As the final part of the Integrative Seminar, the capstone course of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness master’s program, I gave this presentation as part of a day-long seminar with twelve of my fellow graduates in May 2013. The accompanying paper can be found here, and a shorter introduction is available here.
A sole treatise is all that the world has inherited of the philosophical thought of Lady Anne Finch, Viscountess of Conway, yet aspects of her unique system and cosmology can be traced in quiet echoes through the work of several of the great names that came after her, from Leibniz, Blake, and Goethe, to Bergson and Whitehead, to contemporary feminist and ecological thinkers. Her legacy is obscured, it seems, primarily by her gender, for she lived in a time when a university education was denied to women and her name was not even included on the title page of her only publication.[1] Except in rare cases, such as in the work of Leibniz, Anne Conway’s influence on subsequent thinkers can only be traced by a shadowy similarity of content, rather than directly by name. Yet she has been called “the profoundest and most learned of the female metaphysical writers of England”[2] by James Crossley, and “the most important woman philosopher in seventeenth century England” by Sarah Hutton.[3]
Conway was the “Heroine pupil”[4] of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who said in his dedication to her of Antidote Against Atheisme that she is one “whose Genius I know to be so speculative, and Wit so penetrant, that in the knowledge of things as well Natural as Divine, you have not onely out-gone all of your own Sex, but even of that other also, whose ages have not given them over-much the start of you.”[5] In his letters to Conway, More addresses her as, in Hutton’s words, an “exceptional woman: a kind of secular saint, remarkable for her virtue and piety, not the equal of men but their superior.”[6] What can we find of this ‘exceptional woman’ in the single manuscript we have of her own words? What was Conway articulating that More, along with the other men of Conway’s intellectual circle, held her in such admiration? Conway was a truly independent mind, drawing from such diverse sources as Plato and Origen, Behmenism and Quakerism, and the Lurianic Kabbalah,[7] to craft a critique of the early modern philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, and even aspects of More’s work as well.[8] To quote Carol Wayne White at length, Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy
may be viewed as an invaluable cultural artifact of the early modern period, depicting Conway as a high Renaissance thinker who keenly integrated occult knowledge, alchemy, ancient wisdom, and the new mode of organizing reason, or “science” represented by the mechanists. In it, she introduced a conceptualization of “processional nature” that is measured and authorized by the worth of ancient and marginalized wisdoms. The result is a unique Christian cosmology or mystical naturalism that affirms a continuum of “life-affirming impulses” stretching from God through the most inconspicuous minutiae of perceived materiality.[9]
In the Principles we are presented with a “cross-fertilisation of Cartesianism and Platonism”[10] planted in the rich soils of ancient esotericism and watered generously with Conway’s own original thought. Although brief, it is the fullest philosophical system written in English by a woman in the seventeenth century.[11]
Conway presents a vision of the continuum of all existence, argued as a rationally deducible religious truth.[12] Conway’s treatise opens with a rewriting of the Trinity and a delineation of the three substances or species of existence: God, Christ, and Creation. Conway writes, “In God there is no time, change, arrangement, or division of parts.”[13] She describes the Trinity not as “three distinct persons”[14] but rather as a “triune deity,” with distinct powers rather than parts: “a triplicity of God, divine wisdom, and divine will.”[15] Conway goes on to say of God that “He is also in a true and real sense an essence distinct from his creatures, although not divided or separate from them but present in everything most closely and intimately in the highest degree.”[16] She differentiates God from God’s creatures not dualistically but rather as one end of an infinite continuum is differentiated from its other end, like an infinite spectrum of light fading towards dimness.[17] God is simultaneously distinct and above Creation, while “intimately present” in all created beings as well.[18]
Drawing on Kabbalistic influences, Conway describes God diminishing God’s own brilliant light for the sake of God’s creatures.[19] In the space of diminished light arises the second species or substance, the Middle Nature between God and creation: the Messiah, the Logos, Christ.[20] Conway maintains the divinity of Christ not as a person of a triune God ontologically separate from Creation, but rather as the Mediator between God and Creation.[21] “The first concept,” Conway writes on the Trinity, “is the infinite God himself, considered above and beyond his creation; the second is the same God insofar as he is the Messiah; the third is the same God insofar as he is with the Messiah in creatures.”[22] These three substances, the only three substances as Conway clearly emphasizes, share spirit as a universal characteristic. “Deity was present in everything,” White comments, “most closely and intimately, and in the highest degree.”[23] Yet for all that God, Christ, and Creation hold in common they remain infinitely differentiated, not in essence but in expression with relation to mutability, and therefore also in relation to time.
The first of the three kinds of being, God, is altogether immutable. “God was always a creator and will always be a creator because otherwise he would change.”[24] Conway goes on to say that “while he is in time, he is not bound by time.”[25] Because God is absolutely perfect God does not move toward greater perfection, and without movement or change there is perforce no time in God; God is eternally at eternity.
God’s creatures are both within time and bound by it, and therefore mutable and susceptible to change. Such mutability arises from what Conway calls the “indifference of will,” which “is the basis for all mutability and corruptibility in creatures, so that there would be no evil in creatures if they were not mutable.”[26] This indifference of the will Conway believes is something God does not have because of God’s divine goodness:
For this reason God is both a most free agent and a most necessary one, so that he must do whatever he does to and for his creatures since his infinite wisdom, goodness, and justice are a law to him which cannot be superceded.[27]
God is immutable, bound by goodness but free from time, while creatures are mutable toward goodness or evil and are subject to the motion of time. It is interesting to note that the indifference, or freedom, of the will of which Conway writes is not only a property of human beings, but of all creatures. In this particular sense she does not give humans a privileged position in Creation.
Christ, as the Middle Nature, the soul generated by God’s partially diminished light[28]—the space the Kabbalah calls tsimtsum[29]—shares in both the nature of God and the nature of Creation. Christ, unlike God, is mutable, but only toward an ever-increasing perfection of goodness; unlike creatures, Christ cannot change toward evil. Conway writes, “Christ cannot become evil but he can become good and consequently he partakes both of divinity and creatureliness as well as eternity and time.”[30] Like the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, Conway articulated the existence of a “fluid intermediary” between spirit and matter, but in Conway’s system, as Jacqueline Broad writes, Conway differed from her contemporaries by “advocating a monistic theory of created substances.”[31] Conway is clear, in an unnamed refutation of Spinoza, that her system is not pantheism because if all were one substance “sin and devils would be nothing but parts or the slightest modification of this divine being.”[32] Nor is it dualism because Christ is the Mediator between God and Creation, a being that participates in both divine and created substance, permeating both and uniting them through love.
In Conway’s system Christ seems to play a role differing from the orthodox Christian views of her time. Later in her life Conway converted to Quakerism, and it was through some of her Quaker ties, as well as her reading of the Kabbalah and other ancient texts, that allowed her to question the universality of Christian doctrine. Her treatise shows sympathies for other religious perspectives: for example, when she is rewriting the Trinity as three distinct powers instead of persons, she notes how the reference to distinct persons may be “a stumbling block and offense to Jews, Turks, and other people.”[33] In White’s words, Conway also questioned, “How could Christianity be a universal religion if Christian soteriology required a belief in the historical figure of Jesus Christ?”[34] The Christ of Conway’s philosophical system is a mediating being called by many names, not only Christ and the “soul of the Messiah,” but also the Kabbalistic Adam Kadmon, [35] the Middle Nature not made or created by God, but generated by God.[36] “Such a mediator is necessary by the very nature of things,” writes Conway, “because otherwise a gap would remain and one extreme would have been united with the other extreme without a mediator, which is impossible and against the nature of things.”[37] The Middle Nature unites “the creator with his creatures, in which union their happiness lay.”[38] The Christ of Conway’s philosophy, as the loving mediator, is not dissimilar to Plato’s realm of metaxy, in which daemons, such as Eros and Logos, carry prayers and blessings between mortals and gods.
Anne Conway was introduced to Henry More by her brother John Finch who was studying under More at Cambridge University.[39] Conway had not always held all the views she expressed in her posthumously published treatise, and came to More with several questions regarding God’s goodness and justice, as well as the nature of the soul.[40] In a letter dated 1652 Conway writes, “Upon the Reading of your Poem of the Prae-existence of the Soul, and serious thinking of it, I desir’d to be satisfied in Four Particulars, which are these.”
First, Whether God did create the Matter for the Enjoyment of Souls, since they fell by it?
Secondly, Whether the Soul could Enjoy the Matter without being Clothed in Corporeity; and if it could not, how it can be the Fall of the Soul that makes it Assume a Body?
Thirdly, Upon Supposition most of the Souls fell; Why did not all Assume Bodies together: And how Adam can be said to be the first Man, and all Men to Fall in him, since they Fell before: And how the Souls of Beasts and Plants came into Bodies?
Fourthly, How Man can be Restor’d, to what he Fell from; And why the Devils that Fell; cannot? Why Christ’s Death should Extend more to One than to the Other?[41]
As Terryl Givens comments on these questions, such genuine inquiry into the preexistence of the soul without dismissal had “little precedent or parallel” in the history of philosophy, especially during the early modern period.[42] Conway continued in her pursuit of these and other related questions in her philosophical studies and intellectual salons, and finally offered her own answers to some of them in the Principles. Her understanding of the relation of spirit to matter, which arguably is the primary subject of her treatise, reconciles many of the questions she posed to More in the aforementioned letter, from how the soul relates to the human body, to the souls of other species, and finally to the restoration of all who have fallen away from God.
Conway argues that all of Creation, as the third substance of being next to Christ and God, is a single substance. All of creation is one spiritual substance, a continuum from body to soul, from spirit to matter. For Conway, the unity of created substance explains how the soul and body can relate to each other, the causal connection between mind and body that Descartes saw as completely incompatible and distinct.[43] In the same language that she uses to describe the continuum of God through Christ to Creation as a gradual diminution of God’s light, she writes of body as only the darkened form of spiritual light. “Truly,” she writes, “every body is a spirit and nothing else, and it differs from a spirit only insofar as it is darker. . . Consequently, the distinction between spirit and body is only modal and incremental, not essential and substantial.”[44] Conway’s primary influence on her belief in a spirit-matter continuum is her reading of the Lurianic Kabbalah,[45] a version of the Kabbalah drawn from the teachings of Isaac Luria, a Jewish zaddik from the sixteenth century whose writings carry strains of Plotinus’ and Origen’s thought.[46]
Illustrating her point further Conway writes, “spirit and body are of one original nature and substance, and that body is nothing but fixed and condensed spirit, and spirit nothing but volatile body or body made subtle.”[47] Both spirit and matter, according to Conway, can be located in time and space and have mutual influence upon each other.[48] In this latter respect, Conway holds a position contrary to More and the other Cambridge Platonists, who believe that the body is impenetrable and divisible, while spirit is penetrable and indivisible.[49] Carolyn Merchant, who sees great value in Conway’s philosophy overall, nevertheless charges that Conway’s system is “simply a reduction of all reality to the idealist category of spirit.”[50] Broad points out that “one might be led to believe that when Conway collapses the distinction between soul and body, she is more concerned to emphasise the spirituality of matter, rather than the other way around.”[51] But as Broad goes on to emphasize, “Conway’s spiritual particles are not quite ‘spiritual’ in the orthodox sense, because they are always extended and (potentially) divisible and impenetrable.”[52] Furthermore, unlike the Platonic and Cartesian views, Conway has “unorthodox conceptions of bodies, as alive, self-moving, perceptive, and penetrable,” and she has “materialistic views of the soul, as extended, divisible, and capable of being penetrable.”[53] Rather than merely collapsing all of reality into the category of spirit as Merchant suggests, Conway seems to be emphasizing the similarity of spirit and matter and their affinity as gradations of a single substance that is neither spirit nor matter essentially, but characterized simultaneously by material and spiritual properties. That spirit and matter are the same substance explains how they are able to relate to each other, but it is their distinction that allows them to be in relationship, which is required for their evolution and movement toward perfection. Both difference and similarity, as Conway understands it, are required for the purposeful motion of Creation to exist.
Conway was introduced to philosophy through Cartesianism, taught to her by More through their correspondence.[54] She was not taught to take Descartes’ system as dogma, however, and in the end her own philosophy became a refutation of the Cartesian mind-body dualism: she even went so far as to call her treatise “anti-Cartesianism.”[55] The primary question she puts to Descartes, More, and others who hold similar views, is the interaction problem: if bodies are impenetrable and divisible and souls are penetrable and indivisible, how can they possibly interact? She argues that impenetrability is the mode of matter rather than its essence, and that matter can be penetrated by substance when in a subtler, more spiritual form.[56] She offers the metaphor of iron, which cannot be penetrated by another “equally course body” but can be penetrated by a body more subtle than it: “namely, by fire, which enters it and penetrates all its parts.”[57] So it is also with the soul and its body that they are able to be intimately present in one another as fire is to iron.
The soul has an affinity for its body because they are alike; they are one substance expressing itself in opposite modalities. Conway draws an analogy between, on the one hand, the body-soul relationship and, on the other hand, the relationship, love, and cooperation of a wife and husband.[58] But unlike other philosophies that use gendered metaphor for the soul and body, Conway emphasizes the similarity between women and men rather than how they differentiate to explain their love for each other. As Broad writes, “Her argument relies upon the supposition that men and women love one another because they have the same nature.”[59] Furthermore, Conway writes of the need the soul has for the body to be complete; the body retains the image of the spirit so that it might exist as a being:
Spirit is light or the eye looking at its own proper image, and the body is the darkness which receives this image. And when the spirit beholds it, it is as if someone sees himself in a mirror. But he cannot see himself reflected in the same way in clear air or in any diaphanous body, since the reflection of an image requires a certain opacity, which we call body. . . Just as every spirit needs a body to receive and reflect its image, it also needs a body to retain the image.[60]
In order for a person to have memory her spirit must have a body, for the body is what retains the image of the spirit. “Every spirit has its own body and every body its own spirit,” Conway writes.[61]
Seemingly in response to the first two of her own questions to More about the soul, Conway speaks of the “great love and desire which spirits or souls have for bodies, and especially those bodies with which they are united and in which they dwell.”[62] Not only this, but it is the goodness of the body that moves the soul to love it, a goodness which is shared by the nature of the soul—a view starkly contrasted with both the Platonic and Cartesian conceptions of the body.[63]
One position from which Conway argues for the unity of the soul with the body is from the experience of pain—something with which Conway was deeply familiar. From a young age Conway suffered chronic ill health and severe pain, primarily in the form of incapacitating headaches that left her bedridden for long periods of time.[64] She was often so weak she took to conducting her philosophical salons in her own bedroom—a practice tremendously uncommon for the time.[65] It is interesting to note that she wrote the Principles during her last two years of life, when her health and physical pain were at their worst.[66] In reference to the concept of soul-body dualism she writes,
Why does the spirit or soul suffer so with bodily pain? For if when united to the body it has no corporeality or bodily nature, why is it wounded or grieved when the body is wounded, whose nature is so different? . . . If one says that only the body feels pain but not the soul, this contradicts the principle of those who affirm that the body has no life or perception.[67]
It is on this subject of the ontological status of matter with which Conway most strongly disagrees with Descartes, Hobbes, More, and other like-minded dualists: is matter dead and inert, or is it vital and perceptive?[68] Based on her initial arguments for the continuum of all reality and the intimate presence of God in God’s creatures, she asks, “Since every creature shares certain attributes with God, I ask what attribute produces dead matter, or body, which is incapable of life and sense for eternity?”[69] In White’s words, Conway “asserted that all substances have some element, or at least potential possession, of thought or mentality.”[70] From this position Conway argues further that animals are not soulless automatons as Descartes declared, but rather they too, like human beings, “have some kind of spirit which possesses thought, sense, love, and various other properties.”[71]
The vitality Conway saw running through all of Creation, and the unity of nature, led her to perceive “a certain universal love in all creatures for each other.”[72] It is this perspective held by Conway that led such ecologically oriented thinkers as Merchant and White to draw on her philosophy for an ecological ethic. Merchant writes on Conway’s philosophical system:
Its emphasis on the life of all things as gradations of soul, its lack of a separate distinction between matter and spirit, its principle of an immanent activity permeating nature, and its reverence for the nurturing power of the earth endowed it with an ethic of the inherent worth of everything alive.[73]
Meanwhile, from White’s perspective: “Conway’s religious philosophy placed emphasis on the life of all things and compelled its adherents to adopt an ethic of care for the inherent worth of everything alive.” White goes on to say, “She offers a religious cosmology resonating with ethical force regarding proper relations among all forms of nature.”[74] Conway is articulating an utterly different approach to the cosmos—a “mystical naturalism” as White calls it—from the mechanistic world view that so powerfully captivated the modern mind and subsequently shaped the very face of the Earth through industrialization.
Merchant draws on Conway for her vitalist, organicist perspective, saying “Conway based her system of creation not on the machine but on the great, hierarchical chain of being, modified to incorporate an evolution or transmutation to higher forms, based on the acquisition of goodness and perfection.”[75] Conway maintains the Platonic view that Creation continually and infinitely moves toward the Good.[76] Indeed, as Broad points out, Conway agrees with the Cambridge Platonists in emphasizing the spiritual purpose behind Creation, which is to move to greater and greater spiritual perfection and goodness.[77] Because all of Creation is a single substance, it is not the essence of Creation that changes toward the Good but rather its mode, or expression.[78] Yet, as previously mentioned, what differentiates Creation from God is its mutability, and what differentiates Creation from Christ is its mutability not only toward goodness but toward evil as well—a difference made possible by creatures’ ability to have indifference or freedom of the will.
Between created beings—humans, plants, animals, water, minerals, and so forth—only a finite difference exists, making it possible for creatures to perfect themselves through the ‘hierarchical chain of being.’[79] This chain of being Conway compares to an infinite staircase, in which the steps extend infinitely yet the distance between each step remains finite.[80] Such is the finite distance between created species. Animals can become human, plants can become animals and so on, but also vice versa. Conway seems to have two different perspectives on how such mutation occurs. For one, she seems literally to hold that one species can become another, an idea she likely adopted from her close friend and fellow Quaker convert Francis Mercury van Helmont.[81] She writes of such mutation saying,
daily experience teaches us that various species can change into each other: earth changes into water, water into air, air into fire and ether and, vice versa, fire into air, air into water, etc., and these are nevertheless distinct species.[82]
She also goes on to describe more unusual transmutations of species, such as wheat into barley, worms into flies, and other aspects of the still widely believed theory of spontaneous generation that would not be disproved until the nineteenth century by Louis Pasteur.
In addition to Conway’s conception of the changeability of species into each other at a material level, she also has an alternate perspective on how a member of one species becomes that of another: echoing the Kabbalah,[83] and even aspects of More and Cudworth’s thought that was influenced by ancient sources,[84] Conway presents the idea of metempsychosis, a transmigration of souls after death from one species to another depending on how the life of that soul was lived.[85] The character of the soul will give shape to the body with which it is united—whether it be animal, vegetable, human, angel, or demon—an idea not dissimilar to Aristotle’s, and later Aquinas’s, conception of the soul as the form of the body.[86] The transmigration of souls is an expression of God’s justice in Conway’s cosmology, souls ascending or descending the infinite stairway according to their behavior not only towards fellow humans but in the treatment of animals and other species also.[87] For this perspective Conway seems to be drawing on the work of Origen, introduced to her by More, who “proposes a principle of change running through all created things,” change that is both moral and ontological.[88]
In continued agreement with Origen, who had been dismissed by the Catholic Church as a heretic centuries prior to the Renaissance revival of his thought, Conway asserts that God’s goodness would not allow God to punish souls eternally for their wrongdoings.[89] In a refutation of the Calvinist system still dominant in England during her lifetime, Conway believed punishment not to be eternal damnation but rather part of the continual movement of Creation towards goodness.[90] The benevolence and love of God would not allow God to act as a tyrant eternally punishing God’s own creations. Echoing Origen’s concept of apokatastasis[91] and the Kabbalistic notion of tikkun,[92] Conway believed in, as Givens defines it, “the eventual salvation and restoration of all spirits—even that of Satan himself.”[93]
Creatures can ascend or descend the hierarchical stairway infinitely, but Conway is clear they will never ascend to the point of equaling God in God’s perfection. “For the highest excellence of a creature,” she writes, “is to be infinite only in potentiality, not in actuality. That is, it is always able to become more perfect and more excellent to infinity, although it never reaches this infinity.”[94] God is infinitely greater than the infinite potential of God’s creatures in the way that “one infinity is greater than another.”[95] God is like a perfect sphere that no other geometrical shape can approach: even if a geometrical shape has an infinite number of sides it will never become the smooth curve of a sphere.[96]
Some disagreement exists between interpreters of Conway’s text on whether she believed in the preexistence of souls as her teacher More did. After all, it was his poem “Prae-existence of the Soul” that inspired her series of questions regarding the nature of souls. Hutton argues that Conway did not share More’s belief in the Origenist doctrine of preexistence, although she did agree with other aspects of Origen’s thought as has been previously mentioned.[97] Givens, on the other hand, clearly asserts that Conway did agree with More on preexistence,[98] which he draws from her text when she writes, “Creatures, although they are not coeternal with God, nevertheless have existed for an infinite time from the beginning.”[99] Yet Conway also goes on to say, “In different senses, creatures have existed and not existed from eternity.”[100] How one interprets this depends on what one understands souls to be: are they individual personalities that have existed from the beginning? Or rather is the single substance constituting all of Creation what has existed from eternity, and souls are constituted later by the process of eternal motion toward goodness?
Just as Creation is a multitude within the unity of a single substance, and the Trinity a triune within a single Spirit, Conway has a similar conception of all creatures. Not only are God’s creatures “infinite and created in an infinity of ways”[101] but also that “in every creature, whether spirit or body, there is an infinity of creatures, each of which contains an infinity in itself, and so on to infinity.”[102] This idea, drawn by Conway from the Kabbalah,[103] gives rise to the conception that not only is every body composed of a multitude of bodies, but furthermore so is every spirit.[104] How then is one to understand where the concept of personhood arises? If all of the spirit-matter continuum is perceptive and vital, albeit to varying degrees, what part of myself can assert “I am”? Conway writes that just as the parts that make up a body are arranged in a certain order so too are spirits arranged, to be governed by a principle ruling spirit[105]—not unlike Emerson’s conception of the Over-Soul, or Whitehead’s dominant monad. There is not a single ruling spirit, but rather a hierarchy of ruling spirits, “such that one is the principle ruler, another has second place, and a third commands others below itself. . . Thus every human being, indeed every creature whatsoever, contains many spirits and bodies.”[106] These ruling spirits are organized along the continuum from matter to God, who is the ultimate leader of the multitude of spirits.
The dynamic multiplicity of Creation’s unity is another aspect that differentiates the spiritual being of creatures from the spiritual being of God: Creation is composed at the primary level of spiritual monads—a concept that greatly inspired Leibniz[107]—whereas God is not.[108] While creatures, as previously mentioned, can be divided to infinity, Conway writes that this is only a mathematical possibility, but not one that God, bound by goodness, would allow to occur physically. For if divided to the smallest mathematical monad, instead of merely the smallest physical monad, a creature would cease its vital motion and thus no longer have the ability to move toward perfection and goodness.[109] Something in which the motion has ceased would be dead matter, which Conway has already deemed to not exist due to the goodness of God.
Finally, Conway asserts that the infinite multiplicity of creatures is actually what allows them to have the capacity for motion and the ability to strive for perfection. “A creature,” she writes, “because it needs the help of its fellow creatures, must be multiple in order to receive this help.”[110] All creatures need their fellow creatures; despite their multiplicity no creature can ever be separated from Creation because they are all ultimately of one nature, one being.[111] Referring back to the principle ruling spirit that organizes the multiplicity of spirits to compose the soul and body of a creature, Conway clarifies that even this ruling spirit itself is multiple:
It is called central because all the other spirits come together in it, just as lines from every part of the circumference meet in the center and go forth from this center. Indeed, the unity of spirits composing this central predominant spirit is firmer and more tenacious than that of other spirits . . . This unity is so great that nothing can dissolve it.[112]
Because it is God’s nature to be immutable, God has been a creator from eternity; as such, creatures also have existed from eternity because God has always created.[113] From this position Conway concludes to the Christian doctrine of the eternal existence of the soul, while simultaneously maintaining the multiplicity of that soul. She writes, “Thus it happens that the soul of every human being will remain a whole soul for eternity and endure without end, so that it may receive proper rewards for its labor.”[114] Conway affirms the eternal existence of the soul not only forward in time but backward, while also affirming the evolution of Creation, in which creatures learn from embodied action and morally guided metempsychosis.
Sacred Relationality
Conway’s religious philosophy holds that the role of Creation is ultimately to recognize and move toward its own divine nature, a belief that draws on the diverse influences of Platonic, Kabbalistic, Gnostic, Neoplatonic, and alchemical sources.[115] Her system of natural mysticism, which might also be characterized as an early modern form of process panentheism, can be seen quietly reflected in aspects of the monadology of Leibniz,[116] the organicism of Blake,[117] the morphology of Goethe,[118] the vitalism of Bergson,[119] and the process philosophy of Whitehead.[120] Her protest against a mechanical world view[121] and the Cartesian soul-body dualism has been picked up by contemporary feminists and ecological thinkers alike as they find a voice in solidarity hailing from the pivotal time of the early modern period.[122] As White notes,
Her early modern perspectives thus provide a remarkable antecedent for new naturalistic impulses in religious studies, particularly current reconstructions of nature that challenge “dominion-over-nature” ideologies derived from early scientific and modern conceptions.[123]
Yet Conway’s name is rarely included in major histories of philosophy, despite the brilliance of her thought that was recognized by her colleagues. The patriarchal tide of Western history swept her under its strong current to become a name infrequently retrieved. Nevertheless, the ocean of history is wide and the tides of the world are changing. Conway’s brief treatise may yet resurface in a significant way as humanity searches for answers within our historical lineages, answers from thinkers who present a cosmology that can remind us of our connection not only to each other but to the divinity of the planet on which we live and the cosmos through which we travel. Her emphasis on multiplicity within unity brings awareness to the relationality of the entire cosmos, to the love inspired by the simultaneous affinity and difference of all beings held together in dynamic union. In the picture White paints of Conway’s vision she says, “For Conway, the love among all creation constitutes a sacral universe where the shared love among all entities is based on a processional view of natural phenomena participating in the divine life.”[124] Conway’s may be one of the voices we need to hear in order to learn how to remain afloat upon the changing tides of a universe woven of sacred, multiplicitous unity.
Broad, Jacqueline. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Conway, Anne. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Edited and translated by Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Course. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Givens, Terryl L. When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hutton, Sarah. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1990.
More, Henry. “The Epistle Dedicatory.” In An Antidote Against Atheisme: or an Appeale to the Natural Faculties of the Minds of Man, whether there be not a God. London, England, 1653.
Ward, Richard. The Life of the Pious and Learned Henry More. Edited by Sarah Hutton et al. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2000.
White, Carol Wayne. The Legacy of Anne Conway: Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008.
Worthington, John. The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington. Edited by James Crossley. Manchester, England: The Chetham Society, 1847.
[1] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1990), 254.
[2] John Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, ed. James Crossley (Manchester, England: The Chetham Society, 1847), 142, note 1.
[3] Sarah Hutton, qtd. in Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65.
[4] Richard Ward, The Life of the Pious and Learned Henry More, ed. Sarah Hutton et al. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2000), 123.
[5] Henry More, “The Epistle Dedicatory” in An Antidote Against Atheisme: or an Appeale to the Natural Faculties of the Minds of Man, whether there be not a God (London, England, 1653).
[6] Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29.
[7] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 255.
[8] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 2, 49.
[9] Carol Wayne White, The Legacy of Anne Conway: Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 48.
[10] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 3.
[11] Ibid, 5-6.
[12] Ibid, 55.
[13]Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. and trans. Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Course (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9.
[14] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 10.
[15] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 65.
[16] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 9.
[17] Ibid, 10-11.
[18] Ibid, 50.
[19] Terryl L. Givens, When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 163.
[20] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 10-11.
[21] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 65.
[22] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 11.
[23] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 49.
[24] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 13.
[25] Ibid, 14.
[26] Ibid, 15.
[27] Ibid, 16.
[28] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 24.
[29] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 53.
[30] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 23.
[31] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 70.
[32] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 31.
[33] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 10.
[34] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 22.
[35] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 10.
[36] Ibid, 25.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid, 11.
[39] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 17.
[40] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 55.
[41] Ward, The Life of the Pious and Learned Henry More, 169.
[42] Givens, When Souls Had Wings, 158.
[43] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 45.
[44] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 39-40.
[45] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 73.
[46] Givens, When Souls Had Wings, 163.
[47] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 61.
[48] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 52.
[49] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 42.
[50] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 263.
[51] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 72.
[52] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 78.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 4.
[55] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 64.
[56] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 76.
[57] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 50.
[58] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 38.
[59] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 78.
[60] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 38.
[61] Ibid, 39.
[62] Ibid, 46.
[63] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 48.
[64] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 33-4.
[65] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 11.
[66] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 34.
[67] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 58.
[68] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 69.
[69] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 45.
[70] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 3-4.
[71] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 32.
[72] Ibid, 47.
[73] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 254-5.
[74] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 4.
[75] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 260.
[76] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 83.
[77] Ibid, 85.
[78] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 29.
[79] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 33.
[80] Ibid, 34.
[81] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 254-5.
[82] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 34.
[83] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 53.
[84] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 260-1.
[85] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 36.
[86] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 57.
[87] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 35.
[88] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 70.
[89] Givens, When Souls Had Wings, 163.
[90] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 52.
[91] Givens, When Souls Had Wings, 97.
[92] Ibid, 163.
[93] Ibid, 98.
[94] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 33.
[95] Ibid, 17.
[96] Ibid, 67.
[97] Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 70.
[98] Givens, When Souls Had Wings, 164.
[99] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 12.
[100] Ibid.
[101] Ibid, 16.
[102] Ibid, 17.
[103] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 73.
[104] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 39.
[105] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 39.
[106] Ibid, 39.
[107] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 264.
[108] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 50.
[109] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 20.
[110] Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 54.
[111] Ibid, 52.
[112] Ibid, 55.
[113] Ibid, 13.
[114] Ibid, 55.
[115] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 26.
[116] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 257.
[117] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 69.
[118] Ibid, 70.
[119] Ibid, 77.
[120] Ibid, 83.
[121] Merchant, The Death of Nature, 268.
[122] Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, 80.
[123] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, ix.
[124] White, The Legacy of Anne Conway, 92.
“Death is certain; the time of death is uncertain.”
– Second reflection of Buddhist practice[1]
“When did we become human? One second to midnight.”
– Joanna Macy[2]
I am walking through a world of accelerating decay. I am walking through a world of exquisite beauty. I am living a life of sorrow and suffering. I am living a life of boundless joy. Somewhere, and at some time, I know my death is out there. We wander along life’s twisting roads, our paths occasionally coming breathlessly close. We almost know that we have met, but not quite. Sometimes I feel as though I am stalking my death, sometimes my death seems to almost deliberately be avoiding me. But then, one day, after walking around an inevitable bend, we encounter one another. Time halts.
I look deeply into my death’s eyes, seeing the beauty present in this moment, embodied in her. My death. And for her too I am death, the bringer of this life’s closing. We lock eyes. A smile plays across my lips, and a light giggle escapes on my breath. What is this? A sense of utmost relief. A release from the hold of incarnation. We reach up to touch each other’s hands and then, as if this was always meant to happen, we fall into a deep embrace, sinking into the comfort and warmth of each other’s presence.
Quietly we take each other’s hands and walk slowly together to a place where we can gaze out over the world, to take in all that we are leaving behind. I feel calm, at peace. Then, just as quietly, we sit down together, still hand in hand, our knees touching. She puts my hand on her heart and as we breathe together it feels as if every good deed, every kind gesture, each moment of grace in her life passes out through me and into the cosmos. As her life continues to flow through me our positions change, and her hand is upon my heart: now I too feel the release of letting all that I did and all that I was pour forth into the universe. And then there we sit, just two beings, outside of time.
As a culture, the West seems to have a disengaged relationship with death. We are often raised with little confrontation of the knowledge that this life someday will end. Somehow we see death as a possibility, rather than a certainty. Death is the greatest certainty we have in life, and yet it remains the greatest of mysteries as well. It is an ever-present reality to us, whether we acknowledge it or not. As Sean Kelly writes,
The natural and cultural dimensions of the human experience, however, cannot of themselves circumvent the fact that this Earth and all of its life forms, as indeed our sun and the entire physical cosmos within which they are embedded, are finite beings, with beginnings in time, and bound to inevitable death.[3]
For much of human history, when we contemplated the inevitability of our individual deaths, we had the comfort of a sense of continuity, remembering our ancestors behind us and our descendents whose lives await in the future. Continuity, perhaps, was as much an inevitability as our own death. Yet now humanity has entered a new period in which that continuity is no longer certain. The devastation of the ecological crises endangering every region of our home planet has made that continuity questionable. As Joanna Macy writes, the deleterious effects of the industrial growth society—from species extinction, to mass deforestation, to ocean acidification and climate change—“are warning signals that we live in a world that can end, at least as a home for conscious life. This is not to say that it will end, but it can end. That very possibility changes everything for us.”[4] As Kelly remarked, all finite entities of our physical reality will have an eventual, inevitable end, but the time scale on which Macy is speaking is one that could be experienced in a single lifetime: a reality so terrifying it has the ability to either stop us in our tracks in fear and apathy—or to give rise to the greatest creativity humanity has ever expended in service not of preserving our own personal lives, but of offering some hope to the very existence of future generations.
When we allow the realization of our potential collective death—as individuals, as a species, and as a planet—“to become conscious,” as Macy explains, “it is painful, but it also jolts us awake to life’s vividness, its miraculous quality, heightening our awareness of the beauty and uniqueness of each object and each being.”[5] Awareness of death not only awakens the possibility for our highest creative potential within life, but also brings up questions of what exists after the threshold of death: questions of personal and collective continuity not only on Earth but beyond this lifetime as well. It is in this context that Macy’s exercise, the Meditation on Death with which I opened this essay, was conducted.
The sense of peace, release, and well-being I experienced during the meditation with my death echoes many of the stories told by religions and spiritual traditions, and by individuals who have survived near death experiences. Contemplating one’s own personal death can lead to a beautiful acceptance of the inevitable, a realization that it may not be a doom but rather a gift. But shifting the contemplation of death to a collective level presents us with a great paradox: for while one’s own death may come to seem acceptable, or eventually even welcome, the idea of our entire human species, or the entirety of life on Earth, coming to an end is beyond the scope of tragedy. It feels impossible to transfer the sense of post-mortem peace to the loss of billions of individuals or whole species.
The severance of our continuity as a species, the “future canceled” as Macy writes, has only been realized as a global possibility since the atomic bomb was first exploded 1945.[6] As Robert J. Lifton explains, the possibility of species annihilation seems to have sliced the currently living generations off from any sense of connection to future descendents, but also from our ancestors who likely lived with a collective sense of species survival. Lifton argues, “We are thus among the first to live with a recurrent sense of biological severance.”[7] Interestingly, the remembrance of individual death under natural circumstances provides the opposite sense: not a severance, but a thread tying the generations together, as the elderly pass away and leave the world to their grandchildren, who will one day do the same for their own grandchildren.
Besides the biological continuity of familial generations, many cultural and religious traditions contain an understanding of spiritual continuity as well, in the form of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. From the perspective of reincarnation, as Christopher Bache puts it, “Death is but a pause that punctuates the seasons of our life, nothing more.”[8] Being able to see that some part of us carries on through multiple lifetimes releases us from the constraint imposed by the limited time of a single life. It makes death less of something to fear and more of a milestone upon a long, evolutionary journey. Yet death is much more than mere punctuation because, from Bache’s perspective, “the concept of reincarnation actually challenges the notion of personal survival because it ruptures the category of personal identity itself.”[9] Bache and Kelly both write of the need to understand reincarnation without retaining the image of an individual, atomistic soul being reborn in life after life.[10] Bache continues, “We must eventually move beyond the atomistic vision of separate souls reincarnating for their individual evolution and begin to grasp the larger intentional fabric that our lives collectively express.”[11] Such a perspective shifts the focus away from the individual human being and broadens the horizon to include the collective: at the community, species, and possibly even planetary levels.
A major component of Macy’s “Work That Reconnects” is engagement through practices and exercises with the future generations whose potential existence we strive to bring to reality. Including the concept of rebirth in the practice of visualizing our future descendents can draw us even more personally into working for their well-being; not only might we be paving a smoother way for our great great grandchildren to walk, we ourselves in some form may be walking that path. Drawing from his research on reincarnation and the bardo, Bache suggests that rebirth may not be affected by linear time in the way we perceive it while incarnated. The possibility may exist for one to be born into any historical period, or even perhaps to be living multiple lives simultaneously.[12] “Each life,” as Kelly writes, “. . . however seemingly distant in our past or future—is always and already ensouled, is inalienably associated with its own soul, whose personal and singular drama is ever unfolding in the Eternal Now.”[13] The future is already present within us: biologically—in our ovaries, gonads, and dna, as Macy points out,—but also possibly spiritually—in our souls. Our present personality, along with our past and future personalities may coexist or participate in soul, an entity greater than anything with which our present personality can identify.
The other side to the equation of rebirth, the yin to reincarnation’s yang, is the concept of karma. Kelly writes,
The series of lives is said to be bound together by the law of Karma or its analogue, which, whether or not one believes in a transmigrating soul, provides continuity both before and beyond an individual life, and therefore also gives a ground for its value and meaning.[14]
The karma of our actions ripples forward into the future, affecting not only ourselves but all those who may come after. Nuclear waste and ecological devastation, Macy argues, may be the clearest physical example of how karma, in this case negative karma, ties together thousands of generations. Yet karma is not a fate engraved in stone, and how we choose to meet our karma will positively emanate into the future as well: as the Buddha said, if we cannot alter our karma, “all effort is fruitless.”[15] The fruit born by our effort is a selfless gift given to those who will inhabit our future world; yet it is also a gift to ourselves for the future we will inhabit. Bache describes a vision he had of that future with the following words: “I could see that the future we were creating was a future that we ourselves would participate in through future incarnations. We were doing this for God, for others, and also for ourselves.”[16]
The others:
Gray Wolf
Swallowtail Butterfly
Polar Bear
African Elephant
Blue Whale
“The Bestiary:” Macy’s poetic eulogy of those species leaving, or on the brink of departing, our planet forever—each name spoken, punctuated by the harsh beat of the drum.[17] Boom. A species erased. Boom. Yet another lost. The punctuating drum marks their permanent death. The accelerating drumbeat of extinction does not feel like a simple pause punctuating the seasons of life. Extinction is an irreversible loss, a diminishment of the wholeness and the creativity of our living planet.
The only sane response seems to be despair. Yet somehow despair is not the collective human response, at least at a conscious level. Macy observes, “Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear warfare, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”[18] Our cultural inability to confront death has extended to the numbness we feel in place of mourning, as the presence of thousands of our ecological companions is erased forever. Macy continues, “The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.”[19] By turning our empathy into apathy we seal ourselves off from the collective suffering of our planet: we either become numb or experience the world’s pain as solely our own, expressed in our personal pathologies, depressions, and diseases. Releasing the experience of one’s isolated suffering, while simultaneously living into and owning the despair that is such a real presence upon the Earth, unleashes the energy suppressing one’s grief and also may help release some of the suffering of the collective. Bache writes on this latter point saying, “Instead of seeing ‘my’ pain as existing separately from the suffering of ‘others,’ it becomes more natural to see it as a distinct nodal point within a collective field of suffering that runs throughout the species”—and, I would argue, throughout planet Earth as a whole.[20]
We are learning to confront grief and despair and to make it part of who we are. We are facing our mortality, learning to reinhabit death as a part of life and maturation. Macy writes, “We are confronting and integrating into our awareness our mortality as a species. We must do that so that we can wake up and assume the rights and responsibilities of planetary adulthood.”[21] Much of Western civilization has lost the ritualized initiation rites that serve to guide young people into the responsibilities of adulthood. Such rites of passage usually involve immense pain, a real confrontation with one’s mortality that helps forge the adolescent into the adult they will become. As Macy, Bache, and many others have suggested, the human species as a whole may be confronting such an initiatory rite in the imminent potential of our collective demise. “The specter of global death,” Bache writes, “that hangs over the postmodern era may be fueling a profound psychic transformation of our species.”[22] Bache goes on to describe what the container for that profound transformation seems to be:
The crisis of ecological sustainability is even more lethal than the nuclear crisis because it is not being generated by an overzealous military minority but by the very fabric of modern civilization. . . If there is a species ego-death in our immediate future, I think it will be triggered by the impending ecological crisis of sustainability.[23]
The ecological crisis forces us to face not only the mortality of our species and our planet, but also the deep shame that comes with the realization that we have done this to ourselves, shame that is more difficult to accept and perhaps even more repressed than our grief and despair.
I would argue that the rite of passage presented by the ecological crisis is not only an initiation for the human species, but for every species on this planet and perhaps even for the Earth itself. There may be an ego death of industrial civilization, but much of the suffering and confrontation with mortality of this rite of passage is being borne by the thousands of species going extinct at far too rapid a pace. They have borne the pain of this initiation far longer than we humans. To fully understand the depth of this rite of passage I believe humanity has to recognize that it is an initiation for the planet as a whole.
In a meditation to “re-story our identity as Gaia”[24] Macy offers the experience of imagining the entire existence of the Earth taking place within twenty-four hours, beginning at midnight. For much of the day the Earth is undergoing large-scale geologic processes, and not until five o’clock does organic life emerge. The evening is dedicated to the evolution of all living beings, and not until the last half hour of the day do mammals even evolve. “When did we become human?” Macy asks. “One second to midnight.”[25] In that one second before the clock strikes midnight all that we know of human existence takes place: every tribe is formed and reformed, every civilization rises and falls, every religion flourishes, every human to ever be born lives and eventually dies. The expansion of time felt by embracing a belief in reincarnation is suddenly compressed into that one second before midnight. Could that really be the time human souls have reincarnated within? If a spiritual continuity does exist between human lives, would not this continuity carry back throughout more of the twenty-four hours of our earthly evolution? Were we present with the beginning of life? The beginning of Earth? Might we have some spiritual continuity beyond even that beginning? And if so, what happens moving into the future, when the clock does eventually toll midnight?
A rite of passage is often related to the notion of the dark night of the soul. Perhaps it is only fitting that humanity would emerge during that dark night, in that one second before the midnight hour. Bache writes of his own personal understanding of our significance as a species, in connection with the greater whole of the cosmos:
How blind a species we are. How noble. How deep and profound the evolutionary currents that carry us. Sometimes the darkness stands out for me, sometimes the dawn. Increasingly it is the dawn.[26]
The midnight hour is the hour of mortality, death, the crossing of a threshold. It is the hour of transformation. Humanity may be undergoing a rite of passage but I believe it is an initiation in which we are one of many participating members. If we learn to support our fellow initiates, our fellow species, ecosystems, and biomes, then some of us may pass midnight. Eventually we, in an expanded sense of the term, may see the dawn.
Works Cited
Bache, Christopher M. Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Kelly, Sean “Integral Time and the Varieties of Post-Mortem Survival.” Integral Review. 4. No. 2 (2008): 5-30.
Lifton, Robert J. The Broken Connection. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Macy, Joanna. World As Lover, World As Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007.
[1] Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007), 76.
[2] Macy, World As Lover, 183.
[3] Sean Kelly, “Integral Time and the Varieties of Post-Mortem Survival,” Integral Review, 4, No. 2 (2008): 6.
[4] Macy, World As Lover, 17.
[5] Ibid, 124.
[6] Macy, World As Lover, 174-5.
[7] Robert J. Lifton, The Broken Connection (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 338.
[8] Christopher M. Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 41.
[9] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 42.
[10] Kelly, “Integral Time,” 24.
[11] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 34.
[12] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 133.
[13] Kelly, “Integral Time,” 23.
[14] Ibid, 6.
[15] Macy, World As Lover, 57.
[16] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 223.
[17] Macy, World As Lover, 87-90.
[18] Macy, World As Lover, 92.
[19] Ibid, 93.
[20] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 169.
[21] Macy, World As Lover, 184.
[22] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 215.
[23] Ibid, 232-3.
[24] Macy, World As Lover, 181.
[25] Ibid, 183.
[26] Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, 249.
“The imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and in the wind. The imagined tree becomes imperceptibly the cosmological tree, the tree which epitomizes the universe, which makes a universe…”
– Gaston Bachelard[1]
Imagine a stream, choked, murky gray, oiled surface, sunken deep below the watermark-stained banks. Feel deep within your soul the hopelessness of this place, the deadening of your senses to the despair of the river. Allow your imagination to fill with the river’s pain. Now, slowly, begin to imagine those waters rising, gradually at first, then more and more quickly, flowing first as a muddy trickle, widening into an onrushing stream. Bulbous plants begin to flourish along the banks, setting roots into the silted bottom. Filth becomes food, the waters begin to run clear. Light, once again, sparkles on the rippling surface. Fish return. What has allowed such a transition to occur? A re-imagining of purpose.
The imagination plays many roles in our practice of ecology upon this exquisite, blue and green celestial gem we have named Earth. As our planet suffers the ravaging destruction of industrialization and the consumptive growth of human greed, humanity is beginning to re-imagine its purpose in relationship to the Earth. The imagination is a multifaceted gift to ecology, one that can connect us to both our past and future, that can connect us with spiritual strength and moral empathy, that allows us to see our human role in an enchanted cosmos. The imagination is the eye of the soul, a bridge between the rational mind and the physical world, the opening of a realm in which the true beauty of the anima mundi can be revealed. Aspects of what could be called “imaginal ecology” can be glimpsed throughout the work of Joanna Macy, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Christopher Bache, James Hillman, Theodore Roszak, David Abram, and many other thinkers; it resounds in the poetry and philosophy of the Romantics, Transcendentalists and German Idealists. Imaginal ecology flourishes in the articulations of the enchanted realm of Faërie penned by J.R.R. Tolkien, and other fiction writers whose work reveals the enchantment of the realm in which we live.
The moral imagination of which Macy speaks can allow us to situate ourselves in the experience of other beings, whether ancestors of our past, or plants and animals, ecosystems of our current Earth, even beings of the future. Through imaginal practice we can hear the needs of others and recognize them as our own. Macy writes, “The imagination needs to be schooled in order to experience our inter-existence with all beings in the web of life.”[2] We can gain spiritual and psychic courage by seeing with the imagination’s eye into our potentially dire future. The work of Bache allows one to envision such a future while learning to cultivate the spiritual center needed to stay grounded in such an unstable time. The grief and despair work of both Macy and Bache lay a solid foundation in reality that can act as the fertile ground from which creative solutions can sprout and flourish.
Imagination can carry us back through time to the flaring forth of our cosmos, and as we experience the unfolding of our universe our own role as human beings becomes clearer. As Swimme and Tucker write, “Every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting upon itself.”[3] Such a realization can reorient our actions into a more harmonious relationship to the Earth as we recognize that we also are the Earth in relationship to ourselves.
Because we are the cosmos in human form, the pain of the world is expressing itself through our human pains, through our pathologies and diseases. The work of ecopsychology practiced by Hillman, Roszak and others, which itself could be seen as a form of imaginal ecology, seeks to engage in the healing of the soul of the world, the anima mundi.
Abram suggests that the imagination exists not only in the human but in the Earth and the cosmos itself. The imagination of the Earth is diverse, and varies from region to region like the landscape, affording various insights and ideas that differ by location. Abram writes,
There are insights we come upon only at the edge of the sea, and others we glimpse only in the craggy heights. Some prickly notions are endemic to deserts, while other thoughts, too slippery to grasp, are met mostly in swamps. Many nomad thoughts migrate between different realms, shifting their habits to fit the terrain, orienting themselves by the wind and the stars.[4]
Our ability to create and sustain our existence, to imagine the future, is wholly dependent on this creativity gifted by the Earth.
The creative works of many authors and artists can serve ecology by offering a “recovery,” as Tolkien writes, giving us the opportunity of “regaining a clear view”[5] of the enchantment inherent to the world in which we live. They offer a view of a fantasy realm, which Tolkien calls Faërie, crafted out of the materials of our everyday world, just as the painter’s or sculptor’s materials are drawn also from nature.[6] Yet fantasy allows us to see these primary ingredients in a new way, once again marveling at the wonders of our own world.[7] Tolkien shows the overlap between our world and Faërie when he writes,
Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.[8] (Emphasis added.)
Faërie could then be seen as the real cosmos but without the human, or rather, without the disenchanted human. Fantasy—expressed through any art form, from literature, to painting, to sculpture—allows us to look again at our own world with new eyes, for as Hillman writes, “We pay respect to it simply by looking again, re-specting, that second look with the eye of the heart.”[9] The role the imagination can play in ecology is to unlock the doorway to this realm, our own cosmos, and re-enter as re-enchanted human beings, reflecting on themselves in the form of the universe.
Bibliography
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. 2010.
Bache, Christopher M. Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 2000.
Bachelard, Gaston. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, Inc. 2005.
Berry, Thomas. Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. 2006.
–––––. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. 1988.
–––––. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. 1999.
–––––. The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2009.
Hillman, James. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, Inc. 2007.
Macy, Joanna. World As Lover, World As Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007.
Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, ed. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. 1995.
Swimme, Brian and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Journey of the Universe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Swimme, Brian and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. 1994.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York, NY: Ballantine Publishing Group. 1966.
[1] Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, Inc, 2005), 85.
[2] Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007), 112.
[3] Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 2.
[4] David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2010), 118.
[5] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York, NY: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1966), 77.
[6] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 78.
[7] Ibid, 77.
[8] Ibid, 38.
[9] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 129.
NATURE WRITING: A NATIVE PARK
This is not the wilderness. The crisp leaves rattle overhead as squirrels jump from branch to branch. The wind and sun alike are filtered through the dry, prickly foliage causing the reflective leaves to sparkle like the ruffled surface of a lake. Spiderwebs catch the westering light, near invisible threads stretching seemingly to nowhere. It is here that I encounter my subject, the tree who will be my emissary of Nature, a representative on behalf of landscape, ecosystem, Earth: Quercus chrysolepus, the canyon live oak, one of many oak species native to the California climate. I cannot presume to know this tree, but I will attempt to inquire, to observe, to learn, perhaps to better understand the land that generated us both.
This oak is not in the wilderness. We have both grown up in the city of San Francisco. This particular Quercus lives within the Botanical Gardens of Golden Gate Park, in the California Native Plant section. It lives in an enclosed space surrounded by a human constructed city, a place that is artificial yet natural at the same time. This park is tended and cared for by human hands, not for food, clothing, or shelter, but as a place of beauty. This tree is not growing in the wilderness, but it is still a tree, it is still nature. Perhaps it is better to conduct this inquiry within the bounds of a city park, a place where human and non-human ecosystems coincide, where boundaries are less clear and the symbiotic role of the human in these micro-ecosystems is more apparent than in the places that have been designated pristine wilderness.
The live oak I sit beneath is several feet wide at the base of its trunk with seven thick boughs extending radially outward, branching again and again until they end in thin twigs clothed in the distinctively pointed, dull green leaves that characterize California’s oaks. Many brown leaves litter the wide, mossy paving stones and the small, fern-covered slope beneath its spreading branches. It is a chilly November day, and both the fallen leaves and the temperature bring to mind that autumn is well underway. The rough, cracked bark of the ochre branches are spotted with sea-foam green lichen. Toward the base of the trunk, nailed into the wood, hangs a small, black, metal sign printed with the words: Fagaceae, Quercus chrysolepus, Canyon Live Oak, Western North America.
Spreading out around the oak is a gardened landscape containing many of California’s native plant species. Within the enclosure of this park is likely a better representation of the plant species growing on the West Coast of North America before European settlement than anywhere else in California. It is a reproduction and preservation of the past, guarded and tended to remain in such a state. Paths wind between dense clusters of chaparral—which means “short, woody vegetation” in Spanish—that are comprised of manzanita, buck brush, chamise, nude buckwheat, scrub oak, mountain mahogany, toyon, California coffeeberry, and silk tassel bush. Around and beneath the denser patches of chaparral are herbs and flowers: matilija poppies, red maids, farewell-to-spring, melic grass, gilia, chia, and clover.[1] Although the composition of the plants reflects an ecosystem prior to European contact, the contemporary common names clearly do not.
Timothy Morton writes in his book Ecology Without Nature that “We discover how nature always slips out of reach in the very act of grasping it.”[2] As I sit beneath this live oak tree writing of the play of golden light across the waxy leaves of the chaparral, I am actually distancing myself from nature. The more I describe the landscape, the deeper I go into the writing and the further I depart from where I am situated in this moment.[3] Nature slips away as it is turned into written words, making what is tangible and alive transform into a piece of art, something that is no longer nature. This paradox may be worth keeping in mind as I enquire further into the nature of nature, the nature of the human being, and the boundaries that may or may not exist between us.
I have titled this essay “The Great Mosaic” for several reasons: the name refers to the diverse ecological microclimates of the landmass named California, as well as to the mosaics created by symbiotic human interaction with that landscape; but it also refers to the method of writing I am exploring in this piece. I will attempt to create a mosaic of language, forming puzzle pieces of nature writing, scientific and ecological study, and philosophical and historical inquiry that will fit together with the same diversity, incongruity, and complexity as the landscapes that inspired these words.
A DUALISTIC WORLD VIEW
It is becoming increasingly evident that human beings are rampantly destroying the ecosystems of the Earth. A primary reason for such destruction seems to be part of the Western world view as developed and inherited from the European tradition: a perceived dualism between the human and all other non-human entities, the latter often termed nature. If one is to address this dualism one needs to understand not only how it came to be, but also why it is a problem. Many, although certainly not all, environmentalists work on behalf of nature without actually addressing the underlying foundations of why they do their work, acting from a sense of reverence and love for an intrinsically valuable and good environment that must be saved from the marring touch of human hands. For this kind of environmentalist, the environment is defined as “that form of nature that is vulnerable to human-made devastation and disaster.”[4] The work such environmentalists do should not in any way be disregarded or dismissed. It is important work not to be taken lightly or for granted. What I hope to address is the world view behind their actions. Their work may ultimately be futile unless we can have a clearer understanding of the role of the human being, not as an alien destroyer of the natural world, but as a fundamental part of Earth’s ecosystems, a species that shapes and inhabits its ecological niche like all other species.
WITHOUT WILDERNESS, WITHOUT NATURE
“Scientific findings indicate that virtually every part of the globe, from the boreal forests to the humid tropics, has been inhabited, modified, or managed throughout our human past.”[5] As is clear in this quote from Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus’s article “Taming the Wilderness Myth,” the idea of wilderness as a pristine, untouched landscape is increasingly being exposed—through the writings of William Cronon, M. Kat Anderson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, and many others—as an idealized myth of the Western psyche. Timothy Morton takes this perspective a step further by calling for not only a human practice of ecology without the idea of wilderness, but without even the concept of nature. The idea of nature will have to “wither away” for an “ecological” human state to be able to exist.[6] He writes that “in all its confusing, ideological intensity, nature ironically impedes a proper relationship with the earth and its life-forms, which would, of course, include ethics and science.”[7]
Cronon writes in his essay “The Trouble With Wilderness” that wilderness does not exist apart from the human, it is rather an entirely human construction.
Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.[8]
This is not to say that the land itself is shaped exclusively by human hands—indeed, quite the contrary—but rather that the human is a species interacting with the natural environment in ways that shape it like every other species that participates with that land.
CALIFORNIA AND ITS OAKS
The landscapes of California provide a clear example of ecosystems that have been preserved under the guise of untouched wilderness in some of the world’s most famous and majestic national parks. Far from being untouched, however, these ecosystems were formed in relationship to human inhabitants over thousands of years, and some species may even have become dependent on a symbiotic relationship with humans. Therefore, I will be concentrating specifically on the various oak species indigenous to California, to understand the role they play in their ecosystems, their relationships to humans, as well as to ecosystem disturbance, to fire, and to the virulent pathogen that causes sudden oak death which is now devastating oak populations across the state.
California is a richly diverse landscape supporting between 5,800 and 6,300 plant species that grow in a wide variety of ecosystem communities, making it one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots.[9] California’s microclimates range from deserts to salt and freshwater marshes, coastal prairie, valley grasslands, shrublands, riparian and foothill woodlands, and coastal redwood, lower montane, and evergreen forests.[10] The state has been called by some “the great mosaic.”[11] The wealth of species diversity can be seen in the example of the coastal prairie grassland, in which the average of 22.6 plant species per square meter is higher than in any other grassland in the North America.[12]
There are nine major kinds of chaparral ecosystem in California, each defined by the dominant species in its community. The variety I was observing in San Francisco’s Botanical Gardens was the ceanothus chaparral, characterized by its abundance of buck brush (Ceanothus cuneatus).[13] Different oak species grow among this kind of chaparral, predominantly scrub oak (Quercus dumosa), a shorter, more shrub-like oak than the Quercus chrysolepus under which I was sitting.[14] Unlike the scrub oaks, canyon live oaks grow primarily in California’s moist ravines and canyons and can live to be three hundred years old. Foothill woodland ecosystems, which cover some three million acres of California land, are dominated by oak species. In the drier inland regions the endemic blue oak (Quercus douglasii) grows in stands from the Sacramento Valley to Los Angeles County. Often the blue oak grows in mixed stands along with valley oak (Quercus lobata), interior live oak (Quercus wislizenii), coastal live oak (Quercus agrifolia), and gray and foothill pine (Pinus sabiniana); blue oak also grows among chaparral species and even in pure stands solely comprised of Quercus douglasii.[15]
The largest species of California oak are the valley oaks, christened “monarchs of the soil” because of their enormous size. Their shade provides a nourishing microclimate rich with a diversity of understory species.[16] In the northern coastal regions of California the dominant oak species are California black oak and Oregon oak; further south coastal live oaks are the dominant species. Unlike the valley oak, live oaks have little to no undergrowth, giving their stands the look of well-tended parks.[17] Indeed, California has been compared not only to a park but also to a flower garden, or as John Muir named it “the Pacific land of flowers.”[18] While this concept of California as a park or garden may have seemed unusual to arriving Europeans who believed they were entering a pristine wilderness area, it actually was the case that they were entering a garden of sorts, a landscape that had been developing in symbiosis with the hundreds of indigenous tribes living in the area over the previous 12,000 to 13,500 years.[19]
THE WILD GARDEN
No country in the world was as well supplied by Nature, with food for man, as California, when first discovered by the Spaniards. Every one of its early visitors have left records to this effect—they all found its hills, valleys and plains filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; its rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds and berries.[20]
This evocative excerpt from Titus Fey Cronise’s book The Natural Wealth of California, published in 1868, provides a delectable image of a veritable Garden of Eden ripe for the taking. Yet Cronise makes no mention of the thousands of people whose lifestyles were thoroughly integrated into this wealthy landscape, who had coaxed forth such abundance through cultural practices that cultivated the land not as an intensive farm but as an extended wild garden.
California’s high species diversity was matched by its diversity of indigenous peoples. Indeed, Fikret Berkes has written of correlations worldwide between cultural diversity and biodiversity, likely caused by human “disturbance” and rotational use of the land.[21] Some 500 to 600 tribes lived in California, with each tribe spread over multiple villages.[22] Estimates of California’s indigenous human population at the time of European contact ranges from 133,000 to 705,000 people, with the most widely accepted estimate at around 310,000.[23] The tribes that lived in what is now the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was sitting beneath the canyon live oak, were the Ohlone, Coast Miwok, and Pomo, among others.
Juan José Warner, a European traveler in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1830s, noted with some wonder that such large indigenous populations could thrive on land that was apparently not cultivated.[24] Yet what he did not see were the subsistence activities carried out by these different tribes that were a form of cultivation and conservation, a coaxing of abundance from the natural processes of the land. Native Californians gathered, hunted, fished, and quarried stone for tools.[25] The acorns of the canyon live oak were used by the Pomo to relieve coughs and sore throats. The oak stands and prairies provided ingredients for acorn bread, wild grass seed cakes, and a variety of edible bulbs. Indigenous peoples lit fires on the land that could burn through chaparral and other woody vegetation to open up pathways and restart the cycle of regenerative plant growth that provides new vegetable matter and attracts grazing herds.[26] Fire is critical to the California landscape and many plant species have developed both a resistance and dependence on it for their lifecycles to continue. The same acre of land burned about once every ten to fifteen years before European contact, and fire has been crucial in shaping at least three quarters of California’s flora.[27]
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: FIRE AND DISEASE
Ecosystem resilience is defined as how much disturbance a system can take before it is fundamentally altered and becomes a new kind of ecosystem.[28] The four stages of ecosystem recovery after disturbance begin with the reorganization phase, in which the ecosystem is renewed, seeds open and begin to germinate; followed by the exploitative phase, in which pioneer species compete and colonize the landscape with rapid plant growth; the next is the conservation phase, during which growth slows and larger, perennial species dominate; the fourth phase is ecological disturbance, or the creative destruction phase, which begins the cycle anew. It is the phase of creative destruction that is activated by such activities as routine burning of the land. Such a disturbance releases what Lance Gunderson calls “accumulated ecological capital,” such as nutrients and dormant seeds, that can now germinate and grow into new plants.[29]
Another type of ecosystem disturbance can come in the form of insect or pathogen invasion.[30] Like fire, insects and pathogens can lead to a creative destruction phase but, also like a fire that burns too hot or for too long, such invasions can cause irreparable damage, pushing an ecosystem to the brink of collapse. An example of such an invasive pathogen is Phytophthora ramorum, which has been the cause of sudden oak death for thousands of oaks across California and Oregon. Thus far it is unknown which stands of oak trees will be infected or exactly how the disease is spread, but research has been conducted to locate the most susceptible parts of oak forests. The species of oak that have been most devastated are coastal live oaks (Quercus agrifoli), black oaks (Quercus kelloggi), and tanoaks (Lithocarpus densifloru).[31] It appears that the trees at highest risk for infection are those at the edge of forest clusters, those growing near stands of bay laurels, and also those in close proximity to hiking and biking trails.[32]
The pathogen can colonize several other species of plant without actually killing them, such as the California rhododendron, huckleberry, madrone, California buckeye, big leaf maple, and manzanita.[33] Many of these species grow in the understory of oak stands and only carry the pathogen on their leaves while the main stem of the plants remain uninfected. The disease can pass easily from this understory foliage to their terminal hosts, the oaks, during rain and wind storms.[34] Mortality of oaks is highest at the edge of forest stands where the presence of pathogen-colonized undergrowth is most prevalent.[35]
Lee Klinger, a scientist who has closely studied sudden oak death, has found a correlation between abundance of moss and lichens on oaks and diseased and weakened trees. The mosses and lichens contribute to acidification of the soil, which is detrimental to the health of the trees and often kills their fine root systems.[36] Klinger suggests that the compromised health of the oaks, due to acidification and lichen growth, are making the trees more susceptible to Phytophthora ramorum, aiding the spread of sudden oak death.
Studies conducted on sudden oak death throughout Northern California have indicated that Phytophthora ramorum infecting oaks is far less prevalent in areas that have been recently burned.[37] Interestingly, the presence of lichens and mosses are also greatly reduced in frequently burned forest stands.[38] Although three quarters of California’s vegetation, including oaks, are fire-adapted species, the frequency of fire is dramatically different than during the time before European settlement. The U.S. Forest Service suppresses most forest fires, and as a result large quantities of undergrowth and lichens can build up that once were regularly burned away. It is quite likely that fire suppression has played a major role in the spread of sudden oak death.
Many of the indigenous tribes of California had symbiotic relationships with the oak trees growing near them. They often tended to the trees by burning brush and undergrowth from beneath the oak, thus improving the fertility of the soil and suppressing pests or diseases that might be detrimental. The soil fertility was also enhanced through working seashell and bone fragments into the soil, and mulching with seaweed.[39] Klinger writes,
In my holistic view, the problem of sudden oak death is ultimately related to the profound ecological shift of the oak forests in California brought about by a fundamental change in management practices associated with white settlement of the lands. The oak forests that, for centuries, were tended by native people were suddenly abandoned.[40]
Klinger treats oak trees today with a holistic medicinal approach which aims not to treat sudden oak death, or eradicate Phytophthora ramorum, but to support the trees’ health so they are more resistant to pathogens.[41] He scrubs the moss and lichens from the trees to reduce acidification, then fertilizes the soil surrounding the oaks, essentially mimicking the effects of fire.[42] He is stepping in to fulfill an ecological niche critical to California’s oak-dominant landscapes that was once filled by a species often not considered to be an integral part of nature: the human being.
THE SUBLIME AND THE FRONTIER
Over a relatively brief period of time touching three centuries from the 18th to the 20th, the concept of wilderness shifted from a place of evil and desolation to the sublime cathedral of pristine perfection wrought by the hand of God. Romanticism and the Enlightenment were the two primary catalysts of this profound shift. Before this transformative period, as Cronon writes, “To be a wilderness then was to be ‘deserted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren’—in short, a ‘waste,’ the word’s nearest synonym.”[43] Yet by the year 1862 Henry David Thoreau would be declaring “In Wildness is the preservation of the World,”[44] and just seven years later John Muir, upon his arrival in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, said “No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine.”[45]
The two sources that led to such a reverence for the concept of pristine, wild nature, according to Cronon, were the ideas of the Sublime, and of the Frontier. The Sublime comes to us through European Romanticism, whereas the Frontier is truly a concept of Americanism.[46] Cronon writes,
Indeed, it is not too much to say that the modern environmental movement is itself a grandchild of Romanticism and post-frontier ideology, which is why it is no accident that so much environmentalist discourse takes its bearings from the wilderness these intellectual movements helped create.[47]
Romantic thought is what birthed the concept of Nature that Morton finds so problematic. “The ‘thing’ we call nature becomes, in the Romantic period and afterward, a way of healing what modern society has damaged.”[48]
In both contrast and complement to Morton, Berkes traces the origins of the concept of nature, as an external environment, to post-Enlightenment thought and the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, man and nature (I use the term “man” instead of the gender-inclusive “human” here purposefully).[49] Thoreau wrote a beautiful passage in The Maine Woods which captures both this Romantic notion of sublime awe and the Enlightenment dualism of man and nature:
It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there… It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be a dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. (My italics.) [50]
Nature, for Thoreau, is a place of sublime, terrifying beauty. It is a place where spirit and matter are able to be conjoined, an overcoming of the Cartesian dualism, but it can only be so if nature does not include the human. Nature is, as Morton writes, “a transcendental term in a material mask.”[51] The grand cathedrals of the natural world, for the Romantics and American conservationists, were places where the lone individual might have the chance to encounter the might of God.[52] This is, of course, not an experience unique to Euro-Americans; for example, the indigenous tribes living near the Arctic glaciers understood that the glaciers had a powerful sentience and would respond to human behavior.[53] The sacred in nature is certainly not isolated to the European tradition. However, it seems the idea of an untouched sacred wilderness, with a complete lack of human presence, is less common worldwide.
Morton makes a strong case against revering such a conception of Nature: “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman.”[54] He is clear though that he is not advocating for no environmentalism—or what he prefers to call “ecology” as this term encompasses so much more—but rather he is suggesting an “ecology to come,” an ecology of the future.[55] Many environmentalists are trying to preserve what they see as pristine wilderness, particularly places of supreme natural beauty or biodiversity.[56] But the problem with privileging such sublime locations of grandeur is that we choose to value some parts of the Earth over other, perhaps more humble, places, or endangered species over more “common” plants and animals.[57] New dualisms are created between wilderness and the garden, the park, or even our human dwellings.
The other source of the American notion of wilderness, besides the Romantic Sublime, is the American Frontier. As Euro-American settlers moved ever westward across the North American continent the idea of the frontier became a way to reconnect with one’s primitive origins, to experience what it meant to be a true American. As settlers reached the West Coast they shared a sense of loss, a lament for the “free land” that had been available to them.[58] But this is the heart of the problem of wilderness, or nature, and of the frontier: there never was free land. This land had been occupied and shaped by and with the thousands of tribes that had been living here for millennia.
AN EMPTIED WILDERNESS
Both the movement of the frontier and the movement to preserve national parks were, and still are, acts of violence against the indigenous people who belonged to this land. As national parks were emptied of their inhabitants it created the illusion for tourists that they were visiting, “raw nature,”[59] land as fresh and pristine as God first created it.[60] Activities that helped shape the land and ecosystems, such as hunting, gathering, and burning, have been made illegal in many, although not all, parks, and are now labeled arson and poaching.[61] The 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act defines wilderness as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”[62] Cronon points out that the ideal of a natural landscape unworked by human hands can only be the fantasy of those who have never had to make their living from the land.
Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the Romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land… If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not.[63]
Wilderness, from such a perspective, is imagined to be an escape from history, from our human past.[64] We can enter the wilderness and leave behind our personal and collective histories, forgetting the violences committed so no trace might be left of the human being on these isolated preservations of nature. Yet any study of environmental history, which is an emerging branch of ecology, will show how human interaction has shaped nearly every landscape on Earth.[65]
Forests worldwide that were once thought to be pristine, for example, are actually the result of ecosystem resilience developed directly through human disturbance over thousands of years.[66] Forest islands amid the African savanna, once thought be the remains of an original primal forest, are now understood to have been brought forth from the grasslands and maintained through human care and nourishment.[67] By studying the environmental history of the landscape, Fairhead and Leach were able to see how the distribution of these forest islands follow the distribution of past and present village settlements.[68] Human interaction and engagement with the landscape in ways that are integrative and not domineering, have been shown in numerous cases to increase biodiversity and maintain resilient ecosystems.[69] A different example of this comes from India, where grazing water buffalo in Keoladeo maintained the biodiverse wetlands that otherwise would secede to less abundant grasslands.[70] Ecosystem resilience is defined by a system’s keystone species; perhaps the human is also a keystone species in many landscapes, able to build resilience and diversity if we can keep our own activities in check, within a threshold of sustainability.[71]
KEEPING THE LAND
The indigenous cultures that were able to cultivate such abundance in relationship to the California landscape over 13,000 years developed many social and cultural narratives, guidelines, and taboos for engaging with the land. Common terms used for this engagement have been “keeping the land,” “caring for the country,” or “taking care of the land.”[72] As Berkes defines it, tradition ecological knowledge is about moral and ethical human-ecological relations.[73] Cruikshank writes, “Narratives underscore the social content of the world and the importance of taking personal responsibility for changes in that world.”[74] This is a great contrast to the notion of pristine wilderness erased of any signs of our human past. In indigenous California nearly every place was named, even seemingly unimportant locations, usually for the subsistence activity carried out there.[75] The landscape was more than just a container for human knowledge though; it carries the memories of all past events, it is a mnemonic of social relations and responsibility.[76] The poet Gary Snyder writes, “In the old ways, flora and fauna and landforms are part of the culture.”[77]
Of course, being part of an indigenous culture, or possessing the knowledge of such a culture, is no guarantee that one will have a sustainable relationship with the Earth.[78] Not all indigenous cultures have consistently treated the land they live on well, and many examples exist of those who failed or did not survive.[79] But this does not mean there are not powerful lessons to learn from many of these cultural groups. It is true that the Earth must be conserved from the ravages of industrialism and greed, but not by the violent methods used to preserve the national parks of the United States. Such preservation is a form of embalming, a moment frozen in time, an erasure of the dynamic life forces that allow the Earth to be resilient and regenerative. It is a slow but eventual death knell, a false tilling of the soil to preserve a moment long gone, that does not allow new birth to take place. If the planet is divided solely into wild places and places domesticated for development neither will truly flourish to their full potential. Engagement of all species is required. If land is to be conserved, the human beings who shaped that ecosystem should be treated as a continual, integral part of that landscape as well.[80]
In her book Friction, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes of “anthropogenic” landscapes, landscapes that are co-created with their human inhabitants, forming places that are neither domesticated nor wild.[81] For true conservation of the Earth, a form of conservation that includes human beings, to flourish it must rise up in the gaps, between the dualism of nature and human, like an acorn buried beneath a concrete sidewalk that eventually pushes up between the seemingly impenetrable slabs on either side. But the tender shoot will grow strong in its liminal space, forging a new path where none seemed to exist before, eventually emerging as a sturdy, powerful oak tree.
SOLSTICE OAK
The leaves whisper, drier even than when I first sat beneath this tree in mid-autumn. Winter has nearly set in; the branches are cold to the touch. The tree has changed little itself during this shift of the seasons, only its leaves have faded from dusty green to a crunchy brown. Yet I see this canyon live oak with new eyes now. Are the mosses and lichens growing up its branches weakening its health? Ferns grow right up to the base of the tree, and I know no fire will sweep through this park to clear the underbrush.
As I gaze west through the branches the sunlight streams through with the rich, deep golden glow so characteristic of the days around the winter solstice. In between the branches pale, white-winged insects flutter, their wings like an ethereal gauze in the sunset. There is no denying that the scene is magical. This sense of ecological wonder is a form of magic created between the human being and all other species we humble ourselves to approach in communion. The magic of this moment is one ignited specifically between myself, the dancing insects, and this truly majestic oak tree.
As I walk away from the oak, meandering through the winding paths in between the chaparral, I realize that this particular canyon live oak has something that many oaks in California once had, but no longer do. It has human caretakers, caretakers who will clear the underbrush and mosses away by hand, and who will nourish the soil so that the oak remains healthy. This oak is neither domesticated nor wild, but growing in the gap, the liminal space of a human-shaped park, thriving between the streets of San Francisco.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, M. Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
Berkes, Fikret. Sacred Ecology. New York, NY: Routledge. 2012.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 69-90. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995. Accessed November 12, 2012. http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Trouble_with_Wilderness_1995.pdf
Cruikshank, Julie. “Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition.” Arctic 54 No. 4 (2001): 377-393.
Fairhead, James and Melissa Leach. Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Gomez-Pompa, Arturo and Andrea Kaus. “Taming the Wilderness Myth.” BioScience. 42 No. 4 (1992): 271-279. Accessed November 13, 2012. http://campus.greenmtn.edu/faculty/gregbrown/NRM3061/biosciencearticle.pdf
Gunderson, Lance H. “Ecological Resilience—In Theory and Application.” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 31 (2000): 425-439.
Kelly, Maggi and Ross K. Meentemeyer. “Landscape Dynamics of the Spread of Sudden Oak Death.” Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing. 68 No. 10 (2002): 1001-1009. Accessed October 16, 2012.http://www.asprs.org/a/publications/pers/2002journal/october/2002_oct_1001-1009.pdf
Klinger, Lee F. “A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Pathogenic Effects on Trees.” Paper presented at the Treework Environmental Practice Seminar XII, Trees, Roots, Fungi, Soil: Below-ground Ecosystem & Implications for Tree Health, at the Natural Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK, November, 13, 2008. Accessed December 18, 2012. http://suddenoaklifeorg.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/tep-paper-final.pdf
Moritz, Max A. and Dennis C. Odion. “Examining the Relationship Between Fire History and Sudden Oak Death Patterns: A Case Study in Sonoma County.” Paper presented at the Sudden Oak Death Second Science Symposium: The State of Our Knowledge, Monterey, California, January 18-21, 2005. Accessed December 18, 2012. http://suddenoaklifeorg.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/psw_gtr196_004_037moritz.pdf
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
[1] M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 30.
[2] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 19.
[3] Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 30.
[4] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 123.
[5]Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus, “Taming the Wilderness Myth,” BioScience 42, no. 4 (1992): 273, accessed November 13, 2012, http://campus.greenmtn.edu/faculty/gregbrown/NRM3061/biosciencearticle.pdf.
[6] Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 1.
[7] Ibid, 2.
[8] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995), 1, accessed November 12, 2012, http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Trouble_with_Wilderness_1995.pdf.
[9] Anderson, Tending the Wild, 25.
[10] Ibid, 26-34.
[11] Ibid, 26.
[12] Ibid, 28.
[13] Anderson, Tending the Wild, 30.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid, 32.
[16] Ibid, 31.
[17] Ibid, 32.
[18] Anderson, Tending the Wild, 15.
[19] Ibid, 37.
[20] Titus Fey Cronise, qtd. in Anderson, Tending the Wild, 13.
[21] Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 44.
[22] Anderson, Tending the Wild, 35.
[23] Ibid, 34.
[24] Ibid, 37-38.
[25] Ibid, 38.
[26] Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 89.
[27] Anderson, Tending the Wild, 17.
[28] Lance H. Gunderson, “Ecological Resilience—In Theory and Application,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 31 (2000): 426.
[29] Gunderson, “Ecological Resilience,” 430.
[30] Gunderson, “Ecological Resilience,” 430.
[31] Maggi Kelly and Ross K. Meentemeyer, “Landscape Dynamics of the Spread of Sudden Oak Death,” Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 68 no. 10 (2002): 1001, accessed October 16, 2012, http://www.asprs.org/a/publications/pers/2002journal/october/2002_oct_1001-1009.pdf.
[32] Kelly and Meentemeyer, “Landscape Dynamics of the Spread of Sudden Oak Death,” 1005.
[33] Ibid, 1001.
[34] Ibid, 1002.
[35] Kelly and Meentemeyer, “Landscape Dynamics of the Spread of Sudden Oak Death,” 1006.
[36] Lee F. Klinger, “A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Pathogenic Effects on Trees” (paper presented at the Treework Environmental Practice Seminar XII, Trees, Roots, Fungi, Soil: Below-ground Ecosystem & Implications for Tree Health, at the Natural Museum Cardiff, Cardiff, UK, November, 13, 2008), 3, accessed December 18, 2012. http://suddenoaklifeorg.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/tep-paper-final.pdf
[37] Max A. Moritz and Dennis C. Odion, “Examining the Relationship Between Fire History and Sudden Oak Death Patterns: A Case Study in Sonoma County” (paper presented at the Sudden Oak Death Second Science Symposium: The State of Our Knowledge, Monterey, California, January 18-21, 2005), 173, accessed December 18, 2012. http://suddenoaklifeorg.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/psw_gtr196_004_037moritz.pdf.
[38] Klinger, “A Holistic Approach,” 4.
[39] Klinger, “A Holistic Approach,” 5.
[40] Ibid, 6.
[41] Ibid, 2.
[42] Ibid, 1.
[43] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 2.
[44] Henry David Thoreau, qtd in Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 2, 19.
[45] John Muir, qtd in Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 3.
[46] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 3.
[47] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 3-4.
[48] Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 22.
[49] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 51.
[50] Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988), 93.
[51] Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 14.
[52] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 4.
[53] Julie Cruikshank, “Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition,” Arctic 54 no. 4 (2001): 387-388.
[54] Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 5.
[55] Ibid, 6.
[56] Ibid, 9.
[57] Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 16.
[58] Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 7.
[59] Cruikshank, “Glaciers and Climate Change,” 390.
[60] Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 9.
[61] Ibid, 10.
[62] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 249.
[63] Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 11,
[64] Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 10.
[65] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 30.
[66] Ibid, 79-80.
[67] James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 78-83.
[68] Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape, 90.
[69] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 44.
[70] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 43.
[71] Gunderson, “Ecological Resilience,” 431.
[72] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 40.
[73] Ibid, 11, 19.
[74] Cruikshank, “Glaciers and Climate Change,” 391.
[75] Anderson, Tending the Wild, 38.
[76] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 6.
[77] Gary Snyder, qtd. in Anderson, Tending the Wild, 39.
[78] Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 78.
[79] Ibid, 241.
[80] Ibid, 252.
[81] Tsing, Friction, 174.
“You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction.”[1] The entire purpose and means of this essay is to use a variety of provisional abstractions to attempt to avoid mistaking the abstraction of reality for reality itself, or what Alfred North Whitehead refers to as the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”[2] As stated in the quotation from Whitehead that opens this essay, one cannot think, describe, or write about anything without employing some kind of abstraction of that thing. It is essential to know how one has come to an abstraction so that when the time comes to understand it in its full context the abstraction can be dismantled in exact reversal of how it was built. The proper method of abstraction is like holding the waters of the ocean at bay to better study the shore, while remembering that one’s retaining wall is not actually a part of either the ocean or the shore, and that the ocean and shore create and define each other reciprocally.
This essay will explore Whitehead’s concepts of the separative, prehensive, and modal characters of space and time as put forward in Chapter IV “The Eighteenth Century” in his Science and the Modern World. The study I am undertaking is a nest of abstractions focusing on two pages within a chapter, set within a book, which is itself a written abstraction of the reality first spoken in lectures delivered by Whitehead in 1925, and now explored in an entirely different context eighty-seven years later. To grasp a concept is to feel it as an intuition, in Henri Bergson’s use of the term.[3] To bring it forth into thought or writing is like a layering of multiple images that provide refractions of the full picture but can never entirely represent the initial intuition. We shall proceed with this limitation in mind.
The foundational assumption of eighteenth century science, from Whitehead’s perspective, is the concept of “simple location” used when studying any kind of phenomenon. Whitehead defines simple location as follows:
To say that a bit of matter has simple location means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.[4]
To reconnect simple location with the reality surrounding and composing it, Whitehead draws forth three characters of space-time: the separative character, the prehensive character, and the modal character. These can also be conceived as six characters, three in reference to space and three in reference to time. The more the concepts are divided the easier it is to grasp their definitions but the further we retreat from their actual meaning.
The separative character of space and time is the simplest of the three to comprehend: things can be separated from each other in space, and they can also be separated from each other in time. In space I am physically separate from the person sitting next to me, and all others surrounding me. In time I am also separate from other persons; billions have been born and died before me, and billions more shall live after I have died.
The prehensive character of space and time is the necessary opposite of the separative character; they allow each other to exist. Within space things are not only separated but also together, and the same holds true for time. This togetherness is what creates compounds and allows new things to exist. Hydrogen is together with oxygen and thus water is formed. I am together in time with a glass of water I drink, or with the person next to me with whom I am conversing. Yet this idea of togetherness, the prehensive quality, becomes more complicated yet is also clarified when understood in conjunction with Whitehead’s third quality of space and time: the modal character.
The modal character, as Whitehead initially defines it, is what gives rise to simple location if not understood in relation to the separative and prehensive characters. But as he goes on to explain the modal character further it is also what allows for the overcoming of that particular form of abstraction, simple location. Whitehead’s first definition of the modal relates to the limit of something both in space and in time. All things have a limit in space, limits that define their shape and location. For example a ball is limited by its shape as a sphere, which is also the spherical limit of its location. In time such limitation can be understood as the duration of something; for example I am limited in time by the length of my life as bookmarked by my birth and eventually my death. But again, to describe the modal character in isolation from separative and prehensive characters is to give rise to a false understanding of each of these things. Hence, they must all be conceived in relationship.
Whitehead first uses the example of volume to illustrate how the abstraction of simple location cannot give a full representation of reality. A volume, when measured, is divided into sub-volumes; to visualize such division one must picture not the space itself but rather the lines dividing it. As a result, what is being conceived is not the space at all but rather the divisions. Thus it appears that the volume is only a collection of lines and points. The problem that arises is that in order to add up these divisions to measure a volume either the lines must be added up, or the space between them, but not both. If only the volume is added without the divisions we arrive where we began, with an unmeasured volume. If only the divisions are added we have a collection of lines all put together producing nothing but a single line. We have a number representing the divisions but no longer a space. It is as though the volume has been turned inside out.
An example of how such ways of measuring cannot present reality can be seen in the relation of matter to space in the atom. An atom is composed of ninety-nine percent empty space. Only one percent of an atom is actual matter. This can be visualized by imagining a human being, and then subtracting the empty space from each atom in the human body. The remaining matter would be no bigger than a grain of sand. While the pure matter of a human body has now been measured, what remains is not a representation of what we understand a human being to be.[5]
What is needed is an intuition of space as inclusive of both its separative and prehensive characters. Yet these cannot be understood together without the participation of the third character, the mode. Each part of space, defined by the separative character and unified by the prehensive, is in relation to every other part of space, for it only exists by relation to each of those parts. Whitehead describes it as follows: “The parts form an ordered aggregate, in the sense that each part is something from the standpoint of every other part, and also from the same standpoint every other part is something in relation to it.”[6] An example that can help illustrate this is a technique used in watercolor painting, called negative painting. The technique is used to bring an object, say a leaf, to the foreground (see Figure 1). The leaf, which presumably has been sketched in with pencil, is then painted around. In this way the background is defined by a distinct color whereas the leaf, which is actually the focal subject, is the plain, undefined white of blank paper. The background is defining the subject, while the subject defines the background. They create each other.
Figure 1 – Negative Watercolor Painting
Whitehead chooses to illustrate the way in which the modal character works with the abstract example of spaces A, B, and C. He writes, “Thus if A and B and C are volumes of space, B has an aspect from the standpoint of A, and so has C, and so has the relationship of B and C. This aspect of B from A is the essence of A.”[7] But B is not the only essence of A. For the aspects from A to C, to D, to E, and so forth are also the essence of A. “The volumes of space have no independent existence. They are only entities as within the totality; you cannot extract them from their environment without destruction of their very essence.”[8] One way to visualize this is with the image of a honeycomb, an example of organic geometry (see Figure 2). The honeycomb is made up of many hexagons, each one creating the others around it. Each of the six walls of one hexagon are simultaneously one of the six walls of each hexagon next to it, and so forth. No single hexagon can be isolated, otherwise all semblance of structure is lost and one is left only with a small globule of wax and honey.
Figure 2 – Honeycomb hexagons
It is the aspect of B from A, or of the one wall shared between two honeycomb hexagons, that Whitehead calls “the mode in which B enters into the composition of A.” Thus the mode in which hexagon A enters into hexagon B next to it is the wall they share between them. Furthermore, if hexagon C shared a wall with hexagon B, but not hexagon A, then the modal character between A and C would be different than between A and B but they would be in relationship nonetheless. Thus the modal character can best be understood as the relational character. One hexagon cannot exist, it will have no essence, without the presence of all the other hexagons. Unlike the previous example of negative painting, no space is in the background while another in the foreground. All spaces are in the foreground and simultaneously dependent on each other. A better of example of how to visualize this would be the trick image of two facial silhouettes in profile looking at each other (see Figure 3). Viewed one way the faces are apparent. Viewed in another the space between the faces becomes visible, revealing the silhouette of a vase. Both the faces and the vase are present simultaneously and they each define each other, however, they cannot be described except by abstracting one from the other alternatively.
Figure 3 – Vase and two faces
It almost seems odd that what Whitehead has termed the modal character, what I am calling the relational character, in his initial definition is that which, when isolated from the separative and prehensive characters, is the abstraction known as simple location. Simple location, according to Whitehead’s second definition of the modal, is the concept of relationship without factoring in actual beings or objects into that relationship. It is merely the concept of relationality with no participants. This is not likely how scientists of the 18th century might have defined simple location, which would be more along the lines of the participant without the relationship. It is this paradox that Whitehead’s somewhat contradictory definitions of the modal character appear to reveal.
Applying these three characters of separation, prehension, and mode to time is both simpler and more complex than applying them to space. Simpler because it is easy to understand that a moment in time cannot be separated from the moments on either side of it. Time continues to flow whether someone pauses to think about it or not. Time can never be stopped. (Unless one has entered another realm such as Faërie; but in such a place the laws of physics may not apply in the same way, so the characters of separation, prehension, and mode may not be relevant.) On the other hand, it is more complicated to understand the character of time (back in our realm) because time cannot be visualized; our usual way of imagining something requires the introduction of space. The need for space within time is entirely Whitehead’s point, because ultimately space cannot be understood without the flow of time either. So even the separation of space and time from each other are false abstractions, or misplaced concreteness. “For each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time.”[9]
This tri-part relationality of all things can also be applied to how the thinking mind relates to anything that it contemplates. To study any one object, time, place, being, or anything else is to have the mind in relationship to that thing. The object and the mind are each defining the essence of each other. Whitehead quotes Bishop Berkeley on this point:
When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and does conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in itself.[10]
The object and the mind are each defining the essence of each other.
As Whitehead writes more on this concept of interrelationality he begins to use the term prehension, which was initially introduced as one of three characters of space-time, to refer to the entire concept of essence defining essence. He writes, “This unity of a prehension defines itself as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other times.”[11] The modal becomes the prehensive, the prehensive becomes the separative, the separative becomes the modal. What keeps the leaf separate from its background, or environment, is what brings the leaf together with its environment. The leaf cannot exist as a leaf without its branch, its tree, its forest, its soil and so forth, and they each would not be branch, tree, forest, or soil without the existence of that and all other leaves. As we pull away from viewing reality as an abstraction all abstractive descriptors blend one into the others. Reality, the entire universe, begins to pour in to our experience.
The concept of prehension expands when considering a perceiver in relationship to the universe. The prehensive character is no longer merely a volume defined by all other volumes, it is all the senses in relationship to every stimulus. Yet it is also more than this, for sense is too specific a word for prehension. Prehension occurs without either sense or cognition. Stimulus is too simple a term as well, because what are referred to as stimuli are also each in their own acts of prehension of the universe.
When prehension is brought into the context of human relationships—whether between two or more human beings, between humans and other species, the Earth, or any other part of the cosmos—Whitehead’s concept can provide a grounding for an ethics of relationship and responsibility. If every part of the cosmos is prehending every other part, and they each create the essence of the other, no fundamental separation exists that can justify causing harm to another being without it also affecting oneself in an essential way. As previously quoted, Whitehead writes that all things “are only entities as within a totality; you cannot extract them from their environment without destruction of their very essence.”[12] Such a concept, if brought into other realms of thought, can provide a powerful ethical argument on behalf of human and ecological justice.
This exploration of Whitehead’s philosophy of prehension and separation has moved back and forth between the abstract and the concrete in an attempt to bring clarity to abstract concepts that can ultimately reveal a more concrete form of reality. I believe the best test for the validity of a philosophical concept is an exploration of how that concept can serve the ways we behave in everyday life. Do they make a difference in our habits, thoughts, and personal relationships? Whitehead is providing not only a way to overcome the fallacy of misplaced concreteness but also the fallacy of misplaced separation and independence. I say “misplaced separation” instead of merely “fallacy of separation” because holding a balance between separation and unity is what allows relationship to exist. A relationship cannot be formed within a unity alone, but requires some sense of separation as well. Carrying an understanding of the interdependence and relationality of our own essence to every other aspect of reality, I believe, could make such a difference in how one’s life is lived, not only in relation to our fellow human beings, but in relationship to other species, ecosystems, the planet Earth, and perhaps even the extent and interior of the cosmos.
Bibliography
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York, NY: The Free Press. 1967.
Bergson, Henri. “Philosophical Intuition.” In Henri Bergson: Key Writings, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, translated by Melissa McMahon, 233-247. New York, NY: Continuum. 2002.
[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1967), 59.
[2] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 58.
[3] Henri Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition,” in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, trans. Melissa McMahon (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002),240.
[4] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 58.
[5] Brian Swimme, personal communication, 2011.
[6] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 65.
[7] Ibid, 65.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 71.
[10] Berkeley, qtd. in Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 67.
[11] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 69.
[12] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 65.
This series of four paintings is a visual response to the content of Chris Bache’s course The Birth of the Diamond Soul, offering different images of the reincarnating soul both inside and outside the influence of time and space, as well as an homage to the devastation of the ecological crisis and how it may be the catalyst for the forging of the Diamond Soul.
THE OVERSOUL
The Oversoul is a term used by Bache in his book Lifecycles to describe the larger soul overseeing, but also incorporating, each incarnating human life. It is simultaneously a single entity, but also a family of entities nested within each other, and ultimately nested within the larger and larger spheres of existence. This painting is one representation of the Oversoul, pictured as a nautilus, an image Bache provided in class. The chambers of the nautilus each represent a human incarnation, yet the whole shell is the full soul. I have depicted a waiting fetus gestating within each chamber as a symbol of these lives. The life about to be born resides in the outermost chamber, with a diamond in potentia within his heart. The diamond represents the Diamond Soul being forged slowly over the course of each lifetime. A second diamond resides in the center of the nautilus representing the ultimate birth of the Diamond Soul at the end of the incarnational process.
The pantheon of planets within the nautilus and the zodiacal signs surrounding it indicate the archetypal influences on each life and upon the soul as a whole, each chamber of the nautilus having a different perspective and relationship to the signs and planets that characterize that particular life. The baby about to be born residing in the outermost chamber is within the realm of Pisces, both as a fetus in the aquatic realm of the womb, but also as a symbol of our current times since we are in the Age of Pisces.
The vision of this painting came to me nearly in complete form when I began contemplating the nautilus as a metaphor for the Oversoul. To my delight, each of the zodiacal signs took on a life of their own as I painted them, as I had not pictured their exact form before drawing them in. I was particularly surprised by the form Sagittarius took, as a horseshoe doubling as a bow with an arrow. The animals also each took on their own personality seemingly independent of my intentions for them. The real surprise came as the baby being born into the Age of Pisces, for it was pure synchronous chance that the nautilus opened into the sign of Pisces, yet it seemed to fit perfectly with the concept behind the painting.
THE DIAMOND SOUL NEBULA
In an effort to visualize the concept of the Diamond Soul, Bache introduced us to several images from the natural world that might represent parts of the Diamond Soul, ranging from blossoming flowers to nebulae. This particular nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, is one that conveys the idea in an especially evocative way, with its ethereal explosion and heavenly sacrificial blooming. The core of the nebula, as can be seen in all the images captured of it, is a pure white space resembling a diamond.
I found in my attempts to paint this nebula with watercolor that portraying the light and darkness, the veiled colors of the celestial event, was much more difficult than I had previously expected and took more than one try. When one looks at a photograph of a nebula it is the qualities of the whole that are so compelling, but in painting it I had the experience of becoming intimately familiar with each part, trying to understand where the colors blend and where they do not, yet also attempting to capture the whole as well. The only adjustment I made from the image as I painted it was emphasizing the diamond at the heart, forged in the layers upon layers of light and color.
DROUGHT AND HOPE
This painting of a drought-ridden desert with a single sapling growing in it is less an image of the Diamond Soul, but rather of the birth canal humanity seems to be entering before such soul transformation is possible. The painting is a representation of the changes rapidly being wrought upon the globe by human-induced climate change, and was particularly inspired by Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. McKibben provides the data that clearly demonstrates that global warming is no longer a future threat, it is a current reality. On a personal level this understanding was reinforced by a road trip I took across the American Continent this July while creating the concepts for this gallery. From Nevada to Michigan temperatures soared above 100° F, usually averaging at 104° but sometimes even reaching 108°. Fields were dry and often barren, and many cornfields showed yellowing leaves coated in a layer of dust. Yet oil wells continued to pump in these same fields by the roadside, and every building we entered was blasting arctic temperatures of air conditioning, all fueled by coal and oil burning power plants.
In the painting a young woman is bending over an olive sapling, seemingly watering it with her tears. It is ambiguous if this is the last plant left growing in this barren desert, or if it is the first that has managed to survive. I chose the olive as this single plant because of the great lineage of symbolism connected to the olive, particularly in the Western tradition. The olive is the tree of Athens, mythically a gift from the Grecian goddess Athena who gave it to provide wood, oil, and fruit to the people of Athens. In return they named their city-state after her. Athens is the birthplace of democracy and as such the olive may also symbolize the democratic process. The olive is part of the painting to pose the question of the role of democracy, or perhaps its absence, in the onset and unfolding of the ecological crisis.
The olive is also a symbol from the Hebrew tradition, a sign of hope in the Old Testament. When Noah sends a dove from the Ark to search for signs of land, the dove returns upon the second journey with an olive branch. The olive thus is the first growing plant after a devastating environmental catastrophe, the Great Flood, and also able to emerge out of a desert, but in the biblical case it is a desert of sea water.
The woman’s body is painted in a multitude of colors to represent all races that will be affected by the ravages of climate change, yet it also has an ethereal quality to it, almost resembling the sparkling surface of a diamond, as perhaps she is approaching the stage of a Diamond Soul.
Finally, the labyrinth in the background represents the circuitous route of the human journey, of the soul’s journey, and of our pathway to learning and wisdom.
BREATHING TIME
Breathing Time was inspired by a meditative exercise presented by Bache during the Diamond Soul course in which each breath we took represented one hundred years, or approximately one human life. Eventually we brought the movement of our hands into this meditation, each expansion and contraction of the hands 
representing a lifetime. The energy created by this movement we slowly gathered into a sphere at our centers, then held it like a ball of light, before pressing the energy into our hearts and letting it fill our bodies. This painting is a visual representation of that 
meditation as I saw it during the exercise itself.
In the painting, within the arcs of energy created by the breath and the moving hands are revealed faces, each one the face of a previous life. The faces are the color of the murky, nebulaic background indicating that the air may be packed full of these faces, full of lifetimes, but only the ones that are swept over with the meditative energy are revealed in that moment. There may be an infinity of faces present, just as we likely have an infinity of lifetimes to our souls.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bache, Christopher M. Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. New York, NY: Paragon House, 1994.
Bache, Christopher M. Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Grof, Stanislav. Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Grof, Stanislav. The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011.
The human species has only one home in the cosmos, one place that has intimately nourished us into existence, has made us the powerful, independent beings we are. Our home is day by day falling further into illness, a body and soul sickness descending toward death that can be felt by each person with the sensitivity or openness to perceive it. The planet Earth is suffering and, often without awareness of the connection, her inhabitants suffer with her. Humanity needs to awaken to the intimate interconnection and dependence of the collective psyche of the Earth, or the anima mundi, of which each of our psyches are an integral part. Together the Earth and humanity need to heal, and simultaneously move towards a wholeness in which we each have the sense of security of truly being home in our world.
The healing that must take place begins on the individual level, but can only be true healing when placed within the context of the whole. An approach to this healing that has been emerging over the last few decades is the field of ecopsychology, a psychology of the human soul taken within the context of the anima mundi, the larger ensouled world. The term “ecopsychology” was coined by the cultural historian Theodore Roszak to broaden the context of psychology and marry it to the study of ecology. The root eco is derived from the Greek oikos, meaning “home,” and psyche comes from the Greek for “soul” or “animating spirit”; thus ecopsychology could be seen as a study of the ensouled home, or the study of the soul at home.
The modern West, inheriting the Cartesian dualism of a split between spirit and matter, has come to see the human being as an isolated island of subjectivity experiencing a soulless, inanimate world. As humanity has become increasingly individualistic during the modern era, our sense of alienation from the Earth, and ultimately the cosmos, has increased as well.[1] “An existential uncertainty haunts the modern psyche,”[2] as the ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak writes, as a result of this alienation and sense of homelessness. For the modern human, the environment is considered to be “out there,”[3] the “background for economic purposes”[4] from which we are almost completely dissociated.[5] At most, the world may cause profound suffering for the human, but it does not suffer itself, for it has no inherent subjectivity.[6]
For the millions of humans who spend the majority of their lives within the concrete confines of cities, this dissociation from the natural world deprives the soul of an essential contact that makes the human being whole and healthy.[7] Yet merely leaving the urban setting to visit a protected wilderness is not enough to heal the afflicted soul, for the Earth itself carries the sickness of the disconnection and, as the “geologian” Thomas Berry writes, “… the health of the planet is primary while human health is derivative. We cannot have well people on a sick planet.”[8] The disease, as the archetypal psychologist James Hillman observes, is in both the person and the world.[9] The suffering Earth is speaking her pain through us, and as Sarah Conn has perceived, she “speaks the loudest through the most sensitive of us.”[10]
In most contemporary psychology, an individual experiencing “pain for the world” is considered to be projecting their inner turmoil onto the inanimate environment outside.[11] Any desire to connect in a more meaningful way with the Earth, such as speaking in conversation with the voices of nature, could indicate a certain instability of sanity in the individual. Roszak points out that little has furthered the agenda of industrial civilization more than the repression of the ensouled animation of the cosmos .[12]
The human relationship to the Earth in the West has become deeply riddled with pathologies as we almost blindly continue the unchecked destruction of our only home. The psychotherapist Ralph Metzner identifies some of humanity’s collective psychological disorders in his book Green Psychology, ranging from autism, to addiction, narcissism, amnesia, developmental fixation, repression, dissociation, and anthropocentrism. We have lost our ability for empathy and humility, our perception, and our sense of mystery.[13] Hillman extends the vision of collective pathologies beyond the human sphere entirely, recognizing our psychological diseases manifesting in the world itself, in our food, our politics, our medicine, and even our language.[14] He writes of “addictive” agriculture, “paranoid” businesses, “anorexic” or “catatonic” buildings, and “manic” consumption.[15] Because, in some form or other, all people in industrial society participate in this pathological system, we become prone to these same diseases for the very reason these pathologies try to repress: we are intimately interconnected with every part of the world we inhabit. Conn, a practicing ecopsychologist, sees the symptoms of her patients “as ‘signals’ of distress in our connection with the larger context or as a defect in the larger context itself.”[16] Whether we can identify the source or not, as the environmental activist Joanna Macy expresses, no one is exempt from this pain.[17] For those who can understand the source of their pain, of their pathology, the ability to fully act on behalf of the Earth has often been so long denied it must be aroused by deep healing work, a profound therapy of the psyche.[18]
In a personal correspondence to Roszak, the Australian rainforest activist John Seed speaks of the role therapy can play in the environmental movement: “Psychologists in service to the Earth helping ecologists to gain deeper understanding of how to facilitate profound change in the human heart and mind seems to be the key at this point.”[19] Until quite recently, the scope of psychotherapy “stopped at the city limits,”[20] but with the advent of ecopsychology, and other forms of reconnection between humanity and the Earth, as put forward by Roszak, Hillman, Berry, Macy, Conn, Metzner, and many others, that scope is at last broadening.[21] Ecopsychology addresses the alienation felt by the modern human, and seeks to repair the sense of homelessness in the cosmos.[22]
In assessing the pathological relationship modern humanity has with nature, Metzner questions whether some collective trauma, sustained from the terrors faced by early humans in the natural world, may have led to a form of shared amnesia and repression that severed our perception of the interconnection and harmony of the cosmos.[23] If so, our healing process will have to address this trauma and begin to rebuild a new trust in the Earth. Like early humans we are still fully dependent on the Earth, but we hold far more power than primal peoples once did; with this power comes equal responsibility, for now not only is our survival dependent on the Earth, but the Earth’s survival has also become dependent upon us. One will not continue without the other, and as Berry describes, this “…is a community project. Only the community survives; nothing survives as an individual.”[24]
A prevalent belief in Western civilization is that to address the needs beyond our individual selves we must first have our own lives together.[25] Yet, because of the deep, though often veiled, interconnection of the human to the Earth, healing of the human and the planet must take place simultaneously.[26] There cannot be a divorce between the two, for they are really one. Healing, as Conn writes, is “an exploration of ways to remember our wholeness, to reconnect with other humans and with the natural world.”[27] We are not separate entities living on the Earth, but as the ecophilosopher David Abram observes, we are actually living in the Earth, walking hundreds of miles below the outer layers of the atmosphere.[28] Our bodies our composed of the same elements as the Earth, the same as the entire cosmos. “We were mothered out of the substance of this planet,” Roszak writes, “Her elements, her periodicities, her gravitational embrace, her subtle vibrations still mingle in our nature, worked a billion years down into the textures of life and mind.”[29]
If we are composed of the substance of the Earth, then not only our bodies but our psyches as well must be one with the Earth’s; we are differentiated souls forming and participating in one larger soul, the anima mundi.[30] Our minds, rather than being solely our own, are rather facets of the consciousness of the planet, “…a power,” as Abram writes, “in which we are carnally immersed.”[31] Conn discusses Arthur Koestler’s term “holon,” which indicates a self which is simultaneously a real individual but also an integral part of a larger whole.[32] Each human psyche is a holon within the greater context of the anima mundi.
Hillman, the champion of soul and the anima mundi, sees the world soul as pervading all things, not only the natural world but each human-made object as well, animating trees, rivers, mountains, lions, and butterflies, but also the concrete roads, street lamps, bridges, buildings, and books and pencils too.[33] We are forever caught in a dance of animating each other, human projecting upon the world, the world projecting upon the human, and also the world projecting upon all other facets of itself.[34] Because of this living interplay we are able to perceive the Earth’s suffering within ourselves, feeling it as our own, because it is our own. Hillman recognizes that “the soul of the individual can never advance beyond the soul of the world, because they are inseparable, the one always implicating the other.”[35]
As humanity broadens its sense of self to encompass the Earth, our care for self will extend to the planet as well.[36] If we approach Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere, as a part of the larger anima mundi, we can begin to uncover what Roszak calls the “ecological unconscious.”[37] The ecological unconscious can “be drawn upon as a resource for restoring us to environmental harmony.”[38] This can lead to the development of what Arne Naess has named the “ecological self,” a conception of the individual self always identified with and embedded in the larger context of the Earth environment.[39]
One way to develop the ecological self and tap into the ecological unconscious is through the ecopsychological practice of bioregionalism.[40] A bioregion is an area of land defined not by human boundaries but by the contours and features of the land itself, often a watershed, land enclosed by bodies of water, or changes in climate or elevation. By coming to intimately know the features of the bioregion in which we each make our home, we can develop a sense of place and belonging, a connection to the spirit of the land which is the spirit in us as well.[41] If we acquaint ourselves with the soul of the land, we can come to know the anima mundi and thus come to know ourselves.[42] Hillman writes, “We pay respect to it simply by looking again, re-specting, that second look with the eye of the heart.”[43]
Part of the process of ecopsychology is actively engaging with the land, engaging with respect, or looking again to see what we could not previously. Conn describes some of the ways in which we can engage, from gardening and restoration work, to participating with environmental groups, to conducting rituals in nature.[44] Each of these practices connects us to our bioregion, rebuilding a sense of home and harmony. Conn concludes her essay “When the Earth Hurts, Who Responds?” by saying:
The goals of therapy then include not only the ability to find joy in the world, but also to hear the Earth speaking in one’s own suffering, to participate in and contribute to the healing of the planet by finding one’s niche in the Earth’s living system and occupying it actively.[45]
The entire universe is connected as one in the beginning of time, to the moment the cosmos flared forth. Those ties still remain, often hidden, waiting to be uncovered through patient healing work. As they are uncovered, humanity can see that to heal ourselves is to heal the Earth and to heal the Earth is to heal ourselves.[46] Thus, together the planet and the human species will both be able to move toward wholeness, to see ourselves as integral holons in a larger sphere. We can once again come to realize we were always at home, in ourselves, in the Earth, in the cosmos.
Works Cited
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2010.
Berry, Thomas. Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2006.
–––––. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1999.
–––––. The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Hillman, James. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, Inc., 2007.
Metzner. Ralph. Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1999.
Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, ed. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995.
Roszak, Theodore. Person/Planet. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1979.
Spretnak, Charlene. The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999.
[1] Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 222.
[2] Ibid, 221.
[3] Sarah A. Conn, “When the Earth Hurts, Who Responds?” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind ed. Theodore Roszak et al. (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 157.
[4] Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 22.
[5] Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1999), 95.
[6] James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, Inc, 2007), 94.
[7] Berry, The Great Work, 82.
[8] Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2006), 35.
[9] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 93.
[10] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 171.
[11] Ibid, 161.
[12] Theodore Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind ed. Theodore Roszak et al. (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 7.
[13] Metzner, Green Psychology, 91.
[14] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 96.
[15] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 104.
[16] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 162.
[17] Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind ed. Theodore Roszak et al. (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 241.
[18] Ibid, 243.
[19] John Seed, qtd. in Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” 3.
[20] Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” 2.
[21] Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” 3-4.
[22] Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real, 76.
[23] Metzner, Green Psychology, 92.
[24] Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), 47.
[25] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 161.
[26] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 118.
[27] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 160-161.
[28] David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2010), 99.
[29] Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1979), 54.
[30] Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” 5, 16.
Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real, 76.
[31] Abram, Becoming Animal, 123.
[32] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 164.
[33] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 101.
[34] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 103.
[35] Ibid, 105.
[36] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 164.
[37] Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” 11-12.
[38] Ibid, 14.
[39] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 163.
[40] Metzner, Green Psychology, 185.
[41] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 166.
[42] Metzner, Green Psychology, 189.
[43] Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, 129.
[44] Conn, “When the Earth Hurts,” 170.
[45] Ibid, 171.
[46] Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” 8.
Presentation at the PCC Cosmology of Love Conference with Matthew Segall.
Becca Tarnas 