In all these experiences of the wilderness we also experience ourselves in a new way.39 In the wilderness we are not, at least for a time and in relation to what immediately surrounds us, either consumers or conquerors of nature. But neither are we indifferent viewers of the scenery. The land engages not just our eyes but all our senses and indeed our bodily strength, endurance, and sense of balance. In turn, we know ourselves to focus the land more fully than the bear or the hawk. More clearly and deeply than they, we can take in and comprehend the diversity and beauty of the wilderness. We can understand the summer landscape as it has emerged from spring and will drift into fall. We can see the cirque as the work of the glacier and the dense stand of lodgepole pines as the aftermath of a forest fire.
These are the pristine experiences of the wilderness. But there are wistful and sorrowful ones as well. For in the stillness of a mountain meadow we remember the distant noises of technology, and we can see the jet trails overhead. The fact that we had to qualify our experiences in the wilderness by saying that they held “at least for a time” shows that the wilderness is not strictly a thing in its own right but always a thing in the technological universe as well. This troubles the wilderness experience, and we must now trace these troubles more closely to show that they can lead to fruitful measures.
The wilderness, we saw, engages us in the fullness of our capacities, and we in turn comprehend and gather the wilderness in its extent and depth. But this commensuration is contradicted by the frequently made charge that interests of humans and of nature are at odds with one another and that a harmony of interests requires a subordination of human interests to those of nature and of all its species. To put the human species at the center of creation is arrogant; anthropocentrism or homocentrism have become the terms for this sort of species egotism.40 To this one must reply that there is a sober sense in which the higher animals comprehend and embody the world in greater scope, depth, and concentration than the lower ones, and humans are clearly at the apex of that order.41 This Aristotelian insight requires, of course, a deictic explanation. It must be conceded that even if human eminence is, in relation to other species, established by measures of complexity, intelligence, memory, or whatever, such eminence may be an indication of intrinsic nobility but is certainly not identical with it. One can easily define measures of eminence by which insects outrank humans. One must, moreover, acknowledge the grain of truth that lies in the charge that humans are guilty of species egotism and imperialism. The point can be put in terms of the rights of humans versus the rights of nature or of natural objects.42 Rights should be construed as reflections of an entity’s significance, and the latter is established in deictic discourse. In a world without humans, rights are arranged in a natural and unproblematic order. Conflicts over rights occur in a human world because human beings not only embody significance but also comprehend it, mediate it as prophets and artists, and make it prevail in statecraft. It can be shown, I believe, if that is necessary, that human beings are more significant than trees and rivers, and so they have greater rights than natural objects. But it is certainly not the case that every conceivable human right takes precedence over every conceivable natural right. It is this latter principle that is acted out in technology when it is held that anything and everything is to be procured for human consumption. This is a perversion of the notion of human rights and a corruption of the significance embodied in human beings. It was the task of Part 2 of this study to show this. Precisely in the experience of the wilderness we can begin to understand that our significance comes fully to life only in the engagement with things that we recognize and respect in their own right. We must distinguish, then, between the base anthropocentrism of mature technology and the higher anthropocentrism of the respect for things in their own right.43 We can also put the point in Rodman’s terms and say that the liberation of nature is inseparable from human liberation.44
But more needs to be said about the commensuration of nature and humanity that we experience in the wilderness. Though the latter may engage us fully in our capacities, we cannot help but be aware of the imbalance between our physical needs and what the wilderness supplies. It provides us with water and perhaps firewood, trout, and huckleberries. But what really keeps us warm and nourished in the wilderness of nature are the blessings of technology, hiking boots, backpacks, tents, stoves, freeze-dried foods, and all the other compact, lightweight, and efficient devices that we carry into the wilderness. Without technology we could not venture safely or comfortably into the wilderness. One may take offense at the way the point is expressed here. If the wilderness is truly something like a sacred precinct, one that is a counterplace to technology, then it seems inconsistent or perverse to want to enter it in the technological mode of safety and ease. But it is even clearer that it is immature to court mortal dangers deliberately and needlessly, whether in a technological or natural setting. There is something like a new maturity required of us which recognizes and accepts the fact that in the ordinary and foreseeable circumstances of contemporary life the need to risk one’s life has disappeared.
The foregoing reflections imply two points. The first reminds us that whenever we live today in a physically sustainable way we have always and already accepted technology, be it in the middle of the wilderness or on a homestead where we pretend to live a self-sufficient life. The second point is that this acceptance is required of us. It is the sign, I said, of a new maturity.45 To grasp the point better, let us consider the difficulties that surround it. If we must accept technology, is there not an ever-present and irrepressible danger that, acting technologically, we will overwhelm the wilderness? This can happen along a gradient from brute force to subtlety. We may road, log, or mine the wilderness; we may build airstrips and hotels in it; or we may venture into it with a packstring and an outfitter who will procure all the conveniences of home in the middle of a mountain meadow; and finally, if too many of us set out for the wilderness at once, even with the best of manners, our footsteps, campsites, and numbers will destroy the wilderness.46 As regards the brute force of technology, it exists now and cannot be wished away. It would continue to exist as a possibility even in the utterly unlikely case where we would disarm technology to secure the wilderness. Thus respect for the wilderness will never again be nourished by its formerly indomitable wildness. On the contrary. The wilderness now touches us deeply in being so fragile and vulnerable. This is another aspect of the inversion of nature and culture of which I spoke before. In one respect, the citizens of the technological societies must now achieve the same adulthood in relation to the wilderness that each of us had to attain in regard to our parents. As infants our affection for our parents was informed by our dependence and their power. But as our powers came to equal and in certain ways exceed theirs, we had to learn a new respect. Surely such a respect is more profound for its being extended to the parents in their own right rather than as providers of comfort and security. But neither is it a disinterested general goodwill that we show our parents in our adulthood. Rather we honor in them the embodiment and practice of an order that is greater than ourselves, that has given birth to us, and that we have received with gratitude and want to carry on. One should not overextend the analogy; and here too, as in the case of religion, nature in its pristine state may be more eloquent than parents in a nursing home, and we may have to learn filial reverence through the respect of nature.
Just as the wilderness teaches us to accept technology, so through technology we learn to respect the wilderness, not for its power but for its beauty. It is clear what is meant by power: ferocious animals, steep terrain, high elevations, raging rivers, forbidding snowstorms. All of this technology can overcome. Consistent with my earlier remarks, I use “beauty” as a generic and approximate term for the eloquence of pristine nature as it speaks to us in its splendor and calmness; and as said before, short of hearing that voice directly, it is presented to us most vividly in the speaking of the poet. Technology cannot ov
ercome and secure it. It can procure the beauty of the wilderness only by either killing it or keeping it at bay. Technology kills the wilderness when it develops it through roads, lifts, motels, and camping areas. It keeps the wilderness at bay when, without affecting untouched areas permanently, it insulates us from the engagement with the many dimensions and features of the land, as it does through rides in jet boats or helicopters. Here we can see that technology with its seemingly infinite resourcefulness in procuring anything and everything does have a clear limit. It can procure something that engages us fully and in its own right only at the price of gutting or removing it. Thus the wilderness teaches us not only to accept technology but also to limit it. The limitation of technology is an impossible task when it is undertaken with a view to technology only. But when it takes its measure from engagement, principled and sensible steps are possible. It would be arbitrarily harsh to admit people to the wilderness with at most a coat and a loaf of bread, and it would be inconsistently lenient to allow access to motor vehicles. To require that people (or at most horses and mules) carry in whatever is needed and leave no trash or scars is a rule that balances the mature acceptance of technology with the openness to pristine nature in its deep texture. Thus we become free for the wilderness without courting the danger of disburdenment and disengagement. The burdens of one’s gear and of a climb are the ways in which the wilderness discloses itself. They are onerous, to be sure, and taxing. And so they call forth a discipline which is sensibly marked off not only against the strain of labor and the pleasures of consumption but also against the immature pursuit of pretechnological risks.
We can now grasp the significance of the wilderness experience in the midst of technology more generally still. This is necessary since that specific experience is not accessible to many people, and if it were the sole focus for a reform of technology it would permit little hope. It is necessary also to meet the requirement of tolerance; it would be naive or arrogant to expect that the wilderness is equally eloquent for all or that its voice is the only one abroad. A more general statement is possible, as said in the preceding chapter, because there is in fact a kinship among eloquent and focal things.
We can learn from the wilderness that pretechnological things are not mere forlorn remnants of an irretrievable order but attain a new splendor in the midst of technology. They teach us both to accept and to limit technology in a principled and sensible way. They allow us to be more fully human in offering us engagement, in calling forth a new maturity, and in demanding a rightful discipline. The question now is whether we can give these suggestions a broader grounding and derive from them more specific guidelines for a reform of technology.
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Focal Things and Practices
To see that the force of nature can be encountered analogously in many other places, we must develop the general notions of focal things and practices. This is the first point of this chapter. The Latin word focus, its meaning and etymology, are our best guides to this task. But once we have learned tentatively to recognize the instances of focal things and practices in our midst, we must acknowledge their scattered and inconspicuous character too. Their hidden splendor comes to light when we consider Heidegger’s reflections on simple and eminent things. But an inappropriate nostalgia clings to Heidegger’s account. It can be dispelled, so I will argue, when we remember and realize more fully that the technological environment heightens rather than denies the radiance of genuine focal things and when we learn to understand that focal things require a practice to prosper within. These points I will try to give substance in the subsequent parts of this chapter by calling attention to the focal concerns of running and of the culture of the table.
The Latin word focus means hearth. We came upon it in Chapter 9 where the device paradigm was first delineated and where the hearth or fireplace, a thing, was seen as the counterpart to the central heating plant, a device. It was pointed out that in a pretechnological house the fireplace constituted a center of warmth, of light, and of daily practices. For the Romans the focus was holy, the place where the housegods resided. In ancient Greece, a baby was truly joined to the family and household when it was carried about the hearth and placed before it. The union of a Roman marriage was sanctified at the hearth. And at least in the early periods the dead were buried by the hearth. The family ate by the hearth and made sacrifices to the housegods before and after the meal. The hearth sustained, ordered, and centered house and family.1 Reflections of the hearth’s significance can yet be seen in the fireplace of many American homes. The fireplace often has a central location in the house. Its fire is now symbolical since it rarely furnishes sufficient warmth. But the radiance, the sounds, and the fragrance of living fire consuming logs that are split, stacked, and felt in their grain have retained their force. There are no longer images of the ancestral gods placed by the fire; but there often are pictures of loved ones on or above the mantel, precious things of the family’s history, or a clock, measuring time.2
The symbolical center of the house, the living room with the fireplace, often seems forbidding in comparison with the real center, the kitchen with its inviting smells and sounds. Accordingly, the architect Jeremiah Eck has rearranged homes to give them back a hearth, “a place of warmth and activity” that encompasses cooking, eating, and living and so is central to the house whether it literally has a fireplace or not.3 Thus we can satisfy, he says, “the need for a place of focus in our family lives.”4
“Focus,” in English, is now a technical term of geometry and optics. Johannes Kepler was the first so to use it, and he probably drew on the then already current sense of focus as the “burning point of lens or mirror.”5 Correspondingly, an optic or geometric focus is a point where lines or rays converge or from which they diverge in a regular or lawful way. Hence “focus” is used as a verb in optics to denote moving an object in relation to a lens or modifying a combination of lenses in relation to an object so that a clear and well-defined image is produced.
These technical senses of “focus” have happily converged with the original one in ordinary language. Figuratively they suggest that a focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them. To focus on something or to bring it into focus is to make it central, clear, and articulate. It is in the context of these historical and living senses of “focus” that I want to speak of focal things and practices. Wilderness on this continent, it now appears, is a focal thing. It provides a center of orientation; when we bring the surrounding technology into it, our relations to technology become clarified and well-defined. But just how strong its gathering and radiating force is requires further reflection. And surely there will be other focal things and practices: music, gardening, the culture of the table, or running.
We might in a tentative way be able to see these things as focal; what we see more clearly and readily is how inconspicuous, homely, and dispersed they are. This is in stark contrast to the focal things of pretechnological times, the Greek temple or the medieval cathedral that we have mentioned before. Martin Heidegger was deeply impressed by the orienting force of the Greek temple. For him, the temple not only gave a center of meaning to its world but had orienting power in the strong sense of first originating or establishing the world, of disclosing the world’s essential dimensions and criteria.6 Whether the thesis so extremely put is defensible or not, the Greek temple was certainly more than a self-sufficient architectural sculpture, more than a jewel of well-articulated and harmoniously balanced elements, more, even, than a shrine for the image of the goddess or the god. As Vincent Scully has shown, a temple or a temple precinct gathered and disclosed the land in which they were situated. The divinity of land and sea was focused in the temple.7
To see the work of art as the focus and origin of the world’s meaning was a pivotal discovery for Heidegger. He had begun in the modern tradition of Western philosophy where, as suggested in the first chapter of this book, the sense of reality is to be
grasped by determining the antecedent and controlling conditions of all there is (the Bedingungen der Möglichkeit as Immanuel Kant has it). Heidegger wanted to outdo this tradition in the radicality of his search for the fundamental conditions of being. Perhaps it was the relentlessness of his pursuit that disclosed the ultimate futility of it. At any rate, when the universal conditions are explicated in a suitably general and encompassing way, what truly matters still hangs in the balance because everything depends on how the conditions come to be actualized and instantiated.8 The preoccupation with antecedent conditions not only leaves this question unanswered; it may even make it inaccessible by leaving the impression that, once the general and fundamental matters are determined, nothing of consequence remains to be considered. Heidegger’s early work, however, already contained the seeds of its overcoming. In his determination to grasp reality in its concreteness, Heidegger had found and stressed the inexorable and unsurpassable givenness of human existence, and he had provided analyses of its pretechnological wholeness and its technological distraction though the significance of these descriptions for technology had remained concealed to him.9 And then he discovered that the unique event of significance in the singular work of art, in the prophet’s proclamation, and in the political deed was crucial. This insight was worked out in detail with regard to the artwork. But in an epilogue to the essay that develops this point, Heidegger recognized that the insight comes too late. To be sure, our time has brought forth admirable works of art. “But,” Heidegger insists, “the question remains: is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?”10
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