Learning True Names
In February 2026, I did my best to learn the True Names of all manner of things. With this admittedly strange phrase, I am referring to an exercise inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. In this story, a master wizard shows the main character a humble little plant and says: “When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name”. This is how it’s done: you begin by learning the (conventional) name of something, before perfecting your attunement to it through careful observation across different contexts. Birds, insects, plants, and even the local electrical grid: I did my utmost to come to know what I was looking at.
I feel as though my life has undergone a sharp and deep transformation. On paper, much is the same, I still go on those long daily walks that one might call mental health walks. But the experience has become very different, tremendously exciting and adventurous. What has caused this sea change is that I have integrated “spotting” as a hobby into my life. Bird spotting to be exact. But I do think that the act of “spotting” itself has spiritual implications of its own, aside from what is being spotted. I have taken a first stab at articulating the spiritual benefit of bird-watching as a philosophical exercise – if you do it right, it makes you sensitive to the feeling of wonder for rare things and common things – and I think that this is true of “spotting” in general, regardless of your chosen object. That being said, I am of the opinion that when it comes to philosophical exercises, small differences are consequential, so I don’t think that what you choose to observe is of little importance.
This gave me the idea of what to experiment with this month: what if I changed up my object of observation? I had such excitement and hunger for this spotting hobby that I wanted to learn to observe much more than just birds, I wanted to learn to observe everything! To include as many things as possible in the scope of my learned interest! For this philosophical experiment, I read from an excellent book by two naturalists – veteran spotters – who broadened the scope of my spotting hobby and made clear certain of its implications regarding the natural world. In addition, I made myself a spotter of the local electrical grid, to see how spotting artificial objects might be different from spotting living beings.
Walking the Wonderland (or “Walking the Land” Revisited)
Wonderland: A Year of Britain's Wildlife, Day by Day by Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss (nominative determinism much?) is a very good book, and it was offered to me by someone who knows me very well for two reasons: its structure and its subject matter.
Its “day by day” structure is perfect for lovers of spiritual exercises. Each “diary entry” corresponds to a day of the year. Not only is it easy to read one a day, but you might also synchronize with the book by making sure to read the entry that corresponds with today’s date. I highly recommend it. I skipped the January entries to read the February ones day by day, and this way, the book spoke of my world, as if in real time. I don’t live in Britain, I live in France, but its description of the seasonal wildlife of Britain was quite similar. If it were not, it might still be worth a read: the virtue of the book is less about wow-ing you with particular species & phenomena, and more about instilling a sense of wonder, by modelling the attitude of the wonder-seeker. Though I do think there is something especially good about connecting with the seasons of your particular region.
This brings us to its subject matter: wildlife across the seasons. Each diary entry focuses on a small wonder: an insect, a plant, an animal, a natural phenomenon. Consulting the book daily, and comparing its observations to my own, made a certain recurring theme salient. This theme is something that I knew in the abstract, but that never quite stuck with me in a permanent way. It is the theme of population shifts. Wildlife shifts a lot. Animals migrate, species are driven to extinction, or brought back from near-extinction through intelligent efforts. The seasons change both in the sense of the regular cycle of seasons and in the sense of the dysregulation due to climate change. As a result, wildlife behaviour changes in both those senses as well. As you can see, by allowing me to borrow its expert knowledge to enhance my nature-spotting walks, this book put me in the shoes of someone who knows all the implications of what they are seeing. In many cases, the expert will see the impact of human behaviour on the environment. I used to feel absolutely nothing when learning that a species had gone extinct, but ever since I have been properly guided on the path of wonder-seeking, I now feel the appropriate grief for all that is lost.
This was a real boon to me, and as soon as this boon was bestowed upon me, I recognized it as something that was sorely missing back when I practiced the exercise called Walking the Land. Walking the land consists in immersing yourself in the care-taking of a piece of land, thus experiencing the land’s possibilities, needs, and resistances, and seeing yourself as a caretaker of nature. Back then, the way I attempted this immersion was by picking up trash outside, and by trying to contact fellow humans to help me in this endeavour. I now understand that acquiring knowledge about the land is an absolutely necessary step that I neglected at the time. Or rather, to be more precise, I knew that acquiring knowledge about the land through experience was important, but I didn’t know how to put myself in the proper conditions for this to happen (except that I knew it was important to start somewhere; I should give myself credit for that much!).
The practice of Learning True Names strikes me as the proper way to acquire knowledge about the land you live on. In various myths, you have this idea that things have a True Name, and that if you learn it, you gain power over them. The idea of a “True Name” creates an interesting distinction between a thing’s conventional name and its true being, yet it does not shun the idea of language altogether. In fantasy books like A Wizard of Earthsea or The Name of the Wind, you get the idea that to uncover the true being of something you have to experientially attune to it, precisely, carefully, and thoroughly. If you experientially know the wind in all its forms, then you might know the “name” of the wind. In A Wizard of Earthsea, a wizard gives an intriguing lesson about a little plant called the “fourfoil”: “When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name”. I find it interesting that this path of attunement begins with the “conventional name” of the plant and takes you through the seasons. Learning the conventional name of the plant is a good start: with this label, it is easier to spot the plant later, and to think about it. This is the pre-condition to deepen your attunement. Wizard of Earthsea does not shy away from describing its main character secluded in the “Isolate Tower” learning a myriad of true names from books. Granted, the work in the tower is not how Ursula K. Le Guin depicts fully-fledged wisdom, but it looks like a necessary start, for the character who begins his hero’s journey. After that, you have to go further: you have to follow the phenomenon experientially, across the seasons, through its ineffable shifts. Eventually, you see how inadequate the conventional name is, and I would wager that Le Guin is right when she tells the story of how, by the time you get power over things, you have wisdom enough not to use it all that much.
Learning True Names is what the Wonderland book teaches you to do. I highly recommend it.
Let's now turn to the artifices of the human world.
Biocentric wonder vs. Historical wonder
To push the Spotting/Learning True Names experiment further, I made myself a “spotter” of the local electrical grid. It was interesting to learn how electricity is brought to me for my convenience, and to learn to spot the equipment that makes it possible across town.
How does spotting artificial objects compare to spotting non-human lifeforms? It’s both very different and very similar at the same time.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer remarks that Nussbaum’s biocentric concept of wonder helps us to be open-minded about lifestyle diversity, through the contemplation of the idiosyncratic striving of different lifeforms. I suppose that when I spot artificial things like this, I do not have a very “biocentric” experience of wonder. Instead, all I see is human striving, our very own brand of craftiness. Yet, this opens up equally interesting things.
As Sara Ahmed says “wonder allows us to see the surfaces of the world as made”. You learn to see contingency. The way things are built and set up could have been different. As such, it opens up “historicity”. You start to wonder how things came to be this way, based on what happened in the past.
It is such an interesting experience to go from perceiving a world of artificial objects in the background – a.k.a the “already familiar” (which is to say, not the familiarity of expertise, but the familiarity of not paying attention to what you became used to seeing) – to instead perceiving these same objects and their placement as contingent. All of a sudden, what appeared as “just the way it has to be, I assume”, is revealed as what it always was: political decisions. I learned a bit about how things are set up and how things are ready or not ready for the natural catastrophes that are going to happen more and more due to climate change.
It highlights political decision-making! But it also highlights the elements of nature. Electricity, darkness, cold, wind…. Those are the words that come back when you take an interest in civil engineering, the tacit assumptions behind our human craftiness and solidarity. I find it so very important to be in touch with those elements. In a way, even artificial objects remind us of nature, which is their larger context.
Conclusion: let's keep going
I still have this hunger within me, to learn the True Names of everything. I feel like now that I have started and now that I have had a good taste of biocentric wonder and historical wonder, it’s simply inconceivable to go back. So then, curious about everything, I shall continue to walk the land, to spot what I can, and to try to know what I am looking at.
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, last time, we explored the wonders of bird-watching. Another time, we experimented with learning wise sayings by heart, for example the Sermon on the Mount. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!
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(11/03/2026)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
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