Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Why Is Iceland a Portal to the Moon?

There is a trite and obvious thing to say about Iceland, and that is that it looks like the moon. Descending into the Keflavik lava fields the other day, on an Icelandair flight from Paris, I was permitted to feel annoyed and a bit superior when I overheard the virgin French tourists behind me exclaiming as they gawked at the land below: Mais il n'y a rien là! By 'nothing' I thought perhaps they had meant 'no Michelin stars', but then one of them added, as if on cue: C'est comme la lune! Yet if there is an association between the earth's only satellite and this basalt outcropping of the mid-Atlantic range that is too obvious to mention, there is another that remains to this day far too occult, and that is as deserving of notice as the other is of suppression. 

The great German astronomer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler, most famous for defending the Copernican system and for establishing the elliptical orbit of planets, began his 1634 Somnium (sometimes subtitled A Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy) as follows:

My name is Duracotus. My country is Iceland, which the ancients called Thule. My mother was Fiolxhilde. Her recent death freed me to write, as I had long wished to do. While she lived, she carefully kept me from writing. For, she said, the arts are loathed by many vicious people who malign what their dull minds fail to understand, and make laws harmful to mankind. Condemned by these laws, not a few persons have perished in the chasms of Hekla. 

 The narrator goes on to describe his mother's commercial undertakings in what might be euphemistically called 'folk medicine', or, slightly more bluntly, 'natural magic':

In the earliest years of my boyhood my mother, leading me by the hand and sometimes hoisting me up on her shoulders, often used to take me up to the lower slopes of Mt. Hekla. These excursions were made especially around St. John's Day, when the sun is visible all twenty-four hours, and there is no night. Gathering some herbs with many rites, she cooked them at home. She made little bags out of goatskin, which she filled and carried to a nearby port to sell to the ship captains. This is how she earned her living.

That Kepler decides to preface what turns out to be a fairly serious work of lunar astronomy --to wit, a theoretical reflection upon the conditions on the still-mythical dark side of the moon-- with this narrative set-up is peculiar, not least because we know, and his contemporaries knew, that it reflects Kepler's own life in significant ways. Kepler's own mother, Katharina Kepler, née Guldenmann (1546-1622), was in the years leading up to the Somnium's composition being held in prison in Stuttgart on suspicion of witchcraft, under threat of imminent torture and execution. The son fought for years for his mother's release, and eventually won it, but much of their life was spent in the frenetic uncertainty of the Hexenjagd. Kepler was concerned with witchcraft not only as a source of fanciful characters for his thin fictions.

And yet, this bit of biography in no way helps us to answer the question: Why Iceland?

Duracotus cuts open one of his mother's little bags, and the herbs and runes come falling out. In a rage, she sells the little boy to a ship captain, and he sails off to the Danish island of Hven, where he eventually falls into an apprenticeship under the great Tycho Brahe, who instructs Duracotus first in Danish, then in astronomy. From the beginning, the displaced Icelander notices the similarity between his new learning and the traditions embodied by his own mother:

I was delighted beyond measure by the astronomical activities, for Brahe and his students watched the moon and the stars all night with marvelous instruments. This practice reminded me of my mother, because she, too, used to commune with the moon constantly. 

Duracotus eventually returns to Iceland and is reunited with Fiolxhilde. Upon reuniting, they engage in an exhaustive exchange of information about their respective traditions. The Icelandic witch is happy to learn the latest science from the continent, and her son, in turn, is just as pleased to finally be indoctrinated into native secrets, "those arts among a people so remote from all the others." Fiolxhilde relates her wisdom as follows:

Advantages have been conferred, Duracotus my son, not only on all those other regions to which you went but also on our country, too. To be sure, we are burdened with cold and darkness and other discomforts, which I feel only now, after I have learned from you about the salubriousness of other lands. But we have plenty of clever persons. At our service are very wise spirits, who detest the bright light of the other lands and their noisy people. They long for our shadows, and they talk to us intimately. Among them there are nine chief spirits. Of these, one is especially known to me. The very gentlest and most innocuous of all, he is evoked by one and twenty characters. By his help I am not infrequently whisked in an instant to other shores, whichever I mention to him... Most of the things which you saw with your own eyes or learned by hearsay or absorbed from books, he related to me just as you did. 

This spirit, it turns out, specializes in organizing trips to 'the island of Levania', which lies 'fifty thousand German miles up in the ether', and which is, evidently, nothing other than the moon. Fiolxhilde goes on, channeling the spirit, to explain how the lunar voyage unfolds:

The road to it from here or from it to this earth is seldom open. When it is open, it is easy for our kind, but for transporting men it is assuredly most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to life... Great as the distance is, the entire trip is consummated in four hours at the most... Because the opportunity is so fleeting, we take few human beings along, and only those who are most devoted to us. Some man of this kind, then, we seize as a group and all of us, pushing from underneath, lift him up into the heavens. In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates. His limbs must be arranged in such a way that his torso will not be torn away from his buttocks nor his head from his body, but the shock will be distributed among his individual limbs. Then a new difficulty follows: extreme cold and impeded breathing. The cold is relieved by a power which we are born with; the breathing, by applying damp sponges to the nostrils. After the first stage of the trip is finished, the passage becomes easier. At that time we expose their bodies to the open air and remove our hands. Their bodies roll themselves up, like spiders, into balls which we carry along most entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its destination of its own accord. But this onward drive is of very little use to us, because it is too late. Hence it is by our will, as I said, that we move the body swiftly along, and we forge ahead of it from now on lest it suffer any harm by colliding very hard with the moon When the humans wake up, they usually complain about an indescribable weariness of all their limbs, from which they later recover well enough to walk. 

Fortunately, like some Laurence Sterne or DFW who can never be happy or finished with his work, Kepler provides us with his own explanatory notes on the Somnium, which are significantly more lengthy than the work itself. And he does not shy away from the question we've been circling around, Why Iceland? He begins by noting that "in our German language," 'Island' means 'Ice Land'." But, he continues, the real reason for choosing it is the power it seems to hold of inducing a state of rêverie:

In this remote island I perceived a place where I might fall asleep and dream, in imitation of the philosophers in this branch of literature. For Cicero crossed over into Africa when he was getting ready to dream. Moreover, in the same western ocean Plato fashioned Atlantis, whence he summoned imaginary aids to military valor. 

But still, why Iceland in particular, rather than the distant lands selected by his classical predecessors? Kepler supposes Plutarch had already discussed Iceland in his On the Face of the Moon from the 1st century CE, though he insists that this had nothing to do with his own choice. This choice, if we are to take Kepler at his word, turns out to be fairly uninteresting, a contingent result of a contingent choice of an obscure publisher to collate the plots of unrelated stories into a single volume. He writes of his sojourn in Bohemia:

At that time there was for sale in Prague Lucian's book about the trip to the moon, as translated into the German language by Rollenhagen's son; bound with it were the stories of St. Brendan and St. Patrick's Purgatory in the earth beneath Mt. Hekla, the Icelandic volcano. Moreover, since Plutarch, in accordance with the belief of pagan theology, located the purgatory of souls on the moon, I decided that when I set out for the moon I would most prefer to take off from Iceland.

My thesis here, if I must have one, is that there is more to the story than this. The association between Iceland and lunar voyages runs deeper than some editorial caprice of Georg Rollenhagen fils. For one thing, we know that Kepler was reading other books, which can be shown to have had a significant influence on the content of the Somnium. In particular, the 16th-century Swedish minister and polymath Olaus Magnus's Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) seems to have been particularly important. Magnus refers to the "artem magicam apud septentrionales populos" (Bk. 3, Ch. 15, 117), a phrase which Kepler subsequently picks up virtually unaltered. According to Edward Rosen, "Kepler's use of the words montis... ignivomi to describe Mt. Hekla as the site of Purgatory strikingly echo" the terminology of the 1599 abridgement of Magnus's Historia. 

In fact, when we look at the entire passage on Iceland to which Rosen refers, we can plainly see that Kepler is relying on Magnus not just for his picture of Mt. Hekla, but also for much of Fiolxhilde's later account of the Icelandic spirits that, as she puts it, 'love the shadows'. Allow me to cite the passage at some length: 

Islandia terra est subiecta polo Arctico, vento praesertim Circio opposita, ac mari Glaciali propinqua: atque ob id dici meretur terra glacialis, seu ultimum Tyle, nulli veterum non celebrata... Pro maiori parte montosa, & inculta, praesertim versus plagam Septentrionalem, ob austera spiracula praedicti venti Circii, qui nec frutices elevare permittit. Insula est insolitis miraculis praedicanda. Rupes etenim, sive promontorium in ea est... quod instar Aetnae perpetuis ignibus aestuat. Ibique locus esse creditur poenae, expiationisque sordidarum animarum. Illic nempe spiritus, seu umbrae, comperiuntur se exhibentes manifestos humanis ministeriis submersorum, sive alio violento casu enectorum. Spectra sese offerunt congressibus notorum hominum tam manifesta, ut tanquam viventes accipiantur ab ignaris mortis illorum, data dextra. Nec deprehenditur error prisquam disparuerint umbrae. Incolae plurimum praesagiunt fata principum, quiduc remotius in orbe peragitur, revelationibus apparentium spectrorum non ignorant, prout inserius cap. de magicis praestigiis lucidius aperietur. 

The land of Iceland is situated beneath the Arctic pole, oriented principally toward the northwest, and close to the glacial sea: and this is why it merits the name of 'Ice Land', or 'Ultima Thule', celebrated among the ancients... For the greater part it is mountainous and wild, above all towards the northern coast, for nor does the austere vent of the aforementioned northwesterly wind permit anythng to grow. The island is known for its unheard-of wonders. And indeed the rocks, or the promontory in them, ... are seething with a perpetual fire like Mt. Etna. And it is in that place that the punishment and expiation of besmirched souls is believed to occur. One finds there spirits, or shadows, that are manifested through the conjurations of men. The specters of drowned men or of men who died a violent death appear so real that, like living men, they shake hands with men who don't know they are dead, and the error does not reveal itself until the moment when the specters have disappeared ('De apparentibus umbris submersorum', Bk. II, ch. 3, 62).

It is, in short, even more clear than it had been for Rosen, when we look at this entire passage, that Kepler is greatly indebted to Magnus, and not just for his appreciation of Hekla as a point of entry to a nether-realm, but also as an inspiration for the idea that Iceland is a place of commerce with spirits. 

But we are still missing something very important: the sort of transit Kepler describes as happening from Iceland is not a descent into a dark nether world. Iceland as a point of entry to the center of the world is of course a familiar trope, as for instance in Jules Verne, whose 1864 Voyage au centre de la Terre begins with the deciphering of a supposed runic manuscript that describes where the volcanic points of entry lie. The idea that Iceland possesses such points of entry appears to be rooted both in the geology of the mid-Atlantic range, as well as in Norse mythology itself. Thus in the Gylfaginning, which makes up the first part of Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century Prose Edda, there is mention of the Gjallarbrú, a bridge across the River Gjöll into Hel (a place that is what it sounds like). But the Gjallarbrú has its symbolic inversion in the Asbrú, or Æsir Bridge, which does not descend into the bowels of the earth, but rather extends from this world into Asgard, the realm of the gods. An alternative term for 'Asbrú' is 'Bifröst' (as found in the Prose Edda) or 'Bilröst' (as found in the Poetic Edda). These terms can all serve, even in contemporary Icelandic, as poetic or elevated ways of saying 'rainbow': a bridge that leads to the æsir, the gods. Thus in the Grímnismál, a component of the Poetic Edda, we find a concealed Odin revealing cosmological knowledge to Agnarr, who learns that the Asbrú is the best of all bridges, even if it is constantly burning up those who cross it:

Ka/rmt oc Avrmt 
oc Kerla/gar tver, 
þer scal Þorr vaða 
dag hvern, 
er hann doma ferr 
at asci Yggdrasils; 
þviat asbrv 
brenn a/ll loga, 
heilog votn hlóa.

Or, in Benjamin Thorpe's 19th-century translation: "Körmt and Ormt, and the Kerlaugs twain: / these Thor must wade each day, / when he to council goes / at Yggdrasil's ash / for as the As-bridge is all on fire, / the holy waters boil."  

There is no sign in Magnus, or any of Kepler's known sources, of an understanding of the commerce wth spirits in Iceland as initiating a flight rather than a descent. There is little indication of any interest in the Historia in the arcana of Norse mythology, and if it is to this latter that we ultimately wish to trace Kepler's Somnium, from the lunar voyage back to the burning bridge of the Æsir, scholarly prudence requires us to concede that we have yet to discover the path by which this trope was transmitted from medieval Iceland to early modern Germany. 

What can be established is that in Iceland, as a result of the coincidence of its geological features with its geographical situation, we find the confluence of two widespread and ancient mythological tropes. Its vulcanism marks it out as a site of access to Hades or Hel, while its Arctic location causes it to be associated with another world not beneath but above or beyond this one-- we see the Arctic being used for exactly this purpose in, e.g., Margaret Cavendish's conception of a 'blazing world' that attaches to this one at the North Pole, and in the many subsequent iterations of the idea that 'Nova Zembla', as it was long called in quaint misunderstanding (and where, good maps show, there is a river called 'Nabokov'), is a site where the ordinary laws of nature break down. Remarkably, both of these tropes are found already in the medieval Eddas, narratively represented by the two bridges, Asbrú and Gjallarbrú, burning and scintillating, dissuading the common lot of men from crossing them. 

Some Remarks on Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov has done pretty much all a human can do, from within the pouch of corporeal experience and the tunnel of time, to trace out the boundaries of the absolute. He has done so entirely without positive beliefs, but armed only with a love of the names of things, and a superhuman power to combine these names according to the rules --which are his own rules-- of the art of description. This, from Speak, Memory: 

I have journeyed back in thought --with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went-- to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remember having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues-- and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, form their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

Vladimir Nabokov is not himself a bitter embryo, but he is a big baby, a spoiled child at his best when he is describing the years he spent as an actual spoiled child, in sailor's costume, coddled by nurses, fondled by uncles, plied with sweets. He has trouble comprehending the Bolshevik revolution beyond what it means for his own plight, which is to say the practice of his lepidoptery, of being bathed by servants, and other mischief. It is this same indifference to politics, which is to say also this conservatism by default, that makes Nabokov a transnational, and translinguistic author, which in turn are the very things that make him a great author. He can readjust even to America, and become great there while other emigrés flap and fizzle, because there are butterflies in Colorado too. And in this way the whole world is his home, even as his indifference to his fellow human beings seethes from nearly every page. 

Vladimir Nabokov had moreover been transnational from the beginning, and never had to convert or adapt. As he put it, by the time he arrived in America he was too old anyway to be 'Conradically transformed'. His English came before his Russian, though both seem to have been preceded by an innate or congenital mépris:

I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar-- Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts-- 'Who is Ben?' 'He is Dan,' 'Sam is in bed,' and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ --for the initial lessons, at least-- words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools ('Ben has an axe'), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory.

Already on the manor outside pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, though, traces of America, and not just of the English language, seem to have had a particularly strong hold on his imagination. Thus the same uncle who fondled him (about which fondling Nabokov, the anti-Freudian, makes little),

would solemnly bring me from America the Foxy Grandpa series, and Buster Brown-- a forgotten boy in a reddish suit: if one looked closely, one could see that the color was really a mass of dense red dots. Every episode ended in a tremendous spanking for Buster, which was administered by his wasp -waisted but powerful Ma, who used a slipper, a hairbrush, a brittle umbrella, anything --even the bludgeon of a helpful policeman-- and drew puffs of dust from the seat of Buster's pants.

What is going on here? There is genius, for one thing, but whose is it? Nabokov is simply relating to us the trifling comics he recalls having read decades before. He has at the very least had the talent to remember them, and to preserve and eventually reveal their own inborn genius. Buster Brown is a work of genius, as Nancy and Sluggo might be, as Archie or Garfield might be, but it takes a genius to draw it out, and it is a mark of Nabokov's genius that it can be drawn out by being described simply, by being barely described at all, but almost only mentioned. Buster Brown, from whose pants puffs of dust rise when he is spanked. Genius! 

And when he is observing his fellow men, is it not just as if Vladimir Nabokov is delighting in Buster Brown's spanking? Here, I think, is the very cruelest and most delightful passage in all of Speak, Memory, which brings together anti-unionism, anti-collectivism, Nabokov's sense of his own singular specialness, and, finally, his unmistakable power to convey through the art of description that he is, just as he senses, special: 

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing.

It was only when I read Ada, or Ardor two years ago or so that I became convinced of Nabokov's greatness. I hesitated for a long time after that to read his memoir, since memoirs have a way for me of overexposing their subject, and in the case of novelists of depriving me of the precious illusion of novels as autonomous works of art. In this case the memoir has had the effect of revealing to me the way in which Vladimir Nabokov's greatness as an author is fundamentally rooted in his limitations as a human, in particular in his lack of fellow-feeling with other humans, his constitutional indifference to matters of solidarity. What he finds when all of this is stripped away are nature, and freedom, and humor and amazement.

Whether you take this as a 'positive' assessment of Nabokov or not will depend on whether you see inculcation of virtue as one of the functions of literature. 

George Saunders, Tenth of December

I've carried around with me for the past few years this idea that George Saunders discovered a new method for exploring the human soul at hitherto unimagined depths, that he was the culmination of what Nietzsche had in mind when he called Stendhal 'a great psychologist', etc. This is in part why I put up so much resistance when, reading Tenth of December last night, I felt a certain familiar feeling, and sensed that this feeling was not the one I had when I last read Saunders, and judged that he was plumbing the depths of the human soul, etc., but rather the one that I have had, on occasion, when, passing through one of those American cities where they still have local newspapers with 'funny pages', my eyes land upon that day's installment of Dilbert. Office memos from small-minded middle managers, meaningless tech speak, and the grinding debasement of wage labor: ha ha. 

But still, Saunders has discovered something new, and while this something is not a new method for excavating the human soul, quite, it is enough to merit quick praise from Thomas Pynchon, and long-winded, dorky praise from Dave Eggers. Saunders has discovered namely a system of punctuation that reproduces contemporary American diction and cadences with astounding accuracy. And this diction and these cadences are precisely the manner of speaking of people, contemporary Americans, who can barely speak: Saunders's most stunning literary achievement is to reproduce inarticulacy with unprecedented verisimilitude.

This is why the stories involving pharmaceutically induced eloquence are so funny: they put into such sharp relief what his characters cannot do, and would like to do with the strength of their feelings alone. Strikingly, those with medically enhanced speech are still not terribly eloquent: he tells us that the temporary lovers under the influence of Verbaluce have become veritable poets, but we do not see much poetry; and the amusement-park employee under the influence of KnightLyfe starts speaking in a courtly and medieval style, but still does not know that 'didst' cannot be used as the third-person past indicative of 'do'. Saunders himself is more like the characters who are not under the influence of Verbaluce, and his principle purpose is to convey their inner lives, lives of mostly prelinguistic feeling that, when forced into written words --since, after all, Saunders has chosen to convey their inner lives by writing stories-- can only give rise to a new system of punctuation, custom-made for a fragmentary syntax. The characters can barely make sense of their own feelings in utterances, yet Saunders is able to make them make sense in writing. That's something. 

A few years ago, when I was floored by Saunders, and thought he had found new methods for probing the depths of the soul, etc., I think I was in fact just floored by his punctuational innovations, as these, when applied to questions of life and fate, seem to cast life and fate in a new and strange light. I recall in particular a story he published in the New Yorker, which involved, among other things, a man who was really not all that bad, but was going through a difficult time because he had a mortally ill wife at home under his loving care. He was explaining to another man what mattered to him, and evoked his care for his wife, saying:

That, to me? Is real. 

When I read this, it seemed to say something about reality itself. When by contrast I read, in "Puppy," the line,

So what she'd love for tonight? Was getting the pup sold...

it didn't seem to reveal anything about love or desire or even puppies, but only something about a handy convention Saunders mastered some years ago and knows how to recycle for good effect.

Saunders is an American writer in the same way that Chingiz Aitmatov is a Kyrgyz writer or Robert Service is a Yukon poet. He speaks for the place. He especially speaks for the lower-class white part of the place. And if, like me, that is a part of America you know well, but from which you have become estranged in later life, then it can be particularly gratifying to see Saunders describing it with such great power of observation. The encounters in "Puppy" and in "Home", between the benighted, marginalized lower classes, on the one hand, and the equally benighted, but vastly more self-satisfied, so-called 'middle class' on the other, seem to tell the whole story of America, and a good part of my own life history in America. When the middle-class mom goes to pick up the puppy from the white-trash family, and sees "the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it," I swear I have known both sides of this encounter with equal intimacy, and love, and desire to get away.  

Certain other respects in which his stories are All-American, as one of his characters might say, interest me less. I don't know about Dilbert's America, and so satire of it falls as flat with me as earnest commitment to it. If we try to isolate particular complaints in Saunders's social critique, the two that come through most clearly have to do with the negligence of war veterans, and the cynical profit motive that lies behind the hypermedicalization of our emotional lives. I find the latter more compelling as an issue, and I think "Escape from Spiderhead" is a wonderful near-future-dystopian satire of the sort of society big pharma seems intent on bringing about (with the collusion of the profit-driven prison industry).

The dénouement of "Escape" looks a great deal like the story from the New Yorker that impressed me so much years ago, featuring a freshly dead man floating up toward the sky. Again, when I read that story I thought I was learning something new about death; this time, the effect is considerably reduced. I'm not sure what has changed in me, but I think at least part of the problem is that something has not changed in Saunders. He's found his formula and stuck with it. It's pretty good. But anyhow now that I've spent my $31.95 CAD and got my fix, I intend to return to my usual rule of not reading anything written after 1923, and sticking with the sort of authors who use 'didst' correctly because, when they're using it? They're using it for real. 

Immanuel Kant and his Man-Servant Lampe

I've been reading Thomas de Quincey's 1827 essay, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, which is really little more than a massively long quotation, in English translation, of Ehregott Andreas Wasianski's 1804 work, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren. In fact, Wasianski's entire work is cited, after a few paragraphs of framing from de Quincey, and with a few additional footnotes here and there. I am not really certain why this work is attributed to the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater at all. De Quincey is at most the editor. 

Wasianski had been Kant's friend of long standing, and the account he gives of the philosopher's life, and his ultimate decline, is precious. It is, I suppose, the source of many of the legends we hear about Kant the personality, as that he took a regular constitutional stroll at the same time every day. But many of the details offered by Wasianski never attained to the status of legend. This for example:

Kant never perspired, night or day. Yet it was astonishing how much heat he supported habitually in his study, and in fact was not easy if it wanted but one degree of this heat. Seventy-five degrees of Fahrenheit was the invariable temperature of this room in which he chiefly lived; and if it fell below that point, no matter at what season of the year, he had it raised artificially to the usual standard. In the heats of summer he went thinly dressed, and invariably in silk stockings; yet, as even this dress could not always secure him against perspiring when engaged in active exercise, he had a singular remedy in reserve. Retiring to some shady place, he stood still and motionless--with the air and attitude of a person listening, or in suspense-- until his usual aridity was restored. Even in the most sultry summer night, if the slightest trace of perspiration had sullied his night-dress, he spoke of it with emphasis, as of an accident that perfectly shocked him.

The most delightful scenes of Wasianski's work describe Kant's relationship with his manservant Martin Lampe (delightful to me anyway, who am perhaps overly fascinated by this particular sort of interpersonal relationship, enough so to have invented one from my very imagination. Kant's relationship to Lampe is different from that of Dr. Smith to Isaac --Isaac is smart but subversive, while Lampe is dumb and loyal--, but both strike me similarly as both unhealthy and singularly touching, and in these respects as very much like marriage). 

Here is how Wasianski first introduces Lampe:

Precisely at five minutes before five o'clock, winter or summer, Lampe, Kant's servant, who had formerly served in the army, marched into his master's room with the air of a sentinel on duty, and cried aloud in a military tone, -- 'Mr. Professor, the time is come.'

Wasianski pauses to describe the relationship between the two in some detail. He considers it important to do so, since Kant and Lampe had a falling out two years before the philosopher's death. The nature of the dispute is not entirely clear from what Wasianski is willing to report of it, but it leads to the servant's dismissal, in 1802, and inaugurates the period of Kant's decline and eventual death two years later: 

It was a great misfortune for Kant, in his old age and infirmities, that this man also became old, and subject to a different sort of infirmities. This Lampe had originally served in the Prussian army; on quitting which he entered the service of Kant. In this situation he had lived about forty years; and, though always dull and stupid, had, in the early part of this period, discharged his duties with tolerable fidelity. But latterly, presuming upon his own indispensableness, from his perfect knowledge of all the domestic arrangements, and upon his master's weakness, he had fallen into great irregularities and neglect of his duties. Kant had been obliged, therefore, of late, to threaten repeatedly that he would discharge him. I, who knew that Kant, though one of the kindest-hearted men, was also one of the firmest, foresaw that this discharge, once given, would be irrevocable: for the word of Kant was as sacred as other men's oaths. Consequently, upon every opportunity, I remonstrated with Lampe on the folly of his conduct, and his wife joined me on these occasions. Indeed, it was high time that a change should be made in some quarter; for it now became dangerous to leave Kant, who was constantly falling from weakness, to the care of an old ruffian, who was himself apt to fall from intoxication. The fact was, that from the moment I undertook the management of Kant's affairs, Lampe saw there was an end to his old system of abusing his master's confidence in pecuniary affairs, and the other advantages which he took of his helpless situation. This made him desperate, and he behaved worse and worse; until one morning, in January, 1802, Kant told me, that, humiliating as he felt such a confession, the fact was, that Lampe had just treated him in a way which he was ashamed to repeat.

We know that, in spite of the falling out, Kant felt obliged to include Lampe in his will, and as a result the former servant received a comfortable pension beginning the year Kant died. 

Elsewhere in his éloge, Wasianski describes the routines of the philosopher and his servant in comic detail, the one comically haughty and exigent, the other comically dim-witted and devoted:

For the space of more than thirty years, during which he had been in the habit of reading the newspaper published by Hartung, Lampe delivered it with the same identical blunder on every day of publication. -- 'Mr. Professor, here is Hartmann's journal.' Upon which Kant would reply -- 'Eh! what?-- What's that you say? Hartmann's journal? I tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, repeat it after me-- not Hartmann, but Hartung.' Then Lampe, looking sulky, and drawing himself up with the stiff air of a soldier on guard, and in the very same monotonous tone with which he had been used to sing out his challenge of -- Who goes there? would roar- - 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now again!' Kant would say: on which again Lampe roared -- 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now a third time,' cried Kant: on which for a third time the unhappy Lampe would howl out-- 'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' And this whimsical scene of parade duty was continually repeated: duly as the day of publication came, the irreclaimable old dunce was put through the same manoeuvres, which were as invariably followed by the same blunder on the next.

Towards the end of their decades together, Kant grew more irrascible, but Lampe continued to do what he could to placate him. And so, more comedy:

the expressions of his impatience, though from old habit still gentle, were so lively, and had so much of infantine naivete about them, that none of us could forbear smiling. Knowing what would happen, I had taken care that all the preparations should be made beforehand; the coffee was ground; the water was boiling; and the very moment the word was given, his servant shot in like an arrow, and plunged the coffee into the water. All that remained, therefore, was to give it time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to Kant. All consolations were thrown away upon him: vary the formula as we might, he was never at a loss for a reply. If it was said -- 'Dear Professor, the coffee will be brought up in a moment.' Will be!' he would say, 'but there's the rub, that it only will be: Man never is, but always to be blest.'

The most touching part of the essay comes when Wasianski describes his own effort to help maintain the daily routines around the Kant residence after Lampe's dismissal:

One part only there was of the daily ceremonial, where all of us were at a loss, as it was a part which no mortal eyes had ever witnessed but those of Lampe: this was breakfast. However, that we might do all in our power, I myself attended at four o'clock in the morning. The day happened, as I remember, to be the 1st of February, 1802. Precisely at five, Kant made his appearance; and nothing could equal his astonishment on finding me in the room. Fresh from the confusion of dreaming, and bewildered alike by the sight of his new servant, by Lampe's absence, and by my presence, he could with difficulty be made to comprehend the purpose of my visit. A friend in need is a friend indeed; and we would now have given any money to that learned person who could have instructed us in the arrangement of the breakfast table. But this was a mystery revealed to none but Lampe. 

Wasianski concludes his treatment of Lampe by mentioning "an affecting instance of Kant's yearning after his old good-for-nothing servant in his memorandum-book":

Other people record what they wish to remember; but Kant had here recorded what he was to forget. 'Mem.: February, 1802, the name of Lampe must now be remembered no more.'

Lampe is gone, and Kant will mention him no more. He is in decline, and more irrascible than before. He is an old, dying man, but one who can still be made to perk up, like most old men, by a good friend who knows how to coax out his old passions. In Kant's case, significantly, these are not, at the very brink of death, the deep questions of metaphysics and epistemology, but rather the trivia of geography:

[W]hen he became perfectly incapable of conversing with any rational meaning on the ordinary affairs of life, he was still able to answer correctly and distinctly, in a degree that was perfectly astonishing, upon any question of philosophy or of science, especially of physical geography, chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler's, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless, -- even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise of everybody but myself, he immediately gave us a summary account of their habits and customs; and told us by the way, that in the word Algiers, the g ought to be pronounced hard (as in the English word gear).

Within the week, Kant would be dead, and he would die as he lived --as the ancients believed great men do--, which in his case means that he would die without sweating:

About ten o'clock in the forenoon he suffered a remarkable change; his eye was rigid and his face and lips became discolored by a cadaverous pallor. Still, such was the effect of his previous habits, that no trace appeared of the cold sweat which naturally accompanies the last mortal agony... Soon after his death the head of Kant was shaved; and, under the direction of Professor Knorr, a plaster cast was taken, not a masque merely, but a cast of the whole head, designed (I believe) to enrich the craniological collection of Dr. Gall. 

I also wanted to get, in this post, to the question that comes down to us from the ancients: why, namely, should we take an interest in the manners of the deaths of the philosophers? Of course today we suppose that we should not take an interest, that to do so is to do bad philosophy, or to lapse into mere 'philosophical biography' or 'philosophical journalism'. But from Diogenes Laërtius's point of view anyway, philosophical biography, the genre of the bios, was philosophy par excellence. To know a philosopher's views fully, and to grasp how successfully they were implemented, one had to wait to see how he died. This was a corollary to the adage that no man must be called happy until he dies, which held that a man's wisdom too can only be adequately judged post-mortem. Sometimes, of course, the manner of approaching death does indeed show something about character, and character may well be grounded in philosophical commitments. Yet death strikes in many ways, most of which signify nothing. And in any case Kant's not sweating at the time of death does not seem to reveal any more about his philosophy than Kant's not sweating during life.

Yet, contrary to what we usually suppose, Diogenes Laërtius's project died out much later than we tend to think. Leibniz's amanuensis Eckhart gives us a stunning account of his master's demise from gout in 1714, while Wasianski, seeing that his friend did not end his days with a servant up to the task, took it upon himself to document the medical condition of his equal. His presumption seems to have been that this work must be written, simply in view of who Kant had been in life, and in view of the greatness of his thought.

Wasianski included details about interpersonal relations that are missing in Eckhart's account of Leibniz, and in Diogenes Laërtius's summaries of sundry philosophical luminaries in antiquity. He thought it fitting to devote much of this short biography to the relationship between the philosopher and the manservant. Perhaps apart from his relationship to Wasianski himself, which remains surprisingly opaque in Wasianski's account, the relationship Kant had with Lampe appears to be the most significant and interesting one in his entire life, the one that tells us, much more than the manner of his death, who Kant was. 

The Delights of Disgust

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. To read the entire essay, go here.

Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2010) appears to have been written for a high-school civics course. Implicit already in its title is the idea that disgust is inhuman, or perhaps pre-human, that it is a stage to advance out of on the way to humanity. For Nussbaum it's all very simple: Disgust is immature, and well-adjusted adults should grow out of it.

As an effort to shape law and public policy in the United States, Nussbaum's approach makes sense. But it's a sad fact of public debate in America that words intended to influence public debate must sound like they are intended for adolescents. From Disgust to Humanity is in large part a riposte to the argument made by Leon R. Kass, head of President George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, that disgust (for example, at the thought of anal sex) has its own inherent "wisdom," which may serve as a "natural" basis on which to develop a sexual ethics. Nussbaum argues against Kass, but the two are united by a sort of anthropological obtuseness. He is wrong to suppose that what disgusts us in sexual matters can simply be read off of nature, and that nature writes in the same idiom in all times and places. She, in turn, is wrong to suppose that just because disgust is culturally variable and thus to some extent arbitrary, and because it can result in oppressive social relations, it is therefore somehow inhuman.

I confess I am disgusted by a great many things about people (and about myself, but let's put that aside). I do not believe it is particularly urgent for me to overcome my disgust, even if I recognize that this emotion must remain entirely separate from my thinking about which laws would be most just. I am disgusted by other people's dandruff, facial moles, food stuck in their beards, yet I do not accept that in feeling this way I am judging those people to be subhuman. I take it rather that humanity, while endearing, is also capable of appearing disgusting.

In fact, one great problem with Kass's approach, which Nussbaum does nothing to refute, is that disgust and its various opposites—relish, delectation, delight—seem ever so delicately close to each other, and always ready to slide unawares over to the other side. This is not some abstruse psychoanalytic paradox, but a simple observation of an obvious condition of human bodily experience. The same things that excite our desire most—the naked bodies of other humans, the bright red shell of a boiled lobster, a cigarette glowing in an ashtray—are the things that always, simultaneously, threaten to excite our revulsion. Kass should be suspicious of his "wisdom" regarding the various uses of the anus, lest he find his revulsion crossing over all too suddenly into a very different sort of passion.

Cicero observed that the greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust. Nussbaum no doubt knows that, even if she prefers in the present work to focus on the Roman orator's more elevated treatment of the concept of humanitas,"a responsiveness to others that prominently included the ability to imagine their experiences." Could it be, though, that Cicero did not consider this responsiveness to the humanity of others as incompatible with being grossed out by them? Such a presumption of compatibility may, in fact, be truer to the spirit of humanitas than any version that results from an effort to isolate this responsiveness in its pure, other-embracing form.

That last point has generally been best understood in the arts; novelists and poets are often much better than theorists at appreciating the complicated ways in which disgust and desire work together, even conspire together, and at appreciating the ways in which this conspiracy, far from being an impediment to our humanity, is constitutive of it.

Rabelais, to cite one extreme example, pounds away with instance after instance of the disgusting ways human beings appear: in gluttony, in bestiality, in massaging one's groin with the downy head of a duck. The giant Gargantua is disgusting, and hilarious: a pair of closely related, perhaps inseparable adjectives. It is hard to imagine how one could operate freely in the humorous mode without courting disgust. Risibility, as the medieval philosophers understood, is a trait found wherever there is humanity. Rabelais courts disgust, but the reader never loses sight of the fact that it is humanity's marvelous, over-the-top disgustingness that is under consideration. In real life, too, the food in the beard would not disgust me if it were on a plate, and that is because the beard is on a human, and it is precisely his humanity I am recognizing when I am disgusted by him.

Nor would I reproach a culture, should one be discovered, that considers food in the beard a fitting tribute to a host after a fine meal. There are a number of historical examples of culinary practices that today seem no less repulsive. For example, French explorers among the Huron in the 17th century found it difficult to enjoy one of the local delicacies: a sort of cornbread, whose batter, before baking, was mixed with saliva in the mouths of the tribe's elder women.

Is that intrinsically disgusting? Well, it might help to recall that, biologically speaking, all cooking is a form of extrasomatic predigestion, beginning a process of breaking down raw food through dicing, boiling, etc., that is subsequently continued by our digestive system. That might explain why communal eating is potentially a source of great disgust. Like sex, it is a sharing of the stuff of life, and who you do it with determines to no small degree who you are. That is also why communal eating is so crucial for the establishment of social bonds, and thus why the French explorers in the end forced themselves to swallow the cornbread.

There is nothing categorically more disgusting about the Huron recipe than there is about the sort of predigestion that precedes communal eating in all cultures, yet this does not mean the French were simply being fickle when they felt disgust. Neither Kass nor Nussbaum, however, if they had been talking about cooking rather than sex, would have had the conceptual resources to come to that simple, and obvious, conclusion...

At the Galerie de Paléontologie

Since the Paris World Fair in 1900, the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle exhibition has been housed together with the Galerie de Paléontologie, featuring the fossils of extinct creatures: the dinosaurs and outsized Pleistocene mammals that so enrapture the children, and that often compel them to pose some of their first philosophical questions about the nature of existence (dinosaurs do not exist, yet they are not, for that reason, fictional; how is this possible?). I feel more at home in Comparative Anatomy. It reveals a static, Polaroid-like slice of nature as it is at present. But nature is not really like this. Nature is always unfolding, and it is the Gallery of Paleontology that reveals the effort of the Muséum's founders (most of whom, again, were creationists) to take into account the entire film of it, so to speak, rather than only the single still that the present provides.  

Entering the Gallery of Paleontology from the north staircase, we immediately encounter three large dinosaur skeletons. All of these turn out, on closer inspection, to be casts made of metal, rather than skeletons of bone. The kids running around don’t seem to care. Successive waves of them flow by, all declaring that they are in the presence of ‘dinosaurs’: not bones of dinosaurs, let alone models of bones of dinosaurs, but dinosaurs. One of the three models, of the peculiarly named Allosaurus fragilis, is the only bipedal carnivore on display, the only one approximating the Platonic form of the dinosaur established for all time by the Tyranosaurus rex. Another of the three is the Iguanadon bernissartensis, a species whose gait, and the proper display of whose bones, has been the source of sustained controversy. Does it walk upright? Does it walk on all fours? The masses of six-year-olds are eager to know. Finally, the largest of the three is a cast of a Diplodocus Carnegii, a brontosaurus-like dinosaur, one of the lumbering, gentle vegetarians, given to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle as a gift from Andrew Carnegie in 1908, who was at the same time building up one of the world’s great natural history museums in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A year earlier, Carnegie had been one of the principal donators to the French Muséum; like Jefferson to Buffon before him, the American continued to think of Paris as one of the great centers of natural history.

We also find the holotype of the Sarcosuchus imperator, not a dinosaur but rather a gigantic --as in, characterized by gigantism-- extinct relative of modern crocodiles dating from the early Cretaceous. A holotype is a paleontological specimen that is used for the original species-defining description. This means that at the Gallery of Paleontology one can see the Sarcosuchus imperator itself, the standard against which all subsequent finds are measured. In this respect modern paleontology retains a trace of Platonism, to the extent that there is an exemplary measure of what it is to be a member of a given kind. Yet rather than casting its exemplars into some otherworldly realm of transcendental forms, it locates them in actual fossils, than which nothing can be more concrete.

There is a cast of a pteranodon hanging nearby, and there are glass cases with a Pelagosaurus typus and a Lystrosaurus Murrayi. These names, I am finding, are exhausting and unevocative. Other than a few of the most well-known --T. Rex, bronto, sabertooth, etc.--, for obvious reasons extinct animals do not have popular names parallel to their binomial nomenclature. One of the most intriguing things about the ground floor of the gallery is the way the Latin binomials variously complement and contrast with the names that have bubbled up spontaneously for the animals in the vulgate (taupe, tatou, etc.). This is a possibility paleontology lacks, since for the most part it studies creatures that departed before there was language in the world.

There is a composite Cryptoclidus oxoniensis, pieced together from several representatives of this marine reptile species dug up in Oxfordshire. There is an Ichthyosaurus tenuirostris not yet removed from the rock in which it was found, and a Tarbosaurus Bataar, discovered, as its name implies, in Mongolia, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist who believed that evolution is a testimony to God's greatness.

Before coming to the half-way point of the main floor of the exhibition hall (the point at which, one floor below in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, the display of terrestrial mammal skeletons gives way to the Cetaceum), we begin to find remains of the great mammals that thrived throughout the last glacial period, particularly the skulls of gargantuan Rhinocerotidae. Only one of these is known by a folk name, the ‘woolly rhinoceros’, which is to say the Coelodonta antiquitatis. These various skulls are mixed in with a cast of from a triceratops, and other remnants of the Cretaceous period, which preceded the Pleistocene of the great mammals by 65 million years or so. But no one seems to notice the anachronism, and least of all the children, who are running about indiscriminately labelling everything they see a ‘dinosaur’. And it is hard to blame them, for the Rhinoceros megarhinus, the Acerotherium Persiae, and most of all the Arsinoitherium of the early Oligocene, with two massive blades for horns, do indeed appear nearly indistinguishable, in mass and in monstrosity, from the saurians. Sometimes, even their names are misleading, as is the case with the Dinoceras mirabile, an Eocene mammal whose name means ‘wonderful terrible-horn’. This creature is like the dinosaurs, in name, only to the extent that it is deinos, terrible, but its ceras has nothing to do with a saurus.

We are now half-way through. The second segment of the hall, directly above the Cetaceum, begins, from left to right, with a bloc ossifère, a fossil-bearing stone block, with scattered vestiges of the ancient horse known as ‘hipparion’; then a glass case with dodo bones (originally called by Linnaeus a Didus ineptus; was it out of respect for the departed that this name was subsequently changed?) on top of a wooden cabinet with locked and unlabelled drawers; then the complete skeletons of two extinct fossil species of manatee. Behind these, Cuvier’s own complete skeleton of a Megatherium Americanum, which translates simply as ‘great American beast’: a fitting name for this Pliocene ground sloth at least as large as any African elephant. It is a sort of prototypical beast, a hungry mound of fur, without many distinguishing features beyond this. Even the name ‘great American beast’ seems too specific for it.

To its left is the complete skeleton of a Hipparion mediterraneum, and behind it a complete Equus hemionus (a ‘half-ass’) and a cast of a Hippidion principale. The horse lineage does not seem to have exhibited the diversity of the rhinoceroses or even the elephants: all equids seem, more or less, to be horses. There is another sort of ground sloth behind them, and to their right two skulls of the Pleistocene Hippopotamus major, and also a complete Glyptodon asper, to which we will return shortly. There are scattered skulls, jaws, and tusks of extinct proboscidians; to the left a composite skeleton of an Archaeobelodon, and to the right a rather small skeleton of a juvenile Mammuthus primigenius. In the middle rear of the hall, directly above the fin whale one floor below, is the Pleistocene pièce de résistance, a complete Mammuthus meridionalis skeleton, a behemoth extracted out of deepest, coldest Siberia. Even its skeleton seems woolly, somehow. Surrounding the mammoth are various casts, of a saber-toothed tiger (known in the nomenclature by the evocative name of Smilodon, which unfortunately has nothing to do with smiling); and of a Diprotodon australis, a sort of rhinoceros-sized wombat. There is a cast of a male Irish elk, and a skeleton of a much smaller female.

In the middle, behind the great mammoth, there are two glass cases. One contains the skeletons of three cave bears (Ursus spelaeus), two lions, a wolf, and a hyena, all displayed, though skeletons, in the middle of some species-specific activity (rearing up, scavenging). The rearing cave bear is the only display in the Gallery, on either floor, that has been able to induce in me a frisson of fear. Behind these creatures is another glass case, filled with extinct ‘ratite’ birds (giant, flightless, ostrich-like), including the shockingly large Aepyornis maximus, along with five of its watermelon-sized eggs. These do not invoke fright, as does the cave bear, but a much more familiar feeling from other encounters in the museum: a sort of wonder mixed with queasiness, a sort of fascinated nausea. It is peculiar that there is no word for this.

As at the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, here as well there are glass cases surrounding the exhibition floor. In the Gallery of Paleontology though they are much more haphazard; the numbering, as one moves clockwise around the hall from the north entrance, is odd, going up to 115 at the other end of the hall, at which point one arrives at an even 116 and begins to count down from there to cabinet number 2. Many of the cases are empty, and many contain models made of styrofoam, felt, and what look like fishing lures, the sort of re-imaginings of the Jurassic one might find at a high-school science fair. There is extensive information, often presented on what looks like construction paper, about various excavations that took place in France in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cabinets 59 through 67, running alongside the hipparion skeleton on the main floor, tell of the evolution of equids; and on the opposite side cabinets 106 through 98 run through the history of primates, and feature a cast of the Lucy skeleton, whose original is on permanent display in Addis Ababa. Cabinet 86 features the still furry and gristly leg and face of a Siberian mammoth; cabinet 18, the still scaly fossil of a Lepidotus laevis fish. Cabinet 10 teaches us, in cut-out construction paper, that among fish it is a mark of advanced evolution to have fewer and softer bones; as the French puts it, ‘ossification regresses’ in fish evolution.

And there is much that I missed besides: the skull of an Odobenocetops, a sort of tusked Pliocene whale; a display on the neoteny of stegocephalids; the Ichthyosaurus platyodon skull found by Mary Anning, Cuvier’s English correspondent from Dorset, who from 1826 until her death ran a small shop, Anning’s Fossil Depot, near the Blue Lias cliffs in Lyme Regis, where she sold devil’s-fingers and the fossils of 'verteberries': her own spontaneous folk term, a sort of diminutive, for ‘vertebrates’.

Kafka's Ape

In his 1917 short story, “Report to an Academy,” Kafka tells the story of Red Peter, a chimpanzee captured in Africa and brought back to Europe to be studied by the members of an institution very much like the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Red Peter, by some unusual transformation that is never fully explained, develops after his capture into a cultivated, language-endowed gentleman, and the titular report is in fact his narration of his own autobiography, beginning shortly after his first encounter with humans while still in his merely animal stage.

Peter recounts how, early in his captivity, he had been subjected to various experiments in which, for example, scientists hung a banana from the ceiling in order to see whether he had the requisite intelligence to stack blocks together and climb up to reach his reward. This sort of experiment, of course, takes a number of things for granted. Among other things, although it purports to be testing for something human-like, it does not allow for the possibility of individual whim; it does not allow for the possibility of a response such as that of Zira, the fictional chimpanzee in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), who cannot help but exclaim, when the human scientists try a similar experiment on her, “but I simply loathe bananas!”

The fact that experiments such as these require a certain course of action in order for an animal to be deemed intelligent suggests that what is being tested for is not really intelligence in any meaningful, human sense --since humans are permitted to have arbitrary whims and individual tastes-- but rather a certain automatism that reproduces the kind of action of which a human being is capable, e.g., stacking blocks, but in the pursuit of a species-specific goal, a goal that a creature is supposed to have simply in view of the kind of creature it is, and that for that reason is not the result of a human-like willing, e.g., the will to obtain a banana. If ‘being intelligent’ is defined as ‘being like us’, we may anticipate in advance that non-human animals are doomed to fail any possible intelligence test.

We may also predict that the more distant a creature is from homo sapiens in its evolution, the greater will be its challenge in demonstrating to human researchers that it, too, is intelligent. A parallel problem has been confronted by researchers attempting to conceptualize what extraterrestrial intelligence might look like. What if, for example, an alien race has evolved that communicates by means of electrical signals?  What if, here and now, we are already surrounded by such species? What if a species of electrical eels has its own Beethovens and Kurt Gödels, communicating their beautiful compositions or penetrating discoveries through media we have not yet even thought to investigate as potential reflections of intelligence? Even if this is a foolish example, it reveals a real problem: as long as it is human beings who are designing the intelligence tests, non-humans are predetermined to come up short.

Recent scientific research is, thankfully, starting to overturn the old criteria for the measurement of the richness of internal life, and rather than asking of animals that they show us their ability to solve puzzles we design for them, researchers are instead focusing on the way different species relate to members of their own group in the pursuit of species-specific ends. One thing that has become apparent is that, in our own species, much intelligence is in fact social intelligence: the ability to interact with other humans in subtle and complex ways. We also know, now, that the mechanisms underlying human social relations are just the same endocrinologically, and much the same neurologically, as those that cause walruses, say, to prefer to live in groups rather than to live alone.

Still, the old habit of standardized testing dies hard, and an important question remains as to what constituency, exactly, an individual animal represent when it takes an intelligence test. When a child takes an IQ test, it is clear that he stands alone, that the results will be considered only as a measure of his intelligence, but not as a measure of humanity. An individual animal, in contrast, in taking a test involving blocks and bananas, is held up as a representative of its entire kind.  Sometimes, individual animals are even held up as representatives of the animal kingdom as a whole.  Consider the BBC News item of 9 March, 2009, concerning a chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden that had stockpiled rocks as part of a plan to throw them later on at the zoo’s visitors. “There has been scant evidence until now,” the article observes, “that animals can plan for future events.” One chimp in a zoo in Sweden is made to tell us something about animals in general, while a child prodigy, or for that matter a child dullard, tells us in his exceptional or mediocre test results only about himself.

Of course, the Swedish chimp tells us nothing at all about animals: its ability to plan for the future says nothing about whether fruit flies or tapeworms are able to do the same. What is meant by ‘animals’ here, we may suppose, is actually ‘some non-humans’. If capacities that are jealously guarded as the exclusive property of human beings are found to occur anywhere beyond the human species, the thought seems to be, then they may as well occur everywhere. In the end, however, no amount of experimental evidence will suffice to convince those with an a priori conviction that animals cannot plan for the future, or entertain a concept of the self, or of absence, or the like, that they were in fact mistaken.  Anything a non-human animal does can always be explained, if one chooses, in terms of ‘instinct’. Take planning, for example. Of course we all already knew that squirrels, bees, and countless other species go about their business in a way that appears to anticipate future states. Why does this not count as planning for future events? The usual answer is that in squirrels and bees this activity is only instinctive, which is to say programmed into them simply in virtue of what they are, and not requiring any conscious agency in order to execute it. But this, again, means that in an important sense it is impossible by definition to detect the existence of other intelligent species, since intelligence is taken as something that can only show up exceptionally. And yet, again, while whatever is universal is taken to be merely instinctive and so not indicative of intelligence, what is not universal but exceptional, such as the storage of stones, is taken to say something about animals as a whole.

What is going on here?  It seems that in general humans hope to be able to explain everything animals do in terms of automatism or instinct, and that journalists regularly hope to create a sensation by providing evidence to the contrary. But what this scenario leaves out is the possibility that different creatures will manifest different capacities, in part in view of the kind of creatures they are, in part in view of the opportunities and challenges their environments present to them. This scenario leaves out, moreover, the possibility that there is simply no such thing as ‘animals’, conceived as a discrete class of entities that lies between the vegetable and the human in the same way that the human was long thought to lie between the animal and the angelic. ‘Animal’, I mean, is an uninformative umbrella term, one that fails to pick out a set of kinds of creature with similar internal natures and capabilities.

This failure is sustained and encouraged by the great majority of science writing on the topic of animal intelligence.  In an article in Discovery, for example, we find Jennifer Viegas dealing with some purportedly new signs of elephant intelligence. She observes that “[o]ther animals clearly engage in teamwork,” while by contrast one of the scientists involved in the study “thinks they are ‘pre-programmed for it’, unlike elephants that seem to understand the full process.” But what kind of empirical evidence could ever ground such a distinction? Is undertanding, moreover, really incompatible with pre-programming? These are the deep problems left unadressed by most popular writing on the question of animal intelligence, but there is also a problem of style: the condescension and cutesiness of it all: words like ‘yummy’ to describe the fruit desired by the ape; the resorting to easy alliterations that would be an embarassment even in a children’s book. All this inevitably transforms any intelligence animals might display into the same old familiar circus performance, now in print rather than in the three rings of old.

If animal intelligence exists, it is of course a property of living animals. This may appear as a departure from our guiding concern, shared with the comparative anatomists at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, with the study of natural order as reflected through the anatomical evidence of --obviously-- dead animals. No one disputes that a human skeleton in a display case is no more or less intelligent than a macaque in formaldehyde. Yet it is hard to look for too long at these different products of nature and not come to the conclusion that they are substantially the same, that they are diverse expressions of the same order, and if the one exhibits a different behavioral repertoire than the other over the course of its brief life, this does not, could not, place them on separate sides of a gaping divide from one another. It is sometimes said that death is the great equalizer, and this is born out by the project of comparative anatomy, which reveals the fundamental unity of structure that, in life, permits such an efflorescence of different sorts of activity. We are in the habit of calling our own sort of activity ‘intelligent’, and of permitting ourselves to be perpetually surprised when animal activity resembles our own too closely, since intelligence has already been defined as uniquely human. It is undeniable that humans are peculiar: as has been said, their crania are greatly inflated compared to their nearest primate relatives, and their teeth are greatly reduced. But a good strong bite is an expression of nature’s reason too, and comparative anatomy helps to see that in the balance between teeth and cranium, there is no absolute reason for preferring the one advantage or the other.

Kafka’s ape and Balzac’s donkey are at once objects of scientific interest, as well as sharp observers and critics of the scientific project that has transformed them into the reflective, but also fallen, animals they are. They are simultaneously the objects of scientific inquiry and the most lucid critics of its motivations and aims. The donkey leads a double life, or better, a triple life, never betraying to human beings that he is in fact not a zebra, let alone that he is a rational animal. Red Peter, by contrast, enters the halls of the academy not as a stuffed and mounted carcass, but rather as a full-fledged member, with the right and the privilege of holding forth upon the academy’s mission. The cost of this privilege is that he is no longer able to be the sort of creature he naturally is, and one explanation of the melancholy tone of Peter’s discourse, the tone of loss, is that he understands that something great has slipped away, and that trading the one behavioral repertoire for the other does not feel, after the transition, like a move upward on any scale of being.

Red Peter probably suspects that, though he is a member of the academy, he will remain until and beyond his death a specimen of the academy, and like Marmus’s donkey his remains will be mounted and displayed. But enough time before the primate display case at a good gallery of comparative anatomy, of the sort one might find in Mitteleuropa as well as in France, cannot fail to convince the attentive spectator that this sort of display amounts to a continuation of the very case Red Peter sets out to make in his discourse: that humanity’s sense of its own uniqueness, which in the scientific age has been anchored to the nebulous concept of intelligence, is in the end nothing but a prejudice.

To Enjoin a Double Law Upon My Sinews

I've been reconsidering my earlier attempt to characterize the distinction between philosophical interests and extra-philosophical ones. I'm finding my initial stab at it more than inadequate. I sought at one point to say that it lies in one's appreciation of res singulares, of singular things, and that, though natural philosophers in the past would have disagreed, one handy criterion we have today for distinguishing between the philosophical and the non- is to accept as philosophical only that which doesn't directly concern itself with this particular plant or country or river or planet, but always stays far enough away from the abundance of singular things to, so to speak, maintain its dignity.

There is something to that, but I think, at least historically, another more significant line of demarcation, one that extends back to Aristotle and that remains perfectly relevant today in making snap judgments about whether a blog is a philosophy blog or not, is the collaboration between the metaphysics of substance and the law of the excluded middle that compels all of us following in the tradition of Western philosophy to affirm that any given thing can only be the thing it is. This sounds easy enough to accept, and at little cost, yet it leaves us ill-equipped to deal, for example, with Ovid, or the Grimms, or Saxo Grammaticus (about whom more in a second). We are familiar with Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history, as between that which ranges over the possible and that which relates the actual (and the fault of Herodotus, unlike Thucydides, had been to fail to grasp this distinction), but there is an even more fundamental distinction between different conceptions of possibility, depending on which 'laws' one starts with, and here you could say that philosophy and poetry are both subdivisions of the sort of thinking that ranges over the possible, and the crucial difference has to do with each subdivision's stance on the identity of things over time. Philosophy wants fixed things, substances; poetry --a significant portion of which we now call 'mythology'-- allows metamorphoses. 

This is not at all a new observation; I am simply recalling it from my culture's storehouse of received wisdom in order to come to a clearer explanation than I was able to offer previously of why this is not a philosophy blog. It struck me last night as I was reading Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta danorum, a 12th-century compendium of Danish history and lore. In one incident recounted there, Hardgrep seeks the embraces of her foster son, Hadding. But she is descended from giants, and he complains that "the size of her body [is] unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal." Hardgrep assures him:

Youth, fear not the converse of my bed. I change my bodily outline in twofold wise, and am wont to enjoin a double law upon my sinews. For I conform to shapes of different figure in turn, and am altered at my own sweet will: now my neck is star-high, and soars nigh to the lofty Thunderer; then it falls and declines to human strength, and plants again on earth that head which was near the firmament. Thus I lightly shift my body into diverse phases, and am beheld in varying wise; for changefully now cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops. Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects. He who knows of Proteus should not marvel at me. My shape never stays the same, and my aspect is twofold: at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs, at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members and now rolling them back into a coil. I dart out my ingathered limbs, and presently, while they are strained, I wrinkle them up, dividing my countenance between shapes twain, and adopting two forms; with the greater of these I daunt the fierce, while with the shorter I seek the embraces of men.

This kind of thing goes on more or less constantly in the world Saxo describes: humans coupling with relatives, with giants, with bears; being born from monstrous black seed, being kept alive by corrupt matter rather than blood. But none of this is ever really so damaging, since forms change freely, and there are advantages to being monstrous just as there are advantages to being comely. 

Now Saxo is a Christian, writing in Latin, and he wavers between denying that such transformations are possible, and affirming that they are possible, but denouncing them as sinful. As for me, I definitely do not believe they are possible, but I also think it is extremely important for a humanist to reflect on why, in the majority of times and places in human history, people have spoken as if they were possible. There is one tradition in human history --descending from Greece, reaching Denmark by the 12th century CE (even as it retains its memory of pre-contact ways of thinking) and now dictating the range of things that can be said at academic conferences, and in polite society, in Java, the Amazon, and the Arctic-- in which such transformations are explicitly not possible, and this is the tradition I work in. These transformations do seep back into this tradition at different times and places, but usually more as a threat or a taunt than as anything like a conceptual revolution; thus the natural philosopher Richard Lower allowed a brief whiff of Ovidian metamorphoses into philosophical debate in 17th century England by succeeding in transfusing blood between species; and arguably much of what seems so outré about figures like Deleuze comes down in the end to their daring to chicken-walk at the boundary between the two subdivisions I've described. But for the most part, philosophy continues to define itself as the tradition that can take no interest in Ovid or Saxo and their flights into the impossible. 

And anyway, to get back to the distinction I was attempting inadequately to make the other day: here I am very interested in giant women who wax into strange aspects, gods who appear as swans, &c. Which --and this is the key point-- seems pretty close to just another way of saying that this is not a philosophy blog.

On Kirill Medvedev

 

Kirill Medvedev, It's No Good: Poems / Essays / Actions, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen, with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich, n+1 / Ugly Duckling Presse, Eastern European Poets Series #30, 2012. 

1.

I should begin by confessing a history of prejudice, which reaches back more than two decades, to a different historical era. Some readers will have heard this story by now, and will likely be bored by it; but it is my story, and each time I tell it I see something new about myself. I became interested in Russia during the Cold War, and was disappointed by the onset of perestroika because, from a certain suburban American perspective, that made the place less bad-ass. I stole Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism from my California high school's library in 1988, shortly before dropping out.

Two years later, I surfaced in Leningrad --and here's the prejudice part-- and found myself haughtily, condescendingly, imperialistically judgmental of what Russia at that time was able to put forth as a youth counterculture. Everything seemed imitative, derivative, shabby. Kids with long hair tied actual shoelaces around their heads, like some cartoon version of hippies they must have seen somewhere. I saw 'Sex Pistals', misspelled (and, I see now, beautifully botanicized), written in ballpoint pen on fake leather jackets.

I was disappointed. I was a youth --if not wholly exceptional in this regard-- intent on revaluing all values, etc., and yet I was far more influenced by the standards of MTV glossiness than I myself could see. I was, I think now, part of a sort of advance reconnoitering mission for what in a few more years would be official IMF policy towards Russia: the demand that they move 'up', to our level, on our terms, the refusal to accept that a part of the world could decline to strive toward glossiness, and the belief that this gloss could only be attained through the ordeal of 'shock therapy'. That there was anything there to build on, indigenous, pre-Soviet and running like an underground stream from 1917 to 1989, never occurred to me or to Jeffrey Sachs. 

A few years later, in 1994, I was in Moscow, and I started to notice things that were occluded earlier, in the other capital, perhaps by the general misery of the potato lines, or by the shortness of the days, or by my naiveté (or all three). I was taken along to some art performance, which, I was told, was going to be very avant garde, very andergraund. We went to some apartment off of the Arbat and watched a skinny guy wearing tights roll around on the living-room floor with pieces of plywood, to the sound of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' squeaking out of a cassette player that could not quite be called a boombox.

This time it did the trick for me. Still shabby, still shoestring, still open to ridicule from a smart-ass American, it seemed nonetheless to spring up from the depths, precisely to not come from nowhere. It sprang from a variety of early-20th-century avant-gardism that was noteworthy for drawing its inspiration in turn from the dark forest of ancient Slavic paganism. I understood, without being able to put this into words, that to judge that guy in tights would have been to judge it all together, the performance art of the early 1990s, the dissonant composition of the 1910s, and the somber pagan rites of the mythical past. I was in no position to do that.

I haven't been back since 1996 (other than a brief misadventure in 1999 in Kaliningrad, which, perhaps in part because of the massive arsenal of nuclear submarines it had inherited, remained at the time an unreconstructed outpost of the otherwise non-existent USSR), but I gather from the distance that the fragments of an indigenous tradition of expression, that does not adapt itself to outside expectations, have come together, as if those pieces of plywood gradually propped themselves up into a serviceable structure. The 1990s, everyone now agrees, were a period of more or less pure destruction in Russia, exacerbated by Western triumphalism, certainly, but alsomade possible in the first place by the crippling legacy of official Soviet culture. What has taken shape since then has, again, done so largely through palingenesis, a reawakening of submerged forms of life. 

It should not be so surprising that some of the forms that would come to thrive would be the ones that not only do not need the world outside for their legitimation, but that indeed reject that world, and that do little other than to bask in their own Russianness. I have in mind the various artistic and political (let us say, for simplicity's sake, 'cultural') movements that we can identify with the right: skinheads at the lower end, creative historical syncretisms like Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Party at the higher end. But for obvious reasons anything identifiably on the left would prove much more fragile in this new ecosystem, and would take much longer to come into its own.

If the post-Soviet imperative was to find forms of expression that are not echoes of the old party-line internationalism (largely pro forma, but still), nor the mere carrying-out of instructions delivered from the 'international community' (whether MTV or the IMF), then it is not surprising that a politics generally dismissive of nations and their Sonderwege could not find its place. It would take a while for a properly new Russian left to appear on the radar, one that is attuned to distinctly Russian circumstances and legacies, but that never loses sight --and this I take to be a minimal condition of counting as left-- of the fact that these circumstances and legacies exist alongside many others in the world, with no greater cosmic urgency. Russia is important to think about, yes, especially if you're Russian, but Russians are no more important to care about than anyone else. Here is how Medvedev himself describes his life and work:

... I identify myself with Russia-- I think that's natural and realistic. And because in the future, in this or that collision between it and other systems and other states, I will continue to identify with Russia, I would like her to represent values that are dear to me: democracy, rather than despotism; truth, rather than violence; freedom, rather than servility and ass-licking; solidarity rather than individualism; talent rather than fakery (134-35).

It is against the background of reflections like these, I think, that Keith Gessen has identified Kirill Medvedev as perhaps the first truly post-Soviet Russian writer: he is neither repeating the stale party formulas about the humanity of all peoples, nor is he living out the trauma of rejecting those formulas by turning to crude nationalism. He is instead a Russian humanist, writing about Russia and for Russians, but lucidly aware of the global system in which national literatures have their place, and of the universal concerns that ripple through these literatures.

I admit that the first inkling of an awareness I had of the existence of a new post-Soviet internationalism in Russia was very recent, when I noticed some months ago a photograph of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, of Pussy Riot fame, wearing a t-shirt that referenced the Spanish civil war. Many on the paranoid left in the West, the sort of people who believe that one should not support Pussy Riot's cause because to do so is to meddle in private Russian affairs, the ones who think RT is a serious news outlet, would not be affected in the same way as I was by Nadya's ¡No pasarán! But to me it signalled something entirely different than anything in the previous quarter century of cross-fertility between Russian popular culture (fashion, music, politics, etc.) and the rest of the world. There was nothing here akin to the mediocre Boris Grebenshikov's ascension into Western consciousness thanks to the gracious gesture of Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame). Even at the level of scrappy punk, an earlier generation, my own generation, needed its Joanna Stingray to penetrate into the darkness of Russia and extend her seal of approval to a handful of groups who, it was understood, would have remained nothing without her. 

Stingray and Stewart were in their own way, too, doing the work of Jeffrey Sachs, in a way that people who share Pussy Riot memes on Facebook are not; and in a way that, I take it, Gessen, in promoting the work of Kirill Medvedev, is not. In these latter cases, there is no salvation going on, but only solidarity and common cause on the part of the global, hopeful, non-paranoid left.

2.

Quite apart from all these considerations, Medvedev is worth translating and promoting outside of Russia for this reason alone, that he is a good poet. Medvedev himself does not believe, for reasons we'll see, that a poet can simply be described as 'good', without consideration of the circumstances of the society in which he sets himself up as 'a good poet'. For him Joseph Brodsky, more than anyone, embodies the tragic flaw of the Russian poet who thought or insisted that he could be just a poet, a private citizen who writes poetry. Medvedev seems to think that such a path might have been open to him if he had been born in a 'small country'; having myself lived in Québec for the past decade, it seems to me however that in small countries (with respect to population and geopolitical weight anyway, if not land mass) as well as large ones, the question of national destiny has a way of imposing itself on the littérateurs. It seems to me also, pace Medvedev, that under some not-too-hard-to-imagine circumstances, the refusal to be anything but a private citizen who writes poetry can be an eminently courageous act. 

By his own account, Medvedev started out with no greater ambition than to be a good poet, only to find himself embarassed and stifled at the very moment this ambition began to come true. Thus he reminisces:

Once, after performing in a poetry competition in Rome, I remember walking around that city, absolutely happy, a kind of successful poet on tour, half-Bukowski, half-Yevtushenko, a real VIP (and at the same time a child), sipping at a gigantic bottle of beer, which seemed to terrify the woman I was walking with, a young Swiss poet, and I remember thinking --or, no, at the time I couldn't think it, but I felt it-- that nothing better than this would ever happen to me, not, anyway, in this sense, and so I should probably not do it again (122).

This may have been the beginning of the end, but luckily there was still time for Medvedev to extract another poem from this Italian sojourn, the delightful 'Europe' of 2002. The opening lines describe his long journey there, on a bus from Moscow:

I’m riding the bus

with a group of athletes

from some provincial town

they’re going to a competition in Milan;

our bus has stopped at the border,

and waits to go through customs.

what country are we entering? one of them asks me;

Poland, I say

so that’s what, the EU? he asks.

no, I say. Poland’s not in the EU yet

what other countries are we going

through? Germany, I say, Austria,

he nods

Portugal, I lie; he nods again;

I could have said Greece, Syria, Ireland—he’d have

nodded.

oh, mighty athlete:

our bus will travel through Iceland,

we’ll see sheep, deer,

muskoxen;

we’ll see camels;

we’ll see the early ice—

hills of not quite solid,

not yet formed

(they call it “uncrystallized”)

but very real, early ice;

we’ll see the Alps—they’ll be

to both sides of us—

there’ll be some nice places to cool off;

we’ll see the ruins of Thebes, and the remains

of mad Alexandria—

It is of course a truism that poetry cannot be translated. Gessen and company have done a fine job at this impossible task, but it is worth pausing at at least one point where the charm of the original is necessarily lost. Consider the narrator's spiralling fibs to the athlete, drifting further from reality with each line, adding absurd detail to test the limits of the athlete's ignorance. He tells him that there is a certain variety of 'early ice' in Iceland, that is called 'uncrystallized'. The Russian word, which did not exist before Medvedev used it, is nedovykristallizovavshiïsya, which is something more like 'not-yet-having-been-fully-crystallized', some sort of perfect passive participialized adjective with so many prefixes that I could not possibly give you the full parsing of its semantic components. The bluff that there are Icelandic iceologists who regularly deploy this technical ice term captures the full extent, even more than the claim that Portugal lies on the route from Moscow to Rome, of the difference between the poet's and the athlete's understanding of the world. 

Balzac's Ass

Whether species all emerged from the same origin, each representing slight variations on the same underlying type, or whether, to return to Buffon’s view, they are timeless variations on the same underlying type, related not by ancestry but only by their conceptual proximity in the mind of God, remained a contested matter at the Muséum long after the demise of Buffon and of the ancien régime. The two positions were well represented in the controversy between the Gallery’s two most prominent members in the early 19th century, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Geoffroy was a disciple of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the evolutionary theorist best known as the pre-Darwinian who got it all wrong, supposing, as the high-school biology textbooks often caricature him, that the necks of giraffes grew longer because giraffes themselves made such an effort to stretch their necks and to reach the leaves at the tops of trees. Cuvier would criticize this theory as holding “that efforts and desires may engender organs.”

Cuvier succeeded Louis Daubenton as ‘professor of the natural history of organized bodies’ in 1800, and two years later was made chair of animal anatomy at the Muséum. A devout Protestant, he believed that it was befitting God’s power and wisdom to have created all beings at once, and to have outfitted them with every part and every function they would ever need to survive. He held that there were four basic classes or embranchements of animals --the vertebrates, the articulates (or exoskeletal animals), the molluscs, and the radiates--, and that their parts were so ingeniously designed to function together as integral wholes that from any one part the existence and conformation of the others could be inferred with a high degree of accuracy. Thus he says of the skeleton that “the number, direction, and shape of the bones that compose each part of an animal’s body are always in a necessary relation to all the other parts, in such a way that --up to a point-- one can infer the whole from any one of them and vice versa.” He also believes that it is unworthy of the creator’s dignity to suppose that there should be any continuity or contact between these classes, to suppose, in effect, that God should have created a messy order of nature, where one category of thing bleeds into the next.

Mummified animals recently recovered from Egypt (by Geoffroy) seemed to confirm for Cuvier his doctrine of species fixism: the fact that cats, oxen, and the once sacred ibis had not changed at all since the Pharaonic period could only mean that members of a species are eternally bound to one another in a closed generational series. Geoffroy had accompanied Napoleon as the resident naturalist on the general’s 1798 expedition to Egypt, and may have felt that Cuvier’s speculations about mummies were an unjustified usurpation. Geoffroy’s mobility contrasted with Cuvier’s stationary career: the latter remained as fixed in Paris as he supposed animals were in their lineages. It is difficult not to notice, here, that theories of species transformation had long been held by Europeans to be richly confirmed in Africa, and in particular along the banks of the Nile. The ancient motto Ex Africa semper aliquid novi (‘Out of Africa there is always something new’), cited by Aristotle and nearly every natural historian after him, originally had to do with the idea that on that unknown continent the ordinary laws of reproduction do not hold, as animals regularly generate hybrids by mating with members of other species. The Nile, in turn, was held to possess the ideal balance of heat and moisture for the spontaneous generation of unusually large animals. Rather than being limited to bringing forth frogs, eels, and geese, as was thought to happen in the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine, in Egypt even crocodiles could be spontaneously generated from expansive bubbles of Nilotic slime. In Italy, the Renaissance freethinker Lucilio Vanini had his tongue torn out by the Inquisition for suggesting that human beings could be produced this way as well.

Curiously, Geoffroy’s principal interest throughout his career was the classification of fossil species of Crocodylia, and here he flatly rejected Cuvier's vision of discrete and non-overlapping kinds. Geoffroy believed that there is a ‘unity of composition’ throughout nature, that all species are, so to speak, variations on a single theme. The full spectrum of these variations, Cuvier believed, can be observed in fetal development. A descendant of this view would later be expressed in Ernst Haeckel’s famous 19th-century dictum that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, that is, that the stages of development of a fetus are substantially the same as those of the species of which the fetus is a member. Of course, in order to believe that the development of the fetus duplicates the history of the fetus’s species, one must believe that a species emerges over time, and that God did not create it once and for all as it is in its current state. This belief also transforms embryology into a vastly more important endeavor than it otherwise would be: to observe and describe the development of a fetus is to witness in nuce the entire history of a species. Accordingly, the study of ‘misfires’ in the course of embryogenesis, of so-called ‘monsters’, would come to be seen as a source of insight into how evolutionary branching might occur. Geoffroy thus sets himself up as the founder of a new discipline, teratology, or the study of monsters, which yields his classic 1812 work on the Essay on the Classification of Monsters. A curious new taxonomy emerges: there are ‘g monsters’, which have two heads and are fused at the torso; and there are ‘l monsters’, the reverse, having a single head but two bodies. There are ‘thoracodelphic chickens’, that is, chickens with brother chickens emerging from their thorax; and ‘derodymous ducks’, a designation whose meaning, I admit, I have not been able to unravel. There are also the elegantly named monstres simples, ‘simple monsters’, such as the ‘cyclops pig’ with a single eye in the middle of its head. All of these are on display, in formaldehyde, at the rear end of the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy. 

The conflict between Cuvier and Geoffroy on the question of the unity of the animal kingdom caused a sufficient storm to be discussed, often very critically, well outside of the European scientific community, even leaving its mark in the French literary canon. In his Guide-Âne à l’usage des animaux qui veulent parvenir aux honneurs [Beginners’ Guide for Animals Seeking Acclaim], which appeared serially between 1840 and 1842, Honoré de Balzac set out to demonstrate the asininity of the men of science who build their reputations on claims about the organization of the animal kingdom. The story centers around a man named Adam Marmus, who arrives in Paris accompanied by his donkey, scheming to gain fame and fortune however he can.

The donkey is obliging; he seems sensitive to the vanity of all human endeavors, and as a good beast of burden is more or less happy to go along with them when called upon. From their first arrival in the capital, the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes represents for Marmus’s companion a sort of paradise on earth, “where the animals are so well cared for,” and “where one drinks and eats without fear of being beaten.” Will you ever, he implores the garden, “open up to me your twenty-square-foot steppes, your Swiss valleys thirty meters in size? Will I ever be an animal that lies upon the grass of your budget? Will I die of old age among your elegant trellises, labelled under some number, with the words: African ass... Will the king come to see me?”

Marmus and his donkey check in at a flop-house. The beast is stabled outside, while inside its owner discusses with the other lodgers the best way to become rich and successful as a scientist. Together, they cook up a new science of ‘instinctology’, which holds that instinct is in animals the equivalent to thought in human beings, and according to which it is an animal’s instinct, rather than “its bones, its tarsals, its teeth, or its vertebrae,” that is most useful in determining the nature of a given animal, since “although instinct undergoes modifications, it is one in its essence, and nothing will better prove the unity of things, notwithstanding their apparent diversity.”

The scheme really begins to come together only when it is revealed that Marmus has an animal companion waiting outside. “You have a donkey!,” one of his interlocutors exclaims, “we’re saved!” They devise a plan to “make of it an extraordinary zebra, which will draw the attention of the learned world to your system of comparative instincts, by a certain singularity which will disturb the classifications. Learned men live by nomenclature, so let us overturn the nomenclature.” Marmus’s donkey is worked over by the lodgers. The newspapers will soon report that “a courageous traveller, the modest naturalist Adam Marmus, who crossed Africa by going right through its center, has brought back... a zebra whose peculiarities plainly unsettle the fundamental ideas of zoology, and prove right the illustrious philosopher [i.e., Geoffroy] who does not admit any difference in animal organization, and who proclaimed, to the applause of the learned men of Germany, the great principle of one and the same contexture for all animals.”

This is not just any zebra. Its stripes, we quickly learn, “are yellow and they stand out from a black background.” The new creature is also peculiar in its behavior, with a giraffe-like gait, and this is taken to show, in favor of Marmus’s new science of comparative instinctology, that “the instinct of animals is modified according to the environments in which they find themselves.” And from this modification derives “a new theory of the greatest importance for zoology, one that threatens to overturn the reigning doctrine of the great ‘Baron Cerceau’ --a thinly veiled representation of the historical Georges Cuvier--, according to which “each class (is) an organization unto itself.” Now, it turns out, as a result of the yellow-striped, giraffe-like zebra, that “the oyster, the polyp, the coral, the lion, the zoophyte, microscopic animalcules, and man, are all the same apparatus, simply modified by means of organs that are elongated more or less.” Marmus will accordingly declare, at the height of his fame, that “my zebra is no longer a zebra, but a fact that engenders a science.” More correctly, the zebra has engendered a rift in the scientific community, with Cerceau losing ground to the defenders of ‘zoological unity’. The Baron is soon betrayed by a disciple who converts to Marmusianism, and who offers a course of comparative instinctology, opening it up even to women and to curious members of the bourgeois public. Various intrigues ensue, and eventually the ‘zebra’ ends up in the zoological garden of London (“France was not able to hold onto the most curious animal in the world”), from where he recounts the story of Marmus and Cerceau.

Balzac allows the disguised donkey, telling its tale from London, to serve as a mouthpiece for his own, the author’s, dire assessment of the machinations of learned men: the only thing that has been learned from the great French zoology wars of the early 19th century, the author thinks, is that ‘imbeciles are ready to give money and acclaim to intriguers’. The donkey exhorts his fellow inmates at the London zoo to accept their lot, indeed to realize (in reference to the tale’s French title) that to live out one’s days in a menagerie is precisely to ‘make it’ [parvenir], and that his parvenu companions should banish the thought of rebellion or protest. He imagines a future in which jardins des plantes multiply in every country, and animals are free to live out their lives “behind gilded trellises, at the cost of the state: a bunch of Marmusian sinecures.” For him, as for the Rhinoceros of Versailles and so many other animals, the mortal end of this charmed life represents only a transition from the menagerie to the gallery of comparative anatomy: “Think about it,” he implores them: “after my death I will be stuffed and preserved in the collections, and I doubt that we would be able, in the state of nature, to achieve such an immortality. Museums are the Pantheon of animals.”

This is all very good satire: where else but in satire’s inverted world could an ass appear, to invoke Buffon's categories, as the most noble figure, and the humans the most degenerate? After all, as Edward Topsell tells us in his 1607 Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, the ass is nothing if not “slow, burthen-bearing, back-bearing, vile, cart-drawing, mill-labouring, sluggish, crooked, vulgar, slow-paced, long-eared, blockish, braying, ydle, devill-hayred, filthy, saddle-bearer, slow-foot, four-foot, unsavoury, and a beast of miserable condition; beside many other such titles in the Greeke.” (Curiously, however, one of Buffon’s most elegiac passages, cited above, in which he encourages us to “admire equally the magnificence of the execution and the simplicity of the design,” occurs in the section of his Histoire naturelle on ‘The Donkey’). Yet the satire only works on the presumption that animals do not deserve their own Pantheon. On one way of reading Balzac’s tale, human beings only debase themselves when they attribute too much importance to learning about the order of nature, and about their own place in that order. Marmus’s intrigues are permitted because the Parisian world, sustained by the fleeting enthusiasms of bourgeois women and men, is ready to be taken by storm at the sight of a new sort of creature brought out of the depths of Africa. They are so ready, in fact, that they are able to let a painted donkey overturn everything they had previously believed about the principles behind nature’s organization.

I have never been to the real Panthéon, the pantheon of French humans, though I have crossed in front of it countless times, when I was a visiting student in Paris. I had next to no money, and was obliged to do my grocery shopping at an oddly placed branch of Picard les Surgélés, a store specializing in down-market frozen foods, at the Place du Panthéon, inserted among some of the world's most distinguished real estate. (If my mood had been slightly different this summer, I could very well have ended up writing a book about Picard and its elegant aisles of chunky white plastic sacs, filled with frozen spinach pellets and curled-up little shrimps.)  I gather the Panthéon is a great gallery filled with busts of a number of the heroes of the French Republic. I can't help but note, though, that this is already a sort of profanation, an intentional crossing of ontological boundaries that were once carefully guarded. A pantheon, after all, is a place to revere gods, and not men, and once the gods have been chased out of a culture’s imagination, it is not at all surprising that attention turns to animals: for heaven’s sake, we need to revere something besides other humans.

If Balzac is right, that the modern natural history museum is a Pantheon for animals, this could mean that the banishment of the gods in the modern era has in fact led to a sort of retheriomorphization of divinity, a return to the idea, last embraced in full in ancient Egypt, that animals themselves are gods. Certainly, no Buffon or Cuvier would ever say as much. They would acknowledge at most that animals are, so to speak, divine wisdom congealed. Yet that basic insight driving Buffon and Cuvier, it seems to me, is the same insight that motivated Aristotle to say, of the study of living beings, ‘here too dwell gods’. This insight is nothing to ridicule. The Gallery of Comparative Anatomy is a Pantheon of animals, and it is not only an ass who would suggest they deserve to have one if humans do.

--

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Philosophometry

I may have mentioned already that I am in the beginning stages of a massively ambitious, multi-year project: I have been asked to write a very long, but not nearly long enough, book called A Global History of Philosophy, to 1750. The manuscript is due in 2017.

For the past several months I have been considering the different possible ways to approach this project. One thing that is certain, and that I've made clear from the beginning, is that I don't want to write a sort of multicultural redux of Russell's History of Western Philosophy: a basically teleological how-things-led-up-to-me scenario, with some stuff about China and India tacked on to appeal to current sensibilities. As I see it, though, one is trapped between a Scylla and Charybdis however one approaches this project: either it amounts offering one's own idiosyncratic twist on what this whole history has been about, or it amounts to a compendium of facts that aspire, within the bounds of the word-limit set by the publisher, to be genuinely comprehensive.

In the era of Wikipedia (and we will be much deeper into that era by 2017) we seriously need to rethink the purpose of presenting facts to readers at all. How can I write a book that relates the global history of philosophy, and at the same time provides readers something that online, collaborative information sources cannot? Again, one option is to offer the sort of idiosyncratic interpretation that one is allowed to have as the author of a book, rather than of an encyclopedia entry, but as I've already said, the Russellian danger there is one that I also wish to avoid. One possible way I've been considering to navigate a path that steers clear of both Russell and Wikipedia is what I've started thinking of as 'philosophometry' (check Google; you heard it here first!), but which might also perhaps be called 'quantitative metaphilosophy'.

I've been thinking a lot about the revolutionary work, for example, that Franco Moretti has done on the modern novel in books like Graphs, Maps, Trees. More generally, researchers in fields outside philosophy are learning the value of quantitative, digitally based study of the materials they are devoted to illuminating. The other humanities, if not yet philosophy, have come to understand the value of 'distant readings' as a complement to the sacred practice of close reading. The idea, then, is to compile a massive database of texts, titles, key words key arguments from the first few millennia of philosophical activity across Eurasia, and to process these data in order to generate graphs, maps, and trees that could reveal new things about how we came to think about truth, reality, the self, etc., in the way we do.

Imagine, for example, an interactive website (and by 2017 it is quite likely that 'books' themselves will be interactive) that plots philosophical texts on a map of Eurasia, with different coloured blips indicating different doctrines defended in the texts (materialism vs. idealism, for example, or corruptibility vs. immortality of the soul). My model here is the surprisingly beautiful graphic showing the history of nuclear explosions since World War II (replace the explosions by texts, and the nuclear states by schools of thought). Or imagine, further, the plotting of arguments or doctrines against extratextual factors like the political regimes, modes of production, population densities, and so on, that correlate with the texts. Of course, the huge problem here is compiling the database from which one could, once it's there, fairly easily generate the beautiful graphcs. This is what I have a few years to figure out how to do. Obviously I can only read a small portion of the texts myself. Equally obviously, I need some grant money.

I can already hear a certain kind of philosopher insisting that this project is futile at worst or, at best, that it contributes nothing to philosophy itself. But I am more convinced than ever that what is said by some guy who happens to be alive right now, and employed by a university to tell us what he happens to think about, e.g., whether there is a hard problem of consciousness or not, can be of next to no interest for our understanding of the philosophical question in question. The truth is I just don't think it's very grown up, intellectually, to set about actually trying to answer questions like these, at least in the way we are used to seeing philosophers try to answer them. In this respect, I am sympathetic to the approach of experimental philosophy, even if I have not yet been able to convince any experimental philosophers that I'm on their side. Like them, I think the more sophisticated and fruitful approach to questions like, e.g., whether the mind is distinct from the body, is not try to answer them directly, but to somehow take a survey of the range of possible positions human beings take up on the question. Now, the experimental philosophers today think it is enough to survey their contemporaries, by methods borrowed mostly from psychology. I'm starting to think that what we need to do is, so to speak, to survey the past, using methods adapted from archeology, historical linguistics, and evolutionary biology, and recently applied with impressive results in unlikely fields such as comparative literature.

Again, I recognize that the philosophometric results will only be as valuable as the initial phase of data collection permits them to be, and that this collection will require the old, traditional methods of reading texts and determining what the arguments are. But still, I think this can be done as a collaborative project, and that it is the most urgent project we should be undertaking if we wish to better understand what this whole endeavor of philosophy has been all about. That I think this might, paradoxically, be an expression of my own idiosyncratic understanding of what human intellectual activity, such as philosophy, is; and that I think such an ambitious philosophometric project could actually be carried out might be a result of the fact that I'm living in an era in which the labors of scholars in the digital-huamanities are starting to bear fruit. In this respect then, I've avoided neither the Scylla of Russell nor the Charybdis of Wikipedia, but in fact have collided with and embraced both of them. 

Diski on Melancholy

I'm happy to see Jenny has taken up the topic of depression, and is coming up with a book that will plum the depths of Robert Burton's astounding Anatomy of Melancholy (see my 2011 post on Burton, inter alia, here). I am also particularly happy that she has come out as a neo-humoralist:

Remembering his time living with the Azande people of north central Africa, the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard said after he returned to England that he thought their habit of studying of chicken entrails was as good a way as any he had come across in his life of making decisions. I have a feeling that Galen’s and Hippocrates’s humoural imbalance theories are in much the same relationship with modern monoamine imbalance depression theory.

Read more at her wonderful new blog here.

Rob Carter, Faith in a Seed

For more information about Rob Carter's 'Faith in a Seed', go here.

 

I was slow in noticing the wonder of plants, and in this I do not believe I was unusual. When one is young, it is the furry things with faces, the creatures that dart about looking for food, driven on by their appetitive souls, that attract attention. At this stage, the plants are only the stage-setting, the animals the protagonists.

But in my case the innatention to the vegetal order continued well past my first youth. I long took Aristotle's greatness as a philosopher, for example, relative to that of his disciple Theophrastus, to consist principally in this, that whereas the former wrote books on the generation, parts, motion, and history of animals, the latter only came up with a couple of books about plants. It strikes me now, however, that this lack of interest would better be described as a severe case of phytophobia: I insisted plants were uninteresting, but what I really meant is that they are positively threatening. 

"Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret," said Horace: you can drive nature out with apitchfork, but she always comes back. This does not mean what I long thought it meant, but let us proceed as though it did. The Roman poet intended to say that innate character (the 'nature' of an individual being) cannot be supressed, but what the dictum long said to me was rather more literal: that nature, or rather Nature, cannot be beaten back for long. In appealng to 'Nature' here, what naturally comes to mind is of course the world of plants. Animals can be contained, more or less (other than insects and other microanimals, which, modern taxonomy be damned, no one really thinks are animals anyway), but the order of plants, as Lord Shaftesbury already understood incontemplating an early modern English garden, is sublime. The stated goal of the Jardin Royal des Plantes in Paris, by contrast, to assert 'controle totale sur le monde végétal', cannot but appear as so much absolutist and unsustainable hubris.

My fear of plants is deep-rooted. When I was little, growing up in a depressed, post-agricultural exurb of California's Central Valley, I dreamt of perfect cities somewhere far away. When I first went to San Francisco, the nearest so-called city, I was disappointed to discover empty lots overrun with weeds, and grass pushing up even through the cracks in the sidewalk. Nature, I thought, by which I understood vegetal nature, would take this place back in no time if we were to let our guard down. I set my sights on New York, imagining that it was there (if anywhere, etc.) that plants had been succesfully shut out. I imagined a city consisting in nothing but World Trade Center-like highrises, stretching out in all directions as far as one could see, between which one might hop by jetpack, never even having to descend low enough to catch sight of some invasive blade of grass. Kant once said there would 'never be a Newton for the blade of grass', and I wanted only that part of the world for which there could be a Newton, the world described by mechanical physics, the world out of which our architectural accomplishments have been built up. Our cities are not, of course, as I imagined them. I've been to all the 'real' ones, and I can report that Berlin is scarcely more than a willow grove, and when I'm in London I'm never quite sure when I'm in the botanical gardens and when I'm outside of them. It's a plants' world, I mean to say (at least the terrestrial part of the world is; under the ocean, the relative proportions of animal and vegetable biomass are reversed, which is really just to say that under the sea, where everything is by definition à rebours, topsy-turvy, upside down, one of the surest signs of the reversal of cosmic order is the preeminence of animals).

Rob Carter's Faith in a Seed, reminds us of many basic truths about the balance between nature on the one hand and human settlements on the other, but for me it was impossible to apprehend these truths without reflecting upon my long history of phytophobia. It struck me, in particular, that the three men Carter selected as subjects for his work, each in his own way, wielded a pitchfork and sought to do with it what the ancient poet had insisted could not be done.

You are not supposed to say 'seminal' anymore, but that is only because the people who think it is sexist don't know that it is really just the adjective of 'seed'. Thus to say that the work of Lawes, Thoreau, and Darwin was 'seminal', is not at all to praise them, as men, for their intellectual cum-shots, but only to say that things grew from them. One could put this in more mechanical-physical terms and say they had an 'impact', but that might be missing something. They changed the way we understand fundamental aspects of humanity's place in nature.

Thoreau opened up a line of very influential questioning of the value of modernity, at precisely the moment when conventional opinion was converging on the view that there was no problem (disease, war, etc.) that modern industry and industriousness could not solve. Darwin, well, Darwin is generally given credit for reinscribing human beings into the order of nature, following upon a few millennia of separation, and doing so at more or less the same moment that Thoreau was questioning the automatic inscription of modern men and women into, so to speak, the order of cities. Whether Darwin really did what he is given credit for doing is not so important (there were of course Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles's own grandfather Erasmus, who were all saying things with fundamentally the same metaphysical import as that of The Origin of Species, even if the details about the mechanism of natural selection were still missing).

Lawes appears as something of an outlier, though in fact he left a far greater mark (or stain) on the world than the other two. In creating the first chemical fertilizers from superphosphate, more than any other single individual Lawes helped to advance the industrialization of agriculture. That is, he brought the human activity of cultivating and growing, a practice that had by then been well established for 10,000 years or so, under the purview of the men who were principally interested in building, automating, and controlling, a cluster of activities that had enjoyed tremendous advances across only the previous few centuries. Chemistry, the discipline in which Lawes primarily worked, may be seen as a sort of bridging science between mechanical physics (for which, again, there is a Newton) and what we now call 'biology'. Here, entities that are ordinarily seen as homogeneous masses, the clumps or lumps or heaps that nature produces in such abundance, are shown to be made up out of 'building blocks': a telling term, for it reveals how someone such as Lawes, in applying chemistry to nature, can take a clod of dirt and reconceptualize it in fundamentally architectural terms.  

Lawes's pitchfork is easily visible: he wanted to exercise controle total in the world of agriculture. Yet there is one important thing to note here. Superphosphates are part of nature's bounty too, and strictly speaking they are no more unnatural than, say, the techniques of crop rotation or irrigation that had long been in use. Agriculture is by definition a bending of nature to human will (it is on these grounds that some anarcho-primitivsts think, with some justice, that it is first with the Agricultural Revolution, and not with the Industrial Revolution or the demise of the welfare state or any such thing, that social inequality and all the other symptoms of demise really start to become apparent). Lawes only wanted to apply a new way of bending nature, not to go against nature. In older alchemical terms, the science of chemical fertilizers is a perfective art applied to nature; it is not contra naturam. And yet, here we are, with the earth now almost completely divided up into plots you can see from an airplane, producing mostly unhealthy food from seeds patented by multinational corporations, and if that's notcontra naturam, it's still rather hard to see it as perfective.

Darwin for his part was not bending nature, but only trying to make sense of it. One way of thinking about the sense he made is that he sought to replace the grid, favored by the older natural historians such as Linnaeus, with a tree or an arborescent model of the kinds of creature in nature. And yet he wanted this tree to be well-groomed, a sort of perfect, easily surveyable bansai. Botanists today will tell you that strictly speaking there is no such thing as a tree, that is, there is no significant biological boundary between the kind of plants with woody trunks, and the kind that appear more bush-like. The order of nature has itself proven rather more like a bush, where it's hard to see which ramification leads where, where new branchings are always ready to be followed out, where neighboring bushes appear to form one entity, but in fact do not, and so on. It turns out, moreover, that the bush of species has no permanent, stable parts. Rather, all of nature's kinds are always on their way to being something else, and species names turn out to be more like proper nouns, identifying an individual that comes into existence for a certain period of time before giving way to another. Yet Darwin wanted to hold onto species as real, enduring kinds. Unlike Lawes, Darwin did not want to impose more order than his predecessors had on the domain of nature that interested him. But to some extent he remained unable to anticipate just how disordered things were going to get, largely as a result of theseed he planted.

Thoreau, it is said, preferred not to relate, in his Walden, how frequently and easily he repaired to the general store of Concord when he was running low on supplies. As far as world-renunciation goes, other wise men in history have taken it quite a bit further (though Thoreau's case is probably an instance of a more general tendency among famous world-renouncers). Thoreau doesn't so much drive nature out with his pitchfork, as he drives out society. But that, too, comes creeping back, or rather, our lone transcendentalist goes creeping back to it, whenever he finds himself running low on grain or potatoes.

So here are these three peculiar men, each with a very special relationship to nature, and each strongly associated with a particular home, of which, to all appearances, each of them seems to have been very fond. Thoreau with his Walden cabin, Darwin at Down House, and Lawes at Rothamsted Manor: each edifice is now imagined as a monument to the ideas of the men who inhabited them, ideas that, again, involve a particular stance against nature (in the dual Latin sense of 'against',contra: either 'abutting' or 'opposing'). And now Carter proposes to miniaturize these edifices, and to have us watch as sprouts grow around them from seeds he has cultivated.

What exactly is going on here? I have said that each of these men was working, each in his own way, 'against nature'. Something that is against nature --and this by definition-- is art. Artists today will likely not want to hear it, but I'm sorry, that's just what the word 'art' means. Perhaps this point can be made clearer if we appeal to the notion of the 'artificial', an adjective that once would have been understood to contain our glorified noun. Art is what little human beings are able to come up with inresponse to the immeasurabilty, untameability, and indifference of infinite nature. Nature, if I may say, generally kicks art's ass.

From this admittedly premodern optic, the idea of turning the growth of plants into art is a puzzling one. Carter's art is not like the artificial disruption of vegetal growth that we see in bansais or in the Jardin Royale des Plantes. Instead, he plainly wants to show the plants doing what they do best, which is to say growing towards the sun unimpeded by human designs. And moreover, he shows these plants usurping human monuments of some significance to the development of the modern world's perspective on nature. So art, which is small, seizes upon nature to show the smallness of art. This is, if I may also say, a grand geste, and by it Carter wins one for art.

In the way I have been construing art, as artifice, as techne, there is nothing further from the semantic cluster that contains it than the cluster sprouting from that fine, archaic, Indo-European root,*gen, which gives us such diverse words as 'gene', 'genus', 'generation', the Greek and Persian words for 'woman' (gune, zan), the Russian word for 'wife' (zhena), 'gynecology', etc. It also gives us 'germ', and the Greek verb gignesthai, 'to become'. Germs become plants through generation, and in this they are fundamentally unlike the works of human artifice, which are made rather than generated. There is, again, a certain comfort in making. But in the end, at least on our planet, generation is the law of the land. Carter's art, to the extent that it reminds us of this law, while still not, by that, being diminished as art, is worthy of notice. Anyhow it forced me to confront my own lifelong phytophobia, and to see what I'd been sensing for some time already, but could not fully articulate without Carter as cultivator: that the plants are not the stage-setting, but the very protagonists of this dazzling show.

--

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Why I'm Studying Sanskrit

My month-long ultra-intensive spoken Sanskrit course at the University of Heidelberg has come to an end. I was the oldest student, and probably the weakest (in my defense, I'd had only one semester of formal study prior to beginning the course). This was an extremely humbling experience, but also, in the obvious and clichéd ways, edifying, character-building, etc. The most humbling (or, to be frank, humiliating) moment came on the final day. I had naively signed up to take part in the Saraswati Prize Contest, which is sponsored by the Indian government, pitting non-Indian students of Sanskrit against one another as they each deliver a 10-15 minute speech in that language. I really did not know what I was getting into, but by the time it began to dawn on me that I was in over my head, it was all too late to pull out. So, this past Friday, in front of 50 or so people, many of whom speak Sanskrit as fluently as I speak English, I offered up the following --how should I put it?-- rudiments of sentences on the assigned topic, "Why Study Sanskrit?" (translation follows):

िकमर्थं संस्कृतमधीमहे ?

सम्भवतः अहं अधुना सम्भाशणं सम्स्कृतेन कर्तुं उद्युक्तो नस्मि । इदानीमप्यहं एतया भाशया अत्मानं सम्यक् प्रकाशयितुं न शक्नोमि । एकं सुन्दरं सुभाषितं उपदिशति : "मनस्येकं वचस्येकं कर्मण्येकं महात्मनाम् ।मनस्यन्यद्वचस्यन्यत्कर्मण्यन्यद्दुरात्मनाम्" ।। किन्तुवहं दुरात्मनो नास्मि । यो हि पठितुं अर्थयते तस्य अज्ञानं अपचारो नस्ति । अतो यद्यपि मम मनो व्यक्ततरं मम पदेभ्यो अस्ति तथापि एतनि पदनि पौंश्चलीयनि न सन्ति ।  यद अहं सम्स्कृतं पठितुं प्रविश्यमि स्म तदा पुर्वं एव अहं अष्टात्रिंशद्वर्ष आसम् । तदनिम् मया पूर्वं एव कनिचित् पुस्तकनि इतिहस्य दर्शनस्य यूरोपखण्डे विशये  लेखितनि । मह्यम् दर्शनम् जेर्मनि-देशस्य, प्रतमाम् आन्वीक्शिकी महोदयस्य गोत्फ्रिद् विल्हेल्म् लैब्नित्स् रोचते स्म । तदनिम् न किमपि सम्प्रदायस्य दर्शनस्य भारते न जनमि स्म । तत्कालम् मया अपि पदनि "वैशेषिक," "न्याय," "मीमाम्सा" इति तावन्न श्रुतवन्ति । इदनिमपि एतनि दर्शनि न सम्यक् जानामि । परन्तु एतावत् अपि अधुना गुरुतां च अर्थवत्तां च सम्प्रदायाणाम् दरशनस्य भारते अवगच्छमि । कुत एते गुरुता च अर्थवत्ता च ? । आरिष्टतलो लिखितोवन् : यथा पार्सिके तथा युवनदेशे अग्निः तुल्यम् अभिशोचति इति । एवमेव वक्तुं शक्यते : यथा युवनदेशे तथा भारते प्रश्नाः तत्त्वायाः च सत्यस्य च भवस्य च विशये तुल्यम् उत्प्लवन्ते । दर्शनम् युरोप-महदेशे न जयते स्म । युरोप-महदेशः दर्शनस्य स्वमी नस्ति । यद्यपि दर्शनम् एव संपत्ति मानुष्यतायाः अस्ति तथपि सर्वं रष्ट्रम् स्वकीयं विधिम् च स्वकीयां पद्धतिम् च तर्कायाः उपजानीते । परिणामतः यत्र यत्र द्वि दर्शनिकौ अन्यद्भ्याम् रष्ट्राभ्याम् मेलनम् कुरुतः तत्र तत्र अरिषण्यम् नस्ति यत् तौ परस्परम् दर्शनस्य विशये सम्ब्रवितुं शक्श्यतः । ताभ्याम् अपि सम्भक्ता भाषा वक्तव्या । अतः यदि पश्चिमः दर्शनिकः सम्स्कृतम् नावगच्छति, सः स्वकीयम् प्रतियोगिनम् भारतात् न अनुद्रष्टुं शक्श्यति । यः भाषाम् न वदति सः अर्थान् सैद्धान्तिकानाम शब्दाणाम् तस्याः भाषायाः अवगन्तुं न शक्नोति । यथा उदाहरणम् अनुचिन्तयमः शब्दम् "रुप" । एतम् शब्दम् अनुवक्तुं न शक्नामः । अपामित्यम् हि एतस्य शब्दस्य पश्चिमेषु भाषासु नस्ति । 26. यथार्थ अनुवदकाः एतम् शब्दम् कुत्र "matter" इति कुत्र "form" इति अनुवक्तुं । परन्तु पश्चिमदर्शने "matter" च "form" च द्वौ अपष्ठुरौ अर्थौ स्तः । पूर्वतनः हि उपस्तरम् उपरस्य अस्ति । तदर्थम् यदि अनुवदकः अर्थम् अनुपालयितुं इच्छति तर्हि शब्दः "रुप" न अनुवक्तव्यः । अनुचिन्तयमः अन्यकम् उदाहरणम् । अनुचिन्तयमः प्रविभागम् शास्त्रणाम् ।  ज्योतिःशास्त्रस्य प्रतिवस्तुः पश्चिमायाम् किम् अस्ति ? ।  ज्योतिषम् प्रयुक्तगणितम् च सर्वशाकुनम् च व्यतिशजति । इत्थम् एतम् शब्दम् "astrology" इति अनुवक्तुं शक्नुमः । किनु यत् पश्चिमायाम् एतस्य शब्दस्य असमना अर्थगतिः अस्ति तत् अस्मभिः न विस्मरन्तव्यम् । अनुचिन्तयमः अन्ततः न्यायविद्याम् । एषा विद्या षोदश पदार्थान् व्यतिशजति तथा प्रमाणम् च संशयम् च वादम् च जल्पम् च । पश्चिमाः दर्शनिकाः तु सर्वान् एतान् शब्दान् शस्त्रे "logic" न विचन्ति । यत् एतानि दर्शनानि -- मिमंसा वेदन्त न्याय इव -- केवलम् सम्स्कृतेन युक्तम् अवगन्तव्यिनि तत् एतैः निदर्शणैः स्पष्टम् भवति । यदि एतानि दर्शनानि पश्चिमैः दर्शनिकैः न अगतनि तर्हि ते दर्शनम् एवम्, यत्रकुत्रपि एतत् दर्शनम् उत्प्लवते, अवगन्तुं न शक्श्यन्ति । दर्शनम् हि भारते प्रतिध्वनिः च प्रतिच्छाया च दर्शनस्य यवनदेशस्य, आरबदर्शनम् इव, नस्ति । चरित्रम् च वृद्धिः च दर्शनस्य भारते नितरम् अव्यतिकीर्णाः सन्ति स्म । केवलम् भारते पश्चिमाः दर्शनिकाः पूर्णा च स्वयंशासिता च विपारीतता स्वकीयायाः परम्परायाः अनुद्रक्श्यन्ति । तद् अपि  बहवः सहकारिनः कनद-देशे च अमेरिक-देशे च विशवसं कुर्वन्ति यत् दर्शनम् भारते नस्ति, यत् तर्कः सत्यस्य च भवस्य च विशये भारते केवलम् अन्धश्रद्धास्ति । नूनम् खलु तत् केवलम् शुद्धा पक्षपतिता अस्ति । तेषाम् अज्ञानं निर्मूलयितुंर्थे पश्चिमा मद्यसथैः दर्शनिकैः प्रयोजनं अस्ति । याः सुज्ञाः उभयोः सम्प्रदयोः सन्ति, तैः पश्चिमा प्रयोजनं अस्ति । अहं तदृशः दर्शनिकः भवितुं इच्छमि ।

Why Study Sanskrit?

It may be that I am not yet ready to give a speech in Sanskrit. Regrettably, I am still unable to express myself well in this language. A certain beautiful subhāṣita teaches: "wicked people think one thing, say another, and do something else." But I am not wicked, for whoever seeks to learn is at no fault in his ignorance. Thus, although my mind is clearer than my words, nonetheless these words are not meretricious. When I began to study Sanskrit, I was already 38 years old. At that time, I had already written a few books on the history of European philosophy. I was particularly interested in German philosophy, and above all the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz. At that time I didn't know anything about the tradition of philosophy in India. Back then, I had not yet heard words like 'Vaiśeṣika', 'Nyāya', and 'Mīmāṃsā' Still today, I do not know these schools well, but at least now I understand the venerableness and importance of these traditions. In what way are they venerable and important? Aristotle wrote that fire burns in Persia just as it does in Greece. It could likewise be said that as in Greece, so in India, questions concerning reality, truth, and being arise in the same way. Philosophy was not born in Europe, and Europe is not the proprietor of philosophy. Yet although philosophy is in fact the property of all humanity, still, every culture invents its own method and its own system of reasoning. Consequently, whenever two philosophers from two different cultures meet, mutual recognition is not certain. They must also speak a common language. Thus, if a Western philosopher does not know Sanskrit will not be able to recognize his own counterpart in India. Whoever does not speak a language will not be able to understand the (full) meaning of philosophical terms in that language. For instance, let us consider the term rupa. This term is untranslatable, for it has no equivalent in Western languages. As a matter of fact, sometimes translators render this term as 'matter', and sometimes as 'form'. But in Western philosophy 'matter' and 'form' are two opposite concepts, for the former is the substratum (or underlier) of the latter. Thus, if the translator wishes to conserve the meaning, he must not translate the term rupa. Let us consider another example. Let us consider the classification (or division) of the disciplines. What is the equivalent in the West to the science of jyotisha? This discipline includes both applied mathematics and augury. We can translate this term as 'astrology', but we must not forget that this word has a different meaning in the West. Let us consider, finally, the science of Nyaya. This discipline involves sixteen categories, such as 'the means of knowing', 'doubt', 'discussion', and 'wrangling'. Western philosophers do not recognize all of these categories in their science of logic. Is, then, Nyaya 'logic'? The only way to adequately answer this question is to approach it from within the language in which it was articulated. By these examples it is clear that these doctrines --such as Mimamsa, Vedanta, Nyaya-- can only be clearly understood in Sanskrit. If these doctrines are not understood by Western philosophers, moreover, they will not be able to understand philosophy itself, wherever it appears. For philosophy in India is not an echo or a shadow of the philosophy of Greece, as is Arabic philosophy. The history and development of philosophy in India was entirely independent. Only in India will a Western philosopher find a complete and autonomous counterpart of his own tradition. And yet, I have colleagues in Canada and America who still believe that there is no philosophy in India, that speculation about truth and being in India is merely superstition. Of course this is a pure prejudice. In order to eradicate their ignorance, the West needs philosophers who are mediators. The West needs philosophers who are competent in both traditions. I would like to be such a philosopher.

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So that was that. There was some polite applause, and then the next contestant began his speech (this was my Serbian friend Marko, a true Wunderkind who seems to have gained his high proficiency in spoken Sanskrit primarily by watching Sanskrit newsclips on YouTube; I hope he wins the prize). 

Now it should go without saying that what I said is not quite what I would have liked to have said. Rather, what I said was a sort of compromise between what I wanted to say and what I was able to say. The core thought, which I believe I was able to convey, was that India provides the best, and perhaps the only, full-fledged instance of an independent philosophical tradition that covers all of the fundamental questions addressed in the European philosophical tradition. Arabic-language philosophy cannot provide a comparison case, since in fact it is a continuation and development of the same tradition with which Europeans identify; and Chinese philosophy cannot provide as useful a comparison case, since for the most part it is concerned with ethics, statecraft, political philosophy, and rather less with the metaphysics and epistemology that have, arguably, underpinned the Western philosophical tradition (I am waiting for this point to be refuted). For this reason, any serious attempt at understanding the nature of philosophical inquiry through cross-cultural comparison will be one that considers the similarities and differences between the Indian and Western approaches to philosophical questions. 

I take it as a contingent fact about world history that India and Europe developed philosophical traditions, and I take it as a contingent fact, also, that Sanskrit has been the medium for so much important philosophical reflection. To this extent, beyond the fact that my Sanskrit is terrible, there is another reason why I will probably not be winning any prizes from the promoters of Sanskrit in India any time soon: I am not saying what they want to hear about the value of this cornerstone of their cultural heritage.

Within India, Sanskrit is promoted largely by conservative and nationalist factions, and their take on the antiquity and expressiveness of the language is rather different from anything that a linguist or a scholar could assent to about any natural language. In short, they don't really think Sanskrit is a natural language at all. It is, rather, the Devabhasha, the divine language, which exists entirely outside of history. Now in classical Indian philosophy the idea of a transendental language that is channeled through human beings but that is not produced by them yields very interesting reflections about the nature of both language and meaning. But as an understanding of language today, this theory can have no place among thoughtful, reasonable people. Remarkably, many Western students of Sanskrit are perfectly happy to buy into the nationalists' myths about Sanskrit, thus bringing about a strange collusion between idealistic Western aspirations to enlightenment and universal harmony, on the one hand, and a rather conventional sort of ethnic chauvinism on the other. I have heard Western students of Sanskrit rapturously declaring that this language is 'the mother of all languages', that it bears a singular relationship to truth, that it is not of human origin, etc. (For a small sample of this sort of nonsense coming from Westerners, watch this.) Unfortunately, the Indian promoters of Sanskrit do not go out of their way to quell this enthusiasm. Professional Western scholars of India, in the meantime, who surely know better, strive for a delicate balance: they do not wish to offend the people who care most about the thing they themselves study, and so, I gather, are indulgent of unscholarly views about the antiquity and origins of the language.

Sanskrit is important, and the corpus of scientific, philosophical, sacral, and poetic texts produced in this language is surely one of the richest, probably the richest, contributions to global textual culture ever. Millions of these texts remain unstudied. Western philosophy, to the extent that it refuses to take an interest in these texts, will remain, as I've said before (paraphrasing Nietzsche), nothing more than a catalogue of its own prejudices. As far as I'm concerned the case for studying Sanskrit makes itself, and there is no need at all to invoke higher spiritual incentives in order to justify one's interest. 

If only I had been able to put it this way in my speech. 

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A Conversation with Danielle S. Allen

For the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine, devoted to the theme of punishment, I talked to Danielle S. Allen about criminal justice in ancient Athens, the civil rights movement, and the Trayvon Martin case, among other things. To read the entire interview, go here, or, better yet, go buy Issue 46 of Cabinet, in stores now.

Your book The World of Prometheus offers a perfect way of giving historical depth to this issue on punishment, but it may also be interesting to reflect on how punishment in ancient Athens is relevant to our understanding of punishment in the contemporary world and, in particular, in the US. I’ve read both Prometheus and Talking to Strangers, your more recent book on Brown v. Board of Education, and one thing that struck me is how many of the same themes run through both books. You observe in Prometheus that the value of approaching punishment through the Greeks is that we’re able to “sharpen our thinking about punishment on the stone of the unfamiliar ancient world.” Does this remain for you the ultimate reason for studying ancient conceptions of punishment: that it gives us a point of access for understanding the problem of punishment itself by looking at an unfamiliar conception of it?

I can tell you the origin story of the book, which is simply that, as an undergraduate, I took a class on Athenian politics in which we read a lot of the speeches that were given in Athenian law courts. I was really taken aback by the fact that there was very little mention of imprisonment in those speeches, and I suddenly realized that I couldn’t imagine a world where prisons weren’t a major part of how we think about punishment. That captivated me, and I wanted to understand a world where imprisonment was not the dominant mode of understanding punishment. In that regard, the origin of the book was absolutely the shock of discovering, by looking at the ancient world, that our world is contingent, and that one particular contingency is the degree to which we use incarceration. It bears some thinking as to how we got there and what a world without extensive incarceration looks like.

Well, that might be right about our contemporary context; the ancient story is somewhat different. Generally—there are minor exceptions to this—Athenian methods of punishment strove to protect the body of the citizen, and this established a distinction between citizen and slave, between citizen and foreigner, resident alien, and so forth. The citizen stood out as having that bodily protection. In the early phase of the democracy, the main modes of punishing were monetary fines and exile. What happened, though, was that poorer citizens would find themselves imprisoned indefinitely: there were monetary penalties, and you would be thrown into prison until you’d paid them. So imprisonment wasn’t itself a penalty, except that poorer citizens began to have these indefinite periods in prison because they couldn’t actually pay the fine. Imprisonment as a penalty seems to have been developed in order to equalize the penal system, so that poorer citizens could pay with their bodies. In that regard, it was a different approach to the body than the physical punishment used for slaves and foreigners. It wasn’t really so much a matter of chastising or wounding the body, but rather of accepting the idea that the body could stand in for property. That’s what happened at that historical moment: the body became a form of property, and the person could use that property to pay their debts. Only the citizen had such rights and control over his own body [...]

The Politics of Curiosity

[Excerpt of an essay forthcoming in Cabinet Magazine's 10th-anniversary book. To read the full essay, buy the book!]

...A curious thing happens as curiosity is legitimated, over the course of the modern period, through its transformation into what would be called 'science': it is coopted by the state. And so begins the next chapter, the late modern chapter, of curiosity’s history. Murals go up on the sides of public buildings depicting atoms, bridge-builders, men in lab coats. Science becomes conflated with national glory.

This chapter of curiosity’s history dominated most of the 20th twentieth century, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and began its decline only in the past generation. Now the state grows jealous of the curiosity of individuals, seeking not so much to squelch it as simply to channel it for the state's own interests. Every competence must have a license, and every interest an official association. State support easily crosses over into state control, and this is a circumstance in which the true curiosus is unable to thrive.

A telling illustration of the conflict between state science and individual curiosity is given by the life-work of Vladimir Nabokov, who appears to have seen his love of lepidoptery --which yielded up a new bit of Linnean nomenclature: the Nabokovia genus of the order Lepidoptera— precisely as a defiance of the form of life from which he escaped when he fled to Berlin in 1922. Nabokov’s butterflies stand for a celebration of the possibility of a life that includes the non-political. In the circumstances of the early Soviet Union, in which he did not ask to live, attachment to such a possibility itself becomes deeply political.

But what happens when the individual who embodies the state is himself a curiosus? Consider the late Emperor Hirohito’s marine-biological endeavors, which yielded up serious scientific publications. The curiosity of the emperor, demoted from his pre-war status as an incarnate divinity, was coupled with a lifelong indifference to what one might imagine would be the heavily freighted matter of Japan’s role in World War II and the build-up to it.

In 1975, when asked, “Does your majesty feel responsibility for the war itself, including the opening of hostilities?,” the emperor replied: “I can't answer that kind of question because I haven’t thoroughly studied the literature in this field” (1). The Japanese emperor is not an expert on the Japanese empire; he's more interested in marine worms and hydroids. One can’t help but detect in the emperor a fairly selective variety of curiosity, one that is evasively non-political, and very much unlike Nabokov’s defiantly apolitical lepidoptery...

(1) Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 676.

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The Venereal Gadfly: More Notes towards a History of Orgasm

I've observed before that until at least the early 19th century, 'orgasm' did not mean what it does for us today. In La philosophie zoologique of 1809, for example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck uses the term to describe something like the vital principle in an animal, which in various other iterations has been called élan vital, archaeus, soul, etc. He defines 'orgasme' as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive."

At some point after Lamarck, I imagine, the orgasm comes instead to be seen as a sort of culmination or maximal expression of this force, as the moment in which we are living our bodily life to its fullest. I suppose. I'll try to chart the development of this new meaning some other time, but what interests me here is the matter of how, if not by the term 'orgasm', did authors up to Lamarck's era describe this physiological event?

In my reading of Latin texts on animal generation I've often come across a curious phrase, the true meaning of which escaped my attention until yesterday, when I found it in Tobias Andreae's Brevis explicatio corporis humani prout anima vegetativa pollet of 1669:

Oestro igitur venereo animalia perfectiora irritata, spiritum seminalem tam subtilem emittunt, ut licet (observante Harveo) visibile semen penetralia uteri non intret, hic tamen pervadens spiritus.

The more perfect animals, therefore, agitated by the venereal gadfly, emit a seminal spirit that is so subtle that (as Harvey observes), granted that it does not enter into the innermost reaches of the uterus, nevertheless this spirit pervades.

Oestrus venereus, obviously, is a fixed expression for 'orgasm'. But oestrus, in turn, without its venereal modifier, originally had a much broader scope. Thus in Liddell and Scott's dictionary of classical Greek we find:

ΟΙΣΤΡΟΣ. the gadfly, breese... an insect which infests cattle... II. metaph. a sting, anything that drives mad, Eur. : absol. the smart of pain, agony, Soph. 2. mad desire, insane passion, Hdt., Eur., etc. : --generally, madness, frenzy, Soph., Eur.

So oestrus, or oistros, means in the first instance 'gadfly', 'pest', and secondarily, 'irritation'. One striking thing about this term in its later transformations in scientific Latin is its strong association with female physiology: thus 'estrogen' is, etymologically, the hormone productive of sexual irritation in women, while non-human female primates spend a period of each month, 'estrus', that is, in visible sexual agitation.

But why is the sexual itch marked as feminine? One thing that comes as a surprise to people with little historical memory is that it was not until very recently that sexual insatiability came to be associated with men. In the early modern period, these were classic female attributes, and if a man were to exhibit them he would be thought to have lapsed into effeminacy. The idea that men are naturally and essentially the lustful ones, and the pseudoevolutionary explanations that are offered for this idea, are really nothing more than apologetics for our own current set of prejudices. I have never come across a single early modern male author who owns up to his own libidinousness. They write about themselves as if sexuality were not a defining factor of their existence.

But when did the shift of prejudice occur? I suspect that it happened roughly in tandem with the shift in the meaning of 'orgasm', which in turn was a reflection of a much broader shift in the conception of the place of sexuality in an individual person's identity. The culmination of the sexual act came to be described not as the relief of an itch, as a physiological release comparable to sneezing, but rather as the culmination of the vital force of the body, again, as the supreme expression of one's bodily life. And naturally, it was men and not women who came to be seen as charged with this vital force.

This lexical shift, away from an association of sexual climax with feminine 'estrus' (in the Euripidean and Sophoclean sense) and towards an association with masculine 'orgasm' (in the Lamarckian sense), leads me to think that the idea that female orgasm remained largely unknown to men until the sexual revolution is really a symptom of our own era's lack of historical depth, of our tendency to begin our histories in the Victorian period. Female orgasm was well known long before 'orgasm' came to mean what it does today, but it was conceptualized as a physiological disorder to be dissipated, an irritation, and not as a 'positive' force.

I had hoped that something could be said also of Plato's description of Socrates in the Apology as a 'gadfly', which, along with the familiar leitmotif of the Socratic dialogues, according to which the philosopher functions as a 'midwife' for the birthing of ideas, would have perhaps provided some more fuel for the idea that there lies, at the origins of the philosophical tradition, what in some circles might be called a 'genderfuck'. But it turns out that the word Plato used for this sort of gadfly was μύωψ, while the extension of oistros or oestrus to sexual irritation, and the addition of the modifier 'venereal' seems to be an invention of early modern or Renaissance Latin medical writing. Still, I take the shift in our conception of sexual climax, from estrus to orgasm, and at the same time also from female to male, to be no less remarkable a genderfuck, and, if I'm right, to offer a powerful piece of evidence in favor of a revisionist account of the history of sexuality since the beginning of the modern period.

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Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

This novel is an important contribution to Icelandic literature. It channels the past millennium's experience of nature and history in that peculiar place, but does not aspire to mere peculiarity. For this reason, it is a great shame that the book has been packaged for foreigners as a sort of offshoot of Björkian quirkiness.

Sjón has long been part of the creative circle that includes Iceland's most marketable pop icon, as are many of the currently dominant generation of Iceland's cultural, and even political, elite. I had thought, when I bought the novel on may way out of Reykjavik yesterday, that I would be mildly amused by the literary effort of a graduate of the '80s punk scene. I also worried that it might not be worth my trouble at all, that this would be another case, comparable to Sven Regener's forgettable novels, which he started writing when the physiognomy of middle age set in and he could no longer front the Berlin band Element of Crime with any dignity. But this is not one of those cases. Sjón is a writer of literature, who happens to have been present at some Sugarcubes shows (and, perhaps revealingly, joined them on stage to play, of all things, the air guitar).

The novel is called Rökkurbýsnir or 'Marvels of Twilight' in the original Icelandic, has for no apparent good reason (other than a disconnected if intriguing flourish in the final few paragraphs) been called The Mouth of the Whale in English. This too must have something to do with marketing. The perennial appeal of Moby-Dick maybe? Of course it is an admirable thing to produce even a faint echo of Melville, but that is not at all what Sjón aims to do. His is prose that frequently lapses into poetry as if by inward inclination. The mood of it is rapturous, at times almost reminiscent of Saint John the Divine's coda to the New Testament.

It tells us the story of a certain Jónas Palmasson 'the Learned', an early-17th-century Icelandic natural philosopher, runic scholar, and healer. He is self-taught, and syncretistic in his commitment to Christian faith and to Icelandic folk-beliefs. He is a devout follower of Paracelsus, and is something like what the Swiss physician and occultist might have ended up being if he had been born, liks Jónas, into what was essentially an Iron Age society, with few books and only a fairly barren natural landscape from which to learn.

Part of the narrative (though this is not a very narrative novel) concerns Jónas's voyage to Copenhagen, at the request of Ole Worm, the actually existing historical character who founded the Museum Wormianum, one of the largest cabinets of curiosities in early modern Europe. Worm has heard of Jónas's learnedness, and hopes that he can help him to decipher runic writing, something Worm in fact attempted in his Runir, seu Danica literatura antiquissima [Runes, Or, the Most Ancient Danish Literature] of 1638. Jónas is hesitant to aid Worm, since he has been persecuted in his home country for sorcery, and is in Denmark in part to clear his name. But he is happy to clarify for Worm the true origin of a purported unicorn skull. It comes from a narwhal: Icelandic traders had for centuries been duping Europeans who were willing to pay enormous sums of money for remedies made from a powder of the marine mammal's tusk, on the presumption that this came from the mythical terrestrial mammal. The build-up to the revelation of the skull's true origin is somewhat tedious for those of us who have read the 1628 treatise De Unicornu by Caspar Bartholin (Worm's brother-in-law), and it all starts to feel a bit too Eco-esque. Not surprisingly, this sequence is the one that is marketed most aggressively in the publisher's packaging of the novel. (Unicorns appeal, I gather, in roughly the same way Björk does.)

When I say that this is an important contribution to Icelandic literature I mean in part that the author channels a tradition that stretches back to a time when literature was meant to do something other than what it has been doing since the 19th century or so. Jónas has few books to read, does not know Latin, but is loyal to the idea that nature can be read, and that books, ideally, are epitomes of nature. Nature in turn is Divine Creation, and learning is the project of mastering the order behind this creation. One of the most touching sequences concerns Jónas's recollection of his first encounters with his future wife, Sigga:

Our courtship was one uninterrupted conversation about the origin of the stars, the nature of land and sea, the behaviour of beasts great and small, and although it was not conducted in Hebrew or in the angleic tongue as it was with Adam and Eve, it was nevertheless our hymn to Creation. We sat together into the early hours, investigating the delightful puzzles of light and shadow, such as what happens to the shadow of your hand when the shadow of mine falls upon it? Have they become one? Or has yours disappeared temporarily? And if so, where to?

In her youth Sigga correctly predicted an eclipse through astronomical calculation. Her kinfolk ran around like it was the end of the world, but she was calm. She and Jónas both embody an approach to learning that is 'scientific', in that it seeks to get things right, but also one step away from sorcery, in that it probes where one really isn't supposed to go (as a boy Jónas specializes in laying his hands upon the bellies of old crones, and diagnosing their 'female illnesses'). This shared disposition unites Jónas and Sigga erotically: science as a hymn to creation, as the basis of erotic love, and finally as a highly charged danger zone that borders on the magical. Sjón reconstructs with sympathy the world in which this all made sense.

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Divination, Sacrifice, Art

There is a certain variety of pulp erotic novel that will try to entice you into purchasing it by showing on its cover the curve of a woman's hips, or the suggestion of what is properly called the 'intergluteal cleft'. Some of these covers will play on a sort of visual metaphor, and show you an image of a piece of fruit that might at first glance be mistaken for the female anatomy just described. Peaches and cherries work particularly well towards this effect.

Now suppose the graphic-design department of a publishing house decided to use the haunches of a goat, say, or a piece of gristle from the dinner plate, to bring about the same trompe-l'oeil we are so accustomed to experiencing, and even enjoying, with representations of fragments from the vegetable kingdom. Pause a moment on the difference between the two sorts of illusion. When we learn that what we are seeing is a cherry, and not a woman's derrière, we feel amusement, and perhaps even more desire than we would have felt had it been, so to speak, the real thing. A cherry is a suitable replacement for a woman.

But if the same tromperie is carried out by use not of a cherry, but instead a blob of fat, we will feel we have been truly and unfairly trumped; any desire we had will now be thoroughly squelched, and we will go off in search of the latest Churchill biography or some equally unsexy thing instead. The eye likes to be trumped by fruit, but takes its trumping by meat as an offense. Along similar lines, cherries and peaches are the staples of erotic poetry, while 'meat' comes up only once we have crossed from the erotic to the pornographic.

Now Heide Hatry proposes not to replace the woman with fruit or with meat, but rather to put meat in the place of the fruit, the carnal --the truly carnal-- in place of the vegetal. But what is she up to, now, really?

In ancient Rome the haruspex was the man who divined the future by reading the internal organs of sacrificed animals (mostly lambs). You might think we are a long way from art here, but be patient. Divination is by definition aleatoric: it lets the world, and time, and chance decide the outcome of a given trial, and the result is taken as a statement of the truth quite apart from the question whether it is a thing of beauty or not. Divination wants answers; art (at least as it's often understood) wants pleasing representations.

But this distinction has not always been so clear. In the ancient world there was a fluid back-and-forth between athletic competition and ceremonial display: one century's game might be the next century's performance. When the hexagrams of the I Ching were first introduced into Europe in the 17th century, arguments abounded as to what they actually were: were they designs meant to be pleasing to the eye? Were they binary encodings of information? Were they the product of some aleatoric process? In fact, the last of these possibilities comes closest to the truth, but that does not necessarily mean we should exclude other interpretations. And similarly with haruspicy: the internal organs were inspected as a signpost of the future. But were they not also beautiful? Is the organic body of an animal, with all its interconnected viscera, not among the best bits of evidence for God's creative potency?

Hatry's work is not divinatory, of course, at least not explicitly or intentionally. She takes the viscera and she purposefully arranges them into new formations that accord with her will and vision. She makes meat into plant, just as the Chinese Buddhist monks with their culinary tradition have long made plant into sea anemone, sea cucumber, duck, and pig. Hatry's work is willful, it is planned, but, I want to say, it is not wholly unconnected to an array of traditional practices, including haruspicy, and perhaps including a sort of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine in reverse.

Whether for the willful production of beauty, or the divination of the future, arguably it is preferable to take note of the viscera of slaughtered beasts, than simply to discard them as offal. Now I myself hate the slaughter of the four-footed and peaceable brutes, and if the world were the way I would like it to be Hatry would have no access to the materials with which she works. But as long as the slaughter continues, I also must suppose that what is found inside of these gutted beings is at least as revealing of our own predicament as any cherry, cube, or drop of paint.

That her work disgusts --and it does-- should give us pause, to reflect not only on aesthetics, but also ontology. Why can paint or clay be made fruit or brute, and fruit in turn be made brute or human (usually female), yet nothing be made from the raw material of the brute (other than, of course, food, along with its companion, refuse)? Now bones are of course often used in what until recently was called 'primitive art', and leather was and remains an important medium of art and design. But bones and leather are deanimalized products of beasts: tanning in fact is the process whereby the animality of the hide gets processed out, and it is this process that makes the hide, from the dead pig, suitable for society. Hatry wants to skip that process and give society the slaughtered beast itself, not as food, and not as deanimalized decor, but as art.

Why does this disgust? Tzvetan Todorov said, in connection with the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century, that civilizations may be distinguished into those that sacrifice, and those that slaughter. If you belong to the latter sort of civilization, to dispatch a lamb or a cow or a virgin at an altar seems a horrific thing, even if in terms of numbers it is the slaughtering societies that far outdo the sacrificing ones with their violence.

Now Hatry, like almost everyone who is exposed to her work, comes from a slaughtering society. We kill humans and animals en masse, day after day and year after year, as a matter of routine, but we see no sense in the sort of violence that once was understood as an offering to the gods. The slaughter of animals, in particular, has been entirely routinized over the course of the previous century, turned into the sort of work that's protected by labor unions and for which one punches a time card. We prefer the billions of deaths that are a footnote to the data about our GDP, to the singular death that Stalin called a tragedy, but might also simply be called significant. We prefer it in large part because what results from the system of factory farming is a product: meat, a bio-artefact, something ontologically quite distinct from an animal. And how can products endure tragedy? 

Every non-vegetarian is in fact a vegetarian with respect to most species of animal, and with respect to most cuts of the animal he or she has deemed acceptable to eat. In North America, in contrast with Europe and a fortiori with Asia, the cuts with which Hatry is working in this series are considered particularly strange: inedible, other than on for very special occasions (such as trips to Asia, which always involve the desire to come back with stories).  These are the euphemized 'sweetbreads', the 'head cheese', la triperie. These are the parts that play a specialized role in the functioning of the living animal, the parts in virtue of which the animal is not just a mass of force-wielding muscle, but an end-driven, intricate being, what G. W. Leibniz called a 'divine machine'.

North Americans would have to do only with the deanimalized muscle, and would have the internal organs simply thrown away, or in some way or other kept out of sight. Asians would eat it all up, and relish it: the pancreas, the thymus, the testicles, the heart. Hatry proposes to make flowers out of it, and again the ontological question: why does it seem to force nature in the wrong way, à rebours, to make these out of that?

In part it's just the particular North American sensibility, which holds that offal is, well, awful, and again wants nothing to do with it. In part, moreover and more generally, it's returning animals back from victims of slaughter to their archaic status as victims of sacrifice. To the extent that Hatry is creating art, and to the extent that any of us have any idea what it is to do that in this day and age, she is giving something like an offering. It's not clear to whom, and it's not clear why, but the guts of slaughtered animals are being offered up for something or other, rather than discarded or gulped down; and that feels awkwardly regressive.

Finally, there is the catena rerum, the chain of being, in which we all believe to some degree whether we know it or not, which extends from the raw stuff of earth at the very bottom up through plants and earthworms and quadrupeds and apes and angels and finally God. A corollary of this vision of the cosmos holds that striving is always upward, and that anything lower on the scale may suitably imitate only what is higher than it. Offal is repulsive, in a sense, but it's also, in another sense, more dignified than plant matter. It comes from a being with a higher sort of soul than a mere plant, and so to force it into vegetal forms is also à rebours.

Now I know none of this is on Hatry's mind when she is creating her art, and no doubt that's for the better. I come to her work simply as a philosopher interested, first of all, in the history of reflection in the West on the ontological differences between inanimate objects, plants, animals, and humans; and, second of all, interested in the history of reflection on the nature of objects of art. I think of this latter category, as it has been conceived until very recently, in the broadest sense of whatever it is that is produced by human artifice.

To the extent that art is to be both something more and something more precise than this, as many want it to be, it is going to converge with the sort of semiotically dense business that has long been familiar to us from things like ritual sacrifice and other elements of what is now called 'religion'. Hatry's work does not, like that of Hermann Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists, explicitly attempt to breath new life into the ancient cult of sacrifice. It is (slightly) more subtle than that: it confounds our idea of what art is by taking what is ordinarily off-limits as an artistic medium and turning it into one, at high risk of being misunderstood as the work of a Hannibal Lecter, or as, you know, 'another one of those Germans'.  

Ontologically (where I prefer to dwell), the power of it lies in the refusal to deanimalize the medium before it is put to use: it's still entirely animal. This confounds our sense of etiquette, to begin with; but beyond that it confounds our grasp of the order of nature, and at least brings back into view, if not loudly announcing as much, the reversion of 'art' in the narrow contemporary sense, which no one really understands, to the more profound category of offering (which Walter Burkert reminds us is the very root of the German word Opfer, meaning 'victim').

Or else it's just a game, like haruspicy, another variation on what T. S. Eliot called 'fiddling with pentagrams'. I don't know. I also don't know how much time I will spend gazing at the gut-flower Hatry makes to accompany my essay, nor yet what I will scry within it. 

 

Probably the Best Visual Pun on an Ancient Sanskrit Grammarian and a Light Italian Repast Ever