At Wed, 20 Jan 1999 21:13:39 EST, you wrote:
>
>In a message dated 1/20/99 5:51:29 PM Pacific Standard Time,
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
><< Yep, nonsensical sounds good to me! >>
>
>Ok, if you are going to be so flippant as to throw this word around, I think
>you need to establish the Criteria of Sense by which you are determining this
>as nonsense, for what you are in fact doing is marginalizing, which is a
>violent act, and an arrogant one, as it assumes the centrism of the discourses
>you have taken as your own. I challenge you, for whenever we find something
>"silly", we are up against the edge of Unthinkables in our culture .. there,
>embarassment and ridicule lurk .. But one of our jobs is to transform
>Unthinkables into Thinkables, through daringness of thought, and engagement
>with the Other.
>
The RepubliChristians have had good success in demarginalizing their extremism.
Sometimes things which are on the margin belong there; in these cases centering the
marginalized is NOT a good thing.
>I suspect that your judgement of this way of speaking as "nonsense" stems from
>some sort of logic whereby a plant " = "just" a plant", and then you place
>this being into some scientific classification of insensate vegetation. But
>your choice to affirm your society's taxonomy is not a neutral choice, and
>represents a cutting or de/in/cision of reality to the benefit of the dominant
>way of thinking. Sartre reminds us that reality is always transcendant to any
>schema we can place upon it, and therefore there are always remainders to
>realities which we try to box into categories. Thus is may be that there is
>more to the tree than what Linnaeus and his successors had to say.
But Jean-Paul would never have spoken of "plant-persons"; you are devaluing
self-consciousness for the sake of empowering flora. Who or what arrogated to you the
right to judge others and their personal preferences on this basis? Certainly not the
bastard progeny of an unholy union between Derrida, Foucault and Mary Daly which you
are here attempting to foist as philosophy.
>This isn't to say that the scientific taxonomy I don't find useful within
>certain parameters. Within certain parameters, it is a lens that will help me
>draw out certain truths from the Larger Reality which is this Tree.
You may also speak of Rocks in this manner, or any Object; they are all
phenomenologically inexhaustible (Husserl), due to the impossibility of finite beings
apprehending them from all of the infinite number of possible perspectives.
Nevertheless, I find it no more useful or true to capitalize tree than to capitalize
god.
>But when I come into the presence of this tree, when I have an encounter with
>it, I find that my experience simply does not fit into the available
>categories, including our ways of speaking.
You mean it is ineffable. Any experience ultimately is, not permitting its
communication in its entirety to an Other (and when I capitalize it, I mean another
Dasein).
I encounter this tree as a Being,
>a Being just as much as you or I or a dog is a being. It is a radically
>different type of being, a being for example with no observable nervous
>system, that stays rooted in the ground, etc., but a being nevertheless. I am
>not going to Negate my Experience on the grounds of a common sense which is
>often nonsensical.
But not nonsensical in this case, if that's what you were slyly attempting to imply.
Approach it any way you want; it's not going to run away (hehe). Now you're trying to
mangle Heidegger and Buber. Next I suppose we'll get some bizarre quasi-lecture on
the transcendant Thou-ness of the Tree, leavened with a semiotics of our
existential-hermeneutic Tree-Encounter intended to therapeutically facilitate our
recovery of our urban-blocked experientially mediated awareness of the brute is-ness
of the Being-in-the-Tree! Your experience, qua yours, cannot be negated by anyone
else's (experience being, like Dasein, "in each case mine" (Heidegger)), but, by the
same logic, neither are you free to pull a Baudrillard on us by forcing us to adopt a
similacrum of your experience as our own. Having said this, I also require at least
two weeks' worth of uninterrupted wilderness camping, twice a year, to recharge my
emotional batteries so that I can deal with the draining effects of urba!
!
n civilization; and I revere the wild, and do what I can to preserve it.
>Do you think that this "common sense" is a historically static subject? Au
>contraire, it changes throughout history. In fact, amongst preliterate,
>preChristian communities, the naming of a plant as a "plant-being" seems about
>as sensical as one can get. It is only within the context of a desacralized
>civilization that this would seem such nonsense. Religion divided the world by
>cleaving it into "sacred" and "profane" (or "secular"), when in fact the world
>was a mixture where both and neither of these terms applied. In facing
>phenomena, people once experienced awe. But religion monopolized and
>redirected that awe into particular social formations.
Preliterate prechristian cultures were awash with pagan and shamanistic religions
(some of which still exist today), and in some cases they were extremely
environmentally destructive (check out the Anasazi and the Easter Islanders). I
myself am Pagan, (Wiccan, precisely) and know that without the concept of consecrating
a particular space, the Casting of a Circle would make no sense, even though one is
really casting a Sphere (the Circle being where the Sphere intersects the
Horizon/Ground), and that this sphere is a representamen of Gaia, our Earth/Mother.
Later, science came
>around and "debunked" the sacred, leaving us with only the "profane" .. in
>this (d)evolution, the sense of wonder and awe in and about the world was left
>behind .. this is why philosophers have time and again tried to return us to
>a wonder about things, and encouraged genuine encounter with the world,
>challenging our ordinary conceptions.
I find philosophy indispensable, which is why I got a degree in it (this is known as
the fallacy of argument from authority, and is about as valid as the thinly veiled ad
hominum moral condemnations you have so amply employed). I myself would hesitate to
label an Other's experience, or their perspective on it, as inauthentic or counterfeit
(the opposite of genuine) simply because it differed from mine. As to the sense of
wonder, David Abram wrote a lyrical book concerning just this point, titled "The Spell
of the Sensuous." His point was that we have been blinded not by technology, but by
the written word. BTW, our ordinary conceptions do need challenging, but we can not
assume a priori that they are spurious.
>
>When I go into my back yard to pick some oregano leaves for cooking, I grasp
>the plant, and ask it for those leaves it is willing to give. I gently pull,
>and do not yank against resistance. I move around the plant, and those leaves
>that gently remove themselves I take, saying "thank you" to the plant each
>time, and touching the branch from which I have pruned leaves, connecting my
>lifeforce with its.
>
>Now this practice is practiced amongst a wide variety of nonliterate cultures.
>It is a way of respecting the life around us.
>
It is a way of using the plant without killing it. For some plants this is possible;
for others not (BTW, if a butterbean vine could talk, would she prefer we eat her, or
eat her children?). I am part Native American, and was taught this way by my mother
(who nevertheless raised farm animals, and, with respect, slaughtered them for food).
>One might rebut, how are we supposed to do that when it comes to the
>industrial usage of plant material?
>
>Indeed, that is a very good question, perhaps one that is ultimately critical
>of the industrial pace itself .. how different indeed a factory if the
>workers insisted upon giving proper respect to all bodies entering therein,
>taking time ..
>
Are you against the use of vaccines, antibiotics and disinfectants because of the
devastation they wreak on the microbe population (spawns of science they are; how evil
they must be!)? My point being that just because something is not entirely natural
does not mean that to employ it is a sign of moral deficiency.
>So I will continue to call plants "plant-beings", perhaps even radically
>"plant-persons", because this usage draws attention to certain ways of
>approaching the plant which I wish to encourage.
>
Until we reduce our populations to the point where a mass agricultural infrastructure
is unnecessary, our options are limited. I would prefer birth control to the death
control massive human die-off solution that would inevitably result were we to simply
and abrupyly shut the whole system down.
>(un)leash
>
>
>
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher
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