How to understand that emptying oneself is a gain and withdrawing is the fullest action?
In the etymological sense of the word contingency “cum-tangere” we read the human condition as the inseparable relationship between the certainty of finitude and the experience of infinity. Also the root of the word human, humus : born of the Earth, speaks to us of a great interwoven matrix that constitutes the link between all living beings.
Staying within the limits does not imply giving up the desire for the absolute, quite the contrary, it is the way we humans have of intuiting it. It is the immemorial art of keeping our gaze on the infinite from the full attention to the moment we live . In this arc of consciousness we move being the margin of our capacity to understand. A sufficient margin, if we explore it not extensively, but intensely.
Hebenshausen’s statement on soil
The ecological discourse about the planet earth, global hunger and threats to life, impels us to look at the soil , in a humble way, like philosophers. We are planted in the soil, not in the earth. We come from the ground and throw our excrement and remains on the ground. And yet it is very remarkable that the soil, its cultivation and our ties with it, are absent in the universe of issues that has made clear our philosophy of Western tradition.
As philosophers, we explore under our feet because our generation has lost its ground and virtue. By virtue we refer to the form, order and direction of the actions linked to a place, actions documented by tradition and which acquire their being by the options assumed within the habitual scope of the person who acts; we refer to the adoption of practices mutually recognized as good within a shared local culture, and which emphasizes the memories of that place.
We note that such virtue is traditionally found in work, trade, housing and suffering, sustained not by an abstract land, environment or energy system, but by the very particular soil that these same actions have enriched with their traces. And yet, despite this fundamental link between the soil and being, between the soil and the good, philosophy has not generated concepts that allow us to relate virtue to the soil in common, something totally different from administrative behavior on a shared planet.
We were torn from the links with the soil, from the connections that limited action—what made a practical virtue possible—when the modernization of the plan isolated us from the dirt, the agony, the flesh, the soil and the tomb. The economy in which we were absorbed, some without knowing it, others at high cost, transforms people into interchangeable fragments of the population, governed by the laws of scarcity.
Homes and common areas are barely imaginable for people hooked to public services and parked in furnished cubicles. Bread is a mere edible when it has no calories or simple fodder.
Talking about friendship, religion or joint suffering as a kind of conviviality, once the ground has been poisoned and covered with cement, seems like an academic dream for people scattered at random in vehicles, offices, prisons and hotels.
As philosophers, we emphasize the duty to talk about the soil. For Plato, Aristotle and Galeno, it was taken for granted; it’s not like that now. The soil in which a culture grows or grains can be grown is lost sight of when it is defined as a complex subsystem, sector, resource, problem or “farm” – as agricultural science tends to do.
As philosophers we resist the ecological experts who preach respect for science but promote a disdain for historical tradition, for local qualities and the earthly virtue of setting limits among ourselves . With sadness but without nostalgia, we recognize the past of the past. So, with little confidence we try to share what we see: some of the effects of the land losing soil. And we were annoyed by the disdain for the soil that we observed in the speech of the slate ecologists. We are also critical of many well-intentioned romantics, Luddites and mystics who exalt the soil and make it the matrix, not of virtue as we raise it, but of life in the abstract. Therefore we launch a call to constitute a philosophy of the soil: a disciplined analysis of that experience and memory of the soil without which neither virtue nor any new suerte sustenance can exist.
Sigmar Groeneveld, Lee Hoinacki, Ivan Illich
Hebenshausen, Germany, December 6, 1990
Translation: RVH
