Arguing with the Darwinians

In the consciousness literature, Darwin is king. Whatever consciousness is (and there is plenty of disagreement about that), every one in the conversation accepts that consciousness must be a product of a Darwinian process of evolution. There are various competing versions of an evolutionary narrative for the arrival of consciousness on the scene.

In its most extreme versions, panpsychism tries to avoid the sticky problem of identifying the “before” from the “after” moment. The problem for any Darwinian account: once consciousness did not exist, but at a certain point in time it emerged, it arrived. By saying something (just what is unclear) fundamental to consciousness was always already there, the panpsychist tries to sidestep the before/after conundrum; but even the panpsychist has to have a story about how the originating germ of consciousness develops into the full-blown consciousness of humans, higher primates, other mammals, and other creatures. No one is claiming mollusks have a consciousness as fully elaborated as that in chimpanzees. Or that chimpanzees were there at the origins. There still needs to be a story about the elaboration of consciousness from its primitive beginnings into the sophisticated forms displayed in life forms that arrive on the scene at a much later date.

There are two things it would seem any plausible Darwinian account must provide. First, it must provide a plausible bio-chemical account of a) how variants are produced for a process of selection to choose among, and b) the physiological/chemical processes that create consciousness itself. Genetics (most directly random genetic mutations) is assumed to provide most of what is needed to answer the variant question. As for b, a bio-chemical explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness, that such an explanation must exist is generally assumed in the literature, although everyone (with a few exceptions, as always) agrees that we are still a long way away from possessing anything like a complete and satisfactory bio-chemical understanding of consciousness.

I am going to leave these bio-chemical questions aside in this discussion—as do Veit and Humphrey in their books. [Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023).] Instead, I want to focus my attention on the second requirement of any Darwinian account.

Namely, such an account must identify the “advantage(s)” that consciousness would provide to an organism. Only if there are such advantages would consciousness be “selected” for. Since (of course) we don’t get to see the competition between creatures possessing different types and/or degrees of consciousness in real time, we must (as both Veit and Humphrey explicitly state in their books) “reverse engineer” the account of how one possible variant is “selected” over another. Those more skeptical of Darwinian explanations call “reverse engineering” “just-so stories.” Lacking direct evidence, a narrative is produced that assumes the mechanism of natural selection.

Essential to such accounts is functionalism. The writer must identify what consciousness does, what functions it performs, and from that basis argue for those functions as providing advantages in a struggle for existence understood in Darwinian terms. Veit is what might be called a Darwinian fundamentalist. He flatly states “the goal of biological systems is ultimately reproduction” (54); and identifies “the real purpose of the organism, which is to maximize its representation in future populations” (55). Armed with this fundamental and overriding purpose, he can then assess how consciousness would provide a leg up in the effort to “maximize” an organism’s chances for reproductive success. That such an account of “purpose” seems awfully reductive in the face of the wide variety of behavior exhibited by animals and humans does not seem to bother him a bit.

More interesting is Veit’s holistic understanding of the dynamic nature of the organism. He calls his approach “teleonomic”: “organisms are goal-directed systems,” that “evolve to value states and behaviors that increase their own fitness and avoid those that are detrimental to their health” (9). This approach falls in with other recent accounts that rehabilitate an Aristotelean notion of teleological or final causes. The organism is directed toward something—and that something acts as one cause in the action of natural selection. As Veit strongly puts it: “the external factors that matter to the evolutionary trajectory of the organism are themselves causally dependent on the organism” (8). In other words, the organism is not a merely passive recipient of what external environmental and genetic factors produce. The organism’s active pursuit of reproductive advantage guides its own selection process; the organism evaluates what the larger ecological scene makes available and works to exploit the elements in that scene that will serve its purpose(s).

Of course, this approach still must posit an overriding purpose present (innate to) all organisms: the drive for reproductive success. So one complaint I have about such Darwinian theorizing is that natural selection does not get off the ground unless there are randomly produced variants. If we only have clones, then there is no range of actual variants for selection to choose among. Yet the theory allows for no variance in the fundamental purpose of organisms. Everything walks in lock step to the Darwinian command to maximize reproductive success. And that leads to the absurdities of the endless worries about altruism, music, laughter, and play. More and more implausible stories must be told about all of these behaviors to make them serve the overriding Darwinian purpose. Reductionism doesn’t simply haunt Darwinian thought; it appears as absolutely central to such thinking.

Veit cheerfully accepts the hard-core utilitarianism of his approach. “It is thus not unreasonable to treat them [organisms] as economic agents maximizing their utility (i.e. fitness). Each individual within a species is fundamentally faced with a resource allocation problem. . . . This is the economy of nature” (19). Casually swept aside are all the frivolous and downright counter-productive behaviors on view every day in the natural world. The failure of humans and other animals to be reasonable resource maximizers must be ignored or subjected to torturous (and implausible) explanations. Surely the simplest approach here would be to concede that the struggle for life and reproductive success doesn’t consume all of the organism’s time and energy—and the surplus is devoted to activities that don’t further Darwinian goals. But very few of the Darwinian advocates take this easy way out. Of course, it has been a commonplace that it is rich societies (Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England etc.) that witness a flourishing of the arts. The problem is that, in fact, we don’t know of any societies without music and dance. Variety, activities that are hard to account for by a strict Darwinian logic, appear baked in from the beginning.

I am hardly conversant with the vast literature about Darwinian evolution. But I do know that whole books get written about the “problem” of altruism. Whereas, as far as I know, no one takes up what seems to me the much more glaring problem of war. After all, from the standpoint of reproductive success, war (which also seems endemic to all human societies of which we have any record) is a real puzzler. Here’s an activity that places in danger precisely the (male) members of society who are in their prime years for passing on their genes. And it would take a lot of ignoring of facts on the ground to claim that wars are primarily about securing resources necessary to life. Despite the intuitive appeal of the Marxist notion that economics drives everything, wars are not only more often driven by issues of pique, status, and out-group hostility than by the scarcity of resources, but there is also the fact that wars destroy resources rather than augment them. Wars are costly—more like potlatches dedicated to the wholesale destruction of goods and lives than a reasonable way to secure resources. (A side note: Engels realized that Marx and Darwin are at one in their appeals to economic reasoning and in identifying the pursuit of “interests” as the primary motive of “life.”) In short, Darwinian reductionism (as well as its Marxist counterpart) offers little in the way of a plausible explanation for this all too frequent form of human behavior.

I want to end by moving on to more technical concerns about evolutionary accounts. I will quote here from Humphrey’s book. “Since we are discussing evolution, we can assume three guiding principles. First, there must have been a continuous sequence of stages with no unaccountable gaps. Second, every stage must have been viable, at the time, on its own terms. Third, the transition from one stage to the next must always have been an upgrade, adding to the chances of biological survival” (101).

I have trouble with both assumptions one and three. This may come down to semantics, to what exactly is meant by a “new stage.” But let me state my worries.

On number one, I don’t see how unexpected and random genetic mutations (which are the engine of change, of movement from one stage to the next) are “continuous.” It’s the discontinuity of mutations that seems much more obvious. As I say, Humphrey might very well reply that I am misunderstanding the sense in which he is using “continuous.” And, of course, various evolutionary theorists (most famously Stephen Jay Gould) talk of “punctuated equilibrium” to describe the sudden transformations that a genetic mutation can generate. Still, Humphrey seems to think there will be an orderly “sequence” from one evolutionary stage to the next. And that assumption will guide his “reverse engineering” account of the emergence of consciousness. I think this confidence in an orderly sequence is misplaced—and thus makes the strategy of reverse engineering much more problematic. It is harder to tell a story that, as Humphrey understands, has “gaps” that are not easily bridged.

The third assumption we might call the “things get better” thesis. Each stage is an improvement over the last in terms of enhancing “chances for biological survival.” But that way of stating things dismisses variants. I had thought one goal of Darwinian theory is to explain diversity. Variants are produced in the course of reproduction—and some of the variants (hardly all of them, but not just only one of them) prove viable (to use Humphrey’s term). They are viable either because they exploit different ecological niches to secure the necessary resources to sustain life or because they are “good enough” to sustain life even as they differ from other variants. Another way to say this: various traits get produced along the evolutionary track that do not undermine the ability to sustain life drastically enough to cause extinction of the organism carrying that trait. A fairly obvious example is myopia. Hardly a great asset in the “struggle” to survive, but apparently not enough of a deficit to have been discarded along the evolutionary pathway that leads to today’s humans. In short, variants get produced all the time that are not “upgrades.” They are simply not strong enough “downgrades” to prove fatal.

By a similar logic, just as not all features of the organism necessarily make fully positive contributions to the effort to survive, not all features of the organism need be devoted to that effort. The issue, once more, is surplus. Just as the arts (in one reading) can seem irrelevant to the effort to sustain life, so various features of complex organisms may not be contributors to that effort. A hard core Darwinian can consider them “free riders”—and that way of addressing the issue is fairly common in the literature. Knowing how to read is not strictly necessary to survival—but humans get that extra ability because it develops from cognitive abilities that are essential to survival. The problem becomes how do we identify (except by some seat of the pants appeals to what is necessary as opposed to what is “extra”) the abilities required by survival and those that free ride upon it. Going back to war: perhaps we would want to argue that just like reading is a beneficial free rider, war is a disadvantageous one. War, in other words, is an offshoot of some fundamentally necessary component of human physiology/psychology and thus can’t be jettisoned as evolution moves us toward “stages” where our chances our survival are enhanced. Even though war itself decreases chances of reproductive success.

I am hardly claiming that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally mistaken theory. But I am saying that the ham-handed, reductionist accounts of evolution overlook a number of puzzles that should give prevailing mono-causal biases some pause. Furthermore, these puzzles should at least disturb any blithe confidence in “reverse engineering” stories. Introducing a wider array of possible causes into such accounts, along with recognizing the random and disruptive effects of genetic mutations, would certainly complicate matters greatly. But it also might yield more plausible accounts of how an evolutionary history got us the diversity and complexity of the animal and human worlds we can observe in the wide variety of behavior displayed in the present.

Addendum (added January 19, 2024). I have just come across this relevant statement by Daniel Dennett on the error of thinking that evolution always produces enhancements of chances for biological success (quoted from Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, Polity 2021, p. 162):

“It is a fundamental mistake in evolutionary thinking to suppose that whatever ways (ideas, practices, concepts, policies) survived this process must have proven fitness-enhancing for the human species, the lineage, or even the individuals (or groups of individuals) who adopted them. Some, even many, of the established ways (of thinking, of acting) may have been cultural parasites, in effect, exploiting weaknesses in the psychology of their hosts.”

Albert Einstein on the Humanities

A passage from Einstein, lifted from the compilation of his writings titled Ideas and Opinions (New York: Bonanza Books, 1954). Offered without comment.

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he–with his specialized knowledge–more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community.

These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not–or at least not in the main–through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the “humanities” as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.

Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the grounds of immediate usefulness kills the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.

It is also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening him with too much and with too varied subjects (point system). Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality. Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty. (Originally published in the New York Times of October 5, 1952.)

Notes on Consciousness

I have been reading fairly extensively in the literature on consciousness. Stuff written over the past thirty years by philosophers and neuro-biologists. This post simply aims to get down a few specifics about what consciousness is.

This post is derived from two sources: Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023). Both Humphrey and Veit are Darwinians who aim to give an account of how consciousness emerged in the course of evolutionary history. I may take up their Darwinism (which is problematic in my eyes) in a later post. For now I just want to get to how they describe consciousness, since I think they are both admirably clear on that issue and basically convincing. I don’t presume to assess whether they are right. Neither of them (and as far as my reading goes no one else in the world either) has a slam dunk physiological/neurochemical account of consciousness. Instead, they both rely on a phenomenological description (what consciousness feels like and is experienced as) and a functional description (what consciousness does).

Let’s start with Veit. He offers five fundamental functions for consciousness:

1) sensory experience. Consciousness entails being able to process various stimuli that originate outside the organism as well as internal stimuli (such as the sensation of hunger);

2) evaluative. Consciousness provides the ability of an organism to evaluate its environment and react accordingly. That is, the organism does not just receive sensory signals, but also evaluates them.

3) the integration of experiences in the present moment. Consciousness unifies; it takes incoming signals that might be visual, auditory, scents etc. and organizes them into an holistic understanding of the present, of what is before the organism and how its various components stand in relation to one another.

4) the integration of experience across time. Consciousness also unifies across time, weaving together the various experiences at specific moments into a history (or narrative) that specifies the relations between the particulars of individual experiences. (I find this function dubious. Or, better, I would not make such an easy assumption of unity, even if the effort to unify does exist. However, it also seems to me that efforts to unify are also more than happy to dismiss various experiences as irrelevant within certain narrative frames. So, yes, we deploy narratives to organize experiences over time, but I don’t think of the narratives as holistic in the sense of incorporating everything. Lots of stuff doesn’t fit with lots of other stuff, even as some things do go together.)

5) Self-consciousness. This, of course, is the biggie, the holy grail of consciousness studies. How to explain its existence—either by specifying its function in a Darwinian account or by providing a bio-chemical account of its existence. It is a matter of faith for just about everyone writing about consciousness that there is a material, bio-chemical cause of consciousness. Materialism (no non-material facts or substances; thus consciousness must be a material thing) and naturalism (everything that exists does so–and originates–within a natural frame; nothing extraneous to nature) are the default positions for 95% of contemporary philosophers and scientists. But no one has come particularly close to providing such a materialistic account of consciousness, so that a skeptic like Colin McGinn argues that no such account is likely to be given within (to pick an arbitrary number) the next 100 years. Materialism, in other words, is an unproved axiom, an item of faith that gets the whole game rolling.

Humphrey is good at describing self-consciousness. He zeroes in on “sensations” and “qualia.” He writes: “Sensations are basically mental states . . . that track what’s happening at our sense organs.. . . They provide us, as subjects, with information about the quality of the sensory stimulus, its distribution and intensity, its bodily location, and–especially—how we evaluate it: the pain is in my toe and horrible; the red light is at my eyes and stirs me up. But ‘tracking’ this information is only half the story. For, as we can each of us attest, sensations have a qualitative dimension that sets them apart from all other mental states and attitudes. There’s something that our pains, smells, sights, and so on have in common that our thoughts, beliefs, wishes and so on don’t”(2). That something extra is what Humphrey (following common philosophical usage) calls “qualia.” Sights and smells have a bodily dimension that beliefs and wishes seem to lack. (I think this statement wrong, as I will discuss below.) Consciousness for Humphrey is tied to the ability to track, to register, the “feel” of sensations, to not only see the Van Gogh painting, but to register the sensation that accompanies seeing it.

Qualia, then, refers to the “phenomenal quality” of sensations. (page 3). Which leads Humphrey (for a variety of reasons that are generated by empirical studies of things like “blind sight”) to distinguish between “cognitive consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness.” There is plenty of evidence that most organisms can process and then respond to information provided by their senses. But for Humphrey at least there is not evidence that starfish have any consciousness of the “feel” of perceptual experience even as they do respond to sensory input. For biological reasons, he thinks phenomenal consciousness is only available to warm-blooded animals.

He tells us that “consciousness of the kind we are talking about” is present when “sensations [are] represented as having phenomenal properties” (139).

Here’s Humphries three stages of consciousness; he thinks they are evolutionary stages even as there are also organisms in 2023 who are living examples of each stage. “(a) First came sentition—an evaluative motor response to sensory stimulation. 9b) Then came sensation, when animals discovered how to monitor this response so as to arrive at a mental representation of what the stimulations means to them. [Cognitive consciousness.] (c) Then, once the process was privatized and feedback loops established, came phenomenal sensation, with the representation taking on a whole new look” (146).

He elaborates: stage one includes “animals with elementary uncentralized nervous systems, whose behavior is largely reflex and does not involve creative processing of information: for example, sea anemones, starfish, earthworms, slugs” (146).

Stage two are the “’Sub-Sentients.’ They do form mental representations of sensory stimulation and what it means but their sensations lack a phenomenal dimension. I would expect this group to include animals with developed brains that may be capable of intelligent behavior that requires cognitive consciousness. . . . They will, however, have a limited sense of themselves as individuals and will not attribute selfhood or mental states to others; for example, honeybees, octopuses, goldfish, frogs” (147).

Finally, at stage three, we get the “true ‘Sentients.’ They uniquely represent what’s happening at their sense organs as having phenomenal depth. . . . They will be highly intelligent, especially in the social sphere, and have a strong sense of their own individual selfhood; for example: dogs, chimpanzees. parrots, humans” (147).

Note that Humphrey thinks “privatization” is a crucial step toward full phenomenal consciousness. There must be the sense of my sensation and its “feel” as belonging to me. It’s my pain, not yours. But, of course, we can say the same about my thoughts, beliefs, wishes, and desires. It seems odd to claim wishes and beliefs don’t have a “feel” attached to them. Surely, there is a sensation that has a phenomenal quality attached to it when I feel jealous or in love or believe in my country right or wrong. And even though it is difficult, we like to think that evaluation (and subsequent revision) of our beliefs and desires is possible, just as we evaluate (and sometimes revise) what we take to be sensory information.

Humphrey, with his privatization thesis, is strongly committed to self-consciousness. Many of those who write about consciousness take the more Humean position that the “self” is, at the very least, problematic. There is no underlying substance or thing to the temporal flow of sensations, of experience. But Humphrey appears to believe that you can’t have phenomenal awareness unless there is a self to whom the sensations that are registered belongs. I think it fair to say, although he never explicitly says this, that his position is that there is no phenomenal consciousness without selfhood. Phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition of selfhood (as I understand his work). Maybe better to say that phenomenal consciousness creates selfhood. Where phenomenal consciousness is, the self will also be. No phenomenal consciousness without a self accompanying it. Pushing back a bit from the entanglement of phenomenal consciousness with selfhood, all kinds of environmental and biological things have to be in place for phenomenal consciousness to emerge in evolutionary history and to be present in organisms today. That’s Humphrey’s position.

Veit would seem equally committed to a fairly robust notion of the self. Once he assigns consciousness the task of unifying experiences across time, he is flying in the face of Humean atomism. And, of course, Veit accepts without much discussion the basic idea of “self-consciousness.” This is Nagel’s famous “what it feels like to be a bat.” We don’t only have a sensation related to eating a taco; we also have a sensation related to being one’s self. My selfhood has a “feel” to it—and the ability to register and reflect on that “feel” is part of what it is to be conscious. Consciousness is of the self as well as of things that exist outside of and apart from my body.

I am just reporting here. I don’t have enough footing in this whole field to even know what I think is true and what I think dubious. Veit’s five-fold list of functions seems useful to me just because it puts some flesh on the bones, at least points us to some of the capabilities we would be talking about when we appeal to consciousness. And Humphrey’s focus on qualia, on the phenomenal, usefully specifies the on-the-ground experience that undergirds the assertion that consciousness exists in the face of skeptics who think it does not. (Hume may have been skeptical about the self; but he was not skeptical about consciousness; his very distinction between “impressions” and “ideas” presupposes consciousness as the faculty that works upon the “impressions” offered by the encounter with the world.)

One final point for now. Bentham said the only relevant question to ask when developing a hierarchy of beings, from the “lowest” forms to the “higher”, was whether a given being could suffer. All the rest was sophistry in his view. Our relation to other entities should be governed by their ability to suffer. We can do whatever we want to stones because they are insensate. But if clams and goldfish experience pain as something akin to the unpleasant experience we call pain, then we have as absolute an obligation to avoid inflicting pain on them as we do on a two year old human. Nothing in Humphrey’s distinction between stage two and stage three animals suggests that stage two animals are incapable of suffering. The stage one case is a bit more ambiguous; I don’t know what he would say about earthworms and pain.

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).