Ecoalescence II PDF

Cohabitations
Ecoalescence
Maximilian Frederick Herbert
330611901
3300 Words exactly
0
The major problems of the world are the result of the difference

between how nature works and the way people think.

-‐ Gregory Bateson, An Ecology of Mind

The subtlety of nature is greater many times

than the subtlety of argument.

-‐ Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

Understanding nature is a feat approached by humankind in a variety of ways.

Our relationship with nature is informed by our apprehension of it. Survival of
both humans and the ecosphere depends on a healthy symbiosis between the
no single discipline or ideology can claim to understand nature
two. However,
fully, so achieving a symbiotic relationship is challenging. In efforts to
understand nature philosophically the term has taken on a variety of
connotations that differ throughout history from school to school. Traditional
and ideological differences between diverse cultures often lead to conflicting
perceptions of nature, which can exacerbate tensions and create hostilities
between authoritative voices in disparate and rival communities. Although
thorough understanding of nature may remain forever beyond the grasp of
human intelligence, this essay seeks to argue that consideration of the
compatibility of contrasting approaches is the best hope for generating a
synergistic and collectivized knowledge process sufficient to ensure the survival
of humanity within the ecosphere in a period of anticipated global ecological
crisis. Combining scientific rationalism, provisions for indigenous knowledges,
eco-‐feminism and classical and contemporary philosophy with Romanticism, it
enshrines the common ground necessary for ecoalescence.
1
There are many examples of enmity expressed by ecological
commentators about the scientific community. Joseph R. Des Jardin wrote in
Environmental Ethics (1993) that ‘leaving environmental decisions to the
“experts” in science and technology does not mean that these decisions will be
objective and value neutral. It means only that the values and philosophical
assumptions that do decide the issue will be those that the experts hold.’1 The
stance that ‘facts are always examined in light of some theory and therefore
cannot be disentangled from philosophy’,2 underpins a wealth of arguments in
opposition to the scientific establishment, which is alleged to be attempting
monopolization of truth. The traditional knowledges of indigenous communities,
for example, whose approaches to nature tend to differ from those of scientific
interventionists, are habitually overlooked. Fikret Birkes writes in his Sacred
Ecology (1999) that ‘the issue of a power differential between science and
traditional knowledge will never be completely resolved’3 because an
‘overemphasis [on objectivity] and a corresponding devaluation of… Earth in its
sensuous particulars and emotional meanings – ‘things’ that do not survive being
quantified or, significantly commodified – is itself implicated in [the] crisis.’4 The
detached, objective scientific approach seldom takes into consideration spiritual,
symbolic or sentimental connections between humankind and the environment,
instead tending to focus on overt practicality and empiricism. Perceived hubris
on the part of the scientific community results from the correlation between
historic growth of the post-‐Enlightenment enterprise and the concurrent
destruction and subordination of nature and the biosphere during

1 Curry, Patrick. Ecological Ethics, Polity, 2011. p.5
2 Vykotsky, Lev Semonovich. Thought and Language ‘Piaget’s theory of Child Language and
Thought’, Trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vaker M.I.T Press, p.11
3 Birkes, Fikret. Sacred Ecology, Routledge 2012. p.19
4 (Ibid.), p.19
2
industrialisation. Many indigenous communities have lived in subsistent
equilibrium among natural habitats from time immemorial, and yet a conviction
of authority held by inheritors of the hegemonic occidental tradition leads them
to fancy themselves the best recourse for developing solutions to environmental
problems, despite a tarnished historical record. ‘Indigenous knowledge is treated
as a challenge to the dominant positivist-‐reductionism paradigm in Western
science’,5 and so the two become opposed. Furthermore, as difficulties mount, a
customary response of establishment science is to advocate increased research
into more technologically advanced modes of intervention, whilst proven ancient
principles and practices are dismissed as anachronistic and impotent. Birkes
argued that, ‘techno-‐science does not itself offer a solution to the eco-‐crisis
[because] the value that proponents of science place on objectivity can
contribute to the ecocrisis as much as… it can help by gathering, analysing and
presenting evidence’,6 going on to state: ‘it is highly doubtful that reason alone
can save the Earth; [it] will take emotion as well as intellect – and probably…
spirituality.’7 The compatibility of spirituality and science and their cross
integration is an area of much contention and historical difficulty.
The Romantics were spiritual, intelligent and emotional. For them, Love
was a metonym for the divine; equivalence succinctly expressed in the phrasal
expression ‘God is Love.’ They positioned themselves at the outskirts of society,
their activities representing a break from the motives of the industrial revolution
in the early 19th Century. Theirs was a ‘thorough and genuine revolution…
against the respectability of the bourgeois temper… against the whole of the

6 (Ibid.), p.13
7 (Ibid.), p.19
3
mathematico-‐mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, [and] against a
conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality’.8
Industrialisation was elevating man’s perception of his position relative to the
environment, with ‘science… opening the way for boundless improvement
through control over nature’.9 The industrialists were rendering the material
ecosphere subaltern, gaining from its exploitation. Benjamin Franklin wrote that
it was ‘impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand
years, the power of man over matter.’10 Man sought to triumph over the natural
domain, making it his own dominion. Romanticism and Industrialisation were
ideologically opposed in this respect, with disparities in their perceptions of the
natural world’s axiological merits. For the Romantics a combination of bucolic
appreciation and co-‐identification with nature led to emotional reciprocity.
Rejecting the emerging Age of Reason with their own Counter-‐Enlightenment,
they nonetheless ‘did not… wish to go back to… institutions of the past but
[rather] to look for alternatives… [so] into [a] transcendental vacuum [they]
moved [and] were initiated into a new phase in the... dialectic between a culture
of feeling and a culture of reason… the former… last … in the ascendant (sic.)
during the baroque era before being thrust to one side by… Cartesian
rationalism.’11 By amalgamating sensitivity and spirituality with their existing
knowledge they generated a hybridized ideological system on the margins of
various pre-‐existing fields. This repositioned man relative to God and nature.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Discourse on Human Dignity (1486)
features a text representative of God speaking to Adam, characterising a common

9 Blanning, Tim. The romantic revolution: a history. Vol.34. Modern library, 2011. p23
10 (Ibid.), p.38
11 (Ibid.), p.6
4
perception of the Christian tradition. He wrote: ‘I have made you neither celestial
nor terrestrial, neither mortal nor immortal, because you yourself… will shape
and sculpt yourself… You could degenerate into something inferior; as are the
brutes; [or] you could regenerate yourself according to your will, into something
superior, as are the divine.’12 Similarly, in The Open: Man and Animal (2002)
Giorgio Agamben wrote of the anthropological machine constructed by
Enlightenment industry as ‘an apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature
proper to Homo, holding him suspended between celestial and terrestrial nature,
between animal and human – and thus… always more and less than himself.’13
Also, in Against Ecological Sovereignty (2011) ecologist Mick Smith argued that
the occidental philosophical tradition maintains man’s position through ‘a
constantly recurring manufacture of metaphysical distinctions to separate and
elevate the human from the… natural world.’14 Here, God, Science and Western
Philosophy share the same effect of positioning man as an intermediary between
categories. Romanticism dissolves these distinctions in co-‐identification with
nature and the divine. For example, in the writing of pastoral poet William
Wordsworth, with whom there is ‘no incentive… to believe that …faith in God
[was ever lost]’,15 an extension of man into the environment in a reciprocal
morphosis ascribes sentience to the natural world with emotional affinity:

12 Berrardi, Franco. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha
generation. Minor Compositons p.9-‐10

13 Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford University Press, 2004. p.29
14 Smith, Mick. Against Ecological Sovereignty, Ethics Biopolitics and Saving the Natural World,
pxii
15 Ulmer, William A. The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-‐1805. New York SUNY Press, 2001, p.17
5
Thus, while the sun sinks down to rest
Far in the regions of the west,
Though to the vale no parting beam
Be given, not one memorial gleam,
A lingering light he fondly throws
On the dear hills where first he rose16
-‐&-‐
How pleasant, as the sun declines, to view
The spacious landscape change in form and hue…
…There, objects, by the searching beams betrayed,
Come forth, and here retire in purple shade…17
-‐&-‐
Dear is the forest frowning o’er his head,
And dear the velvet green-sward to his tread:
Moves there a cloud o’er mid-day’s flaming eye!
Upward he looks--”and calls it luxury:”
Kind Nature’s charities his steps attend;
In every babbling brook he finds a friend…18

16 Wordsworth, William. The Poems of William Wordsworth, Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 1994. p.1,
(Extract from the conclusion of a poem composed in anticipation of leaving school,)
17 (Ibid.), p.2
18 (Ibid.), p.7
6
The projection of human traits onto nature was described by John Ruskin as
‘pathetic fallacy’19 in 1856, despite his belief that: ‘love of nature… is an
invariable sign of the goodness of heart and justness of perception.’20 But what
was not accounted for in Ruskin’s appraisal is the manner in which the
Romantics identified not only with, but as nature, and often nature with and as
God. Theirs was not a pointed anthropomorphosis but a transversal mutuality of
the kind inscribed in the philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, who wrote that ‘the
Absolute in its aspect of self-‐dispersion is the world of Nature… as realized in
space and time… whose very essence consists in keeping its contents apart from
one another down to the minutest particular detail.’21 Nature was an expression
of God in particularized, separable and temporally limited forms. Furthermore,
Hegel ‘explained that romanticism had ‘‘dissolved all particular gods into a pure
and infinite self-‐identity [destroyed by] the flame of subjectivity.”’22 Man,
environment and God were one. Life in all its discrete permutations transiently
expressed aspects of an absolute and eternal God. As an early proponent of
Subjectivism Hegel’s phenomenological philosophy dealt with direct experience;
the individual’s interaction with nature entailing spiritual contact with the
omnipotent force in a mode of eccentric identification. The individuation of a
distinguishable “Self” was maintained in natural life as a distributed element of
the divine and eternal: ‘the distinguishing marks of animals, for example, are
taken from their claws and teeth [with which] each animal… itself separates
itself… preserves itself independently by means of these weapons... keeps itself

19 Ruskin, John. ‘Landscape, Mimesis and Morality,’ (1856) in The Green Studies Reader: From
Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Couple (London: Routledge, 2000), p.26
20 (Ibid.), p.29
21 Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover Philosophical Classics, 2013. Translator’s
Introduction, xxiv
22 Blanning, Tim. The romantic revolution: a history. Vol.34. Modern library, 2011. p.21
7
detached from the universal nature [whilst] a plant… never [exists] for itself; it
touches merely the boundary line of individuality… where [it shows] the
semblance of diremption and separation by the possession of different sex
characteristics; [which furnish], therefore, the principle for distinguishing plants
inter se… The qualifying mark… is the unity of opposite factors, viz. of what is
determinate, and of what is per se universal.’23 In this conception when a
particular life form died it lost its determinate particularity and joined its higher
identity in the universal. Thus man and nature were part of God, experiencing
separation through the course of life, but positioned among and not between
metaphysical categories. Unlike in the anthropocentrism of Enlightenment
thinking the Romantic centre was everywhere, much as it was for later
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty, who wrote in his Phenomenology of
Perception (1945) that ‘he before whom the horizon opens is caught up, included
within it. His body and the distances [participating] in one… corporeity or
visibility in general, which reigns between them and it, and even beyond the
horizon, beneath his skin, unto the depths of being.’24 Feminist theorists
Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss reflect that the ‘volubility of “the flesh” in its
turning back upon itself, in its chiasmic reversibility, is not an act of nostalgic
mourning for one origin, now irretrievably lost… it is the dehiscence, or bursting
open, of the origin itself in its infinite reproductions’.25 The origin of self is not
identified as the organism, but the whole of which the organism is part.
Romantic, feminist and phenomenological outlooks concern themselves
not only with centrality and identification, but also with sensitivity. Hegel

23 Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover Philosophical Classics, 2013. p.142-‐146
24 Merleau-‐Ponty, Maurice. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Psychology Press, 2014. The
Visible and the Invisible, p.264

25 Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss. Feminist interpretations of Maurice Merleau Ponty, Penn
State Press, 2010. P.134
8
believed that ‘Reason [had to] pass from that inert characteristic which had the
semblance of stability, and go on to observe it as it… is in truth, viz. as relating
itself to its opposite… the instinct of reason [arriving] as the point of looking… in
the light of its true nature… passing over into its opposite and not existing apart
by itself… [there] the notion [destroys] within itself the indifferent subsistence of
sensuous reality.’26 Understanding that Reason was part of something bigger
than itself he sought to turn it back upon itself reflexively, contemplating Reason
from within a sensuous context. His thinking was later echoed by Freidrich
Nietzsche, who ‘[showed] that “European Nihilism” resulted from the truth
requirement of science being turned back against itself’,27 and later still by
Jacques Derrida, whose Deconstructivist philosophy sought to interrupt rational
systematicity and create a porosity to logic. Rudolphe Gashé in Deconstruction
and Philosophy (1987) wrote of Derrida that ‘if he rejected… forms of
antisystematic thought, it is primarily because he [recognized] philosophy’s
demand for systematicity and system-‐formation as an unsurpassable and
indispensible demand to which unsystematic thought (as Romantic thought
amply proves) remains profoundly committed.’28 These cultural and
philosophical disciplines were often situated at the banks of mainstream
thinking, remaining partially integrated and in negotiation with existing
knowledge apparatuses whilst generating sensuous and radical alternatives.
Invariably they engage with the dialectic between thought and feeling, also
framed as the nature-‐culture divide.
‘Baudelaire wrote that ‘“romanticism is precisely situated neither in

26 Hegel, G.W.F, The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003. pp.142-‐146
27 Lyotard, Jean Francious. The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge.Vol. 10. Uof
Minnesota Press, 1984. p.38

28 Gashé, Rudolphe, Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, Edited by John
Sallis, Infrastructures and Systematicity, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p.
9
choice of subjects not in exact truth, but in a way of feeling”.29 It was positioned
where, in the words of Caspar David Freidrich, “the artist’s feeling is his law”.30
To the Romantics, this realm of feeling was absent from The Enlightenment.
‘Since the early seventeenth century, science [had] been dominated by
positivism (also called logical positivism or rationalism) [which assumes]
existence of a reality driven by immutable laws [and is] based on the search for
universal truths. The role of science is to discover these truths, with the ultimate
aim of predicting and controlling nature… Positivism uses reductionism, which
involves breaking a system into discrete components, analysing the compounds.
And making predictions on the basis of… analysis of the parts.’31 Making
reference to Enlightenment Rationalists in a letter to Thomas Poole in 1797
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote: ‘they contemplate nothing but parts, and all
parts are necessarily little – and the Universe to them is but a mass of little
things.’32 Enlightenment thinking was perceived to be preoccupied with
comprisal and composition, not with what things ultimately are or what they
mean. These were more questions for which spirituality aided contemplation in
its ethical considerations and apprehension of divine unity. Patrick Curry writes
in his Ecological Ethics (2006), that ‘Science might be able to tell us…what is
currently considered ‘true’, but it cannot tell us what is good, or right, or fair.’ 33
Fikret Berkes concurs, stating that ‘traditional knowledge systems tend to have a
large moral and ethical context; [in which] there is no separation between nature

29 Blanning, Tim, The romantic revolution: a history. Vol.34. Modern library, 2011 p.6
30 Novotny, Fritz. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-‐1880 (Pelican History of Art), Yale
University Press, 2nd ed. 1971, p.96

31 Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: a history. Vol.34. Modern library, 201., p.275
32 (Ibid.), p.27
33 Curry, Patrick. Ecological Ethics, Polity, 2011. p.20
10
and culture,’34 as Achille Mbembe corroborates in his Decolonizing Knowledge
(2015) when he argues that ‘a new understanding of ontology, epistemology,
ethics and qualities has to be achieved… by overcoming anthropocentrism and
humanism, the split between nature and culture.’35
One of the ways in which the nature-‐culture divide is sought to be
overcome is through theories of ‘vibrant matter’36 in eco-‐feminist discourse.
Jane Bennett’s political ecology argued that ‘even the humblest forms of matter
and energy have the potential for self-‐organization’,37 making reference to what
she termed ‘matter’s inherent creativity’.38 Mbembe asserts that ‘matter has
morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into
generating form’.39 Feminist knowledges and postcolonialist theory chime with
the traditional romantic attitude in that ‘nothing roused the romantics to greater
indignation than the notion that nature was inert matter,’40 but whilst construing
material as vital and animated invites re-‐evaluation of nature’s typical alterity
within Western philosophical discourse, the changes undergone in matter have
been proven to result from processes of energy transferral, rendering energy;
not matter; the creative force behind expressive characteristics perceived in
nature. Matter, therefore, is not vibrant as such, but the universe of which matter
is part is vibratory and energetic. Attribution of agency to matter is accordingly
only partially correct, in that the force beyond shifts in matter’s characteristic
features; its proposed creativity; is energy. Nevertheless, said energy permeates

35 (Ibid.)
36 Bennett, Jane. ‘The Force of Things’ in Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, Durham and
London, Duke University Press, 2010, pp.1-‐19

37 (Ibid.), p.7
38 (Ibid.)
39 Mbembe, Achille. Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, Aula magistral
profierda (2015)
40 Blanning, Tim. The romantic revolution: a history. Vol.24. Modern library, p.28-‐29
11
all things; pervading through matter; so the fact of science does not detract
entirely from the sentiment at the root of conceptualization of matter as
expressive.
Although the established scientific position may seem irreconcilable with
efforts to invigorate traditional ecological ethics, energy understood as broadly
synonymous with God in the monistic Spinozan sense all but eliminates
problems of compatibility between scientific theory with spiritual belief and
custom. Syllogistically, if God connotes energy then science and spirituality are
not fundamentally incompatible: nature and humankind are empirically
constituted of the same energies, and can be understood as sharing in an
essentially metaphysical energetic force or spirit. In the words of Freidrich
Wilhelm von Schelling, ‘Nature is visible spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature.’41
Accordingly, spirituality may contribute to the nurture and cultivation of
ecological ethics necessary for sustainable survival of the ecosphere. Coextensive
contributions from custodians of indigenous and alternative wisdoms along with
preservationist and restorative scientific interventions can ensure that
sensitivities unapparent to practitioners of the established scientific rationale
are applied and traditional ecological ethics upheld. In so doing, ecological
understanding can evolve into what Berkes referred to as “knowledge the
process” [rather than] “knowledge the thing known”:42 the means of adapting to
live harmoniously and sustainably amongst nature in sensitive ecosynthesis.
Such collaboration requires reciprocal, interpolated educational crossover
between indigenous and scientific centres of situated knowledge: a ‘knowledge

41 Schelling, Freidrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, Breitkopf und
Hartel, 1797, Introduction, Ixiv

42 Berkes, Fikrit. Sacred Ecology, Routledge, 2012. Preface to 2nd Edition, xix
12
dialogue,’43 of logical and sensuous spheres sustained by their respective
validating apparatuses, each porous and open to cross pollination.
The scientific model to which anti-‐establishment ecological
commentators have generally referred is centred on a Newtonian conception of
an objective universe in which matter is inert; a model inherited from 17th
Century Cartesian mechanistic materialism and substance dualism.
Contemporary efforts to describe matter as agential react against this Newtonian
view, which was superseded in Quantum Physics by the discovery that the
universe is comprised of sub-‐atomic energy vortices. Furthermore, the Hegelian
view which argued that ‘every part and element of nature is in reality a unitary
focus of space and time—an event’; 44 was affirmed in Science by Albert
Einstein’s mass-‐energy equivalence formula in his General Relativity Theory,
which determined that light does not travel through space-‐time, but is one of its
constituent aspects. Space-‐time itself was thus defined not as an environment
but an occurrence. Hegel wrote that ‘matter… is not a thing that exists, it is a
being in the sense of universal being, or being in the way the concept is being’.45
For both, the universe is not a space but a happening – an incident. The
Romantics ‘proclaimed [that] all nature constituted a single living organism, a
Universal Nature or World Soul’.46 Such a perception is now compatible with
Science through the cosmological absolutism of 21st Century Quantum Theory.
Irrespective of whether one subscribes to a scientific view of unified energy
vibration or a religious view of an encompassing divine force, common ground
has emerged in holistic, unificatory thinking.

43 (Ibid.), Preface to 3rd edition, xxi
44 Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind, Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003. Translator’s
Introduction, xxiv
45 (Ibid.), p.142
46 Blanning, Tim. The romantic revolution: a history. Vol.24. Modern library, 2011. p28-‐29
13
Coleridge wrote that ‘deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep
Feeling, and… all Truth is a species of Revelation.’47 The coupling of science with
Romanticism, eco-‐feminism and indigenous knowledges pledges to offer such a
marriage between sensitivity and logic. In his Discourse on the Moral Effects of
the Arts and Sciences (1750) Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau ‘proclaimed that, contrary to
expectation, the civilising process was not leading to liberation but to
enslavement, as it flung “garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh us
down,” so that our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and
sciences have improved.’48 In contemporary discourse Nicholas Bourriaud
anticipates an era of post-‐humanism, contemplating a demise promised by the
pollutant anthropocentric epoch. Recovery narratives concerned with salvation
for humankind are ascribed to ideological inheritance from Christian Old
Testament Eden archetypes, with global cataclysmic destruction beyond
recuperation deemed immanent and inevitable. However, for humankind to join
God and love in death is perversely romantic; the survival and prosperity of
nature through mankind’s martyrdom harks to sacrificial paradigms akin to
Christ’s suffering for the sins of man and a fall from Grace that restores peace
and innocence to the garden. Paradoxically, to kill the poet and destroy his
poetry is itself a distinctly poetic act, and for romance to die; romantic. However
pathetic its fallacies, a return to Romanticism; once replete with Christian
spiritualism and physisaphilia; is auto-‐surrectable: in dying it lives. EX MORTE
VITA.

47 Blanning, Tim. The romantic revolution: a history. Vol. 24. Modern library, 2011. p.27
48 (Ibid.), p.9
14

Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford university press. 2004
‘Bifo’ Berrardi, Franco. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies
of the post-alpha generation. Minor Compositions, 2010
Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: a history. Vol. 34. Modern library, 2011.
Bennet, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press,
2009
Berkes, Fikret Sacred Ecology. Routledge, 2012.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Vol.
10. Uof Minnesota Press, 1984
Merleau-‐Ponty, Maurice. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Psychology
Press, 2014.
Maurice Merleau Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. Motilal Banarsidass
Publishe, 1996
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The major works. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000.
15

Curry, Patrick, Ecological Ethics. Polity, 2011.
Hegel, G. W. F. “The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. “ JB Baillie (Mineola,
NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003) (1931): 258-9
Hegel, George Wilhelm Freidrich, Phenomenology of spirit Motilal Banarsidass
Publ., 1998.
Israel, Jonathan and Michael Silverthorn, eds. Spinoza: Theologial-Political
Treatise. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Mbembe, Achille, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the question of the archive.” Aula
magistral proferida.
Olkowski, Dorothea and Gail Weiss, Feminist interpretations of Maurice Merleau
Ponty. Penn State Press, 2010.
Ruskin John, “Landscape, Mimesis and Morality.” The Green Studies Reader: From
Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000): 26
Schelling, Freidrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur,
Breitkopf und Härtel, 1797.
Smith, Mick, Against Ecological Sovereignty, Ethics Biopolitics and Saving the
16
Natural World, pxii
Wordsworth, William, The Poems of William Wordsworth, Edward Moxen, 1858.
17

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Cohabitations

Maximilian Frederick Herbert

3300 Words exactly

between authoritative voices in disparate and rival communities. Although

crisis. Combining scientific rationalism, provisions for indigenous knowledges,

eco-­‐feminism and classical and contemporary philosophy with Romanticism, it

enshrines the common ground necessary for ecoalescence.

Environmental Ethics (1993) that ‘leaving environmental decisions to the

monopolization of truth. The traditional knowledges of indigenous communities,

traditional knowledge will never be completely resolved’3 because an

detached, objective scientific approach seldom takes into consideration spiritual,

symbolic or sentimental connections between humankind and the environment,

historic growth of the post-­‐Enlightenment enterprise and the concurrent

destruction and subordination of nature and the biosphere during

problems, despite a tarnished historical record. ‘Indigenous knowledge is treated

as a challenge to the dominant positivist-­‐reductionism paradigm in Western

environment, with ‘science… opening the way for boundless improvement

appreciation and co-­‐identification with nature led to emotional reciprocity.

rationalism.’11 By amalgamating sensitivity and spirituality with their existing

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Discourse on Human Dignity (1486)

Giorgio Agamben wrote of the anthropological machine constructed by

the occidental philosophical tradition maintains man’s position through ‘a

constantly recurring manufacture of metaphysical distinctions to separate and

categories. Romanticism dissolves these distinctions in co-­‐identification with

generation. Minor Compositons p.9-­‐10

Far in the regions of the west,

Though to the vale no parting beam

Be given, not one memorial gleam,

A lingering light he fondly throws

On the dear hills where first he rose16

How pleasant, as the sun declines, to view

The spacious landscape change in form and hue…

…There, objects, by the searching beams betrayed,

Come forth, and here retire in purple shade…17

Dear is the forest frowning o’er his head,

And dear the velvet green-­sward to his tread:

Moves there a cloud o’er mid-­day’s flaming eye!

Upward he looks-­-­”and calls it luxury:”

Kind Nature’s charities his steps attend;

In every babbling brook he finds a friend…18

of God in particularized, separable and temporally limited forms. Furthermore,

Subjectivism Hegel’s phenomenological philosophy dealt with direct experience;

characteristics; [which furnish], therefore, the principle for distinguishing plants

metaphysical categories. Unlike in the anthropocentrism of Enlightenment

phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-­‐Ponty, who wrote in his Phenomenology of

Romantic, feminist and phenomenological outlooks concern themselves

Visible and the Invisible, p.264

State Press, 2010. P.134

Jacques Derrida, whose Deconstructivist philosophy sought to interrupt rational

antisystematic thought, it is primarily because he [recognized] philosophy’s

demand for systematicity and system-­‐formation as an unsurpassable and

indispensible demand to which unsystematic thought (as Romantic thought

amply proves) remains profoundly committed.’28 These cultural and

thinking, remaining partially integrated and in negotiation with existing

knowledge apparatuses whilst generating sensuous and radical alternatives.

framed as the nature-­‐culture divide.

‘Baudelaire wrote that ‘“romanticism is precisely situated neither in

Minnesota Press, 1984. p.38

positivism (also called logical positivism or rationalism) [which assumes]

involves breaking a system into discrete components, analysing the compounds.

things.’32 Enlightenment thinking was perceived to be preoccupied with

University Press, 2nd ed. 1971, p.96

humanism, the split between nature and culture.’35

eco-‐feminism and classical and contemporary philosophy with Romanticism, it

historic growth of the post-‐Enlightenment enterprise and the concurrent

as a challenge to the dominant positivist-‐reductionism paradigm in Western

appreciation and co-‐identification with nature led to emotional reciprocity.

categories. Romanticism dissolves these distinctions in co-‐identification with

generation. Minor Compositons p.9-‐10

And dear the velvet green-sward to his tread:

Moves there a cloud o’er mid-day’s flaming eye!

Upward he looks--”and calls it luxury:”

phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty, who wrote in his Phenomenology of

demand for systematicity and system-‐formation as an unsurpassable and

framed as the nature-‐culture divide.

London, Duke University Press, 2010, pp.1-‐19

The scientific model to which anti-‐establishment ecological

Einstein’s mass-‐energy equivalence formula in his General Relativity Theory,

Romanticism, eco-‐feminism and indigenous knowledges pledges to offer such a

of the post-alpha generation. Minor Compositions, 2010

Merleau-‐Ponty, Maurice. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Psychology

NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003) (1931): 258-9

Israel, Jonathan and Michael Silverthorn, eds. Spinoza: Theologial-Political