Encounter with Nature as a Possibility for an Integral Calibration of the Self Or: Considerations for Promoting Post-Anthropocentric, Vital, and Sustainable Attitudes and Perspectives from the Perspective of Dialogical Aesthetics in the Anthropocene
In a time of exceeding global capacity limits (the so-called Anthropocene), a new epoch is emerging - an ecozoic age. In this necessary transformation, it will be revealed whether humankind (more as a species rather than as individuals) is capable of peacefully and altruistically shaping the required change under precarious conditions and with an unknown outcome, in an entirely new way that is oriented towards life. Alternatively, the present civilization may continue to mask its decline (remaining in the Anthropocene) as progress, thereby sealing its fate - with a spectacular but seemingly relatively harmless voyeuristic pleasure that swiftly turns into pure horror in the face of a catastrophe that no one truly wants to envision.
"The human" or "humanity" can no longer be understood as a unified, well-defined, calculable entity, but rather as a form of life among countless others. However, it differs from other life forms on this planet in that it is endowed with the capacity to perceive and reflect upon its own status. It can thus act in the world selflessly, driven by trust and perhaps even love. Alternatively, one can perceive humans in their particularity as a form of life that has always renounced "blind" trust for its own advantage and calculates its thoughts, feelings, and actions at the expense of others. Or as a form of life that, although living in this world, is imbued with notions of a transcendent or otherworldly utopia (in the afterlife, on another planet, or in the distant future). Attention is then predominantly directed towards linguistically transmitted and mediated notions and fantasies, without perceiving, let alone wanting to respect and protect, the living world within and around oneself.
The latter two distancing, calculating, and abstracting variants that fuel the narcissistic, inflated self prevail in a world where reliance on distance, exploitation, and profit is habitual, rather than cultivating a culture of closeness, connection, and being touched - in short, a culture of shared existence. The culture of exploitation and material self-aggrandizement permeates our monetarily mediated perception of reality - we can no longer imagine that anything could function or be possible (and thus truly serve as an alternative) without money and possessions. And many of the losers in this game (winners are, "naturally," few and far between), who do not gain access to satisfying amounts of money and possessions, increasingly seek compensatory experiences of happiness through nationalist, religious, or even fanatical means, once again realizing them at the expense of others. Alternatively, they detach themselves from the suffering world and save themselves, as if from nothingness, through apparent enlightenments, which lead them even deeper into delusion.
The true state of the world cannot be determined here either. However, it can be observed that the possibilities and realities of the "world" (accessible to all living beings) are realized in a process in which humans have long played a decisive role (several thousand to hundreds of years, depending on the perspective), which is why the term Anthropocene is now used.
Esoteric outlooks on forms of existence beyond our perceptible and measurable reality cannot be ruled out, but unfortunately, they are often nonsensical, disconnected from reality, and turned away from life. There are worldviews that, by principle, remain untouched and maintain a dogmatic compulsion that keeps them at a distance from any form of connection. However, such worldviews cannot completely free themselves from connections as long as they have not yet been transformed into pure spiritual beings.
Their detachment from everything worldly is motivated by their soul, and one can only wish them luck in their project. The question is whether in the end, detachment from everything that appears can truly do justice to the real, when one negates, devalues, and ignores everything beyond one's own mental constructions in a blanket manner. Can such a purely spiritual, worldly concept, turned away from the present, ever do justice to a constantly giving, exchanging, and expressing - living - world of "phenomena"? And even if it's just for the sake of saving the self, which itself is nothing but a phenomenon?
The prevailing worldview on this planet today mostly has cold faces. Essentially, it is based on imagined, world-consuming, world-denying, and increasingly world-destroying attitudes and dispositions that do not perceive themselves as such in order to function, and therefore taboo self-perception as a being that perceives at the deepest level. Humans, who have learned to think and act primarily motivated by money, are no longer capable of taking a liberated look at themselves and their conditions and circumstances. Because if this were possible, an entire world (according to their respective worldview) would suddenly collapse in the face of the thinly disguised ugliness and destructive power of what is then recognized, and the associated suffering that countless people, animals, and nature experience worldwide today more than ever. One would suddenly find oneself infinitely sad, ashamed, and filled with pain due to one's then recognized delusion, ignorance, deafness, and greed.
As someone who recognizes the given conditions and the resulting distorted perspectives, one would have to fundamentally question oneself as a "civilized" human being and acknowledge one's complicity in the destruction of life. One would not know how to stand up again since one has become a root of destruction and injustice on this planet as a modern, enlightened (or worse yet: postmodern, jaded) human being, with one's identity as such. How could we globally recognize ourselves as the technologically rational-functional deformed and cold-hearted beings that we have become? Regardless of our origin or culture, we somehow always consider ourselves superior and suffer or become tense if this is not confirmed and praised. Aren't we already doing our best for our loved ones and in general? Why should we, as the "good" individuals who have supposedly chosen their own self-optimization but are actually determined by external factors, change anymore? What can we do to face our weaknesses and failures without being left powerless? How can we gain courage and creative power in this self-revealing process? Is there a way to reinvent ourselves as human beings and thus perceive and shape the world in a completely different, unimaginable, yet familiar way?
Let's go back to the initial understanding of humans as a form of life among countless others, but one that differs from other life forms on this planet in that it is equipped with the ability to perceive and reflect upon its own status. In this sense, it acts in the world selflessly and guided by trust, perhaps even love. Isn't that a humanistic, largely secular worldview that we believe we have already embraced to a good extent, at least in democratically civilized countries, and only need to further cultivate? That would be nice, but what are the foundations of the terms perception, reflection, status, trust, love, and world that are mentioned here? How can this mentioned and essentially desirable world relationship become evident and effective in an appropriate manner? How can we perceive the world and ourselves within it? How can we, through our thinking, actions, and emotions, work towards making these idealized concepts, which stand for a possible better world, truly come to fruition and prove their worth? How can we free ourselves from these concepts to allow them to become effective in their true, ultimately conceptless potentials? Can truth be conceived outside of concepts at all?
This brings us to aesthetics in the sense of a reflective and reflected perception of what encounters us, and even more so, of what touches us. And it brings us to dialogue in the sense of personal exchange about it, along with all conceivable implications associated with it. And here we also come to the era in which this happens: the Anthropocene, the time when humans begin to perceive, shape, and understand the world beyond themselves. So we go beyond ourselves in a time when we become questionable to ourselves, and the present becomes more present as the future, lacking familiar resources, closes off as a livable and desirable space of possibilities. A dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene can pave and accompany this path of "beyond ourselves and towards ourselves" in the sense that it attentively directs our attention to what encounters us and makes this encounter fruitful for our feelings, thoughts, and actions in what we can then truly call "world" in a lived and lively sense. The future unfolds in the happening and leans towards us in the present, quite different from before when it seemed we had to continually conquer it from the present.
These considerations lead to something that can only be experienced and understood outside of human language. Here, phenomenological, communitarian, deep ecological, epistemological, behavior therapeutic, etc., ways of understanding and approaches come into play, serving as means of communication but unable to bring forth what this is all about: the soulful encounter with nature as the foundation of everything that concerns us. That is immeasurably much and something completely different from what we have become accustomed to in our comfortable consumerist, seemingly enlightened way of life, where we (re)produce arbitrary objects, ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
"Nature" is initially just a concept that can be illuminated and understood in various ways. However, what lies behind the concept is more than an idea or a general notion of something – nature is concretely the happening and fabric in which life occurs, that in which we exist. What understanding can we gain as humans from this life when we suddenly realize and want to do justice to the fact that this life is bestowed upon us and yet is unattainable in its depth and dignity? How can we attune ourselves to something living that we have only used for our purposes until now, something to which we have denied any "independent life," but suddenly notice that we are dependent on it and that, after millennia of thinking and developing, we have not perceived, let alone understood, anything of the living world as it occurs around, in, and through us? Who are we as humans in this infinitely changing, living happening that envelops and permeates us? Is it not the case that such questions present us with an almost superhuman task that is actually appropriate?
Dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene illuminates questions like these and aims to be nothing more and nothing less than a propaedeutic towards a new perception of ourselves as part of a comprehensive living happening that has not yet come to fruition through us to the extent that it could and that can and wants to gain more significance through us as human beings.
How can we approach this happening, make it perceptible to ourselves, attune ourselves to it? How can we continue to experience ourselves as human beings who are special precisely because this happening extends far beyond our previous possibilities, allowing us to unfold in this simultaneously immeasurable and touching space that encompasses us and is touched by us? What is our task, what are our possibilities as humans in a vibrant, sentient, and interconnected planetary world, which in turn is part of a solar, galactic, and intergalactic structure in an immeasurable cosmos of unforeseen dimensions?
Here, the cosmic Anthropos resonates in the sense of Jochen Kirchhoff, as do social science perspectives such as Hartmut Rosa's resonance model, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, embodied phenomenological perspectives developed by Hermann Schmitz, planetary thinking as pursued by Claus Leggewie, and insights from ecocriticism, including perspectives and methods of nature writing, all flowing into dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene.
The encounter with nature inevitably touches upon non-scientific realms, some of which are also motivated and effective from a spiritual standpoint. Nature, in a way that surpasses humans in a sublime and creative manner, can be perceived and described as "sacred." The sacred, as an expression of a comprehensive creative principle, directly speaks to us through our perception of nature – and isn't everything in which and that we exist part of nature?
Becoming aware of consciousness as a condition of any experience leads to pantheistic notions: the cosmos as a universe filled with spirit dust (Müller/Watzka). Experiencing nature as something permeated by spirit, even as something animated or soulful, with all the personalities that manifest within it and beyond as potentially responsive beings, opens up a shamanic approach to the world. Modern civilizations, convinced of their supposedly clear "scientific" worldview, can only with difficulty – if at all, then only psychologically or anthropologically – recognize and acknowledge such an approach.
Although the shamanic approach to the world is fundamentally unscientific (and must be a personal, non-analytical approach to a world beyond the perceptible world), and the forces revealed and manifest in artistic exploration of nature are unsuitable for scientific access, it does not mean that there are no hidden and cultivable realities at work here. It is vital, particularly in our time, to perceive, appreciate, and integrate these realities into our thinking, feeling, and actions. Philosophy and art, through their vivification of nature, have opened up many realms of thought and imagination that are inaccessible to the natural sciences, at least since Romanticism. However, it is necessary to go even beyond the realms of art and philosophy... into the reality of what (is not yet) real, but possible and desirable, and what may even be worth desiring.
Perhaps – and based on my artistic research in encounters with nature – there are fewer blind, random, or destructive forces at work in nature, but rather loving and healing forces that defy scientific understanding. These forces are not ascertainable or measurable by rational thought but are only perceptible (in the sense of being felt) through their emergence and passing on a mental-spiritual level. What are these living-perceptible realities and beings all about? What buried perceptual and consciousness qualities are being addressed here, waiting to be rediscovered and developed? What does it reveal to us as humans and what consequences should we draw from it? What worldview and reconcilable culture can emerge from it? Is the dichotomy between nature and culture completely dissolving, and could this dissolution be helpful, healing, and even life-saving for the future of life and humanity on this planet?
From the artistic research conducted in encounters with nature, an integral calibration of the self can be derived.
Integral calibration in the sense that through encounters with nature and reflection on perception and consciousness, humans can arrive at a new understanding of themselves – as beings enabled and carried by nature, experiencing depth and dignity in acknowledgment and exchange with other beings, no longer limited to humans alone. Individual creaturely existence then reveals itself as a creative gift within a shared field. Those who adopt this attitude, it can be presumed, will engage with reality and all life as their home in a different, more gentle, and creative manner compared to those who refuse this attitude and continue to handle their (surrounding) world in a soulless and heartless manner, unconsciously or consciously abusing it for their own purposes.
A dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene seeks to make the difference between living (healing) and lifeless (destructive) nature and culture palpable and to work it out, thereby also engaging in dialogue to develop ideas and concepts that demonstrate how healing of our instrumentalized, objectified, soulless, and hence fragmented "Being in the World" can become possible and real through encounters with nature and exchanges about it. This would be the contribution of dialogic aesthetics to promote post-anthropocentric, vibrant, and sustainable attitudes and perspectives in a time of human-induced scarcity.
I am deeply grateful to Barbara Kastura for allowing this artistic research, along with the associated considerations, to exist within a lively and creativity- and encounter-enabling shared experiential horizon. This is what lays the foundation for dialogic aesthetics and makes it exemplarily fruitful.
"The human" or "humanity" can no longer be understood as a unified, well-defined, calculable entity, but rather as a form of life among countless others. However, it differs from other life forms on this planet in that it is endowed with the capacity to perceive and reflect upon its own status. It can thus act in the world selflessly, driven by trust and perhaps even love. Alternatively, one can perceive humans in their particularity as a form of life that has always renounced "blind" trust for its own advantage and calculates its thoughts, feelings, and actions at the expense of others. Or as a form of life that, although living in this world, is imbued with notions of a transcendent or otherworldly utopia (in the afterlife, on another planet, or in the distant future). Attention is then predominantly directed towards linguistically transmitted and mediated notions and fantasies, without perceiving, let alone wanting to respect and protect, the living world within and around oneself.
The latter two distancing, calculating, and abstracting variants that fuel the narcissistic, inflated self prevail in a world where reliance on distance, exploitation, and profit is habitual, rather than cultivating a culture of closeness, connection, and being touched - in short, a culture of shared existence. The culture of exploitation and material self-aggrandizement permeates our monetarily mediated perception of reality - we can no longer imagine that anything could function or be possible (and thus truly serve as an alternative) without money and possessions. And many of the losers in this game (winners are, "naturally," few and far between), who do not gain access to satisfying amounts of money and possessions, increasingly seek compensatory experiences of happiness through nationalist, religious, or even fanatical means, once again realizing them at the expense of others. Alternatively, they detach themselves from the suffering world and save themselves, as if from nothingness, through apparent enlightenments, which lead them even deeper into delusion.
The true state of the world cannot be determined here either. However, it can be observed that the possibilities and realities of the "world" (accessible to all living beings) are realized in a process in which humans have long played a decisive role (several thousand to hundreds of years, depending on the perspective), which is why the term Anthropocene is now used.
Esoteric outlooks on forms of existence beyond our perceptible and measurable reality cannot be ruled out, but unfortunately, they are often nonsensical, disconnected from reality, and turned away from life. There are worldviews that, by principle, remain untouched and maintain a dogmatic compulsion that keeps them at a distance from any form of connection. However, such worldviews cannot completely free themselves from connections as long as they have not yet been transformed into pure spiritual beings.
Their detachment from everything worldly is motivated by their soul, and one can only wish them luck in their project. The question is whether in the end, detachment from everything that appears can truly do justice to the real, when one negates, devalues, and ignores everything beyond one's own mental constructions in a blanket manner. Can such a purely spiritual, worldly concept, turned away from the present, ever do justice to a constantly giving, exchanging, and expressing - living - world of "phenomena"? And even if it's just for the sake of saving the self, which itself is nothing but a phenomenon?
The prevailing worldview on this planet today mostly has cold faces. Essentially, it is based on imagined, world-consuming, world-denying, and increasingly world-destroying attitudes and dispositions that do not perceive themselves as such in order to function, and therefore taboo self-perception as a being that perceives at the deepest level. Humans, who have learned to think and act primarily motivated by money, are no longer capable of taking a liberated look at themselves and their conditions and circumstances. Because if this were possible, an entire world (according to their respective worldview) would suddenly collapse in the face of the thinly disguised ugliness and destructive power of what is then recognized, and the associated suffering that countless people, animals, and nature experience worldwide today more than ever. One would suddenly find oneself infinitely sad, ashamed, and filled with pain due to one's then recognized delusion, ignorance, deafness, and greed.
As someone who recognizes the given conditions and the resulting distorted perspectives, one would have to fundamentally question oneself as a "civilized" human being and acknowledge one's complicity in the destruction of life. One would not know how to stand up again since one has become a root of destruction and injustice on this planet as a modern, enlightened (or worse yet: postmodern, jaded) human being, with one's identity as such. How could we globally recognize ourselves as the technologically rational-functional deformed and cold-hearted beings that we have become? Regardless of our origin or culture, we somehow always consider ourselves superior and suffer or become tense if this is not confirmed and praised. Aren't we already doing our best for our loved ones and in general? Why should we, as the "good" individuals who have supposedly chosen their own self-optimization but are actually determined by external factors, change anymore? What can we do to face our weaknesses and failures without being left powerless? How can we gain courage and creative power in this self-revealing process? Is there a way to reinvent ourselves as human beings and thus perceive and shape the world in a completely different, unimaginable, yet familiar way?
Let's go back to the initial understanding of humans as a form of life among countless others, but one that differs from other life forms on this planet in that it is equipped with the ability to perceive and reflect upon its own status. In this sense, it acts in the world selflessly and guided by trust, perhaps even love. Isn't that a humanistic, largely secular worldview that we believe we have already embraced to a good extent, at least in democratically civilized countries, and only need to further cultivate? That would be nice, but what are the foundations of the terms perception, reflection, status, trust, love, and world that are mentioned here? How can this mentioned and essentially desirable world relationship become evident and effective in an appropriate manner? How can we perceive the world and ourselves within it? How can we, through our thinking, actions, and emotions, work towards making these idealized concepts, which stand for a possible better world, truly come to fruition and prove their worth? How can we free ourselves from these concepts to allow them to become effective in their true, ultimately conceptless potentials? Can truth be conceived outside of concepts at all?
This brings us to aesthetics in the sense of a reflective and reflected perception of what encounters us, and even more so, of what touches us. And it brings us to dialogue in the sense of personal exchange about it, along with all conceivable implications associated with it. And here we also come to the era in which this happens: the Anthropocene, the time when humans begin to perceive, shape, and understand the world beyond themselves. So we go beyond ourselves in a time when we become questionable to ourselves, and the present becomes more present as the future, lacking familiar resources, closes off as a livable and desirable space of possibilities. A dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene can pave and accompany this path of "beyond ourselves and towards ourselves" in the sense that it attentively directs our attention to what encounters us and makes this encounter fruitful for our feelings, thoughts, and actions in what we can then truly call "world" in a lived and lively sense. The future unfolds in the happening and leans towards us in the present, quite different from before when it seemed we had to continually conquer it from the present.
These considerations lead to something that can only be experienced and understood outside of human language. Here, phenomenological, communitarian, deep ecological, epistemological, behavior therapeutic, etc., ways of understanding and approaches come into play, serving as means of communication but unable to bring forth what this is all about: the soulful encounter with nature as the foundation of everything that concerns us. That is immeasurably much and something completely different from what we have become accustomed to in our comfortable consumerist, seemingly enlightened way of life, where we (re)produce arbitrary objects, ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
"Nature" is initially just a concept that can be illuminated and understood in various ways. However, what lies behind the concept is more than an idea or a general notion of something – nature is concretely the happening and fabric in which life occurs, that in which we exist. What understanding can we gain as humans from this life when we suddenly realize and want to do justice to the fact that this life is bestowed upon us and yet is unattainable in its depth and dignity? How can we attune ourselves to something living that we have only used for our purposes until now, something to which we have denied any "independent life," but suddenly notice that we are dependent on it and that, after millennia of thinking and developing, we have not perceived, let alone understood, anything of the living world as it occurs around, in, and through us? Who are we as humans in this infinitely changing, living happening that envelops and permeates us? Is it not the case that such questions present us with an almost superhuman task that is actually appropriate?
Dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene illuminates questions like these and aims to be nothing more and nothing less than a propaedeutic towards a new perception of ourselves as part of a comprehensive living happening that has not yet come to fruition through us to the extent that it could and that can and wants to gain more significance through us as human beings.
How can we approach this happening, make it perceptible to ourselves, attune ourselves to it? How can we continue to experience ourselves as human beings who are special precisely because this happening extends far beyond our previous possibilities, allowing us to unfold in this simultaneously immeasurable and touching space that encompasses us and is touched by us? What is our task, what are our possibilities as humans in a vibrant, sentient, and interconnected planetary world, which in turn is part of a solar, galactic, and intergalactic structure in an immeasurable cosmos of unforeseen dimensions?
Here, the cosmic Anthropos resonates in the sense of Jochen Kirchhoff, as do social science perspectives such as Hartmut Rosa's resonance model, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, embodied phenomenological perspectives developed by Hermann Schmitz, planetary thinking as pursued by Claus Leggewie, and insights from ecocriticism, including perspectives and methods of nature writing, all flowing into dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene.
The encounter with nature inevitably touches upon non-scientific realms, some of which are also motivated and effective from a spiritual standpoint. Nature, in a way that surpasses humans in a sublime and creative manner, can be perceived and described as "sacred." The sacred, as an expression of a comprehensive creative principle, directly speaks to us through our perception of nature – and isn't everything in which and that we exist part of nature?
Becoming aware of consciousness as a condition of any experience leads to pantheistic notions: the cosmos as a universe filled with spirit dust (Müller/Watzka). Experiencing nature as something permeated by spirit, even as something animated or soulful, with all the personalities that manifest within it and beyond as potentially responsive beings, opens up a shamanic approach to the world. Modern civilizations, convinced of their supposedly clear "scientific" worldview, can only with difficulty – if at all, then only psychologically or anthropologically – recognize and acknowledge such an approach.
Although the shamanic approach to the world is fundamentally unscientific (and must be a personal, non-analytical approach to a world beyond the perceptible world), and the forces revealed and manifest in artistic exploration of nature are unsuitable for scientific access, it does not mean that there are no hidden and cultivable realities at work here. It is vital, particularly in our time, to perceive, appreciate, and integrate these realities into our thinking, feeling, and actions. Philosophy and art, through their vivification of nature, have opened up many realms of thought and imagination that are inaccessible to the natural sciences, at least since Romanticism. However, it is necessary to go even beyond the realms of art and philosophy... into the reality of what (is not yet) real, but possible and desirable, and what may even be worth desiring.
Perhaps – and based on my artistic research in encounters with nature – there are fewer blind, random, or destructive forces at work in nature, but rather loving and healing forces that defy scientific understanding. These forces are not ascertainable or measurable by rational thought but are only perceptible (in the sense of being felt) through their emergence and passing on a mental-spiritual level. What are these living-perceptible realities and beings all about? What buried perceptual and consciousness qualities are being addressed here, waiting to be rediscovered and developed? What does it reveal to us as humans and what consequences should we draw from it? What worldview and reconcilable culture can emerge from it? Is the dichotomy between nature and culture completely dissolving, and could this dissolution be helpful, healing, and even life-saving for the future of life and humanity on this planet?
From the artistic research conducted in encounters with nature, an integral calibration of the self can be derived.
Integral calibration in the sense that through encounters with nature and reflection on perception and consciousness, humans can arrive at a new understanding of themselves – as beings enabled and carried by nature, experiencing depth and dignity in acknowledgment and exchange with other beings, no longer limited to humans alone. Individual creaturely existence then reveals itself as a creative gift within a shared field. Those who adopt this attitude, it can be presumed, will engage with reality and all life as their home in a different, more gentle, and creative manner compared to those who refuse this attitude and continue to handle their (surrounding) world in a soulless and heartless manner, unconsciously or consciously abusing it for their own purposes.
A dialogic aesthetics in the Anthropocene seeks to make the difference between living (healing) and lifeless (destructive) nature and culture palpable and to work it out, thereby also engaging in dialogue to develop ideas and concepts that demonstrate how healing of our instrumentalized, objectified, soulless, and hence fragmented "Being in the World" can become possible and real through encounters with nature and exchanges about it. This would be the contribution of dialogic aesthetics to promote post-anthropocentric, vibrant, and sustainable attitudes and perspectives in a time of human-induced scarcity.
I am deeply grateful to Barbara Kastura for allowing this artistic research, along with the associated considerations, to exist within a lively and creativity- and encounter-enabling shared experiential horizon. This is what lays the foundation for dialogic aesthetics and makes it exemplarily fruitful.
