beautiful soul syndrome
DESCRIPTION
A lecture for the seminar “A Cultural Prehistory of Environmentalism” at UCLA (May 20, 2009). A study of contemporary environmentalism and its ideological deadlocks.TRANSCRIPT
Beautiful Soul Syndrome
Timothy Morton
Hegel held that philosophy wasn't just about ideas, it was about attitudes
towards ideas. These attitudes were kind of as yet unthought ideas, ideas
that hadn't yet been fully realized consciously. If, as Donald Rumsfeld has
claimed, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown
unknowns, there are also, as Zizek adds, unknown knowns—things that we
know, but we don't know that we know them: the unconscious, if you are
going to be psychoanalytic. So once you realize what your attitude towards
an idea is, that attitude itself becomes an idea, towards which you have yet
another attitude which you'll need to figure out—and so on in a dialectical
progression that Hegel calls the phenomenology of spirit. Philosophy,
therefore, is the history of philosophy, and history is inextricable from
philosophy. Thus it's a pleasure to be talking today about the history of
environmentalism, and in particular about an attitude towards certain ideas
2
within environmentalism, an attitude that maintains its grip precisely to the
extent that it hasn't been fully thought, consciously. This is the attitude I am
calling Beautiful Soul Syndrome, or BS for short. Yes, that is a joke. And it's
a pleasure to explicate the history of this idea, which is doubly Romantic, as
it were, because the name Beautiful Soul was first developed by none other
than Hegel himself to describe a certain attitude he found typified in
Romanticism.1 And within Romanticism there developed the
environmentalism within whose ideological framework we are still
struggling today.
First, though, a word about “prehistory,” as I note that our lecture
series is entitled “A Cultural Prehistory of Environmentalism.” Prehistory
seems nicely poised between history and nature, as if it indicated a time
before history as such, or as if it was a prior history that is continued in the
sequence of events we acknowledge as historical. We know the ideological
uses of prehistory to describe “primitive” or “non-Western” societies, a
usage to which Hegel himself was prone, as when he designated Africa as
outside of history, locked in a perpetual prehistoric cycle whose spell could
1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller,
analysis and forward by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 383–409.
3
only be broken by an imperial incursion. Prehistory, then, is a rather
suspect term, but it also works in a strange way, because it suggests, as in
my second tentative definition, a history of which we are not yet properly
conscious. This pre-historical condition is, I suppose, the condition of most
ecological knowledge—we are as yet unaware of the extent to which
Darwin, born two hundred years ago, had already historicized nature, laying
the groundwork for a truly natural history by outlining in broad terms the
algorithmic processes according to which this history might proceed. And
indeed this history is not simply a story we are telling about something that
is not historical in essence. For DNA is a code, and codes are languages,
and history is not only events but also the inscription of events, and so is
evolution, because that's how evolution works—through constant
rewritings of the DNA sequence.
This rewriting proceeds without a teleology, which is why Marx
loved it so much that he wrote Darwin a fan letter, and which is why it's
truly historical, because every single contingent event counts, and nothing is
an analog, metaphor, or metonymy for anything else. Our lungs evolved
4
from swim bladders in fish.2 There's nothing lung-y about a swim bladder,
nothing predictive or teleological about it, nothing superior about a lung,
nothing metaphorically suggestive of breathing in the swim bladder, and so
on. Like history, the more you find out, the more ambiguous things
become. All the way down to the DNA level, things are highly ambiguous.
DNA as such lacks an essence—it's made up of all kinds of viral code
insertions so you can't tell which bit is original—the question of originality
is meaningless, to some extent. DNA as such isn't very DNA-ish. And it's a
text, so you can reread it and rewrite it. That's what viruses do—they tell
your DNA to make copies of themselves. So DNA doesn't contain a little
picture of you. In the same way, to study historical events is to study an
ever-ramifying, increasingly complicated mesh of interconnected
circumstances that don't quite add up to each other.
So the more we know about so-called nature, the more unnatural it
seems. Do you think a virus is alive? A virus is a macromolecular crystal
that contains some RNA code. It doesn't reproduce as such, it only tells
your cells to make copies of it. The cold virus is a huge twenty-sided
2 Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 160.
5
crystal. If you think the rhinovirus is alive, then you probably should admit
that a computer virus is also alive, to all intents and purposes. A computer
virus also tells other pieces of code to make copies of itself. The life–non-
life boundary is not thin and it is not rigid. We have a very protein-centric
view of life as a squishy, fluid, palpable thing—we're still living with the
remnants of that other Romantic view, Naturephilosophy, with its fantasy
of protoplasm or Urschleim. Your DNA doesn't stop expressing itself at the
ends of your fingers. A beaver's DNA doesn't stop at the ends of its
whiskers, but at the ends of it dam.3 A spider's DNA is expressed in its
web. The environment, then, from the perspective of the life sciences, is
nothing but the phenotypical expression of DNA code. This includes
oxygen (anaerobic bacterial excrement). And it includes iron ore (a
byproduct of archaic metabolic processes). You probably drove or flew
here today using crushed liquefied dinosaur bones. You are walking on top
of hills and mountains of fossilized animal bits. Most of your house dust is
your skin. The environment is beginning to look like not a very successful
upgrade of the old-fashioned term nature.
3 See Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6
What the heck am I doing, then, as Professor of Literature and the
Environment? Well, I suppose that's my job, making things difficult and
complicated that appeared to be simple and straightforward. In part this is
merely about bringing us up to speed with contemporary life science and
with contemporary capitalism, which is now embarking on an inner
colonization of life forms and their DNA, and which is now developing the
technology to tell bacterial cells to produce plastic, not bacterial cells. It's
called Life 2.0 and as Zizek points out, if you call it Life 2.0 you've conceded
that nature was really Life 1.0—life as such is always already a form of
artificial life.4 But we're nowhere near up to speed with this and have no
real idea of what it means, beyond some posthuman platitudes about
cyborgs. In the words of another great Romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”5
So nature and environment are not such good words, because they're
not so accurate. There are, however, other reasons for finding these terms
problematic, and that's where Hegelian philosophy comes in, because, as
you'll recall, Hegelianism claims that ideas also come bundled with attitudes,
4 See Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 440.
5 Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman
and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2002), 530.
7
attitudes that may even be encoded into the ideas themselves, like
operating software, so that the idea is unthinkable as such unless you also
plug in some kind of attitude towards it. Like a vanishing point in a
perspective picture, ideas select for certain ways of being understood. This
is a strange feature of ideas, which some call ideology. Ideology is not a well
understood term, because we think it means belief, which we think means
an idea you are holding onto tightly—these two assumptions are
themselves ideological, unfortunately, and obscure what ideology actually is.
The horrid thing about ideas, says ideology theory, is that they come
bundled with attitudes, as Hegel claims, so that the attitude is as it were an
automated feature of the idea—it just kind of pops up when you have it. In
other words, the attitude isn't a subjective state that is somehow
independent of the idea you're thinking. That's why attitudes are hard to
get rid of: they're hardwired into “that” side of reality, rather than “this”
one. If it was just a matter of prejudice, then we'd all have grown up long
ago and we wouldn't have any need for cultural prehistories of anything.
But as Marx saw, the attitude that sees attitude as prejudice (we call this
attitude the Enlightenment) suffers from its own bind spots, which have to
do with an illusion of freedom and autonomy.
8
The critique of attitudes is the subject of William Blake's poetry,
which is why he makes such an interesting ecological poet, though not a
nature poet and not an environmental poet by any stretch of the
imagination, for he saw immediately that nature codes for a certain attitude
that he found regressive and oppressive. His Songs of Innocence and of
Experience are wonderful, deceptively simple attitudes, or as he says
“contrary states of the human soul,” which you can teach undergraduates
to read by telling them to put a speech bubble around them. In England in
the 1970s there was a common newspaper competition called Spot the Ball.
A group of soccer players appear in a photo, all positioned differently, and
you have to put an X where you think the ball is. Blake's songs, by contrast,
are Spot the Player. There's the ball, hanging in space, and you have to
figure out the position of the player—the attitude—that must have
determined the position of the ball. So, for instance, “The Tyger” is not
really about tigers, and only superficially about whether God could have
created evil things. It's about how the kind of attitude that sees things as
autonomous external objects (objectification) imagines God to be an all
powerful tyrant to whom we must kowtow, the Universe as a mysterious
place of powerful sublimity that makes us tremble with fear, and so on. It's
about a state of mind that reduces reality to a set of rhetorical questions
9
along the lines of “Is the Pope Catholic?” “What immortal hand or eye /
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (“The Tyger,” 23–24) implies an answer
that somehow “we all know very well” (my ideology warning light blinks on
now), like those Discovery Channel shows about the awesome destructive
powers of Mother Nature.6 Unlike the speaker in its mirror poem, “The
Lamb,” the narrator of “The Tyger” is too scared and tongue-tied, and
oppressed by his ignorance, masquerading as worldly wisdom and
“experience,” to be able to see how he's caught in an attitude of which he's
not conscious. Innocence, for Blake, doesn't mean ignorance, but simply
never having harmed anyone whatsoever, a state that gives you a lot of
power. Experience, funnily enough, is the ignorant one—it tells lies in the
form of the truth.
And this is where we need to revisit the notion of nature. Nature
seems incontestably “there”—as many have reminded me, because what I
need, as a theory guy, is a good strong dose of it to set me straight. Karl
Kroeber, in Environmental Literary Criticism, literally says that what so-called
postmodern theorists need is a night out in a Midwestern thunderstorm, a
6 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman
(New York: Doubleday, 1965; revised 1988).
10
kind of ritual hazing that sounds horribly like waterboarding in 2009.7 But is
the “thereness”—I'll go further and say the “over-thereness”—of nature
actually a lie in the form of the truth, like one of Blake's Songs of Experience?
What kind of attitude (what kind of lie) is this truth enabling?
Ironically, I claim that the attitude that nature enables is the dreaded
dualism, Cartesian and otherwise, from which nature-speak in all its guises
from Romanticism to environmentalism has sought to extricate itself.
Nature is over there; the subject is over here. Nature is separated from us
by an unbridgeable ontological wall, like a bullet proof plate glass window—
plate glass being the Romantic-period invention that enabled shops to
display their wares as if they were in a picture frame, aestheticized, and
therefore separated ontologically from the viewer, belonging to another
order of reality altogether. Now this mention of plate glass is not
accidental, because plate glass is a physical byproduct of a quintessentially
Romantic production, the production of the consumerist. Not the
consumer, but the consumerist, that is, someone who is aware that she or
he is a consumer, someone for whom the object of consumption defines
7 Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 42.
11
their identity, along the lines of that great Romantic phrase, invented once
by the gourmand Brillat-Savarin and once again by Feuerbach, “You are
what you eat.”8 Now this phrase implies that the subject is caught in a
dialectic of desire with an object with which it is never fully identical, just as
Wile E. Coyote never catches up with Roadrunner in the cartoon. If Wile
E. Coyote ever did catch Roadrunner, he would eat Roadrunner, at which
point Roadrunner would cease to be Roadrunner and would become Wile
E. Coyote. There is in effect, then, a radical ontological separation between
subject and object. And yet and at the same time, consumerism implies a
performative identity that can be collapsed into its object, so we can talk of
vegetarians, hip hop fans, opium eaters, and so on.
These performative styles are outlined by myself and Colin
Campbell.9 One style stands out, and that is a kind of meta-style that
8 Ludwig Feuerbach, Gessamelte Werke II, Kleinere Shriften, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972), 4.27; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of
Taste, trans. Anne Drayton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 13.
9 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1987); “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in
Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in John Brewer and Roy
Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge,
12
Campbell calls bohemianism and I call Romantic consumerism. This kind of
consumerism is at one remove from regular consumerism. It is
“consumerism-ism” as it were, that has realized that the true object of
desire is desire as such. In brief, Romantic consumerism is window-
shopping, which is hugely enabled by plate glass, or as we now do, browsing
on the internet, not consuming anything but wondering what we would be
like if we did. Now in the Romantic period this kind of reflexive
consumerism was limited to a few avant-garde types: the Romantics
themselves. To this extent Wordsworth and De Quincey are only
superficially different. Wordsworth figured out that he could stroll forever
in the mountains; De Quincey figured out that you didn't need mountains, if
you could consume a drug that gave you the feeling of strolling in the
mountains (sublime contemplative calm, and so on). Nowadays we are all
De Quinceys, all flaneurs in the shopping mall of life. This performative role,
this attitude, is all the more pervasive, leading me to believe that we haven't
1993), 40-57. Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5, 9, 50–51, 57, 107–
108; “Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic
Period,” in Timothy Morton, ed., Cultures of Taste / Theories of Appetite: Eating
Romanticism (New York and London: Palgrave, 2004), 1–17.
13
really exited from the Romantic period—another sense in which
“prehistory” isn't quite right for what I'm describing, but extremely right in
another sense, namely that we're still caught in an attitude that we don't
fully understand or become aware of.
Romantic consumerism can go one step higher than the Kantian
aesthetic purposelessness of window-shopping, when it decides to refrain
from consumerism as such. This is the attitude of the boycotter, who
emerges as a type in the proto-feminism of the Bluestocking circle in the
1780s and 1790s, and which Percy and Mary Shelley, and many others,
continued. The specific product boycotted was sugar, which was
sentimentally described as the crystallized blood of slaves. By describing it
thus, the boycotter turned the object of pleasure into an object of disgust.
In order to have good taste you have to know how to feel appropriate
disgust, how to turn your nose up at something. So the zero degree
performance of taste would be spitting something disgusting out, or
vomiting. So the height of good taste performativity is abstaining from
sugar, and spice if you are one of the Shelleys, who held correctly that spice
was a product of colonialism. (Their vegetarianism was thus not only anti-
cruelty, but also anti-flavor.)
14
The attitude of the boycotter is that she or he has exited
consumerism, but one could just as easily claim that this attitude is itself a
form of consumerism, as I've just argued. It's a performance of a certain
style of aesthetic judgment. So thinking that you've exited consumerism
might be the most quintessentially consumerist attitude of all. In large part
this is because you see that the world of consumerism is an evil world. You,
having exited this world, are good. Over there is the evil object, which you
shun or seek to eliminate. Over here is the good subject, who feels good
precisely insofar as she or he has separated from the evil world.
I am now describing Hegel's beautiful soul, who claims precisely to
have exited the evil world. Now the twist that Hegel applies here is so
beautiful that's it's worth pausing over, and perhaps adding a remark or two
on torture, and possibly on Dick Cheney, who seems to be preoccupying
us all at present. Hegel does not claim that the world may or may not be
evil—he doesn't claim that what is wrong with the beautiful soul is that it is
prejudiced and rigid in its thinking. The world is not some object that we
can have different opinions about. No: the problem is far subtler than that.
The problem is that the gaze that constitutes the world as a thing “over
there,” is evil as such. This is so brilliant that it's worth repeating. Evil is not
in the eye of the beholder. Evil is the eye of the beholder. Evil is the gaze
15
that sees the world as an evil thing over yonder. Clearly we're in Bush–
Cheney territory here, and Al-Qaeda territory, with their platitudes about
the axis of evil and evil America and so on. Evil is the materialism that sees
evil as a lump of nasty stuff over there that I should be hell bent on
eliminating. There are really only two options: quietism, which is to
withdraw passively from the evil world; and terrorism, which is to fly a
plane into it. There is some truth, then, terrible to say, in the horrifying way
in which the Bush administration has classified certain forms of
environmentalist action as terrorism—its own kind of lie in the form of the
truth, as it were. Unfortunately, the kind of environmental fundamentalist
that sees the world as an essentialized living Earth that must be saved from
evil, viral humans is the very type of the beautiful soul, whose gaze is evil as
such. Ironically then, this kind of environmentalism is not spiritual, if by
spiritual we mean that it transcends the material world, but is instead
deeply committed to a materialistic view that sees evil as a concrete thing
that must be eliminated.
Now this kind of environmentalism is a form of anti-consumerism,
which in my view puts it at the summit of consumerism, not beyond it, but
at its very peak. It is indeed the most rarefied and pure form of
consumerism on Earth at this time. And as such it is plagued by Beautiful
16
Soul Syndrome, because it sees consumer objects, and consumerisms (all
the various styles), as so many reified things over yonder, from which it
distances itself with disdain. So how do we truly exit from the Beautiful
Soul? By taking responsibility for our attitude, for our gaze. And on the
ground in slow motion, this looks like forgiveness. We are fully responsible
for the present environmental catastrophe, simply because we are aware of
it and can understand it. No further evidence, such as a causal link that says
humans brought it about, should be required. In some sense, looking for a
causal link only impedes us from assuming the direct responsibility that is
the only sane and ethical response to global warming and the Sixth Mass
Extinction Event (the two ways in which our current emergency appears to
us). This means that it's worse than a waste of time to keep trying to
convince people that environmentalism is a right way of thinking—a right
attitude. The current ecological emergency should have proved to us once
and for all that the attitude of environmentalism—that there is a “world”
that is separate from me, that nature exists apart from human society—is
not only wrong, but dangerously part of the problem, if only because it
provides a very good alibi and impedes us from actually doing anything
about our dilemma. The message of ecological awareness should be not
“We Are the World” (that awful charity song) but rather, “We Aren't the
17
World.” And never were: there never was a nature; letting go of a fantasy
is even harder, of course, than letting go of a reality.
I can't have a “debate” about torture, because I don't think that
torture is a thing over yonder that you can have different opinions about,
like a flower arrangement. It isn't a matter of aesthetic judgment (“Is it
appropriate under circumstances? What is the precise threshold of pain
that constitutes it…”). To see torture thus is to be subject to Beautiful Soul
Syndrome, in which things appear as alienated from me. Torture is
something for which I am directly responsible. The only sane response to
Abu Ghraib was that we did it, we are responsible. This goes beyond, at
least at a certain limit of thinking, rounding up and punishing scapegoats,
even if we prove that they are directly responsible for torture. Because our
own reluctance to speak up at the time (the dark time, between 2001 and
2005—the other bits were dark, too, but that was really dark) also
implicates us, even if we are victims of an abuse of power that made us
afraid and paranoid.
Beautiful Soul Syndrome wants to induce in us the correct aesthetic
appreciation of the world. But this aesthetic attitude can never truly
become an ethical one. I'm with Kierkegaard on this, Kierkegaard who
brilliantly and terrifyingly showed how insidious Beautiful Soul Syndrome
18
can be in his narrative of the seducer in Either/Or.10 In effect,
aestheticization is synonymous with evil because it always holds the world
at a distance from which to size it up, evaluate, assess. Thus the attitude
that says “We need more evidence on global warming before we act” is
joined ironically by the attitude that says, “If only you could experience
nature in the raw, you wouldn't have these evil beliefs about destroying it.”
They are both examples of Beautiful Soul Syndrome, because they both
require a certain aesthetic distance, an evaluative pseudo-contemplative,
“meditative” stance that always contains aggression somewhere in there.
Here is a Buddhist lama writing about Beautiful Soul Syndrome in what I
hold to be the definitive passage on the affinity between contemplativeness
and violence. The lama is recounting the words of a visitor from the city of
Birmingham to his monastery in southern Scotland. The visitor was a little
hesitant to do any actual meditation:
10 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. and intro. Alastair Hannay
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 243–376.
19
Well, it's nice you people are meditating, but I feel much better if I
walk out in the woods with my gun and shoot animals. I feel very
meditative walking through the woods and listening to the sharp,
subtle sounds of animals jumping forth, and I can shoot at them. I feel
I am doing something worthwhile at the same time. I can bring back
venison, cook it, and feed my family. I feel good about that.11
I have recently been accused of not knowing what nature is because I have
never killed an animal that I've subsequently eaten. This is a criterion that I
am happy not to have fulfilled. Heideggerianism, which is the quintessence
of the contemplative ecophenomenological mode in which a lot of nature-
speak now addresses us, is marked by a trace of violence, an unspeakable
violence towards the world it so lovingly appears to reveal to us. The very
worn insides of the peasant shoes about which Heidegger rhapsodizes so
beautifully in his essay on the origin of the work of art are made from
11 Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (Boston:
Shambhala, 1993), 35–36.
20
leather, which is animal skin.12 You can imagine committing a murder in a
beautiful, mindful, Heideggerian way. This is pure Beautiful Soul Syndrome,
because it sets up reality on a pedestal to be admired and scorned, and sets
up your own experience that way, as an object of aesthetic contemplation.
Aesthetically powerful descriptions of the natural world, then, are not only
a bit of a waste of time, but might actually unwittingly aid the “other side”
of the contemporary coin, which for sure sees the world as an exploitable
resource or as objects of instrumental reason (the difference between a
cow and beef would be the application of this instrumentality).
Ecological ethics, then, cannot be grounded in aesthetics. But there's
a further problem. If you beat up on the Beautiful Soul and leave it bleeding
to death in the street, are you not also a victim of Beautiful Soul Syndrome?
However much you try to slough off the aesthetic dimension, doesn't it
always stick to you ever more tightly? At a certain limit of thinking, then,
transcending Beautiful Soul Syndrome means forgiving the Beautiful Soul,
recognizing that we are responsible for this Syndrome, whether we think of
ourselves that way or not. The only way out of the problem is further in,
12 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 15-87 (33–34).
21
which means jumping into our hypocrisy rather than pretending that finally
we are totally disillusioned and are now thinking outside of ideology,
without attitudes. This is a test case for our ability to progress in our social
collectivity, because thinking this means dropping various support concepts
that provide the background against which regular thinking takes place:
concepts such as nature, environment, world, life. Taking full responsibility for
the planet means dropping these concepts. We can't have our cake and eat
it too. Having your cake and eating it too is called consumerism, which is
Beautiful Soul Syndrome. The only way out is in and down. Which is why I
have chosen to call my approach to ecology dark ecology.
Dark ecology realizes that we are hopelessly entangled in the mesh
of interconnectedness, without any possibility of extricating ourselves. Dark
ecology finds itself fully responsible for all life forms, because like a
detective in a noir movie, it has realized that it is complicit in the crime.
Dark ecology is ironical, introverted and introspective, attitudes that are
routinely shunned by masculinist, heteronormative environmentalism.13
Dark ecology is melancholic because melancholy is the medieval humor that
is closest to the Earth, it being the Earth humor, and likewise because
13 See Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA (forthcoming).
22
melancholy is that residuum of our unbreakable psychic connection to our
mother's body, which stands metonymically for our connection with all life
forms. The irony of dark ecology is like being caught in your own shadow.
Hegel disliked Romantic art because its ironies reminded him of the
Beautiful Soul. He describes this irony in hauntingly environmental terms in
his lectures on aesthetics. Environmental awareness is, finally, a sense of
irony, because it is through irony that we realize that we might be wrong,
that identity might not be as solid as we think, that our own gaze might be
the evil that we see.
The University of California, Davis