Project Vision 21

In the not-so-distant past, it was said that planting a tree (along with writing a book and having a child) was a clear sign of the stability and maturity of the person who had planted that tree because it indicated a long-term action without expecting anything in return. For this reason, numerous spiritual and philosophical traditions have used the tree as a metaphor for existence.

For example, Seneca (1st century BCE), in his Letter 12 to Lucilius, describes the passage of time by mentioning that, when visiting his old home, he notices that those trees he had planted are already “old” and with large branches. And in On Providence, he compares resilient people to trees capable of withstanding harsh situations.

Even more remarkable, in Letter 33, Seneca compares philosophy to a “forest of ideas,” in which each thinker is a tree. Other philosophers and writers (Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Dante, Descartes, Spinoza, Goethe, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Coccia, among others) have also spoken about trees.

In a recent column, the Spanish philosopher Ariadna Romans emphasized that trees are (paraphrasing) symbols of the wisdom inherent in nature and of an autonomous organization of life. So the act of cutting down trees is both an environmental and philosophical phenomenon, that is, the change in our relationship with the world, time and transcendence.

In that context, the tree is a symbol of time in its complexity. Unlike the straight line of progress or the fleeting instant of our time, the tree is cumulative growth and simultaneous unfolding: it unites its past (roots) with the present (trunk) and its future (branches).

By reducing the tree to a mere resource, we are reducing time to a mere consumable instant, nullifying historical continuity and the projection of the future. And we ourselves become “human resources.”

South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han adds another element when he speaks of the disappearance of the “symbolic forest” in our era of “hypertransparency” and overexposure. Without “trees,” time becomes flat, without roots or shadows where memory can be protected and regenerated. Without memory, identity does not remain either.

From a similar perspective, Professor Shelly Palmer, an expert in new technologies, states in a recent article that we have “stopped seeing the forest of artificial intelligence by seeing only synthetic trees.”

In other words, synthetic trees do not let us see the forest of AI. But the forest of AI does not let us see its trees either. In our society, the obsession with the immediate prevents us from seeing the totality of the change that we are causing in our way of inhabiting the world.

Hence the need for an integral philosophical vision that does not forget either the tree or the forest but rather understands them in their interconnection.

I am not suggesting a nostalgic return to nature, but rather a reconsideration of what it means to be human in a world where nature disappears from human consciousness, leading to oblivion and the felling of a way of thinking and existing.