Abstract

To advance the discourse of texts and surfaces is to embrace a logic of dreams, rejecting the deep eternity of earth and sky for the postmodern shallows of history and narrative. And although Arne Naess and his philosophy of “deep ecology”—which today often serves as a program for environmental action—invokes the notion of depth, he leaves it philosophically unclarified and unexplored. Rendering luminous surface and text alike, this unexamined depth of nature entails both beauty and eternity, as Nietzsche and Camus understood. But as Heidegger, following Hölderlin, as well as Florensky comprehended, these both lead to a certain element of the holy in nature that Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” It is argued that without these depths of beauty, eternity, and the holy, the deepest grounds, and the ultimate motive, for environmental action can be neither adequately understood nor sufficiently motivated.

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