Living Earth Community - 9. Confucian Cosmology and Ecological Ethics
9. Confucian Cosmology and Ecological Ethics: Qi, Li, and the Role of the Human
Mary Evelyn Tucker
© Mary Evelyn Tucker, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.09
In our search for more comprehensive and global ethics to meet the critical challenges of our contemporary situation, the world’s religions are emerging as major reservoirs of depth and insight, particularly with regard to the pressing environmental crises of our times.1 While the scale and scope of the crises are being debated, few people would deny the seriousness of what we are facing as a planetary community immersed in unsustainable practices of production, consumption, and development. Clearly the world’s religions have some important correctives to offer in this respect.
There is a growing realization that attitudinal changes toward nature will be essential for creating sustainable societies, in addition to new scientific, technological, and economic approaches to our environmental problems. Humans will not preserve what they do not respect. What is currently lacking is a moral basis for changing our exploitative attitudes toward nature. We have laws against homicide, but not against ecocide or biocide. Thus, we are without a sufficiently broad environmental ethics to alter our consciousness about the Earth and our life on it. Consequently, what should concern us is this: to what extent can the religious traditions of the world provide us with ethical resources and cosmological perspectives that can help us redefine mutually-enhancing human-Earth relations?
The dynamic and holistic perspective of the Confucian worldview may offer significant contributions in this regard, enlarging our sense of the ethical terrain and moral concerns, and providing a rich source for rethinking our own relationship with nature. Confucianism’s organic holisms can give us a special appreciation for the interconnectedness of all life forms and renew our sense of the sacredness of this intricate web of life. Moreover, the Confucian understanding of the dynamic vitalism underlying cosmic processes offers us a basis for reverencing nature. From a Confucian perspective, nature cannot be thought of as simply composed of inert, dead matter. Rather, all life forms share the element of qi or material force. This shared psycho-physical entity becomes the basis for establishing a reciprocity between the human and nonhuman worlds.
In this same vein, in terms of self-cultivation and the nurturing of virtue, the Confucian tradition provides a broad framework for harmonizing human life with the natural world. An example of this is the Confucian view of the human as a child born out of the Universe and the Earth, and thus owing filial respect and reciprocity to the Earth community. Another example is the Confucian understanding of virtues as having both a cosmological and a personal component, so that love is a generative force expressed by humans, but is also seen as comparable to the original generative forces in the universe. Thus, nature and virtue, cosmology and ethics, knowledge and action are intimately linked for the Confucians in China, Korea, and Japan. This chapter will concentrate on three major themes and their implications for ecological ethics: qi, li, and the role of the human.
We are aware that, like all spiritual traditions, there is always a gap between aspiration and realization of these practices. Despite the narrow, ideological views of Confucianism, China is not a model of an ecologically realized society, historically or at present. However, aspects of this worldview are worth retrieving in order that we may break out of the constraining perspective of a modern reductionistic worldview.
Qi
The Chinese have a term to describe the vibrancy and aliveness of the universe. This is qi or ch’i, which is translated in a variety of ways in the classical Confucian tradition as spirit, air, or breath, and later in the Neo-Confucian tradition as material force, matter energy, vital force. It describes the realization that the universe is alive with vitality and resonates with life. What is especially remarkable about this ancient and enduring realization of the Chinese people is that qi is a unified field embracing both matter and energy. It is thus a matrix containing both material and spiritual life from the smallest particle to the largest visible reality. Qi moves through the universe from the constituent particles of matter to mountains and rocks, plants and trees, animals, and birds, fish and insects. All the elements — air, earth, fire, and water — are composed of qi. We humans, too, are alive with qi. It makes up our body and spirit as one integrated whole, and it activates our mind-and-heart, which is a single unified reality in Chinese thought.
In other words, qi courses though nature, fills the elements of reality, and dynamizes our human body-mind. It is the single unifying force of all that is. It does not posit a dichotomy between nature and spirit, body and mind, matter and energy. Qi is one united, dynamic whole — the vital reality of the entire universe.
The implications of this unified view of reality become apparent to us rather quickly. One wants to know and experience this qi more fully. This is why most of the martial arts and exercises like taiqi aim to cultivate and deepen qi. Humans, for all their obliviousness, are intelligent enough to want to taste and savor this marvelous aliveness of the universe. They want to harmonize their most basic physical processes with qi — thus the dynamic coordination of breath and movement is at the heart of the Chinese physical arts. And arts they are indeed — this is not just a physical toning of the body or building up of muscles. This is a spiritual exercise filled with potency for health of mind and body — a coordinated and aesthetically pleasing dance of the human system in and through the sea of qi.
One way to visualize qi is as a vast ocean of energy, an infinite source of vibrant potency, a resonating field of dynamic power that is in matter itself, not separate from it. For qi is matter-energy, material force. This is the important contribution of Chinese thought to world philosophy. It is an insight and realization of particular significance for our contemporary world, which has been broken apart by our Enlightenment separation of matter and spirit, of body and soul, of nature and life.2
From the perspective of qi the world is alive with a depth of mystery, complexity, and vibrancy that we can only begin to taste and never fully exhaust. The sensual world is the spiritual world from the perspective of qi. The dynamism of each particular reality begins to present itself to us — the oak tree in the forest radiates an untold energy, the snow-covered mountains in the distance are redolent with silent qi, the rivers coursing to the ocean are filled with the buoyancy of qi.
One of the earliest Confucian writers, Mencius, speaks of the great flood-like qi. This is what I am evoking here. We are flooded, surrounded, inundated by qi. We walk around completely unconscious most of the time that this ocean of energy is here — sustaining us, nourishing us, and enlivening us. Qi is the gift of the universe — the endlessly fecund life source unfolding before us and around us in a daily miracle of hidden joy. It is the restorative laughter of the universe inviting us into its endless mystery.
As we return to the Chinese sources to sift through the texts and commentaries, what becomes apparent is that the notion of qi is not constant, but evolving. Nor is it unified and consistent. It is rather a multivalent idea that begins to reveal something of its shape and function only when seen from a variety of perspectives and texts.
In the classical Confucian tradition, qi tends to refer more generally to the spirit which animates the universe, the breath which enlivens humans, and the air that connects all things. Even from its earliest articulation, however, qi was never seen as an entity apart from matter. Rather, it is embedded in the natural and the human world. It animates and nourishes nature and humans. Indeed, the very Chinese character itself is said to represent the steam rising from rice, suggesting the nourishing and transforming power of qi. Like food, qi maintains life and human energy. Benjamin Schwartz observes, ‘The image of food even suggests the interchange of energy and substance between humans and their surrounding environment’.3 The idea of qi as having the properties of condensation and rarefaction like steam suggests the same.
As the later Han and Neo-Confucians began to articulate their cosmological understandings, the unity of qi as matter-energy became more evident. Dong Zhongshu (170–104 BCE), the leading Han Confucian, described qi as a ‘limpid colorless substance’ which fills the universe, ‘surrounds man as water surrounds a fish’, and unites all creation.4 The Neo-Confucians, however, developed the notion of qi to refer to the substance and essence of all life. It pervades and animates the universe as both matter and energy.
For the Neo-Confucian, Zhang Zai (1020–77 CE), the vibrancy of material force originates in the Great Vacuity (taixu) which contains the primal, undifferentiated material force. As it integrates and disintegrates it participates in the Great Harmony (taihe) of activity and tranquillity. This perspective affirms the unified and real processes of change, not seeing them as illusory, as the Buddhists might, nor as a product of a dichotomy between non-being and being, as the Daoists would. There is, instead, a dynamic unity of qi as seen in its operations as both substance (emerging in the Great Vacuity), and function (operating in the Great Harmony).
Li
Li is the inner ordering principle of reality that is embedded in the heart of qi. The Chinese character for li suggests working on the geological veins found in the mineral jade, which must first be discovered, and then carved adeptly. Li is comparable to the principle of logos, whereby all of reality is imprinted with structure and intelligibility. It is both pattern and potential pattern, and thus gives reality its intricacy of design as well as its thrust toward directionality and purpose. It is a revealing and concealing sensibility for human consciousness. We seek to find its imprint in the flow of the natural world around us, as well as in the unfolding of our lives. As Thomas Berry often said, we have lost the ability to perceive this vast intelligibility of the universe and thus have become ungrounded and rudderless, locked in our own self-referential mindsets.
It is, however, the universe which is calling to be read and to be heard in the deep patterning of its particularities. The beauty of li is that it brings us into contact with the myriad forms of life, the ‘ten thousand things’ (wanwu) as the Chinese say, with a penetrating clarity. This is because li is both normative principle and intelligible pattern. As pattern, it gives us entry into understanding nature and its complex workings. As principle, it gives us a grounding for a morality that arises from the very structure of life itself. The moral dimensions of the universe are found in the depths of matter revealing itself to us as li.
Li is principle and pattern — both a moral and a natural entity bringing together our profound embeddedness in a universe of meaning and mystery. The allure of the universe lies in seeing and experiencing that meaning and mystery before us, behind us, and all around us. We are drawn forth into a sense of the breadth and depth of li as manifest in the phenomenal world in great diversity and particularity. All of this breadth and depth of inner ordering is gathered up in the Great Ultimate (taiji) — that which contains and shapes and generates all principles and patterns in the universe.
As one of the principal Neo-Confucian thinkers, Zhu Xi (1130–1200) says, ‘The Supreme Ultimate is merely the principle of Heaven-and-Earth, and the myriad things’.5 According to another leading Neo-Confucian, Cheng Yi (1033–1107), ‘Principle is one (in the Great Ultimate); its manifestations are many (in the world)’.6 To illustrate this, both use an analogy involving the moon shining in the water in the irrigated rice fields on a terraced mountain side. There are many moons which are reflected, but only one full moon in the sky. Taiji is like this full moon. It is translated as the Great Ultimate or the Supreme Ultimate, while the term itself refers to a pole star — guiding, illuminating, and alluring. For Cheng Yi, and his brother Cheng Hao (1032–85), li was like a genetic coding, and was thus identified with the creative life principle (shengsheng).7
The creative dynamics of this great container of principles are cosmological, namely there is an interaction of non-being and being or the unmanifest and the manifest. This is seen in the interaction of the wuji (Non-ultimate) and the taiji (Great Ultimate). Some of the most interesting arguments and discussions in Chinese thought have arisen among thinkers who are commenting on this complex interaction.
Some would say that the Daoists want to maintain a dichotomy between non-being and being, emphasizing the dynamic creativity of non-being as the source of all life. Others would say the Buddhists want to maintain the ultimate emptiness of non-being and the illusory quality of being. The Neo-Confucians struggled to assert the importance of the dynamic continuity between these two forces (non-being and being). Indeed, they would maintain that the very creativity of the universe is revealed in this dialectical interaction. The complementarity of these creative forces is at the heart of all cosmological processes for the Confucians. The vast changes and transformations of nature in the endless flow of qi become clear in this interaction. That is because all reality, namely all qi, is imprinted with li. Discovering this patterning in the fluid material force of the universe is the challenge for humans.
As li is unveiled, humans can discern the appropriate patterning for both their individual and their collective lives. The universe unfolds according to these patterns of deep structure embedded in reality. Social systems are established according to these patterns, agriculture is conducted in harmony with these patterns, politics functions in relation to these patterns, and individuals cultivate themselves in response to these patterns.
The Role of the Human
In the Neo-Confucian understanding, humans receive li from heaven. Their heavenly endowed nature is thus linked to the patterning throughout the universe. By the same token, humans are composed of qi, the same dynamic substance that makes up the universe.
Humans are thus imprinted with unique and differentiated li embedded in qi, the material force of their own body-mind. Li guarantees the special and different qualities of each human being, while qi establishes the material and spiritual grounds for subjectivity, thus uniting humans with one another and with the vast world of nature. In other words, qi as vital force is the interiority of matter, providing the matrix for communion and exchange of energy between all life forms.
Humans, then, are given a heavenly endowed nature which joins them to the great triad of Cosmos, Earth, and other humans. While this heavenly endowed nature is a gift of the universe from birth, it is understood as something to be realized over a lifetime. This realization of one’s full nature occurs through the process of self-cultivation, which is at the heart of Confucian moral and spiritual practice. This process of actualization is not abstract or otherworldly, but rather concerned with the process of becoming more fully human. In doing so, one penetrates principle and perceives pattern amidst the flux of material force in ourselves and in the universe at large. The goal of our cultivation is to actualize and recognize the profound identity of ourselves with heaven, Earth, and the myriad forms of life.
Because the qi that we are each given may vary in its purity or turbidity, cultivation is needed. Evil, imperfection, loss, and suffering are thus part of the human condition. The Confucians, however, believe one’s heavenly endowed human nature is essentially good and thus perfectible. To illustrate this, Mencius uses the example of a child about to fall into a well (Mencius II A 6). The instinct of any person is to save the child from harm, not for any exterior reasons but due to a naturally compassionate heart. The key to the goodness of human nature is a profound sympathy or empathy which all humans have. Indeed, affectivity is what distinguishes humans in the Confucian worldview. As Mencius says, ‘No one is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others’ (Mencius II A 6). Because of this basic sympathy, Confucians affirm that at the level of our primary instincts we will tend toward the good. Mencius uses wonderfully evocative images from nature to illustrate this, like water flowing naturally downhill (Mencius VI A 2). Like wind blowing over grasses, people are inclined toward the good and respond to the good because they are imprinted with the good.
From these examples, Mencius goes on to describe the basic seeds implanted in human nature which, when cultivated, become the key virtues for living a fully humane life. The seeds are compassion, shame, courtesy, and modesty, and a sense of right and wrong (Mencius II A 6, Mencius VI A 6). These seeds need to be watered and tended so that they grow and flourish into the primary Confucian virtues of humaneness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. The images used to describe the growth and cultivation of virtue are derived from the agricultural patterns and seasonal cycles of humans dependent on nature. Consequently, I am inclined to use the metaphor of ‘botanical cultivation’ when speaking of Confucian moral and spiritual practice.
The aim of such practice is to allow the seeds or tendencies of our deepest human spontaneities to be nourished and to flourish. Mencius suggests that this should be as clear as tending trees in one’s garden: ‘Even with a tong or a zi tree one or two spans thick, anyone wishing to keep it alive will know how it should be tended, yet when it comes to one’s own person, one does not know how to tend it. Surely one does not love one’s person any less than the tong or the zi’ (Mencius VI A 13). In this same spirit, there should develop a naturalness to our actions based on the rhythms of the cosmos itself. From seeds in the soil to seasons and their cycles, to the flow of rivers and the thrust of mountains, we are part of the rhythms of the universe and need to nourish our original nature.
If one develops these seeds, it is like ‘a fire starting up or a spring coming through’. The moral power that results from this cultivation of virtue is boundless: ‘When these (seeds) are fully developed, one can take under one’s protection the whole realm within the Four Seas, but if one fails to develop them, they will not be able even to serve one’s parents’ (Mencius II A 6).
The key is to tend, to activate, and to align our deepest spontaneities with the dynamic patterns of change and continuity in nature. Thus, self-cultivation needs to be an organic process. As Mencius suggests, we need to nourish our flood-like qi with integrity (Mencius II A 2) and recover our original mind-and-heart (Mencius VI A 11). However, this cannot be a forced or artificial process. Mencius uses the example of the man from Sung who planted rice seedlings. In his desire to see them grow quickly, he pulled at them too soon, and they withered. As Mencius observes, ‘There are few people in the world who can resist the urge to help their rice plants grow’ (Mencius II A 2). Others leave them unattended or do not bother to weed. How to nurture and nourish is the art of cultivation in both nature and in humans.
Mencius also uses the example of Ox Mountain, where, due to deforestation and overgrazing, the mountain becomes denuded (Mencius VI A 8). Erosion sets in, and the ecosystem is destroyed. People are inclined to think this has always been the nature of the mountain. Improper cultivation of ourselves and of the land results in waste and loss. As Mencius says, if one is not restored by the natural rhythms of the day and night, but rather dissipates one’s energies and becomes dissolute, people will think that dissolution is one’s essential nature. However, he insists that nourishment is the key: ‘Given the right nourishment there is nothing that will not grow, and deprived of it there is nothing that will not wither away’ (Mencius VI A 8).
These examples are so simple, clear, and timeless. They are as appropriate for our day as for Mencius’, as their natural imagery restores us to the deeper rhythms of our being in the universe. For, in this context, self-cultivation does not lead toward transcendent bliss or otherworldly salvation or even personal enlightenment. Rather, the goal is to move toward participation in the social, political, and cosmological order of things. The continuity of self, society, and cosmos is paramount in the Confucian worldview.
Thus, self-cultivation is always aimed at preparing the individual to contribute more fully to the needs of the contemporary world. For the Confucians, this implies a primacy of continual study and learning. From this perspective, education is at the heart of self-cultivation. This is not simply book learning or scholarship for the sake of careerism. It is rather education — leading oneself out of oneself into the world at large. More than anything, then, the role of the human is to discover one’s place in the larger community of life. And this community is one of ever expanding and intricately connected concentric circles of family, school, society, politics, nature, and the universe. We are embedded in a web of relationships and one fulfills one’s role by cultivating one’s inner spontaneities so that one can be more responsive to each of these layers of commitments.
For the Confucians this is all set within the context of an organic, dynamic, holistic universe that is alive with qi and imprinted with li. Thus, finding one’s role is realizing how one completes the great triad of heaven and Earth. As we rediscover our cosmological being in the macrocosm of things, our role in the microcosm of our daily lives will become more fulfilling, more joyful, more spontaneous. The pace and rhythm of our lives will be responsive to the rhythms of the day, the changes of the seasons, and the movements of the stars. The great continuity of our being with the being of the universe will enliven and enrich our activities. By attuning ourselves to the patterns of change and continuity in the natural world, we find our niche.
We thus take our place in the enormous expanse of the universe. We complete the great triad of heaven and Earth and participate in the transforming and nourishing powers of all things. In so doing, we will cultivate the land appropriately, nurture life forms for sustainability, regulate social relations adeptly and fairly, honor political commitments for the common good, and thus participate in the great transformation of things. This will be manifest as our own inner authenticity resonates with the authenticity of the universe itself.
This holistic and dynamic understanding of the world and the role of humans, found in Confucianism, could bring us far in the revisioning that is needed for us to deal effectively with our current ecological crisis. In turn, it is but one example of the potential benefit of tapping the resources of the world religions in our endeavor to formulate a more comprehensive and global ethics.
Bibliography
de Bary, Wm. Theodore, Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1960).
de Bary, Wm. Theodore, and Irene Bloom, eds, Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Grim, John, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).
Lau, D. C., trans., Mencius (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1970).
Schwartz, Benjamin, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Berthrong, eds, Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans (Cambridge, MA: 1998).
1 This was one of the main objectives of the Harvard conference series and edited volumes on Religions of the World and Ecology (http://fore.yale.edu/religions-of-the-world-and-ecology-archive-of-conference-materials/). From that series, see Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong, eds, Confucianism and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).
2 On the Enlightenment legacy, see also ‘Introduction: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Valuing Nature’ in this volume.
3 Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 180.
4 Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 466.
5 Ibid., pp. 701–02.
6 Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds, Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 700.
7 Ibid., p. 689.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
2021/08/05
Living Earth Community - 8. Affectual Insight
Living Earth Community - 8. Affectual Insight
Living Earth Community
8. Affectual Insight
8. Affectual Insight: Love as a Way of Being and Knowing
David L. Haberman
© David L. Haberman, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.08
There is a poetic phrase commonly known in the north Indian region of Braj: pritama prita hi te peyi, which means ‘the Beloved is found precisely through love’. I would like to meditate on this seemingly simple sentence for the deeper meaning it has to offer our considerations of multiple ways of being and knowing, particularly as they relate to the living Earth community.
The Krishnaite traditions of Braj are informed by early Hindu Vedantic texts that give philosophical expression to an understanding of all life as simultaneously radically unified and bountifully diversified. This is recognized as the siddantik perspective that provides the philosophical basis for understanding the true nature of all life. Since accounts of creation are productive points of entry into the general worldview of a particular tradition, I begin with the emergent understanding of creation that is encountered in the foundational Vedantic texts, the Upanishads. One of the major tenets of Vedantic religious philosophy is non-duality (advaita). Principal Upanishadic texts recount that in the beginning the One Ultimate Reality (Brahman, atman, purusha) was lonely and bored, as there is not much joy in playing with one’s self alone (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4).1
Hence, the One desired others, and, as a result, divided itself and proceeded to interact with itself in a multitude of manifest forms (nama-rupa). Through this creative process, the unmanifest One produced out of itself the manifold world of all entities, both animate and inanimate. Accordingly, everything in the world is concurrently non-different and different, one and many. Although difference is acknowledged — and even celebrated — sharp ontological divides do not exist. It is all Brahman, for the fundamental Upanishads declare: ‘this whole world is Brahman’. Significantly, the sacred totality includes a manifest (adhibhautik) as well as an unmanifest (adhyatmik) dimension. In contrast to, for example, a Calvinistic view, there are no impenetrable boundaries between the supreme reality (Brahman or God) and the visible world. As it says in the important Vedantic text the Bhagavad Gita, ‘God is everything’ (7:19).2 Therefore, everything in the world is a part of the ultimate Whole, and, as such, is sacred. Animated presence pervades everything. The religious studies scholar Emma Tomalin calls this ‘bio-divinity’, the notion that Nature is infused with animated divinity, an idea widespread in India for a very long time.3 An intellectual understanding of the siddhantik philosophical assertion that a sacred presence pervades everything, however, is not enough; it must be realized. And this leads us to another important perspective: the bhavatmik.
Bhavatmik is an adjective meaning the perspective ‘whose essence is bhava’. The key term in this compound is bhava, a complex Sanskrit word with multiple dictionary meanings that include a state of mind, manner of being, way of thinking or feeling, emotion, attitude, affection, disposition, or realization.4 In the Braj Krishnaite traditions, this word is best and most simply translated as ‘love’. It is this term I had in mind in assigning the title to this short essay. A common way of expressing the goal of the Braj religious traditions is with the word sarvatma-bhava, which I would render as ‘a loving realization of the divine in everything’. The crucial question is: how does one actually come to know the sacred or divine presence in some living entity? I return to the poetic phrase that I began with; the answer is precisely through love. When someone approaches us with aggression, shouting with rage in our face, we tend to pull back protectively and conceal ourselves. On the other hand, when someone approaches us with tender love, we are drawn out and reveal much more of ourselves. Might it be this way with all entities?
Conversations with religious practitioners in Braj suggest that it might indeed. There is a common thread that runs through hundreds of interviews I have had with worshippers of sacred rivers, trees, and mountains in northern India. Many reported that what formerly seemed like an ‘ordinary’ river, tree, or mountain revealed its divine nature or true sacred form (svarupa) after a period of interacting with that entity through loving acts of worship (seva). I met a young man on the bank of the Yamuna after watching him perform a very moving worship of the river. He explained to me how he had come to this: ‘I used to see Yamuna-ji as an ordinary river and treat it badly. But then I met my guru, and he told me to start worshiping Yamuna-ji. At first I was a little resistant, but I did what he said. Soon, I began to see her svarupa (true divine form) and realized how wonderful (adbhut) she really is. So now I worship her everyday with love. The main benefit of worshiping Yamuna-ji is an ever-expanding love. I want to live in her world of love’.5 This man suggests something very important. Loving attitudes and actions lead to a perspectival awakening; through a reverent approach one comes to know the true nature of some entity in a manner that exceeds mere intellectual knowledge. Once that true nature is revealed and one has an experience of its marvelousness, one enters spontaneously into an appreciative and worshipful attitude, and engages naturally in acts of loving care.
This is a common story. A woman I met who lovingly revered a neem tree daily with worshipful acts of service told me the result of this was that ‘Mother revealed herself to me, which has led me to a very close relationship with her. I cannot now ever imagine cutting a living tree’.6 A woman who worships a stone from Mount Govardhan in her home every day reported that after some time, this stone revealed its svarupa, or true nature, and that this has led to a deep relationship in which the stone sometimes even talks to her. ‘Before I began my worship, I never imagined how truly wonderful these stones were’.7 During my visits to an outdoor shrine housing a stone from Mount Govardhan, a man I spoke with explained: ‘When people lovingly decorate a Giriraj shila (Govardhan stone) and worship it, the personality comes out. Look, there are many Giriraj shilas here, but the svarupa is really showing itself in this one (svarupa nikal deta hai) because people have added eyes and decorations, and have worshiped it’.8 Love is both a way of acting and an emotional state of being, and loving attitudes and actions are the very doorway into an insightful world of realization; they are concrete levers for opening up new perspectives. This is what I mean by ‘affectual insight’. Many claim that through love the face of the Beloved is available in every entity.
This sense of the value of loving relationality has also been underscored by some important western scientific thinkers. For example, the 1983 Nobel Prize winning biologist Barbara McClintock promoted a ‘feeling for the organism’ as a crucial element in knowing it.9 She called herself a ‘mystic in science’ and endorsed a form of attention based on loving relationship as a way of seeing things not available to the more aggressive approaches represented by such figures as Francis Bacon. In seeming agreement, Norman Brown promotes Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of ‘a science based on an erotic sense of reality rather than an aggressive, dominating attitude towards reality’.10
How does one develop a loving connection with the living Earth community that leads to affectual insight into its true nature or divine presence (svarupa)? Though the whole world is sacred, human beings are not good at connecting with abstract universalities. We are embodied beings designed to connect with tangible particularities. Our nature is such that our most powerful relationships are with specific, individual beings. Universal love, for example, is a noble sentiment, but it cannot begin to compare to the passionate engagement with the intimate love of a particular person. Intimate interaction with natural entities in northern India tends to be directed toward individual trees, rivers, and stones. There is an element of personal possession (mamata) in matters of love, as ‘this is my child’ or ‘here is my lover’. A woman who maintains a Govardhan stone shrine in her home confirmed this viewpoint with a familiar example: ‘There are many men in the world who are husbands, but the one who lives in this house is my husband. Likewise, there are many Giriraj shilas, but this one (gesturing to the Govardhan stone in her home shrine) is mine’.11 But as love of a particular matures with concomitant knowledge, the scope of that love tends to broaden, just as people with no prior regard for dogs tend to look at dogs differently once they become friends with one particular dog.
The possibility of reverent interaction with a particular entity opening up to a more universal reverence was highlighted for me during an instructive conversation. One day I visited a large peepul tree shrine in Varanasi, and there I met a woman who was a sadhvi, a female practitioner who had renounced ordinary domestic life to devote herself to spiritual pursuits. At one point in our conversation, she explained what she thought was the real value of worshiping a tree: ‘From the heartfelt worship of a single tree, one can see the divinity in that tree and feel love (bhava) for it. After some time, with knowledge one can then see the divinity in all trees. Really, in all life. All life is sacred because God is everywhere and in everything. This tree is a svarupa of Vasudeva (Krishna). As it says in the Bhagavad Gita, from devotion to a svarupa (one’s own particular sacred form of God) comes awareness of the vishvarupa (universal form of God)’.12 In brief, this knowledgeable woman was advancing the idea that the love of a particular has the possibility of opening up a more reverent attitude toward the universal. Regarding trees, her point was that loving interaction with a particular tree could lead to the realization of the sacrality of all trees — and by extension, of all life. With the comprehension of the universal via the particular, we return full circle to the notion of sarvatma-bhava, the idea that everything is sacred. What first began as a proposition, is now deeply realized through affectual experience.
I close by suggesting that a new and special kind of love is available to us during these challenging times; a possibility is being offered to us that has perhaps never existed before. This may be the great redeeming feature of this troubled age of massive extinction, the silver lining in the proverbial dark cloud of our times. It is a love that is both astonishingly sweet and extremely urgent. Earth is singing us a special love song, if we can only open our hearts to hear it.
Today, we have the possibility of loving the living Earth community, of loving old-growth forests for example, in a manner that has perhaps never been possible before, for we now experience them at once as overwhelmingly beautiful and as tremendously vulnerable. The powerful, vibrant forests that frightened the early Puritans when they landed on the eastern seaboard and led them to conquer and clear-cut them have now been replaced by forests vastly diminished — and perhaps even dying. Much of the success of the great work we are being called to depends on understanding the nature of and embodying this special love. Although as a lifelong student of religion I would insist that love is fundamentally unified, I want to assert that the love we seem to be called to today has a dual nature: it is a boundlessly joyful love, and it is an affectionately concerned love. It is somewhat similar to the love a parent feels for a child ill with a life-threatening disease: the parent feels deeply moved by the child’s smile while simultaneously being aware that the disease may take the child before her time. The intensity of the love is increased by the vulnerability of the child, and now so much of the living Earth community is endangered. The joyful dimension of this love has to do with opening ourselves to a power and wondrous presence in the world beyond even our greatest knowledge. The caring dimension of this love has to do with being sensitively attentive to the needs of particular threatened forms of life. This insightful, tender love offers a pathway to a deeper way of knowing and a more sensible way of being in the world today. Long live the whole living Earth community!
Bibliography
Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013).
Haberman, David L., Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).
— People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929177.001.0001
— River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Keller, Evelyn Fox, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1984).
McGregor, R. S., The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Olivelle, Patrick, trans., Upanishads (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Tomalin, Emma, ‘Bio-Divinity and Biodiversity: Perspectives on Religion and Environmental Conservation in India’, Numen, 51.3 (2004), 265–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527041945481
Sargeant, Winthrop, Shri Bhagavad Gita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
1 For an English translation of this text, see: Upanishads, trans. by Patrick Olivelle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13–14.
2 My translation of the Sanskrit ‘Vasudevah sarvam’ from the Bhagavad Gita 7.19. For the Sanskrit original with a readable English translation of this text see Winthrop Sargeant, Shri Bhagavad Gita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
3 Emma Tomalin, ‘Bio-Divinity and Biodiversity: Perspectives on Religion and Environmental Conservation in India’, Numen, 51.3 (2004), 265–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527041945481
4 See R. S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 765–66.
5 David L. Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 185.
6 David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929177.001.0001. Selected from additional notes from ethnographic interviews with tree worshipers for this book project.
7 David L. Haberman, Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 210.
8 Ibid., p. 208.
9 See Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1984). The phrase is found throughout the verbal expressions of McClintock. See, for example, p. xxii.
10 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), p. 316.
11 Haberman, Loving Stones, p. 198.
12 Haberman, People Trees, p. 197.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Living Earth Community
8. Affectual Insight
8. Affectual Insight: Love as a Way of Being and Knowing
David L. Haberman
© David L. Haberman, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.08
There is a poetic phrase commonly known in the north Indian region of Braj: pritama prita hi te peyi, which means ‘the Beloved is found precisely through love’. I would like to meditate on this seemingly simple sentence for the deeper meaning it has to offer our considerations of multiple ways of being and knowing, particularly as they relate to the living Earth community.
The Krishnaite traditions of Braj are informed by early Hindu Vedantic texts that give philosophical expression to an understanding of all life as simultaneously radically unified and bountifully diversified. This is recognized as the siddantik perspective that provides the philosophical basis for understanding the true nature of all life. Since accounts of creation are productive points of entry into the general worldview of a particular tradition, I begin with the emergent understanding of creation that is encountered in the foundational Vedantic texts, the Upanishads. One of the major tenets of Vedantic religious philosophy is non-duality (advaita). Principal Upanishadic texts recount that in the beginning the One Ultimate Reality (Brahman, atman, purusha) was lonely and bored, as there is not much joy in playing with one’s self alone (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4).1
Hence, the One desired others, and, as a result, divided itself and proceeded to interact with itself in a multitude of manifest forms (nama-rupa). Through this creative process, the unmanifest One produced out of itself the manifold world of all entities, both animate and inanimate. Accordingly, everything in the world is concurrently non-different and different, one and many. Although difference is acknowledged — and even celebrated — sharp ontological divides do not exist. It is all Brahman, for the fundamental Upanishads declare: ‘this whole world is Brahman’. Significantly, the sacred totality includes a manifest (adhibhautik) as well as an unmanifest (adhyatmik) dimension. In contrast to, for example, a Calvinistic view, there are no impenetrable boundaries between the supreme reality (Brahman or God) and the visible world. As it says in the important Vedantic text the Bhagavad Gita, ‘God is everything’ (7:19).2 Therefore, everything in the world is a part of the ultimate Whole, and, as such, is sacred. Animated presence pervades everything. The religious studies scholar Emma Tomalin calls this ‘bio-divinity’, the notion that Nature is infused with animated divinity, an idea widespread in India for a very long time.3 An intellectual understanding of the siddhantik philosophical assertion that a sacred presence pervades everything, however, is not enough; it must be realized. And this leads us to another important perspective: the bhavatmik.
Bhavatmik is an adjective meaning the perspective ‘whose essence is bhava’. The key term in this compound is bhava, a complex Sanskrit word with multiple dictionary meanings that include a state of mind, manner of being, way of thinking or feeling, emotion, attitude, affection, disposition, or realization.4 In the Braj Krishnaite traditions, this word is best and most simply translated as ‘love’. It is this term I had in mind in assigning the title to this short essay. A common way of expressing the goal of the Braj religious traditions is with the word sarvatma-bhava, which I would render as ‘a loving realization of the divine in everything’. The crucial question is: how does one actually come to know the sacred or divine presence in some living entity? I return to the poetic phrase that I began with; the answer is precisely through love. When someone approaches us with aggression, shouting with rage in our face, we tend to pull back protectively and conceal ourselves. On the other hand, when someone approaches us with tender love, we are drawn out and reveal much more of ourselves. Might it be this way with all entities?
Conversations with religious practitioners in Braj suggest that it might indeed. There is a common thread that runs through hundreds of interviews I have had with worshippers of sacred rivers, trees, and mountains in northern India. Many reported that what formerly seemed like an ‘ordinary’ river, tree, or mountain revealed its divine nature or true sacred form (svarupa) after a period of interacting with that entity through loving acts of worship (seva). I met a young man on the bank of the Yamuna after watching him perform a very moving worship of the river. He explained to me how he had come to this: ‘I used to see Yamuna-ji as an ordinary river and treat it badly. But then I met my guru, and he told me to start worshiping Yamuna-ji. At first I was a little resistant, but I did what he said. Soon, I began to see her svarupa (true divine form) and realized how wonderful (adbhut) she really is. So now I worship her everyday with love. The main benefit of worshiping Yamuna-ji is an ever-expanding love. I want to live in her world of love’.5 This man suggests something very important. Loving attitudes and actions lead to a perspectival awakening; through a reverent approach one comes to know the true nature of some entity in a manner that exceeds mere intellectual knowledge. Once that true nature is revealed and one has an experience of its marvelousness, one enters spontaneously into an appreciative and worshipful attitude, and engages naturally in acts of loving care.
This is a common story. A woman I met who lovingly revered a neem tree daily with worshipful acts of service told me the result of this was that ‘Mother revealed herself to me, which has led me to a very close relationship with her. I cannot now ever imagine cutting a living tree’.6 A woman who worships a stone from Mount Govardhan in her home every day reported that after some time, this stone revealed its svarupa, or true nature, and that this has led to a deep relationship in which the stone sometimes even talks to her. ‘Before I began my worship, I never imagined how truly wonderful these stones were’.7 During my visits to an outdoor shrine housing a stone from Mount Govardhan, a man I spoke with explained: ‘When people lovingly decorate a Giriraj shila (Govardhan stone) and worship it, the personality comes out. Look, there are many Giriraj shilas here, but the svarupa is really showing itself in this one (svarupa nikal deta hai) because people have added eyes and decorations, and have worshiped it’.8 Love is both a way of acting and an emotional state of being, and loving attitudes and actions are the very doorway into an insightful world of realization; they are concrete levers for opening up new perspectives. This is what I mean by ‘affectual insight’. Many claim that through love the face of the Beloved is available in every entity.
This sense of the value of loving relationality has also been underscored by some important western scientific thinkers. For example, the 1983 Nobel Prize winning biologist Barbara McClintock promoted a ‘feeling for the organism’ as a crucial element in knowing it.9 She called herself a ‘mystic in science’ and endorsed a form of attention based on loving relationship as a way of seeing things not available to the more aggressive approaches represented by such figures as Francis Bacon. In seeming agreement, Norman Brown promotes Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of ‘a science based on an erotic sense of reality rather than an aggressive, dominating attitude towards reality’.10
How does one develop a loving connection with the living Earth community that leads to affectual insight into its true nature or divine presence (svarupa)? Though the whole world is sacred, human beings are not good at connecting with abstract universalities. We are embodied beings designed to connect with tangible particularities. Our nature is such that our most powerful relationships are with specific, individual beings. Universal love, for example, is a noble sentiment, but it cannot begin to compare to the passionate engagement with the intimate love of a particular person. Intimate interaction with natural entities in northern India tends to be directed toward individual trees, rivers, and stones. There is an element of personal possession (mamata) in matters of love, as ‘this is my child’ or ‘here is my lover’. A woman who maintains a Govardhan stone shrine in her home confirmed this viewpoint with a familiar example: ‘There are many men in the world who are husbands, but the one who lives in this house is my husband. Likewise, there are many Giriraj shilas, but this one (gesturing to the Govardhan stone in her home shrine) is mine’.11 But as love of a particular matures with concomitant knowledge, the scope of that love tends to broaden, just as people with no prior regard for dogs tend to look at dogs differently once they become friends with one particular dog.
The possibility of reverent interaction with a particular entity opening up to a more universal reverence was highlighted for me during an instructive conversation. One day I visited a large peepul tree shrine in Varanasi, and there I met a woman who was a sadhvi, a female practitioner who had renounced ordinary domestic life to devote herself to spiritual pursuits. At one point in our conversation, she explained what she thought was the real value of worshiping a tree: ‘From the heartfelt worship of a single tree, one can see the divinity in that tree and feel love (bhava) for it. After some time, with knowledge one can then see the divinity in all trees. Really, in all life. All life is sacred because God is everywhere and in everything. This tree is a svarupa of Vasudeva (Krishna). As it says in the Bhagavad Gita, from devotion to a svarupa (one’s own particular sacred form of God) comes awareness of the vishvarupa (universal form of God)’.12 In brief, this knowledgeable woman was advancing the idea that the love of a particular has the possibility of opening up a more reverent attitude toward the universal. Regarding trees, her point was that loving interaction with a particular tree could lead to the realization of the sacrality of all trees — and by extension, of all life. With the comprehension of the universal via the particular, we return full circle to the notion of sarvatma-bhava, the idea that everything is sacred. What first began as a proposition, is now deeply realized through affectual experience.
I close by suggesting that a new and special kind of love is available to us during these challenging times; a possibility is being offered to us that has perhaps never existed before. This may be the great redeeming feature of this troubled age of massive extinction, the silver lining in the proverbial dark cloud of our times. It is a love that is both astonishingly sweet and extremely urgent. Earth is singing us a special love song, if we can only open our hearts to hear it.
Today, we have the possibility of loving the living Earth community, of loving old-growth forests for example, in a manner that has perhaps never been possible before, for we now experience them at once as overwhelmingly beautiful and as tremendously vulnerable. The powerful, vibrant forests that frightened the early Puritans when they landed on the eastern seaboard and led them to conquer and clear-cut them have now been replaced by forests vastly diminished — and perhaps even dying. Much of the success of the great work we are being called to depends on understanding the nature of and embodying this special love. Although as a lifelong student of religion I would insist that love is fundamentally unified, I want to assert that the love we seem to be called to today has a dual nature: it is a boundlessly joyful love, and it is an affectionately concerned love. It is somewhat similar to the love a parent feels for a child ill with a life-threatening disease: the parent feels deeply moved by the child’s smile while simultaneously being aware that the disease may take the child before her time. The intensity of the love is increased by the vulnerability of the child, and now so much of the living Earth community is endangered. The joyful dimension of this love has to do with opening ourselves to a power and wondrous presence in the world beyond even our greatest knowledge. The caring dimension of this love has to do with being sensitively attentive to the needs of particular threatened forms of life. This insightful, tender love offers a pathway to a deeper way of knowing and a more sensible way of being in the world today. Long live the whole living Earth community!
Bibliography
Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013).
Haberman, David L., Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).
— People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929177.001.0001
— River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Keller, Evelyn Fox, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1984).
McGregor, R. S., The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Olivelle, Patrick, trans., Upanishads (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Tomalin, Emma, ‘Bio-Divinity and Biodiversity: Perspectives on Religion and Environmental Conservation in India’, Numen, 51.3 (2004), 265–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527041945481
Sargeant, Winthrop, Shri Bhagavad Gita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
1 For an English translation of this text, see: Upanishads, trans. by Patrick Olivelle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13–14.
2 My translation of the Sanskrit ‘Vasudevah sarvam’ from the Bhagavad Gita 7.19. For the Sanskrit original with a readable English translation of this text see Winthrop Sargeant, Shri Bhagavad Gita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
3 Emma Tomalin, ‘Bio-Divinity and Biodiversity: Perspectives on Religion and Environmental Conservation in India’, Numen, 51.3 (2004), 265–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527041945481
4 See R. S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 765–66.
5 David L. Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 185.
6 David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929177.001.0001. Selected from additional notes from ethnographic interviews with tree worshipers for this book project.
7 David L. Haberman, Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 210.
8 Ibid., p. 208.
9 See Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1984). The phrase is found throughout the verbal expressions of McClintock. See, for example, p. xxii.
10 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), p. 316.
11 Haberman, Loving Stones, p. 198.
12 Haberman, People Trees, p. 197.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories
Living Earth Community
7. Fluid Histories
SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY
Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Prasenjit Duara
© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07
Time and tide wait for no man.
The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.
I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows
In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.
My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.
Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.
The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.
The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.
This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.
Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.
Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8
Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.
Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.
Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.
We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.
On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12
The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.
Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History
What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?
Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.
Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13
Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.
While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:
Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17
Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.
The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.
Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.
Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.
The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.
Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.
The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.
It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.
The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.
Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.
I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?
Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.
The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography
Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222
— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841
Lozier, M. Susan, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
Peters, John Durham, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114.
Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
Robbins, Jim, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marin Life’, New York Times, 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
Slif, Brent D., Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).
Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
Weintraub, Karen, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985).
1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.
4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.
6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.
7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.
8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.
18 Ibid., p. 88.
19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Living Earth Community
7. Fluid Histories
SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY
Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
.jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_){kind=link}
7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Prasenjit Duara
© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07
Time and tide wait for no man.
The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.
I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows
In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.
My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.
Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.
The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.
The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.
This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.
Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.
Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8
Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.
Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.
Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.
We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.
On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12
The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.
Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History
What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?
Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.
Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13
Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.
While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:
Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17
Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.
The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.
Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.
Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.
The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.
Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.
The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.
It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.
The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.
Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.
I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?
Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.
The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography
Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222
— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841
Lozier, M. Susan, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
Peters, John Durham, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114.
Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
Robbins, Jim, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marin Life’, New York Times, 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
Slif, Brent D., Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).
Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
Weintraub, Karen, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985).
1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.
4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.
6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.
7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.
8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.
18 Ibid., p. 88.
19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Living Earth Community - 3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Living Earth Community - 3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Paul Waldau
© Paul Waldau, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.03
In preparation for the workshop’s dialogue on ‘multiple ways of being and knowing’ in our shared ‘living Earth community’, I attempted to ascertain themes relating to the following question: how might an individual today choose actions that celebrate the plain fact that each of us is a member of a species that has only sometimes, and not often lately, been a responsible member of the Earth community? I present my findings in this exploratory piece.
My framing of these issues focuses particularly on the importance of different forms of humility. I suggest that different forms of humility are needed because each of us is a member of human-centered communities that have, whether intentionally or not, produced diverse harms beyond the species line that many individuals within our own species and, in particular, the major institutions of modern industrialized societies have long celebrated rather than condemned.
My framing also foregrounds our obvious animality, although again I want to spur my own thinking by using the plural ‘animalities’, since lives on this planet are unbelievably diverse and always embedded in a more-than-animal context. I refer here both to those nonhuman lives we name with words like ‘plant’ and phrases such as ‘the material world’ to denote those parts of the universe that our host culture overwhelmingly treats as non-living, and thus merely a resource for our use and benefit.
My experience over the last half-century has suggested to me that no rich form of ‘self-actualization’ is possible for us when humans claim to be separate and superior, as occurs habitually through the demarcating property of language that produces categories such as ‘humans and animals’. I take human exceptionalism to be the dominant narrative of our time, even though in our received wisdom traditions there are many profound formulations about recognizing the importance of both human and nonhuman ‘others’ whenever any human individual or group seeks full self-actualization.1 I offer here a few forthright statements that make plain the importance of such wisdom. The first is from Viktor Frankl.
[S]elf-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.2
A pair of comments from Thomas Berry takes the issue well beyond the species line:
[W]e must say that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
Indeed we cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.3
Beware Bootlegging. I also use the plural ‘self-actualizations’ in this chapter because I intentionally want to call out another issue — it does not follow that one’s own notions and/or attempts at self-actualization provide any sort of paradigm by which the self-actualization of other animals, whether human or not, can be measured. Instead, I go forward on the assumption that, in any group (and this gathering of chapters would provide a paradigmatic example of the following), there will be different forms of self-actualization. One widely successful form appears in service traditions, and yet other forms appear in meditation traditions. Many other forms appear in instances where individual humans have found a way to stand outside the penchant for self-preoccupation that individuals in our own species so often exhibit. In such instances, these individuals have thereby approached particularly fulsome forms of self-actualization.
Based on the personal and communal experiences that have led me to describe issues as I do above, and based on the challenges I tried to meet in my previous book-length projects (both single-author publications and the two edited collections A Communion of Subjects and An Elephant in the Room),4 I am currently finishing a book that will carry the title The Animal Invitation: Science, Ethics, Religion and Law in a More-Than-Human World. This book is an attempt to say what five different human domains — science, ethics, religion, law, and education — might look like if we took our animality seriously.
To introduce the issue further, I include next the opening two paragraphs of the book, after which I will try to sketch out ways in which I think each of the four eminently human efforts described in the subtitle — science, ethics, religion, and law — must always be living efforts (this claim, which is by no means novel in regard to any of these four domains, is related to how I discuss our own animality throughout the book). In my closing comments below, I will address both formal and informal education, since this theme is a meta-topic, as it were, of the chapters addressing science, ethics, religion and law.
Animals invite us. This world-constituting fact is true whether we are talking about humans inviting humans, or, the focus of this book, nonhumans inviting human awareness, co-existence, appreciation, and even awe. One domain after another of our human existence, including often our daily lives, reveals the astonishing variety and depth of these invitations.
It is both of these features — variety and depth — that are, tellingly, reflected in the human domains we know as ‘science,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘religion’ and ‘law.’ Admittedly, the great variety of approaches, which has spawned many different ways of talking and thinking about the animal invitation, reflects both deep acknowledgements and facile dismissals. Considered alone, the variety is revealing, for it reflects basic features, especially the finitudes, of our human capacities. But it is the depth evident in many humans’ recognition of the animal invitation which, though less commonly encountered than diversity, reflects best the fecundity and vivifying power of human thinking and action. As this book will show, human possibilities, narrow and broad, play out in the depth and variety of responses to the animal invitation that are evident in different human groups’ claims of identity, community, compassion, awareness, self-delusion, self-inflicted ignorance, and so much more.
In the following four sections, I raise the issue of whether our astonishing achievements in science, ethics, religion, and law are (i) helpfully seen as eminently animal achievements, and (ii) better understood when each of these four domains is discussed primarily as an ongoing commitment of our kind of animal that must be understood and experienced as ‘living now’, rather than ‘eternally fixed’ or as an ‘absolute truth’. Correspondingly, treatment of any of these domains as irrevocably fixed defeats what can be thought of as the vivifying and enabling genius of each of these living domains as a human achievement. I suggest in the book, then, that it takes truly living, responsive forms of each of these human achievements to move individual humans in the direction of full actualization of our human animality.
Human Science in a More-Than-Human World
That our sciences have organic features is strongly hinted in the long history of shifts in ideas and changes in governing paradigms across the centuries. Organic features of many sciences are also seen in the unbelievable rate of new discoveries in recent decades, for these discoveries have produced shifts in particular scientific communities’ dominant ways of thinking. I want to add, though, that it remains my impression (perhaps a result of my ‘education’) that the western science tradition in some ways still does not feature ‘living aspects’ quite as fully as do ethics, religion, and law.
Human Ethics in a More-Than-Human World
I’m only too aware that ethics has long been taught in the western intellectual tradition as a set of answers to questions such as ‘what is the right thing to do?’ and ‘what does it mean to be a moral and/or good person?’ Having taught ethics now for over twenty years, I do not think such formulations are helpful, nor do I think these formulations reflect that ethics is, and always needs to be, very alive indeed. For this reason, I have come to see such views of ethics as a failure to detect the true heartbeat that takes place as we embrace, develop, and seek full actualization of our human ethical abilities. A question that does prompt us to hear more clearly the heartbeat of our ethical abilities is what I have come to call ‘the root question’ of ethics, namely, ‘who are the others?’ This is an abbreviated version of what is, in our daily lives, a far more complicated rendition of this root question, which can be stated in a variety of ways — here’s one version that I think captures some of the animal and human genius of the abilities we call ‘ethics’: ‘Who are the others about whom I should care given that I have finite abilities and there are, as a practical matter, many other limits on my ability to care?’
The principal point in the book’s chapter on ethics is that such root questions, and of course the abilities that we use in pursuing our own answer, reflect what can only be described as eminently animal abilities. I do not mean to suggest with ‘eminently’ in the prior sentence that each and every kind of animal features the high-level abilities we call ethics — my guess is that only some animals do (caring about ‘others’ is more common, I suspect, in mammals, but there is much to suggest that some birds and a variety of non-mammals also have some feature in their life that, in effect, can be described as a version of the ‘who are the others?’ question).5
In this chapter, I suggest that one cannot understand an ability of the ethical sort without affirming that ability’s animal origin and nature. As a segue into the following comments about humans’ spiritual/religious awarenesses, let me add that I have come, after a half-century of studying religious traditions, to think that much, if not all, of great value in our religious traditions follows from the eminently animal nature of ethics. Religious traditions are of particular interest to me on account of their following aspects: the role of narrative; the pervasive degree to which our worlds feature sacredness and gift in connection with real places and other living beings; and the insightful observation that relational epistemologies are crucial to each of us recognizing much of who we are.
Human Religion in a More-Than-Human World
Here I tread on sensitive ground — I do this intentionally and reverentially, recognizing that there is no single definition of religion that I might employ to argue that ‘religion must be alive in order help humans self-actualize.’
As I get older, I’m less inclined to preface the following claim with mea culpa, but perhaps I should as a way to underscore my theme of ‘humilities’ — much that is called ‘religion’ fails to help ‘adherents’ or ‘believers’ self-actualize (in the sense I use this term in these short comments). Yet our spiritual/religious domains seem to me, after a half-century of immersion in studying religion, to include a great variety of options, some of which embrace responsibly rather than repudiate what it means for religious awareness to respect and nurture our many animal-based abilities, finitudes, fragilities, organic births, decline, and eventual death. Religious awareness, when it acknowledges our animality in responsible, foundational ways, will itself be truly alive and living in every sense that I am an animal now alive and living.
Human Law in a More-Than-Human World
Law (by which I mean ‘legal systems’, of which there are at least seven distinct major traditions and obviously many different minor variations) may also seem, like science, somewhat of a challenge to fit into the ‘living’ paradigm. Yet any study of comparative law makes it obvious how fully constructed each individual legal system is, and how such ‘construction’ has features that are easily discerned to be ‘living’, in the sense that I’m using that broad term in this short paper. This can be observed in these two comments by Robert Cover:
To live in a legal world requires that one know not only the precepts, but also their connections to possible and plausible states of affairs.6
Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.7
The need for stability in legal systems, especially as they are part of complex societies, creates features and pressures that tend to make legal systems ‘conservative’, ‘predictable’, and subject to forces that easily and often have made enactment and enforcement of ‘law’ the prerogative of reactionary forces.8 Consider the exclusion implied in Cicero’s seemingly inclusive comment that ‘we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.’9 The ‘we’ today might seem to refer to the human group alone, but Cicero through this claim in actuality hides two recurring facts. Human groups now use, and seemingly forever have used, ‘law’ (developed legal systems) to subordinate not only nonhuman animals and the more-than-human Earth, but also marginalized, politically powerless human groups.
Although the contemporary movement widely known as ‘animal law’ has for the last two decades challenged such a narrow construction of law, public policy circles today nonetheless remain ignorant of and unconcerned about the ‘animal question’. There are changes afoot today by which the living features of law can be seen, but since, characteristically, ‘the political trumps the legal’, the full potential of public policy for the more-than-human world remains, as of yet, unrealized.
Some Final Comments on Human Education
The education theme is, as noted above, a meta-theme in the forthcoming book. In my Animal Studies — An Introduction, I worked with both formal and informal education, both of which are encapsulated by an observation made by the English philosopher Stephen Clark: ‘one’s ethical, as well as one’s ontological framework is determined by what entities one is prepared to notice or take seriously’.10 I entered the academic world because, for me, it is a place a daring, and so much so that, at its best, the academic world fosters critical thinking that allows for self-criticism along the lines of Theodore Roszak’s ‘But then let us admit that the academy has very rarely been a place of daring’.11 David Orr adds a further dimension to this discussion, extending the issue across the species line — ‘The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth’.12
One way in which our society has been equipping ‘educated humans’ to be ‘effective vandals’ (or, in Aldo Leopold’s phrasing, ‘conqueror of the land-community’ rather than ‘plain member and citizen of it’) is categorical division of humans from other animals.13 This framing defeats us even as it prompts ignorance that leads to great harms to other animals and their local communities. Teachers and students who insist on language that foregrounds a ‘human/animal dualism’ seem to me to have less chance, often none at all, of accurately assessing themselves or counseling other humans in ways that lead to greater prospects of self-actualization. Why do I suggest this? Because our evident mammality, primatehood, and ape-ness are radically (that is, at the root) denied by the dualism.
A key feature of our local formal education — the two-part division of ‘higher education’ into the sciences, on the one hand, and the ‘arts and humanities’, on the other — continues to foster the notion that human possibilities are the paradigm of achievement for any living being. In effect, the two-part university has features that legitimize human exceptionalism in a more-than-human world — this is one way that it equips us to be effective vandals of our shared world. Moreover, education further vandalizes in those areas of formal education where the ideology ‘all humans matter’ inadvertently masks harms done to many human animals as well. Thus, in the book, I suggest that teaching about science, ethics, religion, and law in virtually all mainline institutions today presents a face of human exceptionalism that goes beyond harms to nonhumans and their communities because, ironically, formal education in practice continues to hold in place the privilege of only some humans.
A Near-Term Task
I have come to think of our personal and social tasks as finding ways to re- assert our animality, even though these fundamental features of our lives are hidden in plain sight, as it were. These animal abilities are, I suggest, the very condition of our (i) doing science thoroughly and effectively, (ii) pursuing ‘living’ forms of ethics, (iii) fostering diverse opportunities for spiritual and religious awareness that are truly alive and free, and (iv) creating legal systems that create and project for ourselves a future of responsible membership in the larger community.
A Longer-Term Task
My sense that we can do such work by returning to a full, gracious acknowledgment of our own animality needs, I think, to be supplemented by affirmations of the fact that ‘our larger community’ includes more than animals alone — insights about the plant world are cascading into our awareness again by virtue of creative scientific work, and our connection to the whole earth is, of course, something that many small-scale cultures have long known. The senses of ‘gift’ and ‘community’ found in writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, and Linda Hogan reveal that our human forebears knew a great deal about setting the stage for the emergence of a larger community and for forms of self-transcendence that such a community offers, and thereby helps make our own self-actualization possible and fuller.
Let me end on notes that are intentionally provocative and personal — I have come to think of denials of humans’ evident animality as cowardice in the face of reality. I am an animal, and so are members of my human community. I love them not in spite of their animality, but because of their animality. And I have come to recognize that I cannot ‘know myself’, nor it seems to me can any human come to know the possibilities of their life well, without coming to terms with the plain fact that we are now and have always been and will always be animals. By acknowledging our animality, we stand to open up key possibilities for self-actualization. This is why my forthcoming book, as well as the present volume in which this chapter appears, attempts to explore our scientific, ethical, religious, and social sensibilities that permit forms of life and a rule of law that are fair to all members of our extended, larger community.
Bibliography
Abram, David, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010).
Ackerman, Jennifer, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016).
Balcombe, Jonathan, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
Bekoff, Marc, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).
Berry, Thomas, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10.
Cicero, M. T., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu
Clark, Stephen, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Cover, Robert M., ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Forward: Nomos and Narrative’, 97 Harvard Law Review, 4 (1983).
— ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).
Forthman, Debra L., Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau, eds, An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
Haskell, David, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017).
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013).
Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991).
Olmert, M. D., Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009).
Orr, David, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994).
Roszak, Theodore, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42.
Shubin, Neil, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
Waldau, Paul, Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
1 I have previously defined ‘human exceptionalism’ in my book Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), as follows (p. 8): ‘Human exceptionalism is the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightfully enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms. Such exceptionalist claims are well described by [James] Rachels as “the basic idea” that “human life is regarded as sacred, or at least as having a special importance” such that “non-human life” not only does not deserve “the same degree of moral protection” as humans, but has “no moral standing at all” whenever human privilege is at stake’.
2 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 115.
3 The second quote is from Thomas Berry, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10 (p. 5). The first quote was said by Berry on multiple occasions, and it appears at p. 7 of the same collection.
4 An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity, ed. by Debra L. Forthman, Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
5 Note, for example, the great range and diversity of life explored in the following titles: Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013); David Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017); David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010); M. D. Olmert, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009); Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016); Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016); Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
6 Robert M. Cover, ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review, 97.4 (1983), 4–68, at 10.
7 Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, at 1604, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
8 It should be noted that my generalizations here do not apply to Indigenous legal systems.
9 Cicero makes this comment in ‘The Speech of M. T. Cicero in Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus’ (M. T. Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu). See paragraph LIII, paragraph 146.
10 Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 7.
11 Theodore Roszak, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42, at 4.
12 David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), p. 5.
13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991), p. 240.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Paul Waldau
© Paul Waldau, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.03
In preparation for the workshop’s dialogue on ‘multiple ways of being and knowing’ in our shared ‘living Earth community’, I attempted to ascertain themes relating to the following question: how might an individual today choose actions that celebrate the plain fact that each of us is a member of a species that has only sometimes, and not often lately, been a responsible member of the Earth community? I present my findings in this exploratory piece.
My framing of these issues focuses particularly on the importance of different forms of humility. I suggest that different forms of humility are needed because each of us is a member of human-centered communities that have, whether intentionally or not, produced diverse harms beyond the species line that many individuals within our own species and, in particular, the major institutions of modern industrialized societies have long celebrated rather than condemned.
My framing also foregrounds our obvious animality, although again I want to spur my own thinking by using the plural ‘animalities’, since lives on this planet are unbelievably diverse and always embedded in a more-than-animal context. I refer here both to those nonhuman lives we name with words like ‘plant’ and phrases such as ‘the material world’ to denote those parts of the universe that our host culture overwhelmingly treats as non-living, and thus merely a resource for our use and benefit.
My experience over the last half-century has suggested to me that no rich form of ‘self-actualization’ is possible for us when humans claim to be separate and superior, as occurs habitually through the demarcating property of language that produces categories such as ‘humans and animals’. I take human exceptionalism to be the dominant narrative of our time, even though in our received wisdom traditions there are many profound formulations about recognizing the importance of both human and nonhuman ‘others’ whenever any human individual or group seeks full self-actualization.1 I offer here a few forthright statements that make plain the importance of such wisdom. The first is from Viktor Frankl.
[S]elf-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.2
A pair of comments from Thomas Berry takes the issue well beyond the species line:
[W]e must say that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
Indeed we cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.3
Beware Bootlegging. I also use the plural ‘self-actualizations’ in this chapter because I intentionally want to call out another issue — it does not follow that one’s own notions and/or attempts at self-actualization provide any sort of paradigm by which the self-actualization of other animals, whether human or not, can be measured. Instead, I go forward on the assumption that, in any group (and this gathering of chapters would provide a paradigmatic example of the following), there will be different forms of self-actualization. One widely successful form appears in service traditions, and yet other forms appear in meditation traditions. Many other forms appear in instances where individual humans have found a way to stand outside the penchant for self-preoccupation that individuals in our own species so often exhibit. In such instances, these individuals have thereby approached particularly fulsome forms of self-actualization.
Based on the personal and communal experiences that have led me to describe issues as I do above, and based on the challenges I tried to meet in my previous book-length projects (both single-author publications and the two edited collections A Communion of Subjects and An Elephant in the Room),4 I am currently finishing a book that will carry the title The Animal Invitation: Science, Ethics, Religion and Law in a More-Than-Human World. This book is an attempt to say what five different human domains — science, ethics, religion, law, and education — might look like if we took our animality seriously.
To introduce the issue further, I include next the opening two paragraphs of the book, after which I will try to sketch out ways in which I think each of the four eminently human efforts described in the subtitle — science, ethics, religion, and law — must always be living efforts (this claim, which is by no means novel in regard to any of these four domains, is related to how I discuss our own animality throughout the book). In my closing comments below, I will address both formal and informal education, since this theme is a meta-topic, as it were, of the chapters addressing science, ethics, religion and law.
Animals invite us. This world-constituting fact is true whether we are talking about humans inviting humans, or, the focus of this book, nonhumans inviting human awareness, co-existence, appreciation, and even awe. One domain after another of our human existence, including often our daily lives, reveals the astonishing variety and depth of these invitations.
It is both of these features — variety and depth — that are, tellingly, reflected in the human domains we know as ‘science,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘religion’ and ‘law.’ Admittedly, the great variety of approaches, which has spawned many different ways of talking and thinking about the animal invitation, reflects both deep acknowledgements and facile dismissals. Considered alone, the variety is revealing, for it reflects basic features, especially the finitudes, of our human capacities. But it is the depth evident in many humans’ recognition of the animal invitation which, though less commonly encountered than diversity, reflects best the fecundity and vivifying power of human thinking and action. As this book will show, human possibilities, narrow and broad, play out in the depth and variety of responses to the animal invitation that are evident in different human groups’ claims of identity, community, compassion, awareness, self-delusion, self-inflicted ignorance, and so much more.
In the following four sections, I raise the issue of whether our astonishing achievements in science, ethics, religion, and law are (i) helpfully seen as eminently animal achievements, and (ii) better understood when each of these four domains is discussed primarily as an ongoing commitment of our kind of animal that must be understood and experienced as ‘living now’, rather than ‘eternally fixed’ or as an ‘absolute truth’. Correspondingly, treatment of any of these domains as irrevocably fixed defeats what can be thought of as the vivifying and enabling genius of each of these living domains as a human achievement. I suggest in the book, then, that it takes truly living, responsive forms of each of these human achievements to move individual humans in the direction of full actualization of our human animality.
Human Science in a More-Than-Human World
That our sciences have organic features is strongly hinted in the long history of shifts in ideas and changes in governing paradigms across the centuries. Organic features of many sciences are also seen in the unbelievable rate of new discoveries in recent decades, for these discoveries have produced shifts in particular scientific communities’ dominant ways of thinking. I want to add, though, that it remains my impression (perhaps a result of my ‘education’) that the western science tradition in some ways still does not feature ‘living aspects’ quite as fully as do ethics, religion, and law.
Human Ethics in a More-Than-Human World
I’m only too aware that ethics has long been taught in the western intellectual tradition as a set of answers to questions such as ‘what is the right thing to do?’ and ‘what does it mean to be a moral and/or good person?’ Having taught ethics now for over twenty years, I do not think such formulations are helpful, nor do I think these formulations reflect that ethics is, and always needs to be, very alive indeed. For this reason, I have come to see such views of ethics as a failure to detect the true heartbeat that takes place as we embrace, develop, and seek full actualization of our human ethical abilities. A question that does prompt us to hear more clearly the heartbeat of our ethical abilities is what I have come to call ‘the root question’ of ethics, namely, ‘who are the others?’ This is an abbreviated version of what is, in our daily lives, a far more complicated rendition of this root question, which can be stated in a variety of ways — here’s one version that I think captures some of the animal and human genius of the abilities we call ‘ethics’: ‘Who are the others about whom I should care given that I have finite abilities and there are, as a practical matter, many other limits on my ability to care?’
The principal point in the book’s chapter on ethics is that such root questions, and of course the abilities that we use in pursuing our own answer, reflect what can only be described as eminently animal abilities. I do not mean to suggest with ‘eminently’ in the prior sentence that each and every kind of animal features the high-level abilities we call ethics — my guess is that only some animals do (caring about ‘others’ is more common, I suspect, in mammals, but there is much to suggest that some birds and a variety of non-mammals also have some feature in their life that, in effect, can be described as a version of the ‘who are the others?’ question).5
In this chapter, I suggest that one cannot understand an ability of the ethical sort without affirming that ability’s animal origin and nature. As a segue into the following comments about humans’ spiritual/religious awarenesses, let me add that I have come, after a half-century of studying religious traditions, to think that much, if not all, of great value in our religious traditions follows from the eminently animal nature of ethics. Religious traditions are of particular interest to me on account of their following aspects: the role of narrative; the pervasive degree to which our worlds feature sacredness and gift in connection with real places and other living beings; and the insightful observation that relational epistemologies are crucial to each of us recognizing much of who we are.
Human Religion in a More-Than-Human World
Here I tread on sensitive ground — I do this intentionally and reverentially, recognizing that there is no single definition of religion that I might employ to argue that ‘religion must be alive in order help humans self-actualize.’
As I get older, I’m less inclined to preface the following claim with mea culpa, but perhaps I should as a way to underscore my theme of ‘humilities’ — much that is called ‘religion’ fails to help ‘adherents’ or ‘believers’ self-actualize (in the sense I use this term in these short comments). Yet our spiritual/religious domains seem to me, after a half-century of immersion in studying religion, to include a great variety of options, some of which embrace responsibly rather than repudiate what it means for religious awareness to respect and nurture our many animal-based abilities, finitudes, fragilities, organic births, decline, and eventual death. Religious awareness, when it acknowledges our animality in responsible, foundational ways, will itself be truly alive and living in every sense that I am an animal now alive and living.
Human Law in a More-Than-Human World
Law (by which I mean ‘legal systems’, of which there are at least seven distinct major traditions and obviously many different minor variations) may also seem, like science, somewhat of a challenge to fit into the ‘living’ paradigm. Yet any study of comparative law makes it obvious how fully constructed each individual legal system is, and how such ‘construction’ has features that are easily discerned to be ‘living’, in the sense that I’m using that broad term in this short paper. This can be observed in these two comments by Robert Cover:
To live in a legal world requires that one know not only the precepts, but also their connections to possible and plausible states of affairs.6
Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.7
The need for stability in legal systems, especially as they are part of complex societies, creates features and pressures that tend to make legal systems ‘conservative’, ‘predictable’, and subject to forces that easily and often have made enactment and enforcement of ‘law’ the prerogative of reactionary forces.8 Consider the exclusion implied in Cicero’s seemingly inclusive comment that ‘we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.’9 The ‘we’ today might seem to refer to the human group alone, but Cicero through this claim in actuality hides two recurring facts. Human groups now use, and seemingly forever have used, ‘law’ (developed legal systems) to subordinate not only nonhuman animals and the more-than-human Earth, but also marginalized, politically powerless human groups.
Although the contemporary movement widely known as ‘animal law’ has for the last two decades challenged such a narrow construction of law, public policy circles today nonetheless remain ignorant of and unconcerned about the ‘animal question’. There are changes afoot today by which the living features of law can be seen, but since, characteristically, ‘the political trumps the legal’, the full potential of public policy for the more-than-human world remains, as of yet, unrealized.
Some Final Comments on Human Education
The education theme is, as noted above, a meta-theme in the forthcoming book. In my Animal Studies — An Introduction, I worked with both formal and informal education, both of which are encapsulated by an observation made by the English philosopher Stephen Clark: ‘one’s ethical, as well as one’s ontological framework is determined by what entities one is prepared to notice or take seriously’.10 I entered the academic world because, for me, it is a place a daring, and so much so that, at its best, the academic world fosters critical thinking that allows for self-criticism along the lines of Theodore Roszak’s ‘But then let us admit that the academy has very rarely been a place of daring’.11 David Orr adds a further dimension to this discussion, extending the issue across the species line — ‘The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth’.12
One way in which our society has been equipping ‘educated humans’ to be ‘effective vandals’ (or, in Aldo Leopold’s phrasing, ‘conqueror of the land-community’ rather than ‘plain member and citizen of it’) is categorical division of humans from other animals.13 This framing defeats us even as it prompts ignorance that leads to great harms to other animals and their local communities. Teachers and students who insist on language that foregrounds a ‘human/animal dualism’ seem to me to have less chance, often none at all, of accurately assessing themselves or counseling other humans in ways that lead to greater prospects of self-actualization. Why do I suggest this? Because our evident mammality, primatehood, and ape-ness are radically (that is, at the root) denied by the dualism.
A key feature of our local formal education — the two-part division of ‘higher education’ into the sciences, on the one hand, and the ‘arts and humanities’, on the other — continues to foster the notion that human possibilities are the paradigm of achievement for any living being. In effect, the two-part university has features that legitimize human exceptionalism in a more-than-human world — this is one way that it equips us to be effective vandals of our shared world. Moreover, education further vandalizes in those areas of formal education where the ideology ‘all humans matter’ inadvertently masks harms done to many human animals as well. Thus, in the book, I suggest that teaching about science, ethics, religion, and law in virtually all mainline institutions today presents a face of human exceptionalism that goes beyond harms to nonhumans and their communities because, ironically, formal education in practice continues to hold in place the privilege of only some humans.
A Near-Term Task
I have come to think of our personal and social tasks as finding ways to re- assert our animality, even though these fundamental features of our lives are hidden in plain sight, as it were. These animal abilities are, I suggest, the very condition of our (i) doing science thoroughly and effectively, (ii) pursuing ‘living’ forms of ethics, (iii) fostering diverse opportunities for spiritual and religious awareness that are truly alive and free, and (iv) creating legal systems that create and project for ourselves a future of responsible membership in the larger community.
A Longer-Term Task
My sense that we can do such work by returning to a full, gracious acknowledgment of our own animality needs, I think, to be supplemented by affirmations of the fact that ‘our larger community’ includes more than animals alone — insights about the plant world are cascading into our awareness again by virtue of creative scientific work, and our connection to the whole earth is, of course, something that many small-scale cultures have long known. The senses of ‘gift’ and ‘community’ found in writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, and Linda Hogan reveal that our human forebears knew a great deal about setting the stage for the emergence of a larger community and for forms of self-transcendence that such a community offers, and thereby helps make our own self-actualization possible and fuller.
Let me end on notes that are intentionally provocative and personal — I have come to think of denials of humans’ evident animality as cowardice in the face of reality. I am an animal, and so are members of my human community. I love them not in spite of their animality, but because of their animality. And I have come to recognize that I cannot ‘know myself’, nor it seems to me can any human come to know the possibilities of their life well, without coming to terms with the plain fact that we are now and have always been and will always be animals. By acknowledging our animality, we stand to open up key possibilities for self-actualization. This is why my forthcoming book, as well as the present volume in which this chapter appears, attempts to explore our scientific, ethical, religious, and social sensibilities that permit forms of life and a rule of law that are fair to all members of our extended, larger community.
Bibliography
Abram, David, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010).
Ackerman, Jennifer, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016).
Balcombe, Jonathan, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
Bekoff, Marc, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).
Berry, Thomas, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10.
Cicero, M. T., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu
Clark, Stephen, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Cover, Robert M., ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Forward: Nomos and Narrative’, 97 Harvard Law Review, 4 (1983).
— ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).
Forthman, Debra L., Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau, eds, An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
Haskell, David, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017).
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013).
Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991).
Olmert, M. D., Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009).
Orr, David, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994).
Roszak, Theodore, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42.
Shubin, Neil, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
Waldau, Paul, Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
1 I have previously defined ‘human exceptionalism’ in my book Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), as follows (p. 8): ‘Human exceptionalism is the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightfully enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms. Such exceptionalist claims are well described by [James] Rachels as “the basic idea” that “human life is regarded as sacred, or at least as having a special importance” such that “non-human life” not only does not deserve “the same degree of moral protection” as humans, but has “no moral standing at all” whenever human privilege is at stake’.
2 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 115.
3 The second quote is from Thomas Berry, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10 (p. 5). The first quote was said by Berry on multiple occasions, and it appears at p. 7 of the same collection.
4 An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity, ed. by Debra L. Forthman, Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
5 Note, for example, the great range and diversity of life explored in the following titles: Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013); David Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017); David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010); M. D. Olmert, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009); Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016); Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016); Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
6 Robert M. Cover, ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review, 97.4 (1983), 4–68, at 10.
7 Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, at 1604, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
8 It should be noted that my generalizations here do not apply to Indigenous legal systems.
9 Cicero makes this comment in ‘The Speech of M. T. Cicero in Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus’ (M. T. Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu). See paragraph LIII, paragraph 146.
10 Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 7.
11 Theodore Roszak, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42, at 4.
12 David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), p. 5.
13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991), p. 240.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)