There were horses in a moonlit pasture in western New York the night before I left, stomping purposefully upon farmed earth a few miles outside of small towns founded by wandering soldiers of the American revolution. There were tourists milling about Fisherman’s Wharf the next day, eating their chowder in the mists that gather above the churning seas at the outermost edge of what was once a vast frontier. Driving out of San Francisco greys, cold Pacific at our backs, it wasn’t long before we saw the sun’s summer handiwork reflected in the steep swells of foothill greens long since crisped into toasted browns and golds.

The first impression on the senses is the abundance of light. Light shines and flows and pools up everywhere, an immense ocean pouring down into its diurnal shore. Its powerful rhythms slowly, inexorably, continually washing the concretes and asphalts, warming miles and miles of interlocking clay tiles in unison, fading the fast food colors of roofs standing like islands amidst the reflected heat of sun-worn strip mall parking lots.  It reveals every nuance in shape, texture and sheen.  It exposes the banality of artifice, of flaw and dross, drawing visual attention instead to physical purities and proportionate perfections of all material form.  Yet it overpowers even these, indifferently washing out everything below as if it was purposely sacrificing the properly adjusted luster and tint of the beautiful for the sake of total and complete clarity of vision.

This clarity presents the colossus of space between place to eye and mind.  It emphasizes the enormity of everything. The Great Plains and their fickle skies are swept up into the continental crescendo of the Rockies and then the land unfolds roughly down and gently up to the sea, the air above dried and purified.  Upon entering this guarded space we become impostors, uninvited visitors crawling around the gigantic geographic features of a rough-hewn, earth-bound waiting room for gods en route to some far-flung, full-blown intergalactic Eden.  A land for giants.  Canaan on the edge of a continent.

There are at least four ways one could shrug off such comments without giving them their due.

1) One might say his comments are simply not applicable to nature in that they are, oddly enough given his reputation as a film maker who stares at length into the abyss, profoundly moral complaints. Although Herzog doesn’t strike me as a full blown nihilist, it is interesting to note as an aside that those who tend that way–even old Fred Nietzsche himself–often exhibit a marked tendency to make profound moral judgments about nature itself, generally without any sort of extended argument actually examining the nature of nature in any great detail. One might want to cut any conclusion arising from this sort of rant off at the pass: why anthropomorphize nature in this way?  Even if one agrees with Herzog’s understanding of good and evil, one might disagree that this understanding can be applied to anything other than human beings.

There are deep waters we must swim over here at present, but we can safely leave this objection alone for now since his central complaint seems to be a severe lack of order and harmony amongst natural things in the rain forest, and in light of this one could take his moral references as metaphors for disorder rather than supposing him to be accusing nature of actual sins.  Few devout religious people throughout the ages have actually condemned nature for immorality, after all, so taking Herzog of all people literally is a tad ridiculous.  Besides, as we will discuss later, all human beings think and talk in a similar anthropomorphic vein about nature to some extent or another whether they want to or no, so we ought not immediately dismiss his comments on account of his phrasing.

2) One might say his comments are seemingly driven by too much time in the Amazonian rain forest in grueling conditions, and thus he is simply expressing anger with a frustrating circumstance of his own making.  If one watches the entire documentary, it is clear that Herzog went through hell on jungle earth in order to get the movie made.  Anyone who’d been through such excruciating experiences would likely want to vent a little.

No doubt this judgment is partly true, but his comments are extreme enough to question his sanity if he is simply angry at plants and animals for making him uncomfortable.  After all, he’s made countless other, similar public remarks even when nature has not been standing so obviously in the way of the production of his art.  More significantly, his films are often vehicles for specific understandings and explorations of the natural world.  It’s not as if he hasn’t spent years of his life experiencing and considering the nature of nature.

For instance, watch this haunting short clip and listen to his fascination with the deranged penguins marching off to oblivion in Encounters at the End of the World:

Or consider his commentary in Grizzly Man: “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears…I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy, I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me there’s not such a thing as the secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”

3) One also wonders, especially given such similar comments he’s made elsewhere, the extent to which Herzog might be finding what he wanted to find in the Amazon; he may have brought a specific natural philosophy of sorts with him.  What if he was already convinced of the truth of this bleak view and simply foisted it on the rain forest once he got there?  Even if true, one must examine the possible reasons for which he might say what he does before rejecting his conclusions.

4) For most of us, our initial reaction to such comments consists in either laughter or distaste, largely for the same underlying reason.  Most people that I have shown the video I opened with to or that I read about coming into contact with these remarks on the internet have initially found it humorous.  Why?

First, let’s put aside the fact that part of our amusement is likely that his strong German accent and intonation sound like some sort of nihilist parody to the American ear.  Humor necessarily follows upon reason, and analyzing the reasons for which humor arises is something like the intellectual equivalent of a doctor analyzing a patient’s knee jerk reaction.  Humor often arises from a recognition of what is disproportionate, often of what is grossly out of proportion, and Herzog says things that are in direct and extreme opposition to much that the western world today regards as the canonical understanding of nature.  This disjunction is made extreme in part by the fact that the Amazonian rain forest in particular is considered a sort of sacred ground by most people living in western, “developed” countries, a frequently used example of the truth of conclusions about nature that are seemingly diametrically opposed to everything Herzog says.  Yet if it was simply the case that our understanding of the rain forest today was a self-evident truth, and that Herzog was therefore stating a self-evident lie, one wonders if we would still laugh or muster enough passion to be upset at what he says  A lack of proportion makes human beings laugh: mere contradiction and opposition is often comes off as simply stupid.

Not long ago, and perhaps still today, western young people were bombarded with exaggerations and hastily constructed myths mixed up with varying truths and half truths concerning the rain forest.  “Hastily constructed myths” is a polite way of phrasing it, because productions such as Captain Planet and the Planeteers are impossible to receive as organically grown, honest to goodness myths, however well intentioned they might have been.  At worst, such pieces of entertainment were were insipid bits of odd propaganda; at most, they were an attempt to create a sort of mythology ex nihilo.

In Herzog’s jungle, “the trees…are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.”  Fern Gully, however, is “a magical place…where everyone sound is a song, every tree a home.”

One needn’t turn to cartoons, however, to grasp the fact that the Amazonian rain forest is routinely held forth by experts as well as everybody else as a wondrous example of natural harmony, bursting with an overwhelming and vibrant abundance of life.  In fact, many of us see the Amazonian rain forest as a living monument to the harmony of nature: a spectacular, complex “ecosystem” that acts as the “lungs” of the planet but whose very existence, along with its potentially miraculous curative powers, is in grave danger because of man.  And so forth and so on.  So when we hear Herzog’s rant, it is very difficult for us to take it seriously.  It seems so extreme as to be humorous.  Yet we realize there is something wrong, or at least not true to life, about the other extreme: for instance, the rain forest as commonly portrayed in children’s entertainment affected by the “environmania” that flared up in America during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Herzog told an interviewer recently that although he borrowed his favored phrase “ecstatic truth” from medieval theology to explain the goal of his art, when explaining what he means by the phrase he wants “to get away from the religious, from the mystical, because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm. And this is something you see in a film like Avatar by the way… What annoys me is the way the film romanticises and idolises nature. It’s celebrating a new form of paganism and it gives me knots in my intestines just thinking about it.”  It is precisely this reining, romanticized view of nature that Herzog’s films often either explicitly deconstruct or implicitly question simply by telling their story.

Can we learn anything  from Herzog’s critiques and our reaction, be it laughter or distaste, to his conclusions?

I say yes. 

Philosophy, or loving the truth to enough to pursue it, begins in wonder.  Wonder refers to knowing and not-knowing: delighting in the partial or isolated bits one knows but realizing that one is mostly or partially ignorant of the whole picture.  Wonder thus spurs one on to pursue the truth.  A certain combination of a kind of knowledge and a kind of ignorance, then, engenders wonder.  When one is unaware of what one doesn’t know, and when what one thinks one knows is actually shallow and platitudinous, held by one’s mind in a reflexive and rote fashion only, wonder vanishes.  In the case of the natural world and our relation to it today, wonder must be awoken by digging until we reveal our own deep rooted ignorance.  Wonder must be conjured up by uncovering what we do already know of nature and polishing these fragmented reflections of reality in such a way as to make them shine truly.  The task at hand is to reveal our ignorance while also revealing the partial truths we don’t even yet know that we already know.  We must seek to understand formerly unconsidered truths such that we see them as the tantalizing shards that they truly are.  Awareness of our own ignorance will be the light by which we pick up these pieces.  This is the normal course of things.  These are always the vital courses of action necessary if we are to wonder and thus seek the truth of reality.

Philosophy, then, can sometimes be said to begin in nervous laughter, or even deepening annoyance, and a number of other states of mind before it begins in wonder.

Herzog presents, in extreme form, the sorts of objection we must directly confront and answer if we are to break out of the rut of our current unconsidered, untethered and often contradictory assumptions.  Our minds are clouded on these matters.  We need to wake up from our stupor, and Herzog provides the needed philosophical smelling salts.  His comments serve as an opening question to which modern society assumes the answer.  Upon reflection, however, we will find hidden contradiction and muddled confusion at every turn as we unpack that answer.  And this is exactly why we are in desperate need of taking just this sort of radical objection to modern presuppositions seriously if we are to begin to jump start real dialectic about the universe and and our relation to it (i.e., philosophy properly understood).  We need to be shown our desperate need by having someone peal back the layers of accepted ideas and question the unquestioned cultural assumptions about nature to which we have grown accustomed.