Experiencing the Elements: Salt-working as Environmental Wisdom

Abstract

Gaston Bachelard brings the forgotten classical elements of earth, water, air and fire back to philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s by writing at least one book dedicated to each of these elements. The elements are not at all what science, for example, chemistry says of them, but something experiential, phenomenological, imaginative, psychological and poetic as they inspire us to live, dream, imagine and think in new ways. This means that, in Bachelard’s view, each element, if we learn to listen to its intimate dreaming within us, can inspire and guide us to develop totally different ideals, passions, beliefs, psychologies, aesthetics, ethics, poetics, and philosophies. The elements are the roots and sources of our experiential world and environment. They are as conditions of possibility constantly bestowing elemental meaning to each and every thought, act and gesture within our lifeworld. Inspired by Bachelard’s phenomenologically oriented elemental poetics we allow the four elements to guide us in researching salt-working as environmental wisdom, that springs out of the relationship that appears in the processes of salt-working among humans and other beings or entities or the environment, the saltworks, in general. One of the methods we use is the phenomenological reduction, epoché, that opens up the experience-centred approach or attitude of “standing in wonder before the world” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). The epoché we use in approaching salt-working is the elemental reduction – a return to the elemental world. The complexity of the relationa-lity between us, “salt-workers”, and the environment, the saltworks, is engaged-with through experience and practice, especially in sensual perception of the environment (David Macauley). This presentation is therefore an elucidation on our attempt to (re)establish an elemental ecophenomenology of the elements as present in salt-working with inquiring into: modes of experiencing the elements, their influence on the relationality of the saltworks, and experiencing salt as the result of the interplay among the four elements, which through concentration are crystallised through and as salt.