Intro: Trees and other objects
Trees populate the edges of phenomenology, seen as they often are from the perspective of the philosopher’s window, sat at their desk and in turn writing what they presumably perceive. Phenomenology seems to start with paper, a desk and a window as Sara Ahmed demonstrates. Saliently, it involves an orientation towards objects. But this orientation not only hinges on one’s own capacity to enact this attention, but equally and perhaps more importantly to what is reachable, that which engenders our attention in the first place. What is reachable is therefore dependent on the body in question and why Ahmed writes ‘The surface of bodies are shaped by what is reachable. Indeed, the history of bodies can be rewritten as the history of the reachable’ (Ahmed, 2006: 55) What is within the phenomenologist’s grasp? And what slips through the net?
Phenomenology seems from the start humbled by its very limitations, the frugality of Husserl’s Epoché (ἐποχή), to demarcate the margins that can be accounted for, always put in check by the horizon. Husserl will strive to simplify in order to glean what is true to our perception of things, that which furnishes any scientific enquiry at all. This is why a tree for Husserl, which he perhaps observes from out of his office window ‘is nothing less than this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to perception’ (Husserl, 1983: 216). What he calls ‘the sense of this perception’ is something untouched, even by the elements, an ‘essence’ that cannot burn up. But what makes the sense of our perception invulnerable? It seems that Husserl would like to separate our perception of the tree from the tree ‘simpliciter’, so much so that it becomes unclear how such objects like trees actually orient us at all in the first place. Surely they are more than mere background objects seen from the philosopher’s window and hence why they are normatively invoked as objects worth describing? There is undoubtedly something unique about the ways trees appear in our experience, besides from their often prodigious size. Competing with the height of our built environments, they continue to grow in multiple directions, even after the development of a building has stopped.
Sat at his desk, Merleau-Ponty describes that when he glances over the objects that surround him to orient himself among them, they do not necessarily stand out as individual entities but contribute to an underlying framework that enables him to carry out his projects. Though when it comes to the living objects that perhaps intrude his office environment, even with the shadows of their foliage, Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘to recognise this tree as a tree’ the ‘momentary arrangement of the sensible spectacle must begin afresh - as if at the origin of the vegetal world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 46). This is differential to Husserl’s take, because the tree ‘ceases to be an allusion to a general type’ and stands out as a growing and emerging entity, which embodies a ‘vegetal’ history if you will, a living history which is perceived in the rich plenitude of the tree’s growth, intuited without such invocation of dendrochronology. Living objects like trees encroach and unsettle phenomenology’s proclivity for the calm habitual setting of the office, ‘queering’ as Ahmed phrases it, the penchant for static truths. As Merleau-Ponty implores, ‘Husserl’s essences must bring with them all of the living relations of experience, like the net that draws up both quivering fish and seaweed from the seabed.’ (Ibid: Ixxix). This net of life that Merleau-Ponty beautifully illustrates is both excessive and equally non-exhaustive. Only so much can be dredged from the seabed, but life clings obstinately to our perception, respiring and indeed quivering.
Anxious nature
Merleau-Ponty’s writing has been unequivocally fruitful for environmental philosophers keen to challenge and undermine anthropocentrism (See Abram, 1996; Toadvine, 2009; Bannon, 2014; Booth, 2021). His philosophy intimates something symbiotic about corporeal connection to nature, how our human lives are weaved like a fold in the fabric of the world. This is divergent to Merleau-Ponty’s contemporary Sartre, who characterises humans as ‘Nothingness’, a ‘hole in being’, (Sartre, 1998: 79) that is totally discontinuous with the world and nature, like a hole in dough that cannot be kneaded and bind. Whether ‘Being’, that which is distinct from Nothingness qua human, includes all other forms of life for Sartre is ambiguous. As he writes in Being and Nothingness:
‘The world is human. We can see the very particular position of consciousness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being that table which is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree [italics my own], that landscape - being and nothing else’ (Ibid: 218).
But as Paul Gyllenhammer points out, while Sartre is particularly indifferent to the value and beauty of nature, dubious of any such entwinement between us and non-human world, he does recognise at times that ‘Our lifeworld is constituted by the basic descriptive divide between the animate, the inanimate (whether naturally occurring or created by humans) and the once living or dead’ (Gyllenhammer, 2023: 178). Quoting Sartre, who says ‘that the perception of life “cannot by nature be of the same type as that of inanimate object”, there is at least the suggestion that the living engender our attention in manifestly differential ways to inanimate matter. While Sartre’s more philosophically rigorous treatment of phenomenological description involves a rather indifferent and even pejorative treatment of nature, there are moments in his writing that reveal a heightened awareness of the manifestation of the living or once living, qua non-human. In contrast to Husserl, perceptions of objects like trees are not bracketed as impenetrable essences qua noema, but are often coloured by an intense degree of uncertainty and indeed anxiety. This is most pronounced in Sartre’s fictional work, such as in Nausea, where the emotion of panic inflects his perception of his environment, perhaps excessively so.
Emotions for Sartre ‘evoke the appearance of a world’. ‘Horribleness’ as Sartre describes it, envelopes not only ‘the present state of the thing’, but also the ‘future’, covering in the shadow of darkness. (Sartre, 2006: 54) The act of flight or fight is broached by Sartre, as he contends that ‘flight’, that is anxiety or panic, is actually ‘mistakenly supposed to be a rational behaviour’, construed as a calculated response to danger. The emotion of panic or flight though according to Sartre is ‘magical’, insofar as it is not attributed to reason or logic, but to a kind of freedom relative to one’s consciousness, transforming the situation not as a concrete reality but as a psychological one. This is why he invokes the example of being face-to-face with a ‘ferocious beast’. As he describes, during one’s panic response, his legs give way, his heart beats more feebly and he turns pale and faints. While powerless, the act of flight is an escape of kind, in that this dissociation is an attempt to deny the reality of this encounter, which is ultimately sleight of hand. Its no coincidence really that Sartre uses predation and in fact an encounter with non-human nature as such an example to describe the emotion of panic. We see this again in his novel Nausea, but this encounter involves an urban chestnut tree, not a dangerous and wild predator.
Sartre's chestnut tree
In rather atypical fashion to most, certainly contemporary treatises on nature, Sartre describes what one can quite safely presume to be lichen, or at least some form of moss or bryophyte, growing on a chestnut tree planted in the town centre, in quite a pejorative and almost amusingly horrified manner. As he writes ‘Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather (Sartre, 1949: 176). While the green rust that Sartre describes is seemingly lichen, the swollen black bark is likely a burl, a cluster of dormant and premature epicormic growth. They are like a tumorous lump growing out of the trunk of a tree and usually appear due to stress or infection, which are sometimes sought after for their novel and valuable contribution to carpentry. Describing the root as a ‘breathing pump’, involved in the process of the tree’s respiration, Roquentin concedes that ‘the function explained nothing’ and that ‘this root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was…below all explanation’ (Ibid: 174). We are therefore not provided with an accurate description of the chestnut tree’s biology, but we are given a rather esoteric characterisation of something relatively ordinary, an urban tree. Witnessing the roots disturbs him, this ‘knotty mass’ he calls it, ‘entirely beastly’ (Ibid: 171). This characterisation is almost laughably hyperbolic, but permits some degree of nuance when we think about the sort of state of mind Sartre’s protagonist is in, and how this is actually engendered by his attunement towards the natural objects around him.
Roquentin expresses that this perception makes him think of ‘belonging’, sharing that in his state of anxiety he is forced to tell himself that the ‘sea belonged to the class of green objects’, as if he is trying to reassure himself in a state of panic. Here Sartre auspiciously articulates the uncanny state of panic, as one begins to feel dissociated from their environment. What had only moments ago made sense about the world suddenly appears utterly fortuitous, senseless even. One is forced to remind themselves of common features of our existence that can make us feel grounded, i.e. Breathing the air outside, or holding onto objects like trees. But in this heightened state, neither him nor other living beings appear to belong convincingly to the earth. Roquentin contends that this ‘heap of living creatures’, perhaps both human and vegetal, ‘hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us’, adumbrating a kind of provisional eco-existentialism (ibid: 172). As Roquentin observes ‘the tree-trunks shrivel like weary wands, crumple up, fall on the ground in a soft, folded, black heap’, mocking those ‘idiots who came to tell you about will-power and struggle for life’ subverting the veneration of the tree’s upwards trajectory into the sky by recognising its ‘collapse’ (179). This interaction with the chestnut tree, while prima facie negative, doesn’t necessarily elicit disgust at the qualities of the tree qua gnarled, tumorous etc. but actually engenders a heightened sense of existential ambivalence, a profound awareness of the very fragility of living things.
This awareness seems to capture a weird sense of sympathy towards the urban tree and while sometimes guilty of self-indulgent spirals, what Sartre describes does provoke recognition for the existence of other non-living things. As Roquentin puts it, describing the chestnut trees, ‘They did not want to exist, only they could not help themselves. So they quietly minded their own business’. Does this description solely perpetuate a lowly opinion of nature, or does it also instil a weird sense of sympathy , for the destitution of all living things, human and plant alike? Though rather presumptuous, Sartre shakes the environmentalist platitude that plants strive to live and co-exist and with particular attunement to the urban tree, he encourages us to question assumptions about nature and acknowledge the frail conditions of living creatures. Often planted uniformly along roads, urban trees are deprived of the mycelial interconnectedness and relative richness of the ancient woodland. They become stressed, vacuums of pollutants caused by the city’s congestion, strained by the rigidity of their placement in concrete, which they eventually bulge through the growth of their roots. Exposed to ash dieback and Dutch elm disease, urban trees are treated, girdled and manicured by the act of pollarding, preventing boughs from falling on passersby. Quite often overlooked, they constitute a fundamental feature of our urban environments, tacit indicators of the mercurial seasons. While vulnerable and potentially uncomfortable in urban spaces, they are resilient and flourish amidst the grey rows of corrugated buildings. In the above passage, Sartre’s description of the tree is compelling, because while it doesn’t quite capture the beautiful fecundity of non-human life, it does intimate our shared condition of vulnerability.
As Roquentin share how he feels ‘in the way’ and in turn drawn to thoughts of suicide, he concedes that even in his state of being ‘decomposed flesh’, he would still be ‘in the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth’ (173). The very existential character of being 'in the way' might be experienced consciously, but it also pertains to the very brute fact of being there of organic matter, its inherent quality of ‘having-been’. Roquentin’s anxiety might seem like a prime example of feeling detached from one’s environment, dissociated from the natural world and yet his anxiety or nausea actually elicits his attention towards the tree’s existence. While coloured by his rather negative state of mind, the tree isn’t necessarily judged as being inferior to humans, but as actually cut from the same cloth of vulnerability, at least in this brief passage. The image of the roots sinking into the earth is compared to the proverbial cadaver that decomposes in the soil, eliciting an ambiguous sense of sympathy with all that is living and once-living. As Gyllenhammer writes, ‘just because Sartre does not support a beautiful, holistic cosmos does not mean he supports a dualist ontology’ (Gyllenhammer, 174). While this kind of binary ontology does become more conspicuous in some of Sartre’s more philosophical work, there are fragments of his writings that contain interesting takes on non-human nature. Certainly when we consider the excerpt from Nausea, where Sartre depicts non-human life as almost alienated from ‘nature’ in an analogous way to humans. This provokes us to question any such holistic concept of nature in the first place, and engenders differential perspectives of nature based on attunement and mood, such as seeing nature through an anxious and neurodivergent perspective, queering what is normative to representations of nature.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding the imminent threat of the natural world, whether a rare encounter with a predator, or even encountering the poisonous aura of a death cap mushroom on a woodland walk, there are unsettling things about nature that aren't so immediately obvious. Perhaps because these living things actually reflect what is strange about our own existence, the fact that we and they exist at all; the fulcrum of philosophy, that is why there is something instead of nothing. This is where I think Sartre’s unlikely contribution to environmental philosophy is felicitous and why I think existentialism does have something to offer to ecological thought; moreover, that it doesn’t necessarily have to merely perpetuate human exceptionalism. It is an eco-anxiety that isn’t necessarily fear of the emerging disintegration of ecology, our earth, but pertains to the fear of ecology and the earth itself, that which already is. While eco-phenomenologists of a Merleau-Pontian ilk flesh out the intuitive dynamic of sense making when it comes to our perception of the natural world, there is risk that we overlook what is unsettling and uncanny about nature and our ostensible entanglement with non-human creatures. This means that recourse to ‘sense’ must also involve conceding what is not possible to make entirely unequivocal, that is what life slips through the net. Merleau-Ponty does of course avow the invisible layer at heart of the dimensionality of the world, never quite dispelled - but there is less anxiety and alienation than you find in Sartre’s writing, where sense never seems entirely captured. Feeling more connected to the natural world, like a lichen clinging to the trunk of a tree, doesn’t necessarily always correlate to harmonious bliss. We are bound in some sense in an analogous way to the tree, vulnerable to the lumps and masses that grow from the tree’s body like a cancer; we might even find ourselves panic ridden in places where we felt at home only moments before. Sartre does admittedly overemphasise what is ostensibly unsettling about the natural world, whether gnarled roots or beastly animals, and he does indeed exaggerate the exceptionality of human freedom, but there is some recourse to his perspective, doing justice to the sense of anxiety and malaise that is certainly a part of nature.
References
Ahmed, S. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press: 2006
Gyllenhammer, P. 'Counter Finality and the Living World' in Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre After the Holocene. Ed. M. Ally & D. Boria. Lexington Books: 2023
Husserl, E. Ideas, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Martinus Nijhoff: 1983
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Tr. D. Landes. Routledge: 2005
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. H. Barnes. Routledge: 1998
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Tr. P. Mairet. Routledge: 2006
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Tr. L. Alexander. The New Classics Series: 1949.
