” (book 12, para 36). Meditations, more Stoic than cosmopolitan, gives expression to key cosmopolitan ideas: world order (book 7, para 9); the place of humans within the greater order (book 7, para 13); and, the “duty” of humankind to conform to “World Nature” and the human “natural constitution” (book 7, para 55).3 Marcus Aurelius does not put forward a plan for world government, but then he was the ruler of a de facto near-cosmopolis, the Roman Empire. According to Toulmin, the fortunes of cosmopolis decline with the theology of St. Augustine and only rise again with sixteenth-century French thinkers sympathetic to the Stoic idea of holding human conduct to the standard of nature.4 Peter Gay, historian of the Enlightenment, tells us that the philosophe “was a cosmopolitan by conviction as well as by training.” He quotes Diderot saying to Hume, “My dear David, you belong to all nations, and you’ll never ask an unhappy man for his birth-certificate. I flatter myself that I am, like you, citizen of the great city of the world.”5 Here, cosmopolis means worldoutlook rather than world government. Our reflection will make use of Kant’s “modern version” of cosmopolitanism in his essay, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.”6 Several factors recommend the choice of Kant to represent

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cosmopolitan thought. Kant’s speculation has traditional cosmopolitan breadth. It embraces “the human race as a whole” as its history plays out over “unreckonable generations” upon the “great world stage.”7 In true cosmopolitan fashion, Kant links the natural and sociopolitical orders under “universal laws;8 his vision of a “league of nations” (Seventh Thesis) gives a definite political form to the cosmopolitan notion of world community—a notion turned “blueprint” for world government in Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace.”9 Kant’s ideas not only live on in current expressions of cosmopolitan thought, to which we will briefly allude later, but his effort to envision cosmopolis as the outgrowth of nature suggests that cosmopolis is earth-friendly. THE FAMILY OF EARTHLINGS For its part, “earthling” is a neologism. We will elaborate a broader, “descriptive” definition of it from the core notion, posited, that earthlings are those who hold the earth in special regard vis-à-vis other beings and humankind, and who are defined by their relation to the earth. “Earthling” is meant to apply broadly to modes of thought and life shared by various kinds of individuals and groups—e.g., indigenous peoples, premoderns, “Greens” and other environmental activists, naturalists, romantics like Emerson and Thoreau, and “back-to-nature” pioneers. This heterogeneous assembly may suggest that “earthling” derives from an inductive approach that surveys the field and isolates a commonality or least common denominator. The “method” used here, however, is itself heterogeneous and not simply inductive. We “deduce” from the notions of special regard for the earth and closeness to the earth an “earthliness” that more or less holds across the family of types mentioned. Indeed, earthliness should be seen as giving rise to “family resemblance”: not all features will apply to each type of earthling or apply in the same way or to the same degree. On the hypothesis that indigenous peoples are most “earthly,” their situation receives special emphasis and the question of their fate in a cosmopolitan order concludes this chapter. The data of ethnography, mythology, and other disciplines will provide a check on our analysis and speculation so as to ensure that “earthling” has a fundamentum in re. Phenomenologists may see the workings of “imaginative variation” in the fisherman narrative below. Fictively inserting oneself in the world of an earthling is intended to see and show more vividly and dynamically what is essential in his/her constitutive relationships. Presumptively perhaps, the author would call his overall method phenomenological, as it aims for a sense of what is essential to earthliness via reflection on the lived experience of the earth.

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ELEMENTS OF EARTHLINESS We will begin where we stand: on the earth. The earthling, we posit, regards the earth as a special being. Negatively, this implies that the earth is not just one among many other beings, an object among objects, a planet among planets essentially determined by its time-space coordinates, its mass and momentum. If the earth is special, it cannot be derivative, secondary, or subordinate. The special has primacy and power, is encompassing, foundational, originating and commanding. These positive attributes are named in the earliest evocations of earth. The Vedas tell us that Prthivi, earth [goddess] “bears the burden of the mountains’ weight” and “holds with [her] might the forest-trees upon the ground.” Prthivi, “of many streams . . . the potent one” “quickens . . . the soil.” Prthivi, the “far-spreading one . . . sends forth the swelling cloud.”10 For the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians the earth is not a mere constituent of the cosmos but its center and origin. “And earth first gave birth to the starry heaven,” Hesiod says.11 In the maps and cosmologies of ancient people’s (e.g., the Babylonians), the earth is central, the heavens, peripheral.12 Julian Berger, secretary in 1993 for the United Nation’s International Year for the Indigenous People, notes that “although indigenous people vary widely in their customs, culture, and impact on the land, all consider the Earth a Parent and revere it accordingly. ‘Mother Earth’ is the center of the universe, the core of their culture, the origin of their identity as a people.”13 For earthlings who are not indigenous—the earthling-scientist, romantic, or environmental activist—a quiet awe and respect for the earth, reflected in poetry, the tenets of ecology, or a fierce devotion to environmental protection may serve as analogue for reverence rooted in a religio-mythic worldview. Formed by modern thought, we might characterize the earthling’s earth as a kind of material a priori, not an object within space and time, measured by these “universal” forms, but rather that which first forms our experience of space and time, the place of all places, original calendar and chronicle. Indigenous cosmologies seem invariably to make the local landscape a model for the cosmos. In Northwest Amazonia, anthropologist Kaj Arhem tells us, “Pira-Pirana groups conceptualize the cosmos as an immense ‘moloca,’ a World House with doors, posts, beams, walls and roof. . . . The model of the ‘moloca’ cosmos is mapped onto the major features—the hills, rivers and rapids—of the local landscape.”14 For the Makuna, one Pira-Pirana group, Arhem continues, “topographic names encode ancestral events and literally turn them into places.”15 Along the same lines, philosopher Ernst Cassirer tells us how the Zunis “classify” all natural and social phenomena, everything

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from the seasons to occupations like hunting and warfare, within a spatiality defined by a totemically articulated earth.16 The relation of earth and human being takes us to the heart of the matter. The earthling lives from the earth, is of the earth, we want to say. But what can this mean beyond the fact that we all depend upon the earth’s bounty for our sustenance? How might earthliness, as a distinctive mode of life and thought, be distinguished? Perhaps, if modern, technologically determined life is characterized by a highly mediated relationship to the earth, episodic and one-sided, then earthliness might consist in a relation that is immediate. The Lakota thinker Standing Bear describes what immediacy entails for his people: The Lakota was a . . . lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth. . . . It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. . . . [Lakota] tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.17

Earthling or not, we eat. Food connects us to the earth, but in a global market that connection is mediated and indirect. Specialized labor is exchanged for money is exchanged for food. By contrast, earthlings—specifically the indigenous—hunt, grow, gather, and herd. These pursuits insert one into the element, involve a struggle which discloses not only the earth’s abundance, but its refractory nature as well. The Imraguen fishermen of Mauritania offer a striking image of immersion in the element. They literally throw themselves with their nets into the waters, swimming among their catch (mullet) and sharing their bounty with dolphins who “get the ones that get away.”18 In another register, Thoreau’s description of bean cultivation in Walden suggests that even the gardener—Thoreau is more gardener than farmer—can get close to the earth in “making the earth say beans instead of grass.” Sardonically, he tells us how a “home-staying, laborious native of the soil” can come to have the “singular experience” of a “long acquaintance . . . with beans.” It may be trivializing the sense of “struggle with nature” to recall Thoreau’s “long war” with those “Trojans,” the weeds, but in its own wry way, the “war account” attests not only to the incorrigibility of nature but also to an immediacy that translates as intimacy with nature on a small scale.19 We should avoid romanticizing; the earthling can be very practical. Thoreau kept his accounts, and Emerson, in the essay “Nature” discusses his subject first under the heading of “Commodity” and then under “Beauty.”20 For earthlings, the earth has use-value. A forest-survey team visiting Nggatokae Island

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in the Salomons, a land whose forest is bounded by totem trees and legends, recounts how a “village-scientist” would “pause frequently to point out a useful plant—a vine shoot good for a fish lure, a sapling that can be used as a spear . . . leaves that yield potent painkillers.”21 The larger point is made by the Cree. For them, as for other indigenous peoples, practicality and reverence go hand in hand. Religion, consumption, work, and resource conservation are not discrete and unrelated compartments of life. Hunting, killing, butchering, and eating the meat of bear, beaver, otter, and porcupine are vested with religious meaning and governed by religious prescriptions. When the prescriptions are observed, these practices, far from violating the sacredness of the animals, affirm the belief that the animals are gifts of the North Wind. Conversely, careful, i.e., religiously observant, hunting has the practical benefit of preserving the hunted species, by controlling the animal population, as well as nourishing humans and serving other human needs—e.g., skins for clothing. Cree life shows an integral, holistic relationship to the earth characteristic of countless other indigenous peoples.22 An earthling could only have a “holistic” relationship to the earth. Any one-sided approach would reduce the earth to an object framed by a project. A purely cognitive or pragmatic relation would make of the earth what suits our purposes, theoretical or economic. “Holistic” here does not signify that the earthling relates to the earth in its entirety, but rather that she responds to her part of the earth with the whole of her being. Holism is a multifaceted, integral response to a nature that shows us many sides. The fisherman who seeks to protect his catch from the ravages of a storm at once acknowledges the bounty of the waters he fishes, has used all his cleverness to entrap fish within his nets, feels awe and alarm and rage at the power of the tempest, and will do battle with the element to save himself and his catch so that he and his kin can eat and enjoy what he has wrested from the depths of the waters. The fisherman’s relationship to nature is direct but not simple. Nature is bountiful, antagonistic, threatening, sustaining, and awe-inspiring. In his daily, seabound existence, the fisherman is cognitively, affectively, and pragmatically implicated in the life of the sea. The immediacy of the earthlings’ relation to the earth would seem to imply privileging that part of the earth one inhabits. One cannot have an intimate relationship with the planet as a whole. To be sure, one can conceive of the earth in its entirety; it can be the object for any number of wide-ranging though essentially unidimensional undertakings. What seems obvious, however, is that one cannot enjoy an immediate and all-engaging relationship with the whole planet. Until the stirring imagery of the earth taken from space, the earth as a whole was a concept and even with the pictures it remains an object seen—an image mediated by photography for all but a few astronauts who viewed it directly from their vantage point.

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Ethnography witnesses to the role of locality in defining relationship to the earth. Ronald and Catherine Berndt, students of Aboriginal life, write, “no traditional Aboriginal myth was told without reference to the land, or to a specific stretch of country where the incidents it narrates were believed to have taken place . . . the land and all within it was irrevocably tied up with the content of a myth or story, just as were (and are) the people themselves.”23 Attachment to one’s immediate natural surroundings is the foundation of bioregionalism. Its advocate Kirkpatrick Sale suggests that, to become dwellers in the land . . . to come to know the earth fully and honestly, the crucial . . . and all-encompassing task is to understand place, the immediate specific place where we live . . . the soils and rocks under our feet; the source of the waters we drink; the different kinds of winds; the common insects, birds, mammals, plants, and trees [of our area].24

COSMOPOLIS PER KANT With this brief, but hopefully illustrative “definition” of earthliness, we may now ask whether it is compatible with cosmopolitanism? Kant’s cosmopolitanism seems especially earth-friendly. Like any cosmopolis, Kant’s is a polis or state of “cosmic” scope, worldwide. His polis is cosmic in another significant way, however. “Cosmos” means world, and specifically natural world, order. Kant’s cosmopolis derives from the “natural order.” His argument comprises nine theses. In all but two, nature figures significantly. Number Eight might best express the overall thrust of the essay: “The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed.”25 At first blush, Kant answers affirmatively the question we pose: Are earthliness and cosmopolitanism compatible? Indeed, not only are they compatible, it sees, one derives from the other: the cosmopolitan ideal state, Kant says, is the “natural outcome” of nature, its hidden purpose. Before we “paint Kant green,” carefully consider the “nature of the nature” in his cosmopolitan scheme. The nature which “wills” and “destines” here is a denatured nature, a nature in concept and name in which the earth does not figure. The order of nature becomes nature as order, albeit a dynamic order. The concept of nature is nature as concept, namely the concept of purpose. Whenever nature is used in an overarching sense, it means purpose—or perhaps better, purposiveness. Purpose is, of course, a key concept in the understanding of natural things, but Kant has abstracted the notion of purpose from any embeddedness in the organic to apply it to human history.

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To be sure, other senses of “nature”—more organic—operate. Kant speaks of nature in terms of organic endowment (“Nature gave him neither the horns of bull, the claws of the lion, the fangs of the dog”),26 as generation or birth (viz., the births of Kepler and Newton),27 and as need and passion (which drive humankind to restraint).28 Earth is only mentioned parenthetically: the human being finds itself the “only rational being on earth”—a significant characterization that hardly speaks to a close human-earth relationship.29 Living things are seldom mentioned; when they are, they often serve only as metaphors. Kant speaks of trees and the womb. The tree-forest relationship provides an analogy for the individual in society.30 Trees are not taken on their own terms as natural beings but serve as a rhetorical device. Is it going too far to say that the natural is reduced to convenient imagery when the womb is used metaphorically to depict cosmopolis as a supportive environment for human development? At least three senses of the natural are central to Kant’s argument: 1.  Nature is purpose (= purposiveness), one that is higher, hidden, and collective. “Nature has willed . . . Nature knows . . . demands . . . assigns. . . . Nature here follows a lawful course. . . . Nature . . . works not without plan or purpose.”31 As to the secret and broader workings of Nature, Kant writes: “Even if we are too blind to see the secret mechanism of its workings, this Idea may still serve as a guiding thread for presenting as a system, at least in broad outlines, what would otherwise be a planless conglomeration of human actions.”32 2.  Nature as “state of nature” is conflict among individuals and nations, owing to the “unsocial sociability of men,” the product of contradictory natural strivings: “inclination to associate with others” and a “strong propensity to isolate himself from others.”33 The resulting conflict drives humankind toward the realization of its ultimate purpose: the cosmopolitan state. Under the Seventh Thesis, Kant tells us “the friction among men . . . is used by Nature to establish a condition of quiet and security.” And, further on, “All wars are . . . attempts . . . in the intention of Nature . . . to establish . . . a state . . . which . . . can maintain itself automatically.”34 3.  Nature is metaphor for the “universal cosmopolitan condition” itself, a condition which is described as “the womb within which all the original capacities of the human race can develop.”35 Nature first posits cosmopolis as its ultimate purpose, then “goads” human beings to attain a cosmopolitan condition by endowing them with contradictory instincts, and then finally furnishes the metaphor for understanding the nurturing of human development in cosmopolitan society.

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In our reading of Kant we find nature more conceptual and metaphorical than living and populated with things that grow. To be sure, the earth is “missing in action,” but does Kantian cosmopolitanism contradict earth-grounded thought and life? Notwithstanding first impressions, the nature which plays such a propelling role in human history, is linked to human reason in such a way that reason removes itself from and prevails over nature. Nature (the nonrational) is alien to human being. There is that telling parenthetical phrase which begins the Second Thesis: “In man (as the only rational creature on earth).”36 How remarkable it is that in one of the few mentions of earth, humankind is depicted as alone and alienated from the rest of creation and the earth itself by virtue of humanity’s defining attribute and power, i.e., reason—a reason which sets human being “far beyond natural instinct” and “acknowledges no limits to its projects.”37 Nature is a human construct. In another remarkable formulation Kant writes, “we leave it to Nature to produce the man capable of composing it. Thus Nature, produced Kepler, who subjected . . . the eccentric paths of the planets to definite laws; and, she produced Newton, who explained these laws by a universal natural cause.”38 Is it reading into the text to hear Kant saying that Nature is deficient, eccentric and lawless until brought to perfection and order by human reason? Are we stretching the point to see Nature’s value as deriving from “her” giving birth to (“producing”) “men” who would set her straight? If Nature is dependent on human reason for its meaning; human reason, by contrast, is gloriously independent of Nature and resourceful. The Third Thesis reads: “Nature has willed, that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.”39 Ironically, if humankind can be thankful to Nature, it is not for its abundance, but its stinginess, i.e., its not endowing humans with the formidable capabilities of other animals—making it necessary for humans to develop their reason.40 Nature is subservient to the ultimate triumph of reason. Deficiencies of endowment and the limitations of instinctive capabilities as well as the needs and passions which incite to conflict—all these conditions of “Nature” ultimately lead to the triumph of reason in the cosmopolitan condition. And this triumph, is the goal and the work of Nature as purpose! Nature is said to have cosmopolis as its purpose because as restricted natural endowment it forces reason to exercise itself and transcend mere instinct-bound animality. Then as “state of Nature”—competition/conflict among humans based on need and passion—it forces humans to form civic unions or states, and ultimately states are compelled to join in a union of states, a cosmopolitan political

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order. The point is that the value and purpose of Nature lies outside itself in the historical project of cosmopolis! The meaning of Nature as understood by the Greeks—that which has the principle of its being within itself—turns around completely. Now we begin to see lines of conflict between cosmopolitanism ala Kant and earthliness as described: •   Nature as abstract natural order, discernable to reason in its planetary, long-term purposes versus the earth as locality, known in the concreteness of everyday life lived from earth’s lands and waters. •   Nature as a human construct subordinate to humankind’s perfection versus the earth—originary, powerful, cryptic, divine, evoking awe, thanksgiving and reverence. •   Nature as an arena of conflict among human beings—beings alienated by their reason from the rest of creation and shortchanged of natural endowments—versus the earth as dwelling place to humans who live close to the land and integrally within other species. POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF INTERLOCUTION If our interpretation of Kant has merit, then it stands as a cautionary tale. In Kant we have a cosmopolitanism in which the ultimate social-political order of humanity ostensibly derives from the order of nature. On closer examination, however, we find that it is the natural order which derives its meaning from the human order by serving to further the progress and perfection of humankind—a commendable goal itself but one that leaves out the well-being of the planet human flourishing depends on. Kant was chosen to serve as a springboard for reflection on cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis earthliness, but how do the intellectual descendants of Kantian cosmopolitanism deal with the earth? To be sure, Kant’s cosmopolitanism continues to influence political thinkers to this day. Danilo Zolo, professor of political and legal philosophy at the University of Florence, who calls the Gulf War “the first cosmopolitan war,” sees Kant’s—and Hume’s—influence in the “cosmopolitan pacifism” of Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio. Along with Bobbio, Richard Falk, American international relations theorist, belongs to the “cosmopolitan paradigm,” according to Zolo.41 In these and other cases where Kantian influence is attributed, however, it is usually Kant’s essay, “Perpetual Peace,” a scheme for world government, whose traces are discernible. Few writers, with or without reference to Kant, address the relation of cosmopolitanism and earthbound life and thought.

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We are left to ask if cosmopolitanism is inherently opposed to “earthliness”? Is the tension we found in Kant applicable to any cosmopolitanism as such or does it derive from Kant’s distinctive modernity or specific views of nature? If we set aside Kant’s views of nature and consider the notion of world government as such, do we find a discourse at odds with earthliness? Reduced to its irreducible minimum, cosmopolitanism entails the concept of a worldwide state. State for Kant implies both freedom and restraint. The “highest problem” which “Nature assigns to the human race” is a “society in which freedom under external laws is associated in the highest degree with irresistible power, i.e., the perfectly just civic constitution.”42 An interpretation of the “softer” side of Kantian political thought would emphasize its liberal aspects. Freedom is subject to external limits precisely so that the freedom of one can coexist with the freedom of another: “such a society is one . . . with the most exact definition of freedom and fixing of its limits so that it may be consistent with the freedom of others.”43 One risks misunderstanding Kant, however, if one ignores the strong sense of governance—indeed domination and submission—in his notion of state. What humankind needs above all, Kant says, is to be mastered. “Man is an animal which, if its lives with its own kind, requires a master . . . who will break his will and force him to obey a will which is universally valid.44 Kant may dramatize the point, but any state concept involves governance, the submission of people, things, behavior, the earth itself to the determinations of a collective will—however formed. Moreover, a state implies a territory governed, sovereignty over land. A worldwide state, however conceived, would enjoy sovereignty as an essential attribute. Sovereignty would extend over any and all territory comprising the earth or, in a federal construct, would recognize in principle the limited sovereignty of constituent states over their respective territories. Cosmopolis, as the concept of a state, implies hegemony, control, dominance over the earth. It includes either recognition of borders (in a federal order) or the nullification of same in the unlimited territorial sovereignty of a unitary state. Cosmopolis, then, entails hegemony and universal scope. The issue for us is not whether a world government would be able and want to manage the earth wisely. It arguably could and presumably should. The philosophical question is whether the hegemony entailed by the cosmopolitan political construct is compatible with the holism and symbiosis identified with earthliness. Closely allied with this question is whether the planetary overview implicit in a cosmopolitan outlook is compatible with local perspective of those who live close to the earth. Internationalists like Stanley, cited at the beginning of this chapter, will argue that concern for the earth demands a whole earth-perspective and readiness to manage (read: take in hand, govern) the environment for its own

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sake. Feminist philosopher, Carolyn Merchant, traces such a “managerial ecology” to seventeenth century England and argues that it ends up subordinating nature to human purposes. John Evelyn, founding member of the Royal Society in England, made a case in the 1600s for the preservation of forests threatened by shipbuilding, citing the long-term detriment to human progress from uncontrolled deforestation. His argument signaled a shift, Merchant says, from “organismic” approaches to “efficiency and production in the sustained use of nature for human benefit.”45 In Cosmopolis, Stephen Toulmin challenges the “whole earth”/cosmopolitan perspective as a premise for dealing with ecological problems. Toulmin writes, “every niche or habitat is one of its own kind . . . its demands call for a careful eye to its particular, local, and timely circumstances.”46 The point of these considerations is not to countenance mismanagement of world resources or to advocate complete reliance on local approaches to environmental problems. The point is rather to highlight the misfit of cosmopolitan and earthbound discourses. This disconnect has relevance when these respective narratives encounter each other literally “on the ground” over issues of land tenure and use; when indigenous peoples, whom we have described as consummate earthlings, face possible displacement under de jure regimes (either to exploit or protect the earth) or experience the pressures of de facto encroachment (corporate, economic pressure). What is literally the place of the earthling in such circumstances—or conversely, the place of cosmopolitan categories in the landscape of the earthling? Profound philosophical differences separate the two conceptualities, with cosmopolitanism projecting the ideal of a planetary species-hegemony, however benign; and earth-“rootedness,” privileging one’s locale. For the earthling, place signifies that special region of the earth in which he or she lives in an all-encompassing and immediate relationship to nature. To accommodate to a discourse whose categories are state, abstract sovereignty, artificial borders, and territory as a construct entails disconnecting oneself from a holistically lived world and “occupying” vicariously a world whose objects, elements, and relationships have no immediate referents. The problem of communication between earthlings and cosmopolitans is not that their positions are contradictory, but rather that they are not! They are not two types of governance but rather a structure of governance and a way of life. If they were contradictory then they would, per Aristotle, share a common genus. Or, per Hegel, they would be opposites resolvable within a dialectical synthesis. Political left and right, labor and capital, realist and idealist—these conflicts play out within common problematics and conceptualities. What allows for conflict in the first instance permits reconciliation in one of several familiar ways (compromise/balance, exchange, co-optation, etc.). The aforesaid paradigms do not offer ready “logics” and strategies for

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reaching solution of the sort raised here. Lifeworld and communication differences put a high premium on discussion that must aim first for expanding cross-cultural understanding of differing perspectives as setting the stage for collaboration. Partners can provide value-added to all precisely by virtue of those differing perpectives. Notwithstanding the above, collaboration and communication between cosmopolitan and earthling can work. A new model of environmental protection which has developed in recent years suggests that international concerns for the environment can be reconciled with indigenous land tenure and use. It allows and encourages indigenous peoples to live and work—and worship—within protected natural zones. In view of their intimate relationship to the earth and the reverence with which they treat it, Dr. Claude Martin of the World Wildlife Fund says, “indigenous people [generally] are the most important stewards of the earth.” Environmentalists have described successful application of the model.47 Among communication and collaboration Indigenism presents itself. It is a movement represented by a robust network of indigenous groups from around the world. Collaborating with other movements, NGOs, and the media, it raises questions of local environmental concern to international fora and joins with state and NGO partners to press for action on environmental cases stuck in adjudication.48 The indigenous have also shared their traditional knowledge of the earth more widely to collaborators in projects. Reseach scholars have cited the use of indigenous local knowledge (ILK) in environmental projects reported in academic journals.49 In the cases cited here, cosmopolitans for their part and the indigenous for theirs have moved across the conceptual divisions between them to work in concert. INTERLOCUTION, DWELLING, AND POETRY Interlocution is the issue. If a way of dwelling together on the earth is sought, one that benefits the earth and its dwellers both, then that will quite arguably lie within the scope of a “conversation” including all concerned parties, earthlings of all stripes, cosmopolitans of all varieties, and others not named in the chapter. Students of negotiation tell us that that an interlocutory process, when successful, not only produces “solutions” to the problems it addresses, but also, over time, creates engaged stakeholders in its outcomes and legitimacy for the process. Out of that interlocution, applied to environmental issues, can come a collaboration that draws upon the knowledge that derives from kinship to the earth, the ongoing “telemetry” of markets geared to assess costs and benefits across a range of stakeholders, and political commitment, resources, and authorities, from state actors as needed.

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To be sure, all of this is quite general and does not begin to address challenges outside the domain of theory and paradigms. Even at the level of theory, the preceding paragraphs suggest the difficulties of interlocution itself. Additionally, the preceding chapter on the Anthropocene examines in depth other dynamics that challenge the collective deliberative processes denominated by interlocution. Chapter 11 identifies powerful mechanisms—body mapping and the global market—which operate to maximize the interests of individual “cells” within their respective systems. The presentation and discussion of these in chapter 11 warrants still more sobriety with respect to prospects for interlocutory/collaborative approaches. Of itself, the discussion of these two powerful systems is not encouraging as to the prospects of interlocution. Nonetheless, there is a take away from the last chapter. It lies in pointing to the value of a “political space” to serve as the topos for meeting, deliberation, and common action. The need is for a collective approach to a holistic challenge. The risks and harms of global climate change, arising in the Anthropocene, are ever greater. The body politic, envisioned in chapter 11, is the name for a new approach. It is not the Leviathan emerging from the thought of Thomas Hobbes. Quite to the contrary. It gives figurative expression for the “political space” described above. It is not a conception of the state, like that described by Kant in this chapter. It is not a state theory, new or old, but rather a phenomenology regarding the practice and process of politics as consensus formation and collaboration as problem-solving. In its favor, it has a lineage that goes back to Aristotle’s politics, as a speech-mediated practice, expounded in the Art of Rhetoric. It is a lineage that reaches into our time with Habermas’s description of communicative action. The scope of this book does not allow for a full discussion of “political space” and allied concepts or exposition of the two works cited just above. Defined and described as a space, it does merit discussion from a phenomenological and topological perspective like that taken in this work. Hopefully, the book project has advanced the understanding of dwelling in all its dimensions. The reflections enacted in the course of this investigation deployed a variety of philosophical resources and borrowed from a number of disciplines. The book started with poetry and ended with politics and it may seem to have left poetry without anything to say at the end. While poetry figured implicitly throughout the work in articulating the Human-Earth relationship, it merits one’s noting in the culminating chapter of the book poetry’s role in interlocution as described here and in the concept of dwelling that informs this project as a whole. Among the “stakeholders” in any deliberation involving the earth is the earth itself and it is not stretching things to suggest that this most primary of stakeholders has much to say about itself should be heard. It is not a fanciful

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rhetorical flourish to speak of a message that the earth is sending to its inhabitants. Perhaps, it’s only wise to listen. NOTES 1. Stanley, C. Maxwell, Managing Global Problems (Muscatine: The Stanley Foundation, 1979), 151. 2. Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900), 68. 3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964). 4. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 68. 5. Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 13. 6. Kant, Immanuel, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Kant on History, ed./trans. Lewis Beck White (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1963). 7. Kant, “Idea,” 11–13. 8. Kant, “Idea,” 11. “Human actions,” Kant writes, “like every other natural event are determined by universal laws.” 9. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” Kant on History, ed./trans. Lewis Beck White (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1963). 10. Anonymous Prayer, “To Prthivi [Earth],” Rg Veda, in Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, ed. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 11. 11. Quoted from Hesiod’s Theogony in Cornford, F. M., Principium Sapientia, A Study of the Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 193. 12. Contenau, Georges, Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966) 224–26. 13. Quoted by Claude Martin, “Introduction,” The Law of the Mother Protecting Indigenous Peoples in Protected Areas, ed. Elizabeth Kemf, (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1993), xvi. 14. Arhem, Kaj “Landscape, Territory, and Local Belonging,” Locality and Belonging, ed. Nadia Lovell (London: Routledge, 1998) 84–85. 15. Arhem, “Landscape,” 89. 16. Cassirer, Ernst, trans. Ralph Manheim, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume II, Mythical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 87. 17. Standing Bear, “Land of the Spotted Eagle,” Voices of the Earth, ed. J. J. Clarke (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1993), 26–27. 18. Kane, Hadya Amadou, Luc Hoffmann, and Pierre Campredon, “Fishermen of the Desert,” Law of the Mother, 12–13. 19. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995), 101–4.

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20. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Nature,” Emerson’s Nature: Origin, Growth, and Meaning, ed. Merton M. Sealts and Alfred R. Ferguson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 10–13. 21. Lees, Annette, “Melanesia’s Sacred Inheritance,” Law of the Mother, 69. 22. Alexander, Bryan, “Gifts from the North Wind,” Law of the Mother, 37. 23. Berndt, Ronald and Catherine, The Speaking Land, Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1994), 5. 24. Sale, Kirkpatrick, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), 42. 25. Kant, “Idea,” 21. 26. Kant, “Idea,” 14. 27. Kant, “Idea,” 12, 28. Kant, “Idea,” 16–17. 29. Kant, “Idea,” 13. The human being’s aloneness is mentioned parenthetically at the beginning of the second thesis. “In man the only rational creature on the earth.” 30. Kant, “Idea,” 17. Kant argues that as the tree grows straighter and taller competing for nutrients and light in the company of other trees rather than in “isolated freedom” where trees grow “stunted’ crooked, and twisted”; likewise he argues earlier that the very passions which keep humans from living together . . . “do the most good” when individuals find themselves “in the preserve of the civic union.” 31. Kant, “Idea,” 13–14. 32. Kant, “Idea,” 24. 33. Kant, “Idea,” 15. 34. Kant, “Idea,” 18–19. 35. Kant, “Idea,” 23. 36. Kant, “Idea,” 13 37. Kant, “Idea,” 13. 38. Kant, “Idea, 12. 39. Kant, “Idea,” 13. 40. Kant, “Idea,” 14. “Nature seems to have moved with the strictest parsimony, and to have measured her animal gifts precisely to the most stringent needs of a beginning existence, just as if she had willed that, if man ever did advance from the lowest barbarity to the highest skill and mental perfection and thereby worked himself up to happiness (so far as it is possible on earth), he alone should have the credit and should have only himself to thank.” 41. Zolo, Danilo, trans. Danid McKie, Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 28. 42. Kant, “Idea,” 16. 43. Kant, “Idea,” 16. 44. Kant, “Idea,” 17. 45. Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1989), 238. 46. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 194. 47. Martin, Claude, “Introduction,” Law of the Mother, xvi–xvii.

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48. Niezen, Ronald, The Origins of Indigenism, Human Rights and the Politics of Idendity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 150–52. 49. Burgos-Ayala, Arecly, “Indigenous and local knowledge in environmental management in human-nature connectedness: a leverage points perspective,” Ecosystems and People 16, no. 1 (December 1, 2020).

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Index

alienation, 7, 34, 84, 120, 140–141, 147, 173n27 Anthropocene, 1, 3, 9–10, 37, 71, 122, 125, l82, 187, 189–95, 197–201 areal, 97, 99, 101 anthropos, 190, 199, 200 arche, 49, 68, 111, 116 Aristotle, 11, 15, 23, 40, 46n21-23, 59, 83, 87n21, 110, 111, 122, 123n6, 136, 148n1, 167, 179, 181, 188n5-6, 190, 192, 196, 214, 216 being: -in-the-world, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 17, 24, 27, 29, 30, 37, 40, 45, 47, 57–58, 60, 75, 81, 83, 85, 89, 92, 123, l27, 135, 141, 144, 148, 151, 177, 180, 182, 187, 190, 201, 203; -of-theearth, 197; -on-the-earth, 44, 45, 48, 197; being-with, 5, 7, 17, 27, 78, 84, 147, 179 Body-Mapping, 10, 189, 193–95, 197– 99, 201, 216 biosphere, 121, 189, 190, 192–94, 197, 200, 201, 204 Cornhuskers, l6-17, 21, 24–25, 30, 33 characterological type, 166–7 climate-controlled environment, 8, 128, 133–34

commodity, 84–85, 130, 170, 177, 183– 85, 186, 187, 201, 207 comrade, 52–53, 59, 61, 62, 67, 78 Cosmopolis, 9, 182, 204–205, 209– 212, 213, 214 cosmopolitanism, 9, 204, 209, 211, 212–14 Coulange, Fustel de, 34 cultural geography, 7, 90, 91, 103 culture, 5, 6, 48, 50, 61, 83–84, 89, 90, 92–93, 98–99, 102–105, 109, 116, 118, 139, 145, 158, 206 democracy, 6, 47–53, 55, 58–63, 112 dwell: poetically, 1, 19, 30, 55, 20, 41, 45–46, 59, 62; prosaic, 16, 18–19, 25, 37, 52, 63, 77, 81 earthling, 1, 10, 25, 137, 189, 200, 204–208, 214 earth-basis, 136–37 eclipse phenomena, 185. See also horizontal erasure, vertical conflation equine, nature of the horse, 119 ethos, 59, 81, 90, 91, 92, 158 ethology, 2, 20, 113, 141, 198 exclusion, 68, 69, 71–72, 74–75 exteriorization, 72 227

228

Index

factors of production, 183; capital, 183; labor, 183, 184, 186; land, 183, 186 farming, 5, 23, 30, 33, 38, 41–44, 55, 59, 116–117, 179, 197 globalization, 9, 93, 104, 177, 187–88 habitat, 20, 99, 101, 103, 112, 121, 134, 178, 214 habitual type, 166–68 habitus, 134 hermeneutics, 95, 181 Hediger, H., 112–13 Hegel, G. W. F., 72, 81, 97, 98, 99, 115, 214 Hobbes, Thomas, 75, 216 home, 6, 7, 8, 16, 25, 52–53, 63, 67–69, 76–82, 85, 89, 97, 101, 102, 105, 113, 120–21, 129–30, 131, 137, 140–141, 151, 154, 155, 160, 162, 169–70, 177, 182, 184, 186, 203, 207 homo economicus, 152, 166–68, 184, 193, 199 horizontal erasure, 185. See also eclipse phenomena; vertical conflation Hume, David, 77–81, 89, 204, 212, 223 idiographic, 97, 99, 100, 105 imaginative variation, 68, 69, 114, 128, 145, 205 imprint, 10, 61, 71, 95, 193 indigenous, 4, 10, 102–103, 205–208, 215 indigenism, 215 Jacobs, Jane, 82 Jefferson, Thomas, 15 literatus, 6, 48, 51, 52, 70 Locke, John, 204–205, 223 Malthus, Thomas, 10, 193–97, 201–2, 224 market, 3, 9, 176–78, 180–82, 199 marketspace, 3, 9, 177–78, 182–83

Marx, Karl, 9, 34, 178, 184 “mine,” 6–7, 17, 43, 67, 68, 70–71, 73, 75, 77, 84–85, 89, 139, 141, 151, 201, 203 mineness, 44, 55, 67–68, 70–71, 73, 75, 89, 144 “mine and thine,” 6, 67, 69, 72, 139, 151, 201 nature, 3, 6–8, 10, 11n3, 16, 18–24, 30, 33–34, 37–39, 42, 44–45, 51–53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 76, 84, 89, 99, 103–104, 105, 107–12, 132–33, 135, 136, 141, 160, 178, 183–86, 190, 192, 197, 201, 204–5, 209–14, 221–22 oikos, 35, 37, 39–42, 177, 179–80, 182 ownness, 3, 6, 67–68, 70–81, 83, 89, 95, 113, 127, 139, 147, 151, 170, 180 physis, 49, 111, 121, 122, 190 population, 10, 61, 117, 140, 143, 191, 199–202, 206, 208, 224 possibility: open, 161–63, 165–66, 168; problematic, 163, 165, 168 polis, 3, 40, 110, 189, 204, 209 political space, 3, 10, 40, 47, 58, 60, 63, 123, 189, 200, 201 predator, 114 prey, 114 price mechanism, 9, 10, 180–183, 199 privacy, 3, 7, 72, 74 racism, 8, 30, 98–99, 145 Reciprocal Immediate Action, 155 Ricardo, David, 183 A Room of One’s Own, 75 self-world, 8, 83, 89, 128, 141, 143, 145 self-manifestation, 72 Sextus Empiricus, 90–93, 103 shared-world, 89–99, 93, 141, 146, 148 sidewalk, 82 skepticism, 90 social collectivity, 166–68

Index

social contract, 75–76, 84 species-being, 195–96 stewardship, 5, 33–37, 39, 41, 45 surrounding world, 20, 77–78, 83–85, 89, 113, 121, 137, 128–130, 133– 135, 141–147, 156 territory, 20, 102, 114–115, 137, l94, 213–214, 221 “thine,” 6–7, 43–44, 55, 67, 68–69, 72–73, 139, 151, 201 Umwelt, 20, 83, 90, 127 vertical conflation, 185– 186. See also eclipse phenomena; horizontal erasure

229

vis-à-vis, 82, 212 Weber, Max, 167, 199 the Wild, 6–7, l1, 18, 26, 33–34, 48, 57, 68, 111–17, 119–24, 203 wilderness, 7, 111, 112, 115, 119, 123–24, 206 withdrawal, double, 74 Wolfe, Virginia, 74–75 Xenophobia, 137, 139–45, 148 zero point of consciousness, 67, 128 zone of exclusion, 75 zone of ownness, 6, 7, 67–68, 71

About the Author

Dennis E. Skocz received his PhD in Philosophy from Duquesne University. His studies focus on phenomenology and contemporary continental European philosophy with particular emphasis on Husserl and Heidegger. Thematic interests include science and technology, media, economics and environment. He has published chapters in Tensional Landscapes: The Dynamics of Boundaries and Placements, Earth Ways: Framing Geographical Meanings, and Lived Topographies and Their Mediational Forces. He has published journal articles in Analecta Husserliana, Phenomenological Inquiry, Glimpse: Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, Environmental Philosophy, and Philosophy in the Contemporary World. He has also published in the Proceedings of the Husserl Circle and the Proceedings of the North American Heidegger Conference. He is a veteran career diplomat of the United States, now working at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.

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