I. The Forest as a “Notched Space”

Long merely a backdrop on the horizon, the forest has now once again become a destination for the working population from cities, eager to explore it from within. Wilderness schools are springing up like mushrooms; in the online directory alone wildnisschulen.de 121 wilderness schools can be found in German-speaking countries. There, a blend of survival skills, mindfulness in nature, species knowledge, and "feeling" nature is being introduced to an ever-wider audience.¹ Speaking of mushrooms: "Going mushroom hunting" is also experiencing an unexpected renaissance, as can be seen on YouTube or in bookstore displays. In the visual arts, at music festivals, and on (digital) album covers, nature and wilderness motifs are very much "en vogue" – especially since the COVID-19 lockdowns pushed broad new segments of the population into the few remaining natural areas of our industrialized continent, primarily into the forests.

That this reflects a yearning for freedom is stringently argued by philosopher and publicist Alexander Grau in his 2023 book On the Forest. A Philosophy of Freedom very stringently. His thesis, which recurs in various forms throughout the book, is:  

The forest serves so well as a symbol of freedom against human striving for control and obsession with order because it is, in fact, a space of diverse contingent experiences and permanent change. In this respect, the forest is a veto against “the absolutization of man and its modern culmination.”²

Sartre is quoted in the last half-sentence. What is remarkable about Grau's treatise is his detailed description of works related to forests across various political-theoretical camps: starting with the Brothers Grimm, Ludwig Tieck, and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, moving on to Heinrich Heine, then to Ralph Waldo Emerson and, of course, Henry David Thoreau (Walden), he touches upon Marx and Adorno, delves into Adalbert Stifter and Wilhelm Raabe in detail, but also the Wandervogel movement and, in doing so, Nietzsche, especially the Zarathustra, finally going into great detail once again with Ernst Wiechert, as well as with Ernst Jünger, and lastly with Jean-Paul Sartre³.  

Some details of Grau's work – which tends to be placed in a conservative milieu – and his treatise are certainly debatable; for instance, the justification for why tree-hugging and forest bathing are "intellectual kitsch of the highest order" (p. 171) remains somewhat meager, yet it is precisely in these activities that Grau's intuitive approach to the forest, without "interpretation of meaning" (ibid.), which he champions in the same paragraph, is actually expressed. Nevertheless, the text as a whole impresses with a radicalism in the best sense of "going to the root" and questioning, without immediately offering new concepts, which always act as corsets for nature, which is, by contrast, uncontainably complex:

Whoever, in a fit of megalomania and oblivion to the world, breaks away from the harmony of the natural whole, will perish. True freedom is found not in the pursuit of private or political castles in the air, but by immersing oneself in the flow of nature. Today, we would speak of flow.⁴

Here, the postmodern "end of grand narratives" resonates, as does Nietzsche's critique of "hubris" as our entire "attitude towards nature, our rape of nature with the help of machines and the so thoughtless ingenuity of technicians and engineers"⁵, as Nietzsche already proclaimed in 1887 in On the Genealogy of Morality .  

Nietzsche also anticipates the experience of contingency and permanent change in forests and nature in several places, as here in Twilight of the Idols: "Nature, artistically appraised, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance."⁶ Nature as contingency and also as self-giving extravagance – as during tree blossom.

Grau's description of the forest as a prime example of contingency (Heidegger's "thrownness"?) in nature becomes particularly interesting when he draws comparisons to other natural environments:

History is also experienced by the sea or in the steppe […]. Yet these habitats themselves seem timeless, the sea as eternal and immutable as mountains or deserts. In the forest, however, humans are confronted not only with events and the cyclical course of the seasons, but with time itself. Transience is directly experienced here; the forest exposes the eternity suggested by seas or mountains as a perceptual error.⁷

Everything flows, panta rhei – Heraclitus is once again vindicated.  

As justification, Grau states that agricultural fields established just a few years ago are already overgrown today, and paths that were recently passable are now barely recognizable⁸ and also that the flora and fauna of the forest have for millennia been products of “countless generations of humanity, their way of hunting, [clearing land,] settling, and farming.”⁹  

From this, three landscape patterns can be derived: First, the “smooth”¹⁰ space of naturally “eternal” landscapes: desert, mountains, sea. Then, secondly, the “notched” space of the eternally changing forest landscape – in which naturalness and anthropogenicity are inextricably intertwined. And thirdly, finally, the entirely man-made smooth space of “cultura,” described by Grau as “cleared farmland,”¹¹ in which humans strive to create landscape and social order and to decouple themselves from biological evolution, in other words: creating eternity through rationality and mathematics in time (harvest cycles, planning) and space (geodesy, geometry). These endeavors are perfected with each development cycle of human culture and culminate in modernity, where almost every wild animal and health risk is controlled by civilized humans, where chance dies more with every process optimization, and freedom perishes with security in the panopticon of the digitized “Qualityland”¹².

Without providing examples, Grau draws a connection to the history of philosophy:

Accordingly, philosophers of all ages saw in the vastness of the oceans and the majesty of the mountains veritable allegories of thought, which also aesthetically enhanced philosophizing and lent it pathos and majesty. Connected with this was philosophy’s claim to proclaim truths and insights that are as eternal, immutable, and boundless as seas or mountains. However, this asserted claim to absolute truth undeniably has totalitarian features. […] The forest, however, is different. Here, nothing is eternal. Here, nothing is timeless. And nothing here is static at all. Forest means change, temporality, and relativity.¹³

It's a good thing that criticism of totalitarianism and claims to absolute truth has prevailed not only in Alexander Grau's work but across all relevant fields of philosophy and politics. This demonstrates, on the one hand, a certain capacity for learning within the human species in the face of the "totalitarian" catastrophe of the Second World War, but also, on the other hand (somewhat later), a broadening of perspective to include previously "subaltern" viewpoints, whether through feminism, postcolonialism, Indigenous Rights Movements, or, more generally, the underlying currents of post-structuralism and social constructivism.

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II. What is "Postmodernity"?

The experience of the Second World War revealed the dangers and abysses of totalitarianism, yet it took almost another generation for the realization to spread that it is not crucial which modern political system emerges victorious from war, but rather that the hubris of modernity, with its subtle claim to absolute truth, itself is built on shaky ground (or, with Grau and Sartre: on a receding forest, lurking and waiting for the ordering hand to disappear). For in that era, which from today's perspective can partly be considered historically concluded and designated with a "post-prefix"—an era in which Foucault, Deleuze & Derrida experienced their heyday, James Stirling alongside Charles Willard Moore shaped architecture, and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood or Grace Jones, singer and much more, influenced culture—the transience and contingency of human reason itself was articulated as culture for the first time in a grand conceptual framework: We are, of course, talking about Postmodernism!  

In a narrower sense, this era can be understood as a central cultural movement spanning the 1970s to the 1990s. The oil crises, the collapse of the dollar-gold peg in 1971, the Club of Rome reports on the "Limits to Growth" from 1972 onwards, and other events indicated that the claim to absolute truth of the techno-economic feasibility ideology, believed in both the West and the East, seemed to be developing its first cracks.¹⁴  

Michel Foucault philosophically clarifies that the Enlightenment's ambition to foster a more humane society—for example, through more rational systems of psychiatry and penal enforcement—demands a very high, perhaps disproportionate, price.  

Deleuze and Guattari explore in their A Thousand Plateaus in 1980, that the rationality underlying capitalist modernity represents only one of several possibilities, even mathematically; they describe lines of flight to minority currents in mathematics, science, and history (precisely not that of the victors), extending to shamanism and other approaches to body and mind not originating from colonial powers. Rarely has the illusory nature of eternal truths been described in a more multifaceted—or, in their own term: manifold—way than by Deleuze & Guattari in their collaborative works, whose style, fitting for postmodernism, appears eclectic.¹⁵

For postmodernism, as art historian Klaus Kowalski describes, defines itself through a "democratization of cultural life oriented towards independence, which manifests in a poly-stylism"¹⁶ and as "cross-domain thematic mixtures"¹⁷ in contrast to the previous "general, world-interpreting claim"¹⁸. Collage gains popularity as a defining graphic form; in architecture, the mixing of technical modernity with features of earlier eras, such as classical columns or even Gothic or primitivist elements, becomes style-defining. Jean-François Lyotard's famous statement about postmodernism as the "end of grand narratives" underlies all these developments.¹⁹

Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt also add a change in the world of work as an argument to these perspectives, because

from the 1970s onwards, the techniques and organizational form of industrial production shifted [...] towards smaller and more mobile work units and more flexible production structures – a change often referred to as the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist production.²⁰

They therefore define postmodernism as "today's capitalist production," which is characterized "by a series of transitions that name different facets of the same change: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from modernity to postmodernity."²¹.  

Emerging from this, they describe as a new networked global superpower, the "Empire," a complex and entangled global power relationship that cannot be attacked by storming a single center. In contrast, they posit the "Multitude" as a progressive, emancipatory actor:

A multitude is an irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that compose the multitude must always be expressed and must never be leveled into equality, unity, identity, or indifference.²²

As such, they appear sporadically, rhizomatically,²³ come together for a goal, quickly dissolve, and then reconnect – again, the network form:

The Multitude is the true productive force of our social world, whereas the Empire is merely an apparatus of appropriation that lives solely off the vitality of the Multitude – or, as Marx would put it: a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that only survives by sucking the blood of the living.²⁴

The "apparatus of appropriation" that Deleuze & Guattari describe on a psychological level, here in its political-economic dimension. Guy Debord's concept of "recuperation," the appropriation of subversive impulses by the "Society of the Spectacle," is also evident here… The omnipresence of an all-encompassing market has rather grown in recent decades, coupled with the equally typical postmodern loss of "grand narratives of salvation" (communism, religion, …).

Many of these dimensions of postmodernity are certainly experiencing renewed urgency in the 2020s: consider "deep fake" and "post-truth," our fragile global human culture with its public sphere and commodity flows, which were severely threatened by Covid-19, the lockdowns, the incident in the Suez Canal, and the blockade of the "Strait of Hormuz," as well as the fact that even nature itself is no longer imperishable in the face of climate change: mountains are crumbling away with the permafrost, and the sea is no longer the same both underwater (coral reefs) and at the water's surface.  

Thus, the 'panta rhei' principle embodied in the forest fits very well into a 21st century that is slowly gaining momentum, and which Foucault rightly prophesied as the 'Deleuzian century'.²⁵

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III. „We are a forest that grows quietly.“

With its overgrown paths, its intertwining of standing-living and dying-lying trees, its leaf decomposition, and its diverse underground soil network, the forest is in any case a Multitude – just as the Multitude itself can be seen as 'a forest that grows quietly'²⁶.

Forests are a network on both the micro and macro levels – which is not so dissimilar to the internet.

On the micro level, the forest floor is an extremely complex, intricate network; trees communicate with each other via root rhizomes, as one can read in Peter Wohlleben's bestselling books, exchanging substances in symbiosis with fungal mycelium, even nourishing their young or warning of predators through messenger substances in rhizomatic connections.²⁷ Generally, the forest floor is interwoven with a network of diverse, extremely thin threads and strands.

On the macro level, forests are migration corridors for the movement of fauna and flora. For the 'specter of migration'²⁸ This is not only about (post-)modern human society, but also about animals and plants, which on the one hand need to mix their populations to counteract inbreeding, and on the other hand, in the course of climate change, should be able to advance through migration corridors into regions where the climate (still) suits them. While in the course of industrialized modernity, humans have increasingly built and interconnected infrastructure using rational techniques of urban, road, and landscape construction, with the landscape crisscrossed by highways, power lines, and telecommunication channels, environmental organizations like BUND have been working for about 20 years to counteract this by connecting largely isolated forests into a forest biotope network through targeted, scientifically supported corridor plantings. This network is used by wildcats, lynxes, and other animals, but also generally aims to restore the original character of the forest as a network. At the German Nature Conservation Day in mid-March this year, Federal Environment Minister Carsten Schneider announced a draft law on the "Securing of Natural Infrastructure" – a significant step in times of a rather defensive environmental policy.²⁹, with 2% wilderness as a target by 2030 – at least, that's what the National Strategy Paper states³⁰.  

The ambivalence, of course, runs deep in this endeavor, as it does in many methodologies of contemporary nature conservation: correcting previous interventions through new ones in an environment already heavily shaped by humans³¹; the ultimate encroachment of "cultura" on the forest – or a belated recognition of its valuable, transcendent complexity? After all, here, with rational techniques and human planning reason, an infrastructure of "wilderness" is being initiated (also in the literal sense), which is then intended to continue to exist and develop independently of "us".

If one follows Grau, and Sartre as well, the forest would likely seize every opportunity to develop independently, to overgrow "cultura" again: "The forest permanently tries to reclaim what was painstakingly wrested from it before."³². However, it is not in all natural regions of the Earth that the encroaching forest spreads as wild, permanently changing nature against culture – in other parts of the world, for example, it is the deserts that reclaim what was wrested from them. Or the steppes. In rare cases, water also does, for example, on dike marshland or in the area of dams.  

Following this, the question arises whether, in times of climate change, it is always the forest that first spreads on abandoned areas; the "Lieberose Desert" in Brandenburg shows that things can also turn out differently.³³ And there are calculations that many forests are permanently threatened by climate change, because here too, eternal change and entropy certainly do not stop: persistent drought leads to pest infestation, dieback, and often also to the burning down of forest areas.³⁴ The smooth space could be on the advance, in this case the desert. Thus, "cultura" would have managed to reproduce itself and permanently prevent the "relapse" of the forest. It would be the victory of the "metropolitan desert," which is spoken of in post-situationist writings.³⁵ Or a victory of market, noise, and "poisonous flies," which Nietzsche in his Zarathustra contrasts with forest nature:

Forest and rock know how to be silent with you, with dignity. Be like the tree you love again, the broad-branched one: silent and listening, it hangs over the sea. Where solitude ends, there begins the market; and where the market begins, there also begins the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies.³⁶  

A victory that might not only be external but even threatens our inner life. Thus Zarathustra warns elsewhere: "The desert grows: woe to him who harbors deserts!"³⁷

In contrast, a central characteristic of nature and forests is their adaptability and thus resilience. Even man-made deserts like Lieberose or Bledow in Poland can recede,³⁸ in the wildfire areas of the Harz or Saxon Switzerland, new, more resilient tree species are spreading. However, this does not absolve us of responsible action, because precisely because we humans are part of nature's network, it is ultimately our decisions that tip the scales between devastation and reforestation.

A foundation here is certainly respect for nature's complexity, which surpasses us, something Nietzsche describes in a pantheistic-sounding way when he demands: "[W]hen walking a path cut through a spruce forest, remember the cathedrals: the forest had an overwhelming influence on the builder."³⁹

Whether in the construction of "domes" and cathedrals or in countless other examples: forest nature influences large parts of human cultural creation – but more clearly than in Nietzsche's time, we see today how human culture also influences growing parts of forest nature. – Humans and forests are indeed multidimensionally connected.

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Mandus Craiss (born 1983) grew up in Ludwigsburg and studied political science, cultural studies, philosophy, modern history, and geography in Tübingen and Leipzig. He was socialized within the ecological and alter-globalization movement and traveled extensively in this context, largely by hitchhiking. As a key editor of the former BUNDjugend magazine Critical Mass he also published articles and interviews on political philosophy from Fromm to Foucault. His master's thesis deals with the works of Deleuze & Guattari in relation to unconditional basic income. He lives with his son in a shared house on the outskirts of Leipzig. For the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy, he gave on YouTube an introductory lecture on Deleuze & Guattari. 

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The article image was peinted by the Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series. The photos were taken by Mandus Craiss.

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References

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus.  

Foucault, Michel: Writings in Four Volumes II. Frankfurt a. M. 2017.

Franke, Nils: Nature Conservation – Landscape – Homeland. Romanticism as a Foundation of Nature Conservation in Germany. Wiesbaden 2016.

Grau, Alexander: About the Forest. A Philosophy of Freedom. München 2023.

Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri: Empire. The New World Order. Frankfurt a. M. 2003.

Ibid.: Multitude. War and Democracy in the Empire. Frankfurt/ Maina. M. 2004.

Kling, Marc-Uwe: QualityLand. Berlin 2017.

Ibid.: QualityLand 2.0. Kiki's Secret. Berlin 2022.

Kowalski, Klaus: Postmodernism. Style, Era, or Flimflam? Hanau 2013.

Lyotard, Jean-François: The Postmodern Condition. Paris & Vienna 1979.

Invisible Committee: The Coming Insurrection. Hamburg 2010.

Wohlleben, Peter: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. The Discovery of a Hidden World. Munich 2015.

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Footnotes

1: Cf. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/wildnisschulen-natur-selbsterfahrung-umweltschutz-li.3213587?reduced=true.

2: p. 169.

3: It is remarkable that Sartre plays such a significant role in Grau's argumentation, as he is considered a thinker rather detached from nature (cf. the conversation with Jens Bonnemann about Sartre and Nietzsche on our blog).

4: Ibid., p. 116.

5: On the Genealogy of Morality, Sec. III, 9.

6: Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, Aphorism 7. Unfortunately, Nietzsche's quotes on the topic of "nature" are all too often permeated by a contempt for the weak (ibid.: "The study 'according to nature' seems to me a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism"); nature is pitted against Christianity because the latter protects the weak; there is polemic against Rousseau's demand "Back to nature" (the "canaille"; cf. Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, Aphorism 48) and against the socialist Paris Commune (cf. On the Genealogy of Morality, Sec. I, 5). Nature is admired when the predator snatches its prey; at the same time, human destruction of nature ("breaking of branches, dislodging of stones, fighting with wild animals" [Human, All Too Human I, Aph. 103]) is upheld when it manifests the superiority of the superior. This reveals a deep belief in inequality and an ideological foundation of sadism as a "natural act," as if this were a basic need – and not a sublimation of an unsatisfied one, which is more likely.

7: Grau, Of the Forest, p. 38.

8: Cf. ibid., pp. 10 ff.

9: Cf. ibid., pp. 37 ff.

10: The concept of "smooth" and "striated" space originates from Deleuze & Guattari and is described in their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

11: Cf. Grau, Of the Forest, pp. 9 ff. This, incidentally, does not correspond to the actual Latin etymology, which rather stems from the concept of "care" (of body and mind, internally and externally). Cf. https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Kultur.

12: "Qualityland" is the name of the globalized state in Marc-Uwe Kling's two eponymous dystopian novels from 2017 and 2022; however, Orwell and Huxley could also have served as inspiration.

13: Grau, Of the Forest, p. 12 f.

14: Compared to a boat, one would no longer speak of cracks in the hull today, but of a pile of debris in the sea of chaos, with drifting planks on which isolated individuals drift, in permanent danger and unable to steer.

15: Nietzsche already anticipates this criticism of universal truths, even if he tends to proclaim many of his own universal truths against the existing ones.

16: Postmodernism. Style, Era, or Frippery?, p. 156.

17: Ibid., p. 90.

18: Ibid., p. 88.

19: Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 23 ff.

20: Multitude. War and Democracy in the Empire, p. 82.

21: Ibid., p. 146.

22: Ibid., p. 105.

23: The concept of the "rhizome" as a counterpart to the classical logic of the root is also a key concept of Deleuze & Guattari (cf. A Thousand Plateaus).

24: Empire. The New World Order, p. 62.

25: Cf. Michel Foucault, Writings in four volumes II, p. 94.

26: There is an ecological-spiritual protest song with this name: “We are a forest that grows quietly.” Cf.: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=v7F1zlT3I7k.

27: Most well-known, among several other publications by the author: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015).

28: Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 213.

29: Cf. https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/rede/rede-von-carsten-schneider-anlaesslich-des-deutschen-naturschutztages.

30: Cf. BUND Magazine 2 / 26, p. 10; with the current 0.62%, it appears that the implementation of these goals is being pursued as neglectfully as those of the international climate targets – albeit with admittedly lower urgency.

31: Cf. Nils Franke, Nature Conservation – Landscape – Homeland. Romanticism as a Foundation of Nature Conservation in Germany.

32: Grau, Of the Forest, p. 13 f.

33: Cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberoser_Wüste.

34: Among others, available at: https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/faqs/waelder-im-klimawandel.

35: Cf. Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 70.

36: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Flies of the Market.

37: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Among Daughters of the Desert, 2.

38: See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82%C4%99d%C3%B3w-W%C3%BCste.

39: Posthumous Fragments 1882 17[12].