On Wild Ethics

All of man’s mistakes arise because he imagines that he walks upon a lifeless thing, whereas his footsteps imprint themselves in a flesh full of vital power.

— Jean Giono

Although “ethics” is commonly equated with a set of rules or principles for right conduct, the heart of ethics has more to do with a simple humility toward others — an attentive openness not just toward other persons but toward the inexhaustible otherness of the manifold beings that compose this earthly world.

When we consider the palpable earth around us as though it were an object — when we conceive of nature merely as an objective set of mechanical processes — we tacitly remove ourselves from the world we inhabit. We pretend that we are not corporeal creatures co-evolved with the rest of earthly life, but are rather disembodied minds pondering reality from a godlike position outside that reality. In this manner, we free ourselves from any responsibility to the rest of the biosphere. We give ourselves license to engage other animals, plants, and natural elements as a set of resources waiting to be used by us, as a clutch of fixed and finished entities waiting to be manipulated and engineered to suit our purposes. To look upon any entity only as a determinate object is to sever the possibility of real relationship with that being, and so to forestall any need for ethical reflection.

If, however, we acknowledge the myriad presences around us not as objects but as bodily subjects in their own right — as open-ended beings with their own inherent spontaneity and active agency — then we swiftly become aware of the relationships that we sustain with those beings. For only then, when we recognize the things we experience as sensitive beings like ourselves, do we notice that we inhabit a common world. And in truth, it is not only the other animals and the plants with whom we actively share this world, but also glacier-carved mountains and meandering rivers, the asphalt street underfoot, and the wind surging through the skyscrapers. Every aspect of the sensuous surroundings can be experienced as an active, animate power, able to respond to the beings around it and to influence them in turn.

When we speak of earthly nature in this manner, not as a collection of passive and determinate objects but as a community of living subjects, then we straightaway begin to feel ourselves as members of this community, and to wonder about the quality of our relations with the other beings in our neighborhood.

The intuition that we inhabit a breathing cosmos — the awareness that the sensible things around us are, like our own creaturely bodies, sensitive and perhaps even sentient powers — is common to the discourse of virtually every indigenous, traditionally oral culture. For in the absence of intervening technologies, the unaided human senses cannot help but encounter the world as a tangle of animate, expressive beings. Since we ourselves are corporeal creatures thoroughly embedded in the sensuous cosmos, we are able to encounter things only from our limited angle or perspective. We never experience another entity in its totality — we can never completely penetrate or plumb the secrets of another being.

Each thing that we perceive has its accessible aspects and its hidden aspects, its bright facets that capture our attention and its unseen dimensions that lure us deeper into participation. Hence our perception of any presence is not an instantaneous event but rather an unfolding dynamic — a living interchange wherein a thing first catches our eye, or subtly calls our attention, to which we reply by focusing our gaze upon it, or reaching out to touch it, whereupon the other replies by revealing some further facet of itself, and so we are drawn ever deeper into dialogue with the unique allurement of this boulder or that fungus-ridden tree stump. Direct sensory perception reveals the things around us not as inert or inanimate chunks of matter but as enigmatic, elemental presences with whom we find ourselves in a living interchange.

To speak of the world as a clutch of inanimate and mechanical objects is therefore to deny our real experience; it...