With appreciation to the Kent State University Library, Special Collections [http://www.library.kent.edu/speccoll/poetry/snyder.html]
Gary Snyder was born on 8 May 1930 in San Francisco, Calif., to Harold Alton and Lois (Willkie). He was raised in Washington and Oregon on small farms. Snyder held jobs as logger, seaman, fire-look-out and trail crew worker for the U.S. Forest Service. He received his degree in literature and anthropology from Read College and did some graduate work on linguistics at University of California at Berkeley, where he pursued his interests in Asian thought and Oriental languages. He served as a member of the Department of English at University of California, Berkeley, for one year (1964). During the 1950's he became involved with the San Francisco Beat movement and later when he moved to Japan he bacame involved in Zen Buddhism. Both of these involvements have a characteristic influence on his poetry. In his writing we see an appreciation for the hard rural work, an influence of Eastern literature and philosophy, and an interest and commitment to poetry, society, and the natural world. Snyder received a number of honors and awards, among them a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Turtle Island (1974). Among his poetry collections are Riprap (1959), Myths & Texts (1960), The Back Country (1967), Regarding Wave (1969), Turtle Island and Axe Handles (1983). Snyder's most notable nonfiction works are Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1979) and The Real Work (1980). Several books of essays include The Practice of the Wild (1990) and A Place in Space (1995).
Why read Gary Snyder in a course on American philosophy? Isn't Snyder just a Beat poet?
The answer to this lies in the nature of philosophy and how philosophy fits into the life of a society. We don't read Plato just because "he was a philosopher;" we read Plato (and he was a philosopher of note) because he addressed serious problems of his times in ways that have remained informative and interesting to us. What a course on American philosophy should achieve is not only recognition of America's great philosophers but it should also achieve some insight into what American problems have been and what they are now. What may be problematic in the future. It is exactly in this sense that I would argue Gary Snyder needs to be read.
There is another sense, perhaps less necessary but important all the same. That is the relation between philosophy and art. Plato wrote almost all of his essays in dramatic dialogue form; and Nietzsche composed his most important philosophical work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as a dramatic poem. The philosophical tradition of Eastern Asia has persistently embraced poetry as its principal and obvious expression. When we explore them in depth, I would argue that art and philosophy share common goals even though they do not share a common methodology. As a poet, Gary Snyder is philosophical in important ways.
Snyder also introduces an East Asian influence to a society that can no longer be seen as merely a transplanted version of England or even Europe as a whole. The Federalists drew heavily on the philosophical writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu. Emerson and Thoreau demonstrated thorough knowledge of the "classics." Whose "classics" we ask? Western European classics, of course. But the United States, today, is scarcely an exclusively European culture. On the West Coast, in fact, we are more intimately and obviously a part of the whole "Pacific Rim." So Gary Snyder offers us a serious view into what American philosophy might be when influenced powerfully by Buddism. In fact, Snyder's other significant studies have brought him in touch with the indigenous people of the West Coast so he also offers us the philosophical background of Native America.
What are the problems of American society? we should ask. We spent much of this semester on political philosophy. Our nation was well founded and its survival over more than two centuries has demonstrated that. But this does not mean that we should ignore strong, critical explorations of our founding principles, from time to time. Arendt's essays demonstrate that there is still much to be learned about fundamental concepts like authority and freedom; new aspects of these concepts may serve us as better guides in the future. There are also facts of life, today, that call our principles into question. For instance, when voter participation sinks below 30%, where is that Liberty, which our Founding Fathers connected by definition with the principle of representation.
Our political life, however, is only one side. Our spiritual life is another. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Pragmatists helped us explore what life is, at the grass roots. James, in particular, epitomizes the tensions between religion and science, as intellectual and spiritual forces, at the turn-of-the-century.
But what are the great possessions of America? One of those, surely, is our life in relation to our land. It seems ironic that Americans should need reminding of this, since throughout the Nineteenth Century American history was dominated by the issue of land. At the turn of the century, at least 80% of Americans were still living on the land. But, in fact, less than 2% of Americans live on the land today. A consequence of this incredible urbanization is the fact that most Americans have little or no knowledge of a "natural" world. If Thoreau's appeal to the virtues of a natural life was difficult for Concordians in 1845, Snyder's appeal in the 1990s must be revolutionary. Americans, today, inhabit a human-built world. As Arendt notes in the last essay read, one of the grave problems we face today is that we venture out into the world and we find there only ourselves --- that is, the products of our choices.
The Practice of the Wild is a book about people and land. There are at least three fundamentally different relationships between people and land exhibited in the world today. First , is the hunter-gatherer relationship which is the oldest of the three and the least well protected or represented today. The hunter-gatherer relationship has continuity over the lifetime of homo sapiens sapiens, more than 50,000 years, straight into the present. Second , is the agricultural relationship. The earliest agriculture that we know of began approximately 10,000 years ago in the Middle East; agriculture in parts of the New World may have begun 6,000 years ago. Much of the world, today, remains agricultural in this tradition. Third and finally, and for lack of a better word, the industrial relationship is merely about 250 years old, but it is growing at an amazing rate. In industrial societies, even agriculture is industrialized so that the agricultural relationship between people and land ceases to exist.
With respect to the concept of the "wild," the hunter-gatherer relationship embraces wild nature; the agricultural relationship tries to bring nature into conformity with human needs; and the industrial relationship objectifies and disposes of nature. It is essential to recognize that these different relationships with wild nature produce three different kinds of human life and stand in the path of humans understanding other humans. Agricultural Europeans who came to what they called the "New World," from the early 16th Century onward, found most of it inhabited by hunter-gatherers, whom they viewed as "primitives" and even "savages." The expansionist American policies of the 19th Century that carried agricultural (and eventually industrial) Americans across the continent to the Pacific Coast were founded on a principle of "manifest destiny" that provided a future only for those who conformed to American society. Agriculturalists do not understand hunter-gatherers and industrialists do not understand agriculturalists --- noting the plight of the small, family farm in America, today.
Hunter-gatherer and agricultural lifeways are well proven, sustainable human lifeways. The industrial lifeway is a radical experiment, only 250 years old, way too short a timespan for legitimate human evolution. It is still in its earliest phases as a momentary glitch in human development, a glitch that evolutionary forces could wipe clean in less time, leaving posterity without real memory of it. One of its features that makes it a truly dramatic experiment is the principal fact that people have abandoned the land. Both earlier economies necessarily postured a certain number of people in relation to a certain amount of land. The land --- whether wild or cultivated --- provided for life. The enormous increase in population that has brought the rural percentage down to below 2% has all settled in urban areas where there is no provision of land, hence, no provision for life (survival). Life depends on other people, on industry; for the first time in 50,000 years, life cannot depend on nature. Or, at least, that's what we propose; that is the experiment.
Why is this a problem that we should care about? The answer, I think, can be found in several ways. While people have been industrialized since the middle of the 18th Century, the real thrust of industrialization in America did not happen until the middle of the 19th Century. Furthermore, there was plenty of "open land" in America, especially if you ignored indigenous people, so that there was little pressure toward urbanization until, perhaps, the "Dust Bowl" disasters of the 1930s. Most people of my own generation, born in the 1930s and 1940s, had parents who grew up on farms; many of us grew up on farms ourselves. America's experience as an all-out industrial people, then, is a century or less in age. In that sense, we know very little about the impact of this relationship; yet every generation grows up farther away from land and the wild. Ageless lessons of land stewardship are being lost while the newest generations assume that the world has always been as it is, without realizing how much of an experiment their lifeway remains and how utterly foreign it is to the past.
It is my contention, then, that Snyder's Practice of the Wild is a most timely work, that it points to a complex of serious human problems, and that its poetic/philosophical approach is informative in developing some sensitivity to earlier ways of life. It is not particularly that we must retreat to an earlier lifeway; but the point is that any sustainable lifeway must meet certain needs. As an industrial people, Americans have been impulsively unaware of this and have blindly assumed that survival lies in a future of innovation and appropriation and consumption. To say that Americans have been successful at this is ridiculous because, in the natural world, "success" is not measured in such a short timeframe. Success, in fact, is only in sustainability; and very simple computations, today, make it clear that the American industrial lifeway is not sustainable. To succeed America must change; there is no question about that. The question is When will we wake up to the basic facts of human natural history and begin to make the changes? The question, also, is where we will find the wisdom to do this sooner rather than later!
Back to Contents