Journeying between home and nature: a geo-phenomenological exploration and its insights for learning (original) (raw)
Related papers
At Home in the World: A Reading and Reflection on Dwelling, Nature, Phenomenology, and Ecopoetry
Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies, 2021
In this essay, adapted from a lecture he delivered to the Humanities Forum of Providence College on 30 September 2021, the Luso-American poet, memoirist, and translator Scott Edward Anderson talks about his book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, his engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger, phenomenology, ecopoetry, and, ultimately, the concept of home.
Becoming at Home in the Natural World
2007
Summary Modernity has impacted on the very sense of ourselves, that is, on the sense of what it means to be a human being and on our role and place on this planet. How to find meaning in a world that often appears stripped of meaning and purpose is a problem implicated in the resistance encountered to the taking of personal environmental responsibility. An ethic of environmental accountability cannot simply be prescribed; it needs to arise from something more fundamental. I suggest that the deficient relationship between humans and the natural world arises out of a loss of a sense of a fundamental earthly ground out of which humans derive significance and a personal sense of wellbeing. I contend that, as it involves an essential feature of human existence, the retrieval of this experience is a critical issue for modern western culture. The experience of ‘Being as such’ is not an ‘everyday’ experience, but a particular kind of experience that nurtures the wholeness of human beings. It tends to engage an experience of astonishment, awe and wonder at existence itself. Its absence, implicating deeper questions of existential homelessness, is a factor in mechanistic, indifferent and negative attitudes towards the environment and nihilistic worldviews. I propose that the philosophy of Martin Heidegger may throw light on how such an experience might be reawakened and thereby open up fresh possibilities of perceiving the human place and role within nature. Within his work, particularly in his Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) , there is a transitory, transitional and transformative pathway of thinking that may well be engaged in the retrieval of a way of being whereby thinking is less influenced by everyday familiarity, indifference or negativity and the changeability of feelings, but, as it grounds the human essence, is more enduring in its worth. I propose that it becomes a manner of thinking, within a deeper sense of what it means to be, that imparts significance to the experience of relating to the world; an experience in which environmental responsibility then becomes an authentic and coherent outcome. I explore the unfamiliar pathway of thinking, enacted in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), which provides both the inspiration and the structural underpinnings for my questioning and reflections. As a central foundation of this ‘post-philosophical turn’ this work, together with other works of this period, demonstrates Heidegger’s own ‘crossing’, which was for him a transformation of thinking, necessary when metaphysical questioning reaches the limit of articulation and such thinking must transform itself in order to enable its continuation. Yet, rather than being an exegesis of this work as a whole, it grasps, clarifies, develops and applies the particular unique kind of thinking that arises there within a framework of identifiable, yet ineffable, connections and relationships. I examine this as a region of passage or transition of thinking, which I describe as the ‘threshold’. Here the emergence of a different way of being and thinking ‘displaces’ or ‘interrupts’ the familiarity of ‘everyday’ thinking and experience, thereby allowing the possibilities of more meaningful ways of being and doing. The pathway itself is not chronologically and spatially sequential; therefore its nature does not make this thesis amenable to an exclusively linear progressive structure. Instead, it is approached as a developmental and tentative pathway which builds upon an emerging awareness and a different conception of truth (to empirical correctness) as a form of translation or encounter with thought. From a broadly Heideggerian perspective, I introduce the everyday ways modernity diminishes the essential experience of human existence as dwellers of the earth. This involves a forgetting or concealing of the unique experience of Being and the human essence, which restricts the manner of relating to the world and tends to see the things and interconnectedness of the earth, and even ourselves, as mere stockpiles of resources, objects for examination or equipment. The thinking of the “crossing” in Beiträge is then taken up, firstly by an examination of Heidegger’s conception of the primordial experience of nature by pre-Socratic thinkers. Features of the joining moments in the crossing between what Heidegger describes as the ‘beginnings’, are then introduced via the metaphor of the threshold. The threshold is engaged as fundamental to the ongoing journey of ‘coming to be at home’ in the world. I express the indefinable ‘dimensionality’ of the threshold, its features and strata, as a transitional, transitory and transformative region of thinking, where there is an ‘interplay’ between different spheres and dimensions. It is an ‘in-between region’ where there is an ‘overflowing’ of everyday thinking beyond purely calculative, objective postures, to a thinking that is both underway and aware of what is happening to it in its transformation. Venturing the threshold requires a posture of ‘openness’ to the uncertain ground of our being, to the ‘abyss-like beyond’ of the threshold and the manner of its revealing. Seeking the source, that which is originary and emerging, shelters the inner home of human dwelling. The nature of the human being in its essence (a non-metaphysical understanding of what we may call ‘soul’) is one of a wanderer, a seeker of Earth, which is the strange ground of human dwelling. It must always be underway towards where its nature draws it, towards an authentic homeliness and not fleeing from it. Thereby, in this seeking, the wandering soul’s being is fulfilled. Here the ‘awesome’ beholding of nature involves a greater discernment of the essential belonging together of Being and beings and of a kind of truth that is usually hidden in the everyday. In the disposition of the threshold we find hints and possibilities for a more deeply engaged encounter with all beings of the earth, and a less belligerent and self-protective way of being that retrieves and shelters what is most precious in earthly dwelling.
Reflection on Nature and Earthly Dwelling
College of Dupage/Palgrave, 2021
In conversation with the eco-philosophical scholarship ofMichael Bonnett and David Jardine, this essay works to further the discussion concerning the fate ofthe earth as it is bound inextricably with the future ofeducation. It analyzes the de-centered, post-humanist phenomenological subject. It presents the notion of “eco-pedagogy” in relation to a view of education that demonstrates a respect for the Earth and the unfolding of the “integrated curriculum of life.” It argues for nature as a “self arising” and value-laden phenomenon that instills in us a sense of awe and respect that grounds and guides our response to nature’s address, communicated in the reticence ofits sway and unfolding, within which we are integral participants. It concludes with a poetic discussion of dwelling that attunes us to the lessons that nature might teach, as evidenced in the intimate conversations to be had, not in the classroom, but on a dense forest path in communion with nature.
EXPERIENCING LANDSCAPE. A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
In this paper, I draw on a possible conception of landscape from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Starting from an overview of the two main positions regarding landscape within the continental philosophical tradition (Simmel and Ritter), I consider the use of the term 'landscape' in Merleau-Ponty's thought, without wishing to claim that the French philosopher presents a philosophy of landscape within his works. I want to show that important elements for the outline of a phenomenological conception of landscape emerge from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. According to Simmel, landscape is seen as the product of a spiritual act, and in Ritter's perspective, landscape emerges from a detached contemplation of nature proper to humans in the modern era. Contrasted with these views, a consideration of Merleau-Ponty's original works allows to draw on a conception of landscape in which the experiential and perceptual dimensions are fundamental. This view enables us to consider landscape in its centrality for human experience, and leads to a better understanding of the strong ontological commitment between humans and nature.
Exploring Our Connections And Relationships With Place And/Or Nature
2005
Over the past 10-15 years, I have witnessed the delivery and Outdoor Education and Experiential Learning in Australia and New Zealand to take a different tangent. Typically, facilitators of Outdoor Education and Experiential Learning have operated ‘in a bubble’ unaware or immune to the impact of nature upon human psyche and being. They have primarily been dislocated from nature, taking photographs of our outdoor experiences, but oblivious to the soulful text of the land. As Winton (2003, p.266) poignantly states ‘aborigines sometimes question the “European” urge to climb high and look out across land from a bluff or peak. I suppose if you know what’s there, if you’re intimate with it in a bodily, spiritual way, you don’t need to look.’
Children, Youth and Environments, 2023
This study investigated the sensory responses of 20 students and a geography teacher in their contact with the green areas around their school in Curitiba, Brazil in 2019. With a theoretical framework of eco-phenomenological and sensory ethnographical references, the study used three data gathering techniques: participant observation, administering a questionnaire, and walking ethnography. Review of the data revealed three categories for analysis: phenomenological deconstruction and reconstruction, slow pedagogy, and the education of attention. The results indicate that the urban context is a rich scenario offering various possibilities for awakening interest in environmental education.
Philosophy of Landscape : Think, Walk, Act
2019
This landmark collection of essays on landscape offers a much-needed comprehensive exploration of an important dimension of our human environment. Landscape is different from such environmental topics as the forest, the city, and the sea. Unlike other subjects of environmental inquiry, landscape is strangely situated, giving it a compelling significance. For landscape is not a place that can be clearly demarcated. It is not a natural object like a mountain or a river, nor is it a location such as a valley or an island. In fact, landscape is no thing at all. Etymologically speaking, landscape is an expanse of the perceived environment: a scene, a region, surroundings as viewed by an observer. This gives landscape unique standing in environmental experience because landscape cannot be considered alone: it is, in effect, defined by and in relation to human perception. Landscape is a relationship. We can think here of the Claude glass, so called because it was an optical device, invented by the seventeenth century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, through which an artist or a traveler in the countryside could look and adjust in order to frame a pleasing aspect of the scenery, arranging the view through the glass to resemble what a painter would depict with brush and paint. This exemplifies how what is designated as a landscape depends on the viewer, a point of exceeding importance. For there is no landscape "out there", so to speak, no independent object or place. Recognizing this has dramatic implications, for it demonstrates how landscape is actually a complex synthesis of viewer and environment. Recognizing this led me to entitle my first extended discussion of environment, "The Viewer in the Landscape", and that same understanding underlies many of the essays in this volume. Moreover, landscape has been used metaphorically in ways that do not always suit a visual meaning, such as 'earthscape' and 'spacescape' and even in referring to memories of one's previous home as an internal landscape.-Filosofia da Paisagem. Estudos, 2013. A compilation of essays by Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, the principal investigator of the project. Organized in four chapters: "Anthropology and Philosophy of Nature"; "Nature and Art: The Composite Categories"; "Landscape and Environment. A theoretical debate" and "Problems of Philosophy of the Landscape", the book reflects on the essence of Landscape as idea and reality, being and manifestation. 'A piece of nature' is, as such, an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is removed from this wholeness, it is no longer nature, precisely because it can only be 'nature' within that unlimited unity, as a wave of that global flow. 2 19 Spazio limitato il paesaggio, ma aperto, perché, a differenza degli spazi chiusi, ha sopra di sé il cielo, cioè lo spazio illimitato; e non rappresenta l'infinito (simbolicamente o ilusionisticamente), ma si apre all'infinito, pur nella finitezza del suo essere limitato: costituendosi come presenza,
A Developed Nature: A Phenomenological Account of the Experience of Home
Though "dwelling" is more commonly associated with Heidegger's philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty, "being-at-home" is in fact integral to Merleau-Ponty's thinking. I consider the notion of home as it relates to Merleau-Ponty's more familiar notions of the "lived body" and the "level," and, in particular, I consider how the unique intertwining of activity and passivity that characterizes our being-at-home is essential to our nature as free beings. I argue that while being-at-home is essentially an experience of passivity—i.e., one that rests in the background of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and that is significantly beyond our "conscious" control—being-at-home is also a way of being to which we attain. This analysis of home reveals important psychological insights into the nature of our freedom as well as into the nature of the development of our adult ways of coping and behaving.