The French philosophers I’ve routinely encountered in literary studies – to wit, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari – have oscillated between the dizzyingly stimulating and the infuriatingly unintelligible. In the emergent thread within ecological-literary academe dubbed Critical Animal Studies, Derrida’s essay “The Animal that Therefore I Am (and more to follow)” has assumed a prominent space. In between quite lucid and polemical statements (like condemning the conceptual divide between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ as a “crime”), he can be bafflingly elusive, addicted to endlessly involuted puns. Mostly the essay convinces me that Derrida didn’t understand cats. Likewise, I attempted at times to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s fashionable concept of “becoming-animal”, frankly without feeling I fully understood what they (or I) were doing. But then I’ve always been a rubbish philosopher/theorist. I respond rather to their poetics, their intriguing metaphorical ventures, their colourful word-play – precisely what, in the eyes of some of my academic colleagues, disqualifies them from being philosophers at all.
Baptiste Morizot – though he refers glancingly to all these
predecessors in his book Ways of Being Alive (Polity Press) – is, thankfully,
eminently lucid. Of a younger generation (he is 40-ish), he is a lecturer in
philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Marseille. He has several other books to
his name, which I’ve not yet read, but which are evidently related in theme to Ways
of Being Alive. This title, though a fair translation of the original
French Manières d’être vivant, sounds unhappily a bit like a popular
self-help manual. Though it is concerned with trying to outline a way of
living better – that is, in more fruitful conjunction with the non-human fellow-denizens
of our world – it is much more than a set of rules to live by. It is too nuanced
and complex, too ambiguous, too lyrical for that.
It seems there’s something of a trend towards, not
quite denying “red-in-tooth-and-claw” Darwinism in our conceptualisation of
nature, but counter-balancing that view by focussing on mutualisms, symbioses,
collaborations. One branch of this trend is concerned to blur if not altogether
disburse the putative division between ourselves and other creatures. Most of
the skills and abilities we usually boast of as uniquely human are, it turns
out, shared by many other animals, from gorillas to ants; we are far closer to
one another than we are different. Moreover, we are scarcely divisible from the
environment we so gaily swashbuckle through as if we own it. After all, each
one of us is mostly water (Morizot has a charming chapter suggesting that we
still pass on and carry saline elements of the ancient seas in which once lived
our most distant ancestors – sponges.) A leading light in this field, Donna
Haraway, likes to point out that of all the cells that astonishingly combine to
form a person, only about 10% contain human DNA: the rest is microbial,
bacterial, viral – non-human elements all busy constructing and combining and
repurposing one another through “horizontal gene transfer” (elaborated in David
Quammen’s rather annoyingly chatty book, The Tangled Tree). On this
view, the human “self” is something of an illusion, a useful fiction that has
unfortunately run amok on the planet. Similarly, there is no clear line between
“culture” and “nature”: “nature” is not “out there”, a mere resource void of intrinsic
meaning – the stance that has permitted us to exploit and wreck the biosphere so
shamelessly. Rather, “nature” is within us, too. Hence Haraway writes instead
of “natureculture”; others of “biohumanism”, or “posthumanism”. Haraway
contributes to a wonderful collection of essays edited by Anna Tsing entitled
(echoing Morizot), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, which ranges from
microbes to lichens, ants to salmon and (again echoing Morizot) wolves.
A related trend is also emerging: the fantastic
symbiotic relationships amongst plants (without whose presence, incidentally,
we would simply cease to exist – would never have existed). A slew of new books
includes Merlin Sheldrake’s delightful Entangled Life (about fungi),
Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and, pre-eminently, Richard
Powers’ astounding novel about humans and their trees, The Overstory. So
it’s perhaps not surprising to find Powers contributing a Foreword to Ways
of Being Alive. Of Morizot’s work Powers writes:
The view from the heights
of this book is vertiginous and exhilarating. Morizot explores life at all
gauges, from the cell to the entire biosphere. He peers through the longest
lens of time, backwards across billions of years and forwards into an endlessly
unfolding future. His words reawaken consciousness to all its possibilities.
For Morizot, “the best analogy for understanding the evolutionary nature of the
biosphere is that of a poetic fire: a creative fire”.
For some, that might smack too much of a wannabe
spirituality, of discredited gods, or a primum mobile, or ether, or a Herbert
Spencer-like Creative Principle. But it’s an analogy, not a statement of
religious fact. Though Morizot does entertain certain refurbished notions of animism
(again, he is far from alone in this), and though he wants in a sense to re-sacralise
our relations with the biosphere, he is not trying to entrench a pre-determining
dogma. It is impossible, he says in an endnote, to altogether evade metaphor
and analogy, even in the sciences (our own scientist-poet Douglas Livingstone
knew this). Rather, the writer-philosopher participates in the enigmatic creative
forces of the biosphere by being poetic, by applying the surprising
recombinations and penetrative engagement of poetry in the very attentiveness
of language. Morizot’s own rich lyricism enacts, beyond either logic or earthy
pragmatics, a search for a “complete style of attention”. John Felstiner, in
his book Can Poetry Save the Earth?, calls it “poetry’s exact enlivening
touch for nature’s common surprises.”
Not that either philosophical logic or worldly
practicality is missing from Ways of Being Alive. Morizot supports his
arguments with references to a wide range of philosophers, from Kant to
Nietzsche, Dewey to Rawls, Spinoza to Latour. On the other count, his
perspectives are deeply informed by in-the-field, tramping-through-the-snow
work, tracking wolves through the mountains of central France. The
reintroduction of wolves here is one of those small-scale success stories of “rewilding”,
to use the favourite term of George Monbiot (another compatible, if more
sociological, thinker-writer). Having been raised alongside many wild animals
by my naturalist mother, this is the most fascinating aspect of the book for
me. And particularly intriguing is an episode of communicating with certain
wolves by mimicking their howls. And they reply! Or do they? What could be
going through a wolf’s mind at that moment? We can’t know exactly, of course,
but something is going on. As my mother demonstrated a thousand times,
communication between species happens, can be nurtured and invented. It
is a hint that animals can be “intercessors” between us and the world, a kind
of doorway to recognise our still deeper “affiliations to plants and bacteria,
which lie further back in our common genealogy”. They are like “ferrymen or smugglers”,
connecting us in mutual respect, however mysteriously. They embody a sensory
connection lost to too many urbanised moderns, the product in large part of “a
dualist philosophical anthropology, which runs from Judeo-Christianity to
Freudianism … the hierarchical dualism that contrasts humans with animals”. Indeed,
many of us don’t even recognise that we’re desperate for deeper connectivity,
one which nevertheless respects the difference of the Other. Morizot uses the
task of tracking of the wolves through the forests as an example (I’m reminded
a little of Louis Liebenberg’s work in The Art of Tracking: The origins of
science). Here’s a particularly arresting passage, exemplifying a “human
openness to the outside”:
To deploy together all
the vibrating antennae of sensation, perception, interpretation, deduction,
intuition, imagination. We need the incandescent alloy of a vibratory
sensitivity to others in their otherness, a participant perception, an
interpretive and imaginative activity of great boldness and caution, a rigorous
and wild activity of deduction, a creation of hypotheses that is dishevelled in
its heuristics and perfectly reasonable in its conclusions, a general openness
to signs, an investigative use of the sensing and walking human body … We can
try, although we often get it wrong, to translate [their wealth of meanings] a
bit.
Wonderful, and suitably humble. And it’s now almost
axiomatic that there are tangible ecological benefits to the reintroduction of
an apex predator. Morizot (like Monbiot in his book Feral) cites the oft-aired
case of wolves being returned to Yellowstone Park in the US, with dramatic
impacts on the whole ecology. (I did once talk to a Finnish wolf-researcher,
mind you, who judged the original assessment of that impact “a bit premature”.
It would also incidentally be fascinating to compare Morizot’s book with Mark
Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf and Barry Lopez’s Arctic
Dreams.) In any event, as with the reinvigoration of bison populations in
Poland, bears in Greece, wild boar in Italy, human-interface problems can
accrue. We’re all too familiar with this sort of thing in southern Africa, with
jackals in Karoo sheep country and leopards in the Western Cape, not to mention
elephants in Botswana. One of the outfits Morizot works with is called CanOvis –
dog/sheep – who try to intercede, work out liveable solutions, that can benefit
both wolves and the sheep-farmers on whose flocks the canines inevitably prey.
The French wolf situation is in effect a case-study, a
real-world synecdoche, for a global crisis. The dynamic of human domination –
with firearms, gin-traps, poisons, axes, ploughs, fences – by way of protecting
crops and livestock, has everywhere resulted in catastrophic declines in the
populations of almost all classes of other worldly inhabitants. What we do with,
and say about, other animals (and plants and insects, fish and fungi) has to be
evaluated against the fact that today, Morizot laments, “we are creating from
scratch a mute and absurd cosmos which is very uncomfortable to live in, on an
existential, individual and collective scale. … [W]e are generating global
warming and a biodiversity crisis that concretely threaten Earth’s capacity to
provide human beings with habitable conditions.” Not only potentially uninhabitable
for us; the catastrophe means that an infinitely variable and
unpredictable gamut of evolutionary possibility has been snuffed out.
I’ve mentioned in passing a bunch of other related
books partly to emphasise that Morizot is increasingly not alone in his broad
thinking. This might also make him seem a bit less than entirely original.
After all, as early as 1798 William Blake was lamenting that some people saw a
tree as merely “a green thing that stands in the way” instead of a flourishing
world of delight. Prophets and scholars of anthropogenic environmental meltdown
have scarcely been lacking over the last century– thousands of them, from
Thoreau to Naomi Klein, Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg, Aldo Leopold to Bill
McKibben – culminating in terrifying books such as James Hansen’s Storms of
my Grandfathers and David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.
Compared to the latter rather swingeing compilation of alarming statistics, Ways
of Being Alive is infinitely more subtle and sensually engaged. If the underlying
message is similar, it is nevertheless one that needs to be said again – and
again and again. Morizot does so with unusual density, complexity and beauty.
He is, novelist Alain Damasio writes in an Afterword to the book, a bit of a “mongrel”,
a “failed novelist” who forges a peculiarly elegant prose from philosophical
ideas, enriched by his living those ideas through in pawprints and scats.
Is there a way out or through, in Morizot’s vision?
One route, as I mentioned earlier, is an appeal to the values suffusing ancient
animism. This is not to recommend an impossible return to some atavistic
primitivism, rather something newly invented to suit our times. But the values remain
pertinent, “namely complex social relations of reciprocity, exchange and predation
which are not peace-loving or pacific … but are political in a still enigmatic
sense, and call for forms of pacification and conciliation, of mutualist and
considerate cohabitation.” Interestingly, Morizot evokes our familiar African
concept of ubuntu as an analogy. To achieve this, we each need to become
“diplomats of interdependence”, the “guardians” of a “community of
interdependencies”. In this diplomatic mode, the fossilised shibboleths and
stereotypes are left behind for a kind of space of creative ambiguity. A
capacity to entertain mysteriousness itself seems paradoxically key. In Morizot’s
wolf work, the more he learns and hears from all sides, through tracking,
howling, thermal imaging at night, swapping anecdotes with shepherds, the more
exceptions, enigmas, ambiguities emerge:
Dogs, wolves, sheep, the
shapes merge into one metamorphic dialogue: you are my ancestor against whom I
fight; you are my old prey that I defend at the risk of my own life; I am your
descendant who sometimes plays with you, and whom I kill when you get close to
my protégés who were still my booty only yesterday; I am your ancestor,
who desires you and deceives you.
As this might indicate, “becoming-diplomat” means
discarding the hard lines we so often and instinctively draw between Them and
Us. It means recognising that each discerned entity is in fact many identities
and impulses woven together. There are many "ways of being alive". Each contact, each situation, each meeting
requires an open attentiveness that will allow for an individuated and
appropriate response. (This is, I would say, rather Zen.) There’s an underpinning
of necessary idealism in this strategy, but Morizot is not naïve about it. It
makes negotiation harder, not easier, but also ever more vital. (He likes Donna
Haraway’s felicitous phrase, “staying with the trouble”.) He knows all too well
that his notion of “adjusted consideration” towards animals, rivers, forests is
regarded by “the men in suits who rule the world” – the executives of global Petro-government
who signally failed last week to achieve anything of life-saving substance at
COP27 – as childish and irrational tosh. Let’s face it, profit-driven neoliberals
are unlikely to be persuaded by this kind of thinking. But we have to try. In
his Epilogue, which manages to be simultaneously grim and ebullient, Morizot concludes:
Why should we treat the
living world with consideration? Well, because it is this world that made our
bodies and our minds, capable of emotions, joy, meaning. It is the living world
that sculpted all our faculties, including the most emancipatory, in a
constitutive interweaving with other life forms. It is the living world that
keeps us upright in the face of death, by its continuous and joyful infusion of
life (this is called, among other things, “breathing”). Unplug this connection
to the living world, and it’s all over.
*****
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