Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross

I finished the first of my two comprehensive examination papers this summer in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The paper is titled “Ecological Intentionality, Creaturely Form, and The Ecology of the Cross: A Cruciform Phenomenology of Creaturely Relation.” It’s the most sustained attempt I have made so far to explain what I mean by ecological intentionality and why I believe perception belongs near the beginning of our ecological thinking.

Over the summer, I have moved through Aristotle’s potency and act, Edith Stein’s empathy and finite being, Henri Bergson’s duration, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, Raymond Ruyer’s organic form, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of difference. It’s certainly a crowded bibliography. The question holding it together remained much closer to home: What am I perceiving when I look at the black walnut growing in our backyard?

Calling it a tree is necessary. Describing it as a specimen, a source of shade, a carbon sink, a collection of biological processes, or even a theological symbol may also disclose something true. Obviously, those descriptions don’t exhaust its life. The black walnut is directed within its own world, however. Its roots follow water through Piedmont clay. Its leaves turn toward light. Its form persists through growth, damage, weather, and season. That living directedness can enter my perception, although it never becomes primordial to me in the way my own experience does. The tree’s world meets mine without becoming mine.

Ecological intentionality names that encounter. More specifically, it describes the relation among a living organism, the milieu within which its life unfolds, and the embodied perceiver to whom some portion of that life becomes given. The ethical possibilities of the encounter depend partly upon how the perceiver has learned to see. Perception has already been shaped by habits, desires, technologies, institutions, and inherited ideas about which lives matter before an ethical principle ever reaches us.

This is where The Ecology of the Cross enters my argument. Phenomenology can teach us to look more carefully. Sustained attention can still leave the appetite for possession intact. I can observe a creature closely, describe it accurately, and continue to treat its life as something available for my use. Edith Stein’s final, unfinished book, The Science of the Cross, helped me name the transformation required at this point. Drawing upon John of the Cross, Stein describes a form of knowing in which the knower must also be changed. The desire to master what has been given must undergo its own emptying.

The Ecology of the Cross names this movement from mastery toward reception. It is a distinctly Christian account of the human perceiver’s transformation, grounded in the cruciform pattern of self-giving rather than self-possession. The cross does not provide an easy reconciliation with ecological loss. It asks what must be relinquished within the perceiver so that another creature can appear as a life with its own form, its own directedness, and its own excess beyond our use.

The paper remains a framework rather than a finished environmental ethic. It leaves political, historical, and practical questions open, including the question that matters most for the larger project: What does this way of seeing require from us in particular places, especially here in the Piedmont and Lowcountry of the Carolinas?

That question will carry me into my second comprehensive examination. Comps II begins this Fall semester where this paper ends, bringing Stein into a more sustained conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s flesh and écart. The shorthand I have begun using is this: Stein protects otherness. Merleau-Ponty explains belonging. Their conjunction may offer a way of describing ecological relation as intimacy with remainder.

Abstract

This paper develops ecological intentionality as a cruciform phenomenology of creaturely relation. Environmental ethics begins within a perceptual field already shaped by embodiment, habit, desire, and relation. I therefore ask what kind of world becomes visible when living beings are understood as internally formed, dynamically unfolding, and situated within milieus that exceed the horizon of any single perceiver.

Drawing on Aristotle, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, Raymond Ruyer, Emmanuel Levinas, and Deleuze and Guattari, I distinguish vital directedness, the immanent activity of a living form, from perceptual intentionality, the givenness of that life to another embodied perceiver. Ecological intentionality names the encounter between these poles across an intersecting organism-milieu-perceiver field. Stein’s account of empathy preserves the non-primordial otherness of another life, while Aristotelian potency and act, Bergsonian duration, and Ruyer’s account of organic form provide a vocabulary for understanding creaturely being as form-in-act. Plant life serves as a limit case, revealing where ecological intentionality extends beyond empathy proper. Perception precedes ethics within the order of inquiry, although it does not create the ethical authority of the other.

The final movement turns to Stein’s The Science of the Cross and John of the Cross. I argue that truthful ecological perception may require a transformation of the perceiver’s appetites, since attention can still convert givenness into possession. The Ecology of the Cross names this Christologically shaped passage from mastery toward reception. The paper offers a perceptual, metaphysical, and theological framework within which an environmental ethic might form, while leaving its political and practical elaboration open to future work in the Piedmont and Lowcountry of the Carolinas.

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