On Heidegger's Distinction between "World" and "Earth"

location: my apartment. my neighbors have been playing their music loudly nonstop for the last few hours. usually this results in fights with other neighbors. nothing is happening even though it is dark. i think we're all too tired.

music: film and tv soundtracks. stuff like the DS9 intro music. i need to drown out the noise.

mood: anxious. lots to do. hoping i'll remember to do it all.

But how to take a walk?

Watch the tribesmen in the jungle,
on National Geographic. Everything
green and alive and messy like
the unfamiliar always is messy.

They don't walk like they're scared.
Or masked with courage. They're just there,
comfortable where they are.

An Earth unafraid to share.

-- from "The Earth to Me"

Look at the cliches in the above half-poem. "Tribesmen in the jungle" are "just there," simply being, "comfortable where they are." I cannot be any more basic. Of course those in the tribe have intricate social interactions and lives of vigor and health not accessible through the enlightenment of New Age gurus. They understand the cost of technology for living and tradition in a way I can at most appreciate remotely. The reporting of my lines is weak in its imagery – "green and alive and messy" is a good triad because "the unfamiliar always is messy." But by themselves those words don't do anything besides conjure a website trying to sell you wabi-sabi inspired home decor for your Kardashian-palette house.

The larger problem these lines evoke is about shame, anxiety, encounter, and sharing. That's the complexity, the "mess" they correctly pinpoint. If you treat it like a psychological problem–which it is, of course–you can untangle it. You have to. Got to step into this world, right? But you have to be careful as you untangle. You don't want to reduce "encounter" and "sharing" to simply feeling good and having normal social relations. Plenty of people feel good and have normal social relations and are absolute monsters. Those who build and staff prison camps for children sleep well at night, unfortunately. They have friends and jobs.

Last time I spoke about "encounter" being beyond tourism. It can start there, but you want to be open to moments where history declares itself. In Montreal, the history students who led the tour knew the traditions to which they committed. I couldn't help but think about my own relation to civic virtue. Whether I even had one or not. What exactly was I devoted to, and would it help anyone?

These lines force me to consider encounters with the natural world. It is tempting to locate them as prior to history, attempting ideally to glimpse primal oneness. (Obviously they are far too clumsy to do any such thing). For example, a way to conceive of Aristotlean soul is to think about how you can see into the eyes of a dog and understand its peculiar aliveness. Or how you intuitively understand plants and fungi and their growth.

This summer, though, I spent time with Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art." There, Heidegger, in order to explain the peculiar power of art, starts with a distinction between "world" and "Earth." Art engages the tension between the two, exploring the rift, documenting the imprint. I am oversimplifying, but I'm interested in how our encounters with nature could be defined by that tension. Allow me to introduce Gregory Schufreider into the discussion:

If what Heidegger calls the world is an historical structure, then the Earth is a prehistoric ground: an Ur- as well as an Ab-grund; which is to say that, as both a primal and abysmal ground, it is as likely to undermine a world as to allow one to be founded on it. ....a world must be created and supported through work that has accommodated itself to both world and Earth: is set between world and Earth or, to be precise, sets up (aufstellen) a world by setting forth (herstellen) the Earth through a settlement of their inherent strife. In so doing, the work is set back (zurückstellen) on an Earth that secures (feststellen) a world, however tenuously, given the struggle through which it originates.

Schufreider plays with "world" as more or less "historical," Earth as "prehistoric," "primal," and "abysmal." What an artwork does is bridge the gap between the two as it "sets up a world" through "setting forth the Earth." That bridging is not a simple closure of a situation; no conclusions are reached. Rather, there is a struggle of origination open to witness. The Earth always contains an element of mystery; you might say the more one probes it, the less one understands. The "world," inasmuch as it reflects some degree of conventionality, promises transparency but multiplies complexity.

I do keep in mind a few resonant encounters with nature. There was a tree in the yard in New Jersey which I could climb fairly high. It had an intricate inner world within its branches, but exploration was sharply limited. You simply couldn't climb too high because the branches got too thin. But you could see how far and wide they went, how they crisscrossed and gave a home for any number of creatures. I also remember how impressed I was by the Grand Canyon when I first saw it. I didn't think anything could be that massive and colorful. It was so clearly a world unto itself. What makes the Natural Wonders so incredible is how they awaken you to nature. You want to start seeing more of it everyday; you feel like a tourist on this planet if you don't.

Those aesthetic encounters with the natural world, I can see now, are conditioned by a dialogue between "world" and "Earth." They are operating as an artwork might, and we might posit them as prior to a given work of art, taking into account that they are lived experiences. Still, I can see the outline of something constituting my experience that was more or less "world:" I want to climb this tree, I hear all these stories of other kids doing amazing things. I want to know I can push myself and do something cool. Or: Here we are on a family vacation. Why do people make such a big deal of going places? I'm probing "world" through my more immediate sentiments at the time, but this is just a start. It ties, in this case, to the whole matrix of what childhood is.

And then there's "Earth." And again, the "natural world" is the beginning of seeing what's happening–here's a tree, here's the Grand Canyon–but that is only a beginning. It's something like the dawning awareness that other creatures live where you're climbing, or that the First Nations understand the canyon as sacred, which brings you to the dialogue you weren't aware was happening. Not the idle romanticization of natural objects, but the question of how they can be for and with us. You can't get to the Earth as a "resource" to be exploited from here; your wonder encompasses "do no harm" from the outset.

My little poem points at the problem of shame, anxiety, encounter, and sharing but then reduces it to an ideal image. It is not a realistic option to be of a completely different tribe, and even if it were, we need to know what we would even ask to understand what we want. My lines flatten "world" and "Earth" and do not allow for there to be a tension between them. The tree and the canyon were clear, even if I didn't know it at the time. There are ways to be here and a choice to be made. This is revealed but not concluded. Rather it is shared, as an enterprise.

References

Schufreider, Gregory. "The Origin of the Work of Art," in the Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (ed. Raffoul & Nelson). London: Bloomsbury, 2016. pp. 199-207. Accessed via beyng.com: https://www.beyng.com/docs/SchufreiderOWA.html