Category: Ecology

Spinoza, Goethe, and Liza Dalby

One of my reading groups has just finished reading Goethe’s Faust (both part)—and our discussion reproduced the arguments that book has generated since it first appeared in the world.

To put the mater bluntly: how is it that Faust is saved at the end of the play? He is, for many readers, a “criminal and a madman” (to quote from David Luke’s introduction to the translation we read.) A criminal in his seduction and betrayal of Gretchen, an act that leads directly to four deaths (Gretchen’s mother, her brother, the infant she conceives with Faust, and Gretchen herself.) His repentance for those crimes is unconvincing to many readers.

And he is a madman in his utopian scheme to hold back the sea and create a “paradisal scene,” a “wide new land” where “new human habitations stand” (Part Two, Act V, lines 11087; 11007-8). What might seem a noble enterprise, a desire to provide the necessities and even comforts of life for others, is tainted from the start by Faust’s declared desire: “I want to rule and to possess; what need/Have I of fame? What matters but the deed?” (Part Two, Act IV, lines 10187-88). A desire for eminence, for the commission of “high deeds” (Part Two, Act IV, line 10181), not any investment in the benefits those deeds might produce, drives Faust forward. The point of striving, it would seem, lies simply in the striving, not in its results.

The madness is revealed partly through the hubristic aim of holding back the sea. Faust tells us that he hates the sea’s “barren will,” the way that it ceaselessly comes forward, only to withdraw, with “not a thing achieved,” “this useless elemental energy!/And so my spirit dares new wings to span:/This I would fight, and conquer if I can” (Part Two, Act IV, 10217; 10219-10222.) He appears completely unaware that his own “striving” is just as pointless, just as wrapped up in the ceaseless expression of energy, and never oriented toward an actual accomplishment.

The madness (which now seems characteristic of modern men) also entails this fight against natural processes, this urge to dominate them, to install a humanly imposed order that brings nature to heel. Only shortly before (at the beginning of Act IV), Faust has recognized that Nature is a power that is separate from and indifferent to human concerns. “When Nature’s reign began, pure and self-grounded/Then this terrestrial globe it shaped and rounded . . . .Thus Nature takes her pleasure, never troubling/With all your crazy swirl and boil and bubbling” (Part Two, Act IV, lines 10097-8; 10105-6). Perhaps it is this very transcendence that makes humans want to subdue nature; nature’s separateness threatens the human pretension to self-sufficiency and thus becomes insufferable. Nature must be subdued, even while its dominion (not least its imposition of a death that will, without fail, come to all) cannot finally be overcome. Striving to deny its power is mad.

Cancer is natural—and few would say that human efforts to thwart its unfolding is ignoble, crazy, and not worth the effort. So there is some chance that Goethe actually endorses Faust’s ambitions, that Goethe sees the efforts of modern man to harness nature’s energies and processes as laudable striving, even if the effort is bound to only limited successes. Here’s how we might ventriloquize a certain (Usually masculine) vision of “life” and the position of humans within it: “We humans are at war with the nature that brings cancer and death; romantic notions of living in harmony with nature are nonsensical delusions, blind to the destructive forces embedded in nature, in the war of all against all that is nature’s primary law. Striving is the only way forward; conflict the way new things, perhaps even better ones, are brought into the world. Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things.” We are doomed to striving, to kicking against the pricks, and it’s sentimental nonsense to call that striving “madness” and think we can find some modus vivendi with the nature that is out to kill us. Similarly, full human potential is only unleashed in competition, in striving against others.”

On that reading, Faust is saved precisely because his restless striving is the right way to live—irrespective of the results of that striving. A life is only fully lived when the self expresses its vital energies, is oriented to “the deed,” with the devil taking the hindmost. Faust’s relentless search for that which might satisfy him should be applauded—while we also admit the harsh fact that his striving will bring him into conflict not only with nature but also with other human beings. Life is a contact sport—and some people (nay, all people) are going to get hurt.

That “positive” reading of Faust and his striving is going to lead me to Spinoza. But two additional thoughts first. 1. The case for a negative reading of Faust, for the conclusion that he is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (the famous description of Byron), is cemented (it seems to me) by his covetousness once he has created his dominion grabbed from the sea. We are told that his land’s creation required “human sacrifice” (Part Two, Act V, line 11128). But, again, that might be read as simply the acceptance that there is no making of an omelet with breaking some eggs. (It is often claimed that sentiment was expressed by Stalin; but, in fact, I have only seen it stated explicitly by the British politician and imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, father of the appeaser Neville Chamberlain.) More damning is Faust’s inability to tolerate that others might have dominion over their own patches of land, no matter how small. He must uproot Baucis and Philemon. Even as he gazes over his “masterpiece of man’s creation,” Faust feels the “sharpest torment: what/A rich man feels he has not got!” “Their stubbornness, their opposition/Ruins my finest acquisition/And in fierce agony I must/Grow weary of being just” (Part Two, Act V, lines 11248; 11251-2; 11269-72).

The result of this “fierce agony” is a reprise of the ending of Part One. Once again, Faust is the agent of death; in clearing Baucis and Philemon off the land, they are killed. Faust, once again, expresses remorse at the deaths he has caused, but just as in the case of Gretchen, he has acted on despicable motives (seduction in the one case, covetousness in the other) and, thus, seems unworthy of the reader’s sympathy or approbation. And most certainly unworthy of the salvation that is extended to him in the scenes immediately following the deaths of Baucis and Philemon.

The second point revolves around the question of forgiveness. To put it bluntly: must forgiveness be “earned?” The “negative” reading of Faust, it seems to me, hinges on this question. Some price—be it true repentance or some form of punishment—must be exacted before forgiveness is extended. To put it that way can seem niggardly. Why not imagine someone of such magnanimity that forgiveness is offered without demanding a quid pro quo? Presumably, that’s what is imagined in some Christian versions of “grace.” The worthiness of the sinner is neither here nor there. And I do think that Goethe, in the final analysis, does not believe in hell. He believes that all are saved. We are all humans, and are all worthy of love—and to be loved.

A hard doctrine, this universal forgiveness. (So hard, in fact, that most versions of Christianity take the exact opposite course—emphasizing how many are damned, how the reprobate fully deserve eternal torment, how there are very many that even a merciful god must consign to the fires of hell.) Are we really going to let people—concretely, Faust—get away with murder? No final responsibility? No accounting? Just forgiveness and love extended to all?

The “positive” reading of Faust might just have to land in that hard place. Maybe not, maybe you can make some kind of case that Faust goes through some process, some set of changes, that makes him worthy of salvation by the end. But it seems to me that case is very difficult, if not impossible, to make. After all, both parts of the play end with him causing deaths that he regrets but also evades all the consequences of.

More plausible is the idea that Goethe is displaying the inevitably conflictual core of life on earth. All must navigate those conflicts; none are innocent, but (equally) none are guilty. Humans are just dealing with the deck they have been dealt, striving to find a path through the violence. They can’t be blamed for that.

Enter Spinoza. Specifically, what gets called (by commentators on Spinoza’s philosophy), the “conatus doctrine.” In Book III of the Ethics (Proposition 6), Spinoza writes: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being.” Note the key word “strive.”

In some ways, conatus can seem a principle of self-preservation, or even a statement about inertia, about the way that things, conservatively, attempt to maintain the present state of things. In Goethe, however, the notion of a thing’s “own being” takes on a temporal dimension. A thing moves toward, develops through the course of a lifetime, its character, its characteristic mode of being. This variant of conatus is captured in the term entelechy, defined as “the realization of potential,: or, more elaborately, as “the vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.”

In short, Goethe places one’s “own being,” one’s identity (in the most profound sense of that term), out in front of us, something to strive for, something to be achieved. (Miles Davis: “it takes a whole lifetime to sound like oneself.”) Goethe thus stands at the beginning of the German obsession with Bildung, a word it is hard to translate since it encompasses education, culture, and growth/formation of character. (Recall the biological sense of the word “culture” to capture the sense of the environment in which an individual grows.)

Faust, understood this way, is striving toward achieving himself. When he reaches that destination, he will tell the moment to “stop.” He will have arrived. But his challenge to the devil is to declare that that moment will never come; he will never arrive. There will always be more about himself to be discovered/uncovered. He contains multitudes and wants, with the devil’s assistance, to experience all those potential selves that he harbors. He cannot exhaust himself, he believes.

That’s one way to describe Faust’s insatiable hunger. We might call that the “inward” path; diving deeper into himself, he will find all that he can possibly be. And there is good reason to think that part of Goethe (at least) believes that multiplicity will never cohere, will never coalesce into some distinctive or unified identity. It’s all fragments all the way down—a point of view the disparate Part Two drives home with a vengeance. Life is a picaresque, an odyssey of disconnected incidents, not the well unified plot described in Aristotle’s Poetics. To taste it all is Faust’s ambition, and to say there will never be a moment that serves as a culmination, as an arrival point, is to say that all the moments have their pleasures and their pains, their sufficiencies and their lacks. There is always reason to move on.

But—and here my discussion will take another turn—there is also the “outward” path. Goethe’s Faust, it seems to me, also asserts that human life, the life lived on earth, is shadowed throughout by another, spiritual, realm. Faust’s restlessness, after all, is not just his desire to plumb his unexplored depths, but also his hunger for connection to the spiritual powers he senses all about him. His frustration with his studies and with his life more generally comes from his inability to break through this mundane, material existence to the spiritual realm beyond it. His striving is for the more than human, for Nature with a capital N, or for God.

We come back to Spinoza here. The “own being” that conatus strives to preserve is not self-created. That being has been implanted in us. It is the divine spark within—the indwelling being that will align us with Nature/God. Spinoza is a pantheist; that is, every component of creation partakes of the godhead. Peace (and freedom in Spinoza’s idiosyncratic definition of freedom) comes when the alignment of part with whole is seamless. (Dante: “In His will, our peace.) We achieve our own being in Spinoza when, and only when, there is no difference, no gap, between the “all” and my individual being.

I don’t think that’s where Goethe is. Faust strives to make contact with the “all,” but I don’t think the goal is to be subsumed into that all. Goethe is too invested in the quest, in the journey, in the striving prior to any arrival. (This, obviously, returns us, on a different level, to the disinterest in results and consequences that Faust evidences.) The energy that conatus points toward, the “vital principle,” is Goethe’s focus—which helps explain why Goethe can be so important to Nietzsche. Life expressing itself through deed is what Goethe seems (at least some of the time) to be celebrating—without any concern for ordinary standards of good and evil. Life as a blind force, but one that should not be reined in by notions of morality, or good taste, or “civilization.” To put it that way takes Goethe too far in Nietzsche’s direction no doubt, but the hint is there. The “spiritual,” in this reading, would then be the vital energies of the universe at large, energies that dwarf human attempts to understand, corral, or moralize them. The whirlwind from the book of Job.

Goethe believes (I am arguing) that this world is shadowed by a spiritual one—and that human “hunger” is generated by the desire to contact that other world. The form taken by the effort to appease that hunger in Faust seems aggressively, even toxically, masculine—with the stress on conflict and the indifference to collateral damage. By the time we get to Nietzsche, striving looks not only toxic, but pathological, all too obviously compensatory for felt (and feared) weaknesses.

All of which reminds us that Goethe’s play is shadowed by something else besides a spiritual realm: namely, the feminine. From Gretchen through “the Mothers” and Helen of Troy to the penitent women of the last scenes, there is the mysterious, never fully developed, presence of women who offer our hyper-masculine hero the glimpse of an alternative path. In one way, the feminine is the possibility of unqualified love. If forgiveness need not be earned, but is simply granted by magnanimous grace, then it is woman who are expected to extend that forgiveness, expected to love without any question of desert. (James Joyce in Ulysses on maternal love as the only sure thing in the world, and the only thing one does not have to earn or deserve in any way whatsoever.) Salvation is through the feminine, through the forgiveness and love that the feminine gives freely, not through the rather pathetic, vain-glorious, striving of the male. The loving Christian god is a woman.

The feminine in Faust offers at least two things. One: the possibility that development might not be through conflict, but instead through the unleashing of potential through the enabling affirmation of love. Is it really competition that yields our best selves? Why not insist that cooperation and encouragement are better catalysts of human achievement? Why is striving to work together, to delight in the talents of others, considered weak and sentimental, scorned as “feminine?”

The second possibility is finding fulfillment in having children, which also entails a reconciliation to the fact of one’s own death. The world will be handed on to one’s progeny. Women in Faust are associated with the mystery of birth. The mysterious “Mothers” of Part Two, Act One are the ineffable origin of all things, terrifying but fecund. And Helen and Faust give birth to a son, Euphorion, in Part Two, Act Three. But becoming a parent proves a path not taken for Faust. Instead of yielding the world to his son, we have a reversal of the usual (natural?) course of things. The son dies before the father, so that Faust does not experience the kind of love that gives of oneself to one’s child, a love that eschews the Oedipal conflict on which Freud focused, choosing instead not to fight with the loved one. (Freud, like Joyce, idealized maternal love, declaring that the only pure love in the world was of the mother for her eldest son.)

This gendered division of labor (where women love, and men conflict/compete) is obnoxious for all kinds of reasons, not least of all for its reserving all possibility of heroic action to men. Women just get to sit around and wait for the man to come home—and then to salve his wounds, his frustrated pride, and provide unquestioning love. Women are just stepping stones toward something else: salvation. But within that gendered division lies the sense that maybe the heroic ideal, the emphasis on deeds above all else, is nuts, can only lead to endless restlessness and striving. Heroic striving is not the path to salvation. How else to read the ending of Faust, the need for feminine intervention on Faust’s behalf? Perhaps endless restlessness and striving are not worthy of celebration, but should be jettisoned for a more sane, a more satisfying, affirmation of what is there in front of us. What if, in fact, humans don’t need to be saved, don’t need to be transported to some “elsewhere,” whether that be some other-worldly spiritual realm or just some imagined utopia where the sea has been held back? The surrender we are looking for is not to the overwhelming energy/power of some god or to some utopian vision of what our human ingenuity can produce, but to the possibility of satisfaction with what human life can afford: a circumscribed place shared with loved others. That, after all, is exactly what Baucis and Philemon represent: the non-heroic and its joys.

In other words, maybe what we need is to change the scale of our desires and our actions, to stop imagining global transformations, or titanic conflicts with forces of good and evil, or momentous encounters with powers beyond the human. A more modest focus has been coded as “feminine” with Western cultures; women represent love and the domestic; men represent striving out in the “wider world.” I don’t know enough about Eastern cultures to claim they assign men and women to different roles than we do in the West. What I do know is that Western writers from Thoreau on have turned to the East when they have wanted to deflate the masculine discourse of heroic action and have tried to emphasize, instead, a quieter attention to the here and now, to achieve a peacefulness that contrasts to a restlessness that they deem more dysfunctional than admirable.

Which brings me to Liza Dalby. I have just finished reading her almanac cum memoir, East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (University of California Press, 2007). Dalby (originally from Indiana) has spent almost half her lifetime immersed in Japanese culture. She is also an avid gardener. Her book travels through a single year, following an ancient Chinese almanac that has been widely adopted (with some alterations) by the Japanese. The point of the almanac is to be attuned to the changes in meteorological conditions as the year unfolds. Such changes are, of course, crucial to the farmer and the gardener, indicating what plants will thrive at different times. The almanac divides the year into 72 five-day parcels, and offers a natural occurrence that signals where each parcel fits into a full year’s cycle through the seasons.

Crucially, the gardener (and farmer) is not someone who lets nature take its course. Instead, there is a partnership. The gardener must respect the natural processes that are inevitable. You can complain about the weather, but there isn’t much you can do about it. Instead, you need to be sensitive to the unfolding weather—and shape your gardening practices toward achieving what the weather makes possible. (The same goes, of course, for other natural factors such as soil, parasites, and weeds.) Dalby is no romantic; like any gardener, she knows that nature can be destructive as well as creative, and that the squirrels will eat her persimmons, and the hawks will eat the squirrels. It is not so much a question of living in some idealized “harmony” with an abstract nature as it a constant attention to a multitude of natural processes with which to contend, taking what those processes afford (make possible) and taking precautions (not all of which will succeed) against what those processes will destroy. Carving out a garden amidst the diverse energies and contentions that constitute an eco-system. No monotheism here (no God, no Nature), but a full panoply of actors, human and non-human–and the need to navigate among them.

What I like about Dalby (and here she is very distinct from Thoreau) is how resolutely secular she is. (I have no idea if this secularity is characteristic of the Japanese or not, even as she derives much of her stance toward life from Japanese sources.) She does not see herself as getting in touch with some distinctive (or personified) powers in her attention to natural processes. This is just the world in which she has landed, one in which the seasons change in ways that are simultaneously predictable and not. August will be warmer than February, but more exact predictions are chancy. The almanac provides some clues about what to look out for, but the real work is in being attentive to what is in front of you. Harder work, much harder work, than we usually realize. With our heads in the clouds, dreaming of spiritual elsewheres or enchanted by visions of what tomorrow will bring, attending to, living in, the present eludes us.

That there is nothing else except what is right there before us is, perhaps, the hardest lesson to learn. Of course, Dalby’s urge to keep her diary, to write a book, violates complete immersion in the present. She needs to preserve something of the passing moment, and she needs to feel there is an audience to her witnessing for the present. Still, the injunction to “pay attention” is important to her—and is offered as the best (the only?) path toward rendering life satisfying, interesting, perhaps even worth living. We won’t find meaning some place else if we do not find it in the present.

“A full century has passed since Hearn’s lament that Japan would end up as a dull copy of the West, yet it seems to me that the Japanese attention to seasonality has, if anything, become stronger. Sharpening our senses, aware of the seasons, we can be more present in the world. Once absorbed, this way of looking at things reveals interest everywhere–even in a junkyard, making wind chimes in California” (Dalby, p. 155).

Ontological Egalitarianism, Or, Can We Derive an Ethics from “Life”

My colleague and friend Matthew Taylor has a terrific essay in the current issue of PMLA (Vol. 135, No. 3: 474-491 [May 2020]). His topic is the “new materialism,” aka “the ontological turn,” although it also crops up under various other aliases.

Most simply put, the “new materialism” declares that all matter is animate; humans lived surrounded by other entities that should be recognized as having agency, as possessing “life.” Specifically, all things act to sustain themselves, perhaps even to better themselves (William James’ meliorism). One version is Latour’s “trajectories of subsistence” contrasted to a more static notion of “substance.” The idea is a) to reduce any qualitative distinction between humans and other entities; and b) to introduce a dynamic interactive web of relationships in which both humans and non-humans are entangled to replace the more traditional subject/object split where activity resides in the human subject who works upon passive material objects. In that traditional view, all the entities have their stable identities, their essences, their abiding substance.

Matt’s essay ties current thinking along these lines back to the “philosophies of life” current in the post-Darwinian intellectual world of (roughly) 1870 to 1920. I am more familiar with the characterization of Bergson, Nietzsche, James, Pater, and Whitehead as champions of “life.” Matt shows how “hylozoism” or “panpsychism” (basically, the assertion that all matter is “alive”) was the prevailing view of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century biology as well. From this point of view, Nietzsche does not look like an outlier, a lonely rebel (as he loved to portray himself), but very much in tune with the dominant intellectual orthodoxies of his time.

Current day versions of hylozoism often think there is an ethical pay-off. There are two ways to go in an ethical direction from the assertion that all matter is alive. First, you can preach a deontological respect for “life,” basically extending the Kantian “kingdom of ends” to include everything—thus erasing the privilege of “the human” to arrive at “posthumanism.” Second, you can use life (as Ruskin wants to do in “Unto the Last”) as your ethical standard. Whatever promotes life is good; whatever harms life is bad.

In both cases, it is easy to see that the ethicists among the new materialists are driven by a concern about climate change. The “respect” position addresses the massive extinctions of our era and bemoans an exclusionary focus on what is good for humans.

The “promotion of life” position is basically utilitarian. We judge actions in terms of whether they serve the interests of life—or not. Since climate change will be a disaster (is already a disaster) for many varieties of life (human and non-human), it is ethically wrong to perform actions that fail to work against that change.

Matt is having none of it. He does not think you can derive an ethics from an allegiance to life. I want to consider his reasons for this conclusion—some of which I agree with and others that I want to resist.

He presents four major arguments (as I understand the essay).

1. There is a central—and fatal—imprecision lurking in the term “life.” No one is ever able to nail down just what “life” means or entails. It is hard to deploy something so vague as a standard. I don’t quite know what to do with this argument, so will leave it be.

A different, but related, argument along these lines seems to me to have real bite. If you say mountains are alive as are protozoa as are human beings, you obviously need to have a very capacious (and perhaps vacuous) notion of life. However, at the same time, you can’t simply ignore the differences between mountains, protozoa, and humans. Inevitably (in other words), forms of life are going to be differentiated within the overarching category of life. And Matt argues that this differentiation will lead to a hierarchy; some things will be deemed “more alive” than others; there will be “degrees” of life.

This is the familiar post-structuralist insistence that wherever there is difference, there will be the privileging of one term over the others. Humans just aren’t equipped (mentally? in terms of the deep structures of thought?) to be egalitarians. I have always been suspicious of this transcendental move—transcendental because it posits a fundamental form that is endemic to all human mental processes. I always suspect “false necessity” at such junctures. Why can’t we equally value things that we recognize to be different? I don’t see any logical or ontological or psychological impediment to that possibility.

2. But Matt has a much better argument for the inevitability of hierarchy. Ethics, he says, requires judgments about better and worse. You don’t have an ethics is you have a pure egalitarianism. If you value life, then you must declare some actions harmful to life, even as you applaud others as life-sustaining or promoting. What is our stance going to be toward the mosquitos that carry malaria, the ticks that carry Lyme disease, and the virus that causes COVID-19, not to mention white supremacists? How are we going to avoid valuing some forms of life over others when some agents pose a threat to other agents? In other words, the new ontology repeats the classic liberal mistake of imagining a conflict-free world. But ethics is precisely about conflict—about choosing between competing visions of the good. The mosquito who infects me is pursuing life; from its point of view, its actions are not harmful.

This insistence that ethics must take sides, cannot be universally affirmative, is deeply troubling. For one thing, this insistence is at the root of many tragic and conservative worldviews. The tragic version is highlighted in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Freud expresses outrage in that text at the Christian injunction to love one’s enemies. Such an injunction takes away the very meaning of love, Freud says. As Yeats puts it, “hearts are to be earned, not had.” But Freud adds that our only bestowing our love in some cases goes hand-in-hand with our aggressive feelings (and actions) toward those we cannot (or will not) love. And numbered among those we cannot love is our own self. The superego’s aggression is directed at myself—as well as at my “enemies.”

Ethics—the self-righteous attempt to justify our aggressions—hoists us on own petard even as it stands as the crippling condition of an unending and inescapable tragedy: the tragedy of our uncontrolled and uncontrollable aggression.

Conservative thought holds onto the self-righteousness that the tragic vision (which deems all humans trapped in the same play) eschews. Conservatives hold onto a strong version of the righteous few and the reprobate many; they scorn the idea of “social justice” precisely because it would bestow benefits on the unworthy. Justice is about getting what you deserve—and thus the equal distribution of any good (whether it be health care, a decent education, or a basic income) is an outrage against morality.

The liberal/left tries to use the notion of “social justice” to place some things out of the conflict zone. The liberal must avoid the mistake of wishing away conflict, even as she tries to develop strategies for its mitigation. More on that later in this post. For now, Matt’s point against the new ontologists is well-taken. A univeralist ethos of respect for all forms of life sounds wonderful, but it is so general, so vague, that it can’t stand up for very long when actually encountering facts on the ground. “Life” pits some forms of life against others, so “life” itself can’t be the standard for adjudicating those conflicts.

3. This last point—that “life” can’t be the standard—leads Matt to adopt a strict fact/value dichotomy. You can’t read values out of “life” (or “nature”) is his fairly explicit position. “Justice” or “equality” or even “reverence for life” are human notions; there is no evidence at all (in Matt’s view) that the world or nature or some basic “life force” cares for any of those human values. Life carelessly and prodigally deals out death.

Life, we might say, is deaf and mute. It has nothing to say to us—and cannot hear anything we say to it. Humans, like the other life forms identified/celebrated by the new ontology, are the random, utterly contingent, result of long evolutionary processes that were not aiming to produce what ended up being produced. If ethical ideals are going to get any purchase in this evolutionary production, then it will because humans act to make their ethical values effective.

I want to be careful about adopting fact/value canyons. I am going to skip that can of worms here, only gesturing toward my intuition that the dichotomy functions differently in different contexts, and should be resisted in some of those contexts. But in this ontological context, I am inclined to accept a fairly drastic nature/human split. I am uncomfortable doing so, but don’t see a good alternative.

Two observations underline my willingness to accept that nature and life are amoral, while the human is the realm of value and moral judgments. The first is that we humans are not inclined to morally condemn hurricanes or animals for their destruction of life. We will bemoan the fact that the grizzly bear killed a person, but will not be morally indignant. In other words, we do not hold nature accountable for life-harming actions the way that we do human beings.

The second is the point made so forcefully in Plato’s Euthyphro—and in the scene in Genesis where Abraham bargains with Yahweh about saving Sodom from destruction if a certain number of just inhabitants can be identified there. In both cases, the point is that humans have self-generated standards that they wish/hope/try to get the non-human to adhere to. “Innocence” is a human concept—and the gods and nature are to be condemned when they inflict suffering on the innocent. The ethical standard is being imposed on the non-human—rather than the standard being derived from the non-human. Oedipus at Colonus thus becomes an attempt to save the gods from human condemnation.

The upshot would be a kind of humanism that is hard to evade as long as you want to maintain ethics. Nietzsche, of course, saw this clearly. To escape humanism, you had to go “beyond good and evil” and simply embrace the ruthless indifference of the non-human to human values and to life itself. Wanton destructive indifference, nature red in tooth and claw, is the fact of the matter—and you might as well join ‘em rather than trying to convert them over to (pathetically weak and sentimental) human values. (Of course, there is also plenty of cooperation among living creatures as well, a fact Nietzsche neglects. Sometimes, cooperation proves better than competition in advancing one’s life chances.)

4. Matt also argues that hylozoism almost always leads to a form of Platonism. He doesn’t put it that way. But I think it a fair account of the argument. Basically, the idea is that the general standard (or “form” if we use Platonic vocabulary) of “life” renders every actual instantiation of life an inadequate copy of that ideal. The logic here is endemic to versions of evolution that see each novelty an improvement on what went before. (For that reason, hylozoism in the 1870-1920 period was very, very often tied to eugenics, as Matt demonstrates.) Nietzsche’s “uber-mensch” displays this kind of thinking. The “true” or “ideal” embodiment of life is always out in front of us, which renders current forms unsatisfactory—perhaps even suitable for sacrifice in order to usher in the better future, just as Stalin and Mao murdered millions in the name of a world to come. (But, then again, Christianity committed similar murders long before the justification of a warped Darwinism.)

“Life” thus becomes the bringer of, the justification for, death—an argument found in Foucault and Agamben, but perhaps lurking as well in Arendt’s emphatic contempt for “life.” Certainly, Nietzsche (in another of his guises) points the way here. Platonism and Christianity preach a disregard for, a nihilistic rejection of, the here and now. With Christianity, we get the added hope that a non-human force will “redeem” the human—and the whole world. Against that nihilism, Nietzsche wants to find his way to “affirmation.” How can we affirm what is here before us, instead of whoring after strange gods and wish-fulfilling futures?

I am not convinced that an affirmation of “life” necessarily leads to a denigration of the life currently available. I don’t, in other words, buy the paradox that a stated commitment to life in fact generates a murderous aggression against actually existing life. I am, however, convinced by Matt’s other argument, i.e. that a bland egalitarianism cannot do the ethical work that needs doing.

So how would I propose going forward? At this point, I actually think pushing hard at the fact/value dichotomy might prove productive. We (everything that exists) are not going to be redeemed from the natural (and evolutionary) conditions that set the stage for singular life spans. But there is a social/cultural world that humans construct in their efforts to respond/adapt to that natural setting. That social world develops notions of what a “good” or “flourishing” life looks like (where the notion of flourishing in no way needs to be confined to only human life forms). Life (“bare life”) is a good, but a very minimal one if the means for “flourishing” are not available.

Egalitarianism is tied to ideals of “social justice” when we define what resources are required to afford the possibility of flourishing—and the political/ethical imperative is to work toward social arrangements where those resources are afforded to all.

This is a minimalist position. What goods are needed—clean water and air, enough food, a decent education, health care, security from violence, etc.—to have a life that escapes the sufferings that social arrangements can alleviate? What tribulations are remediable—not in terms of a redemption from the terms of existence, but in terms of having what is needed to cope with those terms? These are questions that can only be answered through political processes of deliberation and negotiation.

The liberal gambit is that providing those necessities to all would mitigate conflict. Yes, there is conflict now over doing such providing. But for many countries the idea of providing health care is no longer a live issue. Constitutionalism is a strategy for removing certain questions from the realm of conflict, of deciding them once and for all. Not a fool-proof strategy, but it works some time for certain issues. And some seemingly dead issues can rise again, zombie fashion.

But the liberal social democrat has this basic agenda: to increasingly make the provision of “basic goods” to all a matter of settled social practice. That is a way to serve “life” without promoting the death of those currently alive. But it is serving “life” in relation to human standards of what a “good” or “flourishing” life requires. So, in that sense, Matt is right to say you can’t derive those standards from life itself.

What about non-human forms of life? What about climate change? I do think that comes back to where I started. We can take the position that respect for all life forms is an ethical imperative—although that will run us into the kinds of problems Matt identifies (namely, that such universal respect is not possible where some life forms actively harm others). The utilitarian position seems more plausible. The new ontology can help cement the lesson that human flourishing is dependent in various ways on the larger ecological network of relations in which humans are embedded. Destroying the planet for short term gain is suicidal. Still, utilitarianism also has its limits. It is not utterly convincing to say humans could not flourish if the snow leopard went extinct. That’s why the deontological argument of respect gets trotted out so often.

Such puzzles remind us that ethical positions—despite the hopes of philosophers like Kant, Bentham, and Rawls—are never logically air-tight. Much more important, in my view, is ethical sensibility. What things outrage us? What things do we admire? Unless unnecessary deaths and lives lived in abject poverty strike us as unacceptable, as demeaning to our human capacities to make life well worth the living, we humans cannot expect either rational arguments nor non-human entities (like “life” or “god”) to generate the ethically affirmable life we claim to desire. Similarly, unless the extinction of the snow leopard strikes us emotionally as a diminishment of the world, we are unlikely to be argued into caring.

Wilding

I still owe myself a long post on Dewey’s aesthetics and my last conversation with Nick Gaskill on that topic. Nick and I are now going to move on to some other writers.

But before I get to that, I have to write at least a short post on Wilding by Isabella Tree (NYRB Books, 2019). My friend John Kucich put me on to this book—and now I have been buying copies for friends. It’s an enlightening read, but (better than that) an exhilarating one. It also gets me out of my rut, having me read something on an entirely new subject for me.

Basically, Tree is narrating the history of the conversion (by herself and her husband) of their large (3500 acres or 5.4 square miles) farm into a nature reserve. They began the process of re-wilding their land in 2000; they own such a huge parcel—just miles from Gatwick Airport in Sussex, England—because her husband is an aristocrat who inherited the family estate that dates back to the 1700s. The estate is called Knepp.

For starters, “nature reserve” is really the wrong term. Basically, the idea of “wilding” or “rewilding” is to get land to return to what it would be without human interference or management. Hence, “return to” is not the right term either. What the land will become if a hands-off approach is taken is unpredictable—and certainly not calculated to be anything that resembles what it might have been in 1650, 1750, 1850, or 1950. The whole environmental context has changed and is always changing. So what you will get if you let things go is just what you will get.

Of course, to say there is no human interference or management is also not completely accurate. For starters, the acreage has to be fenced because one key—and another piece of human interference—is the introduction of animals. Central to the whole project is the establishment of herds of herbivores: deer, cattle, pigs, and ponies. The basic idea is that flora without fauna leads to unbalanced environments. You need to establish the full food chain, from plants, fungi and insects all the way up to carnivores. However, given their locale and the limited footprint, they have not seen fit to introduce carnivores, which means they have to cull their herbivore herds.

Tree is good at describing the various decisions made and their rationale, admitting limitations and set-backs. But mostly the story she tells is of spectacular success—so much so that at times I felt skeptical. But it is a tale of balance—and of intense interaction/interdependency. By not trying to set conditions that would insure the flourishing of this or that endangered species, the result is the emergence of any number of species that were not expected to arrive. What the experiment produces is an astounding wealth of life at every level, from the twenty-two species of dung beetle, to the reappearance of long-departed turtle doves and nightingales, to the flourishing of wild ponies. And the landscape changes from year to year as it rebalances itself in relation to species that had been threatening to become over-dominant and to changes in this year’s as opposed to last year’s weather. The whole story is one of a dynamic eco-system—and that dynamism, with its unanticipated interactions among different players, yields a dramatic tale that makes for a great read.

One big takeaway is that forests thrive when they are subject to constant clearing by herbivores. Tree is adamant the “closed-canopy forests” are not the ideal they are often taken to be. Meadows and marsh-land—what we often see as “scrub”—are richer, more ideal, environments. The pictures in the book show land that is not picturesque or what has come to be considered “beautiful” or “natural” or “untouched” in contemporary sensibilities. A fully occupied landscape—Darwin’s tangled bank—is not
“pretty,” but it is vibrant and teeming with life.

Tree’s book also offers an environmentalist screed. A small part of the critique is directed at certain foibles of the environmentalist community—in particular, targeted conservation efforts that aim at the tunnel-visioned salvation of one or two species instead of taking a holistic approach, and at the whole notion of “invasive species,” as if the evolution of a landscape can be flash-frozen at some chosen moment of time.

But the main target is industrial agriculture and the demented governmental policies (and subsidies) that sustain it. The wilding project itself is not about or enabled by walking away from governmental support. Even if Tree and her husband could not garner governmental monies for their experiment, they still would have to contend with extensive governmental regulation about how they could manage their property. The government (mostly the EU in their case, but also the UK) is neck deep in land management, almost all of it directed toward agricultural productivity. Tree is most convincing that these policies—products of the post-war Green Revolution—are destructive and counter-productive in just about any terms you can imagine: economically, scientifically, environmentally, and in terms of both efficiency and nutrition. It’s a crazy world out there, full of perverse incentives that have trapped farmers into a system that doesn’t serve them well and certainly doesn’t serve the food consuming rest of us.

There’s got to be a better way—and there is. Now it’s a question of re-aligning government policies and governmental monies to put that better way into practice. As always, the obstacles to change are formidable. But Tree certainly makes the case that all involved would be better off if change was effected.

The great thing about the book is that, while awaiting more global change, it is the story of wonderful, tangible success in its own particular locale. Instead of belly-aching about how bad things are, here is someone making things better, offering up a demonstration project of an alternative pathway.

Inevitably, I guess, Knepp has now gone in for eco-tourism. Some way of paying the bills still has to be found. However, in the time-honored English fashion, the grounds are also just free to walk via the footpaths that so often traverse farms in that country. The land itself, like the book about it, invites us to enjoy a world that stands in marked contrast to the one we usually walk in.