Justin Erik Halldór Smith

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.

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.