Fourfoil, the little weed

Ruminations on a passage from Ursula K. Le Guin's “A Wizard of Earthsea”.

Near the start of **A Wizard of Earthsea**, we find the protagonist, Ged, walking with his teacher Ogion across the landscape of Gont island. Ged aspires to be what he believes Ogion to be  - a powerful mage - and therefore hopes for spectacular and exciting lessons. What he receives instead is this gem of wisdom, that is as relevant to our world as it is to his.

"'What is that herb by the path?'

'Strawflower.'

'And that?'

'I don't know.'

'Fourfoil, they call it.' Ogion had halted, the copper-shod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, 'What is its use, Master?'

'None I know of.'

Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away.

'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, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a halfmile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent.'"

I’d like to unpack some of the deep philosophy behind this short exchange - as far as words can.

Ogion refers to the ‘true name’ of fourfoil. In Earthsea, magic gains whatever power it has through the uncovering of such names. While the ‘true names’ of most things other than humans are known to the wise, humans are given theirs by a wise man or woman during adolescence (Ged has recently received his from Ogion). Ogion suggests that this name is a symbol of the being of a thing, which is “more than its use”. People keep their ‘true name’ concealed from all but those they trust most, going instead by their ‘use name’.

What does it mean to use a thing? Who gives or withholds the permission to do so? How is that power to permit legitimised? Le Guin explores these socio-political questions in other places, such as The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home. But I want to lean into the epistemological/ontological side - who gets to decide how a thing is named? and what does that mean for how we relate to it?

Immediately, we are in deep waters - how are we (and who is ‘we’?) defining a ‘thing’, i.e. where do we set its boundaries in space, and in time? Different languages may answer this differently, with some focusing more on processes and verbs, while others solidify and immobilise the world into nouns. Is this a dandelion, or a dandelioning? Or is it Taraxacum officinale (a scientific classification in a ‘dead’ language)?

What I want to point to is the way in which naming, whether in language, folk tradition, or scientific investigation, somehow acts as a summarising symbol of a bundle of preconceptions and previous observations. It implies that, if we know the name of a thing, then we have understood it in some sense. There is, in a way, “nothing more to see here, move along now”. But in Le Guin’s terms, what we know in these ways is only its ‘use name(s)’; and unfortunately, that is all that many people want to know. Because for them, all that’s important is its use, and more specifically, the use to which they will put it. It is an object, not a subject; a means, not an end in itself. And this is where we have, as a species, as a civilisation, locked ourselves out of meaningful relationships with the world around us, and paved the way towards our own destruction.

How do we instead slow down, and come respectfully into the presence of another being, without preconceptions? How do we restrain the urge to classify in terms of our own immediate desires and purposes? How do we get closer to the ‘true name’? One simple, yet difficult approach might be - long, patient, respectful, non-invasive observation, which takes seriously the personhood of beings outside of our own species. This attempt to commune with other forms of life and of ‘non-living’ matter is not certain to produce results that will benefit us; and that is exactly why we should be doing it, for we have spent too long thinking only of ourselves.