April 01, 2001
A return to nature?
In Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, John Sallis calls philosophers to return to nature. His instruction is not a unique one: pick up any environmentally savvy text these days—or any feminist theory worth its salt—and you'll find similar injunctions. What makes Sallis's work stand out from the crowd—and in my opinion, what makes it worth reading—is its attentive engagement with those philosophers often deemed "the bad guys" by contemporary postmodern and liberation discourses: Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Fichte, Nietzsche, and the Romantic poets.
Sallis' basic argument is this: while Western philosophy since Plato has tended to elevate intelligibility over sensibility, or mind over body, a reassessment of "nature" and "the elemental" (as these words are utilized in philosophy) helps us retrieve a more respectful and holistic understanding of the world around us. Such an understanding comes about by way of imagination, a force that allows us to perceive earth, air, and other elemental powers in a profoundly sacred and transformative light.
Two themes stand out as central to Sallis' analysis. The first is imagination. Imagination is, he says, a force that allows us to engage with an Other in such a way that something new is disclosed to us, something that would otherwise have escaped our consciousness. But imagination is not the same thing as imagining. Imagining is a limited act located primarily within the intellect; imagination is a power and a force that belongs both to body/nature and to mind. As such, imagination has the capacity to "seize" things: in particular, it seizes beauty and establishes beauty as truth. And it does so either by way of remembrance or by creating something completely new. Sallis writes that through imagination, "truth is established by being both originally created and repeated. The establishment of truth is at once both originary and memorial" (18).
Beauty and truth are, in Sallis' view, inextricably linked to nature. More specifically, they are linked to "the elemental," which stands as Sallis' second major theme. The elemental is that indescribable force of nature that resists our dualistic categories. It includes earth, sky, water, and fire; and it is described in early Greek thought as the root that gives sustenance to all life. As such, the elements are not merely "sensible objects," or things that the intellect can master and conceptualize. But nor are they simply "intelligible," or things that reside in the mind itself. Elements are liminal things. They force us to do philosophy "at the limit." As all-encompassing forces, they remind us that nature does not exist "for us" but that it has its own integrity. And they hint to us that there are certain truths in life that can be sensed or perceived but not described.
Imagination and the thunderstorm
Sallis gives the example of a thunderstorm: anyone who has ever been caught outside during a fury of lightning and driving rain knows the sensations of awe, fear, and beauty that such an experience produces. During a thunderstorm, he writes, we recognize that we are not the masters of our world, but that something more fundamental than humanity itself encompasses our living and moving and being. This "something" is the elemental.
And the elemental makes itself known to us through imagination. Here Sallis echoes Coleridge, who argued that imagination stands as a finite recapitulation of the infinite creative act: "The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a reception in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." As Coleridge and the idealist poet Hölderlin demonstrate, poetic imagination opens the door for us to perceive "the elemental" in a new light. Through poetic striving, they discover that the "elements" are not just things that compose the world - one thinks here of that old table of the elements chart posted in our 7th grade science labs - but are also, or primarily, things that manifest the world. Elements allow the Other to show itself in ways that intellect alone can never accomplish.
Of course, nature and the elements during the time of Coleridge differ from nature as we know it today. In this respect, there is a certain irony to Sallis' use of 18th and 19th century texts within a discussion of environmental devastation. While we may agree with Sallis that these philosophers offer important methods for retrieving a new sense of the natural world, we may well wonder if his argument comes as too little, too late.
Sallis himself acknowledges this concern: "What remains (of nature) strikes little resonance with the songs of Hölderlin and Shelley: the remains are mostly lifeless phantoms pressed into the service of providing material, grist for the mills of technical production…Or rather, nature is decomposed in order that natural things, deprived of their retreat, might be assimilated to the sphere of what can be governed, controlled, and ultimately…made or produced" (152).
But even this disparity between nature as it was two hundred years ago and nature as it has been ravaged during the 20th century does not discourage Sallis from venturing his final claim. If philosophy would return to its original reflection upon the natural elements, then the philosopher would find herself receiving a vision of the self as situated within a much larger picture. She would, through the forces of imagination that arise both within herself and within the natural world, find her eyes opened to "the rare sight of the natural elements gathered in retreat." Such a retreat that does not mean that the elements have disappeared. It means that they have hidden themselves and are waiting for us to let them return.
Looking for how-to
While Sallis' argument is well worth our consideration, it is not for the faint of intellect. He attempts to combine a provocative, poetic writing style with dense philosophical assessments—a combination that works better in theory than in practice. The reader may find herself wishing, as I did, that Sallis would leave the poetry to the poets themselves, and reserve his own prose for clear and straightforward exposition. We need a "road map" to get through this book in one piece—and unfortunately, Sallis never provides one.
And further, how exactly are we to go about implementing his various suggestions? Sallis's book is not a how-to manual. It shows us neither how to utilize our imaginative capacities nor how to transform a generous viewing of nature into an active care for nature. But these, I think, are not his intentions. Force of Nature is a philosophical argument waged against certain destructive tendencies within philosophy itself, not an applied philosophical argument aimed at practices or policies that harm the environment. As such, his book has a limited audience. And it may leave the activist in the trenches somewhat disenchanted.
But if we take his argument as one of many pieces in the larger ecological puzzle—a piece that takes on the unenviable task of battling the philosophers on the philosophers' own turf—then we may come away from Sallis' book with more gratefulness than frustration. Not everyone can go toe-to-toe with Kant and Nietzsche and retrieve from their writings a transformative philosophy of the natural world.
Sallis may not have solved the current environmental crisis, but he gives his readers—particularly those of us who like to live in our heads—a powerful impetus for moving in that direction.
Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. By John Sallis. Bloomington, 2000. 272 pp. $24.95.
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