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86 | THe Puitosopny oF Eco-PotLIrics
accepted a reality reduced to the quantifiable while consigning
judgements of value and meaning to the outer darkness of the irrational,
which respectable scholars could dismiss as unscientific, leaving
questions of good and evil to prophets, poets and postmodernists,” writes
the Czech ecophilosopher Erazim Kohak.°* Who took the fruit from
the tree of knowledge became, according to Scripture, the knower of
good and evil; this is the basis of all further knowledge. In one of the
footnotes of his work An Understanding Heart, Kohak draws attention
to the fact that it was not without reason that Goethe interpreted the
words of John the Evangelist — In the beginning was the Word — thus:
“In the beginning was the Deed.” To say something is to act. The Word
is a word that implies action and the final conclusion of constructive
phenomenology is indeed that thought does not mirror reality but
instead creates it: it creates the formations of knowledge in which we
are capable of relating our experiences to a common world that can be
shared with others. In this way, not only do thought and its object
belong together, but in fact, reality is a direct province of thought. If
this is so, then man is responsible for the world of knowledge as for his
property. This responsibility would be contemporary man’s authentic
experience of nature, claims Kohak. His hope is that this will replace
defeated nature, the experience of nature as pure raw material, which,
however, was and has remained the sole reality for the technological
civilisation moving towards its tragic fate."
Man gathers experience: he is the author of what he experiences.
This authorship, however, does not mean the empirical person for
Husserl, either. The theoretical conditions (essential structure) of
possible experiences at any time are determined by the network of
intersubjective connections that form the living world. “Subjectivity
means a network of subject relations”,°° Erazim Kohak explains,
according to whom “Husserl’s basic recognition is that subject experience
is rendered intelligible by such a transcendental structure. It is experience
constituted as an intelligible whole by purposive activity and, already
as such, it has a structure independent of and prior to the preferences
of a particular agent."" From the perspective of phenomenology, the
64 Kohak: An Understanding Heart. In C. Brown, T:Toadvine eds: Eco-Phenomenology:
Back to the Earth Itself. p.22. SUNY Press, New York, 2003.
6 Erazim Kohak: Varieties of Ecological Experience. Environmental Ethics 19.2. 1997.
6 Erazim Kohak: An Understanding Heart. In C.Brown, T.Toadvine, eds: Eco-Phenome¬
nology: Back to the Earth Itself, p.26. SUNY Press, New York, 2003.
67 Tbid. p.27.