Eco-Geography
What We See When We Look at Landscapes
Andreas Suchantke
Translation and Introduction by Norman Skillen
Copyright © Lindisfarne Books, 2001
Contents
Ngorongoro: Primeval Past as Living Present
Africa: Three Landscapes as a Single Organism
What Do Rainforests Have to Do with Us?
Humankind and Nature in Different Cultures and Continents
Juvenilization in Evolution and Its
Ecological Significance
New Zealand: Old Land, Young Land
The Signature of the Great Rift Valleys
References
Introduction
The Ecology of Imagination
By Norman Skillen
At first glance this book might appear to be an example of naturalist travel writing — after all, each of its chapters (except one) contains a portrait of a particular landscape. Though it certainly can be read as a travel book, to approach it in that way would be to miss entirely its essential intentions. These are concerned not only with portraying landscapes but also with a way of portraying them, for this book embodies a way of seeing that is ultimately derived from the great German man of letters Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I call him a “man of letters,” and that is indeed the way he is best known outside his homeland, but Goethe’s life of letters was not only “literary.” He also devoted a considerable part of his life to science, and to the development of his own scientific method. As Andreas Suchantke’s way with landscapes cannot really be appreciated without some insight into the basic features of Goethe’s way with science, I will begin with the latter first. In keeping with the true spirit of the enterprise, I also take a literary starting point.
In or around 1932, in a little shack in upstate New York, the novelist John Cowper Powys — one of the great, unrecognized geniuses of this century — sat writing his autobiography. This is an extraordinary book in that it accords as much importance to Powys’s momentary sensations as to any “large events” in his life. Thus, for instance, in describing his time at Cambridge he records the following as the most important thing that happened to him there:
Not far from Trumpington Mill — somewhere in the umbrageous purlieus to the rear of the Fitzwilliam Museum — there stands an ancient wall; and as I drifted along . . . I observed, growing upon this wall, certain patches of grass and green moss and yellow stone-crop. Something about the look of these small growths, secluded there in a place seldom passed, and more seldom noticed, seized upon me and caught me up into a sort of Seventh Heaven.1
He goes on to say that the touch of a pen breaks the spell of this “Seventh Heaven,” but he nevertheless defines this intense experience as a “beyond sensation.” What Powys here describes is a well-known phenomenon. It is — to use Abraham Maslow’s term — a “peak experience,” which is very common, especially among people in their late teens or early twenties (as indeed Powys was at the time). It figures also in the works of other writers. James Joyce would have called such an experience an “epiphany,” and William Wordsworth spoke of “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” and “the pleasure which there is in life itself.” However it has been characterized, all these writers seem to concur in seeing this type of experience as spontaneously conveying a sense of the inherent significance of whatever its subject is. It also makes an appearance in the opening chapter of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as the “oceanic feeling.” Freud does not think much of this feeling; indeed he simply discounts it, having no way of taking it seriously. It is, he feels, highly improbable that the world as we know it could communicate inherent significance directly to us in this way. In the Hobbesian/Baconian tradition of science (the main tradition), Freud’s has been the standard reaction. We must not be misled by romantic illusions; real reality is harsh, brutal, physical; the only metaphors allowable in connection with it are those of struggle and conflict. Hobbes called it “the war of all against all.”
I will not deny that there is something in this view, but why must it necessitate discounting the “oceanic feeling”? What if the oceanic feeling — where “oceanic” may imply depth as well as breadth — is something that has serious epistemological implications for science? What if it could be harnessed, cultivated, applied?
A hundred years before Freud rejected the “oceanic feeling,” we already find Goethe speaking of something called exakte sinnliche Phantasie, which in English is usually translated as “exact sensorial imagination.” Now, to the Hobbesian positivist — and most scientists even at the end of the twentieth century are still Hobbesians and positivists in one way or another — this must seem like a hopeless, multiple contradiction. How can imagination be exact, and what can it possibly have to do with the senses?
What Goethe meant by this is the practical application of imagination as an instrument of scientific observation. As such it represents a slowing down and a conscious cultivation of the “oceanic feeling.” In the oceanic feeling what occurs is a spontaneous expansion of consciousness through which natural phenomena acquire an unaccustomed depth, become charged with meaning, seem to lose their separateness both from each other and their observer, and appear in all their intense relatedness. Powys, for instance, regarded his Trumpington Mill experience as “a prophetic idea of the sort of stories I myself might come to write; stories that should have as their background the indescribable peace and gentleness of the substance we name grass in contact with the substance we name stone.” This is what Coleridge called overcoming “the lethargy of custom,” when things become redolent of significance which may or may not be capable of articulation. (Where articulation has occurred it has resulted in some of the world’s greatest lyric poems.)
In the practice of exact sensorial imagination the same expansion of consciousness, or better still, enhancement of perception, is the aim. To take an example, if we look at the sequence of leaves on an annual or biennial plant as it grows toward blossoming, we will see that each leaf up the stem has a different shape. For the Hobbesian this may be “pretty” but it will not be thought of as anything intrinsically significant (except, perhaps for the purposes of classification). Goethe recommended that we observe these leaf forms until we know them, that we then withdraw and reconstitute our observations in inward contemplation. In this way we can make the formative process between the leaves visible. In imagination we can turn one leaf into the next (something that does not happen as such on the “physical” plant), we can run the whole metamorphic process from root to flower, we can also run it backward. Thus the growth process is observable only in imagination, but it is exact and sensorial because based upon concrete observation. The next step in this scientific path is to turn imagination outward again, for the inner practice of exact sensorial imagination strengthens what Goethe called anschauende Urteilskraft, perceptual judgment (another contradictory expression). This is Goethe’s term for the enhancement of perception that gradually comes with the practice of exact sensorial imagination and results in the ability to perceive unity in combination with multiplicity. We can look at any plant and see the “between” of its different growth forms as one formative process.
This, of course, is a far cry from the mainstream of science where, in spite of a new awareness of the primacy of relationship in ecology and related disciplines, the leading tendency has been toward isolating “basic objects” and viewing phenomena in terms of them.2 This search is based on the assumption that there are in the universe absolute physical things existing by and for themselves in complete, mindless ontological anonymity, that the properties of these “things” have been and will be the same for all time (the principle of uniformitarianism), and that they are the ultimate basis of reality.3 The outlook that is a necessary and inevitable consequence of this assumption — mechanistic materialism — has a persuasively pithy rationality about it, but the trouble is that as a way of seeing it radically undermines any attempt, be it religious, mythic, poetic, scientific, or otherwise, to apprehend meaning in the universe. No one has stated this in starker terms than Richard Dawkins:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people [or organisms] are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.4
Not many writers have reveled in meaninglessness quite so chillingly as this, but at least this quotation has the virtue of making the position clear.5 The question, of course, is, What quality of seeing do we bring to “the universe we observe”? What happens to our observation when we begin to make conscious use of its imaginative component?
One thing that this kind of applied imagination discovers is that form is meaning; or, to put it more broadly, nature is experienced as a language. Reading this language of nature was what Goethe originally meant in coining the term morphology. Hence, for the practitioner of Goethe’s method form is not a mysterious, incidental adjunct of invisible molecular processes, but the revelation of meaning, made directly accessible by the power of imagination. If this sounds like a rather round, even brash assertion, it has been substantiated in great detail in a recent book by Henri Bortoft.6 In chapter 2 he describes Goethe’s approach to the phenomenon of color, offering in this connection a critique of materialist empiricism. For instance,
The error of empiricism rests on the fact that what it takes to be material objects are condensations of meaning. When we see a chair, for example, we are seeing a condensed meaning and not simply a physical body.7
Previously he had noted that we do not gain intelligible access to phenomena by purely sensory experience. Purely sensory experience “would be a condition of total multiplicity without any trace of unity” — in fact, in oceanic terms, more like the Ancient Mariner’s delirium than his moments of lucidity. Bortoft then goes on to say:
Since meanings are not objects of sensory perception, seeing a chair is not the sensory experience we [assume] it to be. What empiricism, and common sense, miss through mistaking meaning for matter is the dimension of mind in cognitive perception. (pp. 53–54, italics mine)
As the book develops it gradually becomes clear that this “dimension of mind” is imagination itself, and that using it in the recommended way enables us “to enter into the coming into being of the phenomenon,” both inwardly and outwardly.
This activity inevitably leads us to a further tenet of the epistemology of applied imagination, namely that form is invariably the expression of a polarity of some kind. In other words, it will be a product of opposing but mutually enhancing, even mutually productive tendencies (for example, the language of color, as it is experienced in cognitive perception, arises through interactions of light and dark). The ability to hold within cognitive perception the tension of a polarized relationship is one of the key functions of imagination. It is the ability to appreciate distinctions without fragmenting the phenomenon into arbitrary divisions.8 This is what Bortoft calls “comprehensive seeing,” the achieved enhancement of perception, which if it happened spontaneously would create an “oceanic feeling,” but in its achieved form leads to the perception of “dynamic unity,” “the depth of the phenomenon,” “multiplicity in unity.” So Goethe’s approach to science can be construed as using imagination to read the language of polarity in nature.
In the essays in this volume Andreas Suchantke has used this approach to characterize whole landscapes, and it is high time I began paying them due heed. But before I do I would like to clear away any lingering possibilities of misunderstanding what is meant here by “language” and by “imagination.” Even if we accept the possibility that imagination working within the process of perception is capable of apprehending form as meaning and therefore nature as language, our understanding of this is still open to interference from “common sense.”
One of the chief difficulties of our materialist habits of thinking (everyone has these, no matter what their persuasion) is that they have a tendency toward reification — an urge to create physical fixities. In the case of language this urge leads to the assumption that it is an exclusively representational system of arbitrary signs; words are seen as invented chunks of sound that stand for “things.” Such nominalism has long reigned supreme, but it has been challenged by a number of modern philosophers, among them Heidegger and, strange as it may seem, Wittgenstein. Besides language as representation Heidegger speaks of language as disclosure, which he paraphrases as “saying as showing.” The implication of this is that we would not be able to perceive anything around us as meaningful if language had not first supplied the concept. Concepts, therefore, cannot be generalizations from sense impressions — it is just the other way round: sense impressions are only possible because the speaking of the object has caused its meaning to light up in awareness.9 (Again, without this, sensation would be an unfathomable jumble.) In this way language can be said to have disclosed the phenomenon, and it is this kind of language that is meant in referring to the perception of nature as a language.
As regards imagination there are similar dangers. Materialism, in identifying the mind with the brain, tries to make mental activity, and with it imagination, into a fully localizable, physical phenomenon. What this leaves us with is an epistemologically absurd intelligence (an epiphenomenon of the brain) gazing out as a helpless onlooker upon an ontologically absurd universe (blind physical forces). This perverse state of affairs is a source of daily discomfort, if not distress, to vast numbers of people, and for the life of imagination, as I have been trying to describe it here, it is an unqualified disaster. For imagination cannot be localized (like the mind it is not a phenomenon). Imagination is not a “thing” or a “faculty.” It is the mind’s propensity to seek unity, to sense the whole that is implied in the part. It is the spontaneous figurative process by which mind, through human perception, makes the world intelligible. As such it is the supreme mediator of meaning to the human soul. This is why Coleridge was at such pains to have it construed as an “active power.” It is the activity by which mind and phenomena interact, the tension that lives within the polarity of mind and nature. The practical use of imagination is thus an ecological activity. The quality of this activity determines the quality of humankind’s relationship to nature.
This realization, not as a theory, but as a living experience, is the moving thread that runs through all the essays in this volume. They are the fruits of Andreas Suchantke’s dedicated efforts on his many journeys to take Goethe’s method seriously as a tool of knowledge, to be a living exponent of the ecology of imagination. These journeys were, indeed are, regular interludes in a life that began in Basel (Switzerland) in 1933. There Andreas Suchantke studied biology, after which he became a science teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School in Zurich, a post he held from 1963 to 1982. Since 1980 he has been active in teacher education, chiefly in Europe, but also in South America, New Zealand, and South Africa. Over the years he has undertaken many Goetheanistic-ecological “field trips” to the tropics of Africa and South America, to southern Asia, Israel, and Siberia, as well as constantly renewing his relationship to the landscapes of Switzerland, southern France, and the fjelds of Scandinavia. His next port of call will be a region of the Himalayas where there is a particularly rich abundance of butterflies. All these travels, entailing a welter of “oceanic feelings” that have been subjected to the discipline of Goetheanist perception, have, of course, produced not only essays, but also a whole series of books (see bibliography) and a large number of papers for scientific journals.
A number of the essays here included represent spin-offs from the books, so that this translation could stand as a general introduction to Andreas Suchantke’s work, as well as to his way of seeing. Having already characterized the latter here to some extent, it will be apparent that as a way of addressing the business of scientific investigation it offers a profound challenge, or at least implies considerable modification, of certain strains of biological thinking, while at the same time displaying a distinct kinship with certain other approaches.
On the modification side the Goethean approach generates a view of evolution that considerably circumscribes the role of natural selection in the process as a whole. A direct consequence of the language of form, for instance, is that evolution is not a unidirectional process driven solely by natural selection. In addition to development and adaptive radiation arising out of the selective refining of established lines — essentially a process of evolutionary aging — there is a countertendency, which Suchantke, following Julian Huxley, calls juvenilization.10 This forms the subject of one of the essays in this book (the most theoretical one on offer), and he also finds evidence of it in the landscape of New Zealand. It would appear, therefore, that New Zealand itself speaks of evolution as a more complex process than that described by the normal neo-Darwinian narrative.
On the kinship side this book is very much in harmony with new approaches in science that seek to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism by focusing on dynamic relationships both within and between whole organisms — a tendency traceable to the influence of such writers as Gregory Bateson. In Suchantke this again is a direct consequence of his way of seeing, and appears most clearly in his descriptions of various kinds of “threefold organisms” that together form one of this book’s major themes. How this view of the organism arises can best be approached by taking an example from an essay that is not included here (although it is available in English).11 In this essay he arrives by a thoroughly organic sequence of observations at the point of being able to describe the layer of green algae found over the surface of the world’s oceans as “the primal leaf.” This layer is the interface between the mineral realm of the ocean and the realm of light and air above. This is a strong polarity, whose poles interpenetrate and are unified in the layer of green algae at the interface. The “primal leaf” thus forms the middle component of a unified threesome that spans the whole Earth. This middle component is preserved as a formative principle, which appears as the leaf in the evolution of plants.12 In the plant the leaf mediates between the mineral realm of the soil and the realm of light and air in exactly the same way as did (and does) the “primal leaf,” so that a similar threefold structure is apparent.