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1. Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest

   It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

   Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

   In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36