Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Agrarian Phenomenology

This May Term I taught a class called Agrarian Phenomenology and we spent a great deal of time experiencing the land and studying the various ways that humans relate to the land. This involved field study every day--everything from visiting big farms to small farms to family farms to wilderness areas to urban and suburban areas. Admittedly, it sometimes included field 'play' such as this field in which I required the students to run through with hands raised high. =) I really enjoyed teaching in this concentrated way--which involved meeting every weekday morning for three hours for three weeks. It was so good to have sustained attention on one subject, and to sustain our attention by immersing ourselves in reading and experiencing what we are studying.

One excellent work we read from was The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature by Erazim Kohak (a Czech Philosopher of Ecological Phenomenology). It is beautifully written and is a different type of philosophy. His goal is not to use arguments to reach a conclusion. Instead of seeking to argue, he seeks to "evoke a vision"--that is a different way of viewing the world and our place in it. There is a certain awareness of oneself and one's being that occurs when the embers are dying out in the campfire and one is gazing up at the stars--an awareness that is not argued TO (trying to prove or justify our existence in this world) but an awareness that argued FROM--or an awareness that helps us see our own reality differently.