Episode 132 - Earth

Transcript

David: 0:14

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:17

The podcast where two philosophy professors connect big ideas to everyday life. In this case, one's concerning the four elements because we are in the middle of our four elements series.

David: 0:27

I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:29

And I'm Ellie Anderson. When thinking about the earth, I feel like it's hard to distinguish earth as element from earth as planet and earth as world. We're gonna be getting into some of those differences in the episode today, but we do have a world episode already, David. And I think like also when we're talking about Earth as an element, it's not exactly the planet, right? It's more.

David: 0:52

Correct.

Ellie: 0:52

I mean, as we talked about already in our water episode, the idea of the four elements comes from ancient Greek philosophy and doesn't really make a whole lot of scientific sense, but it's a fun little theme for these episodes. Interestingly though, like Earth is the only planet, if we're speaking planets for a hot second in the solar system, that etymologically derives from old English or Germanic, and not from Greco-Roman mythology. So the old English word from which we get Earth. It's literally spelled in a way that I like truly won't attempt to pronounce, including a letter I've never seen before. So it, it means ground, soil, dirt, dry land, or also country and district. And it can also mean the material world, the abode of man, like as opposed to the heavens or the underworld. And I like this because it signals that even though the earth as planet is not the way that we're gonna be talking about earth as element. Our very term for our planet, namely Earth, comes from this idea of the earth as element, as ground soil, dry land.

David: 1:54

Yeah, and I mean keeping with the etymology theme, it's connected to that which encircles us, which is why we have environment, often as a synonym for the earth, understood as the milieu in which we flourish. But it is also that which is below us. So it's around us, but it's also below us in the sense that it sustains us and nourishes us. And there earth becomes not just environment, but soil, and soil derives from the term solium in Latin, which means seat. And according to David Macauley, the author of the book Elemental Philosophy that we mentioned in our water episode. It's also related to the term sedere, which means to sit, and so the earth is that which encircles us, which surrounds us, and upon which we sit in the sense of resting and dwelling.

Ellie: 2:50

Whether the earth is a place where we sit or what we dig into, you know, when we're thinking about soil. Strictly speaking, what we're usually talking about when we talk about the element of earth is the earth's crust. So the planet earth is made of a crust that is usually anywhere from a few miles to 40 miles thick. Coming in with some fun facts from geology today, below the crust is a mantle which goes until around 1800 miles below the surface. Those of us who loved Journey to the Center of the Earth are excited yeah, just like imagining what's below there, although I really can't. It is truly beyond imagination. Below the mantle is the core, and the core goes all the way to the very center of the earth, 4,000 miles deep.

David: 3:39

Oh my God. I remember those diagrams of the earth in my science class in Mexico, in elementary school with the cross, the mantle, and then the deep burning core of the earth, and I think it's nice to contrast that straight up scientific geological model of the layers of the earth to the three layers of the earth that Macaulay says represent the psychological depths of earth as a planetary system. So these don't map exactly onto cross mental and core. But they are the topsoil first and foremost. So it is the uppermost part of the earth where things grow, especially things that we need for our survival, like animals, plants, so on and so forth. Then right before that, you get the subsoil that is the dark earth or the kind of underground that you can dig into, but that is not conducive to the same kind of life as the topsoil. And then finally, Macaulay says you have this third dimension of the earth, again, psychological dimension, which is the chthon, C-H-T-H-O-N, chthon. And he says, this is the realm of depth coldness and the dead beneath earth as we normally speak of it. So it's that unfathomable depth that is beyond the realm of human comprehension. So you have the three geological dimensions and then the three psychological dimensions.

Ellie: 5:09

Yeah, and these psychological levels are associated with ancient thought, which is something we've been talking about quite a bit in the Element series. I guess that makes sense given that the four elements come from ancient Greek philosophy. Tag yourself. I'm top soil.

David: 5:24

I, oh no, I'm bottom soil.

Ellie: 5:26

You're Chthon for sure.

David: 5:27

I'm sub, sub soil. Yes. Top soil. Tell me what to do.

Ellie: 5:38

Today we are talking about Earth.

David: 5:40

Why is Earth the element that is most associated with history and the past?

Ellie: 5:46

What are some limitations of our ways of thinking about the Earth as a solid substance?

David: 5:51

And is the earth an inanimate object or a living being?

Ellie: 6:01

In our fire episode we talked about how fire is a reaction strictly speaking, rather than an element, and it relies therefore, on other chemicals to keep it around. It's very temporary. Water by contrast is fluid. Water has a kind of shapelessness to it. Being a fluid element that is a chameleon of sorts, and I think Earth is a bit different from this. Earth tends to be considered solid. We'll come back to that explicitly a bit later, but I think especially when we're thinking about it in terms of our human lives, it signifies our history because it retains the past within it. So I'm thinking here about the fact that organisms that die are eaten by the earth. They become fossils, and we can then, as humans dig these fossils up through archeological digs. Then we can carbon date them. I mentioned last time in our water episode that I was feeling a little bit behind on the scientific stuff. So the overthink team did a little research into carbon dating. Thanks, Erin for that. And I can share the following. So carbon dating can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60,000 years. It was developed in the 1940s and it caused a total revolution in archeology. And how it works in its most basic form is that it measures carbon in these organic materials that have long since died. In order to approximate the age of the organic thing. And so I think what we see there, again, that was like we're not actually really going into the, the details of carbon data'cause we simply don't have enough time. But what we see there is that by getting into the earth and exhuming fossils that are there, we're able to actually learn so much about our past that we wouldn't otherwise be able to know. And in a different way, this is also true of the clay pots that we find, that previous civilizations of humans created, right? There's so much that we can learn about their domiciles as well, their homes, you know, their latrines and so on and so forth by just like actually going physically into the earth.

David: 8:09

And of course there are the things that through human activity and effort, we extract from the earth and that are reminders of the past. But there are also the things that the Earth as it were, spits out for us to discover. And this has to do with the fact that the earth is not a static structure. It's in a constant process of self-transformation, right? Like we know from geology that the top parts of the earth are constantly getting subsumed underground. And when they get to that hot core at the center of the earth, hello? Jules Verne, they melt and then it starts coming back up so that there is this cycle of sinking and emergence that defines geological processes. And that means that over time things that are below get pushed up and things that are above get pushed down. And I think this is one of the most fascinating things about the earth, that sometimes you see things on the surface that were below the surface in the past. I'm here thinking about Charles Darwin, whom I regularly teach in my history of science class here at San Francisco State. And when Darwin went on that very famous beagle voyage, around the world, he went down the Atlantic and down around the tip of South America until he landed very famously in the Galapagos Islands. When he embarked on that voyage, he did not believe in the evolution of species. He was still very much thinking in terms of the fixity of animals, them having these fixed species boundaries. And when they made a stop off of the western coast of Africa in Cape Verde. He started looking at the land and he realized that the land that he was looking at on a cliff was hyper sedimented. He noticed that there are layers that are of different colors, of different shapes, and he noticed very high above the sea level a strata of sedimented soil where he found traces of animals that could only live at the bottom of the ocean. So he started seeing like seashell markings and that's what led Darwin to recognize that the earth itself is in a constant process of change, where what is below gets spit up and vice versa. And it's actually that sense of the transformation of the earth that triggered him to thinking about the living world as also undergoing change and evolution, which ultimately led him to the theory of evolution by natural selection, but it all emerges from his observation of sedimented rock.

Ellie: 10:54

Okay. Sedimentary rock. Thanks for, thanks for helping us out with the theory of evolution.

David: 10:59

Thanks for killing God with your atheistic naturalism.

Ellie: 11:05

Yeah, and moving beyond Earth as material trace of the past. There's also a theme in philosophy that associates the layered or sedimented character of the earth with a metaphor for our relation to our own past. So this comes up in Husserl with the idea of sedimentation. It comes up in Foucault with the idea of archeology, and it comes up in Freud with at least one of his metaphors of our conscious lives and their relation to the unconscious. So let's get into that. David, I know you're gonna tell us a little bit about Foucault and Freud Classic, and I'll go into the Husserl. Where do you wanna start here?

David: 11:39

Okay, let's begin with Freud and Foucault. And that's because both of these thinkers use sedimentation as an inspiration for their own philosophical methodologies. In Freud, for example, we do get what is known as a topological model of the mind, where the mind is envisioned literally as a place, as an almost geological structure that has a surface layer. That surface layer is our conscious mind. It's all those beliefs, ideas, impulses that move us, but that we are aware of and we exercise some kind of rational control over. But right below that top layer there is this subterranean dimension, which of course is the famous Freudian unconscious and much like the literal earth, where the top layer is sinking into the bottom layer and the bottom layer is sometimes bursting up into the top layer, say in the form of tectonic shifts or volcanic eruptions. Freud believed that there is also a similar dynamism that happens in the mind where sometimes conscious ideas become unconscious, and then once those unconscious ideas are in that subterranean dimension, they start exerting a kind of hydraulic pressure on the surface seeking to break through, occasionally leading to volcanic like eruptions. Which is what we call a psychoanalytic symptom, right? When it's a sign that something below the surface is brewing. So with Freud, we really have what I would call a geological model of the mind.

Ellie: 13:20

Yeah, my grad school, Freud is coming back to me a little bit here because I think he adopted that topographic view of the mind at a certain point. Like it wasn't always part of his view. And of course, like, yeah, we have to take it with a grain of salt when we're thinking about the mind.

David: 13:34

Yeah, of course.

Ellie: 13:35

I think it might work a little bit better for our relation to history, and that's what we see in Foucault and Husserl. So tell us about  Foucault and then let us go into  Husserl.

David: 13:44

Yeah, let's talk about  Foucault, on whom, as you know, and our listeners know, I wrote my dissertation, so lots to say about  Foucault, but the important thing is that  Foucault wrote a book called The Archeology of Knowledge, where he uses archeology as a guide for thinking about what philosophy should say about the past and what  Foucault is after, of course, is not a literal archeology. He's not going to be out there digging for those fossils that tell us something about ancient civilizations. What he wants is, a philosophical archeology. An archeology that unearths the meanings of previous historical epochs, which he called epistemes as a way of relativizing the present. So archeology really is a method for analyzing the discourse that we have preserved from other times and places. Like writings, medical records, court records, philosophical treatises as a way at getting at the way of thinking that dominated that particular time period and understanding how the rules of thought that governed that time. Are in some deep and fundamental ways, very different than the rules that give shape to our contemporary episteme. And so for Foucault archeology really is a method for thinking about history, for thinking about the past, but it's first and foremost a way of exposing the contingency of the here and now.

Ellie: 15:21

Foucault is drawing attention to our understanding of the past and past epochs in an attempt to understand them on their own terms, like while recognizing the contingency of our relation to them. What we find in Husserl is this idea of sedimentation that is meant to help explain our relation in the present to our past, and specifically to the way that things that we don't realize, have a history do. And actually that's a phrase that comes from Foucault. So I must have been like thinking Foucault, he has that great line in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History where he says like that which passes without having a history actually does have a history. And I think Husserl equally thinks, and it's likely that  Foucault was actually in part inspired by Husserl in this point. That our ideas, our feelings, our thoughts, they don't just like come out of nowhere. Our lived experience is shaped by who we are as historical beings. Now, this is not the time to go into the differences between those two philosophers, but, I will note that there are pretty significant differences. Foucault is not gonna be down for the kind of phenomenological process that Husserl is advocating, especially with respect to ways that we can uncover our own past. Like you mentioned that  Foucault is not literally going digging archeologically, but he is very interested in archival work and things of that sort. Whereas Husserl's method is a bit more individual, a bit more cognitive. Nonetheless, Husserl like  Foucault is insistent on the point that our feeling, thoughts, et cetera, don't come from nowhere. And so we actually have to study the past, including the history of philosophy in order to understand why we think about things the way that we do, like the tendency that we have to think about the mind and the body as split originates for Husserl in modern philosophy. And so going back to modern philosophy and seeing how people during that period articulated the difference between mind and body can help us understand the things that we take for granted today, and ultimately question them.

David: 17:17

One of the things that Husserl is after, and this is something that comes out in one of his late works called the Crisis of the European Sciences, is the importance not only of the history of philosophy, but the history of science. Because for  Husserl, all of the ideas that govern human thinking, human life, human experience have an origin in lived experience. The problem is that there is this process of sedimentation where once we have an idea that is rooted in our everyday experience of the world, with time we start adding meanings, we start making associations, we start making new connections. That trick us into forgetting that ultimately the origin of that idea was experience itself. And so even scientific ideas, like high-end ideas in the history of science, like ideas about geometry, ideas about physics, ideas about mathematics, he says they don't come from some disembodied process of scientific discovery and investigation. At one point in time, a scientist had that idea because something in their lived experience revealed it. It's just that, again, there is that process of sedimentation that is a concealing and also a forgetting. And so much of what  Husserl is after, especially in the crisis, is to rediscover experience as the soil from which all ideas ultimately emerge. In the mythologies of many cultures, there are metaphors of humans coming out of the earth and being made of earth.

Ellie: 19:17

The example that comes to mind for me here is the Book of Genesis and how Adam was made out of clay.

David: 19:23

Well, and Adam in Hebrew means Red Clay. I did not know that until I read about it in the Macauley book. So he bears his earthly origins in his very name, like his name is clay.

Ellie: 19:39

Yeah, I learned that from the book too.

David: 19:41

And this is very similar also to the Prometheus creation myth that we alluded to in our fire episode, where in Greek mythology Prometheus, the Titan is given the task by Zeus to create humans in order to venerate the Olympians who really want to be venerated by some created creature. And in that story, we get the exact same recipe for the origin of humans, where Prometheus, using his divine sculpting abilities, turns clay into the shape of a man of a male human. And then it is Athena who breeds life into that, formation of clay, giving rise to the first living being.

Ellie: 20:23

I mentioned in the water episode, I had my star turn as Eurydice in a college play I had, it wasn't actually so much of a star turn. I was woefully a minor character in this play, but I did have a turn as Athena in one of my high school plays.

David: 20:36

I don't have any roles that I can allude to.

Ellie: 20:39

Well, you do, you have your history of like reading poetry aloud as performance as a child, so I think you have a, you have a star history too.

David: 20:45

Okay, fine, fine, fine.

Ellie: 20:47

We have our star turns on, Overthink.

David: 20:51

But you know, the question philosophically speaking now about these myths is why is it that we think of earth as having this connection to our humanity? And I wanna suggest that there is a similarity between how we experience Earth and how we experience our own subjectivity and our own embodiment. So when you think about your lived experience, you moving through the world every day, occupying time and space, the point from which we experience the world appears to us as relatively solid, right? Our bodies are solid. Our own subjectivity is solid in the sense that it is real. And also in the sense that it's a principle of resistance to things that are not us. And so we move through the world as if we are made of earth, as if we are this like little chunk of matter leaving a trace upon the world. And I think that this is why when we think about our origins, we think of ourselves now mythologically as having arisen from an element. The element that most mirrors that solidity and that is earth.

Ellie: 22:02

Yeah, the homology of humans and earth, this idea that we're made of the same substance I think really comes to the fore here. And even though we've talked about in our previous elements episode so far, the people do talk about humans as being essentially fire or as being essentially water. I think it's hard to dispute that, at least in our lived experience today. We share, we seem to share, right? We feel that we share this quality of solidity with the earth. And the philosopher Thomas Nail actually has a critique of this. He associates it with some of the biases of Western philosophy. He says that Western philosophical traditions tend to treat Earth as the stable object par excellence. As remaining relatively unchanged across time and as the background of human thought and action. For instance, a fire might be seen as an element of movement, but we tend to take the earth as stable for granted. But nail says this is a fallacy. We've actually never lived on a stable earth. All of the elements, including the earth, are based on movement and our sense of the earth as uniform only emerges in the 19th century with this idea of uniformitarianism, where we think of the earth as static.

David: 23:16

Ooh, I'm so happy that you're bringing in uniformitarianism 'cause I wanted to talk about it, but I didn't know if we would have a chance to do so. And you know, I mentioned Darwin and his strip and looking at the layers in the sedimented rock and then having this, let's say tectonic shift in his understanding of nature. And that is the moment that he came to believe in Uniformitarianism. Because in the 19th century there were two schools of thought for thinking about the earth. On the one hand, you had what is known as catastrophism, which is the idea that, look, the earth as planetary system is mostly static. It's that prejudicial view that Neil is alluding to. But occasionally there are catastrophes, there are floods, there are volcano eruptions, so on and so forth. And that's what explains, for example, the mass extinction of animals that resulted in the discovery of fossils. Of animals that no longer exist. But catastrophes was really an attempt to safeguard the stability of the earth and explain these large changes that we know must have happened in the past. And on the other hand, you had this other school of thought called Uniformitarianism that was spearheaded by Lyell, who was a geologist at the time, who proposed that the Earth is a shifting system where things are in constant motion and you cannot assume that it's just these punctuated events at random moments in history that account for everything that we observe in connection to geology. And the connection I wanna make here to Darwin is that when Darwin is looking at that strata, he's at the same time reading a book called The Principles of Geology, whose author was Lyell.

Ellie: 25:04

I read this book, the Six Extinction a couple years ago. I feel like I might have mentioned it in an episode.

David: 25:08

Yeah, we talked about it in extinction.

Ellie: 25:10

Oh, um, yeah, that would make sense. Okay. I love that book and I learned that there, and then, thanks for reminding me of it.

David: 25:19

Oh yeah. No, no. It's a really great, moment in the history of science because it just highlights the importance of thinking about nature in terms of process rather than substance.

Ellie: 25:30

Yeah, and I don't know how far down to take this. I mean, Nail definitely wants to go all the way down. He thinks that all elements are processes or flows, and he's really against the ontology of substance. I'm very open to the idea that we tend to think too much in terms of solid or stable objects and substances, and we need to kind of like processualize our thinking. But I think going back to what you said about our direct experience of Earth, it is fair to say that we experience it as more solid than water, air, or fire. Certainly when we pick up soil, we can rub it in our hands. We can't do that for any of the other elements that we're discussing. But I like the way that this idea invites us to press on our conception of earth as something we take for granted as like a pure natural resource that we'll come back to later. And before we come back to that a little bit later, I wanna mention something that might seem like a little bit random at first, but it comes to mind when we're thinking about the homology of humans and earth, which is the fact that a lot of cultures, not all certainly, but a lot of cultures bury people in the earth. And there's often a sense there that we're returning to the earth from which we came.

David: 26:39

The term humus. H-U-M-U-S is a Latin name of Greek origin. That means earth, ground soil, but it shares the same Indo-European root as the word homo, , as in homo sapiens or human beings.

Ellie: 26:56

So the etymology, it's telling us about the homology. We love our ologies here. The homology isn't arbitrary, but has this origin.

David: 27:06

Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistance a fair wage.

Ellie: 27:33

In talking about the earth as an element, we're already sort of stacking the deck. Because elements are non-organic. They are inanimate. But this doesn't go without saying, especially when it comes to the earth. Soil percolates with life. Macaulay says in the elemental philosophy book that in one square foot of soil in the forest, you get as many as 70 species of mites, bugs, termites, earthworms, and nematodes. So there's like all of these living things, and those are things that like are mostly visible to the naked eye. We can think about even tinier beings.

David: 28:11

Yeah, like bacteria, so on and so forth, and I think it's really important to foreground the living quality of earth. Earth and you know, somebody could easily say, well, those living beings are not Earth, right? Like, there is no sense in which they are made of earth. They just kind of live there. So in the same way that we don't confuse fish with water or birds with air, we shouldn't confuse the organisms that live in a particular element with the element itself. But Macauley also points out that the connection between life and earth is maybe more intimate, and that intimacy is embodied by the earthworm because the earthworm literally eats earth. That is its mode of life. And in fact, Darwin wrote an entire book about earthworms, noting that they are probably the most important species in the planet because they are the ones that are responsible for the health of the soil, which is a precondition for the health of all other living beings on earth.

Ellie: 29:15

Yeah. Although I do think that somebody who wanted to say that, well, that's not Earth, could still come back and say, yeah, they eat the earth. They consume it, you know, and they shit it out. So they shape the earth, but that still doesn't mean that they are the earth itself. And so I think that somebody, even though we said it's kind of easy to debunk the idea that the earth is an element, because even if we just think about the inanimate aspects and we disentangle the earth worms, the nematodes from the soil, or the humus, the dirt, we could still say, well, yeah, but that's already very heterogeneous, right? And so I think there's maybe a way that we could see the earth as a heterogeneous element, but say it's inanimate versus seeing the earth as heterogeneous and say, actually that means that it is animate. Because if we're already recognizing the heterogeneity of the soil, then we should also include those living things within Earth.

David: 30:07

Yeah, no, I agree with you, and I think a lot depends here on how we interpret the relationship between the organisms that live in the earth and the element itself. Because one way to articulate that relationship is just again, that they live on the element or in the element, but that's really where it stops. Another way of articulating it, which comes from the very famous Gaia hypothesis that was popularized in the 1970s, is that there is in fact a kind of symbiotic relationship between the organic and the inorganic realms such that even if you can, in theory, separate organism from environment, that separation is already an artificial creation of the mind, when at the level of material causal codependence, they actually implicate one another in a very fundamental way.

Ellie: 30:59

Mother Earth baby.

David: 31:01

Yeah, exactly. And the Gaia hypothesis, just to add a little bit of detail here, was articulated in the early 1970s by a chemist by the name of James Lovelock, and a couple of years later was developed further by the microbiologist, Lynn Margulis, who is most famous for her work on symbiosis. The idea that life works not by pure competition as Darwin thought, but that it really is a lot of collaboration and symbiosis. That is the term for what she's talking about. And the basic idea behind the Gaia hypothesis is that living organisms, like those critters that live in the earth, interact with Inorganic matter in ways that give rise to a macro body that is irreducible to its separate components. So there really is a logic of emergence and two ideas that I find really compelling when considering the possibility that the earth is this macro organism, is the argument that the atmosphere itself. It's actually a function of oxygen emitting bacteria, algae, and plants. So, yeah, you know, we can say there is air and then there are the organisms that live in the planet, and those two are different. But the whole point is that the chemistry and the composition of our atmosphere, what makes it the atmosphere is a function of the way in which those organisms process oxygen. Similarly, microbial communities keep the salinity of the oceans within the bounds that are necessary in order for the oceans to be welcoming to animal life. And so at bottom, the organic and the inorganic realm are in constant interaction, and you cannot draw a neat line between them.

Ellie: 33:01

So would you say then that this hypothesis is leading to the idea that because we can't draw that neat line, everything is living like the earth is living, right? Because that seems to be the ultimate claim. That's how you started it, right?

David: 33:12

Yeah. Or that the earth behaves as a living organism, which I guess is kind of the same claim. Maybe a little bit more nuanced to avoid any straight up animism. But yeah, if you take out one of the components, this system as a whole will break down.

Ellie: 33:28

Yeah, because this comes up also in the Nail book and Nail, in addition to rejecting the idea that the earth is just like an inanimate solid substance, he also rejects this view. He thinks that the Gaia view of Earth is biocentric. It involves us thinking of the earth as a living and agential subject like ourselves, right? And so, I mean, we might even say it's anthropomorphic, but the idea for him is that it's a biocentric image of the earth because it takes inorganic matter to be like organic matter. But the historical situation he says is precisely the opposite. The earth is mostly not alive. The earth is part of much larger non-living cosmic cycles and patterns that are not fully captured with the idea of the planet as an organic individual.

David: 34:17

Oh, I think that's a really fair criticism and I'm now reminded of an article that Lynn Margulis coauthored with the essayist, Dorian Sagan, which is called God Gaia and Biophilia. So that term biophilia loving of all things bio and. Lynn Margulis, one of the original co-developers of this idea, of the Gaia hypothesis, essentially does say that embracing the Gaia hypothesis is the first step towards loving life on earth. But I think it's fair to say that this does presuppose that we need to turn things into living beings in order for us to love them. I mean, that's what the term biophilia presupposes, right? That only bio can be an object of love or desire for human beings. Why not love the elemental? Elementalophilia?

Ellie: 35:11

Luce Irigiray has that book, Elemental Passions, which I took a quick look back at for the Element series and I was like, you know, I love that book in college. I'm like, yeah, no, I'm sorry. I don't think there's much here to go off of. We will talk about her in the next episode though when it comes to air. So there's a little teaser for that, but yeah. Okay. So I think whether or not we agree with Nail's, criticism of the Gaia hypothesis. Both his view and that of the Gaia hypothesis are fundamentally against the idea that the Earth is just this natural resource that we can use for our own selfish aims. Think about, for instance, all of the things that we've started doing as humans over the centuries. Not just digging into the top soil, but really getting into the earth in order to find power sources there. We talked in our fire episode about fossil fuels. You might think here about the extraction of natural gas digging into the soil in order to find precious jewels and metals, or even something like fracking, right where you have this digging into the Earth's crust in order to get natural resources that leave just like literal scars on the earth.

David: 36:22

We have to appreciate how radical of a departure this is from the way in which even in the West, we have traditionally understood what our relationship to the earth should be. Macauley points out that for a very long period of time, really from antiquity all the way to the Renaissance, there have been prohibitions against digging too deeply into the earth because there was this shared understanding that robbing the earth of too many things or taking too many freedoms in relationship to, it was crossing a boundary that was a form of disrespect against the life-giving earth. And he cites the Roman Pliny, who writes the following about this problem with humans digging or carving into the earth, leaving those cars that you just mentioned, Ellie. Pliny says, we trace out all the veins of the earth. And yet are astonished that it should occasionally cleave a sunder or tremble as though these signs could be any other than expressions of the indignation felt by our sacred parent. We penetrate into her entrails and seek for treasures as though each spot we tread upon were not sufficiently bountious and fertile for us.

Ellie: 37:44

Implying that he didn't even know about fracking.

David: 37:47

Yeah, he would not have been a fan of fracking for sure.

Ellie: 37:50

So in thinking about the way that treating the Earth as a repository of natural resources undermines a richer relationship to it. One has to think of Heidegger in his essay, the Origin of the Work of Art. Heidegger talks about the way that our relationship with both earth and world come to be determined by our impoverished understanding of them. As just like an entity or thing, and he wants to invite us to think about them a little bit differently and to be like very reductive here, which I think you kind of have to do a little bit with middle heiddeger, late Heiddeger, all the Heideggers perhaps, because his pros can be very hard to wrap one's head around. World for Heiddeger is basically the entire context of our meaning making endeavors. It's our social context as humans, our historical context, he thinks that only the beings who are invested in creating and finding meaning have worlds. So he like famously says that animals are poor in worlds, but this is not our world episode. It is our earth episode. So I'll say when it comes to earth, the distinction, you know, as opposed to this kind of like meaning making social context of world, is that the earth is our sort of fundamental dwelling place, which is usually hidden from us. We don't see the earth as Earth, the earth is, he describes it as a sheltering agent for us. But it only occasionally to use kind of like the sedimentation metaphor from before, it only occasionally juts out from the world and appears as such. And I will read you a little quote here. He describes the earth as the spontaneous forthcoming of that, which is continually self secluding, and to that extent, sheltering and concealing the world grounds itself on the earth and Earth juts through the world. And part of what works of art allow for Heidegger thinks is the earth to come forward and shine as earth rather than as just like mere natural resource for us.

David: 39:47

And one way of framing the role that technology plays here is that for Heidegger, technology is not just a thing. It's not just an object through which we mediate our relationship to the natural world. It's really a kind of relationship to the earth, right? Technology is a relationship of mastery, and it's a relationship that seeks to expose and unlock the secrets of the earth. And so for  Heidegger, there is really a problem here of trying to lay bare the earth for human expediency and for human consumption. That I think is actually quite similar to this concern that Pliny has about us sort of tearing us under the earth and then being surprised that the earth responds with indignation in the form of natural catastrophes or other events that then shape the course of human life and the life of other species on this planet.

Ellie: 40:43

I think in response to that, trying to find ways of connecting with the Earth that go beyond treating it just as a repository of natural resources is really important, even if that means ultimately taking account of the fact that the earth is not actually an element and moving beyond the framing of it that we have in this very episode.

David: 41:02

Well, and if we go back to a comment that we made earlier in the episode, which is this notion that humans come out of the earth or are made of earth, if we are alienated from the earth, then in a deep sense we're also alienated from ourselves, and it's only a matter of time before this mastering attitude towards the earth becomes also a mastering attitude towards our own humanity and our reduction of ourselves to means to a technological end.

Ellie: 41:32

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our overthink community on Patreon for bonus content zoom meetings and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 41:41

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts at Overthink_Pod.

Ellie: 41:57

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.