Yes, Jordan, We Remember When Pride Was a Sin

Jordan Peterson on YouTube (1 July 2022)

 

 

I. 

 

The Canadian psychologist, author, and cultural commentator Jordan Peterson has had his Twitter account suspended for a recent tweet which, apparently, violated their rules governing hateful conduct. The tweet, which I don't wish to discuss in full, opened with the question: Remember when pride was a sin? 

 

It's this line - and Peterson's subsequent defence of the line - which I wish to examine here ...   

 

 

II. 

 

Speaking in a 15 minute video posted on YouTube [1], Peterson acts a little faux-surprised by what he continues to call the ban imposed by Twitter (whilst conceding that, technically, it's no such thing). 

 

He claims - again, somewhat disingenuously - to be uncertain why it is he has had his account suspended by the socal media platform: What was it, that I said, that caused such a fuss? And even more importantly, what exactly was it that I said that resulted in the ban? 

 

Now, Jordan Peterson is a highly intelligent and erudite individual, who chooses his words extremely carefully. So one can be sure that he didn't just post the tweet in a fit of irritation and without thinking; i.e., one can be sure that he knew precisely what he was saying and what the likely response would be. 

 

Peterson claims that his opening statement merely refers us to a time when, as a matter of fact, pride was regarded as a sin. And, yes, okay, there was such a time - a long drawn out period which we might refer to as the Christian era [2] - when pride, along with six other capital vices or deadly sins [3], was contrasted with heavenly virtue. 

 

Indeed, it's even true that pride was thought to be the root cause of all sins, as it's human pride which turns the soul of man away from God. And pride, Peterson reminds us, often comes before a fall into hubris, narcissism, and folly. 

 

Having said that, pride is - like other human emotions - a complex matter (as I'm sure Peterson would be the first to acknowledge). And just as there are those who regard it as a sin, there are others - including Aristotle - who view it positively and as a virtue; i.e., as a justifiable and healthy feeling of self-worth. 

 

Is it not preferable that individuals and groups take pride in themselves, rather than feel shame? I think so [4]. And clearly those within the LGBTQ+ community primarily use the term pride as an antonym for the latter. 

 

Again, I'm sure Peterson is perfectly aware of this, although he openly admits that he does not regard pride as a virtue - which is fine, that's up to him, and, as a Christian devotee of Jung, I wouldn't expect otherwise (the latter insisted that it was through pride that we forever deceive ourselves). 

 

But does Peterson really need to mock what he calls the alphabet acronym used by the above, when it's simply a convenient means of self-referral amongst a diverse group of people?

 

Personally, I don't feel that's necessary - although Peterson doesn't seem to care about hurting anyone's feelings. And besides, he has a moral and professional duty, he says, to warn those who have excessive pride - as well as those who, like me, have read too much degenerate postmodern theory - that we are heading for the Abyss; that the path we are on, in other words, leads rapidly to disaster.  

 

I don't see that sexual orientation, or sexual desire of any sort is something to celebrate or take pride in, says Peterson. Again, that's fair enough and he's entitled to his view. But, as a straight cis male, his sexual orientation and desire hasn't been subject to the same kind of stigma and persecution - hasn't had to overcome centuries of prejudice - so he would say that ...

 

The heteronormative ideal of love that Peterson subscribes to (and practices) - monogamous union between a man and a woman - has always been celebrated and taken to be both that which is natural and that which is blessed by God. He might not take pride in this fact, but he almost certainly draws some sense of identity - and a good deal of moral conceit - from it.     

 

Notes

 

[1] To watch this video on YouTube in which Jordan Peterson discusses his Twitter ban, click here. It's the first five minutes or so that are most relevant to what I discuss here (i.e., the issue of pride).

[2] Strangely, in the video above Peterson seems to suggest that the era in which pride was regarded as a sin only ended a decade ago: see 3.50.  

 

[3] As with the names of the seven dwarves in Snow White, it's often tricky to remember all the sins, so here's a reminder: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. Although not listed in the Bible as such, it's clear that God was not a fan of these things (or the behaviours that result).  

[4] Not that I would wish for people to lose all sense of shame, for shameless people are as irritating as the excessively proud and, interestingly, are often one and the same.

 

 

Reflections on The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From The Pedagogy of Seeing to Burnout Society)

Byung-Chul Han in the documentary film Müdigkeitsgesellschaft - 

Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (dir. Isabella Gresser, 2015) 

Click here to view a trailer, or here to watch the film in full (with English subtitles)

 

 

III. 

 

I believe it was Cato the Elder who said: 

 

'Never is one more active than when doing nothing; never is one less alone than when by one's self.'

 

And I think I know what he means: namely, that the contemplative life - the concept of which was first introduced into philosophy by Aristotle and developed by the Stoics (before being given a Latin twist by Augustine) - is, in terms of Geistigkeit, the most noble form of existence.

 

Anyhoo, let's return to The Burnout Society (2015), in which Byung-Chul Han gives his interpretation of Cato's dictum. I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press.

  

    

IV.

 

The Pedagogy of Seeing

 

Returning to the theme of vita contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han calls on Nietzsche who knew a thing or two about the importance of developing a way of life in which one learns to ignore distractions and resist stimuli. For when one reacts immediately and surrenders to every impulse, one is not only behaving in a vulgar manner, but displaying symptoms of spiritual exhaustion.   

 

However, it's important to note that the vita contemplativa "is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens" [21]; instead, it "offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli" [21]. 

 

In other words, the contemplative life is a sovereign manner of saying No to the world [a]; an active negation of the negative by preferring not to, as Bartleby would have it [b].

 

It's also important to note that it's "an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer" [22]. You're not free if you are obeying every impulse or external stimulus and lack what Nietzsche terms the excluding instincts, without which "action scatters into restless, hyperactive reaction and abreaction" [22]. 

 

It's important to know how to pause and delay; only the machine grinds endlessly on and on and, despite its enormous power, the computer or iPhone is not intelligent; in fact, says Han, it's just a stupid mechanical device insofar as it lacks the ability to daydream.  

 

Perhaps because we can't say No, we are also losing the capacity for rage, a powerful emotion which, according to Han, "puts the present as a whole into question" [22] and is as different from anger as fear is from angst. 

 

In brief, increasing positivization denies all negative energy (evil). And that's a concern, because, as Hegel argued, "negativity is precisely what keeps existence [Dasein] alive" [24]. Or, as Zarathustra says: Man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him. 

 

 

The Bartleby Case

 

I used to hate Melville's Bartleby - as this post from 31 Jan 2013 demonstrates. But I've since changed my mind and now have a greater appreciation for his tale. Indeed, Bartleby's signature phrase, I prefer not to, has even become one of the unofficial slogans of Torpedo the Ark (along with curb your enthusiasm and never trust a hippie). 

 

Han offers us what he terms a pathological reading of the story (rather than a metaphysical or theological interpretation) in relation to his own theories of exhaustion and neurotic hyperactivity. He reads Bartleby's silence and immobility as "symptoms characteristic of neurasthenia" [25] and doesn't much care for the character: "his signature phrase [...] expresses neither the negative potency of not-to nor the instinct for delay and deferral that is essential for 'spirituality'" [25-26].     

 

Of course, Bartleby is still an obedience-subject belonging to disciplinary society (Melville publised the story in 1853), so although he dies in complete isolation, he doesn't develop the symptoms of depression which are the hallmark of our society:   

 

"Feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or fear of failure do not belong to Bartleby's emotional household. Constant self-reproach and self-aggression are unknown to him. He does not face the imperative to be himself that characterizes late-modern achievement society." [26]

 

Ontotheological interpretations of the Bartleby case - like Giorgio Agamben's - are ultimately compromised by their failure to "take note of the change of mental structure [psychischer Strukturwandel] in the present day" [26] [c]. 

 

Further, in a simlar manner to Deleuze, Agamben "elevates Bartleby to a metaphysical position of the highest potency" [27], and it was this giving him angelic or even Christ-like status that used to irritate me also. 

 

Still, whilst I would prefer not to see him in a messianic light, I do think that Bartleby's tale is more than merely a story of exhaustion (it's also a tale of seduction, for example, in which the object extracts its revenge).           

 

 

The Society of Tiredness

 

In order to improve performance and maximise achievement, says Han, we are increasingly relying upon neuro-enhancing drugs and energy drinks. The ironic result: we are generating ever greater levels of fatigue: "The excessiveness of performance enhancement leads to psychic infarctions." [31] 

 

And this can't be good - certainly not if it leads to not only feeling physically exhausted, but mentally tired of everyone and everything. For tiredness of the latter kind leaves us feeling separate and isolated. 

 

If only there could be a shared tiredness; one in which we are not tired of others, but with others; one that brings us back into touch; one that lies beyond exhaustion. Han calls this a tiredness of negative potency. If only we had the chance, at least for one day a week, to just log off and rest; if only we could re-establish the Sabbath (a day of not-doing) and counter the machine-ideal of 24/7.

O for the boredom of a childhood Sunday!

Burnout Society

For Byung-Chul Han, both Kantian and Freudian models of the self are now untenable. 

 

Kant's moral subject who obeys his conscience and wishes to fulfil his duty, has, for example, been replaced by the late-modern achievement subject who has no interest in obedience to the moral law within or any sense of obligation.    

 

Psychoanalysis - a theory designed for a repressive age - is also outmoded:

 

"The Freudian unconscious is not a formation that exists outside of time. It is a product of the disciplinary society, dominated by the negativity of prohibitions and repression, that we have long since left behind." [36]. 

It may still be instructive (and important) to read Kant and Freud - and Han has clearly read a good deal of both authors - but they tell us about passed forms of self and society, not present forms. 

 

But then that could be said of pretty much every author writing before the digital age of information-technology and social media. It's not simply that their thinking is antiquated, but that they have too much character [d], which is why so many young people find them offensive and so many old works - once regarded as classics - now come with trigger warnings.

We need people with character; people who still possess an awareness of Otherness and haven't fallen into solipsism and narcissism; people who can still love and mourn and experience a range of psychic states born of negativity; people who still listen to the voice of their daimon; people who refuse to be hyperactive self-exploiting Letzter Menschen whom Han thinks of as zombies: "too alive to die, and too dead to live" [51].   

Notes

 

[a] In an early post on Torpedo the Ark - published 1 August 2014 - I discussed the importance of being able to say no: click here. 

 

[b] Han offers a critical (and clinical) reading of the Bartleby Case in the following chapter. 

[c] Not having read Agamben's take on the Bartleby case, I can't say if this is fair or not. Readers who wish to investigate this matter further can find Agamben's essay, 'Bartleby, or On Contingency', in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 243-271. 

 

[d] As Han reminds us, for Freud, character "is a phenomenon of negativity" [40] - and thus problematic within an age of woke. Today, speakers with character are accused of hate speech and being no platformed across university campuses by those who demand moral and political correctness (and positivity) at all times. "Today", writes Han, "violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent." [48] 

 

 

To read part one of this post on The Burnout Society, click here.       

Notes on The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity, 2018)

 

I. 

 

As torpedohiles will be aware, I'm a big fan of plants and trees. And interested also in the latest philosophical speculation concerning our CO2-loving friends. Thus, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss - having finally read - a recent book by Emanuele Coccia, published in English as The Life of Plants (2019) [a]. 

 

One of Coccia's main points is certainly not new, but remains something that needs to be repeated as loudly and as often as possible: human exceptionalism is scientifically untenable - it's a theological prejudice. Thus, any system of rank that places mankind above all other animals is one that needs scrapping. 

 

Further, we should also abandon the idea that animals are a superior form of life than plants - or even radically distinct. 

 

For example, I don't know if plants have consciousness as conventionally understood. But, as a Deleuzean, I can happily subscribe to the idea that there are forces working through them that constitute microbrains, enabling plants not only to process information and make decisions, but contemplate the world by contracting the elements from which they originate [b]. 

 

Anyway, let's now look at Coccia's book in more detail ...

 

 

II.

       

Plants - like a lot of other things - have mostly been overlooked in philosophy, "more out of contempt than out of neglect" [3]. 

 

So it's an encouraging development that there has lately been a bloom of interest in them by philosophers such as Coccia and Michael Marder, who reject the metaphysical snobbery that would keep plants "in the margins of the cognitive field" [3] and forever outside the gate. 

 

In other words, the return of the photosynthesising repressed is to be welcomed. I particularly like the fact that this represents a challenge to the chauvinism of the animal rights brigade and is one in the eye of holier-than-thou vegans, who never stop to question their own positing of animal life over plant life.   

For what is animalism if not merely "another form of  anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism [which] extends human narcissim to the animal realm" [4] ...? 

 

Not that plants care - they just keep on doing their thing with sovereign indifference, living a form of life that is "in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment" [5]. To imagine that they are poor in world is laughable: 

 

"They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. [...] One cannot separate the plant - neither physically nor metaphysically - from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world." [5]

 

Ultimately, we need plants to live; but they don't need us: "They require nothing [...] but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light" [8], which they transform into life and into the world we inhabit. We call this god-like ability autotrophy - the capacity plants have "to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body" [8].   

 

This is why it makes much more sense to worship a tree, than a deity made in our own image; we owe plants everything (something that the man next door, forever spraying weedkiller on his drive, should think about, as well as those who are wilfully destroying the world's rainforests). 

 

As Coccia writes, botany might be advised to "rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities [...] that do not need violence to found new worlds" [10]

 

 

III.   

For Max Bygraves, hands were crucial. 

 

But plants, as Coccia reminds us, don't have hands, they have leaves. But then plants don't need to brush away a tear or want to stop a bus, and the absence of hands "is not a sign of lack, but rather the consequence of a restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model" [12] [c]. 

To think like this is, essentially, to revive the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy as a discourse not on ideas, but on nature [peri physeos]; i.e., philosophy staged as a confrontation with the objects of the natural world (something that plants do every moment of the day). 

People often like to say that nature is a cultural construct; but, actually, culture is a natural construct and, as readers of Nietzsche will recall, he always stressed that the former must be understood in terms of φύσις. 

 

For Nietzsche, culture possessed a spiritual quality, lacked by civilisation, which develops organically from within the conditions of existence and he affirms nature as a world of difference and constant becoming. As for man, the flower of culture: Der Mensch ist eine Mischung aus Pflanze und Geist ... [d]

 

Unfortunately, for centuries now - and certainly since the time of German Idealism - philosophy (with a few rare exceptions) stopped contemplating nature and left it up to other disciplines to speak of "the world of things and of nonhuman living beings" [18] [e].

 

Coccia, following Iain Hamilton Grant, calls this forced expulsion from philosophy of all traces of the natural world physiocide and suggests that it has had terrible consequences for philosophy, turning it into an "imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit" [19] and the ghosts of its past:

 

"Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism - and an often moralized and reformist one at that." [19] 

 

Thus, Coccia's little book has a big goal: to rebuild philosophy as a form of cosmology via an exploration of vegetal life. In other words, he wishes to learn from the flowers, roots and - arguably the most important parts of the plant - the leaves ...  

 

 

IV.

As this passage makes clear, for Coccia leaves are key:

 

"The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space [...] It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway beween the two. Our origin is not in us - in interiore homine - but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves [...]" [28]

 

But, on the other hand, Coccia also loves roots - "the most enigmatic forms of the plant world" [77] - which are hidden and invisible to most animals as they move across the surface of the earth. Interestingly, roots are relatively a recent development in the evolution of plant life, which seems not to need them "in order to define itself, exist, or at least survive" [78]. 

 

Indeed, for millions of years, plants lived perfectly happily without roots and their origin is obscure:

 

"The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: the first kind of roots were functional modification of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves." [78]

 

That is fascinating, I think, and it gives one a new interest in roots; particularly in their extremely variable morphology and physiology. 

 

I know Deleuze always hated roots - primarily because Plato and Aristotle thought of them as analogous to the human head (and hence reason) and this idea was to have "an extraordinary success in the philosophical and theological tradition from the Middle Ages and up to the modern period" [79] - but nous somme ne pas Deleuzean [f]. 

 

Thus, we are free to say that roots rock and are perhaps not as bad as we thought they were, although Coccia's suggestion that roots "make the soil and the subterranean world a space of spiritual communication", transforming the earth into "an enormous planetary brain" [81] is not something I would write and doesn't help matters.

 

Personally, I prefer it when Coccia reminds us that roots are ontologiclly nocturnal and "swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin", as Georges Bataille so memorably put it [g]. Flowers face heavenward; but roots have no superterrestrial dreams or hopes; they remain true to the earth:

 

"The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant: it incarnates 'the sense of the earth', a form of love for the soil that is intrinsic in any vegetal being." [85] [h]

V.

 

Finally, having discussed leaves and roots, we come to Coccia's theory of the flower, or, if you prefer, his erotics, which posits sex as "the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us [...] to become other" [100] - which is as boring a definition as you could wish for.

 

And the flower? A flower is a cosmic attractor - "an ephemeral, unstable body" - which allows the plant to "capture the world" [100]. And thanks to flowers, says Coccia, "plant life becomes the site of an explosion of colours and forms and of a conquest of the domain of appearances" [100]. 

 

Flowers are not only beyond good and evil, they are beyond any "expressive or identitarian logic: they do not have to express an individual truth, or define a nature, or communicate an essence" [100] - they just have to look pretty and smell nice.   

 

But the flower isn't, for Coccia, just sex on a stem: it is also reason; "the paradigmatic form of rationality" [110], echoing Lorenz Oken, a leading figure within Naturphilosophie in Germany in the early 19th-century who wrote: 

 

"If one wishes to compare the flower - beyond sexual relation - to an animal organ, one can only compare it with the most important nerve organ. The flower is the brain of plants [...] which remains on the plane of sex. One can say that what is sex in the plant is brain for the animal, or that the brain is the sex of the animal." [i]  

 

What does that mean? It means, says Coccia, that "anthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from the linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality" [117]. 

 

And on that note, I think I'd like to close the post ... [j]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019). All page references given in the post are to this edition of the text.

 

[b] Even Darwin speculated that plants might have tiny brains in their roots; see The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880). 

      Michael Marder, meanwhile, is adamant that plants do, in fact, have consciousness - albeit in a radically different way to ourselves; see Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). Readers may recall that I published a three-part discussion of this book on Torpedo the Ark in November 2019: click here for part one and then follow links at the end of the post for parts two and three.

      Readers interested in this topic might also like to see F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, D. Volkmann, and P. W. Barlow, 'The "Root-Brain" Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin', in Plant Signaling and Behaviour, 12 (Dec 2009), 1121-27. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] This is not to downplay the importance of hands; see my post of 1 June 2019: click here.

 

[d] See Zarathustra's Prologue, 3, in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.    

 

[e] Of course, it was Socrates who first insisted that philosophy should disregard the physical universe and confine itself to a rational study of moral questions.   

[f] In other words, Deleze has a metaphysical objection to roots, which, as Coccia notes, are often still thought of in ordinary speech as "what is most fundamental and originary, what is most obstinately solid and stable, what is necessary" [80] - i.e., the plant organ par excellence. And yet, as Coccia goes on to point out, roots are actually the most ambiguous part of the plant. 

[g] Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. 

      An interesting post written by Michael Marder on Bataille and his vegetal philosophy, can be found on The Philosopher's Plant (his blog for the LA Review of Books): click here. 

 

[h] Having said that, Coccia warns against blind fidelity to the earth if that means forgetting the sun: "Geocentrism is the delusion of false immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from the Sun." [91] 

      That's true, of course, but I'm not sure I understand what he means when he goes on to argue that to "the lunar and nocturnal realism of modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology" [92] - with the latter understood as a universal science. Coccia seems to think there's a correlation between us and the stars; that because we are of an astral nature (and the earth a celestial body), that we can influence the stars (just as they influence us). 

      Predictably, this way of thinking very quickly leads to a theological conclusion: "Everything [...] that occurs is a divine fact. God is no longer elsewhere, he coincides with the reality of forms and accidents." [94] 

      Ultimately, it's important to realise that whilst Coccia loves plants, he's not an ecologist, he's a sky-worshipper. That is to say, for Coccia it's not the soil or the sea that is the ultimate source of our existence, it's the sky, and what plants teach us is not to remain true above all else to the earth, but to make life "a perpetual devotion to the sky" [94], whilst, of course, remaining rooted in the earth. 

      He concludes: "The cosmos is not the inhabitable in itself - it is not an oikos [a home], it is an ouranos [a sky]: ecology is no more than the refusal of uranology." [96]   

 

[i] Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 3rd edition, (Friedrich Schultheisse, 1843), p. 218. Quoted by Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants, p. 108. The quotation is trans. Dylan J. Montanari.

  

[j] Readers should note that The Life of Plants does have an epilogue, consisting of two short chapters; the first on speculative autotrophy and the second on philosophy as a kind of atmospheric condition, rather than a distinct discipline. To be honest, as interesting as his remarks are, I'm not sure why he felt the need to add them to this particular text (unless attempting to fend off criticism of his work from more traditional philosophers).  

Götzen-Dämmerung: Notes on Wandering Wombs, Spontaneous Generation, Bodily Humours and the Ancient Greek Soul

Sounding out idols of the mind since 1888 

 

I. 

 

It's easy (and thus tempting) to look back on humanity's past and smile at some of the odd things that people - including philosophers and men of learning - used to believe. 

 

I've already written, for example, about the theory of maternal impression - click here and here - but thought it might be interesting to briefly mention three other ancient truths that we now know to be false [1] ...

(i) The Wandering Womb

Belief in the wandering womb (as a cause of hysteria) can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks, though it persisted as a popular idea in European medicine well into the medieval and early-modern period. 

 

For celebrated physicians like Aretaeus of Cappadocia, writing in the 2nd century AD, the uterus was a free-floating organ which resembled an autonomous creature happily living within the female body, sensitive to smells and always in search of fluids to sustain it. 

 

It wasn't until our knowledge of anatomy improved from the 16th-century onwards that this idea of a wandering womb began to slowly lose credibility and female hysteria would eventually become a condition associated with the mind, rather than the uterus [2].      

 

(ii) Spontaneous Generation 

 

The theory of spontaneous generation held that living creatures (such as fleas and maggots) could arise from non-living matter (such as dust and decomposing flesh) and that such processes were all part of the natural order [3]. 

 

Again, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for this amusing idea. 

 

For it was Aristotle who synthesised earlier explanations provided by the natural philosophers [φυσιολόγοι] for the mysterious appearance of organisms, into a coherent theory which would be taken as a matter of scientific fact for the next 2000 years (it wasn't until spontaneous generation was disproved by Louis Pasteur and others in the 1850s, that the term fell out of favour within scientific circles).  

 

 

(iii) Bodily Humours 

 

Even the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, subscribed to a few mistaken notions, central amongst which was the idea that vital bodily fluids (or humours) determined human health and disposition. 

 

Again, this theory persisted well into the modern era as doctors down the centuries vainly attempted to balance blood, phlegm, and two types of bile (black and yellow), in the belief that any excess or deficiency of any one of these four humours would result in illness or a bad character. 

 

It wasn't until the advent of germ theory, which demonstrated that many diseases previously thought to be humoral were in fact caused by pathogens, that physicians were able to move on (though such ideas persist in those parts of the world that still practice traditional medicine).  

 

II.

 

The point I'm trying to make here is twofold:

 

Firstly, I'm trying to illustrate how even the best minds can get things wrong and how certain ideas can become so ingrained within our thinking over such long periods of time, that they become unquestioned articles of faith and common belief (doxa). 

 

Secondly, I'm trying to encourage readers not to simply look back and laugh at the mistaken ideas of antiquity, but ask themselves what cherished beliefs they might subscribe to as truths which will one day be exposed as fallacious and fantastical ...

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the still widespread belief in the psyche - a concept often used by people who think mind is something separate from (and other to) brain activity, but who still wish to sound rational rather than religious and so try to avoid words like soul or spirit. 

 

Like all of the ideas examined above, this one can be traced back to the ancient Greeks; ψυχή is central to the philosophy of Plato, and Aristotle wrote a hugely influential work on the subject. Indeed, the latter's theory of the three souls - vegetal, animal, and human - would dominate the field of psychology until the 19th century.

 

I'm reminded at this point of Nietzsche's realisation that one day we will have to overcome the last trace of Greek influence on our thinking - as beautiful and as profound as it may have once seemed - and take a hammer to all the old idols of the mind [4] ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The big one, of course, would be God, but I can't imagine anyone reading TTA needs reminding of the circumstances surrounding his death.  

 

[2] Today, of course, hysteria is no longer a clinically recognised condition and no one thinks the womb a thirsty roaming animal.  

[3] The imaginary process by which life was believed to routinely and rapidly emerge from non-living matter (such as the seasonal generation of mice and other animals from the mud of the Nile), is sometimes referred to as abiogenesis. It should be noted, however, that spontaneous generation has no operative principles in common with the modern hypothesis of abiogenesis used within evolutionary biology, which argues that life arose from simple organic compounds over a time span of many millions of years.

 

[4] It might be argued that the analytic philosopher Paul Churchland has pushed philosophising with a hammer to its extreme in his eliminative materialism, which, as Nietzsche might have said, is radikal bis zum Verbrechen. 

      Churchland is convinced that neuroscience will eventually spell the end for psychology, which he thinks a fundamentally defective and confused theory. The problem, however, is whilst with hindsight we can see the inadequacies and absurdities of ancient theories, it's not so easy to see these within contemporary theories that remain part of our Lebenswelt and which the majority of people still believe to be not merely true, but blindingly obvious to anyone with common sense. 

      Readers interested in Churchland's work might like to see his crucial essay 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes', in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Feb 1981), pp. 67-90. I refer to this essay in a previous (and related) post to this one: click here. 

 

 

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 3: Vegetal Existentiality)

Michael Marder (2011)

II. Vegetal Existentiality

The existential domain (of time, freedom and wisdom) is usually reserved for man alone. But if plants were also to have some experience of these things, then their "ethical and political status [...] will need to be revised in order to reflect their purchase on life [... and] the positive dimensions of their ontology" [90].

(1) The Time of Plants ...

Time, as Boy George once said, won't give us time. But time makes plants, like lovers, feel they have something real and if we are to have a close encounter with vegetal being "we will need to rethink temporality as the mainspring of the plant's ontology" [94].

Unfortunately, however, time is one of those questions in philosophy that I cannot get my head around and feel little inclined to try and do so now. Readers who want to understand vegetal temporality and the manner in which plants "spatially express time" [96] in depth will have to read Marder's work for themselves (I suggest you brush up on your Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger first of all).    

Having said that, I suppose the key point is that time is not proper to the plant itself but derivative from the other; "whether this 'other' is a part of the organic world or a synthetically produced chemical mix, whether it pertains to the temporality of nature or to that of culture" [101]. The downside of this is that it makes the plant naturally vulnerable; "its potentialities are left vacant for infinite appropriation by anything or anyone whatsoever" [101] - it's a natural born victim of circumstance and agro-capitalist technologies.

What this means - and this presents a real challenge to all those who talk about the exploitation of nature - is that  "techno-cultural and economic phenomena do not negate a preexisting 'natural' condition but interject themselves into the place of the plants' other" [102] and thus determine ontophytology.

This isn't to say that "the positing of the human and capitalist temporalities in the place of the plant's hetero-temporality" [102] isn't exploitative or non-violent, but it's hard to imagine the plant cares as long as it flowers and comes to fruition. That isn't quite Marder's conclusion - he still thinks it important to resist this subsumption - but he recognises the futility of appealing to its nature in order to do so, "since the potentialities of the plant are never completely its own" [102].

Ultimately, the plant is not just non-contemporaneous with us, it's not even contemporaneous with itself, in that it's a "loose alliance of multiple temporalities of growth [...] and in that it does not relate to itself, does not establish a self-identity" [104]. Again, that's why it's forced to obey the time of the other and why Marder finds himself up an ethical junction.

How does he get out? By reversing into ethical assertion: "The hetero-temporality of vegetal existence is the most telling instantiation of the ethical injunction for openness to the other." [107] I'm reminded of something I once wrote in my Illicit Lover's Discourse: "The polymorphously perverse nature of the Prostitute explains her generosity of spirit and openness to all."

It's insatiable promiscuity that bring the world's of vegetation and vice together. And it's "monstrous growth and immoderate proliferation" that have always been "unspeakably terrifying for philosophers" who have always sought to establish the proper limits of desire and police these limits "against potential transgressors" [107-08], whether they have green leaves or black fishnet stockings.  

(2) The Freedom of Plants ...

Contrary to what the Cockney Rejects insist, not only is there freedom for human beings, there's also freedom for plants, says Marder, thereby challenging a metaphysical tradition which would foreclose this latter possibility.

Admittedly, it's difficult to think of freedom in relation to a being devoid of selfhood and literally rooted to the spot. But perhaps if we think of freedom in terms of insouciance and indifference, for example, then the plant might be said to be freer than any of us. But can a plant be free in the ontological sense of being other than it is? Let's find out ...

Part of the problem when it comes to thinking about the freedom of plants, is that nature has been so thoroughly tamed: "Vegetal torpor is the aftermath of civilization; it is what remains of plant life after its thorough cultivation and biotechnological transformation ..." [128]. Marder continues - and I think this is a true and important observation:

"If upon encountering a plant, we fail to be impressed with the exuberance of its growth and uncontrollable efflorescence, this is because its current conceptual framing is the outcome of a long history that discarded and invalidated numerous interpretative possibilities for our relation to 'flora'." [128]

In other words, the plant is given a fixed metaphysical shape and in this way made into something that can be stuck in a pot and put in the corner of even the most respectable living room. Even Heidegger is happy to keep plants lodged in their own environment, denying them a place within the clearing of being (i.e., world).

Marder rightly interrogates such thinking and considers the freedom of the plant in relation to our own freedom. But again, that's not easy when vegetal being is so dissimilar to human (and animal) being. Plants are, in a sense, closer to being gods. For both gods and plants like to play in a carefree manner, whereas man prefers to work and to worry. Only when at his most imaginative, does man become playful like a plant; "imagination is the echo of vegetal freedom in human beings" [146].

In order to let the plant flourish in us, we need, therefore, to give free reign to the imagination (or aesthetic play-drive) and abandon ourselves to art as Dionysian intoxication; "'seizing on what is new and startling [...] what is violent and wild'" [146], as Schiller once described (and denounced) it.

Having said that, we must at the same time "be on our guard against the all-too-prevalent idealist illusion that vegetal life is the realm of purity and innocence. The plant's ontological indifference and lack of concern bespeak its freedom from conscience, but it is an anthropomorphic projection alone that codifies these qualities, as well as everything connected to play, in terms of innocence and lightheartedness." [146]  

I have to admit, I'm pleased to hear Marder say this - though isn't it just as much of an idealist illusion to still speak of the struggle for emancipation and to posit vegetal life an important role in this (once plants have been liberated, of course, from "the political and economic conditions responsible [...] for their oppression" [149])?   


(3) The Wisdom of Plants ...

Whilst frequently borrowing from Derrida throughout this work, here Marder admits that his reflections on vegetal intelligence "ought to be taken as a footnote to Nietzsche's provocative suggestion" [151] in The Will to Power about the sagacity of plants being a good starting point for the revaluation of all values.  

In a sense, we're moving from ontophytology to epistemophytology; although, when it comes to plants, being and thinking are so closely bound together that in order to discuss the latter you need to reckon also with the former.

What soon becomes clear is that one needs to overstep "the bounds of the conventional theories of knowledge" [152] towards a postmetaphysical thinking that is "fluid, receptive, dispersed, non-oppositional, non-representational, immanent, and material-practical" [152]. Marder describes it as the non-conscious intenionality of vegetal life.

Again, I'm not entirely sure I know what that means - even after reading Marder's explanation - but it amuses me to think that this idea might irritate some followers of Levinas.

And I do like the idea of plants having memories, which, as temporal beings, I suppose is a reasonable expectation (albeit these memories will be imageless, or non-representational). Further, recent findings in molecular biology seem to confirm that plants can retrieve information stored in cells. Whereas we might remember the things revealed by the light, they, plants, physically remember the light itself (they might not have minds, but they certainly have bodies). 

Memory, then, is a primal quality - before consciousness - and is found in mimosa as well as man. It's a key component  "of the vibrant and multidimensional intelligence of plants" that can be mapped on the "ever-shifting continuum of sensibility-irritability" [156] (plants might not feel much, but just enough to know when they are getting pissed-off and to ensure their survival).     

Importantly, any attempt to think plant-thinking must always remember that vegetal being revolves around non-identity; "understood both as the plant's inseperability from the environment wherein it germinates and grows, and its style of living devoid of a clearly delineated autonomous self" [162].

No wonder their thinking is so restless and agitated! No wonder that becoming-plant is so difficult! What it ultimately requires of us is something we are not easily convinced to do: close our eyes and affirm the darkness, "while refraining form the indiscriminate repudiation of light" [178].

Notes

Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page numbers in the above post refer to this wok. 

To read part one of this post, on encountering plants and ethical offshoots, click here.

To read part two of this post, on vegetal anti-metaphysics, click here.

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 2: Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics)

Front cover design by Evan Gaffney

In part one of this post I discussed the introduction and epilogue to Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking. Here, and in part three, I'd like to discuss the five chapters that are divided between two main sections: Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics and Vegetal Existentiality.

As there's quite a lot of material to deal with, I hope I'll be forgiven for simply selecting out the bits that particularly resonate with my own philosophical interests as a floraphile ...

I. Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics

(1) The Soul of the Plant ...

 As Marder recognises:

"Modern readers are likely to greet positive references to 'the soul of plants' with suspicion. This is not only because it seems absurd [...] but also because we have grown deeply mistrustful of the heavy metaphysical and theological baggage weighing down this paleonym." [17]

That's not going to stop him, however, from using a phrase that combines the most ethereal with the most earthly of things, if only because Marder is happy to position himself outside (or on the margins) of "respectable philosophical discourses" and, more importantly, because he believes it is the conjunction of these two terms - soul and plant - that allow for a "point of entry into the post-metaphysical ontology of vegetal life" [18].

I'm not entirely sure how that might work, but Marder insists that each term importantly transforms the other: "the plant confirms the 'truth' of the soul as something, in large part, non-ideal, embodied, mortal, and this-worldly, while the soul, shared with other living entities and construed as the very figure for sharing, corroborates the vivacity of the plant in excess of a reductively conceptual grasp." [19]

In other words, plant keeps the soul real; whilst soul stops the plant becoming purely an object of scientific analysis (i.e. cut and dried) - it keeps the plant alive in all its obscure and exuberant otherness. Again, this might be nonsense, but it's seductive nonsense on a cold, wet afternoon in November - even if, like Wilde, I prefer to relate the beauty of the flower to a condition of soullessness.

Still, as long as the soul is being seized by the scruff of her neck and kept down amongst the plant pots, I'm prepared to go along with it, though do feel a little happier thinking plant life in terms of obscure non-objects, rather than vegetal soul; "obscure because it ineluctably withdraws, flees from sight and from rigorous interpretation; non-object, because it works outside, before, and beyond all subjective considerations and representations" [20].

One should also mention the virtual immobility of plants - that too is surely a crucial aspect of plant being. Fichte, as Marder reminds us, refers to this barely perceptible motion as das erste Prinzip der Bewegung in der Natur. Watching a plant grow or reposition itself (without the aid of time-lapse photography) isn't as boring as watching paint dry, but for a fast-moving, impatient mammal such as ourselves, it certainly requires a huge amount of discipline.

The pace and rhythm of plant life is simply "too subtle for our cognitive and perceptual apparatuses to register" [21] and that explains why we often think of them as being closer to inanimate objects than living animals. Because the cactus in the corner doesn't leap about like the cat, we think it is less vital, or that it only seems to be alive. Two-and-a-half millennia after Aristotle, D. H. Lawrence was still pushing the same line; insisting, for example, that there is a hierarchy of life in which the fast-moving little ant is superior even to the pine-tree, because more vividly alive:

"We know it, there is no trying to refute it. It is all very well saying that they are both alive in two different ways, and therefore they are incomparable, incommensurable. This is also true.    
     [...] Truly, it is futile to compare an ant with a great pine-tree, in the absolute. Yet as far as existence is concerned, they are not only placed in comparison to one another, they are occasionally pitted against one another. And if it comes to a contest, the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree."* 

The inferiority of plants is just how things are in nature; it's not something to lament over or try to reform. Only in the fourth dimension of being do things become nonpareil; i.e., perfect beyond comparison. But in the realm of existence, says Lawrence, plants are subject to and less vital than animals (though he admits that daisies were here before us and will continue to flower long after even our mightiest monuments have crumbled into dust). 

It's precisely this kind of thinking - rooted in a theo-fictitious vitalism - that Marder is attempting to overturn. He wishes to know more of plant-soul in all its "non-human and non-animal modality" [22]. Our leafy friends may not dance and may not have eyes, but they're not ontologically lacking, defective, or incomplete.

However, plants should not be fetishised, says Marder; by which I think he means wrapped in myth and venerated and whilst I don't much like his use of the term in this manner, I'm glad he's alert to the danger of worshipping plants as magical objects invested with sacred spirit. 

If plants don't move much or very quickly, they do of course grow and as Marder points out:

"The dunamis of the vegetal soul, its capacity for growth but also for decay and the assimilation of nutrients, sets itself to work in a seemingly limitless extension in every conceivable direction, not just in a heliocentric tending toward the light." [37]

In other words, plant life expresses itself via a spatial becoming that is also a becoming-literal of intentionality; by the putting forth of new leaves, the extending of roots, and the fading of its flowers, the plant exercises and enacts the capacities of its soul "without ever fully actualizing or accomplishing them" [38].

I suppose a Nietzschean might at this point speak of the plant's will to power and ask if it's really all that different from that found in animal and man; a desire to become-more (to blossom) and to experience the feeling of power via a (paradoxical) expenditure of energy. Like Plato - but unlike Aristotle who vehemently resisted the idea - Nietzsche accepted plants as desiring beings, but he uncoupled his concept of desire from the negative connotations of absence and lack. Marder, however, isn't very happy with Nietzsche's "reductive view of the plant as a vegetal manifestation of the will to power" [40].

Partly, this is because he buys into Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as an inverted Platonist and the last metaphysician. And partly, it's because Nietzsche robs vegetal life of its "multiple semantic layers" [41] and obscurity: "besides projecting anthropomorphic feelings and behaviours onto plants, he [Nietzsche] includes them under the concepts of sameness and identity ... [ignoring] the fact that in the absence of a clearly demarcated space of psychic interiority, they [plants] are incapable of incorporating anything in their souls which merge with the materiality of their bodies" [41].

I think what this means is that, for Marder, Nietzsche is guilty of an insensitive imperialism that still hinges upon notions of self and non-self, with the latter existing only to be conquered or appropriated. In his own post-metaphysical philosophy, in contrast, the plant's "inability to establish an identity with itself by means of the other" [41] is a prerequisite for a radical understanding of difference and becoming. 

It's a bit harsh: and, in fact, it's quite simply false to say, as Marder says, that will to power is all about accumulating power to the self and that Nietzsche "does not entertain the hypothesis that the phenomena of life [...] often preclude the hoarding of power" [42]. Nietzsche scorned the ideal of self-preservation; he thought it at best an indirect consequence of a living being's desire to discharge and even to squander its strength.   

The thing is, for onto-political reasons, Marder doesn't want plants to be selfish and aggressive beings; he desperately wants them to be caring, sharing members of a vegetal democracy, whose "inherent respect for alterity" [42] is key:

"Positively understood, the dispersed life of plants is a mode of being in relation to all others, being qua being-with [...] vegetal democracy is open  [...] to all species without exception." [51-52]

And in some sweaty, subtropical wetland or godforsaken jungle, I can hear a Venus flytrap begin to laugh ...


(2) The Body of the Plant ...

"What does metaphysics have to do with plants? What can this group of heterogeneous beings [...] tell us about being 'as such and as a whole', let alone about resisting the core metaphysical values of presence and identity that the totality of being entails?" [54]

One can imagine how a sceptical reader might well reply ... But I'm intrigued by what Marder has to say; particularly his claim that the loss of plant varieties and biodiversity is symptomatic not just of capitalist economies, but "of a much more profound trend - the practical implementation of the metaphysics of the One [...] in human and non-human environments" [55].

This monolithic and monomaniacal enframing is something that has long concerned me, but I've not stopped to consider (until now) that plants might have "a crucial role in the ongoing transvaluation of metaphysical value sysytems" [55], precisely because they have been so shut-out of traditional philosophy and its political-economic avatars.

From the position of absolute exteriority, "plants accomplish a living reversal of metaphysical values [...] and thus contribute to the destabilization of hierarchical dualisms" [56]. Or at least that's Marder's fantasy; a green deconstruction carried out in perfect silence (apart perhaps from the rustle of leaves) that we might think of as a sort of Derridean day of the triffids.  

The familiar narrative in European philosophy goes like this: blame it all on Plato! And Marder doesn't disappoint us by going off-script; the inception of Western metaphysics, that privileges the onto-theological status of the human, is rooted in Plato's thinking. And yet, amusingly, Plato also considers man as a kind of heavenly plant with both head and roots located in the sky above (i.e. the eidectic sphere).

We are literally nourished by ideas and Western metaphysics begins with "the inversion of the earthly perspective of the plant, a deracination of human beings uprooted from their material foundations and transplanted into the heavenly domain" [57]. This has been disastrous for mankind and also produced a "correlatve devaluation of the literal plant, mired with its roots in the darkness of the earth as much as in non-conscious existence" [57].

No wonder then, that modern thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, who are anti-Platonic and wish to deconstruct Western metaphysics, tend to side with the plants and exploit vegetal metaphors in their writings. For both, man (and culture) blossoms only when rooted in the soil.

Now, there are, admittedly, problems with such organic thinking, but I'll not address these here; suffice it to say that I agree with Marder that "the first targets of the transvaluation of values are the transcendental ideals now brought down to earth, back to their concealed roots in the sphere of immanence" [59] and that all vegetal materialisms are, to some degree or other, an inversion of Plato's own inversion of reality.   

I also agree that it's important to remember that "germination commences in the middle, in the space of the in-between" [63]. In other words, "it begins without originating and turns the root and flower alike into variegated extensions of the [de-centered] middle, in marked contrast to the idealist insistence on the spirituaity of the blossom and the materialist privileging of the root" [63]. 

Thus: "The root and the flower are neither essential nor radically indispensable, having lost their metaphysical status as the spiritual culminations of vegetal being." [64] And for Marder, this makes plants onto-politically ethical; "they cover the earth but do not dominate or conquer it; they seek their 'place in the sun' but do not usurp the place of others" [66]. Again, I can hear the laughter of jungle plants at this point ...

I mean, plants may do all kinds of wonderful things - including mediating between the living and the dead - but I'm extremely wary of sentences like this: "While plant existence is ethical, post-metaphysical ethics is vegetal." [69] That's just too morally convenient to be true and the radical dependence of plants on its environment shouldn't be mistaken for altruism or unconditional generosity. 

But of course, it's hard to know; if only because plants themselves remain silent on the issue; and the silence of plants is "unbreakable and absolute" [75]. That's not to say they don't find other ways to communicate - chemically, for example - but, as even Prince Charles might concede, talking to plants is not the same as speaking with them. Indeed, as Pardner discovered, when you talk to the trees, they don't even listen to you ...

Despite this vegetal rudeness, for Marder, the language of plants belongs to a "hyper-materialist tradition" [75] that is about posturing and spatial relations and relies as much on the poetic thought of Francis Ponge as it does Walter Benjamin's language of things. Ultimately, each and every tree or plant has it's own unique language - which is why the destruction of each and every tree or plant "signals the obliteration of the meaning that it is in the extended materiality of its posture" [76].  
 
That's a profoundly beautiful point; one that those responsible for the destruction of the rainforests - or, indeed, for casually cementing over their front gardens so they can conveniently park their cars - are never, ever going to understand. But, in the long run, it's vegetal life and not human life that's probably going to have the last laugh and the figure of the plant which "furnishes the prototype for post-metaphysical being" [90].  

* Note: D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 357. 

See: Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

Part one of this post - encountering plants and ethical offshoots - can be accessed by clicking here. 

To read part three - on vegetal existentiality - click here.

Notes on Vegetal Philosophy and Literature

I.  All Flesh is Grass [Isaiah 40:6]

"Plants", says Randy Laist, "play a vital role in the experience of being human" [9].

It's not just the fact we like to keep a cactus on the kitchen windowsill and utilise plants in an ornamental and symbolic manner; we also consume them, fashion clothes out of them, inhabit structures built with plant materials, and - let's not forget - exploit our green-leaved, photosynthesising friends to manufacture drugs, medicines, and cosmetics.    

Archaeologists might like to speak about the stone age, iron age, and bronze age, but we have always essentially lived in an age (and a world) dominated by plants:  

"Not only has agriculture always been the primary source of bioenergy that has allowed human populations to balloon so prolifically, but the weaving of plants into baskets, the carving of trees into floating vessels, and, possibly, the use of plant-based psychotropic substances to provoke dream-visions have all played a crucial role in the emergence of modern globalized human beings." [9]

Our intimate relationship with plants has also shaped our evolution; the hand - so beloved by Heidegger and which he thinks of as unique to human beings - wouldn't be what it is were it not for the branches and twigs it evolved to grasp and manipulate as tools. It's worth remembering that, according to Genesis, God created plants three days before he bothered to create man and that ultimately all flesh is grass.   


II. On the Defoliation of the Cultural Imagination

Having said all this, ultimately Laist's critical interest is in the long and intimate relationship between plants and literature; a relationship that has been in serious decline for some years now, despite our over-fondness for the prefix eco. Laist notes:

"When one scans contemporary culture for evidence of plant-based narratives [...] the most dramatic meta-phenomenon is the defoliation of the cultural imagination." [My italics, indicating not only that I love this phrase, but that I fully intend to use it henceforth.] [10]

Even as recently as a hundred years ago, writers shared a botanical vocabulary with readers who had a deep familiarity with the appearance and properties of a wide variety of trees and plants. Arguably, that's simply no longer the case. For not only do most readers prefer tarmac and technology to woodland and wilderness, but most authors no longer know the names of the remaining flowers growing by the roadside - and nor does this particularly bother them.     

Laist suggests that the situation is a little different with poetry; that there are still a number of contemporary poets fighting a rearguard action "against encroaching mental defoliation" [11], but I struggle to think of a poet who knows the world of flora in the astonishing and intimate manner that D. H. Lawrence experienced it.

And would any poet today define poetry as Blanchot once defined it: the attempt to protect and preserve in speech a voice in which the silent suffering and joy of flowers might come to expression? I doubt it.   


III. On the Uncanny Ontological Potency of Plants

In his introduction to Plants and Literature (2013), Laist also makes the following interesting point:

"The scarcity of plant-life in the cultural canon of the contemporary West is particularly striking when contrasted against the ubiquity of stories that feature animals [...] Despite the fact that urbanization has taken human beings just as far away from animals as it has taken them from plants, the fewer animals there are in the wild, the more seem to crop up on television [...] and on YouTube." [11]

Not only that, but within academia animal studies has recently developed alongside women's studies, queer studies, and black studies. But as Laist rightly argues:

"Animal studies is essentially an extension of human studies; it is relatively easy to imagine the subjectivity of animals. Animals may be shaped differently than we or pursue a different mode of life, but the basic coordinates of human existence and animal existence are identical in many respects." [11]

Reminding us of Aristotle's extremely influential (but limited) characterisation of plants, Laist continues:

"When it comes to plants [...] we encounter a much more significant barrier to our imagination. Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life-cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms." [12]

You might think that Aristotle's positioning of plants at the borderline between inanimate objects and living beings lends them uncanny ontological potency, but it seems that for many writers - primarly concerned as they are with the human, all too human and the personal, all too personal - they're of almost zero interest. 

If I may mention the name of D. H. Lawrence once more, one of the reasons for his greatness - and one of the reasons for my continued fascination with his work - is that he never forgets that human life unfolds within a non-human and inhuman context that is completely depersonalised; a context in which dark pansies and lilies of corruption blossom.

Lawrence understands that the power of plants is not merely symbolic, that they have ontological import all of their own and provide a way of life that is alien, beautiful and soulless; that they challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to be a living thing and our anthropocentric conceit.

The brute force and environmental destructiveness of man may crush many plants or push them into extinction, but, writes Lawrence, the plants will rise again and all our mighty monuments and great cities will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  

See: Randy Laist (ed.), Introduction to Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, (Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9-17.

Why I'm Suspicious of Pride

I.

I'm not a great fan or follower of the journalist Brendan O'Neill, but as an atheistic libertarian he often writes things that cut across aspects of my own thinking (or, as critics would say, reinforce my own fears and prejudices).

Thus, for example, I was interested to read a recent column in The Spectator in which O'Neill expresses his irritation at London Pride; the UK's largest queer celebration which sees rainbow flags hanging from virtually every public building and branded on just about every conceivable product you may wish to purchase in order to show your support for the LGBT+ community and the sinister political project known as diversity.        

Like O'Neill, I'm perfectly happy to commemorate the Stonewall riots and welcome many of the social, political and cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fifty years vis-à-vis the rights of sexual minorities. I might not fetishise notions of freedom and equality, or posit them as ideals over and above all other considerations, but neither do I wish to live in a time or place where these things are denied.  

But, like O'Neill, I also find it depressing to see a genuinely radical event co-opted by governments, corporations and the media and pinkwashed into a bland (and virtually mandatory) spectacle informed by a needy and therapeutic politics of identity:

"It’s no longer enough to leave homosexuals alone to live however they choose and to inflict on them no persecution or discrimination or any ill-will whatsoever on the basis of their sexuality, which is absolutely the right thing for a civilised liberal society to do. No, now you have to validate their identity and cheer their life choices."

Now, we must all assemble - cisgender heterosexuals included - beneath the omnipresent bloody rainbow and condemn anyone who refuses to do so as a political heretic.


II.

Actually, the very word pride is problematic, philosophically speaking, due to the fact that it has both negative and positive connotations. It is, for example, often used as a synonym for the Greek term hubris and refers thus to a destructively excessive or self-indulgent quality. It certainly isn't an unambiguously virtuous concept as Aristotle and the organisers of Pride events seem to believe.

Thus, I'm always rather suspicious of people who speak insistently in terms of pride; particularly those who belong to sexual or racial minorities, as they have a tendency to overcompensate for feelings of low self-esteem and guilt born of a long history of oppression and marginalisation. 

Indeed, it could be argued that pride which has been determined by such a history is simply shame on the recoil, or what Nietzsche would characterise as a revolt in morals and is thus still contained within the same old dialectic rather than part of a genuine revaluation of values ...

Ultimately, the old slogan gay is good is as mistaken as the homophobic view that gay is evil (and for the same reason).

See: Brendan O'Neill, 'Why I'm Sick of Pride', The Spectator (6 July, 2019): click here.