Intimacy with Remainder: Toward Ecological Intentionality

Notes toward an ecological intentionality, between one comprehensive exam and the next

The black walnut behind our house is dropping fruit again. It does this every year before I think it should. By late July, while the rest of the yard still seems occupied with the green abundance of summer, the first walnuts begin striking the roof of the shed and landing in the grass with a weight you can hear from inside. Their husks are green and firm at first. Give them a few days in the heat and rain and they soften, darken, and stain whatever touches them.

I have been watching this tree for several seasons now. Watching may be too dignified a word for some of it. I step around the walnuts when I cut the grass. I move them before Lily finds one and decides it belongs inside. I watch the squirrels carry them along the fence and occasionally find one buried in a flowerpot where no walnut tree could possibly grow for long. The tree has become a familiar part of the arrangement of our yard, and familiarity carries its own danger. A thing seen every day can disappear into its usefulness, inconvenience, name, or location. It becomes shade. It becomes mess. It becomes the black walnut behind the house.

Yet the tree keeps exceeding every one of those descriptions.

That excess is where much of my academic work has been gathering. Over the summer, I completed the first of two comprehensive examinations for my doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The paper tried to give a philosophical and theological account of something I have been circling for several years: how another living being becomes perceptible as a life with its own directedness, its own tempo, and its own manner of inhabiting a world.

I have been calling this ecological intentionality.

The phrase names an encounter between two kinds of directedness. A living being tends toward and within its world through the powers by which it maintains and develops its form. A perceiver, also embodied and situated, can encounter that directed life without exhausting it. The walnut reaches through soil, water, light, season, damage, and repair. I encounter some part of that activity from within another body, another tempo, and another set of concerns. Both of us inhabit a larger ecological field that neither of us contains.

That formulation is still under construction. It almost certainly has weak joints I can’t yet see. The first comprehensive paper built the basic frame through Aristotle, Edith Stein, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Ruyer, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Marder, and John of the Cross. It ended by asking what has to happen to a perceiver whose habits of mastery continue to turn a living being into something available for possession, even after the perceiver has learned to describe that being more carefully.

The second examination begins this fall. It returns to several questions the first paper left open, especially a tension between Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that I think may lead somewhere important.

The formulation I am working with is this:

Stein’s non-primordiality and Merleau-Ponty’s écart can be read as complementary disciplines within ecological intentionality. Flesh names the shared sensible field that makes encounter possible; non-primordiality names the irreducible difference that every encounter preserves. Their conjunction describes ecological relation as intimacy with remainder.

That sentence is dense enough to require some unpacking, and I am still unpacking it myself.

Stein and the distance within empathy

Edith Stein wrote On the Problem of Empathy as a young philosopher working in the early phenomenological movement around Edmund Husserl. Empathy, for Stein, has a more exact meaning than the word usually carries now. Stein uses it for the experience through which another’s experience becomes genuinely given to me as another’s, beyond kindness, emotional sensitivity, or the imaginative act of placing myself in someone else’s situation.

If a friend is grieving, I can encounter the grief as real and as belonging to this person before me. I do not live the grief from the point at which my friend lives it. It is primordial there and non-primordial here. The experience becomes present to me without becoming mine.

This is one of Stein’s great contributions. The distance between us remains within the empathy itself. Greater understanding does not gradually erase the distinction between the one grieving and the one who encounters that grief. I may listen more carefully, learn the history, recognize the gestures of a body I know well, and follow the grief into a richer fulfillment. The other person still possesses a center of experience I do not occupy.

Stein calls the lived body the Leib, distinguishing it from the body considered as a physical thing, the Körper. The lived body is a zero point of orientation, a center around which a world opens. Another person appears through an expressive body as another such center. Empathy gives genuine access, though never total access. Something remains.

That remainder is easy to misinterpret as a failure. We often imagine that perfect understanding would eliminate the distance between us. Stein’s account suggests that some distance belongs to truthful understanding. The other’s inexhaustibility is part of what is given.

This becomes especially important when I turn from another person toward the more-than-human world. A dog expresses pain, anticipation, fear, trust, and excitement through a body whose movements I can learn to read. The mode of fulfillment differs from my encounter with another person, and bodily difference matters. At the vegetal limit, the problem becomes sharper. The black walnut discloses directed activity through growth, fruiting, response, damage, and seasonal form. I can perceive a life underway. I do not know what it is like to be this tree, or even whether that sentence asks the right question of a plant.

The tree’s distance from me belongs inside the relation and disciplines it. Stein protects the tree from the confidence with which I might turn my own experience into a theory of its interior.

Merleau-Ponty and the flesh of belonging

Stein gives me a powerful account of the other center, though her analysis can leave a further question waiting. How do these centers belong to one another before empathy becomes an explicit act? What makes encounter possible in the first place?

Merleau-Ponty begins with the body already involved in a world. We don’t first exist as sealed minds and then work our way outward toward trees, other people, water, soil, or weather. Perception arises through a body that can move, touch, see, hear, reach, tire, hunger, and be wounded. The body opens a world because it already belongs to that world.

His later work names this belonging through the flesh of the world. Flesh names the intertwining through which the one who sees is also visible, and the one who touches can also be touched. Reading it as one mystical substance from which everything is made would obscure the divergence carried within that intertwining. My hand belongs to the tangible world it explores. My body stands among the things it sees. Perception carries exposure within it.

This reversibility is never complete. When one hand touches the other, the touching hand and the touched hand can exchange roles, though they never coincide perfectly in one completed experience. Merleau-Ponty uses écart to name a divergence or gap that persists within relation. Belonging has a spacing within it. The world joins us without making us identical.

This is what Merleau-Ponty can bring to ecological intentionality. The walnut and I meet within the same rain, summer heat, Piedmont clay, gravity, and changing light. We participate in the same watershed, though we inhabit it through very different bodies and at very different tempos. The tree is visible because both of us already belong to a sensible world. I am also visible within that world. The encounter runs in more than one direction, even where the directions are unequal.

Merleau-Ponty explains belonging.

Stein protects otherness.

I am trying to determine whether those accounts can inhabit one framework.

Intimacy with remainder

The risk on Stein’s side is that the protection of otherness can leave living beings standing across a distance that has to be bridged. Empathy may begin to look like a passage between centers already formed in isolation. The ecological field, bodily participation, and reciprocal exposure remain thinly described.

The risk on Merleau-Ponty’s side is almost the reverse. Flesh and intertwining can become so encompassing that the other creature’s distinct life begins to dissolve into shared belonging. Ecological writing is especially vulnerable to this move. We speak of kinship, communion, interconnection, and entanglement. Those words can tell the truth. They can also make us feel closer than our attention has earned.

Stein’s non-primordiality may provide an internal discipline for Merleau-Ponty’s flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s écart may describe the belonging within which non-primordial encounter becomes possible. Flesh names the shared sensible field. Non-primordiality names the difference that the field never abolishes.

Their conjunction is what I mean by intimacy with remainder.

Intimacy means that encounter is real. Bodies participate in one world and become perceptible through that participation. The walnut is not a private image projected by my consciousness. Its roots, crown, leaves, fruit, wounds, and responses belong to a life that shows itself through its activity. I can learn this tree. I can be changed by learning it.

Remainder means that the tree’s life never becomes equivalent to its appearance for me. Better knowledge deepens the encounter while leaving the tree’s own center, activity, and history excessive to my horizon. The remainder names the irreducibility of a life whose activity belongs to itself. It requires no occult essence hidden behind appearances.

This may be another way of speaking about love. Love requires nearness, attention, vulnerability, and real involvement. Love also gives up the fantasy that nearness grants possession. The beloved remains more than the lover’s experience of them. Ecological relation may require the same discipline.

The cross and the danger of innocence

My larger theological framework is something I have been calling The Ecology of the Cross, borrowing deliberately from Stein’s final, unfinished book, The Science of the Cross. In the first comprehensive paper, I used the Carmelite tradition to describe the transformation of a perceiver whose appetite for mastery keeps converting what is given into what is available.

Attention alone does not cure possession. I can know the walnut’s species, record its phenology, learn the chemistry of juglone, photograph its bark, and describe its place in the yard while continuing to see it primarily as mine. Better information can coexist with ownership’s deepest habits. The Ecology of the Cross asks what kind of dispossession those habits require.

That word now needs more care than I gave it at first. Cruciform dispossession describes the loosening of a perceiver’s claim to mastery. Material dispossession describes the imposed loss of land, inheritance, access, home, and political power. The first can never be prescribed to people suffering the second. A theology of self-emptying becomes dangerous when it is preached by those who benefit from someone else’s loss.

This is another direction the second examination will take. Melanie Harris’s ecowomanism and LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant’s work on lived memory among Gullah/Geechee women press the framework toward histories and forms of presence that phenomenological attention by itself cannot supply. No perception of a place begins without history. Land carries memory, ownership, labor, grief, displacement, religious practice, and relations with the dead. These may not announce themselves to the solitary observer who believes careful attention has made him innocent.

Intimacy with remainder therefore has political consequences. The remainder includes the creature’s excess over my perception. It also includes the histories my perception has not yet learned to see. Restraint before the other requires curiosity about what has been concealed, suppressed, or made unavailable to me.

The Piedmont and Lowcountry cannot become interchangeable examples of “Carolina nature” in this work. The black walnut grounds my own sustained practice of attention in Spartanburg. Gullah/Geechee lived religion enters as an interlocutor with histories, practices, and meanings that exceed my framework. If ecological intentionality is worth anything, particular places must be able to correct its concepts.

A work still underway

I don’t know yet whether Stein and Merleau-Ponty will finally hold together in the way I am proposing. Their questions are different. Stein asks how another experience is given as another’s. Merleau-Ponty asks how perceiver and perceived arise within an intertwined sensible field. Non-primordiality may turn out to be the experiential form of écart between embodied centers. That is a possibility I need to earn through the texts.

Other questions remain. Can Ruyer’s account of a living form’s self-survey help explain why damage and flourishing are real for the organism itself? Can Maximus’s account of the logoi hold creaturely integrity and cosmic participation together? How deeply does incarnation enter biological vulnerability and evolutionary suffering? What kinds of historical and political analysis must accompany phenomenology if attention is to become accountable?

These are questions for the fall and, likely, for the dissertation that follows. For now, intimacy with remainder gives me a phrase for the kind of relation I am trying to describe.

The walnuts will keep falling for another month or so. Their husks will darken in the grass. The squirrels will carry some away, and a few will remain hidden until I strike them with the mower next spring. I will continue trying to see the tree whose life makes all of this possible, knowing that the seeing matters and that the tree remains more than anything I will manage to say about it.

Perhaps ecological love begins there: close enough to be marked, attentive enough to be corrected, and humble enough to leave a remainder.

References and Further Reading

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Harris, Melanie L. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda S. Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Marder, Michael. “Plant Intelligence and Attention.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 8, no. 5 (2013): e23902.

Marder, Michael. “Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 7, no. 11 (2012): 1365–1372.

Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Nicholas Constas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Compiled by Dominique Séglard. Translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Ruyer, Raymond. Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.