ENSAIO MODELO - Nº05
"The environment is then the moment in which human existence objectifies itself; but by it and from there on, the human being understands himself. We can call it self-discovery of oneself in the environment".
Tetsuro Watsuji, Fûdo (1935).
From the earliest writings, human beings have attempted to explore the link between our complex and sometimes overwhelming emotions and our environment, a constant but variable phenomenon. There are countless examples of pathetic fallacy, metaphors, sonnets and odes dedicated to our environment, media that demonstrate the human inclination to seek reflections of their fleeting feelings in order to understand themselves. However, are these undeniable links organically inherent in nature, or are they products of our human conditioning?
To better understand this philosophical facet and thus verify Watsuji's hypothesis, we should establish that when Watsuji speaks of the environment, he speaks of nature. This is apparent when we analyze the original Japanese of his work, with its subtle nuances. For example, the word 'sabaku' (desert) combines the words 'sa' (sand) and 'baku' (desolation) necessarily, according to linguistic rules, to denote more than a single simple meaning. This term is not just a stretch of sand, but a deep-rooted emotional concept. In Japanese, it denotes a phenomenon of human desolation, which creates an empathic link between the sandy landscape and our being. This allows us to perceive a reflection of our anguish and thus is empathically projected into nature. I believe that this sense of inextricable connection can only be appreciated with languages more nuanced than English or Spanish; while most of our words belonging to the environmental lexicon do not involve emotions by themselves, in languages such as Japanese, with its frequent compound words and more complicated emotional concepts, it is ordinary to understand more deeply the relationship between our being and the environment. Thus we can see that just as our mere understanding of the concept of Watsuji is limited by our language, so is our perception of the human-environmental link restricted by our poorly nuanced language; we cannot so easily appreciate the immediate and living association between human life and the natural world.
However, it is still possible to understand this link, although we could never understand it at a deep level. We only have to look at the wide range of poems that portray our environment to understand that we attribute an emotional value to nature, and that we identify with it. When an author wants to describe his character's pain and depression, time becomes sad too, with seemingly endless rain, dark clouds blocking every trace of light, and even violent thunder. In Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights', for example, Heathcliff's departure from the house that owes its name to the headline peaks is marked by a violent storm. Pathetic fallacy is often used in literature and may reflect how we find ourselves in time. It is interesting to note that, nowadays, many people believe that this technique means using time to foreshadow a future event or highlight the feelings of the character. However, when John Ruskin coined the word, he used it to refer to the characters themselves, who saw time differently based on their current emotion; in this way, a tormented character would attribute notions of anguish to rain, as much as a happy character would see the sun as smiling. This seems to encapsulate the problem related to this link; although it seems that the environment reciprocates our emotions, it could also be a false identification, an interpretation of nature that we see as a pure reflection of emotion.
However, some people would say that we don't understand each other through the environment, even though we look for deeper meaning in everything around us. Our tireless mission as humans seems to be to find meaning in life and a final goal; whether seeking an omnipotent God to rationalize our actions or idealizing nature to make it seem like a means for our self-discovery, since the earliest times we have desperately sought a sense of life. This puts the supposedly deep link between the environment and our journey to self-discovery into doubt.
Instead of renouncing the possibility of a human-natural connection, however, I choose to consider another, more convincing option, given our past fascination with nature. We do identify with our environment but, as time passes and climate change worsens, we are losing our link to nature that has offered the key to our self-discovery. An example of this loss is also found in our language. In recent times, our disconnection from nature, especially obvious given the unexpected and increasingly ubiquitous level of climate change, is seen in our use of words related to nature. For example, English dictionaries, which change their lexicon based on modern consensual experience, have removed many natural words, such as 'golden button' and 'bitter', from the children's dictionary, replacing them with technological vocabulary. As Robert MacFarlane emphasizes in his work 'Landmarks', instead of 'blackberry', we find 'BlackBerry' in the dictionary. The natural and outer world is being displaced by the inner and virtual world, both in our dictionaries and on our journey to self-discovery. When Watsuji talks about the environment, he means the nature around us. However, our environment has changed; we are now immersed in a world of technology and not a natural world, which allows us to make a sense of self-discovery and has replaced our appreciation of nature to some extent.
From post-Darwinism, in which poets like Matthew Arnold portrayed the loss of identity, with the realization that nature 'has neither reality [...] nor certainty [...] nor relief from pain' and that 'we are here as in a dark plain' (Dover Beach, 1876), we have come to another key point in our human development. The replacement of nature with technology in our environment is a dangerous medium for our sense of being and our self-discovery. We run the risk of losing all sense of reality and being immersed in an artificial world, a virtual reality. And, with a reach of unknown but enormous power, it is inevitable that the powerful individuals in charge of our lives take advantage of technology to make this a reality and ensure that we become docile and malleable members of the public. Every moment of the day, we are exposed to information, advertising and virtual images, which condition us more and more deeply. While a more banal example is found in memes and emojis, which distill complex emotions in their most inane but close form, these methods, in addition to information on the web, manipulate our feelings and make us addicted to technology, just as we can identify ourselves in their supposedly innocuous images. In fact, the average number of hours spent on the mobile per person per day is 4 hours; a quarter of the day, a quarter of the life spent on addictive and harmful applications. While memes and emojis do seem relatable and funny to us, the reality is much more insidious; the world of technology is such an artificial and planned world that it is a mere illusion of feeling, that it can never reach the previous deep level of nature in our characters.
To conclude, the environment does have a very profound impact on our journey to self-discovery; we can identify with it, helping ourselves to form a reciprocal connection with planes that would otherwise be demoralizing and imperative. However, while Watsuji wrote in a time and a language that received and enjoyed nature with open arms, our restricted languages, in addition to our new era of technological domination, have caused the influence of nature to diminish, making the environment a more virtual concept. In any case, we cannot ignore or renounce our fascination with nature completely - it offers a fresh world of reflected emotions and attainable peace, while technology clouds our sight of a thousand anxieties, worries and artificial colors. Perhaps this is why so many people work tirelessly to preserve our dying natural world - it offers a more intimate and pure reflection of our truth, allowing us to achieve a fuller sense of identity.