Arne Naess 1912-2009

Arne Naess, the great ecologist and philosopher, died last month a few weeks short of his 97th birthday.

Here's what I said at his funeral in Oslo:

Arne Naess was a man people love to tell stories about, since he always did his best to trip you up, to do something so outrageous and unexpected, so much so that after a while this is exactly what we came to expect of him. 
On a backpacking trip he once opened up the flavor packet from some freeze-dried dish and announce “we certainly don’t need this” and then our dinner would be just plain, tasteless rice.  Or, once we sat at a fancy dinner at Harvard and a rich, society lady sat next to Arne, trying to engage him in conversation.  When he had absolutely had enough of her banter he just bent his head down, keeping his hands on his knees, and gobbled up a strawberry that was perched atop a grapefruit and gulped it down.  The woman was speechless for the rest of the meal.
Sometimes it was not the best idea to leave Arne alone in the house.  “OK, I’m locking the door,” I said as I left him in my apartment.  “Don’t get into trouble, I’ll be back in an hour.”  When I returned I asked him, “anything happen?”  And he said, “No problems here.  Except that lady in the next building was a bit surprised after I climbed out your window, ascended the fire escape next door, and knocked on her balcony asking her to turn the music down.”  Arne was only about eighty years old at the time.
Such tales of Naess’s irreverance, playfulness, and sometimes just plain rudeness are legion.  But what I value most about him is that as a teacher, he never encouraged students to agree with him or follow his own way of doing things.  “You must,” he would tell me as we were halfway up a cliff somewhere grasping for handholds, “find your own way,” whether on the mountain or in life and work.  His students have not become proselytizers for his particular philosophy.  They are innovators in ecology, criminology, peace studies, nonviolence, literature, the arts, and politics.  There is no Arne Naess school of thought.  That is never what he wanted.
The strongest part of deep ecology works the same way.  To ground a philosophical position in a love for nature, everyone must put forth their own personal principles of what the surrounding world means for them.  This doesn’t mean we should just think whatever we wish, but if we truly want to save the natural world and find a human way to live within it, then we have to believe humanity is understood and developed only upon an understanding that nature is irrefutably at our core.
It is this basic intuition that led Al Gore to write in the 1980s that if we are to save the environment, we must “change the values at the heart of our civilization.”  Over the ensuing decades the former vice-president has worked tirelessly to enable such change, and twenty years later we are beginning to listen to this fundamental insight that emerged from Arne Naess’s idea of deep ecology, which, if I had to summarize it in one sentence, would be my favorite quote:  “The smaller one comes to feel compared to the mountain, the nearer one comes to sharing in its greatness.  I do not know why this is so.”  That captures Arne’s boldness and humility all at once.
Today, even the cautious mainstream of philosophy is starting to listen to Arne Naess.  In his 2007 address to the American Philosophical Association, president Kwame Anthony Appiah praised Naess’s earliest work as the precursor to “experimental philosophy,” the currently in-vogue notion that philosophy must go out into the streets, and find out what people really think instead of imagining in their ivory towers their own out-of-touch ideas.
Well, Arne was always out in the trenches, whether pushing for a moral politics without compromise, or high in the mountains, crossing the stones of value where the air is thin. 
There is another aspect of life that Arne only began to consider seriously in his eighties.  “All my life,” he wrote in Livsfilosofi, a book that became the number one bestseller in Norway in the year 2000.   “I have valued logic and rigor more than emotion.  But perhaps it is feelings that truly matter.”
He always had this side to him, despite efforts to keep it well-hidden.  When I really needed his help, and no one else was willing, he was there.  “Remember,” he told me, “I am still your friend.”  I will never forget that this great philosopher of life also knew how to care.