Tag: ruyer

Edith Stein’s Feast Day and On the Problem of Empathy

On the Feast of Edith Stein, August 9. A shorter, more devotional companion to this post appeared this morning at Carolina Ecology.

The church keeps a martyr’s feast on the day of her death… the dies natalis, the birthday into the life that doesn’t end. August 9 belongs to Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1942. I’ve written here before about the late Stein, the Carmelite metaphysician of Finite and Eternal Being and The Science of the Cross. Today I want to go back to the doctoral dissertation she defended at Freiburg on August 3, 1916, six days short of twenty-six years before her death, published the following year as Zum Problem der Einfühlung. It’s the text where my own project (Ecology of the Cross) starts, and on her feast day, it seems right to give it the same reading I’ve given the later works, because the line from this dissertation to the gas chamber is not an interruption of a philosophical career. It’s the completion of an argument.

The Question in 1916

Some historical grounding is important here. Stein came to Göttingen in 1913 to study with Edmund Husserl because the Logical Investigations had convinced her that consciousness opens onto things themselves, and she followed him to Freiburg when he took the chair there. Husserl had been gesturing at the problem of Einfühlung, of how another consciousness is given to me, since at least 1905, and he’d promised repeatedly to treat it properly. He never quite did, at least not in print or to satisfaction, and he handed the problem to his doctoral student Edith. She defended the dissertation summa cum laude and then spent the next two years as his first assistant, organizing and substantially editing the manuscripts that would eventually become Ideas II… which means that the analyses of the lived body that generations of readers have absorbed as Husserlian bear her fingerprints throughout (in my opinion). When Merleau-Ponty built the Phenomenology of Perception on the Ideas II material he consulted at Louvain, he was, at least in part, also building on Stein. I take a certain satisfaction in that genealogy, since my own framework of ecological intentionality runs through both Stein and Merleau-Ponty.

Stein’s published treatise has three main movements: the essence of acts of empathy, the constitution of the psycho-physical individual, and empathy as the understanding of spiritual persons. Stein’s first move is to clear the field. Empathy, she argues, is a sui generis form of intentionality. It isn’t inference by analogy (I don’t reason my way from your grimace to your pain), it isn’t imitation, and, against Theodor Lipps, it isn’t Einsfühlung, a feeling-into that merges me with you.

In empathy, the foreign experience is given to me non-primordially: your grief announces itself in my field with genuine givenness, and yet it remains irreducibly yours. I’m pulled into it, I can follow its sense, but I never occupy it. The act preserves the distance it crosses. This is also what distinguishes empathy from sympathy or fellow-feeling (Mitfühlen), where I have my own primordial feeling about your state. Empathy is prior to all of that. It’s the act by which there is an other there for me at all.

That structural insistence on distance-preserved-in-givenness has become, for me, the philosophical spine of any ecological perception that is both oriented rightly and practical. The alternative on one side is projection, where I dress the world in my own states and call it kinship. The alternative on the other side is objectification, where the world is Körper all the way down. Stein’s empathy threads between them, and she does it with an analytic patience that the nature-mysticism shelf almost never manages.

The Constitution of the Living Body

The center of the treatise, and the part I was annotating yet again under the black walnut this morning, is the constitution of the psycho-physical individual. Stein asks the question directly:

“How is my body [Leib] constituted within consciousness?” (Stein, 2016)

German gives her the distinction English conflates without an adjective to help: Körper, the physical body, one object among objects, and Leib, the living body, the body I don’t observe so much as inhabit. Her claim is that these are two givennesses of one reality, and the difference between them is the difference between a world of things and a world with someone home in it:

“A living body [Leib] only perceived outwardly would always be only a particularly disposed, actually unique, physical body, but never ‘my living body.'” (Stein, 2016)

How, then, is the Leib given? Through sensation, and here Stein’s analysis gets genuinely strange in the way good phenomenology is strange. Sensation is always localized somewhere, in a hand, behind the eyes, near the “I” but never in it:

“Since sensation is always spatially localized ‘somewhere’ at a distance from the ‘I’ (perhaps very near to it but never in it), I can never find the ‘I’ in it by reflection. And this ‘somewhere’ is not an empty point in space, but something filling up space. All these entities from which my sensations arise are amalgamated into a unity, the unity of my living body, and they are themselves places in the living body.” (Stein, 2016)

And the unity of those places arranges itself around what she calls the zero point of orientation:

“To speak of distance from ‘me’ is inexact because I cannot really establish an interval from the ‘I,’ for it is non-spatial and cannot be localized. But I relate the parts of my living body, together with everything spatial outside of it, to a ‘zero point of orientation’ which my living body surrounds. This zero point is not to be geometrically localized at one point in my physical body; nor is it the same for all data. It is localized in the head for visual data and in mid-body for tactile data. Thus, whatever refers to the ‘I’ has no distance from the zero point, and all that is given at a distance from the zero point is also given at a distance from the ‘I.'” (Stein, 2016)

Every spatial thing is given from the zero point, and the zero point itself can’t be found on any map of the body, because it’s where the maps are drawn from.

Readers of Raymond Ruyer will hear something familiar here, and the echo isn’t accidental to my project. Ruyer’s survol absolu, the absolute survey by which a form possesses itself without standing at a distance from itself, is doing later and more metaphysically ambitious work on the same datum Stein isolates in 1916: that self-presence isn’t one more spatial relation among the others. In my dissertation, I’m arguing that this convergence… Stein’s non-localizable zero point, Ruyer’s survey without distance, Merleau-Ponty’s body schema… marks out the phenomenon that any account of the organism as a center of its own life has to save.

Stein then adds the fold that makes intersubjectivity, and I’d argue ecology, possible at all:

“But the living body is constituted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly perceived physical body of the outer world.” (Stein, 2016)

I’m given to myself doubly: from inside as Leib, from outside as Körper. And it’s this doubleness in my own case that lets empathy do its work in the foreign case. When I perceive another living body, I don’t see Körper and then add soul by hypothesis. The other’s body is given as the outer face of a Leib, surrounding a zero point of orientation I can orient toward but never occupy. There’s another here over there. Stein is careful about how far this reaches. The fullness of empathic givenness varies with type: another human body fulfills the empathic intention most completely, and as she moves through the animal kindom, the fulfillment thins by degrees without simply switching off. She’s cautious. Her caution is part of why I trust her.

One more annotation from this morning, because it points forward to so much she wrote later:

“Our uniform, isolated stream of consciousness is not our soul. But, as we already saw in examining inner perception, among our experiences there is one basic experience given to us which, together with its persistent attributes, becomes apparent in our experiences as the identical ‘bearer’ of them. This is the substantial soul.” (Stein, 2016)

In 1916 this is a phenomenological claim: the soul shows up in experience as the persistent bearer of experience, and it can’t be dissolved into the stream. But it’s also the seed of the whole later metaphysics. The Potency and Act habilitation material, the ascent of Finite and Eternal Being, the anthropology of person and spirit… all of it grows from this early refusal to let the soul be an inference or a construction. She found it given. She spent the rest of her life asking what kind of reality could be given like that, and what kind of ground such a reality requires.

Ecological Intentionality, or Stretching the Act

My dissertation asks a question Stein didn’t ask, using instruments she built. If empathy is the act in which another zero point of orientation announces itself in my field, how far does the act stretch, and under what discipline? The black walnut in my backyard is the test case I keep returning to, here and at Carolina Ecology, because it resists both easy answers. On a strict reading of the treatise, the walnut gives me Körper only: bark, ragged August leaves, green hulls hardening toward fall. It has no face, no expressive field of the kind Stein analyzes. And yet the tree is unmistakably a center of its own life… drawing water on its own schedule, timing its year to light I don’t perceive, defending its ground chemically through juglone against competitors it will never see. It maintains itself as a unity from within, which is exactly what a merely physical body doesn’t do.

What I’m calling ecological intentionality is the disciplined extension of the empathic act toward such centers: chastened by Stein’s own warnings about fading fulfillment, trained by long observation in a particular place, and refusing at every step the projection she ruled out in her critique of Lipps. The claim isn’t that the walnut has experiences like mine and I can feel them. The claim is that the walnut is given to disciplined perception as self-organizing, as an ἐντελέχεια in the Aristotelian sense (being-at-work-staying-itself), a form in act that is the source of its own norms… what counts as flourishing for it, what counts as injury. This is where the dissertation’s Aristotelian thread meets its phenomenological one: the organism grounds ecological normativity only as form-in-act, and Stein and Ruyer are my route from Aristotle to a method that can actually perceive such forms rather than positing them.

And this is why I keep insisting, in the Thomas Berry and Lanham form of the public writing, that perception precedes ethics. We can’t be argued into caring for what we’ve never actually perceived as living. Environmental ethics that skips the phenomenology of perception builds on sand, issuing obligations toward entities it has given us no way to encounter. Stein supplies what that literature is missing: a rigorous account of the act in which another center of life becomes present to me at all. She gives the phenomenology of the thing that ecotheologians urge through practice.

From Empathy to the Cross

Her feast asks us to hold the whole life together, and the whole life runs from Freiburg to Auschwitz. She read Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography through a single night in the summer of 1921 and closed it, saying she’d found the truth. Baptism took place on January 1, 1922, in Cologne, at the Cologne Carmel. In 1933, the same year the race laws ended her teaching, her sister Rosa followed her into the church in 1936. The manuscript of Kreuzeswissenschaft was unfinished on her desk when the SS came to the Echt convent on August 2, 1942, in reprisal for the Dutch bishops’ public protest of the deportations. She and Rosa died a week later. The church calls her a martyr, μάρτυς, which is simply the Koine word for witness (lexical form μάρτυς, μάρτυρος): one whose perception of the truth was so complete that her body was conscripted into the testimony.

I don’t read the conversion as a break with the dissertation. Empathy, remember, is the givenness of what remains irreducibly other, presence across a distance that isn’t abolished. That’s already a proto-theology of revelation, and I suspect she knew it. In The Science of the Cross she writes that a science becomes a science of the cross when the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, a living energy shaping the soul by what it receives. The Ecology of the Cross borrows that architecture deliberately: knowledge of the living world whose inner form is kenosis (κένωσις, from κενόω, to empty; the textual form ἐκένωσεν at Philippians 2:7), knowledge shaped by what it receives rather than by what it seizes. And the one place Paul lets creation itself speak, it speaks in empathy’s grammar. Romans 8:22: πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν… all creation groans together and labors together until now (the textual forms συστενάζει and συνωδίνει, from the lexical συστενάζω and συνωδίνω). The prefix σύν carries the argument. Paul is claiming that creation has an inner life that can be suffered alongside, and Stein, decades before her conversion, was building the philosophical instrument that makes such a claim more than poetry.

Why This Book Matters to Me

Finite and Eternal Being gives my project its metaphysical scaffolding, and The Science of the Cross gives it its spiritual form, but On the Problem of Empathy gives it its method. Everything I’m attempting depends on the possibility this dissertation establishes: that another center of life can be genuinely given to me without being reduced to me, that the distance between us is crossed without being erased, that perception can be trained toward such givenness. A twenty-five-year-old doctoral student worked that out in Freiburg in 1916, and then spent twenty-six years living into its furthest implication… that to perceive the truth fully is to be claimed by it, all the way to the end. The end was this day. The church is right to call it a birth.

Quotes from Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Book 3). Translated by Waltraut Stein. ICS Publications, 2016. See also Finite and Eternal Being (CWES 9, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt) and The Science of the Cross (CWES 6, trans. Josephine Koeppel), both ICS Publications.

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form continues my ongoing work at the intersection of phenomenology, ecological theology, and process-oriented metaphysics. Beginning with sustained attention to the black walnut tree in our backyard here in Spartanburg, this paper asks whether non-human organisms can be understood as bearers of interiority rather than as merely complex mechanisms. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s account of duration, Raymond Ruyer’s theory of absolute survey, Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of embodiment and flesh, I work to develop “Ecological Intentionality” as a way of describing the living world as active, self-organizing, and meaningfully present. The paper argues that our ecological crisis is not only a failure of policy or management, but also a failure of perception, and that any deeper ecological repair must begin with learning to see living form more ontologically “true.”

Harrelson_Ecological_Intentionality_PublicDownload

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