“When a philosopher speaks with a tree, what do they talk about?” Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák asks in his 1992 essay “Speaking With Trees.” “Are they discovering a hitherto hidden or long-forgotten truth – or are they forging a new, more promising manner of speaking, one that will help them both survive?” (381). A professor at Boston University and a student of Jan Patočka, Kohák combines German phenomenology with the more theological Boston personalism to develop an account of the world that holds inherent meaning. However, as the consequences of environmental disaster continue to unfold, the efficacy of Kohák’s project is put to the test. How might this “more promising manner of speaking” yield the actions necessary to secure survival?
In this paper, I explore the effectiveness of Kohák’s ecological personalism in response to this question. I begin by offering an introduction to Kohák’s personalism as it is found in his philosophically infused nature writing text The Embers and the Stars (1984), highlighting the way that he extends the personalism of Bowne and Brightman to non-human persons. This leads Kohák to emphasize the uniqueness of human personhood in two areas: free responsibility and capacity for metaphorical language. The event of environmental disaster pushes these two attributes to their limits, something I demonstrate through Kohák’s ambiguous account of fate. Opposing the language of fate with regards to historicism allows Kohák to clarify the human person as free to be responsible; affirming it with regards to environmental disaster somehow also reveals the human person as free to be responsible. The difference, I argue, lies in the relationship between fate and finitude. Turning to the work of Annie Dillard, I suggest that post-romantic nature writing concretizes Kohák’s effort to “speak with a tree,” demonstrating an ecopoetics of environmental disaster.
In Embers and the Stars, Kohák sets up a conceptual and practical epoche at his cabin in rural New Hampshire to disclose the “personalist inversion”, namely that subjectival categories are primordial and basic to the intelligibility of the world, making the world inherently meaningful and endowed with moral sense. Kohák distinguishes himself from idealist personalism in two ways: first, he opposes the dichotomy of meaningful person vis-à-vis a mute world by leveraging the distinction between human and person. A person is a primordial mode of being that is meaningful and moral; humans are one such kind of person, a member of the community of persons that constitute the world, but so are porcupines, pole beans and trees. Second, in his focus on subjectival categories, Kohák insists that the force of “personality” does not come from its tie to Person – whether in the form of God or an idea – but rather from its metaphorical usefulness (something Kohák learns from Paul Ricoeur to whom Embers and the Stars is dedicated). The metaphor of personal/impersonal is more constructive than inner/outer or natural/artificial, for it displays the relational quality of lived reality while offering a moral diagnostic for human actions. What sets humans apart is their freedom, the capacity to decide not just whether to act in such a way that depersonalizes or repersonalizes, but also to speak in such a way that the importance of such action comes to the fore.
The event of environmental crisis – in which the world is no longer experienced as meaningful – serves as a test for Kohák’s ecological personalism, for it reveals a world in which persons do not use their freedom to act responsibly. Kohák’s discussion of historicism (one of two “demons of doubt” that stalk personalist philosophy) is useful here. Historicism replaces free moral action with fate, tempting the human person to give their freedom over to history. If that which is good is not shining forth in the present but lies deferred in the future, human responsibility too can be deferred into the future. There is a corollary to this in Kohák’s later descriptions of the threat of phenomenological and ecological romanticism. While historicism endlessly defers responsibility into the future, romanticism defers it into the past by appealing to the nostalgia of return. In these writings, fate makes a reappearance, this time with specific regard to ecological crisis. When ecological crisis is experienced as an event of fate, it portrays nature as something precarious and thus in need of help. Thus, when the deferred future is not an eternal good but rather an ill-wrought finitude, freedom regains its commitment to responsibility. This means that for Kohák the experience of the fragility of finitude is also the experience of free responsibility.
But how is it that one does come to experience ecological crisis as fate? What language is appropriate to it? These questions are particularly striking given Kohák’s remonstration of his own earlier work Embers and the Stars as falling prey to the very romanticism he holds in disdain. But neither is Kohák convinced by the efficacy of scientific or philosophical argument to convince; rather philosophy must “share a vision” (Embers and Stars, xiii). Thus, when we return to Kohák’s understanding of personalism as not merely a lived reality of the world but also a lived language for the world, one that finds new metaphors for that reality, we find the basis for something like a personalist poetics. I argue through reference to the nature writings of Annie Dillard that Kohák’s understanding of crisis as fate as well as his personalist philosophy lays the groundwork for an ecopoetics which steps into the natural world and finds in it not just personhood but also the fragility of finitude – think, for example, of Dillard’s famous observation of the death of the water bug. It is this encounter with finitude, a mourning without nostalgia, that secures nature writing against romanticism. Such a poetics is not devoid of but rather intrinsic to a responsibility that refuses to be deferred, for “the first thing,” Kohák insists, “the philosopher says to a tree is ‘Sorry’” (“Speaking With Trees,” 376).
This paper analyzes the efficacy of Erazim Kohák’s ecological personalism in light of environmental disaster. Kohák’s extension of the category of person to non-human creatures in turn demands an emphasis on free responsibility and the capacity of metaphorical language as the distinguishing attributes of human persons. The event of environmental disaster pushes these two attributes to their limits, as is demonstrated through Kohák’s account of the dangers of historicism and romanticism. In analyzing the relationship between fate and finitude as it relates to human responsibility, I argue that the experience of the natural world as finite and fragile elicits a responsibility that refuses to be deferred. Turning to the work of Annie Dillard, I suggest that post-romantic nature writing concretizes Kohák’s effort to “speak with a tree,” demonstrating an ecopoetics of environmental disaster.