Justin Erik Halldór Smith

My Faith: A Confession

[This was originally scheduled to come out in another venue. I went through long, difficult discussions with the editors, and ultimately, because it was so important to me in this case that the words remain my own, I decided to pull it (I'm usually very flexible with editors!). I sat on it for a number of months, but with the coming of the New Year it dawned on me that it might set me off on the right foot to release it here.]

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Different people, different closets. I don't quite know how to say it delicately so I'm just going to come right out and say it. I believe in God. Apart from periodic spells of foolish pride, I have believed in God all my life. Even during these spells, I did not so much cease to believe, as turn my back on what I believed. 

As far as I'm concerned there cannot really be any concern that God does not exist. Even to see God's existence as a problem is to misapprehend what is at stake, since God just is the love, sweet and radiant, that charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation, always ready to be felt by anyone who is ready to believe. 

God is not male, and I cannot say 'he', however tempted I am to remain with the conventions of my beautiful language and its beautiful tradition of devotional writing. But this is a relatively trivial corollary of the more important point that God is not a being, and so also neither a monarch nor a father nor a ruler of any sort. God is love, and I can keep my love of God and have my anarchism too.

Indeed, as I see it the two not only can but must go together. To believe in God, and to feel the divine love that charges through all of creation, is precisely not to bow down, but to rejoice. The great travesty of the history of religion, and the victory of its enemies, has been to bend the idea of God to the legitimation of earthly rulers, to convince people that God is like dad, or the king, or the tyrant, but more so, and that, conversely, these mundane potentates are little reflections of God. There is none of this in my love of God, which shines out of my encounter with creatures, God's creatures, themselves having no power other than the power of their own growth and integrity, their own life, which is itself an expression of the same joy in God as my own.

To experience this joy is to know that the states of my soul and the states of infinite nature always fit, that each is an expression of the other, and so, that my death cannot be the end of anything, since nature, of which my soul was a modulation, a beautiful if dirty outcropping, will keep doing what it always does, and I, now only more obviously a convolution of nature, will flow along in streams and breezes and cosmic rays and will no longer be held up on this concern about the 'I' at all, about its finitude and its mortality. (I have just expressed a version of what is sometimes called 'monopsychism' or 'the Averroist heresy', and it is the first of a handul of heresies to which I will assent here.) 

For some centuries now, no small confusion has arisen from the fact that we talk about belief in God, rather than love of God. The two amount to the same thing, but the first of these expressions, at least since the beginning of the modern period, pushes us willy-nilly into the field of evidence and argumentation, a field where the standards of commitment have nothing to do with the issue at hand, and so not surprisingly, though for poorly understood reasons, belief in God cannot but be a failing proposition. 

But start from love, start from joy, and the demand for further evidence vanishes. To continue to make it would be like demanding to see the hormones that cause an erection before accepting that there is such a thing as eros. It would be vulgar. It is vulgar, every time we hear it from the puffed-up fools who believe they are defending the honour and integrity of something, which they also do not understand, but which they call 'science'. Science has more often than not been driven by what its practitioners have experienced as joy and wonder before God's creation. This is a historical fact, and even if you are one of the puffed-up fools who thinks belief in God deserves nothing but mockery, you cannot change this fact. 

Too often, God talk is set over against science talk, as if the one were concerned with fiction and illusion, the other with truth and reality. But this distinction presupposes an understanding of all talk as principally concerned with denoting entities in the world, and so takes those varieties of talk for which no entities are to be found as inferior or off-target. But there is another method of dividing up the different ways people talk, on which what the aforementioned fools think of as science finds itself in the undistinguished company of insurance claims and warehouse inventory lists, while God by contrast shares space, in the universe of human meanings, with music, metaphor, poetry, and dreams.

Everyone understands when God comes up in the lyrics of a Pixies song, for example. One song says, insistently, 'God is seven!', as if recalling some forgotten Pythagorean numerology, or, just as likely, deploying a Chomskyan example of a nonsense sentence.  When I hear that song, I hear something, born though it may be of irony and the exigencies of rhyme, that I can only hear as a crying out to God. Countless rock songs could be substituted here to make the same point, which is that no one who was into such a song up to the moment where God came up will suddenly throw off the headphones and declare that there has been a mistake.

In his poem 'The Angels', Rainer-Maria Rilke attributes to God a pair of 'wide workman's hands' which move through the pages 'of the dark book of the beginning'. Does God have wide workman's hands? No, and yet, if you ask me, Where is the truth to be found, in Rilke's poem, or in my 2011 tax returns?, I will answer without a second of hesitation: the poet is telling the truth, and of the two sorts of text it is only the first that can even be said to be engaging with something important enough to be called 'true' or 'false' at all. The turn to metaphor is not a turn away from truth, but a response to the difficulty of its expression.

But metaphor is not always what conveys the truth best. When Al Green sings the lines of the old gospel song, 'My God is real, for I can feel him in my soul', no proposition could be more direct, and only a puffed-up fool would seek to tell him he is mistaken. Just listen to him; he's not mistaken. And we can know this because of the depth of the feeling that motivates its expression, so much like the erotic desire we might find him singing about in the tracks that precede and follow 'My God Is Real'. Some of the most incontrovertible expressions of belief in God move in just this way, between RnB and gospel, so to speak, between different modalities of love. In this respect, Al Green positions himself in the same lineage as Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. The expression of their love of God is the more compelling for their refusal to cordon it off from carnal love.

Much invocation of God in music and poetry is not declarative at all, but vocative; it says not that God is so-and so, it says 'Oh Lord', 'Oh my God'. (Sometimes people even say these things when they're fucking.) The puritans will tell you that this is 'swearing', that it is taking the name of God in vain. But listen attentively, openly, in the spirit of charity, and you can only understand that it is not in vain, and that we have no a priori rule to distinguish between swearing and praying.   

Are the lyrics true? (Is God seven?) Are they more true or less true than a correct inventory of the items held in a warehouse? This is an argument I am not interested in having. But I am certain that music, poetry, all those contexts in which everyone understands, whether they 'believe in God' or not, that it makes sense to invoke God: these are not to be dismissed as illusion, shadow, deceit, nor yet as distraction, playtime, divertissement, kid's stuff. An account of human life that does not include them would not amount to much. 

But enough about wrong-headedness; this is not a debate, but a confessio fidei. I am proclaiming what I believe, not beating down opponents. Opponents and sympathists alike are by now probably saying, God, God, fine. But which God? And I answer, with even more trepidation than I felt in making the initial profession of faith: the Christian God. 

But what is Christian here? So far I've only spoken in the sort of vagaries that a few hundred years ago would have found me accused of Spinozism, which is to say crypto-atheism. They were wrong about Spinoza, then, too. Spinoza believed in God, and as far as we can tell his mature philosophy was in no small measure the product of a deep interest in radical Protestant reconceptualizations of Christology. To say 'God or nature' only appears to be a reduction of God if you already hate nature; if you do not hate it, you will understand Spinoza's formula not as a reduction, but as an exaltation. Too often, to say, with Einstein, that one 'believes in Spinoza's God', is interpreted as a way of distancing oneself from belief in the proper sense, a way of sounding respectably modern while also expressing some concern that our various insurance claim forms and inventory lists are inadequate as sources of meaning. It is the high-brow way of saying one is 'spiritual but not religious'.

But I want to say something unmodern here, something that would have made sense in 30 AD. I am a Christian because I affirm the core message of the Gospels, which, I take it, is that God is love, and that therefore a life that aspires to love of all of creation is a life lived in accordance with God's law. This interpretation of what I have called the core message is one that emphasizes what is often called 'the social gospel', and that aligns itself with thinkers like Tolstoy who see Christ as a social revolutionary. From love flows the principle of unconditional forgiveness, and from this flows a commitment to pacifism which underlies all of a Christian's political commitments. To be a Christian is by definition to abhor war. It is also to abhor conventional morality, and family values (see Luke 14:26). It is not only unmodern, but untimely in any era, in 30 AD as much as today. 

The only adequate fulfillment of the core message of love, for me, is the one that, as I have already suggested, extends this love to all of creation, and not only to one's 'fellow man'. This is a challenge, since the Christian tradition, and indeed for the most part the Gospels themselves, is overwhelmingly anthropocentric. Animals come up parabolically, as representatives of singular human virtues or vices (sheep good, goats bad, etc.), but seldom as works of God in their own right. This absence is somewhat compensated in the lives of saints --Francis of Assisi, Seraphim of Sarov, Theodora of Sihla-- who retreated to the wilderness, who learned how to talk to the animals, and who, we may thus infer, understood that animals are an expression of the same divine order and divine goodness as we are. But one must go looking for these tendencies in the Christian tradition in a way that one need not in, say, Buddhism. You might now ask, Why not just be a Buddhist, then? To which I would reply: Quit joking around. I can't be a Buddhist. (I could pretend, I suppose, like many Westerners have, though they usually get tired of doing so before long.) 

I confess I do not have much of a feeling for the meaning of the crucifixion, and for the cult of death that sprang from it. My part of the four Gospels comes early on: the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount; they lose me with the crucifixion. It is not that I don't believe in or understand sin: on the contrary, I find the picture of God's creation as always charged through with grace but also simultaneously tainted by sin entirely compelling. Eating, for example (as the Chandogya Upanishad, by the way, vividly conveys) is a transgression against what is eaten, against that portion of living and striving nature that you have usurped for your own living and striving, but it is by God's grace --by 'saying grace', as some wholesome folk do-- that this usurpation can be made right. Sin is pursuit of self-interested ends as if you deserved the fruits of this pursuit simply in virtue of who you are, as if God had nothing to do with it. Sin is pride, turning away from God in the belief that you have what it takes to make it on your own (one telling and somewhat archaic synonym of 'atheism' in German is Abgötterei, which translates as something like 'away-from-Goddery', 'the condition of turning from God'; atheism here is not a doxastic state about the existence of something or other, but rather an emotional state, a stubbornness). So I get sin, but I don't get what it means to say that Christ died for my sins. I just don't get it. 

I know that I am picking and choosing, and that by many standards I've failed to meet the requirements of being a Christian. Many, like those with the banners at the sports events, take John 3:16 to contain the core message of the Gospels. I also claim to know what the core message of the Bible is: love and forgiveness (1 John 4:8, 1 Corinthians 13:13, Matthew 5:38), and I claim that there is much extraneous stuff too, which can have little to do with our understanding of the essence of Christianity: the rules concerning marriage, the disregard for animals, the cosmic significance of crucifixion. How do I justify my picking and choosing? Well, who wants me to justify it? The hoarse-voiced goon at the sports match shouting about how Jesus Christ died for my sins? What concern is he of mine? 

Those who know me or have read me will probably know that I have often claimed that I am an atheist. I would like to stop doing this, but if I had to justify myself, I would say that it is for fear of being confused with that blowhard with the 'John 3:16' banner that I am unforthcoming about what I actually believe. I am infinitely closer, in the condition of my soul, to the people who feel God's absence-- the reasons for this feeling are a profound theological problem, and one might say that it is only smugness that enables people, atheists and dogmatists alike, to avoid grappling with this problem. I am with the people who detect God's hand, perhaps without even realizing it, where the smug banner-holder sees only sin: in jungle music, dirty jokes, seduction, and swearing. I am with the preacher who puts out a gospel album, then goes to prison on fraud and drug charges for a while, then puts out a hip-grinding soul album, and then another gospel album. I am with the animals, who can't even read, but can still talk to the saints of divine things. I am sooner an atheist, if what we understand by Christianity is a sort of supernatural monarchism; if we understand by it that God is love, though, then, I say, I am a Christian. 

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.

This Is Not a Philosophy Blog

And that title is not a riff on Magritte, where I claim of a thing that it is not the thing it obviously is. This is, in a direct and literal sense, not a philosophy blog. I feel the need to make this clear every now and then because, from the fact that I am a philosopher, and from the fact that I have a blog, many have incorrectly inferred that I have a philosophy blog. (I do have a blog that is focused on my work as a philosopher, namely, jehsmith.com/philosophy, but it is to jehsmith.com, without the extension, that people are generally referring when they mention my 'philosophy blog'.) 

A philosophy blog is a very particular thing, and indeed something very, very different from a blog maintained by a person who is also a philosopher. Philosophy blogs tend to involve a great deal of vocational humour (in essence not so different from the Far Side cartoons you might once have found on a paleontologist's office door), and a lot of concerned discussion of state-of-the-discipline issues: what sort of lighting should be used during APA interviews, which journals should be boycotted for their slow response time, etc. Occasionally, interspersed between these items, you will find some discussion of the actual content of the discipline, though the truth is these days it's getting harder to say where the line lies between, on the one hand, the actual, contentful, inspiring questions that motivated us to get into it in the first place and, on the other hand, the business of it, the running of the discipline. One fears that in the near future there will be ever more self-referential, discipline-focused events passing themselves off as philosophy: 'APA Special Session on Seating Arrangements at Philosophy Conferences: Should We Rearrange the Chairs?' 

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't be thinking about stuff like this (especially when it comes to the crucial matter of eliminating cognitive bias). I'm saying I'm not the one who's doing it, not here. There is no state-of-the-discipline chatter here, nor, I hasten to add, any vocational humour. Nor, for that matter, is there much discussion even of the content of the discipline (the content in the old sense of ideas and arguments and stuff). Philosophy comes up fairly regularly, but it has no special pride of place, and is probably less central to my concerns here, year in and year out, than poetry, folklore, literature, music, autobiography, product packaging, and any number of other things I care deeply about. It is not that all these things are of equal or greater importance to philosophy in my life, but rather that this blog serves for me principally as a place to address all those things I care about that cannot find their way into my professional teaching and research profile.

On occasion, I myself have contributed to the confusion by giving in to temptation and ejaculating some opinion or other about the culture of academic philosophy, as when I complained recently of what I see as a strain of conservative pronatalism among North American philosophers of my generation. One of my resolutions for 2013 is to refrain from doing this; if I don't like something about the culture I'm a part of, I am of course free to simply think about other things, as I should have done in this case: like poetry, for example, and all the other beautiful things for which this blog really exists.

One thing I've been thinking about recently --and here I might be lapsing once again into state-of-the-discipline chatter, but hell, it's not 2013 yet-- is how much clearer, and how much more legitimate, the distinction would be between 'my blog' and 'my philosophy blog' if I were principally interested in blogging about sports, or whiskies, or kayaking, or the furniture I'm building, or the children I'm raising. Now I have nothing against these endeavors, but as it happens my interests lie elsewhere; I have nothing to say about Messi or Laphroaig or whatever, and plenty to say about, e.g., Kafka. And this means that my elsewhere is not neutral territory, but is sufficiently philosophoid to be seen as the sort of stuff a philosopher cannot be interested in without being interested in it qua philosopher.

And this is where the old, facile distinction between the continentals and the analytics, as between those whose philosophy emerges from literary preoccupations and those who come to philosophy via a broad concern for scientific explanation, intrudes uninvited upon my blogging idyll, and gives the casual visitor the impression that because I am concerned with literature here, I must belong to the first of these two camps.

So let me make something very clear: not only is this not a philosophy blog, a fortiori it is definitely not a soft philosophy blog. And let me be perfectly honest: I don't have the slightest clue what Derrida or Husserl is on about, and what little fragments I've managed to understand have failed to capture my imagination in any way. When I am writing as a philosopher, Aristotle, Henry More, Spinoza, and Leibniz are my guiding lights. I believe, moreover, that what we call 'science' must be the ultimate arbiter of questions about the nature of reality, and I believe that at least in principle definitive factual answers, i.e., the truth, can be arrived at for such questions.

But anyhow my point is that the vast majority of the time, the interest I take in things here is an interest I take quite apart from the line of work I'm in, and quite apart from my my orientation in that work, even if, admittedly, this interest often lies somewhat closer to philosophy --and even to that philosophy I've confessed to knowing nothing about-- than do, say, the NBA playoffs.

So, to sum up: this is not a philosophy blog. I don't like philosophy blogs. This is a non-philosophy blog about all those things that matter to me that cannot be easily incorporated into my professional profile. And there is no reason why I, a philosopher, should not be free to maintain this sort of non-philosophy blog, any less than my peers should be free to maintain their Monty Python blogs or their blogs about The Wire or their favorite coffee shops in the Tri-State Area or their favorite vacation spots in Tuscany.

There is another discussion to be had about how the project of philosophy came to be so defined that the full range of interests I've mentioned could not be incorporated into it. Leibniz, for example, would have drawn the boundaries of the discipline very differently, and his blog --and Leibniz definitely would have had a blog-- would have been a philosophy blog with notes on the diversity of plant species in Siberia, on how to build a reckoning machine, with poems about cider, and proofs for the existence of God (for me --as for Leibniz, I think-- the crucial distinction is not whether you see philosophy as deriving from science or from sentiment, from truth-seeking or from self-expression, but rather whether or not you see philosophy as appropriately concerned with the great abundance of particular things in the world, with all the res singulares). For now I will simply say that I am well aware of where the bounds of the discipline lie at present, that I am able to respect them in my professional activity, and that they are of absolutely no interest to me here. 

Support the Prostates of Québec!

To the right is a low-quality photograph of an ad currently in circulation in the Montreal metro system. Its purpose is to encourage Montrealers to contribute money in support of research on and treatment of prostate cancer. The slogan at the top says 'Support the Prostates from Here!', which is to say from Québec, the prostates of Quebeckers. The image below is a sort of athletic cup adorned with a Québécois fleur-de-lys, atop which floats a circle that, in a stroke of graphic genius, seems to represent a halo and an elastic waistband at once. 

The slogan plays on a common plea often found in connection with fruits, cheeses, and other foodstuffs produced in the province: 'Soutenez les x d'ici', is, for any x, a way of saying 'Buy Québécois', support the provincial (or, depending how you see it, national) economy through your spending habits. 

The slogan also, in taking 'prostate' as a possible value of 'x', takes the reproductive systems of Québécois men as part of the total Québécois system of production, alongside the production of cheese and foie gras, and sees all of this production as contributive to national health and well-being, understood in the broad sense here in which these overlap with national pride and glory. 

Obviously, this ad inscribes itself in a long history of cross-hybridity between public health and nationalism. Alison Bashford argues fairly convincingly in her Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health of 2004 that large-scale public-health campaigns are in fact an ineliminable feature of modern projects of constructing national identity. 

What is particularly interesting here, though, is that the ad updates the old formula, in its echoing of the broader North American society's current preoccupation with defeating cancer through orchestrated, mass-scale public gestures of charity, and moreover does so with a pseudo-risqué wink and with a self-conscious, jocular avowal that in this day and age our body parts are not so much like cogs in the great national machine, as one might have seen in early Soviet vaccination propaganda, as they are like vendable commercial goods. 

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. 

My Idea of Nature

For most of my adult life, beginning, really, in the rebellious years of adolescence, I have been against nature. This phrase, against nature, is the standard title for the English translation of J.-K. Huysmans' splendid 1884 novel, À rebours, but when I use it here, I don't mean generally perverted or out-of-whack. I mean I have cultivated a consummately urban existence, and have insisted that people who rush off to commune with the great outdoors are wasting their time. Part of this is based in a concern --about whose legitimacy I have not begun to doubt-- that modern urbanites who speak of how in tune with nature they are are simply deluding themselves, that they no more succeed in bridging the nature/culture divide when they go off camping for a weekend than I do when I stay home in the city and blog. I've often suspected that typically a philosopher's idea of 'nature' consists in little more than a memory of a trip to R.E.I., or the thought of the picture of themselves kayaking that they selected for their department website. I've wanted none of that, and so have shut it out entirely.

Have I been wrong to do so? Back East, where I've always felt culturally at home but, with respect to nature, utterly against the grain (the other standard title for Huysmans' novel), I don't spend much time thinking about this question. The meteorology of the East Coast is schizophrenic and malign; and the wildlife, as Buffon already understood, is degenerate. The closest thing to mountains over there are the final fading bumps of an ancient range. The only animals are pests. Even when it's not hot it's too hot. But now I am back in California, where I am from, and the Sierra Nevadas are off in the distance and the weather is right and the light is right. It awakens a sensibility in me that I ordinarily am not aware I have. This awakening feels rather like anamnesis: I am remembering something I've always known. I am content to finally fit again with my natural surroundings; but also full of regret, at having so long forgotten, in spite of all the discomfort my straying has caused, that there was need of a fit.

I have been driving nature out with a pitchfork in both possible senses of the wise Terence's adage: I have been attempting to live my entire life in sterile, steely, airport-like atmospheres, and I have been denying who I am. This denial has often been expressed as a contempt not just for nature, but also for the history of the place I am from. And so it is only just yesterday that, for the first time in my life, I picked up and began to read a book by John Muir: The Mountains of California, of 1894.

Muir is close to the American transcendentalists in spirit, who are in turn cousins of the German Romantic idealists. They are what results when you move Romantic aesthetics into the wide open space of a new continent. Muir does not shy away from describing landscapes as 'sublime'. Perhaps he used it when he met with Emerson, who was so impressed by Muir's sensibility as a Naturphilosoph that he offered him a position at Harvard on the spot (the hiring process must have been different back then). Muir's response? "I never for a moment thought of giving up God's big show for a mere profship!"

I stopped watching God's big show years ago, in the hopes of being offered a profship at Harvard, or whatever else I could get. But I know the show; I learned it by heart when my grandfather took me fishing on the lakes in the shadow of Mount Lassen more than 30 years ago. It took Muir to remind me that I know what it's like to be at those lakes in winter. He was there a century before, and saw:

The play of the lights among the crystal angles of these snow-cliffs, the pearly white of the outswelling bosses, the bergs drifting in front, aglow in the sun and edged with green water, and the deep blue disk of the lake itself extending to your feet, -- this forms a picture that enriches all your afterlife, and is never forgotten. But however perfect the season and the day, the cold incompleteness of these young lakes is always keenly felt. We approach them with a kind of mean caution, and steal unconfidingly around their crystal shores, dashed and ill at ease, as if expecting to hear some forbidding voice. But the love-songs of the ouzels and the love-looks of the daisies gradually reassure us, and manifest the warm fountain humanity that pervades the coldest and most solitary of them all.

When Muir says 'afterlife' he means the life that comes after the experience, not after death. But these amount to largely the same thing, if that life is spent in the willful unhearing and unseeing of the love-songs and love-looks nature, perceived in a certain mode, is prepared to give.

Muir was famously always itching to be outdoors, in that mode, and the writing was only an after-trace of this primary experience of life. I place him for this reason at one end of a continuum, at whose opposite extreme we find a person I've long considered my model and inspiration: Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton never went anywhere; he spun out hundreds and hundreds of world-duplicating, world-creating pages entirely from within his own head and his own room. In his preface to a recent edition of the Anatomy, William Gass writes admiringly of   “the width of the world that can be seen from one college window…; what a love of all can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair.” This is how one must write, I have long thought, but am now beginning to doubt. Clearly, one mustn't write, anyhow, anywhere in the middle region of the continuum, where for example Thoreau finds himself sticking it out in a cabin not too far from town, just as long as it takes to confer legitimacy on the Walden project. I will excuse Lévi-Strauss's relatively dabbling approach to his own fieldwork only because he is so wonderfully honest in Tristes Tropiques about how hard a thing it really is, and not for reasons of logistics or distance, to go into the bush.

My friend  Ed Rackley is a great writer, and is someone who, unlike me, is very good at experiencing things. He rides motorcycles around Africa, goes ocean kayaking, stuff like that. And he does not do this in order to post pictures of it afterward, either, or even in order to write about it afterward. The opposition I have set up between Muir and Burton, Ed sets up in the somewhat narrower domain of writing about ocean kayaking as between Jon Turk, who "sets the bar for the genre because expedition kayaking and marine exploration are his life," while "writing is secondary," and Paul Theroux, "for whom paddling is mere source material." Coming from my Burtonian perspective I'm still surprised to discover that one might need to do anything at all in order to have source material, but still, when the difference is set up like this one can't help but agree that Turk triumphs. Without having read Theroux myself, it is nonetheless not hard to guess what is driving him; Turk by contrast remains an enigma.

Ed's contrast, anyhow, compels me to revisit the one I have set up between Muir and Burton, and to notice something in it that should have been obvious but that escaped my attention until now: Burton spins out worlds from the solitude of his chamber, yes, but these are worlds of melancholy. Burton is hilarious, and prolific, but he is singularly incapable of moving out of that register of thought that the ancient doctors knew to be caused by an excess of black bile. Muir, for his part, writes out of joy. He watches God's great show because it brings joy, and it is in the joyous register that he writes afterward.

I feel, here in California, that I am ready to share in at least a small measure of this joy. And this feeling, too, is tinged with regret, because I also know that to stick around long enough for it to take effect would seriously compromise my cosmopolitan schedule. For one thing, I am now awaited in Paris, where I have recently accepted a position.

I am quickly learning that it is not nearly as enjoyable as you might imagine to tell people you're moving to Paris. From the reactions, you would think that life in that city consists in nothing but watching can-can dancers and eating at 3-star Michelin restaurants, without interruption, without end (which would very quickly become my idea of hell). For most Americans the word 'Paris' appears to trigger activity in the same region of the brain as 'Frederick's of Hollywood', 'Emmanuelle', or 'Red Shoe Diaries'. I swear to you I've heard Americans groan ooh la la when I inform them of my career plans. This can't go on. I'm going to have to start telling them I've taken a position in some place Germanic-sounding and offputting, some place that sounds like no fun at all. Perhaps Rostock. 

But whatever I say, and whatever people think, this recent visit to California has me feeling that I am going in the wrong direction, that it is not for me to head to the cities any longer, least of all that city whose very name is synonymous with our idea, however downmarket, of urbanity. I should be heading John Muir's way, not 'back to nature' in general; and not to some new and excellent expression of nature in some far corner of the world, as was the case for Muir the Scot; but to the nature that already shaped my consciousness of the world before I had time to choose, to the nature that saw to it that I had read Muir a priori, so to speak, before even learning how to read, to the oaks and hawks and dry grass and ivy of the Central Valley of California. This is where the truth of pananimism and the glory of God's big show strike me most vividly, and the mendacity of all my urban groping and clawing comes into the clear. It is not that there is more nature here. I'm not even particularly convinced, as the immigrant Muir seems to have been, that its splendor is any more on display in California than elsewhere. But it is here, in this light and through this distinctive cast of beings, that it reveals itself to me.

--

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More Notes on Humans and Animals

I am growing increasingly convinced that people who believe  we have an absolute moral duty to see to the well-being of all other human beings, to install water-purifying equipment in villages on the other side of the world, etc., and who, at the same time, happily contribute to the ongoing mass slaughter of animals, are really just picking and choosing their causes. There simply is no compelling reason why I, or anyone, should suppose that all and only human beings are the worthy targets of moral concern. This is not to say that you should care about animals. It is only to say that there is nothing natural or obvious or conclusive about your belief that you should care about all and only human beings. Your belief is a prejudice, characteristic of a time and place, and not the final say about where the reach of moral community ends.

We have an extremely peculiar ontology, from which we suppose our moral commitments flow. It is unlike anything in human experience prior to the rise of the modern West. In all other places and times, since the appearance of the human species, there has been a presumption of some sort of shared socio-natural community that extends well beyond the boundaries of the species. This sounds like an exaggeration, and it attributes to many groups of people views they have left no explicit record of having supported. But from the explicit record, anyway, there is not a shred of evidence of any culture ever supposing, prior to our own, that moral community is defined by the boundaries of our species.

There is a well known rift in the feminist and anti-racist movements, between those who are willing to consider their plight in relation to the way we treat animals, and those who think that the very suggestion that the two questions could have anything in common is offensive. See this comment thread at the website Feministe, for example, for a cascade of mockery of the very suggestion that there might be a connection between masculine domination of women and human domination of animals.

To refuse to pay attention to the obvious parallels is to remain willfully ignorant. Inequality in human society emerge in direct conjunction with the domestication of animals. You can not understand the one without understanding the other. The very fact that consideration of one's own plight in relation to the plight of an animal can seem degrading to, say, a feminist, only shows how thoroughly successful the human domination of animals has been. But if you are looking to understand things, rather than simply looking after your own, then you have to take the wide-focused view, and consider humanity within the community of beings, to which we have uniformly and without exception believed ourselves to belong for the vastly greater part of the history of our species.

When we try to imagine what belonging to such a socio-natural community is like, what we usually do is to think about how much we care about our pets, or how much we enjoy bird-watching, or zoos, and we suppose that primitive Amazonians, say, must have done a lot of this sort of stuff. Thus we stay all the while in our moral-intellectual comfort zone of modern anthropocentric individualism, projecting back onto people in the distant past a caricatured version of our own token and fleeting attention to beings beyond the bounds of our species. In fact, though, this entirely misses the sort of difference we are attempting to understand; it is as off-target as if we were to suppose that hunter-gatherers, out collecting berries or fish, conceptualized their activity as 'a good line of work'.

It is, principally, the work of anthropologists that enables us to think our way into the world of people who inhabited a socio-natural community with non-human beings, and to do this without simply projecting onto these people our own ontology. Philippe Descola, in his monumental Par-delà nature et culture, has done much to reconstruct the non-anthropocentrist ontologies of societies outside the modern West. 

The Makuna, for example, say that tapirs groom themselves with roucou before dancing, and that peccaries play the horn during their rituals, while the Wari' suppose that peccaries make maize beer and that the jaguar takes its prey back home for his wife to cook. For a long time, this sort of belief was taken as testimony of a sort of thought that is resistant to logic, incapable of distinguish the real from dreams and myths, or as simple figures of speech, metaphors, or word play. But the Makuna, the Wari', and many other Amerindian peoples  who believe this sort of thing are not more myopic or credulous than we are. They know very well that the jaguar devours its prey raw, and that the peccary ruins maize crops rather than cultivating them. It is the jaguar and the peccary themselves, they say, that see themselves as carrying out acts that are identical to those of humans, who imagine themselves in good faith to be sharing with humans the same technologies, the same social existence, the same beliefs and aspirations. In short, Amerindians do not see what we call 'culture' as an appurtenance of human beings, since there are many animals and plants that are held to believe themselves to be in possession of it, and to live according to its norms (187-88).

Similarly, when a hunter sings a song to his prey in order to woo it into 'giving' itself, it is not that he has been unable to make the empirical observation that animals do not ordinarily respond to human natural language in the same way human speakers of that natural language do. Rather, every stage of the hunt, including the tracking and the slinging of darts, and other acts that can be recognized by an outside observer as expressions of practical reason, is embedded within a cosmology of perpetual exchange between all domains of the natural world. Descola asks rhetorically:

When an Achuar hunter finds himself within shooting reach, and he sings an anent to the game, a supplication intended to seduce the animal and to assuage his mistrust with captious promises, does he suddenly lurch from the rational to the irrational, from instrumentalized knowledge to chimera? Does he completely change his register following the long period of approach in which he knew full well how to mobilize his ethological expertise, his deep knowledge of the environment, his experience as a tracker, all those qualities that enabled him to bring together almost by instinct a multitude of indices into a single thread that led him to his prey?

It is not that the hunter suddenly shifts from practical-rational action to the merely 'ceremonial' at the moment he begins singing, but rather the singing flows seamlessly from the same rationality that gives rise to the practices, and that is based on a belief in the constant cycling of immaterial life principles between the human and non-human domains. We can recognize and measure this cycling from the outside within the very limited terms of calories, but from within the cosmology that supposes that this exchange is itself constitutive of both individual human beings as well as of humanity itself, there is no reason why it should not also be manifested in verbal exchange, or communication in the usual sense, across domains.

The constant cyclical exchange rests, generally, on a metaphysics of the individual according to which every natural being, including every human being, is constituted out of the life principles of other natural beings. The predicament of the eater, and also what puts him most in danger of deep transgression through cannibalism, stems, as an Inuit informant put it to Knud Rasmussen, "from the fact that the nourishment of men consists entirely in souls." If this suggests to the student of Western philosophy a metaphysics of nested corporeal substances, she or he may not be entirely off track. Interestingly, Descola, following the precedent of Viveiros de Castro and, before him, Durkheim, sees Leibniz's metaphysics as providing a point of access to this sort of animist ontology. Leibniz, like the Makuna and the Wari', supposes that "est sujet qui se trouve activé ou 'agenté' par un point de vue" (197), and thus that the discontinuity of forms in nature is underlain by a deeper unity, and is explained by a difference of perspectives. Perspectivism, Descola explains, "is thus the expression of the idea that every being occupies a point of view of reference, and thus finds itself situated as a subject" (197). Descola, following Viveiros de Castro, concludes that a Leibnizian perspectivism is "an ethno-epistemological corollary of animism" (202). Every being, on this view, is an expression of exactly the same rational order. But heterogeneity or discontinuity of forms arises at the corporeal level. Different beings have different bodies, and so also different phenomenologies, since their perception of the world takes place through their bodily sense organs. This means also that they must conduct themselves in the world differently, that they will be non-identical with respect to their agentive means, even if at a fundamental level all in the end have the same rational ends. Animals are pursuing fundamentally the same ends as humans, even if the different conformation of their bodies requires them to do this differently. There is no ontological gap between them and us, only circumstantial differences, or, to speak with Leibniz, different poitns of view.

This independent existence as rational agents pursuing rational ends in their own way, becomes difficult to conceptualize with the rise of domestication, when we know what animals are doing in their 'private' lives, because we are in control of their lives. They are standing in the barn, or they are tied to a post; they are not at home with their families, cooking and making beer. Culture continues to be attributed to animals in limited spheres of human imagination, such as children's tales. But it does not define our primary, 'grown-up' understanding of what it is animals are like, of what their natures are.

When, in our society, people attempt to win back for animals a degree of sensitivity, of social attachment, and so on, it is now always conceptualized as a sort of lesser approximation of the richness of human social life. Animal-rights advocates will point to the social bonding of a given species, and anthropocentrists will predictably respond: so what, that is only a distant shadow of what human beings are capable of. Animal-rights advocates, just like the most committed speciesists, remain anthropocentrist to the extent that they are measuring animals' capacities, and implicitly or explicitly their moral relevance, by a human yardstick.

We need anthropology, zooarcheology, and related disciplines in order to adequately understand the problem of human-animal relations, and in order to even begin to make normative claims that can have any kind of purchase on us about how we should be interacting with animals. We need these disciplines much more, in fact, than we need neurophysiological research on animals, scientific research on the very narrowest understanding of science, that tells us the objective truth about what animals are capable of feeling and thinking. In spite of what animal-rights advocates never stop hoping, telling the public about the findings of this research changes nothing: it makes no difference to people with an a priori commitment to the non-membership of animals within our moral community to tell them that animals are capable of feeling pain. They're capable of feeling pain, yes, but they're animals that are capable of feeling pain, is the implicit response. So so what? The boundaries of our moral community were not established in the first place based on a misinterpretation of the empirical data about what the inner lives of animals are like. There is therefore no reason why an improvement in the adequacy of the empirical data should be expected to result in a modification of the boundaries of our moral community. 

The way we think about animals, rather, flows from a fundamental ontology, characteristic of a society that is structured in a certain way. This society, with its associated ontology, has been 10,000 years in the making; it begins with pastoralism, and culminates in our current system of factory farming, in which animals, now conceptualized as pure commodities, exist entirely outside the bounds of moral community. Efforts to bring them back into that community are based on weak and unconvincing appeals to sentiment, dressed up in the language of objective science, on the part of a small minority of people: Look how much this turkey cares for its offspring! Look how this pig can operate a joystick! They're just like us! Except that they're not just like us, since on the reigning ontology a pig operating a joystick is an entirely different matter from a human operating a joystick, and again, nothing that pig does with the joystick is capable of budging this fundamental ontology.

Of course this ontology is not entirely a priori. It has a history. And if there is to be any hope of displacing it, this will be through uncovering and examining this history, and not through treating the question --as all Anglo-American philosophers have until now-- as if it were a simple matter of learning from science what sort of entities animals are.

German Poetry: Selected Translations

A Blessing for Horses (Pariser Handschrift, 12th century)

A man went his way ·
dragging his steed ·
There my lord met him ·
With all of his men ·

How · is it going · man?
Why aren't you riding?
How can I ride when ·
my steed is all stiff?

Just push at his flank, man ·
while whispering to him ·
he'll step with his right foot ·
and get along good ·

A Blessing for a Journey (Weingartner Handschrift, 12th century)

I want to see you · I want to send for you
with my five fingers · my fifty-five angels ·
May God send you home safe ·
May triumph's door be open to you ·
and to you the door of sailing ·
May drowning's door be closed to you ·
and to you the door of fighting ·

*

Heinrich Heine

 From Das Buch der Lieder (1827)

The Return

How can you sleep peacefully,
Knowing, I live still?
When the old anger comes again,
I'll bend this yoke to my will.

Do you know the old song:
How there once was a dead knave,
Who grabbed his beloved at midnight
And pulled her into his grave?

Believe me, you magnificent,
You all-too lovely kid,
I'm still alive, and stronger,
Than any dead man is!

The Homecoming

If you shall be my faithful wife
Then fortune on you shines.
You'll live a gay and carefree life
Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave
I'll abide it all with pleasure.
But if my poems you will not praise
Then let us split forever.

*

Friedrich Hölderlin

The Ages of Life

You, cities of Euphrates!
You, alleys of Palmyra!
You forests of columns in the plain of the desert,
What are you?
The fire stripped you
Of your crowns as you passed
Over the border of the breathing
By the smoke of the heavenly beings;
But now I sit under clouds, in which
Each thing has its quietude, under
Well-ordered oaks on the meadow
Of deer, and strange to me
And dead to me seem
The spirits of the blessed.

A Fragment of a Hymn

What is God? unknown, and yet

Is the face of heaven full
Of signs of him. Lightning in fact
Is the wrath of a god. The more one is
Invisible,       the more one conforms to what one is not. But thunder
Is the glory of God. The love of immortality,
As ours, is likewise the property
Of a god.

*

Rainer-Maria Rilke

Judith's Return (1911)

Sleepers, black is the wetness still upon my feet, imprecise. Dew, you say.
O, that I am Judith, I am come from him, from the tent from the bed, his head trickling, thrice-drunk blood. Wine-drunk, drunk on incense, drunk on me -- and now arid as dew. 
Low-held head above the morning grass; but I, above in my going, I erect.
Brain suddenly empty, images flowing out into the earth; but I am still pricked in the heart by the whole breadth of the night's deed.
Lover that I am.
Horrors drive all the pleasures in me together, all places are on me.
Heart, my famed heart, beat against the wind: 
     as I go, as I go
and faster the voice in me, my voice, which will call a birdcall before the city of need.

From the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

A god could do it. But how, tell me, could
a man follow him through a narrow lyre?
His sense is discord. At the crossing of two
hearts' paths stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,
nor the announcement of something finally attained.
Song is existence. For God it is easy.
But when are we? And when will he turn

the earth and the stars toward our being?
It is not this that you love, young one, even if
voice forces open your mouth, -- learn

to forget that you are singing yourself empty. This shall pass.
In truth singing is just another breath.
A breath for nothing. A sighing in God. A wind.

The Duino Elegies (1912-22)

The First Elegy

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the order
of angels? and supposing one of them took
a sudden interest in me: I should wither from his
more powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing

but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed,
and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains

to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren call
of dark convulsion. O whom then are

we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, 

and the clever beasts note this well, 

that we are not so solidly at home 
in the world as construed. There remains to us,

perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again 
daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and

the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habit
t
hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go. 
O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,
wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired,

gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for

the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?
Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.
Do you still not know it? Throw from your arms
into space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps 
the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a star
expected you to sprint. A wave 
raised itself up in the past, or,
so that you should drop by the open window,
a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.
But did you manage it? Were you not always
scattered in expectation, as a beloved heralded
it all to you? (Where will you hide her,
so that these great strange thoughts of yours 
should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)
If you must sing of lovers, still is their
famed feeling by far not immortal enough. 
You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you 
found so much more loving than those who were appeased.
Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;
think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall 
was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.
But exhausted nature takes the lovers back
into her, as if the strength to carry this off
could not come twice. Have you thought enough
then of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed up
by her beloved, on the aggravated example
of these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?
Should these oldest pains not at last become
more fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovingly
free ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,
as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launching
to be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else only
saints have heard: that they raised the great
call from the ground; but they knelt
again, impossible, and paid it no mind.
Thus did they listen. Not that you would bear
the voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,
the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence. 
It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.
Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly 
address you in the churches of Rome and Naples? 
Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,
as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they want of me? Gently shall I 
shrug off the semblance of injustice that the pure
motion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little. 

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,
not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to give
to roses, and to other things that promise themselves,
the significance of a human future;
not to be what one was in infinitely
anxious hands, and to leave behind
even one's own name like a broken toy.
Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar, 
to see everything fluttering that hung
so loosely in space. And being dead is laborious
and full of catching up, so that one gradually senses
a bit of eternity. -- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead. 
The eternal current always pulls all the ages 
along with it through both domains,
and drowns them out in both. 

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed,
one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meekly
grows away from the mother's breast. But we who need
such large secrets, for whom blissful progress 
so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them? 
The story is in vain, that once in the lament for 
Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in;
that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youth
suddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that 
vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

*

Stefan George

From Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1895)

Speak not always 
Of the leaves · 
Violent breeze · 
Of the smashing 
Of ripe quinces · 
Of the coming 
Of destroyers 
At year's end. 
Of the quiver 
Of the darters 
In bad weather 
And the lights 
With the flicker 
Transient.

From Der siebente Ring (1907)

May you still by night and day
Demand your share · you trace ·
In all my joys to have your place ·
From every yield to take your pay? 

My desire still awakens by your suck
Me, whose ore you scraped out ·
Me, whose wine you slurped out–
In the loss do I still shiver at my luck? 

Am I, now that you are slake,
Mean with what I gave?
Do I force you down in the grave ·
Do I drive through your heart with a stake?

From Der Stern des Bundes (1914)

Is this the lad of ancient lore
Who came from thence with flatterer's eyes
With rosy soft virgin's members
With sumptuous tissues enticing?
His trunk was slim and taut. He grasps ·
He tempts no more · has no jewels.
Shines with grit and lust for battle
His look . . his kiss is short and burning.
His seed now shot from the holy shaft
He pushes into pain and danger.

From Das neue Reich (1928)

The Man and the Faun

The Man

A waterfall blocks the narrow creekbed--
Who now extends a hairy leg
From this cliff's dribblingly fat moss?
A horn peeks from a bushy ruffled head . . 
For as long as I have hunted in the mountain forest
I have never met his likes… Be still
Your path has shifted • conceal nothing
Through a clear wave a goat's foot shows.

The Faun

Neither you nor I will be happy that you found me.

The Man

I knew indeed of your sort of people.
From tales of old -- but not that today
Such a needlessly ugly monster still lives.

The Faun

If you drive off the last of my kind
You will look in vain for noble creatures
You will have nothing but rodents and worms
And when you pierce into the deepest thicket
The spring you need most will be dry.

The Man

So far beneath me you deign to teach? Our spirit
Has brought down hydra giant dragons
Has cleared barren high forest
Where bogs stood fields of corn now heave
In the juicy green our tame cattle graze
And there is still enough forest for hart and doe--
We raised the treasures from sea and ground
Stones called out our victories to the heavens…
What do you want you leftover of cruel wilderness?
The light the order follow our trace.

The Faun

You are only a man .. where your wisdom ends
Ours begins • you see the edge only
Where you have been punished for crossing it
When your grain ripens your cattle flourish
The holy trees give oil and grapes
You imagine this comes only from your cunning
The earths that breath in the dull primordial night
Never perish • they are always disposed
They dissolve when a member escapes.
For a good while your reign goes well •
Now hurry back! you have seen the Faun.
You do not know your worst: if your sense
Which can do much is caught in the clouds
The bond has been broken with beast and clod--
Disgust and desire movement and such 
And dust and sunbeam and dying and growing
Can be comprehended in the course of things no more.

The Man

Who told you so? This is the concern of the gods.

The Faun

We speak not of them yet in your madness
You believe that they themselves help you. Unmediated
Have they never approached you. You become you die--
Whose true creature you are you never learn. 

The Man

Soon there will be no room left for your licentious game.

The Faun

Soon you will call inside what outside you malign.

The Man

You poisonous fiend with crooked mouth
In spite of your misshapenness you are too close
To us • otherwise you would get to know my weapon ..

The Faun

The beast knows no shame the man no thanks.
With all the arts you still never learn 
What you most need .. but we still serve.
So hear just this: wiping us out, you erase yourselves.
Where our tufts grow alone comes milk
Where our hooves kick not there grows no straw.
If your spirit alone had been at work: if long ago
Your beat had been muffled with all you had done
Your wood had withered and your crops gone to seed ..
Only by magic does life stay awake.

The News in Review

Sometime around 1978, it must have been, I went to the Mar-Val Food Store in Rio Linda, California, with my mother and my sister. I insisted on buying for my sister, who is 18 months older than I am, a package of Hostess Ding-Dongs. I believe it cost 19 cents. This is one of the only nice things I can recall doing in my childhood for which I cannot also recall an ulterior motive. To this day it is what comes to mind when I think about generosity. The demise of Hostess signals to me, among other things, that the world is becoming a more Hobbesian place.

I have been wanting to say something about General Petraeus, but what can I say that no one else has said? Well, surprisingly no one has pointed out how utterly peculiar it was in the first place to have a military ruler whose name could have jumped right out of the pages of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. How could a general, in the 21st century, have a name with a Latin suffix on it? His family history doesn't explain the matter, but only makes it more peculiar: General Petraeus was the son of Sixtus Petraeus. Davidus Petraeus, dux militaris, filius Sixti Petraei est. You can't make this stuff up. But otherwise what is there to say? It's hard for me to talk about this sort of thing. Yes, I believe Petraeus was right to resign, but this follows from a much more general belief that all generals should resign, immediately. I'm a pacifist, what do you want from me? Still, he should not have had to resign for the thing for which he resigned. My judgment of that thing, rather than the war-making thing, is somewhere between neutral and slightly admiring.

I don't think we should ridicule the Romney supporters who are now talking about secession. There are many laudable secessionist movements. One of the most compelling of them, within the current bounds of the United States, is the campaign for Hawaiian independence. Hawaii was a kingdom until the late 19th century, and when the US seized the islands, in the name of Dole Pineapple, the rising colonial power was flagrantly violating a pact it had made with Great Britain not so long before to not turn the Pacific into a frenzy of island-grabbing. It's already a stretch to see the great West as legitimately American, but Polynesian islands that share a broad civilization with the New Zealand Maoris and (rather more distantly) with the Malagasies off the east coast of Africa: that cannot be a legitimate part of the United States. I suspect that part of the fuel for the 'birther' movement, beyond simple racism and invention, is provided by the not unreasonable perception that Hawaii is just too far off our map to count, and that in a sense Barack Obama, without having to be made to have been born in Kenya or Indonesia or Pakistan, still was not really born in America.

It's easier to see how you could get 'Yangon' from 'Rangoon' than how 'Burma' and 'Myanmar' both flow from the same source. Now we're being told of Obama's anamnetic familiarity with the place on the eve of his first visit there: his Kenyan grandfather had been a chef in Burma for the British army. This guy's been everywhere, and even before he was born!, the cosmopolitan Americans cheer, and the xenophobic ones grouse.

Bal Thackeray is dead. He was a Hindu nationalist, a sponsor of anti-Muslim pogroms, and an admirer of Hitler. I'm told by many German friends that when they go to India they are often congratulated by rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers for being from the same place (roughly) as that 'very great man'. Thackeray probably played some part in making such awkward encounters possible. Good riddance.

Have I mentioned I'm in Mexico as I write these words? I've arrived just ahead of Día de la Revolución, this coming Monday, November 20. But this celebrates an event that happened in 1910, so it's hardly news, strictly speaking. No doubt there will be fireworks, however.

Meanwhile I'm trying to recall where Tolstoy denounces the reading of newspapers as a shameful waste of time, whose sole purpose is to be able afterwards to demonstrate to one's peers how up on things, how very modern, one is.

--

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Must Philosophers Be Parents?

Before I proceed to estrange my reproductively proficient allies, let me begin by saying that I love kids; those who know me know that when I am around them, they delight in my comical ways, and after I'm gone they beg their parents to invite me over again. I have godfatherly and quasi-avuncular relations with numerous little ones, and real avuncular relations with one who is no longer so little. I think they're all great. In fact, I'm on record as saying that childhood is, so to speak, where it's at, and that adults are but the phantoms of former children. I love kids, and I love childhood. This is not an anti-kid screed.

It is, however, anti-natalist, and therefore goes against a prevailing conviction among my peers that the life that fails to cycle back upon itself in kind if not in number, as Aristotle put it, is the life not worth living. 

I hope no one will take this the wrong way, but I am concerned about the way in which the public display of one's parenthood is increasingly a part of the expected career path of the professional philosopher. I often hear of all the great new insights colleagues have had since becoming parents, how this has advanced their thinking about language acquistion and a priori knowledge, about the ethics of care, or the metaphysics of personhood. Sometimes the insights are theoretical in nature, while sometimes the importance of parenthood is celebrated on the grounds that it advances a philosopher in his or her practical project of philosophy as a way of life.

I have been explicitly told three times over the past year, by young philosopher parents, that there are philosophical insights that one simply cannot have without living through the fundamental experience of parenthood. That such an expression of pronatalist normativity exactly mirrors the sort of bias philosophers are by now so well trained not to express, about other quodlibetal forms the intimate life can take, is something that is surely in need of explanation. I suspect it has something to do with the recent, massive success of the campaign, which I support, to deheterosexualize the idea of parenthood. Once this goal was largely reached, at least within pockets of our society, the academics who found it desirable felt comfortable reverting to an evidently innate sort of conservatism. The family unit has been shaken up a bit, and the role of fathers reconceived, but in the end the nearly compulsory philosopher-dad-with-kid pictures that now clutter the faculty profile pages of departmental websites are every bit as conventionally pro-family as the 'at home' pictures on the now-defunct Romney-for-President website. They send the message that to be a philosopher is largely, even principally, to be invested in the bringing up of the next generation, to be doing it all 'for the children'. 

Every one of these pictures shows a figure that Nietzsche, for one, would have described as 'comic'. Thus he tells us what he things about the domestic life in The Genealogy of Morality:

Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer-- they were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule.

Now Nietzsche was of course a raving and sorry case, who precisely failed to implement philosophy as a practice of the good life. But his historical point is unassailable, and the truth of it helps us to bring into relief the exceptional situation of current academic philosophy. The life of the philosopher was traditionally something akin to life in a monastic order; it placed an extremely high demand on its initiates, and forced them to choose between different and competing fundamental goods.

This is particularly clear in the Indian tradition, where the choice was explicit between being a 'householder' and being a 'world-renouncer', as the two ways of expressing Hindu devotion. It was also explicit that the former figure would necessarily be prevented from advancing as far as the latter in matters of illumination. Philosophy was an askesis, and as such was incompatible with the domestic life. Of course these days the fashion is to reconceptualize domesticity so as to fit whatever image we prefer to maintain of ourselves, so that, for example, when a new mother has to cut back on her yoga sessions, she can announce that she is now engaged in 'the yoga of being a mom'. I have read Patañjali's Yoga Sutras, and I have not found anything about that.

Nor have I found any convincing evidence that the figure of the philosopher can be transplanted from the cloister to the household without serious deformation, let alone any evidence that --again, as I've been told three times over the past year-- one cannot fully realize one's potential as a philosopher unless one is a parent.

Implicit in this presumption is the idea that adults learn things from the children in their lives, that the children give the adults a way of imagining themselves into forms of perception and awareness that are largely off limits to us tired old phantoms. Yet remarkably some of the best writing on childhood by philosophers comes from before the era in which parenthood was part of a philosopher's public identity, and was written by philosophers reflecting on their own childhoods. In many cases, these writers were themselves childless, but nonetheless were able to find within themselves resources of imagination and Einfühlung that completely belie the conceit that there are states of awareness that the childless cannot know. I am thinking for example of Richard Wollheim, who had children, but who never would have thought to write about them in his memoir, instead preferring to focus on his own first years. In his memoir, Germs, he describes his own monumental achievement in learning to use toilet paper, and confesses: "It is what I think of when I hear moral philosophers discuss responsibility."

I think of E. M. Cioran, and Andrea Dworkin. I even think of Derrida, whom I ordinarily can't stand, but who captured the experience of childhood eloquently and touchingly in his 1991 essay, 'Circumfession'. These philosophers wrote profoundly on childhood, without having to trumpet their own parenthood. Childhood, they understood, is a source of answers to fundamental questions about what it is to be human, but one can ask these questions perfectly well without having to lapse into a conventional pronatalism that, notwithstanding the efforts to ornament it with the seriousness of a philosophical project, is in the end only an afterecho of the very most conventional values that we, as critics of our society and our age, spend most of the rest of our time kicking against.  

A Tasty Treat for the Slime-Mold: More Inane Reporting on Animal Cognition

It's been a busy few weeks for announcements about how smart non-human life-forms are. First there was the talking beluga in California, then there was the elephant in Korea who could articulate a few words, then, finally, the report on a lowly slime mold's ability to make sophisticated decisions. All three of these reports repeated many of the conventional tropes for talking about animal intelligence; all trumpeted as wholly new and unheard-of the sort of data that have long been a staple of science reporting; and all are sure to leave everything exactly the same: with anti-anthropocentrists shouting see! See!, and with those who believe that human beings are something special in the cosmic scheme insisting that anything they are shown can be explained in terms of mimicry, stimulus, and other automatisms.

The irrelevance of empirical data for deciding the matter, in fact, long precedes the very existence of science journalism: it defines a clear rift already in 17th-century philosophy, while the 'new' discoveries themselves are for the most part only variations of what was already well documented in Aristotle's Historia animalium. And yet, the journalists always report as if until yesterday we were all fully committed to a hardcore version of the bête-machine doctrine. At the same time, however, they ensure that the topic will remain perpetually new by reinforcing, willy-nilly, the very doctrine their news item is supposed to be calling into question.

What do I mean by this? Consider the report from the New York Daily News, in which Koshik the Korean elephant is described as 'parroting' human speech. Parrot speech, again, at least since Aristotle, has been easily bracketed as non-speech in view of its presumed automatic or (to project back our own technological analogies) recorder-like character. The great authority on elephant cognition, Christine Roberts (whose day job is as a reporter for the News), tells us that although Koshik is vocalizing by putting his trunk in his mouth, nonetheless "he is only mimicking the noises, not speaking them." Mimicry, or 'aping', as it's sometimes called, is so far from serving as a corroboration of the reality of animal cognition to those who have an a priori commitment to not believing in it, that in fact it has generally only served historically to reinforce the conviction that nature is a very impressive, and deceitful, producer of simulations. This is why humans hate apes (or generally have hated apes): because they look like they can do many of the things we explain in humans through the possession of a soul, and yet we know that only humans have souls. The language has been updated, but this remains the take-away point of the reporting on Koshik the elephant.

Though it concerns a variety of protists, and not animals, reporting on the slime-mold follows much the same pattern. None of what is described will strike the skeptic as in any way indicative of anything like cognition. The 'ability' to trace the shortest line between any two points, for example, thus 'simulating' the work of a city planner designing an underground rail system, is easily and obviously explicable in terms of the mundane principles of optimality that govern the behavior of catenaries and other systems in the physical world. But what is particularly interesting here is the condescension in the language used to describe what a slime-mold does. What I describe as 'condescension' will of course be explained by others as an attempt to make the news fun, or kid-friendly, or something, but the fact remains that no one would think to describe the behavior of either a human being taking an IQ test or the behavior of gas molecules in a vacuum as if they were describing a diminutive cartoon character. In a PBS video about the slime-mold, we've already been told that this species has no brain, or nervous system, and presumably therefore no taste-buds; and yet we are expected to play along when the protein-carbohydrate blend it gets for performing its little trick is described as 'tasty'.

 

It is by such cute little words ('yummy' is the one that is usually invoked in science journalism to describe the rewards given to test subjects) that we are meant to understand that whatever amazing behavior an animal has just exhibited, in the end it only did it for the treat. This sort of system of rewarding, we are meant to recall at least subconsciously, is, since Pavlov, the touchstone of the classical-conditioning theory of animal motivations, and also by extension of behaviorism, both of which rest on the presumption that there is no real cognition of interest going on in the animal's mind. The fact that we can only introduce the possibility of intelligence in a brainless slime-mold by simultaneously taking it away with reassuring cutesiness about the yummy treats the scientists are giving it shows, I think, how anxious we really are about seriously considering the possibility that non-human creatures have rich, not cute, internal lives. 

I make no secret about being a pananimist. I am fairly convinced that it is minds, or mind-like principles, that govern the activity of all natural beings, and that there is nothing fundamentally different in my intelligent behavior from what we observe in a slime-mold. I am happy whenever new attention to the rationality of creatures such as slime-molds is paid, but (i) I think that it is something we knew about all along, but which we have preferred of late to ignore; and (ii) I am very wary of the conventions we have for talking about it, as I believe they carry with them a built-in mechanism for self-deflation.

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In Pittsburgh

An academic career has a peculiar arc to it. When one is young, and first begins travelling around to various cities for conferences, it is as if one is Axl Rose or something, on tour, in hotels, where ordinary morality does not apply. One feels larger than life, and worthy of a biography or two.

After some years of repetition, though, one comes to feel rather more like Willy Loman, on the road, hawking some cheap unnecessary wares. One notices that it was only a Days Inn all along, and not the Ritz-Carlton, and by now the greatest transgression one can muster is to leave the towels on the floor after the first day, signaling that they are ready to be washed yet again, and that one has more important things to think about than the environment.

And the cities start to repeat themselves: Cincinnati, Bloomington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. I never understood what Nietzsche meant by 'eternal return', but when I find myself waiting in exactly the same Super Shuttle queue I must have been in a year ago, and two years ago, and three years ago, standing behind the same overweight, be-Dockered dolt with a Bluetooth stuck in his damn ear, chattering away about the Steelers, or about how it's time to sell, or about how he's ready to take it to the next level with the company he's partnering with in Grand Rapids, I could swear I am stuck in something very much like the metaphysical loop our German soothsayer envisioned. 

And yet... There is something about coming to a new city, even an old new city, that makes me feel like saying: if only I lived here, I would not grow old; I would not be prone to fatal illness; the memories I hold dear, the memories that constitute me and give me my orientation in the world, would not constantly slip further into the irrelevant past. This is where I need to be, not that other place I just happened to end up. Pittsburgh. Not Montreal, not Paris, but Pittsburgh. I love its hills; its solid, steely monuments, the ruins of the golden age of Carnegian optimism; its Native American toponyms, especially 'Allegheny' and 'Monongahela', which themselves seem to be the very causes of the topographical features they pick out; I love that I can see my breath here, this November 1st, when I walk around and breathe. Why didn't I figure this out before? Why didn't I remember this from last time? And why can I already tell, in advance, just a few hours after arriving here, that in another week or so I will be having the same thoughts, mutatis mutandis, in San Diego? 

I suppose I'm at least glad I'm not a traveling salesman. As Arthur Miller understood, such a life warps all too imperceptibly into death. But the world of moving sidewalks, duty free, Super Shuttle, and complimentary toiletries is a world built for traveling salesmen, and it is hard, once the youthful delusion of a larger-than-life life has faded, not to feel oneself sucked into their orbit when one is obliged to travel on their circuit: sucked into their orbit and, one might say, into the same cosmic fate. 

But again, beyond the Lomanesque circuit of check-in desks and conference nametags, there are the cities themselves, the cities that always seem shining and eternal to me: the cities where everyone already was, before me, and without me, just living their lives, as I could have been. In Pittsburgh, for example. 

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. 

Found Poetry

So the other day I passed by Montreal's best bookstore, Le Port de Tête, and picked up a used copy of Tristan Tzara's 1931 epic poem, L'homme approximatif. When I got it home, I noticed there was a slip of paper inserted between pages 52 and 53, and on it there was an anonymous poem, typed out and printed in that mimeographic purple ink I recall from childhood:

Whom do I know?

Scattered nobodies.

Whom do I love?

Your mother.

What don't I have?

A brother.

And where did he go?

We don't know.

What follows the night?

Light.

And how should I write? 

(Slight):

As smooth as the silk of the worms of Cathay,

and as rhythmic as Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

I Googled various lines of the poem, and nothing came up. It's evidently just some amateur trifle, yet something about it sticks with me, even more than anything I've found so far in Tzara's own poem. What was it doing there, between those pages? Why was it mimeographed decades ago? Who is the questioner? Who the respondent? Wby should one write in the recommended way? I would be delighted if, miraculously, the person with the answers were to step forward.  

Snake-Charmers

A fantastic documentary-- slow, patient, non-judgmental:

 

It's hard to watch this and fail to recognize the obvious parallels to varieties of communal exuberance that educated, secular, urbanites are much more likely to judge positively. I myself have used the term 'snake-charmer' pejoratively, to refer to anti-Enlightenment elements in society, and particularly in American society. But this is fairly inconsistent on my part, since I also acknowledge that one of the unfortunate legacies of the Enlightenment has been to put many varieties of religious experience off-limits. These backward hillbillies appear to be having depths of experience that people like me can only know by watching documentaries.

Spatial Perception in Second Life

I recently opened an account in the massively multiplayer virtual-reality game Second Life, in order to test out some thoughts about what digital avatars might reveal concerning the metaphysics of personal identity.

I am roundly mocked by everyone I meet there as a 'newbie', and am criticized for my laziness in procuring new clothes, hair, skin, sexual organs. But I don't want to procure these things; I think my standard-model avatar looks just fine. My experience is not at all what I had expected it to be, and I'm finding the philosophical reflections it is stimulating lie rather far from questions of personal identity, in the realm of perception.

One thing that struck me right away was the intense familiarity of the sensation of flying in Second Life. I knew it from dreams, and as in dreams it feels in 2l both perfectly natural and somehow sinful. At first I tried to keep my flying time to a minimum, since one is fairly lonely up in the air and the original idea had been to meet people through my avatar in order to learn whether he (alright, to be honest, she) could in fact be said to be me. (The picture shows me flying outside the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.)

So I walked around a lot, down corridors, up and down staircases, through alleys and fields. And just as dream-flying had supported my 2l-flying with an immediate background of familiarity, a sort of a priori, so too within just a few hours of exploring in the virtual world I started to experience my navigations through similar environments of the real world against the background of familiarity that 2l had begun to provide. That is, walking down a corridor in 'rl', I would sometimes find myself in a momentary state of confusion as to what level of reality I was currently dealing with.

This didn't happen everywhere. Mostly it happened when I was doing in rl what might be called 'exploring': looking for the right number on a hotel-room door in a new city, trying to take a shortcut through an unfamiliar alley, etc. I had a very uncanny sense on some of these occasions that it was only the sort of perceptual experience I'd had in 2l that was enabling me to make sense of the experience I was having in rl at all. As if 2l were itself the a priori framework of spatial perception!

That's absurd of course; I had got by just fine for decades in the absence of virtual reality. I didn't need a simulation of space to teach me what space is and how to move through it. And yet that feeling was there, and, I confess, it was confirming the suspicion I've long had that some version of idealism in fact provides the correct account of reality. 2l didn't teach me about spatial perception, but it did harmonize with a capacity that was already there. This is a harmony that, when one is experiencing it, one senses could have been exercised just fine without an actual spatial world out there for it to operate in.

And at moments I thought: holy shit, we've conjured into existence this whole new reality that does just fine without real reality. What amazing creatures we are. But then I thought, in turn: what would happen if I were to show this new reality to my cat? She, were she to exist, would be entirely unimpressed. She would not even recognize it as a reality, but at most as a luminous object, a computer screen, within her singular reality.

Now we can write this off to her lack of intelligence, but then we might instead imagine another sort of being, one we all recognize to be intelligent but with a vastly different sensory apparatus at its disposal, a being that is unable to recognize, for example, pixel-based two dimensional representations of objects in space as representations. We might try to show this being what a philosophical thrill-ride 2l is, and it might say to us: "I can see that you are having a thrilling time, yet I can't help but notice that your actual experience here does not differ in kind from the experience you have when daydreaming, or listening to a story. These are varieties of what was once called ambulatio animae that need no technological support, but that, like 2l, permit a person to go wandering about in a strictly speaking non-existent space. Sitting at a campfire in the middle of the Paleolithic listening to a story about a descent into the nether-world would have done substantially the same thing, and while 2l provides a sort of hard-hitting illustration of the insufficiency of rl for accounting for experience, storytelling and daydreaming were already, all along, fairly compelling illustrations of the plausibility of idealism (or at least of a sort of phenomenalism that takes the ulitmate elements of reality to be perceivers; call it what you will)." 

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Sokurov's Faust

I've appreciated Aleksandr Sokurov since the 1990s, but it was, I think, with his 2003 Father and Son that he first began to seem genuinely puzzling to me. This film, not at all Turgenevian, portrayed two men apparently of the same age, posing in various intimate positions with one another, always in the middle of meticulously composed and painterly scenes (Caspar David Friedrich is cited most often in connection with Sokurov). At the time the Russian director railed against the dirty-mindedness of the decadent Western reporters who dared to suggest that there was anything going on in this film other than what the title implies (more recently he has actively supported an LGBT film festival in Moscow, which makes me wonder whether he has not, perhaps, at least re-thought the spirit of the questions set to him some years earlier). So from at least that point Sokurov had a reputation for being difficult, for making films that do not exactly seem to be about what they are supposed to be about.

Next he impressed me with The Sun, one in a tetralogy of films attempting an extremely personal and apolitical portrait of a world leader, in this case of Emperor Hirohito in the final days of World War II, childishly attempting to go about his marine-biological experiments as usual. The final installment in the tetralogy (the two others were devoted to Lenin and Hitler respectively) is a sort of version of Goethe's Faust. It took me a while to figure out what this character was doing alongside some of the 20th-century's most notorious despots and spillers of blood, until it dawned on me that the 'world leader' in question here is not Faust, but Satan. Anton Adasinskii, the distinguished founder of the Moscow theater company DEREVO, offers the most convincing dramatic depiction of the devil I think I've ever seen, and thoroughly upstages the titular hero. The devil is a money-lender; he drinks poison, takes a shit in a church, and when he removes his clothes to bathe with some maidens (who are inexplicably not horrified), the naked body he reveals is indescribably grotesque.

 

The story is really 'frei nach Goethe', as is promised in the opening credits, since it is not for knowledge that Faust sells his soul, but for a bit of money, some food to eat, and love of a girl. A love interest would of course be a disappointing convention in almost any other film, but with Sokurov it does not make the material less challenging. The girl's naked, living body, in some of the final scenes of the film (just prior to the final shots at the Icelandic geyser, a spot Goethe himself knew to be charged with black-magical lore), up close, in shots that puritan raters would call 'graphic', finally muffle the memory of the opening shot of the film: the penis of a cadaver undergoing autopsy at the hands of Goethe and his imbecile assistant Wagner, who wonders where in all the blood and guts the soul could be hiding. This cadaver; the devil's naked body; the homunculus Wagner has made out of a hyena liver and some essential oils, and keeps in a glass vial until he accidentally smashes it on a rock; and, finally, the brief flashes of actual erotic nakedness we get with Margarete (notwithstanding the ghouls that are peeking in through the open windows even then): these are the four moments that to my mind frame this aggressively corporeal film.

The film is free with Goethe, but it understands and conveys something Goethe understood, and that has been largely lost since then: that on a certain understanding medicine, astronomy, theology, in a word, what the Germans once understood by Wissenschaft, are all part of the same project, and that to undertake this project is to hover on the brink of evil. It's surely good that we don't think about science like this anymore, but it is also surely good that there are artists capable of recapturing the lost spirit in which chemical treatises and grimoires were shelved not too far from one another, and in which it was somewhat easier to put words to the sense (which I for one have not entirely lost) that a life of inquiry is a life of profound, if not damning, moral compromise.