Category: Philosophy

Ecology (Without) Fields: Toward a Different Ontology of the Cosmos

I taught AP Physics and Physics and Physical Science (along with Environmental Science, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science) for almost twenty years. I’d introduce the field concept early in the course, and everything that notion seems to clarify. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, the wave collapse, and wave functions, etc., all work better as long as you have a playing field. Much like our sports today. There’s a value assigned to every point in space, smoothly varying, mathematically tractable, and extraordinarily powerful as a predictive tool. Students felt the elegance of it, and so did I. You could describe the behavior of matter across any scale with the same formalism. The cosmos, it seemed, was fundamentally a manifold of field values, and once you understood that, you understood something deep about reality itself.

I am no longer sure that’s true. Not because the physics is wrong (it isn’t, at least in our human understanding of the Cosmos with our current framing), but because I have come to suspect that the field picture, however useful, is describing something derived rather than something fundamental. And I think the place I’m standing right now, on the bank of Lawson’s Fork in the South Carolina Piedmont, is better evidence of what the cosmos actually is than any field equation.

That’s a large claim. Let me try to earn it or unpack this at least.

In 1980, the philosopher Hartry Field published a book called Science Without Numbers that caused something of a stir in the philosophy of mathematics. His argument was deceptively simple, I think. Basically, the fact that mathematics is indispensable for doing physics doesn’t mean that mathematical entities (numbers, functions, sets) actually exist. Mathematics might be extraordinarily useful without being true, much like some would claim about religion. Field called this position fictionalism, and he went on to demonstrate, technically, that you could reformulate Newtonian gravitational theory without any reference to numbers at all, replacing numerical values with purely relational predicates borrowed from geometry.(1) The numbers, he showed, were conservative over the underlying physical facts… they generated no new physical information beyond what the relational structure already implied. They were a powerful fiction, not a fundamental reality.

Field’s project was aimed at numbers. But the argument licenses something further. If indispensability for prediction is no guarantee of ontological fundamentality, then the same skepticism can be turned on the field descriptions that physics has inherited and extended since Maxwell (my favorite) and Einstein. The electromagnetic, gravitational, and quantum fields are extraordinarily useful for prediction. They are not, on that account alone, fundamental features of reality. They might be conservative over something more primordial… something that field theory represents without quite reaching. The question is what that something might be.

Henri Bergson spent much of his philosophical career pressing exactly this question against the physics of his own time, and his answer still appeals to many of us. For Bergson, the deepest problem with mathematical physics is not its precision but its treatment of time. A field value is assigned to a point in spacetime, a frozen coordinate, mathematically exact and stripped of duration. The continuous field is the smooth assembly of such frozen moments across an abstract manifold. This, Bergson argued, is the intellectualist distortion of real time, lived time, the time of actual processes, being not a coordinate. It is duration, qualitative, irreversible, thick with the past, that has accumulated in it. (2) A field value at a spacetime point doesn’t capture duration necessarily but does eliminate it.

In physics, this means the field of formalism is, in a specific and precise sense, conservative with respect to durational facts. It extracts from the living reality of process exactly what is measurable (such as position, magnitude, rate of change) while leaving the ontological substrate of durée untouched and undescribed. Bergson is not saying physics is wrong. He is saying it is a useful abstraction from something more realistic or deeper, and that mistaking the abstraction for the fundamental thing is a category error with consequences.

At Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg, duration is not an abstraction. The creek carries its own past in its channel morphology, its sediment load, its riparian forest, and the chemical memory of every storm and drought since the last ice age. What I encounter when I sit at the shoal is not a field value. It is the thickness, with the accumulated duration of a place that has been doing this longer than the Piedmont has been the Piedmont. You can assign temperature, velocity, and dissolved oxygen values to the water at this point. You cannot assign a field value to what it means for this water to be here, now, still.

Gilles Deleuze sharpens this. In Difference and Repetition, he argues that extensive quantities (like the kinds of quantities field theory assigns to points in space ) are actualizations of something more primordial, such as intensive difference. (3) A temperature gradient is intensive. It has direction, it drives the process, and it is the condition of heat flow before it becomes measurable as a rate. A temperature field value is the extensive representation of that intensity, which you get when you cancel the gradient into a number. The number is real and useful. But the gradient came first, ontologically. The difference is more fundamental than the magnitude.

For ecology, this is almost self-evident. What ecosystems run on is intensity from thermal gradients, hydrological pressure differentials, chemical potential differences across membranes and soil horizons, and trophic gradients from light-saturated surface to benthic dark. These intensive differences are what ecological work is about. They drive nutrient cycling, species distribution, evolutionary pressure, and succession. The field descriptions represent these intensities by extending them into magnitudes, thereby systematically concealing what is ontologically prior. Ecology, properly understood, is a science of intensive differences and similarities. Field theory is the science of extensive magnitude. Obviously, they are not describing the same level of reality.

Alfred North Whitehead made this argument in a different way, and Michael Epperson’s more recent work connecting Whitehead’s process metaphysics to quantum mechanics has recently given it new precision. Whitehead’s central claim in Process and Reality is that the extensive continuum, or the spacetime manifold that underlies field theory, is not primitive but derivative. (4) It is constituted by the mutual implication of what Whitehead calls actual occasions as irreducibly local events of experience in a broad sense, each taking account of its environment, each contributing its achieved definiteness to the world that follows. The field is the abstract pattern that emerges from the creative advance of actual occasions. It is real, but it is not where reality begins.

Epperson’s contribution is to show that this Whiteheadian picture is not merely a philosophical preference, but it resolves genuine problems in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. The wave function, in Epperson’s reading, is not a field in physical space at all. It is a description of potentiality, the structured possibility space of an actual occasion prior to its determination. The so-called collapse of the wave function is the creative advance from potentiality to actuality and the event in which an occasion achieves its definiteness in relation to its environment. (5) The field formalism is conservative over this event structure as it generates the right predictions without describing what is actually occurring at the level of individual occasions.

What Whitehead and Epperson together suggest is that the cosmos is made of events, not fields. Events that are irreducibly local, durational, relational, and in some broad sense experiential, events that take account of their context rather than merely occupying coordinates in it. This is ontologically closer to an ecosystem than to a manifold.

Here is where plasma physics enters, and the argument takes on a different weight.

Plasma is the dominant state of matter in the observable universe, accounting for something in the range of ninety-nine percent by volume. Stars, the interstellar medium, the vast filamentary structures of the cosmic web… all plasma. And plasma physics is, irreducibly, the physics of collective relationships. A plasma cannot be well described by treating particles as discrete entities moving through a background field. Its behavior is dominated by collective phenomena such as Alfvén waves, magnetic reconnection events, Debye sheaths, current sheets, and filamentary structures that arise from the simultaneous mutual interaction of charged particles at every scale. The plasma doesn’t have properties so much as it enacts them through a collective process(es).

Hannes Alfvén, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his work in magnetohydrodynamics, was himself sharply critical of the tendency to privilege mathematical elegance over the messy relational reality of plasma behavior. He thought cosmological models built on clean field equations were systematically misleading about what cosmic matter actually does. (6) Alfvén was a physicist making a philosopher’s complaint, as well, that the abstraction has been mistaken for the thing.

A plasma is, ontologically, more like a watershed than like a Newtonian gravitational field. It has memory in the sense that it is encoded in its magnetic field topology, the way Lawson’s Fork has memory encoded in its channel morphology. It responds to disturbance through cascading collective reorganization rather than smooth field-theoretic propagation. It is constitutively far from thermodynamic equilibrium, as are living systems, sustained by the continuous throughput of intensive difference. The Alfvén wave is not a perturbation of a background field. It is the medium itself moving, doing something together, the way a flood pulse is the creek itself responding to what has happened upstream.

If ninety-nine percent of the visible cosmos is plasma, then the “clean” physics of particles and fields is actually the physics of the exceptional cases, such as the cold, dense, low-energy corners of reality where matter settles into the forms our terrestrial instruments first encountered as we experience. The cosmos is not, predominantly, a manifold of field values. It is predominantly a tissue of collective, intensive, durational process. Which is to say, it is predominantly something more like ecology.

Let me try to state the thesis clearly, because I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming that field theory is false or that its predictions are unreliable. They are not. I am claiming, following Field’s nominalist license, that the indispensability of field descriptions for prediction is no guarantee of their ontological fundamentality. Field showed this for numbers. The same argument extends to the field descriptions themselves, I think. Fields are conservative about a more fundamental substrate they represent without quite reaching it.

That more fundamental substrate, I am suggesting, has the following features… it is intensive rather than extensive, durational rather than coordinatized, constituted by actual events of mutual encounter rather than persistent substances in a container space, and irreducibly place-specific rather than homogeneously law-governed. These are the features that Bergson recovers when he insists on duration against spatialization, that Deleuze recovers when he insists on intensity against extensive magnitude, that Whitehead recovers when he insists on actual occasions against the continuous manifold, and that Alfvén gestures toward when he insists on the relational complexity of plasma against the elegance of field equations.

They are also the features that ecology investigates. Not ecology as our current applied physics, as the working out of biochemical field gradients in living systems, but ecology as first philosophy and the study of how living systems constitute their places through intensive, durational, relational process.

What I encounter at Lawson’s Fork is not merely complex field theory. It is something ontologically prior to field theory as a tissue of encounters, each with its own duration, each irreducibly local, each constituted by the intensive differences that drive it. The watershed is doing what the cosmos is doing, at a scale I can stand beside and attend to. The cosmos is not, at its most fundamental level, a field. It is more like a watershed, with duration extending all the way down, an intensive difference expressing itself in process, place, and encounter.

That isn’t mysticism (maybe it is?). It is, I think, what physics is actually showing us, once we stop mistaking the conservation of the formalism for a description of what is fundamentally real.

(1) Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1–30. Field’s central demonstration is that Newtonian gravitational theory can be reformulated using only relational predicates, betweenness and congruence relations among spacetime points, without quantifying over real numbers or other abstract entities.

(2) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 1–45. The critique of spatializaton is developed most fully in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, but Creative Evolution gives the most direct statement of duration as irreducible to coordinate time.

(3) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222–261. The distinction between intensive and extensive quantity is central to Deleuze’s account of individuation and his critique of representational ontology.

(4) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 61–82. Whitehead’s account of the extensive continuum as derivative from actual occasions is developed in Part II.

(5) Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 145–187. Epperson’s most concentrated argument for wave-function collapse as Whiteheadian concrescence is in Chapter 5.

(6) Hannes Alfvén, “Cosmology: Myth or Science?” Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1984): 79–98. Alfvén’s critique of mathematical cosmology in favor of plasma-based observational models runs through much of his later work, including Cosmic Plasma (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981).

Einfühlung: Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson

There’s a moment (you’ve had it, I’ve definitely had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye. It’s something more interior than that. A stillness that isn’t empty and a kind of attention in the world that is not yours.

It could be a crow on a fence post, watching you with that particular corvid watchfulness that doesn’t feel like surveillance so much as being assessed. It could be a stand of white oaks at the edge of a parking lot, their roots negotiating some underground arrangement you’ll never see. It could be a box turtle holding perfectly still in the leaf litter while you stand two feet away, the two of you caught together in something that doesn’t quite have a name.

You feel it, and then you feel slightly embarrassed about feeling it, because the dominant story we’ve inherited says that whatever is happening over there is happening in the dark and that the lights of inner experience are a human franchise, or at best a mammalian one, and that the crow and the oaks and the turtle are performing the outward signs of life without anyone home to experience them. The embarrassment is cultural, but the feeling is older.

I’ve been thinking about Edith Stein lately, and about what she might say to this moment.

Stein’s contribution to philosophy, at its most concentrated, is a theory of how we ever know another mind at all. She called it Einfühlung, or empathy, though the German carries something richer than the English… literally, a feeling-into. Her 1917 dissertation (written under Edmund Husserl, in the phenomenological tradition, before WW1 had finished) asked a question that seems obvious until you try to answer it… how do I know that you have an inner life?

It’s not how I infer it, or simulate it, or project it from my own case. How do I know it in the primary, pre-reflective, perceptual sense that I know there is a table in front of me or that the light has gone warm and late? Her answer was that empathy is itself a mode of perception. I don’t reason my way to your interiority, but I perceive it, the way I perceive depth in a visual field. The perception can be mistaken, refined, or enriched. But it is perceptual first.

What interests me so much is that Stein was careful about something most readers slide past because she distinguished between empathy as an act (I reach toward you) and empathy as a structure (there is something there to reach toward). The act depends on the structure. I can only empathize with something that has an interior to meet. And she was explicit that this interiority is not identical to the consciousness humans experience. Rather, empathy is a more basic feature of what it means to be a subject at all, to have an inner life that is genuinely yours, from which you encounter the world.

The question she didn’t fully pursue, and I think this is because the intellectual world she was working in hadn’t yet given her the tools or even vocabulary in terms of ecological intentionality, is what it would mean to extend that structure beyond the human. What if the crow is a subject? Not a metaphor for subjectivity, not a cute approximation of it. Actually, a locus of interior life, capable of being met?

Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher working in the mid-twentieth century who was, for a long time (until very recently), almost unread outside of France, until Deleuze cited him, and then, later a group of philosophers, including Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux started to take him seriously, and then he was rediscovered again by thinkers working on biology and consciousness. His central claim is strange and precise in a way… every living form exercises what he called absolute survey or a kind of self-enjoying, self-forming awareness that cannot be reduced to spatial extension.

This sounds mystical, but it isn’t. It’s more of a biological claim. The embryo developing into an organism isn’t executing a genetic program the way a computer executes code. It is surveying itself, holding its own form in view, orienting its development toward what it is becoming. The cell is not merely processing information, but it has a kind of first-person orientation toward its own activity. This isn’t a capacity that emerges at some threshold of neurological complexity, but it’s a feature of living form as such. The amoeba surveys. The developing limb surveys. I’d argue the mitochondria do the same. There is no organism (or division or formative part of it) without some minimal version of this self-enjoying interiority.

What this means for Stein’s question is significant. If Ruyer is right, then there is genuinely something there, some interior to be met, in every living organism (and we can extend that to its parts and even down to the atomic or quantum level if thought out). Empathy isn’t being extended beyond its proper domain when we feel it toward a turtle or an oak. It is operating precisely as Stein described and perceiving an interiority that is actually present. The embarrassment was a category error.

Henri Bergson adds the temporal dimension. His notion of durée, or duration as lived time, describes how every living (maybe more-than-living) thing carries its past forward in a genuinely creative, not mechanically determined, way. The organism is not a static configuration that happens to move; it is a memory in motion, accumulating its history in a way that shapes its encounter with each new moment. The bird knows its territory the way your body knows how to ride a bicycle as a kind of lived past that has become part of what it is, rather than an explicit piece of information stored and retrieved.

This matters for empathy because it gives the encounter thickness. When you stop and feel that something is happening in the organism (or rock?) a few feet away, what you are meeting is not just a present configuration. You are meeting a duration, and an unfolding, an other with its own temporal interiority, its own accumulated past pressing forward into the present. The feeling of interiority you perceive is not a projection. It’s the trace of that duration registering on your own perceptual field.

Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson are not saying the same thing, of course. Stein is doing phenomenology and describing the structure of the perceptual act. Ruyer is doing philosophy of biology by describing the structure of living forms. Bergson is doing philosophy of time by describing the structure of living memory. But they triangulate on something that, taken together, amounts to a fairly serious challenge to the dominant story… that empathy across species is possible not because we are projecting human experience onto non-human life, but because interiority is a feature of life itself, graded and various, and the perceptual capacity to meet it is something we actually have.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that I can’t ignore or try to pass over without mentioning.

Stein herself became a Carmelite nun and was eventually martyred at Auschwitz along with her sister. She was killed as a Jew, having been born into a Jewish family and having converted to Catholicism after reading Teresa of Ávila in one long night of encounter with a text. She never treated phenomenology and spirituality as separate projects. For her, the capacity to perceive another’s interiority was not merely a cognitive achievement. It was a form of participation in the ground of being and a way that consciousness opens toward what is genuinely other, which she eventually understood in terms of the soul’s movement toward God.

I am not trying to import that theological framework wholesale. But something in it strikes me as exactly right when I stand in the Carolina Piedmont landscape and feel that quality of attention coming back at me from the world. The embarrassment I described at the beginning… the cultural reflex that says you are projecting, anthropomorphizing, romantically confused… that anxious embarrassment assumes that the proper direction of consciousness is inward, toward the self, and that any apparent opening toward the world is a kind of sentimental error.

Stein’s phenomenology and the biological philosophies of Ruyer and Bergson suggest otherwise. The opening toward the other is not an error. It is the structure of consciousness itself and the capacity to be oriented toward an interiority that is genuinely not yours, to receive it without collapsing the difference between you. And if that capacity extends, as I believe it does, to the more-than-human world… then what we wrongly call “nature” is not a backdrop to the drama of human consciousness but a field of genuine subjects, each carrying its own duration, each available in some degree to the kind of participatory perception Stein was describing.

This is where the spiritual layer or dimension becomes unavoidable, at least for me. Because if the world is structured this way, and if there is really something happening over there, and if we have a perceptual capacity to meet it, then the question of how we inhabit the Piedmont, how we attend to the shoals and the hemlocks and the red-tailed hawk quartering the field at dusk, is not merely an aesthetic or ethical question. It is something closer to a contemplative one. The attention itself is a form of participation. The capacity to stop and feel that something is happening over there, and to let that feeling be more than embarrassment, is a practice… not a conclusion.

Stein did not survive to work out the full implications of what she had begun. Ruyer died in 1987, still relatively obscure here in the United States universities and colleges, and in mainstream thinking. Bergson, at least, was famous in his time, though his reputation later suffered the usual eclipse that attends thinkers who insist on the reality of time and memory against the reductionist program (especially after the Einstein debate). But the three of them together sketch something I keep returning to in my own lived experience… the world is not dark. The lights are on in there. And we have always known how to read them; we just stopped trusting ourselves to do so.

The crow on the fence post is still watching you. The box turtle has not moved. The oaks have not stopped their underground negotiations.

What you feel, standing there, is not nothing. It is, if Stein is right, a genuine perceptual act, the meeting of your interiority with another. If Ruyer is right, there is something in the turtle that is doing something not entirely unlike what you are doing: orienting toward its own form, surveying its situation, being present to its own being. If Bergson is right, the turtle is carrying a duration, a history, a lived past that shapes this present moment of its encounter with you.

None of this requires you to believe that the turtle is having human thoughts, or that the oak is happy or sad when you walk by, or that the crow is pondering your moral character (though I am genuinely uncertain about that last one). It requires only that you take the feeling seriously, not as projection, not as sentimentality, but as perception. As the beginning of a different kind of attention to the world we actually inhabit.

The Piedmont here in South Carolina is full of subjects, their histories, and lived time. We have always lived among them. Learning to meet them, without collapsing the difference or dismissing the encounter, is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice there is.

What the Black Walnut Knows

My teacher / friend / kin / Juglans nigra

I have been intently watching the black walnut in our backyard for just over a year, and I am still not sure I know what it is doing.

That sentence probably sounds strange. We have words for what trees do, from photosynthesis and transpiration to allelopathy and mast production, and the black walnut is particularly well-documented in this regard. Its roots secrete juglone, a toxic chemical compound that harms many neighboring plants, meaning it does not merely occupy space but actively shapes the community around it. It is doing something, in the measurable sense. We have instruments for this.

But I mean something else by the question. I mean, what is the walnut doing from the inside?

I started “tracking” (being with) this tree as part of a graduate seminar in my PhD studies in January 2025, a practice of almost daily observation, written reflection, or just sitting “with.” The assignment was simple enough at the time… return to the same organism at the same location over an extended period of time and attend carefully. No agenda. No hypothesis to confirm. Just attention, sustained and patient, as a discipline in itself.

What I did not expect was how much of that practice would consist of watching the tree appear to do nothing.

Through November and into December, the walnut shed its compound leaves in long, slow stages, the leaflets dropping before the central stalk, the stalks yellowing and releasing one by one until the branches stood bare against the gray Piedmont sky. January brought ice once and a good deal of snow yet again, a glaze that made the bark look lacquered, every ridge and furrow filled with light. February was mostly stillness. I would stand at the edge of the yard in the cold and take notes and feel, some mornings, faintly absurd… a man in his late 40’s with a notebook watching a dormant tree, waiting for something that might not come.

The bark was the only thing that changed, and then only when it rained. The walnut’s bark is deeply furrowed, almost architectural in its ridging, dark gray-brown in dry weather. When rain comes, the furrows darken first, then the ridges, the whole surface shifting toward black, toward something that looks almost wet and alive in a way the dry bark does not. I began to look forward to rainy mornings specifically. The tree seemed more present to itself somehow, more legible, though I could not have said what it was saying.

Then, this past week, in early April, the first buds appeared.

Not leaves just yet… just the swelling at the branch tips, a greening at the nodes, the faint suggestion of what is coming. After five months of apparent stillness, the tree is doing something visible again. And what surprised me was not the buds themselves but my response to them as something close to relief, or recognition, as if the tree had confirmed something I had been quietly doubting all winter.

Which raises the question again, in a different way. What was the walnut doing in February? Was it dormant (which is to say, was it doing nothing), or as close to nothing as a living thing can come? Or was it doing something for which we simply do not have good instruments?

The philosopher Henri Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the deepest problem in how we think about living things is that we borrow our categories from physics. We understand matter in terms of isolable parts, reversible states, and spatial positions. We understand organisms the same way as machines with components, as systems with inputs and outputs, as mechanisms whose behavior can in principle be mapped and predicted. What we lose in this borrowing, Bergson thought, is time. Not clock time, not the time we measure, but duration… the continuous, irreversible, accumulating character of a life actually being lived.

A stone has no past in the relevant sense. You could, in principle, reverse all its molecular states, and it would be the same stone. An organism cannot be reversed. It carries its history in its tissues, its timing, its chemistry. The black walnut in my yard is not the same tree it was in January, not because something dramatic has happened, but because it has continued, because duration has moved through it and left its mark in ways that no instrument fully captures.

The French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, writing in the mid-twentieth century, pushed this further. An organism, he argued, is not a surface that can be observed from outside, but it is what he called an “absolute surface,” a domain equipresent to itself, holding its own form together through something like immanent self-attention. Not a machine surveyed by an engineer. A form that surveys itself. The walnut in February, bark darkening in the rain, held its form from within and was not dormant so much as equipresent to itself in ways I was only beginning to notice.

This is what the buds in early April are telling me, I think. Not that the tree has woken up, as if it were sleeping before. But that what looked like stillness was in fact a kind of accumulated tending and the slow work of a living form carrying its past forward into a new season, doing something for which dormancy is not quite the right word.

There is a philosophical tradition, running back at least to Plotinus in the third century C.E., that holds contemplation to be not an exclusively human act but the fundamental activity of all living things. Plants, animals, even the generative forces of nature itself… all are understood, in this tradition, to produce form through a kind of silent, attentive self-coincidence. Not thinking in the way we think. But not nothing, either. A mode of presence to one’s own form, and through that form, to the whole of which it is an expression.

I find I cannot dismiss this idea when I am standing in front of the walnut in April, watching the buds swell. It is too easy, and I think finally too dishonest, to say that what the tree is doing is merely chemical, merely mechanical, merely the sum of its processes. Something in the act of sustained attention resists that reduction. Not because attention is mystical, but because it is precise — and precision, held long enough over a living thing, keeps turning up more than mechanism accounts for.

The juglone in the walnut’s roots is not random cruelty. It is a claim on the surrounding soil, a shaping of the community according to the tree’s own requirements, or, as ecologists call it, allelopathy, and what I am tempted to call, less technically, intention. Not conscious intention in the way I intend things. But a directedness. A form that knows, in some sense, what it needs and moves toward it.

I do not know what the walnut knows. I am not sure that formulation is even quite right. But after a year of watching the bare winter branches, the bark darkening in rain, the five months of apparent stillness, and now these first buds opening in early April like a sentence the tree has been composing all winter, I am less certain than I was that the question is a category error.

The tree is doing something. I am trying to learn how to see it.

Further Reading

(feel free to message if you’d like a copy of any of these but not able to purchase)

On trees and plant intelligence

On duration, living form, and the philosophy

On attention as ecological practice

On Black Walnut specifically

The Great Turning

I’m taking The Great Turning course with Prof. Kelly at CIIS now as part of my PhD studies, and thought I’d share this incredible reflection on the life and work of Joanna Macy who co-taught the course with him and continues to have ripples of impact even though she’s passed over (and who many of us look to now as one of the guiding Ancestors even if we were never in her physical presence)…

CONSPIRING WITH JOANNA MACY – Emerge:

By whatever name, however, the new age that is upon us echoes the mythic image of a “new Heaven and new Earth” announced in the last book of the Bible. And true to the title of that last book – Apocalypse or Revelation – the new age is increasingly apocalyptic, in two senses. Most obviously, there is the prospect of worldwide devastation through the mutually reinforcing processes of global heating, mass extinction, and civilizational collapse. Paradoxically, but true as well to the etymology of the word “apocalypse,” the new age is also one where the veil has been lifted, and the fundamental truth of interbeing and the revelation of our common cosmic and Gaian origins and destiny is obvious for those with eyes to see. Tragically, however, there are still many who do not see, blinded as they are by the three poisons of hatred, greed, and delusion…

The Great Turning is not an alternative to collapse, but a passage through. As an evolving vision and commitment, it shapes and ripens us as we make our way through the rubble of industrial growth society. This passage can be seen as a kind of planetary initiation, a collective rite of passage to the possibility, at least, of a human culture in harmony with a greater life of Gaia, and through whom we have our being. (Kelly and Macy 2021, p. 207) 

Elephant Time, Bergson’s Duration, and the Possibility of Empathy

I’ve always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids?

I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.”

Instead of assuming that animals experience time in ways that mirror our own, Rahmat asks a different question. What if elephants inhabit their own forms of duration? Not simply a faster or slower version of human time, but something structured through memory, ecology, and social life in ways that may not align with the rhythms we impose on the world.

Rahmat organizes her research around three overlapping dimensions: individual history, eco cultural identity, and what she calls human impacted time. The categories themselves are less important than what they point toward. Elephants are not simply products of biology or instinct. They accumulate experience across long lives. They inherit patterns of movement and orientation from older members of their herds. Their lives unfold within landscapes that hold memory across generations.

Rahmat is careful to say that we cannot claim direct access to how elephants experience time subjectively. Temporal experience cannot be observed directly. It appears through signs. Through behavior, social organization, and relationships with place. But those signs are not imaginary. The patterns they reveal are real.

One example from her work is particularly interesting to me. In the Belum rainforest of Malaysia, Indigenous communities have lived alongside wild elephants for centuries. The relationship is not built on management or control but on attentiveness. Local communities have learned which seasons bring elephants to particular fruiting trees. When those seasons arrive, people avoid those areas. The elephants come and feed. The humans yield space.

There is no contract and no shared language. Yet over generations something like an understanding has developed. Rahmat calls these patterns “agreements,” and the word is surprisingly precise. It describes a stable rhythm of coexistence that has formed through long mutual attention to each other’s movements through time.

For anyone familiar with Henri Bergson‘s work, this begins to sound very familiar (I’ve been doing a lot of work and research on Bergson lately, so it obviously stood out to me).

Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the way modern societies measure time is not the way time is actually lived. Clocks divide time into equal segments that can be counted and compared. Lived experience does not unfold that way (hence his famous or infamous debate with Einstein about relativity). Real time, he argued, is durée, or duration.

Duration is a flowing continuity in which the past remains present within the moment we are living now. Memory accumulates inside perception. Experience thickens rather than advancing in neat units. Time, in this sense, is not a series of separate instants but an ongoing movement in which past and present interpenetrate.

If Bergson is right, then it becomes possible that different forms of life inhabit different durations. Time is not a universal grid imposed equally on every living being. It is something lived through bodies, memories, relationships, and environments.

An elephant that remembers distant watering holes from decades earlier, that follows migration routes learned from older matriarchs, and that responds to slow ecological rhythms may be inhabiting a form of duration that looks very different from the accelerated schedules that structure much of human life today.

Rahmat’s three dimensions also explore this possibility. Eco-cultural identity describes the way elephants inherit patterns of movement and knowledge that function almost like cultural traditions. Individual history describes the accumulation of experiences each elephant carries throughout its life, including memories and trauma. Human-impacted time describes what happens when the temporal rhythms of industrial development collide with the slower durations through which elephants and ecosystems have evolved.

When a forest corridor disappears in a single generation, what vanishes is not only habitat. Something else is disrupted as well. The orientation of a herd toward a landscape that once held meaning for them.

Research by the psychologist Gay A. Bradshaw helps make this visible in unsettling ways. Bradshaw has studied elephant herds that lost their matriarchs to poaching and found behavioral patterns that resemble trauma responses observed in humans. Younger elephants in those herds exhibited heightened aggression, unstable social relationships, and behaviors that fell outside the normal patterns of elephant societies.

The matriarch was not simply the oldest member of the herd. She carried decades of memory. She knew where water could be found during drought. She remembered the histories of neighboring herds. She guided the group through landscapes using knowledge no other elephant possessed. When she was lost, something more than an individual life disappeared. A storehouse of collective memory was removed. Part of the herd’s temporal world collapsed with her.

This is where Edith Stein‘s phenomenology of empathy becomes helpful.

Stein argued that empathy is the way we encounter another center of experience without collapsing it into our own. When we empathize with another person, we do not literally enter their consciousness. Instead, we perceive expressions, gestures, and actions that reveal the presence of another subject who experiences the world differently from us.

Empathy is not projection. It is a disciplined attentiveness to the fact that another interior life exists.

What Stein describes philosophically, Rahmat approaches methodologically. She cannot step inside elephant experience. But she can follow the traces that point toward it. The matriarch’s memory. The seasonal agreements between elephants and human communities. The visible disruption that occurs when those relational patterns are broken.

These behaviors become the ways interior life shows itself. Seen in this light, careful attention to those patterns is not sentimentalism. It is a form of perception.

Rahmat describes moments watching elephants in the Belum rainforest as dusk settled along the roadside. The elephants would approach to warm themselves along the edge of the pavement. What struck her was how clearly they could assess her presence. If she turned off her headlights, they remained calm and continued feeding.

Without language, a kind of communication unfolded.

She struggled to describe what was happening without reaching toward words like subjectivity or shared understanding. Yet calling it elephant “personhood” did not quite fit either, since that still frames the animal world through human categories. What she sensed was something else. Another form of life unfolding alongside her own. Another duration moving through the same landscape.

This has implications for conservation that reach deeper than policy discussions usually allow.

Environmental policy tends to operate within relatively short human timeframes. Planning cycles extend across years or perhaps a few decades. Political systems often shorten those horizons even further.

Yet elephants and the ecosystems they inhabit operate within much longer durations. Migration routes can extend across centuries of learned behavior. Herd structures depend on matriarchs whose memories anchor the group’s survival strategies. Landscapes themselves develop through slow ecological processes unfolding across generations.

When those landscapes disappear within a single generation, something more than habitat is lost. Entire temporal worlds are disrupted. The knowledge embedded in migration routes no longer has a landscape in which to function. The accumulated experience within a herd loses the ecological context that once gave it meaning.

Even the quiet agreements that formed between species over centuries can vanish without anyone realizing they were there.

In that sense, conservation may require us to think not only about protecting space or population numbers, but about protecting duration itself. Living beings inhabit temporal relationships with places that extend far beyond our immediate planning horizons. When those relationships are broken, forms of life built on long memory and ecological continuity are fractured in ways we are only beginning to understand.

One of the quieter tragedies of modern culture is how completely mechanical time has shaped our perception of the world. Schedules, productivity systems, and digital calendars encourage us to treat time as a sequence of units to be managed and optimized. That framework has practical advantages, but it also narrows our awareness of the many temporal worlds unfolding around us.

Forests grow in decades. Rivers reshape landscapes across centuries. Elephant herds carry knowledge across generations. These are not poetic exaggerations. They are reminders that life unfolds within durations that clocks cannot fully capture.

If Bergson helps us recognize the thickness of lived time, and Stein helps us understand how empathy allows us to encounter other centers of experience, then Rahmat’s research invites us to extend those insights beyond the human sphere. Elephants are living within temporal structures that we only partially perceive, yet those structures are no less real for that reason.

Learning to notice those different temporalities may be one of the most important ecological skills we can cultivate. It requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit that the world contains many ways of inhabiting time.

And once we begin to notice that, it becomes harder to believe that the human clock is the only one that matters. Somewhere tonight a herd is moving toward water remembered decades earlier.

Further Reading

Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution
Bergson’s classic work introduces the concept of durée, or lived duration, and explores how life unfolds through continuous creative evolution rather than mechanical time.

Edith Stein – On the Problem of Empathy
Stein’s phenomenological study of empathy remains one of the most careful explorations of how we encounter the inner lives of others without reducing them to our own perspective.

Gay A. Bradshaw – Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
Bradshaw’s research on elephant societies and trauma reveals the depth of elephant social memory and the psychological consequences that follow when those structures are disrupted.

Khatijah Rahmat – Research on Elephant Temporality
Rahmat’s work explores how elephants experience time through individual history, eco cultural identity, and human impacted landscapes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s reflections on ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge traditions offer a powerful reminder that attentiveness to other beings and their rhythms has long been part of how humans learn to live with the land.

Eyes of the World and The Spiritual Discipline of Paying Attention

One of the hardest spiritual disciplines (for me at least) in the modern world is simply “paying” attention. I’m not sure why we use the word “pay” here. Interesting etymology if you’re into such things, though.

Not productivity. Not efficiency. Not the curated forms of “mindfulness” from TikTok and Instagram influencers that often end up just another optimization technique. I mean something simpler and more ancient with the slow, patient act of noticing the world around us.

Early this morning, before most of the neighborhood was awake, I stepped outside with my coffee for a brief moment and stood quietly in the backyard. The woods behind our house here in Spartanburg were still mostly gray from winter, and the time change has our morning hours dark again. The forest floor is covered in the same brown leaves that have been gathering there for months now, slowly breaking down into the soil and composting into new things that will soon be green while the billions and billions of microbes in the soil go about their work.

But if you linger for a few minutes, small changes start to appear. A shift in birdsongs, a few red maple buds are even beginning to emerge. The subtle warmth of the air that wasn’t there two weeks ago as our planet tilts and wobbles (in this part at least) back towards our closest star.

None of this is dramatic. Most of it would pass unnoticed if you were scrolling your phone while walking across the yard. But that quiet shift is exactly the sort of thing that attention makes visible.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested that perception is not a passive reception of information. It is a relationship. We do not simply observe the world from a distance. We are entangled within it, bodies among bodies, participants in a shared field of experience.

That idea alone is enough to challenge the way many of us move through our days. Because modern life trains us almost constantly to disengage from that relationship and look down at that black slab of glass, with components extracted from the planet in unscrupulous ways, all in the name of having us pay attention to it to extract our human data.

We move quickly. We skim. We multitask. Our devices offer an endless stream of stimuli that reward speed over depth. Even our forms of entertainment are often designed for rapid consumption and never-ending video loops that tickle our hippocampus (or amygdala).

But the living world does not operate at that pace.

To perceive it well requires something closer to patience.

Edith Stein, writing about empathy in her early phenomenological work, argued that encountering another being is never simply a matter of gathering data. It requires a kind of openness… a willingness to allow the presence of another to disclose itself gradually. That insight is usually discussed in the context of human relationships, but it applies just as much to the more-than-human world.

A tree does not reveal itself all at once. Neither does a landscape. And certainly not a season.

Anyone who has spent time listening to the Grateful Dead knows something about this kind of attention. Their music often unfolds slowly, building through long improvisations that only make sense if you are willing to stay with them. A song like “Eyes of the World” (my fav version) doesn’t rush toward its conclusion. It wanders, explores, returns, and gradually reveals patterns that were invisible at the beginning.

The same could be said of Wilco’s quieter moments. Songs that feel almost fragile at first listening begin to open up if you give them time.

Willie Nelson, in a completely different musical tradition, once described his phrasing as intentionally relaxed… letting the melody stretch and bend so that the listener has space to hear what’s happening between the notes. It’s fascinating to see Willie Nelson perform live because (like Dylan), his phrasing morphs and shifts and relaxes rather than sticking to a script like so many pop culture stadium shows today.

That space between the notes is where attention lives.

Carl Sagan famously wrote that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. It’s a beautiful line, often quoted for its sense of wonder. But it also carries a kind of responsibility.

If the universe becomes aware of itself through conscious beings like us, then our capacity for attention matters. The quality of our perception becomes part of the story of the cosmos itself.

And yet the ecological crisis we face today might be understood, at least in part, as a crisis of attention.

Species disappear quietly while rivers change course slowly, often not due to their natural inclination but human direction, and soils degrade over decades as we extract nutrients for monocrop agriculture.

These processes rarely produce the kind of spectacle that captures headlines or social media feeds. They unfold in subtle ways that are easy to ignore if we are not paying attention.

The result is that by the time we notice something has changed, the transformation has already been underway for years.

Ecology, at its root, is simply the study of our home. But to study a home well, familiarity is required. It requires noticing seasonal rhythms, life patterns, and the relationships between species and place.

In other words, ecology begins with attention.

Theologians have long understood this, even if they used different language. Many monastic traditions described attention as a form of prayer. Simone Weil famously suggested that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

To pay attention is to offer the world the gift of your presence… not as a detached observer, but as a participant within a living system of relationships. That might sound abstract, but it often begins with very ordinary practices.

Standing quietly in a backyard at dawn.

Learning the names of the trees in your neighborhood.

Listening to birds long enough to recognize the difference between their calls.

Watching how the light changes across the same patch of ground throughout the year.

These acts do not solve the ecological crisis, but they do something equally important. They restore our capacity to perceive the world we are trying to care for.

Because it is difficult to love what we do not notice, and it is impossible to protect what we have never truly seen. In the end, the spiritual discipline of paying attention is not about mastering a technique. It is about learning, slowly and imperfectly, to inhabit the world more fully. Like a good song that reveals itself only after repeated listening.

Or the first subtle signs of spring that appear quietly in the woods, long before the leaves return.

The world is always speaking.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
But the heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own
Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning brings
But the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own…”

Edith Stein and the Lost Art of Understanding Another Being

We often talk about empathy as if it were simply a moral virtue. We tell children to “be more empathetic,” or we describe someone as lacking empathy when they seem indifferent to the suffering of others. Empathy, in this everyday sense, becomes something like kindness or compassion.

But for the philosopher Edith Stein and, later, as the Carmelite St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, empathy was something much deeper. It was not primarily a moral instruction. It was a structure of perception.

Stein (1891–1942) was a German phenomenologist and a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In her early philosophical work On the Problem of Empathy (1917), she explored a deceptively simple question: How do we know that another person has a mind at all?

After all, we never directly experience another person’s inner life. I cannot feel your thoughts. I cannot directly access your emotions or sensations. All I ever encounter is your presence in the world: your gestures, your voice, your expressions, your actions.

And yet we rarely doubt that other people are conscious.

We move through the world constantly encountering others as beings who perceive, feel, hope, suffer, and rejoice. Stein wanted to understand how this is possible.

Her answer was empathy. She writes:

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy

That phrase may sound abstract at first, but Stein’s insight is actually quite intuitive. When we see someone wince in pain, we do not simply observe a physical movement. Nor do we literally feel their pain ourselves. Instead, we encounter their expression as the expression of another experiencing subject. Their suffering appears to us as theirs.

Empathy, in this sense, is neither emotional projection nor detached observation. It is the way consciousness recognizes another center of experience. It is how the presence of another mind becomes visible in the world.

And importantly, Stein insists that empathy always preserves difference. When I empathize with another person, I do not become them. Their experience remains irreducibly theirs. Empathy allows us to approach another’s experience without collapsing it into our own. This small philosophical insight carries enormous implications.

Because if empathy is a structure of perception, then the ethical life begins long before moral decisions are made. It begins with how we see. Before we decide how to treat another being, we must first encounter them as a being at all. In my opinion, that may be where many of our contemporary problems begin.

We live in a moment shaped by powerful technologies, accelerating ecological crises, political fragmentation, and deep cultural anxiety. In response, many discussions revolve around solutions: better policies, better systems, better innovations.

But beneath these debates lies a quieter crisis. It is a crisis of perception. More and more of the world appears to us as background… as resource… as infrastructure… as data.

Other people become categories. Landscapes become economic zones. Forests become board-feet of timber. Rivers become a water supply. The world flattens into utility.

Stein’s philosophy points in the opposite direction. She reminds us that our most basic encounter with reality is not with objects but with presences. We are constantly surrounded by other centers of life. However, this does not apply only to human beings.

Anyone who has spent time closely observing animals, forests, or even a single tree begins to notice how quickly the language of “objects” breaks down. The living world presses back against our assumptions. It asks to be encountered differently.

In my own small way, I experience this most mornings sitting near the black walnut tree in my backyard here in Spartanburg. I am not imagining that the tree possesses consciousness in the human sense. But the encounter still shifts something in perception. The tree ceases to be merely part of the scenery. Its form, its rhythms, its seasonal changes begin to register as expressions of a living presence. The experience is subtle but unmistakable. The world becomes populated again.

Stein helps us understand why this matters. Empathy, properly understood, is not simply a feeling we extend toward others. It is a capacity that allows us to perceive the world as filled with beings whose lives unfold alongside our own.

And once that perception awakens, the ethical implications follow naturally.

If the world is full of beings who experience life in their own ways, then the question of how we live together becomes unavoidable. Ethics grows organically from perception. But if perception collapses… if everything appears merely as matter to be manipulated… then empathy fades before ethics even has a chance to begin. This is why phenomenology still matters today.

Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the phenomenological tradition were not merely interested in abstract philosophy. They were trying to recover something that modern life had begun to obscure: the richness of lived experience and the relational character of reality.

Stein’s work on empathy remains one of the clearest windows into that project. She reminds us that the world is not made up only of things. It is made up of encounters. Perhaps in a time defined by distance, screens, distraction, and abstraction, recovering that simple insight is more important than ever.

Empathy, in Stein’s sense, is not sentimental. It is perceptual. It is the quiet realization that we are never alone in the world we inhabit.

Empathy and Imagination as Practices of Hope

It’s not difficult to feel pessimistic right now, especially after last night’s State of the Union and all of its divisiveness on all sides of the aisles, all impotent with the seemingly slouching towards Gomorrah.

The thing that we’re all afraid of has multiple names beyond human words.

Every morning news cycle seems to stack another layer onto an already crowded horizon from ecological instability, biodiversity loss, accelerating AI systems, widening economic uncertainty, political fracture, school shootings, and the persistent drumbeat of conflict. None of these is an abstract trend. They show up in the texture of daily life… in energy debates here in the Carolinas, in conversations about data centers and water use, in classrooms, churches, and family tables, and even in the quiet unease many of us feel about the technological systems reshaping our attention and labor.

The temptation is to respond with denial, despair, or an eternal, paralyzing grief. Denial insists things aren’t really that bad. Despair insists nothing can be done. Both short-circuit meaningful engagement. The algorthims program us to this more than we program the algorithms. Same as it ever was.

But for me, the path toward something like grounded optimism has increasingly come down to two intertwined capacities: empathy and imagination.

Not optimism as cheerfulness or optimism as naive confidence. But optimism is a disciplined openness to possibility within real limits.

Empathy as a Way of Knowing

Empathy is often treated as a moral trait, something we either have or lack (or should eschew). But phenomenologically, it is better understood as a mode of perception.

Edith Stein described empathy not as projecting ourselves into another, nor as observing them from a safe distance, but as a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to us as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully present. Empathy does not collapse difference. It allows relation without possession.

When expanded beyond human-to-human encounters, this becomes an ecological capacity.

To practice ecological empathy is to recognize that forests, rivers, species, and landscapes are not merely resources or backdrops. They are participants in shared conditions of life. Sitting with the black walnut in my backyard here in Spartanburg has taught me more about this than any abstract theory. The tree does not “speak” in human language, yet its seasonal rhythms, vulnerabilities, and persistence disclose a form of presence that invites response. Empathy here is not sentimental projection. It is attentiveness to relational reality.

This matters for optimism because despair often grows from abstraction. When the world is reduced to statistics, models, and catastrophic projections, it becomes psychologically uninhabitable. Empathy returns us to situated relation. It anchors concern in concrete encounters rather than overwhelming totals.

We do not save “the environment.” We learn to live differently with the places and beings already shaping our lives.

Imagination as the Extension of Empathy

If empathy opens us to the reality of others, imagination opens us to possible futures with them.

Imagination is frequently dismissed as escapist or unrealistic, but historically it has been one of humanity’s most practical tools. Every social institution, technological system, ethical reform, or ecological restoration effort began as an imagined alternative to what currently existed.

The crises we face today are not only technical. They are narrative and perceptual. Climate models can tell us what may happen. Economic forecasts can outline risks. AI researchers can map trajectories. But none of these, by themselves, generate livable futures. That requires the imaginative capacity to envision forms of coexistence that do not yet fully exist.

This is why ecological thinkers from Thomas Berry to Joanna Macy have emphasized the importance of story. Without imagination, data produces paralysis. With imagination, data becomes orientation.

Imagination does not deny danger. It prevents danger from becoming destiny.

Why These Matter in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.

AI systems increasingly mediate how we work, communicate, and interpret information. They promise efficiency while also raising questions about labor, creativity, authorship, and the ecological costs of computation itself. It is easy to frame this moment as a competition between humans and machines, or as a technological inevitability moving beyond human control.

Empathy and imagination disrupt that framing.

Empathy reminds us that technological systems are embedded in human and ecological contexts. Data centers draw on water and energy. Algorithms shape social behavior. Design choices reflect values. These systems are not autonomous destinies but relational infrastructures whose impacts are distributed across communities and landscapes.

Imagination, meanwhile, allows us to ask better questions than “Will AI replace us?” Instead we can ask: What forms of human and more-than-human flourishing should technology support? What would a genuinely ecological technological future look like? What practices of attention, education, and governance might guide development in that direction?

Without imagination, AI becomes fate, but with imagination, it becomes a field of ethical and ecological design.

Optimism as a Practice, Not a Prediction

The kind of optimism I find credible today is not based on predictions about outcomes. It is based on practices that keep possibilities open.

Empathy keeps us relationally awake.
Imagination keeps us temporally open.

Together, they resist the two dominant distortions of our moment: the reduction of the world to objects and the reduction of the future to inevitabilities.

When we practice empathy, we perceive that the world is still alive with agencies, relationships, and meanings that exceed our control. When we practice imagination, we acknowledge that the future is still under construction, shaped not only by systems but by perception, story, and choice.

This does not eliminate risk. It does not guarantee success. But it sustains participation.

And participation, more than prediction, is what hope requires.

A Quiet Form of Hope

Some mornings, optimism looks less like a grand vision and more like a small act of attention.

Watching the black walnut shift through seasons. Seeing our children learn to perceive and adapt to new challenges, from math problems to social interactions to losing the championship in a youth basketball league, and listening carefully to a student’s question. Reimagining how a church, classroom, or local community might respond differently to ecological pressures. Writing, teaching, or building something that nudges perception toward relation instead of domination.

None of these solves global crises on its own, but they do cultivate the perceptual habits from which meaningful change becomes thinkable.

Empathy grounds us in the reality of shared life while imagination opens that shared life toward futures not yet fixed.

In a time when so much feels predetermined, these two capacities remain profoundly human… and profoundly necessary.

And for me, that is reason enough to remain cautiously, actively optimistic.

Presentation at Yale on “Returning to the Roots: Edith Stein, Empathy, and Ecological Intentionality”

Here’s my full presentation for Yale Divinity’s 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology that was held last week (February 2026)… what a great time to be back at Yale Divinity after graduating in 2002!

Roots of Cruciform Consciousness: Edith Stein, Empathy, and the Ground of Ecological Intentionality

Sam Harrelson, PhD Student, California Institute of Integral Studies
Yale Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology
February 2026

The theme of this gathering invites us to consider whether what we need for the future might already lie beneath our feet. Such language can easily be heard metaphorically, pointing toward ancestral wisdom, inherited traditions, or the rediscovery of forgotten practices. Yet phenomenologically, the claim may be more literal and methodological than it first appears. What lies beneath our feet is not only soil or memory but the perceptual ground through which the world becomes meaningful at all. The question of roots is therefore not only historical or ecological but experiential. It concerns how the world appears to us, and how we appear within it.

This paper proposes that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a way to rethink ecological consciousness precisely at this level of perception. Stein’s account of empathy, developed in her early work On the Problem of Empathy, does more than explain how one human being understands another. It articulates the structure through which another center of experience becomes present to consciousness at all. When considered in light of contemporary ecological crisis, Stein’s analysis suggests that the breakdown we face is not only technological, political, or economic. It is also perceptual. The challenge before us may therefore involve not simply new policies or innovations, but a re-rooting of awareness itself.

Empathy as the Disclosure of Another Life

Stein famously resists two common misunderstandings of empathy. Empathy is neither projection nor inference. It is not the imaginative insertion of myself into another’s position, nor is it a logical deduction based on external signs. Instead, empathy is a distinctive intentional act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs. I encounter the other not as an extension of myself, nor as a merely observable object, but as a subject whose interior life is present while remaining irreducibly other.

This formulation is subtle but decisive. Empathy preserves difference while establishing relation. It allows proximity without collapse, recognition without possession. The other’s experience appears as both accessible and inexhaustible. I grasp something of their joy, suffering, or intention, yet never exhaust it. Their life exceeds my comprehension even as it becomes present to me.

What is often overlooked is that Stein does not treat empathy primarily as a moral achievement. It is not first a virtue or emotional capacity. Rather, empathy belongs to the ontological structure of consciousness itself. The world we inhabit is never neutral or empty. It is always already populated by other living centers of activity whose presence shapes the field of experience. Empathy, in this sense, is not an optional addition to human life but a basic condition for the appearance of a shared world.

Seen from this perspective, empathy precedes ethics. It grounds the possibility of ethics by disclosing that we do not inhabit the world alone. The recognition of another’s interiority is not a later interpretive step but an original feature of how the world shows up at all.

Ecological Crisis as Perceptual Crisis

If Stein is right, then the ecological crisis may be understood partly as a crisis in this very structure of perception. The devastation of ecosystems is not only the result of poor management or technological excess. It is also enabled by a way of seeing in which the natural world appears primarily as an object rather than as a community.

Forests become timber, rivers become resources, soil becomes substrate, and landscapes appear as inventories of use-value rather than as living fields of relation. In phenomenological terms, the world is flattened into availability. Once this perceptual reduction takes hold, exploitation follows almost inevitably. What no longer appears as expressive or relational becomes disposable.

This does not mean that ecological destruction results simply from individual failures of empathy. Rather, it suggests that modern technological culture has cultivated a habitual mode of perception in which relational presence is systematically obscured. The more-than-human world becomes intelligible primarily through abstraction, measurement, and utility. The experiential sense of encountering other forms of life as centers of activity recedes from view.

Stein’s phenomenology offers a way to articulate what has been lost. If empathy is the structure through which another life becomes present, then ecological renewal may require not only new forms of governance but renewed perception. The task is not to sentimentalize nature or project human consciousness onto nonhuman beings. It is to recover the capacity to encounter the world as populated by lives that exceed our own perspective.

Toward Ecological Intentionality

To name this possibility, I use the term ecological intentionality. In phenomenological language, intentionality refers to the directedness of consciousness toward the world. Ecological intentionality designates a mode of awareness oriented not toward mastery or control but toward participatory belonging.

Such intentionality recognizes that existence unfolds within networks of interdependence. Living beings present themselves as centers of activity whose interior dynamics cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation alone. Their life is not identical to ours, yet neither is it merely inert. Stein’s careful distinction between empathy and projection is crucial here. We need not claim to fully understand another life in order to acknowledge that it exceeds objecthood.

Ecological intentionality, therefore, involves a shift in posture rather than an expansion of knowledge. It is less about acquiring new information and more about recovering a different way of encountering what is already present. The world begins to appear again as a field of relations in which we are participants rather than external observers.

The Cruciform Pattern of Ecological Life

At this point, the cross can be reexamined phenomenologically. Within Christian theology, the cross is often interpreted primarily as the site of human redemption or divine sacrifice. Yet it can also be read more broadly as a pattern of relational existence. The cross marks the intersection of vulnerability and renewal, finitude and transformation. It signifies that life does not persist by escaping death but through processes that pass through it.

When viewed in ecological terms, this pattern becomes strikingly familiar. Soil forms through decay. Forest ecosystems depend upon cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Nutrients circulate through networks of exchange among fungi, plants, animals, and microorganisms. Life flourishes not despite finitude but through it. Descent into the earth becomes the condition for new emergence.

The cruciform pattern therefore resonates with the very processes unfolding beneath our feet. It names a structure in which loss and renewal, limitation and possibility, are inseparable. Such a reading does not reduce theology to biology or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a shared logic of relational becoming that traverses both domains.

Embodiment, Finitude, and Participation

Stein’s later philosophical and spiritual writings deepen this ecological resonance. In Finite and Eternal Being, she portrays the human person as simultaneously grounded in finitude and opened toward transcendence. This openness does not remove us from the world but situates us more deeply within it. Embodiment is not an obstacle to spiritual life but its very condition.

Through our bodies, we are always already embedded within networks of dependence. We breathe air shaped by ecosystems, consume food produced through soil and climate, and live within material processes we neither originate nor control. Finitude, for Stein, is not deficiency but location. To be finite is to be situated, and to be situated is to belong.

Her reflections in The Science of the Cross extend this insight into explicitly theological territory. Transformation occurs not through domination or escape but through participation in patterns of vulnerability and love. Read ecologically, this suggests that the way forward lies not in transcending earthly conditions but in entering them more fully. The acceptance of interdependence becomes the ground of spiritual as well as ecological maturity.

Place-Based Attention

These themes remain abstract unless they are anchored in lived experience. For me, this anchoring occurs quite literally in the Carolina Piedmont, where I live and work. As part of my research practice, I track the seasonal rhythms of a black walnut tree in my yard. Over the course of the year, I watch its cycles of dormancy, budding, leafing, fruiting, and decay.

Such observation does not transform the tree into a human subject. Yet neither does it remain a mere object. It appears instead as a living center of activity whose rhythms intersect with mine. Its shade shapes my summer afternoons. Its leaves enrich the soil each autumn. Birds and insects inhabit its branches. Time itself becomes visible through its changes.

This practice does not solve climate change or halt biodiversity loss. But it reconfigures perception. The tree ceases to be a resource or backdrop and becomes a participant in a shared field of life. Stein’s phenomenology helps articulate what occurs in such moments. Empathy, understood broadly as the disclosure of another center of life, makes possible a renewed sense of belonging within the world.

Returning to the Roots

To return to the roots, then, is not primarily to recover a lost past. It is to return to the participatory ground of perception itself. When this ground is obscured, the world appears inert and disposable. When it is recovered, the world appears again as expressive, relational, and alive.

From this perspective, ecological responsibility no longer presents itself merely as an external obligation imposed by ethical systems or environmental policies. It emerges instead as the natural expression of inhabiting a shared world. The recognition of belonging precedes and grounds the call to care.

In this sense, what we need may indeed already lie beneath our feet. Not only in the soil and its intricate networks of life, but in the deeper phenomenological roots through which the world first becomes present to us at all.

References

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Consciousness Talk in the Mainstream

🙋‍♂️

(Interesting to see thinkers like Pollan wade into the realm of consciousness and panpsychism now… times they are a changin’!)

Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change – The New York Times (Gift Article):

Panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche or consciousness, and somehow this consciousness is combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of superconsciousness. It sounds crazy. There are some very serious people who believe in it. You have to expand your sense of the plausible when you’re looking at consciousness. But we’ve done that before. How long ago was it that we discovered electromagnetism? This crazy idea that there are all these waves passing through us that can carry information. That’s just as mind-blowing, right?

Empathy Is Not Agreement

After writing recently about empathy, I have noticed something predictable beginning to surface in conversations. Some readers assume that defending empathy is the same as defending agreement. Others assume that empathy asks us to suspend judgment, blur convictions, or collapse differences into sentiment. Others hear the word and imagine a soft moralism that refuses conflict altogether.

None of that is what I mean. And none of it is what the phenomenological tradition means when it takes empathy seriously.

Empathy is not agreement.

Agreement belongs to the realm of conclusions. Empathy belongs to the realm of perception. Agreement concerns what we affirm. Empathy concerns what we are able to see.

Those two movements can overlap, but they are not the same thing.

When Edith Stein described empathy, she was not describing kindness, approval, or emotional merging. She was describing the experience of encountering another consciousness as other. That difference matters. Empathy does not erase alterity. It reveals it. It allows another interior life to appear without reducing it to projection or dismissal.

Seen this way, empathy does not require me to accept another person’s conclusions. It asks only that I recognize their presence as something more than an obstacle or abstraction. It makes disagreement possible in a way that is not dehumanizing, because the other remains visible as a subject rather than collapsing into a caricature.

This distinction is important (especially now), when disagreement has become the dominant grammar of public life and social media. We are trained to interpret understanding as surrender and attention as endorsement. But the ability to perceive another position clearly does not weaken conviction. It clarifies it. Convictions formed in the absence of perception are rarely stable. They are brittle because they are insulated.

In teaching, I saw this again and again. Students did not become intellectually stronger by shutting out opposing viewpoints. They became stronger by learning to articulate what others were actually saying rather than reacting to shadows. The same pattern appears in pastoral settings, family life, and ecological work. Understanding what is present in front of us does not determine our response, but it does shape its integrity.

There is also a quieter dimension to this distinction. Empathy extends beyond interpersonal exchange. It informs how we encounter landscapes, species, and places that exceed human intention. To attend to a damaged river or a thinning forest is not to agree with what has happened there. It is to allow the reality of that place to appear without immediately converting it into data, policy, or sentiment. Ecological care begins with perception before it moves toward intervention.

This is where the language of boundaries often becomes confused. People worry that empathy dissolves necessary limits. But healthy boundaries are not walls. They are structures that make encounters sustainable. Agreement can be refused. Distance can be maintained. Decisions can remain firm. None of these requires blindness to the presence of others.

Empathy does not eliminate conflict. It changes the conditions under which conflict unfolds.

To perceive another consciousness as real does not settle arguments. It situates them. It ensures that disagreement takes place within relation rather than abstraction. That is not weakness. It is a discipline of attention.

If anything, empathy makes disagreement more demanding. It removes the ease of dismissal. It requires that we confront actual positions rather than simplified versions constructed for convenience. It slows reaction and deepens response.

I suspect this is part of why empathy feels uncomfortable to many people. It complicates the desire for clean oppositions. It introduces texture where clarity once seemed sufficient. It refuses the comfort of reduction.

But none of this asks us to relinquish judgment. Empathy precedes judgment. It does not replace it.

In daily life, this often appears in small ways. Listening to someone whose conclusions I cannot accept. Sitting with students whose frustrations are not easily resolved. Paying attention to land that does not conform to restoration timelines. Observing my own reactions before converting them into positions. These are not heroic gestures. They are practices of perception.

Empathy, understood this way, is not an ethical performance. It is an attentional posture. It allows the world, in its plurality, to appear with greater clarity. What we do in response remains open. Agreement is one possibility among many.

But perception comes first.

And without it, we are not disagreeing with others at all. We are disagreeing with our own projections.

Empathy Without Exit: Why “Suicidal Empathy” Gets Human Nature Wrong

In Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad advances a forceful and, in some respects, understandable claim that empathy, when unbounded, becomes psychologically corrosive and socially destabilizing. It’s certainly had an impact on tech-bro podcasts such as Joe Rogan who constantly invokes the work.

In Saad’s telling, empathy is a trait that must be regulated lest it undermine individual flourishing and collective coherence. Excessive empathy, he argues, leads to self-erasure, moral confusion, and the collapse of healthy boundaries. What presents itself as compassion becomes, in this view, a kind of slow-motion self-destruction.

There is a surface plausibility to this argument, especially in a cultural moment saturated with moral urgency and emotional overload. Many people do experience burnout, resentment, and paralysis under the weight of constant exposure to others’ suffering. Saad’s critique speaks to a genuine phenomenon. But the deeper difficulty with Suicidal Empathy does not lie primarily in its social or political conclusions. It lies in its underlying assumptions about what empathy is, where it belongs, and what sort of beings we take ourselves to be.

Saad treats empathy as a psychological capacity possessed by fundamentally self-contained individuals. It is something one deploys, withholds, or mismanages. From this perspective, the self precedes relation. Empathy is an add-on, a discretionary feature of human interaction that must be carefully rationed to preserve autonomy. When empathy overwhelms the self, the solution is containment… pull back, reassert boundaries, and close the gates.

What this framework never seriously interrogates is the ontology it presupposes as a picture of human beings as sealed units whose primary task is self-maintenance, and for whom openness to others is always a potential threat. Empathy appears as dangerous precisely because the self is imagined as fragile and enclosed, always at risk of being breached.

But what if that understanding is wrong?

What if empathy is not best understood as a psychological excess, but as a clue to the basic structure of consciousness itself? What if the problem Saad diagnoses is not “too much empathy,” but a modern metaphysics that treats relational vulnerability as pathological?

To raise that question is not to dismiss the harms Saad names. It is to ask whether those harms arise from empathy itself, or from an incoherent attempt to practice empathy while clinging to an ontology of isolation.

Few thinkers allow us to ask this question with greater clarity than Edith Stein.

What follows is not a refutation of Suicidal Empathy by counterexample or moral exhortation (not that I could). It is a challenge to the deeper framework within which empathy is cast as suicidal in the first place. Stein’s life and thought do not offer a safer, moderated version of empathy. They offer something more unsettling with a vision in which empathy is not optional, not manageable, and not reducible to a personal trait.

Stein offers empathy as fate.

Empathy Without Exit: Edith Stein’s Life, Thought, and Death

Empathy is one of those words that risks becoming harmless through overuse. It circulates easily in moral exhortations and leadership manuals, often reduced to emotional sensitivity or interpersonal skill. But in the early phenomenological tradition, empathy named something far more demanding. It described a basic structure of experience…the way consciousness is already open to what is not itself.

Few thinkers lived that claim as fully, or as consequentially, as Edith Stein.

Stein began her intellectual life as a rigorous phenomenologist. A Jewish woman studying philosophy in early twentieth-century Germany, she worked closely with Edmund Husserl and belonged to the first generation of phenomenological thinkers who were attempting to describe consciousness without reducing it to psychology or metaphysics (not ironically as a colleague of Heidegger who would later have very problematic ties with the Nazi’s but became a much more well-known philosopher). Her doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, remains one of the clearest and most restrained analyses of the topic.

For Stein, empathy is not emotional contagion, imaginative projection, or moral sympathy. It is the experience of foreign consciousness as foreign…the direct givenness of another’s interior life without collapsing it into one’s own. Empathy does not erase difference. It makes difference perceptible. It is not something consciousness adds after the fact. It is one of the ways consciousness is structured in the first place.

What is striking, reading Stein closely, is how little sentimentality there is in her account. Empathy is not comforting. It does not guarantee understanding or agreement. It is simply the way the presence of another addresses us, prior to judgment or response. Already here, empathy carries weight. It binds us to a world we did not choose.

Stein’s later life is sometimes narrated as a sharp turn away from philosophy toward religion. That story is too simple. Her conversion to Christianity did not abandon phenomenology. It deepened it.

When Stein encountered Christian theology, she did not set aside her careful attention to experience. Instead, she brought phenomenological clarity with her. The Incarnation, for Stein, was not an abstract doctrine but an event that made sense only if reality itself is relational at its core. The possibility that God could be encountered in a human life depended on the same openness that makes empathy possible at all.

Her philosophical account of empathy quietly widened into a theological vision of participation. To know another was not merely to register their experience, but to be drawn into relation with them. Empathy, once extended theologically, became inseparable from responsibility.

This shift did not lead Stein away from the world. It intensified her attention to it.

As the political situation in Germany deteriorated, Stein was increasingly aware of the danger facing Jewish communities. Even after entering the Carmelite order, she did not imagine herself exempt from the suffering unfolding around her. She refused to interpret religious vocation as withdrawal from history. Instead, she understood it as a different mode of presence within it.

Her later theological writings, especially those reflecting on the Cross, are often misread as expressions of passive suffering. In fact, they are deeply active. For Stein, the Cross names a refusal to stand outside the suffering of others. It is not sought for its own sake. It is endured as a consequence of remaining open when closure would be safer.

This is where empathy becomes costly.

When opportunities arose for Stein to escape Nazi persecution, she declined them. Not out of recklessness or fatalism, but out of solidarity. She insisted on remaining with her people. Empathy, in her life, was not a concept she could set aside when it became dangerous. It had already shaped the posture of her being.

In August 1942, Edith Stein was arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed (with her sister) shortly after her arrival.

It is important to say this carefully. Her death does not prove her theology. It does not sanctify suffering or redeem violence. There is nothing edifying about Auschwitz. Stein did not choose her death. What she repeatedly chose was not to seal herself off from others to preserve her own safety.

Empathy did not save her life. But it shaped how she refused to abandon those with whom her life was bound.

That refusal matters.

In a time when empathy is often invoked as a soft or even an adverse virtue, Stein reminds us that it is not safe. Empathy exposes us to claims we cannot manage. It destabilizes the fantasy of sealed selves. It draws us into histories and responsibilities that exceed our intentions. Properly understood, empathy is not an ethical add-on. It is an ontological condition with consequences.

This is why Stein’s work continues to matter for ecological thought as well. If consciousness is porous rather than enclosed, if perception is already participatory, then our relationship to land, to other species, and to future generations cannot be reduced to management or control. Ecological harm is not only a technical failure. It is a failure of attention…a refusal to remain open to what addresses us from beyond ourselves.

Stein offers no solutions, but she still offers orientation as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Her life traces a trajectory from perception to participation, from philosophy to theology, from empathy as description to empathy as fate. She shows us what it looks like when a thinker refuses to retreat from the implications of her own insights.

Empathy, in Stein’s hands, is not something we deploy. It is something we undergo. And once undergone, it changes how one inhabits the world.

That may be empathy’s greatest ontological demand of us.

Empathy, Selfhood, and the Fear of Porosity

Read against Suicidal Empathy, Stein’s life exposes a crucial misdiagnosis. What Saad names as empathy’s suicidal tendency is, at a deeper level, the fear of ontological porosity. The danger he senses is not empathy per se, but the collapse of a model of selfhood built on enclosure, control, and insulation from others’ claims.

From within that model, empathy must indeed be dangerous. If the self is a bounded container, then any sustained openness threatens depletion. Relation becomes invasion. Responsibility becomes theft. Withdrawal masquerades as wisdom.

Stein does not deny the cost of openness. Her life makes that impossible. What she denies is that enclosure is ever a genuine alternative. Empathy, in her phenomenological account, is not something added to an otherwise intact self. It reveals that the self was never intact in that sense to begin with. Consciousness is already exposed, already addressed, and already implicated.

This is why Stein cannot simply “turn empathy down.” There is no dial. There is only the choice between acknowledging relational vulnerability or fleeing into abstraction.

From this angle, the language of “suicidal empathy” that so many podcasters, YouTubers, and creators want to cling to risks misnaming the problem. What appears to be self-destruction may instead be the collision between two incompatible ontologies: one that assumes sovereignty and control, and one that recognizes participation and exposure as fundamental.

Stein’s refusal to abandon others was not a psychological failure. It was a metaphysical consistency.

None of this licenses coercive self-sacrifice or moral blackmail. Stein’s death does not obligate anyone else to follow her path. But it does stand as a rebuke to any account of empathy that treats withdrawal as the highest form of rationality. It reminds us that some forms of self-preservation depend on a prior fiction of separateness.

The real danger, then, is not an empathy that goes too far, but a culture that teaches us to fear what empathy reveals about who we are.

If empathy is structural rather than elective and ontological rather than sentimental, then the task is not to suppress it but to learn how to inhabit it without illusion. Stein does not offer comfort here. She offers clarity. And clarity, in a world built on sealed selves, will always feel dangerous.

That danger may not be suicidal. It may simply be the cost of refusing to lie about the nature of being.

Plasma, Bubbles, and an Ontology of Empathy

Plasma is not a metaphor, but a problem. We don’t learn a great deal about plasma in school, but it certainly exists and is the main component of all the matter in the universe (and I’m writing this as someone who taught AP Physics, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science for almost twenty years in various schools here in the Carolinas!). But plasma is a problem with how we imagine form, boundary, and relation, which is why it’s offloaded as “another state of matter” in our school textbooks, but not explored in depth unless you take higher-level physics courses in college. Plasma resists being treated as a thing, however. It gathers, disperses, and responds to fields. It holds structure without closure. It behaves less like an object and more like an event…patterned, responsive, never fully contained.

That resistance matters. It presses against one of the most deeply sedimented assumptions of modern thought that reality is composed of discrete, self-contained units with clear edges. Subjects here, objects there. Minds inside, world outside. Consciousness is an interior chamber from which we look out through our eyes.

Plasma doesn’t cooperate with that picture. Neither, I’m increasingly convinced, does consciousness.

Plasma is not rare or exotic. It is the most common state of matter in the universe. Stars are plasma. Auroras are plasma. Lightning traces plasma paths through the sky. Even here, close to the surface of things, plasma appears wherever energy, matter, and field interact in unstable but patterned ways. What distinguishes it is not chaos, but responsiveness. Plasma organizes itself in relation to surrounding forces. It forms filaments, sheaths, and membranes. It is structured, but never sealed.

That combination, form without closure, is one of those “not-normal” ideas about plasma that has stuck with me and causes me to be fascinated by this aspect of our cosmos.

Likewise, a bubble is not a solid thing. It is a relation held in tension (fascinating history of that term, which I’ll go into in a later post). A bubble’s boundary is “real,” but it is not a wall. It is a membrane… thin, responsive, constantly negotiating between inside and outside. A bubble exists only as long as the conditions that sustain it remain. Its form is defined by pressure, by exchange, by the delicate balance of forces it does not control. And they fascinate children who are seemingly more open to “not normal” experiences with reality.

Importantly, bubbles do not need to be isolated to remain distinct. They can cluster. They can press against one another. They can share boundaries without collapsing into sameness. Their integrity is not maintained by separation, but by tension (the Greek term tonos, which we get the word tension in English, is also connected to musical tones, which seems fitting).

I find myself wondering whether this is a better way to think about consciousness.

Much of modern philosophy and psychology still relies on a container model of mind. Consciousness is imagined as something housed inside the skull, bounded by skin, sealed off from the world except through carefully regulated inputs. Perception, on this view, is a delivery system. Empathy becomes an imaginative leap across a gap, while relation is always secondary.

But this model struggles to explain some of the most ordinary features of experience. It cannot easily account for the way moods permeate spaces, how grief lingers in landscapes, or why certain places feel charged long after an event has passed. It treats empathy as an achievement rather than a condition. And it renders the world strangely inert…a collection of objects awaiting interpretation.

Phenomenology has long resisted this picture. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty insist that perception is not a projection outward from an interior mind, but a participation in a shared field (again, more allusions to physics). The body is not a container for consciousness, but its mode of openness. We do not first exist as sealed subjects and then relate. We emerge through relation.

Seen this way, consciousness begins to look less like a chamber and more like a membrane. Structured, yes…but porous. Distinct, but never isolated, and sustained by relations it does not author.

This is where empathy becomes especially revealing.

Empathy is often treated as a moral virtue or an emotional skill. Something we cultivate in order to be better people. But phenomenologically, empathy appears much earlier than ethics. It is the basic experience of being addressed by another consciousness. As Edith Stein argued with remarkable precision, empathy is not emotional contagion or imaginative projection. It is the direct givenness of another’s experience as other…a presence that is not mine, yet not inaccessible.

What matters here is what empathy presupposes. It assumes that consciousness is not sealed. That there is permeability at the boundary, and one field of experience can register another without collapse or confusion. Empathy only makes sense if consciousness is already open.

In this light, empathy is not something consciousness does after the fact. It is evidence of how consciousness is structured in the first place.

This is where the image of the bubble returns with force. Consciousness, like a bubble, maintains its integrity not by hard enclosure but by responsive tension. Its boundaries are real, but they are sites of exchange. Empathy occurs at the membrane, and is where another’s presence presses close enough to be felt without being absorbed.

If this is right, then many of our ethical and ecological failures are not simply failures of will. They are failures of perception. They arise from an ontology that imagines selves as sealed units and treats relation as optional. When the world is apprehended as external and inert, care becomes intervention. Responsibility becomes management while action outruns attention.

This helps explain my growing unease with the language of solutions in ecological discourse. Solutions presume problems that can be isolated and systems that can be controlled from above. They rely, often implicitly, on a model of consciousness that stands outside what it seeks to fix. But ecological crises are not engineering glitches. They are symptoms of fractured relation… between humans and land, between perception and participation, and between ourselves and the cosmos.

A bubble ontology does not promise mastery. It cannot guarantee outcomes. What it offers instead is a more faithful description of how beings actually persist: through tension, vulnerability, and responsiveness. It suggests that ethical action must emerge from attunement rather than command. That care begins with learning how to remain present to what exceeds us.

Ecological encounters often happen at boundaries, such as fog lifting from a field, frost tracing the edge of a leaf, or wind moving through branches. These are not moments of clarity so much as moments of thickness, where distinctions remain but do not harden. They feel, in a small way, plasma-like. Charged, relational, and alive with forces that do not resolve into objects.

Perhaps consciousness belongs to this same family of phenomena. Not a substance to be located, but a pattern sustained by relation. Not a sovereign interior, but a delicate, responsive membrane. If so, empathy is not an add-on to an otherwise isolated self. It is a clue…a trace of the deeper structure of being.

What if consciousness is less a sealed interior and more a field held together by tensions we did not choose? What if its openness is not a vulnerability to be managed, but the very condition that makes response possible at all?

I don’t offer this as a solution. Only as an orientation or a way of learning to stay with the world without pretending it is simpler, or more controllable, than it is. Sometimes, the most faithful response begins by noticing the shape of what is already here.

Letting the World Appear

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to let the world appear.

Not to analyze it.

Not to manage it.

Not even to care for it (at least not yet).

Just to allow the world to show up as something other than an extension of myself.

So much of contemporary life trains us in a posture of extraction. We move through days asking what can be used, optimized, corrected, or explained. Even our best intentions, from ethical concern, activism, and compassion, often arrive after the world has already been reduced to an object of concern. We rush toward response without lingering long enough with perception.

But perception, I’m increasingly convinced, is not neutral. It is already a moral act.

To perceive carefully is to allow the possibility that what I encounter exceeds me… that it carries its own depth, rhythm, and interiority, even if I cannot name it. This is true when I’m listening to another person speak. It’s also true when I’m standing near a tree, watching weather move across a field, or reading a text written centuries ago by someone whose world I will never fully inhabit.

What we often call empathy begins here, not as feeling-with, but as restraint. A refusal to rush in. A willingness to let the other remain partially opaque.

This matters because many of our current crises (ecological, political, spiritual, especially) are not simply failures of care. They are failures of attention. We have learned how to act without learning how to see. The result is a world that feels thin, instrumental, and endlessly available for use.

But when the world is allowed to appear on its own terms, something shifts. Places become storied rather than scenic. Communities become thick with memory rather than data points. Nonhuman life stops being “environment” and starts registering as presence. This doesn’t give us an answer about what to do next. And maybe that’s the point.

Before ethics, there is perception.

Before action, there is address.

Before care, there is the quiet discipline of letting the world show up as more than ours.

Today, at least, that feels like enough.

I’m trying to practice this kind of attention in small, ordinary ways. This past year, that practice has taken the form of tracking a black walnut tree in my backyard… returning to it again and again, not to extract meaning, but to notice what shows itself over time. The notes from that ongoing practice are gathered at samharrelson.com/tracking. It’s a reminder, for me at least, that learning to let the world appear is not a theory so much as a habit… one that grows slowly, like the tree itself.

Empathy Before Relation: Edith Stein and the World That Appears Between Us

Empathy is often described as a bridge between subjects. One consciousness reaches toward another, imaginatively or affectively, and something like understanding takes place. Even in its more careful phenomenological treatments, empathy is typically framed as relational… a way of accessing the interior life of another while preserving difference. Edith Stein’s account is frequently read in this way, and rightly so. Her insistence that empathy is neither emotional contagion nor projection remains one of the most disciplined analyses we have.

But I want to suggest that there is something even more radical at work in Stein’s notion of empathy… something that has not been fully explored. Empathy, for Stein, is not only a relation between subjects. It is a condition for the appearance of a shared world at all.

In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein describes empathy as the experience of “foreign consciousness” that is given to me as foreign, not fused with my own. This insistence on non-identity is crucial. But what often goes unnoticed is that empathy, in Stein’s account, does not simply add new content to an already stable world. It reconfigures the world’s depth. The world becomes thicker, layered with perspectives that I do not inhabit but must now account for. Empathy is thus not an ethical achievement layered onto perception. It is a modification of perception itself.

This is where Stein quietly departs from many later accounts of empathy (and especially tech/podcast influencers who see empathy as a weakness). Empathy is not something I do after recognizing another subject. It is the very means by which the world discloses itself as more than my own field of experience. Without empathy, the world collapses into what Husserl might call a solipsistic horizon… coherent, perhaps, but flattened. Empathy introduces dimensionality. It discloses that the world exceeds me, not abstractly, but concretely, through others who perceive, suffer, attend, and respond in ways I cannot fully access.

Seen this way, empathy is not primarily interpersonal. It is ontological.

This matters because it allows us to rethink empathy beyond the human without reducing it to sentimentality. If empathy is a way the world shows up as exceeding my own perspective, then the presence of nonhuman others… animals, plants, landscapes, even historical communities… need not be justified by analogy to human interiority. The question is not whether trees “have feelings like ours,” but whether our perceptual posture allows the world to appear as more-than-human in the first place. Empathy becomes the disciplined openness that resists premature closure.

This reframing also clarifies why empathy must precede ethics. Ethical systems often assume a world already populated with relevant agents. Stein’s insight runs deeper. Empathy is the condition by which beings become morally visible at all. Without it, ethics degenerates into abstraction… rules applied to a world we have not truly perceived.

In an age of ecological crisis, this has profound implications. The failure is not simply that we lack compassion. It is that our world has become perceptually thin. We move through landscapes, histories, and communities without allowing them to register as having their own depth. Stein offers no environmental program, no political manifesto. What she offers instead is more unsettling… a demand that we learn again how to let the world appear as other than ourselves.

Empathy, in this sense, is not about feeling more. It is about seeing more carefully. And that, perhaps, is its quiet power as St. Edith Stein was pointing us toward.

Gigawatts and Wisdom: Toward an Ecological Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk announced on X this week that xAI’s “Colossus 2” supercomputer is now operational, describing it as the world’s first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster, with plans to scale to 1.5 gigawatts by April. This single training cluster now consumes more electricity than San Francisco’s peak demand.

There is a particular cadence to announcements like this. They arrive wrapped in the language of inevitability, scale, and achievement. Bigger numbers are offered as evidence of progress. Power becomes proof. The gesture is not just technological but symbolic, and it signals that the future belongs to those who can command energy, land, water, labor, and attention on a planetary scale (same as it ever was).

What is striking is not simply the amount of electricity involved, though that should give us pause. A gigawatt is not an abstraction. It is rivers dammed, grids expanded, landscapes reorganized, communities displaced or reoriented. It is heat that must be carried away, water that must circulate, minerals that must be extracted. AI training does not float in the cloud. It sits somewhere. It draws from somewhere. It leaves traces.

The deeper issue, though, is how casually this scale is presented as self-justifying.

We are being trained, culturally, to equate intelligence with throughput. To assume that cognition improves in direct proportion to energy consumption. To believe that understanding emerges automatically from scale. This is an old story. Industrial modernity told it with coal and steel. The mid-twentieth century told it with nuclear reactors. Now we tell it with data centers.

But intelligence has never been merely a matter of power input.

From a phenomenological perspective, intelligence is relational before it is computational. It arises from situated attention, from responsiveness to a world that pushes back, from limits as much as from capacities. Scale can amplify, but it can also flatten. When systems grow beyond the horizon of lived accountability, they begin to shape the world without being shaped by it in return.

That asymmetry matters.

There is also a theological question here, though it is rarely named as such. Gigawatt-scale AI is not simply a tool. It becomes an ordering force, reorganizing priorities and imaginaries. It subtly redefines what counts as worth knowing and who gets to decide. In that sense, these systems function liturgically. They train us in what to notice, what to ignore, and what to sacrifice for the sake of speed and dominance.

None of this requires demonizing technology or indulging in nostalgia. The question is not whether AI will exist or even whether it will be powerful. The question is what kind of power we are habituating ourselves to accept as normal.

An ecology of attention cannot be built on unlimited extraction. A future worth inhabiting cannot be sustained by systems that require cities’ worth of electricity simply to refine probabilistic text generation. At some point, the metric of success has to shift from scale to care, from domination to discernment, from raw output to relational fit.

Gigawatts tell us what we can do.
They do not tell us what we should become.

That remains a human question. And increasingly, an ecological one.

Here’s the full paper in PDF, or you can also read it on Academia.edu:

Gigawatts and WisdomDownload

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being: Hildegard of Bingen, Edith Stein, and the Ecology of the Cross

Here’s another paper on the Ecology of the Cross that brings together Edith Stein with another one of my favorite thinkers, Hildegard of Bingen (along with John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and writings from the Desert Mothers and Fathers), on the notion of perception that I’ve been writing about here in recent weeks.

I don’t like to rank my own work, but I do feel that this is one of my strongest pieces regarding this idea of empathy, listening, attention, and ultimately ontology.

Abstract:

This paper argues that the contemporary ecological crisis reflects not only ethical failure but a deeper disturbance in creaturely perception. Ecological devastation persists, I contend, because the world is no longer encountered as intrinsically meaningful, participatory, or given. Drawing on the theological cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen and the phenomenological metaphysics of Edith Stein, the paper develops an account of ecological intentionality as a mode of perception appropriate to finite, dependent creatures. Hildegard’s theology of viriditas articulates a participatory ontology in which creation exists through continuous reception of divine vitality, while Stein’s analysis of finite and eternal being clarifies the epistemological conditions of receptive knowing grounded in creaturely limitation rather than mastery.

Bringing these figures into dialogue with ascetic and mystical traditions, particularly the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the Carmelite theology of John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, the paper argues that ecological perception requires cruciform formation. Exposure, deprivation, and unknowing function as schools of attention that retrain desire and resist technocratic habits of control. The paper concludes by proposing an Ecology of the Cross, in which vulnerability, dependence, and receptivity become the conditions for ecological faithfulness and renewed participation in a living creation.

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being publicDownload

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees: Vegetal Empathy, Ecological Intentionality, and the Limits of the Human

Here’s a recent paper that I greatly enjoyed writing on Aristotle, Marder, and Edith Stein’s notions, and their relevance to my own creation of ecological intentionality (shaped greatly by Stein’s work on empathy). You can read the full PDF here below…

Abstract

This paper develops a phenomenological account of ethical relation to vegetal life that resists anthropocentric projection and affective assimilation. While recent work within the “vegetal turn” has challenged the philosophical marginalization of plants, many contemporary approaches continue to rely on empathy as the primary ethical bridge between humans and vegetal beings. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of the vegetative soul, Matthew Hall’s advocacy of vegetal empathy, Michael Marder’s philosophy of non-subjective vegetal expression, and Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, this paper argues that empathy reaches a constitutive limit when applied to plants. Vegetal life does not present itself phenomenologically as experiencing subjectivity and therefore cannot be accessed through empathic intentionality without distortion. In response, the paper proposes ecological intentionality as a distinct mode of attentiveness appropriate to vegetal beings. Ecological intentionality does not seek imaginative access to interiority or reciprocal recognition. Instead, it names a disciplined posture of being addressed, in which human attention is interrupted and ethically reshaped by encounter with non-subjective life. Through sustained phenomenological engagement with trees, the paper argues that vegetal presence discloses ethical demand through persistence, exposure, and temporal depth rather than affective resonance.

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees publicDownload

On Schelling’s Naturalism

I’m taking a course on Hegel this semester at CIIS with Prof. Matt Segall (who writes an excellent Substack newsletter) as I wrap up my PhD coursework, so I thought what better time to finally do a deep dive into Schelling, as I have a deficiency in his work and need to understand it more precisely (or at least attempt to).

Hegel and Schelling were once roommates (early 19th Century) before they became rivals. Of course, Hegel became the more prominent philosopher, but Schelling would go on to impact and influence thinkers who have, in-turn, heavily influenced me, from Kierkegaard to Sartre to Merleau-Ponty and many contemporaries interested in the realm of consciousness, philosophies of nature, and exploring religious ontologies from a different point of view than what ended up becoming dominant in the 20th century.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more here about Schelling’s texts in the future!

Empathy Before Ethics (or Why We Should All Read More Edith Stein)

Empathy is one of those words that risks being worn thin by overuse and is too frequently misunderstood. It shows up everywhere now… in leadership manuals, in political rhetoric, in the well-meaning exhortations we give children and congregations. And yet, for all its familiarity, empathy remains deeply misunderstood. Too often it is reduced to a moral sentiment, a kind of emotional niceness, or worse, a strategy for persuasion. I want to suggest something quieter and more demanding… empathy as a way of perceiving.

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (ICS Publications), p. 11

I have come to think of empathy not primarily as an ethical achievement but as an ontological posture. It is not something we do after we have already decided what matters. It is the manner in which the world first comes to matter at all.

This conviction has been sharpened for me through sustained engagement with Edith Stein, whose phenomenology of empathy remains one of the most careful and restrained accounts we have. For Stein, empathy is neither emotional contagion, weakness, nor imaginative projection. It is the act through which another subject’s experience is given to me as theirs, not mine. Empathy discloses interiority without collapsing difference. It is, from the start, a mode of knowing that preserves distance.

“The empathized experience is not given to me originally, but non-originally.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 7

In my own work, empathy names the fragile, attentive space where another presence addresses us before we categorize it, manage it, or explain it away. This is as true of human encounters as of encounters with trees, landscapes, animals, or histories. Empathy is the discipline of allowing oneself to be interrupted.

That interruption is rarely dramatic. Most often, it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. A pause before speaking. A hesitation before naming. A sense that what is before me exceeds my grasp. In that pause, empathy is born… not as fusion or projection, but as restraint.

One of the mistakes modern culture makes is assuming that empathy means feeling what another feels. That framing subtly centers the self. It asks how the other’s experience can be translated into my own emotional register. Stein is especially helpful here. She insists that empathy is a non-original experience… I do not live the other’s joy or suffering as my own, but I genuinely encounter it as real. This distinction matters. It protects the other from appropriation and the self from illusion.

“The subject of the empathized experience is not identical with the subject who empathizes.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 10

This has profound implications for how we relate to the more-than-human world. When I sit with a tree… especially the black walnut that has quietly shaped my days over the past year… empathy does not mean imagining what it would be like to be a tree. That is a category error. Instead, empathy means allowing the tree to show up as something other than a resource, a metaphor, or a background object. It means attending to its rhythms, its vulnerabilities, its way of occupying time.

Here, Stein’s work opens a door rather than closing one. If empathy is the basic way another’s interiority becomes perceptible without being reduced, then the question is not whether nonhuman beings “have” interiority in a human sense. The question is whether we have trained ourselves to attend to modes of presence that do not mirror our own. Empathy, in this sense, is ecological. It resists extraction. It slows us down. It teaches us how to dwell rather than dominate.

“Empathy gives us experience of other persons and of their experiences, but it does not make them our own.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 12

I have found that empathy is also inseparable from humility. It requires accepting that understanding is always partial, always provisional. Stein never treats empathy as exhaustive knowledge. It is an opening, not a possession. This is uncomfortable in a culture that prizes mastery and certainty. Empathy refuses shortcuts. It cannot be automated or optimized. It unfolds through presence, patience, and a willingness to remain with what does not resolve.

This is why empathy cannot be commanded. It cannot be forced through moral exhortation alone. It must be cultivated through practices of attention… through walking familiar paths slowly, through listening without rehearsing replies, through learning the names and habits of the places we inhabit. Empathy grows where curiosity is protected.

And perhaps this is the most important thing I have learned. Empathy is not a soft virtue. It is a demanding discipline. It asks us to remain open in a world that rewards closure. It asks us to stay porous when efficiency would prefer boundaries sealed tight. It asks us to receive before we judge.

“It is only through empathy that we gain knowledge of the psychic life of others.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 14

If there is a future worth hoping for… ecologically, socially, spiritually… it will not be engineered solely through better systems or smarter technologies. It will be shaped by the recovery of this ancient, fragile capacity to be addressed by what is not ourselves.

Empathy does not solve the world’s problems. But without it, we cannot even perceive them rightly.

“Finite knowing is essentially fragmentary.”

Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt Reinhardt (ICS Publications), p. 389