Forest and Philosophy:

Toward an Aesthetics of Wood

Galen A. Johnson
Department of Philosophy, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881;
[email protected]

This paper initiates a phenomenological study of the aesthetics of forest

and wood in three main phases. First, we consider the modalities of
wood’s sensuousness and argue against the formalist tradition that
restricts aesthetic appreciation to visual forms. Second, we examine the
structural, eidetic features of hand-made wooden objects in the “second
life” of trees. Third, we engage in reflections on the communities gathered
by the first and second lives of trees. These themes outline an aesthetics of
the beautiful, the given, and the gathering. We take philosophical inspira-
tion from Merleau-Ponty throughout, and in the end, also Thoreau.

The tree simpliciter, the physical thing belonging to Nature, is nothing less than
this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably
belongs to the perception. The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its
chemical elements, etc. But the sense—the sense of this perception, something
belonging necessarily to its essence—cannot burn up; it has no chemical ele-
ments, no forces, no real properties. —Husserl, Ideas I, § 89

Say that the things are structures, frameworks, the stars of our life: not before
us, laid out as perspective spectacles, but gravitating about us. . . . Replace the
notions of concept, idea, mind, representation with the notions of dimensions,
articulation, level, hinges, pivots, configurations.
—Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

Dedicated to Renee and Marjorie, daughters of workshop and forest.1

A story is yet to be told of the relation between philosophy and the forests. Trees,
rooted in the earth and towering into the sky, afford one of our most constant and

1. In addition to my daughters, I would like to thank my colleague, Prof. Cheryl Foster

of the University of Rhode Island, herself an international scholar in the aesthetics of na-
ture, who read an early draft of this essay and made several invaluable suggestions that have
been incorporated into the final version. I would also like to thank Prof. Ted Toadvine of
the University of Oregon, also an internationally recognized environmental philosopher,
for his careful reading and valuable suggestions that also have been incorporated through-
out.

Environmental Philosophy 4 (1&2), 59–75.

Copyright © 2007 by The International Association for Environmental Philosophy.
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.
60 GALEN A. JOHNSON

intimate contacts with non-human nature, and have afforded philosophers with
the very metaphors of Being: root, leaf, branch, seed, blossoming, begetting and
dying. The second life of trees, transformed into the lumber of architecture and
the fine woods of furniture in the hands of builders and woodworkers, have pro-
vided the architectural and craft metaphors for understanding the workings of the
universe: dimension, interior, exterior, depth, grain, hinges, drawers, doors and
locks.
One could write a considerable portion of the history of Western philosophy
around these trees, wood and woodworking.2 It would include Aristotle’s acorn
and oak tree, Descartes’ tree and branches of metaphysics, Berkeley’s immaterial
falling tree, Husserl’s noema-tree, and Heidegger’s discussions of the clearing,
Holzwege, and autochthony (rootedness). It would take note of Plato’s Demiurge
impressing form on matter and philosopher-king guiding the ship of state, and
Aristotle’s sea-battle, ship of Theseus, and four causes. It would follow out Aris-
totle’s argument in the Physics for the distinction between things that exist “by
nature” as over against things that are composed not by nature, such as a bed; if
one “plants a bed,” Aristotle notes, and the moistened wood sends up a shoot,
that shoot will not be a bed but a plant and eventually a tree.3 A major chapter
would belong to Vico’s New Science and his craft paradigm for the theory of
knowledge originating from the claim that we can truly understand only that
which we have made.4
Attention would also go to those philosophical texts where the metaphors of
wood have established crucial turns in argument. In arguing for the continuity of
our stream of consciousness, for example, William James wrote: “The transition
between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break
in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the
consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.”5 Jean-Paul Sartre’s
Roquentin, in the novel Nausea, learned Sartre’s existentialist meaning of the
contingency of existence from the gnarly chestnut tree in the park: “So I was in
the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just
under my bench…. Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never until these
last few days, had I understood the meaning of ‘existence’…. The essential thing
is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is

2. I express my thanks to David Wood for sharing his essay titled “Trees and Truth (Or,
Why We Are Really All Druids),” which sketches a history of the tree as epistemological
metaphor in philosophy, from which I have learned much. His essay is published in Re-
thinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. Bruce Foltz and Robert Frode-
man (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 32–43.
3. Cf. Aristotle’s Physics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1969), Book B, Chapter 1, 25–26.
4. Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova, cited in Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the ‘New
Science’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 72.
5. William James, Principles of Psychology, Volume I, “The Stream of Thought” (New
York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890). Cited from Pragmatism: The Classic Writings, ed. H. S.
Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 143.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 61

simply to be there.”6 Martin Heidegger introduced the example of the cabinet-

maker and an apprentice in What is Called Thinking? to propose thinking itself as
a kind of craft that requires, beyond facility with tools and knowledge, sensitive
attunement and response.7 In the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus titled
“Introduction: Rhizome,” Deleuze and Guattari tell us they are “tired of trees.”
We should stop believing so much in trees and roots, they argue against the tradi-
tion, for trees mean transcendence and upright vertical striving, hierarchical orga-
nizations of power. Deleuze and Guattari contend against the tree with more
humble vegetation and the rhizome: “long live the multiple;” “grass is the only
way out.”
It would also be a matter of interest that some philosophers have also been
workers of wood. In his “Autobiography,” Karl Popper tells the story of his two-
year apprenticeship to an old master cabinetmaker in Vienna named Adalbert
Pösch. Popper describes a large order for thirty mahogany kneehole desks, with
many, many drawers as the inspiration for his recognition that he was better
suited to philosophy than to French polish. Upon completion of his apprentice-
ship he looked “for something easier than making mahogany writing desks” and
shortly thereafter became a scholar who “could work on a writing desk and yet be
preoccupied with epistemology.”8 We have it from Popper’s students, however,
that he continued his cabinetmaking as an avocation and was especially well-
known for his clock cases.
Rather than enter into such a history of the relation between philosophy and
the forests, I want to initiate a phenomenological study of the aesthetics of forest
and wood. This will unfold in three main phases. First will come a consideration
of the confrontation with the material of wood itself, with the modalities of its
sensuousness; second, a consideration of the structural or eidetic features of
hand-made wooden objects: cradles, beds, desks, bookcases, tables, and chairs;
third, some reflections on the community of those who work with wood and on
the trees that bestow their gifts across the generations and ages. These themes
outline the sketch of an aesthetics of the beautiful, the given, and the gathering.
Though we will be occupied principally with the second life of trees as they have
been transformed into the fine woods of furniture, we will inevitably need to
speak of the more complex first life of the tree within non-human nature. I will be
speaking as a philosopher, but also as a woodworker who knows firsthand the
privileges and pleasures of fine wood, planes and joinery. We hope that we are
not overreaching in attempting to raise the humble, intimate objects of everyday

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964),
126–27, 129.
7. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
(New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1968), 13–15.
8. Karl Popper, “Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Paul Arthur
Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1974), 3–4.
62 GALEN A. JOHNSON

dwelling into philosophical objects that organize the meanings of place, time and
community.
The Beautiful: Toward an Aesthetics of Wood
There is an aesthetic tradition that attempts to distinguish between aesthetic
appreciation and sense pleasure. Aesthetic appreciation, it is held by philosophers
such as Kant and Santayana, has to do with qualities such as form and balance
that comprise what is beautiful. Therefore, only visual forms, such as in painting,
and auditory experiences such as in music, could be beautiful and the object of
aesthetic appreciation. The reasons a person could give for calling an object
“beautiful” could never involve references to the senses of smell, taste, or touch,
and the touch of velvet or the flavor of wine or the smell of a rose could not prop-
erly be called beautiful. Yet there are good arguments for thinking the formalist
tradition in error, and that smells, tastes, and tactile sensations count among the
things that can be beautiful.9 The experience of wood, which itself stands prior to
the experience of the well-formed hand-made object, dramatically confirms the
convergence of aesthetic pleasure and sense pleasure.
The wooden surface is a tactile, sensuous membrane that meets us as a rough
or smooth texture, close kin with the skin of the human body, which awakens the
desire to be held, stroked, and caressed. We never recover from the pleasure of
the touch of the skin, and to the woodworker, the desire to touch the wood is
something similar. There are the rough textures of the various kinds of bark prior
to the milling and the sleek sheen of the board fresh from the planer. To touch a
board of mahogany or walnut or cherry and run one’s hand over its surface length
and width is to be touched in return, to feel its qualities of hardness or softness,
flexibility or inflexibility, strength or fragility. The woodworker interrogates the
wood through a tactile exegesis. The interrogation senses its breaks, checks, and
imperfections which are the marks of its former life before it died and passed into
our hands. No board of significant size is ever perfectly clear, but intermittently
checked with knots, burls, splits, and warps. The woodworker’s job begins by
assessing these imperfections to cooperate with them or eliminate them in render-
ing a work. Sometimes a check or crack can be pulled together with a butterfly
joint, such as those perfected by the great Japanese-American woodworker,
George Nakashima,10 and a magnificent board healed. Sometimes a knot, severe
split, or blemish of grain must be cut out with the least possible damage to the
strength and beauty of the board.

9. This tradition which separates aesthetic and sense pleasure includes, for example,
Kant’s Critique of Judgment and George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty. See the fine ar-
ticle challenging this distinction by Francis J. Coleman, “Can a Smell or a Taste or a Touch
be Beautiful?” American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1965): 319–324.
10. Cf. John Kelsey, “George Nakashima: For each plank there’s one perfect use,” Fine
Woodworking, no. 14 (January/February 1979): 40–46. Also cf. “The Butterfly Joint: Dou-
ble dovetails for strength and beauty,” Fine Woodworking, no. 25 (November/December
1980): 72–73.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 63

The woodworker’s touch that initiates the dialogue with the wood also comes
into prominent play again in the finish. It is a woodworker’s pride to achieve as
perfect a finished surface as possible, and only the hand can assess the quality of
smoothness produced by the final planing, wetting, or sanding. Coniferous, or
cone-bearing, trees generally produce softwoods such as pine, spruce, fir, red-
wood and cedar. Deciduous trees that lose their leaves during the winter months
are classified as hardwoods. The joy of the hardwood finish is the depth and rich-
ness of the wood that can be brought forth with the penetration of oils and a light
protective coat over the surface of the wood. A primordial three-dimensionality
comes forward involving the interplay of light, shape, and depth. With such a fin-
ish, we can look deeply into the heart of a board.
Thereby, no less than a tangibility, the wood is a visibility, a range of colors
and richness of grain. Grain refers to the direction and orientation of the fibers in
the wood produced as the cells grow. There are a number of different grain pat-
terns produced by the slower growth of winter wood and the more rapid growth
of summer wood, making for patterns that are straight and fine or wavy and
course, and colors of grain that are light or dark, the winter wood usually produc-
ing the wavier and darker colors. Maple is a light-colored hardwood particularly
well-known for the variety of its grains, ranging from the spray of darker dots
and specks that figure birds-eye maple to the amazing orange striping of the
prized zebra stripe maple. Logs are most often cut along their length with the
grain of the growth of the tree, and “cutting for the ‘boule’” or “plainsawing,”
which means cutting the log all the way from one end to the other without turning
or trimming, is the preferred way to maximize the hidden possibilites of grain in
the log. There are other ways to cut a log to disclose different patterns of grain,
such as rotary or ribbon cutting for veneer, which spins the log and “peels” a very
thin layer of wood, and “quarter-sawing” in which the log is cut at 90 degrees to
the growth rings, producing narrower and somewhat weaker boards but ones with
a wonderfully even ribbon graining.11
Cross-cutting straight through a log to cut it into slabs will show the cross-
grain of the wood, which can be especially desirable for working with the root
wood of very large trees. Cross-cutting produces a cross-section of the tree, such
as we all have seen peering down at a stump, that can be read as the story of a
tree’s life, from the pith center, which is the first growth of the infant tree from
the seed, outward to the bark, the tree’s outer protective layer. In between are the
growth rings and the visible difference between the heartwood and sapwood. The
heartwood is the aged core of the tree closest to the pith center, which has ceased
containing living cells, and is darker and harder than the sapwood, which are the
more outward rings of the wood containing the living cells that move water from
roots to leaves. Tight growth rings indicate the years in which there has been

11. Cf. George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflection (New York:
Kodansha International Ltd., 1987), 96–99. It is from this invaluable work that we have
learned to speak of the first and second life of trees.
64 GALEN A. JOHNSON

slow growth due to dryness, and wider rings indicate the wet years in which there
has been open fast growth. There also can sometimes be discerned “wind shake”
rings, which are wavy and indicate the years with great storms and stress during
the growth of the tree. It was Leonardo da Vinci who pointed out that the rings
also reveal the side of the world to which they were turned, because each ring
will be larger to the north than to the south, and the center of the tree is closer to
the bark on the south than on the north.12 By reading the cross-section of a tree
we discern the chronology of the tree, its nobility, patience and suffering when
droughts or storms or insects beset the lands and when life-giving rains fell in
abundance. In relation to these natural chronologies, we are able in reciprocity to
measure out the years and historical sense of our own lives.
To see a log of wood split open by the mill saw is to have unfolded before
your eyes the inner secrets of the life of a tree and the possibilities for its meta-
morphosis into a second life as hand-worked object. Sometimes the experience is
one of keen disappointment, such as when we find the interior of a promising log
eaten away and ruined by bugs or disease. Sometimes we find ourselves in the
presence of a magnificent and stunning beauty created over years, generations
and centuries of life and growth. Once there was a tree of African mahogany that
had made its way across the waters to our continent and a nearby mill that
unfolded itself to me under the pass of the saw. The most astonishing, enormous
burl with swirls of red and purple in the wood’s brown became visible, and
instantly that burl was destined to become the center of the top surface of a
mahogany desk. More recently, there was a tree of native Rhode Island walnut
that unfolded itself in the mill and in the streaming sunlight could be seen lines of
red such as I had never known possible in the dark brown/black tones of walnut.
Unusual coloring such as this results from the composition of the soil and water
taken up into the tree through its root system. There still seems to be some evolu-
tionary mystery that surrounds the appearance of burls on trees regarding their
adaptive function. These are the rounded outgrowths or enlargements on the
trunk or branches of trees that make the alignment of the wood fibers into clus-
ters of curls. Usually burling is concentrated in one area of a tree, but sometimes,
like with the English oak tree or English walnut, burling may occupy the entire
tree, creating some of the most prized figuring known in fine wood. This well
may be an example of one of Nature’s “gratuitous beauties”13 that is part of its
play and promiscuity. Such figuring from the first life of trees prefigures the des-
tiny of a board in a second life as hand-made object. An experienced and intuitive

12. Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 178.
13. The term “gratuitous beauty” is that of Holmes Rolston III in “The Aesthetic Expe-
rience of Forests,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, ed. Allen Carlson and Ar-
nold Berleant (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004), 189: “it is difficult to escape the
experience of gratuitous beauty – with autumn leaves, or mountain peaks, or with trilliums
unexpected along a woodland path.” This article originally appeared in Journal of Aesthet-
ics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (March 1998).
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 65

craftsman like George Nakashima “really believes there is one perfect use for
each flitch of timber, and his task—his duty—is to recognize it.”14
During the first life of trees, we are able to meet with the aromas and scents of
the wood in a dense pine or aromatic cedar forest, but in the second life of wood,
it is not until the board is cut, sawn, planed, or sanded that we meet with the aro-
mas of the wood. This sacrifice brings forth a resurrection of the scents of the for-
est, and a woodworker’s shop is a place of smells as fine as those of the kitchens
where foods are prepared. For the experienced nose, we can recognize whether it
is pine or oak or mahogany or walnut that is being worked, even without looking
or touching. There is the fresh fragrance of pine, the dark, charcoal muskiness of
walnut, the spicy fruitiness of cherry, the dusty heaviness of mahogany, and the
moth and insect-resistant pungency of a cedar lining. I think there is no other fra-
grance in woodworking so appealing as a shop filled with the nutty, vanilla,
sienna bouquet of fresh cut oak.15 It is always autumn with leaves turning
golden, falling acorns and scurrying squirrels where oak is being worked. In the
deepest winter we can turn back the seasons with a good fire in the woodstove
and a flitch of oak under the saw.
If the touch, sight, and smell of wood offers pleasures kindred to those of the
places of love or the kitchens of good food, we must admit that the preparation of
food rewards us in a way that fine wood in its second life cannot. When we are
finished cooking, then comes the pleasure of the eating. When we finish a cabinet
or table, we cannot eat it, for we are not insects or worms. Nevertheless, it should
not be forgotten that from the first life of trees there come to us a rich array of
ways in which wood enters into the flavors of food and drink. The dried bark of
the small sassafras tree of Tasmania, Australia and Brazil makes a fine-tasting tea
with excellent medicinal properties, and the dried root of the sarsaparilla, native
to tropical America from Jamaica and Mexico to Peru, combined with tonic pro-
duces the flavor of root beer. The root of the White Heath tree gives us the brier
that is used in the making of fine pipes, chosen for its often wonderful figuring
and its resistance to high temperatures as well as the flavor of the brier that min-
gles with the tobacco. Cedar is used in the “planking” of salmon as it grills and
fragments from the mesquite tree, first soaked in water and then thrown onto the
live charcoal, flavor smoked meats and fish.
The oak tree plays an important role in the production of scotch whiskey and
red wines. By law, the casks used for maturing Scotch must be made of oak, and
the preferred type of wood for making the staves of casks is American oak, prob-
ably due to its straightness of grain with little burling. A very small quantity of
Spanish oak is used by a very few Scottish distilleries for the maturing of Scotch
with a sherry finish. In discussing this law and tradition, Charles MacLean

14. John Kelsey, “George Nakashima: For each plank there’s one perfect use,” 41.
15. This essay is dedicated to my two daughters, the older of whom, Renee, surprised me
by writing an essay recalling, among her earliest childhood memories, the scents of the
woodworking shop.
66 GALEN A. JOHNSON

writes: “What is certain is that the casks in which the whiskey matures are much
more than storage vessels. Wood makes a vital—perhaps ‘the’ vital contribu-
tion—to the character and flavor of the final product.”16 The inside walls of the
casks are first charred in order to prepare them for the release of vanillin into the
liquor. After charring, the casks are first used for maturing bourbon or sherry,
usually bourbon. In turn, the flavor of the first incumbent lingers in the wood and
re-emerges, along with the compounds of the wood itself, in the aroma and flavor
of the mature whiskey. Charred wooden casks are similarly essential to the fla-
voring of red wines and the oak barrels of southern France made from regional
species are much prized in the production of the Pinot Noir and other find reds.17
The acoustics of wood are equally compelling. Wood sings. It sings in its first
life with the rustling sounds of the wind in its leaves, the creaking of its branches,
and the songs of the birds to which it lends habitation. It sings in its second life as
the musical instruments that abound with the sonorities of the wood, from drums
to string instruments to woodwinds. My own brush with the acoustics of wood
came through the desire to create a music box that would bring forth the deepest
sonorities from a fine Swiss musical movement. One quickly discovers the tradi-
tion that generations of musical instrument craftsmen have handed down over the
centuries, that it is the wood of spruce that makes the best soundboards and the
wood of maple that makes the best cases with the richest resonance of tone and
least distortion. Since the 1600’s, the traditional materials used in violin-making
have remained unchanged. Quartersawn maple is used for the back, neck, head
and sides, and straight-grain spruce for the top. The fittings - pegs, tailpiece and
fingerboard - are usually made of ebony, and the bridge that supports the strings
must be maple or sycamore.18 The variations in thickness and secrets of the shel-
lac finish have established the Italian makers, Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri as
the paradigm of excellence among the craftsmen of the strings. In the making of
classical guitars and lutes, the woods of spruce and maple remain constant, and
variations in sound and beauty derive from the rose and rosette patterns created
in the center of the top soundboards, as well as the thin wood edgings called pur-
fling.19

16. Charles MacLean, The Mitchell Beazley Pocket Whiskey Book (London: Reed Inter-
national Books Limited, 1993), 18. I owe this lead regarding the importance of wood to the
flavor of whisky to my colleague, Prof. Albert Silverstein, long-time member of the Single
Malt Society.
17. I have already thanked Prof. Ted Toadvine above for his valuable suggestions, but
he in particular deserves credit for his knowledge of wine production and for pushing me
to better recognize the flavors of woods.
18. Harry S. Wake, “The Shape of a Violin,” Fine Woodworking, no. 15 (March/April
1979), 40.
19. Cf. Lyn Elder, “Lute Roses,” Fine Woodworking 2, no. 1 (Summer 1977), 38–41; Al
Ching, “A Not-So-Classic Rosette for Classical Guitars,” Fine Woodworking, no. 28 (May/
June 1981), 51; and, William R. Cumpiano and Jonathan D. Natelson, “Guitar Binding and
Purfling,” Fine Woodworking, no. 28 (May/June 1981), 52–55.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 67

Though we have worked our way toward a phenomenology of the sensuous

modalities of wood one by one, no one should think that the aesthetic and sense
pleasures of fine wood are experienced singly in the various registers from touch
to sound. In some instances, such as for sound which is not available until the
instrument is finished, or flavor which must be produced indirectly through a
process of manufacture, the sensuousness of the material is approached in a tem-
porally emergent, rather than discrete experience. Yet for touch, sight and smell,
and subsequently flavor and sound, wood awakens and stirs our senses simulta-
neously and kinaesthetically as a global experience of the first and second life of
trees. We might best say that the unity of this sensuousness has a sculptural
sense, a figuring of color, light, shape, depth and age that we must carefully
attend to in all its registers before we begin to fit the wood together into a cabinet
or table according to our forms and purposes. The craftsman interrogates the
wood with the same wonder and attention that the sculptor studies the stone
before the first chiseling and the painter studies the landscape before the first
brush stroke, in order that the wood itself may speak.
Thus, a phenomenology of the beautiful that attends to the materiality and
sensuousness of wood takes its orientation in perceptual exploration as developed
in the ontology of visibility and invisibility elaborated by Merleau-Ponty. Like
the aesthetic appreciation of a work of art, the aesthetic appreciation of nature
requires fully embodied perceptual attentiveness to the sensory meanings (sens)
that present themselves. Far from casual, everyday perception, this sort of per-
ceptual attentiveness and interrogation requires the effort, education, and skill of
seasoned “seeing as” that is essential to the whole range of aesthetic appreciation.
This is not a matter of “consciousness” that touches and feels, but of the experi-
enced hand as an “outer brain of man,” as Kant put it,20 or as the “mind of the
body,” in Aristotle’s phrasing. Merleau-Ponty drew a distinction between the
‘natural perception’ of everyday life that glimpses things and only “alights on
things sufficiently attentively to discover in them their familiar presence” in con-
trast with a ‘primary perception’—sometimes he even says ‘primordial percep-
tion’—that pays “a metaphysical and disinterested attention” to things.21 He
never believed, nor do we as appreciators and workers of the wood ever believe,
that this sort of primary perception achieves perfect coincidence with trees, for-
est, and the world, for our perception is always anchored in our bodily style with
its customary spatial levels and sedimented temporal history. The thing and the
world, as well, comprise an inexhaustible richness and depth. As there has been a
longstanding dispute regarding the relationship of aesthetic appreciation with
sense pleasure, so there has more recently emerged a dispute between those who
defend a cognitivist, science based theory of aesthetic appreciation as over

20. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1964), 316.
21. Ibid., 322f.
68 GALEN A. JOHNSON

against those who defend a theory of direct engagement. The perceptual

approach that we have pursued here correlative with the ontology of Merleau-
Ponty entails that we will best understand aesthetic experience as this sort of per-
ceptual engagement with things and the world.22
The Given: Toward an Aesthetics of Woodworking
The attentive cabinetmaker, like the aesthetic philosopher, never loses the origi-
nal sense of the forest and keenness of its sensuousness, for here derives a “fierce
peace” that is hesitant to name, classify, or speak at all, such as that described by
Barry Lopez in “Children in the Woods.”23 It is an enchanted experience to be
led deep into a woods by a small child to her secret playground in and under the
spreading branches of an ancient beech tree of immense girth that could only
have been formed from life and growth since pre-Revolutionary times. One feels
led by an angel, transported across time and place to an “elsewhere” that graces
us with its peace in which we both lose and find our self.24 As much as for the
painter, the caring craftsman experiences a reciprocity with the wood in which it
is no longer decidable who is speaking and who listening. We remember the
words of Paul Klee that inspired Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind: “In a forest, I
have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I
felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me . . . . I was there, lis-
tening. . . . I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not
want to penetrate it.”25 There are some furniture forms that seem to force the
material, conforming it to a pre-established hegemonic style. It is another matter
to keep silence, to respect and wait on the wood to speak, “Talking to me, not
through me, recognizing that it is I [the wood] alone who lets you sing wood
music. Hitherto shadowy and dumb, I speak to you now as your indispensable
medium.”26 For this sensitivity and respect owed the wood itself, Heidegger pro-
posed the cabinetmaker as an example for understanding thinking itself as a craft.

22. The position taken by Emily Brady in this debate between science based and non-
science based approaches to the aesthetics of nature seems to us appropriate. Brady argues
for an aesthetic that takes its orientation from Kant and stresses perceptual attentiveness and
exploration in addition to four modalities of imagination: exploratory, projective, amplia-
tive, and revelatory. Cf. “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in The
Aesthetics of Natural Environments, 156–69. Also cf. her book, Aesthetics of the Natural
Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Brady’s position stands in
opposition to that of Allen Carlson and somewhat to that of Holmes Rolston III. Cf. Allen
Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Envi-
ronments, 63–75; and, Holmes Rolston III, “The Aesthetic Experience of Forests,” cited
above.
23. Cf. the conclusion of Barry Lopez’s “Children in the Woods,” Crossing Open
Ground (Picador, 1984), 151.
24. For the wonder of this experience, I also dedicate this essay to my younger daughter,
Marjorie, who at the time of that astonishing afternoon when she led me into her secret for-
est playground, was 6 years old.
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader:
Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1993), 129.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 69

The learning of an apprentice is not mere practice to gain facility with tools, nor
acquiring knowledge about the customary forms of furniture. If he is to become a
true cabinetmaker, Heidegger writes, “he makes himself answer and respond
above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within
wood—to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden riches of its
nature.”27 Without this response to what slumbers within wood, the craft will be
only busywork or business. Heidegger did not hesitate to suggest that the wood
“speaks” in quite a similar way that genuine thinking occurs only when a certain
subject matter speaks to a subject: “Thinking is thinking only when it pursues
whatever speaks for a subject.”28
Though the wood speaks, yet the worker of wood eventually must speak as
well and take responsibility for the second life of the trees. The philosopher, like
the woodworker, must “wake up and speak.”29 He must measure and fit the wood
together. It might seem that thereby the woodworker becomes the geometrician
par excellence, and it is true that one must be on intimate terms with mathematics
and the geometrical laws of the square, triangles, rectangles, and circles.30 Our
shops and toolboxes are filled with the practical instruments of geometry. Yet,
ultimately it will not be the geometry that triumphs, but the forms of the human
body and our lives together. In woodworking, our “language of means” may be
geometry and its tools, but the “language of ends” comes from the forms and life
of the human beings that will inhabit our houses, sit in our chairs, and eat at our
tables. The “geometrical-conceptual” organization of space enters into creative
combinations with the “topological-participational” space of our bodily comport-
ment.31 A desk or a dining table is 29 to 30 inches high, and the seat of a chair 17
to 19 inches high, but this is because a desk, a table, and a chair are the obverse
side of a living human body with tasks to perform or in need of rest.
In fitting the wood together to make a piece, the woodworker becomes known
for the integrity of his joints. Joinery really defines the cabinetmaker’s craft. It is
not possible that there be a piece of furniture without the smooth transitions from
one board to another created by the joint. Here we approach something like an
eidetic feature of cabinetry. The mortise and tenon joint is the staple of wood-
working that enables us to stabilize wood fitted together at right angles to form

26. Derek Mahon, “Table Talk,” in The Hunt by Night (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest
University Press, 1983), 27.
27. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 14.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. This is how Merleau-Ponty described the philosopher at the end of his Inaugural Lec-
ture at the Collège de France. Cf. In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James Edie
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 63.
30. For an article on the importance of geometry to the workshop, cf. C. Edward Moore,
“Shop Math: With a little help from Pythagoras,” Fine Woodworking, no. 22 (May/June
1980), 68–70.
31. Cf. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding
of the Place World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 142.
70 GALEN A. JOHNSON

the carcase frame of most furniture. The fit of these joints must be true or the
strength and integrity of the work will be compromised. A joint that is too tight
will, over time, split, and one that is too loose will open up as the glue loses adhe-
sion during aging. Panels rabbeted into the mortise and tenon frame need to be let
float without gluing, for the cells of wood absorb moisture and expand during
periods of high humidity and contract again during low humidity. Though the
tree has died and its moisture dried out in becoming lumber, there remains a cru-
cial relation between the wood and water. The joiner must gauge how the wood
will “breathe,” and as the old woodworkers would say, must be able to “think
like water” and create the tolerances in the joinery accordingly.32
The effects of water on the expansion and contraction of the joints must also
be taken into account in joining the boards that will become the wider top surface
of a piece. The worker must read the end grain of the boards as they have been
cut from the circular rings of the tree, being sure that the boards joined together
for the surface will “breathe” as a unity, and not pull against each other. The ideal
figuring of the top is created by “bookmatching” the joints, creating symmetrical
patterns of graining that make the joints disappear into the figures of the grain
itself. Bookmatching can be created by keeping the boards in numerical order as
they originally come from the mill saw, or where this is not possible, by “resaw-
ing” a thick board into narrower boards that will be placed next to each other as
the pages in a book, unfolding a symmetrical figuring. There is also great plea-
sure, when making the sides of a small case or box, to cut the sides from one sin-
gle board, creating a continuous graining as it runs all the way around the piece,
recapturing the figures of the single, straight board in a four-sided rectangle.
The dovetail is the preferred joint for the sides of drawers because it will tol-
erate the push and pull of wear over the years without pulling apart, as might a
mortise and tenon under similar stress. Sometimes a piece of cabinetry will
require a kind of joinery in which the intersection of the joints is not stabilized,
but needs to move. The hinged joint answers to this need in the joinery of doors,
drop leaf tables, gate leg tables, and moving shelf systems. With the hinge we
come to another eidetic feature of furniture that demonstrates the fluidity of tran-
sition from interior space to exterior space. Not only in modern philosophy, but
in our best social scientists, philosophers of social science, and philosophers of
history, the inside has inevitably been set in opposition to the outside, conscious-
ness to thing. Yet inside and outside are not two unalterably opposed realities,
but flow into one another and out again as two sides of a single fold. What was

32. There is a longstanding controversy with religious overtones regarding cutting the
tails of tenons all the way through the work or leaving them blind, hidden and invisible in-
side the mortise. By stopping the tenon inside the mortise, we are able to hide the unseem-
liness of end grain protruding and marring the finished surface. However, it is easy to see
that this also provides an opening for the unscrupulous woodworker to become sloppy in
the fit of the joints. The Puritan woodworking manuals forbade blind joinery as an opening
to dishonesty and offense against God. Cf. C. W. Hampton and E. Clifford, Planecraft:
Hand Planing (Sheffield, England: C. & J. Hampton, Ltd., 1959), 31.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 71

exterior becomes interior and what was under becomes what is above. There is a
crossing over from inside to outside, from intimacy to strangeness, in the hinges
of our furniture and houses and in the flesh of our bodies and relationships.33 The
movement of hinges and the fluid transition of inside and outside means that it is
better to say, not that our inner and spiritual life is inside us, but in front of us in
the places with which we dwell and the relationships we treasure, or that it is
above us in the sky that lightens and the stars that burn, or that it is beneath us in
the shadows of the dusk, the earth and water that sustain, and the memories of
graves and dead loves. As happened naturally and almost willy-nilly in his dis-
cussion of concepts and their limits in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida began to
speak of the hinge—“but what is a hinge?”34 Philosophy would best draw its
meditations nearer the transitions and interrelationships made possible by the
movement of the hinge, away from the hierarchies, systems, and limits of classi-
cal metaphysics. This is why Merleau-Ponty wrote that the notions of concepts,
ideas, and minds need to be replaced with the notions of “dimensions, articula-
tions, levels, hinges, pivots, configurations.” Then we will say that “the things
are structures, frameworks, the stars of our life: not before us, laid out as perspec-
tive spectacles, but gravitating about us.”35
As we cannot imagine any furniture without joints nor any movement in the
joints without hinges, we cannot imagine a desk or a dresser without drawers. A
desk without drawers is a table, and a dresser without drawers is a chest.36 On the
one hand, drawers are about classifying things, and in the well-made proportions
of a desk or filing cabinet drawer can be enough room to house reliably at our
fingertips an entire world of pre-formed ideas and expectations without a bit of
haziness.37 On the other hand, the drawer can become the symbol of the dull cler-
ical or administrative spirit, and it is easy for a woodworker to understand Karl
Popper’s frustration in producing thirty knee-hole desks with the repetition of at
least some one hundred-eighty drawers. Against such a “dry rationalism,” Henri
Bergson protested when discussing memory in Creative Evolution. “Memory,”
Bergson wrote, “is not the faculty for classifying recollections in a drawer, or
writing them down in a register. Neither register nor drawer exists.”38 If we
slacken our grip on the classifying metaphor of the drawer, we also know that

33. For further elaboration of the meaning of interior and exterior in the philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty, cf. my essay entitled “Inside and Outside: Ontological Considerations,” in
Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. Dorothea
Olkowski and James Morley (Albany, NY: Humanities Press, 1999), 25–34.
34. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), xvii. Also cf. xxv.
35. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 220, 224.
36. I owe to Prof. Ted Toadvine the knowledge that in the history French furniture mak-
ing, dressers and tables as distinct items of furniture evolved from chests.
37. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maraia Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964), 77.
38. Cited in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 75.
72 GALEN A. JOHNSON

drawers are about intimacy. These are places of depth, darkness, and secrets. The
drawers of desks, dressers and chests are the storehouses of our daydreams and
memories, and the intimacy of our personal lives would be impoverished without
these places. The locked drawer that the woodworker creates is witness to our
need for secrecy and speaks less about the violence of possible theft than the
human desire for hiding places. A tumult of dreams and memories floods over us
when we unlock a drawer filled with old correspondence or photographs, or
when we open the perfumed dresser drawer of a departed love. The human spirit
is enlarged in the company of friends, but the human heart also needs its places of
privacy and intimacy, away from the eyes of the world, where we place and pro-
tect our dreams and memories. Like the nests of birds and the shells of snails, like
the small corners and nooks of a house or garret where we curl up to remember
and dream, the making of drawers affords the cabinetmaker the opportunity to
participate in an “aesthetics of hidden things”39 and a philosophy of solitude.
The Gathering: Toward Community in Wood
If we have been led to considerations of intimacy and solitude, this needs to be
set within a larger relief of the communities of wood and woodworking. The first
and second life of trees have, over the years, provided the social bonds and orga-
nizing principles of some well-known communities, the best known of which is
the Shakers.40 The uniqueness of the Shaker style of design is its unusual sim-
plicity and integrity. In the words of Joseph Meacham, “all things ought to be
made according to their order and use.”41 Decoration of any kind was shunned,
and inferior workmanship, superfluous turnings, applied veneers, and carvings
were viewed as wasteful and distracting. The statutes of the community forbade
any craftsman to write or print his name on any article of manufacture. The voca-
tion of the wood and honesty and earnestness of the work were to be the only
things visible in a piece, not a name or trademark. Each tree and board were
thought to have a unique calling and the craftsman was trained to respond to this
call. A Shaker elder, planting his orchard, remarked: “A tree has its wants and
wishes and a man should study them as a teacher watches a child to see what it
can do. If you love a plant, take heed to what it likes. You will be repaid by it.”42

39. Ibid., xxxvii–xxxviii.

40. Led by Mother Ann Lee from Manchester, England, the Shakers or “shaking Quak-
ers” arrived in New York in 1774 and established their founding community at New Leba-
non. By 1850 there were eighteen Shaker colonies in existence, eleven in New England and
New York, and the others in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. From a high of 6000 or so mem-
bers in 1850, their numbers dwindled to about 1000 at the turn of the century, and by the
1970s only two communities were still in existence with about two dozen members at Can-
terbury, New Hampshire and Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Yet, even as the communities them-
selves disappeared, interest in their furniture and principles of handcraft has continued to
grow steadily, and manuals on their furniture abound. Cf. Religion in Wood: A Book of
Shaker Furniture, ed. Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews (Bloomington, IN: In-
diana University Press, 1973).
41. Cf. Alan Gowans, “The Forces Behind the Forms,” in Religion in Wood: A Book of
Shaker Furniture, 12.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 73

The Shakers believed that the forms of their furniture were designed in heaven,
the patterns transmitted to them by angels, and the furniture the Shakers pro-
duced bears a timelessness that unites the generations.43
We should speak of the nature of the social bond itself that can be produced
by the forests among those who work with its gifts. Much of the social bond
comes from a respect for the wood itself. Trees are the most eternal living things
in the universe, and it is a privilege and responsibility to give second life to these
majestic creatures. When Husserl needed an example to persuade us of the ideal
timelessness of noematic meaning (Sinn), it is surely not an accident that he
wrote of the noema-tree that could not be burned, as cited in our opening epi-
gram.44 The age and endurance of some of these trees inspires an awe that is near
to worship of the ancient spirits of the trees, and sacred groves have been estab-
lished and protected. Trees that witnessed the founding of America still sur-
vive.45 Beeches from the time of Robin Hood still populate the forests of
England, with their smooth, gray bark now carved with initials, dates, hearts and
arrows. The Sequoia redwoods of southern California achieve ages between 600
and 1300 years, the cedars of Lebanon and olive trees of Israel are 2000 to 3000
years old, witness to the events of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and the
Yaku sagi cedars on the island of Yaku off the coast of Kyushu, Japan are over
5000 years old, dating from the time of the Vedic sacred writings. In the forests,
we encounter a “deep time” that is paleontological. Holmes Rolston III has spo-
ken of his awe in encountering the Petrified Forest in Arizona where tens of thou-
sands of rock logs are strewn across the desert, “relics of trees living when the
region was tropical forest 225 million years ago.”46 Bachelard has written of the
immensity of the forest, which on the one hand is about spatial depth “going
deeper and deeper into a limitless world,” and on the other hand is also about
temporal depth: “the forest is immediately sacred, sacred by virtue of the tradi-
tion of its nature, far from all history of men.”47
The community experience of woodworking is thus an experience of “the
given.” Together with the gift of the wood we also receive the givens of the tools
and problem-solutions of generations and centuries of craft workers. The tradi-
tion of the hand plane, for example, goes back to the ancient Egyptians and
Romans, and together with it the implements and techniques of sharpening.48

42. Religion in Wood, x.

43. Alan Gowans, “Spiritual Functionalism in Shaker Furniture,” in Religion in Wood,
17.
44. The quotation is from Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Ac-
ademic Publishers, 1982), 216.
45. Cf. Charles Edgar Randall and Henry Clepper, Famous and Historic Trees (Wash-
ington, D.C.:The American Forestry Association, 1977).
46. Holmes Rolston III, “The Aesthetic Experience of Forests,” 183–84.
47. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 185, 186.
48. Cf. “The History of the Plane,” in Planecraft, 8–9.
74 GALEN A. JOHNSON

Having been given so much, the woodworker respects and cares for those for
whom the furniture is built, and desires to give in return as well-crafted hand-
made objects as possible. Once I was searching for a special wood to make some
small gifts for persons for whom I cared, and a local woodworker gave me some
beautifully figured boards of walnut. I thought I should pay him, but instead he
asked me to make two or three of the gifts for him as well. The walnut was grown
by another Rhode Islander who is a stranger to me but who planted five walnut
trees when he was young. By the time the trees could be harvested, he felt too old
and tired to work the wood, and gave the trees to the Saunderstown woodworker,
who had them cut and milled, and who in turn gave some of the wood to me. In
this way, when the gifts were made they came into the hands of family and
friends three times given, passed through three sets of woodworkers’ hands and
never sold. Such experiences that blend place, time and craft with the givens of
the trees are far from everyday. But in such experiences are conjoined all the
pleasures of the wood and the pleasure of a bond with others that is a sometimes
visible, and if not visible, always an invisible, embrace.
“Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build,” Heidegger has
famously written. Speaking of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, he wrote that “it
designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their jour-
ney through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools
and frames as things, built the farmhouse.”49 At Walden, Henry David Thoreau
built not only his humble and honest hut, but also part of his simple, spare furni-
ture: a bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs.50 Though he writes that “none is so
poor that he need sit on a pumpkin,” yet the life of simplicity for which he advo-
cated is hostile to an excess of furniture: “Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I
can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse.”51 Nevertheless, as his own
carpenter, Thoreau argues that there is the same fitness in building one’s own
house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows, he asks, if
human beings “constructed their dwellings with their own hands . . . the poetic
faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing as they are so
engaged?” Architectural beauty grows gradually from within outward from the
character of the indweller, Thoreau finds, out of some “unconscious truthfulness
and nobleness,” and whatever architectural beauty is produced will be preceded
by a “like unconscious beauty of life.”52 Therefore, it was not at all accidental
that Thoreau ended Walden with a metaphor of life drawn from forest and furni-

49. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writ-
ings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977), 338.
50. Cf. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 62. Thoreau does not specify which pieces he made himself; he notes that
“the rest cost me nothing,” and adds that “there is plenty of such chairs as Iike best in the
village garrets to be had for taking them away.” This may imply that it was the chairs that
Thoreau did not make.
51. Ibid., 63.
52. Ibid., 44, 45–46.
 FOREST AND PHILOSOPHY 75

ture. To be precise, it is the penultimate metaphor, for he truly concludes the

book with the metaphor of the sun at dawn. But it is the forest and furniture that
gets him to that dawn. The story is of a strong and beautiful bug that came out of
an old apple-tree table that had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in
Connecticut, next in Massachusetts. The glorious insect emerged from an egg
deposited in the living apple-tree many years earlier while it was still in its first
life before it was harvested. For sixty years after the creation of the second life of
that apple-tree as a kitchen table, the beautiful bug had lain dormant abiding its
time buried within the wood. Thoreau asks: Who does not feel his faith in resur-
rection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? “Who knows what beau-
tiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric
layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society . . . may unexpectedly come
forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its per-
fect summer life at last!” Then, from forest and first life to furniture and dwelling
in second life, Thoreau gives us the dawn. “Only that day dawns to which we are
awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”53

53. Ibid., 324–25.