The Gathering Earth

THIS EARTHLY GATHERING can be thought ecologically and evolutionarily, but in thinking of it in this way, we must also attend to the thinking itself, to the manners in which thought, too, is patterned and gathered here. Otherwise, we will simply think that our thoughts reflect or represent the earth as it is and overlook the materio-semiotic and phenomenal patternings, natural and cultural, in which all thought arises. We will fall back into thinking earth as an object to be studied from above, rather than something of which all thought is also a part. There is not a single thought, however vague, scientific, original, crazy, or clichéd, that is not of (belonging to, emergent from, part of) the earth! There are various ways we might approach this understanding, for example, through Bateson’s (1987) ecology of mind, through material engagement theory (e.g., Malafouris 2013; Graham 2020) or ideas of extended mind (e.g., Clarke 1997; Sutton 2020) where we think with the earth and its worldly manifestations, not over and against it, just as the mountaineer’s thought is composed by and of the rock she climbs. For present purposes, though, Heidegger’s work seems most pertinent because he articulates earth as an ongoing disclosure and gathering of myriad worldings that is both provisional and context dependent.

Earth Heidegger (1993, 351) characterizes as “the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal.” It is explicitly associated with the ancient Greek notion of physis (see earlier discussion), with the sense of things arising out of themselves, pushing up into and becoming manifest in the phenomenological “world” experienced and appropriated by living beings, as seedlings emerging from a rotting log are sensed and grazed by deer. But, Heidegger reminds us, that which emerges to presence is never fully disclosed within the phenomenal world. It is only revealed under certain limited modes of appropriation, under certain aspects, in accordance with certain interests, expectations, sensoriums, histories, frames, predetermined interpretations, and so on. The deer senses the seedling as something to eat, but there is more to the seedling than this. In this sense, earth as such, the mysterious source of material manifestations, always holds something back; it conceals, and remains concealed, within itself.

Heidegger focuses on the particular possibilities for experiencing and composing an understanding of the world. In this sense, our thinking of earthly gathering is akin to, follows on from, but is subtly different from, Heidegger’s. That said, like Heidegger, we can provisionally (the term is used by Heidegger too) delimit the “world as the manifestness of beings as such as a whole” (Heidegger 1995, 282, our emphasis). That is to say, Heidegger’s world is not just the manifestation or phenomenal world of any particular being (entity) or experience of being (existence), for example, a beetle or its sensing the rough bark of a tree, but of the world understood as a composite gathering together of that which constitutes a whole in its manifestations, a whole in which human beings have a capacity to come to realize that they only participate, as mortals, for a while. Of course, when he speaks of understanding the world as a whole, Heidegger is not arguing that knowledge of it could ever be complete, that we can know everything about the world. For example, “we” cannot actually imagine all these myriad worlds, like the beetle’s, because “life is a domain which possesses a wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare” (255). Nor can we fit these worlds together in some “objective” sense—although technology, in Heidegger’s terms, is precisely the attempt to produce a world composed of such objects. Rather, his point is that only human beings can experience and think of the gathering itself, that is, of the world as a world, the world as such.

At issue here, though, is the manner in which, for Heidegger, the world requires humans’ participation for earth’s manifestations to be gathered together as a world. Conceptually, for Heidegger, the earth is “that which shelters in coming forth” (Heidegger, as cited in Haar 1993, 57); it is the hidden but continually manifesting ground, the “spontaneous arising” (Haar 1993, 57) that “informs,” pushes up into the world in its appearing. “The world is founded on the Earth, the Earth thrusts up through the world” (Heidegger, as cited in Haar 1993, 59). However, as already noted, that appearing is always partial and shaped by the way that world is sensed, enacted, and understood (in the modern human case, this is now exemplified by a technological enframing where everything is forced to appear as resource). Earth, then, has a generative role in Heidegger, and the world that manifests is by no means just a human construct, but for Heidegger, earth does not itself have a capacity to form a world as such without the presence and contribution of human beings. That is to say, Heidegger (1977a, 221) argues, the world is only a world as such, for “Man” [sic] the “shepherd of being.” This is why Heidegger (1995) refers to humanity as “world forming” and all other animals as “world poor.” The appearance of world qua world is dependent on an opening or “lighting of Being” (Heidegger 1977a, 229) that is essentially only available to human beings.

How can this be, since animals obviously have experiential access to the world, the earth becomes manifest, appears, to them, too, even if not in the same ways, or even in the same senses? However, Heidegger claims, for animals, the world appears only as a collection of specific features that captivate that particular animal in terms of disinhibiting, letting loose, its instinctual behaviors, for example, the leaf captures the attention of the caterpillar, stimulating it to feed. Animals, Heidegger might say, are environmentally spellbound, caught up in a world constituted only by particular aspects of their disinhibiting environment; they cannot experience the world as such.

Seeing things as things, rather than just responding to them as stimuli, Heidegger argues, requires a capacity to be freed from instinctive captivation. Only then can one “stand within a manifestness of beings” as a being (Heidegger 1995, 248). Humans can be open to the world as such and be world forming only because they can let things be (not be captivated by them). In other words, to experience the openness of the world “as such” requires being able to experience something as more than a matter of passing interest or as being at one’s service. Indeed, things show themselves as such precisely in their (in)difference to us, in the revelation to us of a withholding (as, for example, Heidegger [1995] famously argues, occurs in boredom) that also signals our participation in a world that exceeds our own singular existences. Insofar as human experience and/or thought facilitates an exposure to this withholding, it allows us to achieve a sense of the world as a whole, a world that exceeds our mode of access, a world we understand as existing even when we, as singular beings, no longer exist, have died. The awareness of the finitude of our existence exposes the world as such. Only “Man,” according to Heidegger, has this possibility.

Now to regard animals as uniformly beset and enveloped in their instincts (whatever “instincts” might mean) is, as many, including Derrida (2008), have pointed out, asinine. There may also be, as Derrida further suggests, some doubt as to whether humans can, in actuality, do that, that is, think the world (ontologically) as a world as such or the things in it, the stone, the wind, the tree, as such. Of course, thinking the world as a whole, for Heidegger, is not thinking it in its totality; thinking it as such is not comprehending it as it “really is.” Indeed, it is precisely the burgeoning awareness that beings, things, and the whole world have hidden generative depths, dimensions, and involvements that escapes our attention and resists our appropriation—earthly depths that language cannot fully encompass. Our understandings then, as Heidegger also indicates, can only be “provisional.” To comport ourselves to the world as world, the tree as tree, is to recognize its dependency on earth’s worlding and the withdrawal of its being in the very mode of its appearance. The “as such” is the recognition of this unfathomable generative excess, the inevitable failure of any attempt to grasp everything about the world because of its dependence on the sheltering earth.

Still, insofar as the animal is generalized as “deprived” or world poor, the stone declared worldless, being world forming is cast as a privilege that sets an unbridgeable gap between humanity and all other earthly beings. Heidegger’s approach is indubitably a form of humanism rather than, say, just a recognition of a multiplicity of specific differences. Evolution and ecology both resist this absolute and universal privileging (Smith 2017). We also need to recognize that, for Heidegger, the earth has no “natural history”; it manifests seasonal and sidereal cycles, but it is just generatively grounding—there is no sense of deep time or evolution, of the pre- or posthuman world or radically changing patterns of earth’s modes of manifestation. Ecology too—the innumerable ways in which being-there is always dependent on and party to an ecologically entangled and changing patterning of earthly being are also muted, made to appear philosophically only in ways where they serve, resist, or affect our being-there.1 Both evolution and ecology would be suspected by Heidegger of being just humanly degrading forms of “biologism.” Yet, if we are drawn, as Heidegger suggests, in recognizing our own individual mortality, to an understanding of a world that exceeds, precedes, and survives our own world, then we surely have also to be drawn to recognize earth’s existence before and after us, together with the far from impoverished or imperfect worlds, like those of beetles, that preexisted humanity and might well survive its demise. These worlds did not cease to exist or be gathered together evolutionarily or ecologically in various, never fully apparent ways, without human presence.

We might say, then, that consequent upon the anthropically involved gathering of world as an “inceptual” whole, there is also the possibility, indeed the necessity, to think this other prior, ongoing, and future gathering—the earth without us, without, that is, what Heidegger refers to as a world thought as such, a world lacking the supposedly unique opening that humans afford. To do otherwise, to ignore this calling, would parallel that failing to think our individual mortality that Heidegger so disdains. We need to think the limit of humanity as such, that is, earth’s gatherings without human beings, and also the evolutionary aftereffects of certain human imaginaries on an earth without ends. Of course, such an earthly gathering may not be one where attention is paid to the question of existence per se, but earth is that which, in “its” aimless evolutions, provided the very particular occasion of the there-being that raises this questioning. The diverse world(s) generated by this nonhuman earth may not be gathered together through thought or language (although this depends on one’s definition of language! [see earlier]), but nonetheless, our very emergence is evidence of a continual gathering of “its” ever-changing evolving patternings over billions of years before we existed. We cannot claim to be philosophers, “lovers of wisdom,” and ignore this!

If we can, as Heidegger suggests, provisionally delimit the world as a whole, then we can, to some extent, provisionally delimit the earth, too, in much the same way. Our being-here is always an earthly being-there that transcends in so many ways our experiential and conceptual modes of being. Think of the gap between the aspects gathered together in our paltry attempt to explicate the rotting log in its interconnectivity and the gathering achieved by the earth without any assistance whatsoever from us. We only have an inkling, an intuitive (but multiplicitously and materially informed) sense, of all the being, experiences, reactions, emergences, and flows between interpercolating patterns and the literally innumerable aspects of these overlooked, unknown, inexpressible materio-semiotic and phenomenal manifestations—the wildly patterned earth. Here there is no single overarching principle of creation, no design, no aim or intent. The gathering earth far surpasses the conceptual and material gatherings of humanity. Ecological wisdom would suggest that we should not mistake our world forming for a “higher” realization, nor for earth’s Terra forming. This, too, might be regarded as the wisdom sheltered in Heidegger’s resurrection of the term physis, which, we would argue, fits so very well with nonmechanistic notions of ecology and evolution.

Here, then, is another provisional delimitation of the earth, earth as physis beset by a specific and now dominant pattern of technological world forming comprising a progressive imaginary. Earth as continually worlding and withdrawing, differentially emergent as materio-semiotic manifestations, reproducing (but never identically) intricate patternings of being and beings. Earth as gathering beings together but not by hand, eye, or external order or under a singular principle but as anarchic (de)compositions of these evolving, differentiating patterns on immensely different scales. Earth as generative and expansive within a narrow envelope of soil, sea, and atmosphere, manifesting in different sensory, material, and semiotic registers; sometimes appearing as provisional or cruel, listless or frantic, crowded or deserted, inconsistently constant, as generously dancing leaves and screaming winds, surging icebergs, gently falling snow, ephemeral beings and geological temporalities, pulsing, rhythmic, but always a little offbeat, sheltering and releasing the sudden and unexpected, interweaving the differentially accessible, carrying within it billions of years of natural histories and still entirely encompassing us.