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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-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, p.26. SUNY Press, New York, 2003. 67 Tbid. p.27.
