EcoTopia

Upcoming event at Filoli

paul — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:00:59 +0000

Filoli Botanic Garden in Atherton California is a beautiful formal garden and a manor house. I will be giving a presentaion there September 23, 2013. It is a point of destination for garden enthusiasts of elaborate plantings and seasonal displays.

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There Is a Garden in the Mind Reviewed by Publishers Weekly

paul — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:05:31 +0000

Publishers Weekly gave my new book,There Is a Garden in the Mind: A Memoir of Alan Chadwick and an Organic Movement in California, an appreciative review.

In 1967, author and educator Lee and amateur gardener Chadwick established the University of California, Santa Cruz, Chadwick Garden. Lee originated the idea for the garden, but Chadwick made the garden a reality and, to Lee, seemed to embody the vitality of the space. To many he became the “Pied Piper” of the organic movement in California. In what he describes as a philosophical memoir, Lee provides glimpses of Chadwick’s pedigree, temper, drive, and vision, but a fully realized portrait or biography never emerges. Instead Lee delivers a meditation that begins with Chadwick and explores the modern tension between positivist science and the integrity of organic nature. He laments that the more holistic, organic approach has been driven out of academia and contemporary culture by the quantitative analysis of the physical sciences. He traces the contributions and insights of Goethe, the philosophers Paul Tillich and Rudolf Steiner, ecologist Rachel Carson, and many others. The book is part philosophy, part personal meditation, and part tribute to a man who was a transformational figure in the organic movement that began from small seeds in California and has now reached a global community. (Mar.)

The book was reviewed on 01/21/2013.

The book will be available on March 15th and can be ordered now on Amazon. It’s published by North Atlantic Press (Random House, dist.), $19.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-58394-559-9

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Vital Roots – A Lecture

paul — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 05:02:19 +0000

I gave the following lecture at a conference in West Virginia in 1979 at the last garden site Alan Chadwick made before he died.

The conference included Buckminster Fuller, Sir George Trevalian, Barbara Hubbard, Peter Caddy from Findhorn etc…

To hear the lecture, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:

[audio http://miljkovic.org/old_public_html/nada/plee1970lecture.mp3]

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Homer’s Contribution to the Meaning of Truth

paul — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:16:26 +0000

HOMER’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE MEANING OF TRUTH

The Greeks called Homer wise, the wisest of all mortal men, and made his poems their only schoolbooks. It may be not unwise to ask the question, what kind of knowledge did the Greeks suppose Homer possessed-why was he called wise?

Of course, Homer occasionally inserts into his narrative sentences about life in general, man’s happiness and misery, good and evil, such sentences as we call wise. None of these sentences nor all together make Homer the wisest of all men. The question cannot be answered by referring to these sentences. His wisdom is far greater, but not so easy to extract. It is not at all presented as knowledge, doctrine, or advice. The presentation is much more efficient than sentences and advice can be. His wisdom permeates his poetry and is transmitted in visible images of human actions and passions. It is wholly inseparable from what we call the “beauty” of his poems. Homer’s wisdom and his greatness as a poet are indeed accounted for by the same reason. It is a kind of wisdom that is by no means Homer’s alone. Homer shares it with Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe but only with the greatest. But there the modest question concerning Homer’s wisdom transgresses its limits and grows into a philosophical problem of the first magnitude.

Since a poet’s greatness has to do with something we call “beauty” (in the sense of “quality” of a work of art), and since “wisdom” as a kind of “knowledge” refers to something we call “truth,” there seems to be a link between “beauty” and “truth.” But “beauty,” we are told, is a matter of appearances, senses, taste, and pleasure; “truth,” we learn, has to do with “facts,” propositions, and the syntactical rules of a calculus. I shall, however, not start from such words as beauty and truth, their meaning in a philosophical system or their possible interrelation. I shall inquire into the concrete case. It may be that the concrete case yields at least some suggestions that a philosopher concerned with the meaning of beauty and truth might be wise to consider.

I shall not even deal with the whole of Homer’s poetry but only with one
apparently small aspect of it, inquiring into the way in which Homer uses
comparison and contrast. I do this because I believe that poetry, like
art, never discloses its secrets to general observation. By looking with
care into its minute ways there is more likelihood of at least a partial suc-
cess. Thus I seek Homer’s wisdom just where wisdom is least to be
expected. This way demands, however, a watchful analysis of a few examples.

In his elaborate comparisons Homer unfolds between an “as” and a
“so” a complete picture which runs parallel to the narrative. The narra-
tive itself in terms of a clearly perceptible event, hardly demands an
explanation by means of a comparison. The function of the comparison
on which the poet seems to insist has been a subject of controversial theories
of which none I know is adequate.

(Odyssey, 19, 204.) Penelope listens to the report of the beggar who
brings the first news of her husband. The beggar is Odysseus himself.

She, melting at the sound, with drops of
Tend’rest grief her cheeks bedewed
And as the snow, by Zephyrus diffused,
Melts on the mountain top, when Eurus breathes
And fills the channels of the running streams,
So melted she, and down her lovely cheeks
Poured fast the tears, him mourning as remote
Who sat beside her;
(William Cowper, 1791.)

The interpreters usually look first for the so-called tertiumcomparationis.
They pick out one or several such tertia-both snow and skin are white,
water and tears flow, wind and mood change-but they do not get much
help from any such enumeration. We are told that these tertia “il-
lustrate.” But what illustrates what? The tertia gives the “stimmung,”
as the Germans say, when they mean the whole of an emotional atmosphere
that cannot be put into words. The term is vague and misleading; it is
appropriate to romantic poetry, whose vices it hides behind its virtues, but
beyond the scope of Homer’s poetry.

The comparison encompasses the whole of Penelope’s fate, past and
future, in one visible picture. Our very eyes, looking at mountains, snow,
and brooks, see her becoming numb and rigid in long and dreary years, see
the hardness, coldness, darkness in her soul soften, warm, and brighten,
anticipate even by a silent motion in the picture itself the future, when the
ice will fully break, life flower again, and Penelope come to know that the
beggar is Odysseus himself. Thus the image of the approaching spring
entwines and relates to one another the implicit features of Penelope’s
inner life, and makes their impact visible. This is the function of the
metaphor. Here is the tertium comparationis, not in single traits or in
their piecemeal aggregate.

I must linger a while on this example. Here a kind of miracle is achieved.
The two narratives bestow life on each other. Penelope’s tears animate
the melting of the inanimate snow-but the inanimate returns doubly the
life it receives. As to the first animation, we may stammer something
about anthropomorphism, taking a term for an explanation. Moreover,
the greater miracle is the second animation. It is for the sake of this sec-
ond animation that Homer inserts the comparison. How can a dead
process give life to -a live one-even for us today, when rivers and moun-
tains no longer possess souls?

We should not slight the question. I shall try to formulate the prelim-
inary answer, suggested by this first example. The image of the approach-
ing spring achieves the miracle by just this concatenation of movement
that is the true “tertium comparationis.” Life is neither the dark nor the
bright, neither the hard nor the soft. Separated and put side by side they
are dead. Life is the dark that brightens, the hard that softens, the rigid
that breaks, it is all of them in one their mutual movement towards one
another. The image of the melting snow entwines them; together they
live-they have their being through their relation to one another as limbs
of a single body. Since they are at once sensations of our senses, states
or moods of our soul, and properties of objective things, they endow the
soul with a body, the body with a soul, give life to the dead, and make
visible the invisible. This is the miracle not only of Homer’s comparison,
but of Art. This is what the snow-covered mountain, the wind, and the
swelling river do for the poet. Needless to say the movements of the
language, qualities of consonants and vowels, rhythm and sound of syl-
lables and words accompany the movement of soul and image the ears
guiding the eyes, the eyes the ears.

But, you say, for heaven’s sake, this may have some bearing on a theory
of art, but none whatsoever on Homer’s wisdom. Give me but time for a
few more examples, and do not forget that I am trying to show that the
same reasons account for a poet’s greatness and for his wisdom.
Homer goes on. (Odyssey, 19, 210.)

Soft compassion touched
Ulysses of his consort’s silent woe;
Yet wept not he, but, well dissembling still,
Suppress’d his grief, fast riveting his eyes,
As they were each of horn or hammeredsteel.

The similitude of the snowbreak still exerts its power and shines forth.
It is still the struggle of hard and soft, though in another phase and tension.
Odysseus softens in his heart, but hardens in his air and bearing. One
visible image interprets the other-varying the theme in similarity and
contrast.

Another instance. (Iliad, 17, 53.) Menelaos slays the young Euphor-
bos, who-as we know from Iliad, 16, 811, fights for the first time. An
altercation precedes. Menelaos reminds Euphorbos of his brother’s
wantonness and death. Such warning, however, kindles in Euphorbos
only the desire for revenge. He burns to still the pain of his parents by
putting M\enelaos’ head into their hands. They fight-Menelaos’ spear
pierces through the still tender neck; blood wets the comely ringlets and
the clasps of silver and gold which hold them together. It’s all palpable-
nothing seems to demand a similitude as illustration.

As the luxuriant olive by a swain
Rear’d in some solitude where rills abound,
Puts forth her buds and fann’d by genial airs
On all sides, hangs her boughs with whitest flowers,
But by a sudden whirlwind from its trench
Uptorn, it lies extended on the field;
Such ….
(William Cowper.)

Again the mutual animation of comparison and narrative is manifest.
The cared for olive tree, cooled by gentle winds, its white blossoms shining,
now uprooted and knocked down, embraces in the unity of a visible image
both the care, pride, and grief of the parents, and the beauty, tenderness,
and end of youth.

Now Euphorbos’ death and Penelope’s tears are no longer only death
and tears as facts, but life itself as a whole of intertwined forces and mo-
tions, that permeate man and nature, soul and world alike. The single
event is no longer merely one of many events in space and time; it “is”
what it represents and becomes transparent. A whole lives in the part,
and this whole is the way of things, nature herself, the structure of man’s
existence, or whatever term you prefer.

Here again none of the usual tertia that are only the common qualities
of these tertia nor their aggregate, only their impact in the unity of a
dynamic structure can be said to have this animating power. But we
may try one further step. The tertia have a specific character. They are
not mere properties common to both comparison and narrative. They
all belong to a group of qualities that apply to the human soul as well as
to material things, and thus are common both to subject and object.
This is a very interesting group of qualities for which the current nomen-
clature supplies no satisfactory name. Psychologists speak of intermodal
sense-qualities, meaning such qualities as hard and soft, warm and cold,
clear and dull, that seem not to be restricted to one of our five senses as
other qualities are. I cannot enter into the difficult and controversial
problem of the nature of sense qualities that transcend any single sense.
We can try to avoid the difficulty by assuming either that the qualities
are different and only their names the same, or that we simply transfer
to the ears what belongs to the eyes, and speak only metaphorically
about warm and cold colors. The sameness of the names or the possibility
of such transference remains to be explained. We might as well admit
that these qualities are common to our different senses only because they
have their origin and life in something that we might dare to call the human
soul. At any rate, art has a particular interest in these qualities-just
because they are common to subject and object and thus able both to fill
an object with the life of the subject and to objectify the subject. This,
in fact, is what art achieves. Goethe, in the “Maximen und Reflexionen,”
speaks of art as concerned with a secret correspondence that links an un-
known law in the subject to an unknown law in the object.

But even these mysterious qualities, as the common tertia of comparison
and narrative, cannot yet account for the mutual animation. In them-
selves and isolated, they are abstract and dead. The poet interlocks
them; it is through, in, and with one another that they live and are con-
crete. The real tertiumis the particular pattern of their interlacing, which
in comparison and narrative is “analogous,” i.e., of corresponding struc-
ture. We do not come any nearer to Homer’s-wisdom, but perhaps we do
by nearing his “beauty.” This tertium is in a certain way a primum.
It is obviously the function of the comparison to detach us from the object
qua object. The poet induces us to look away from Penelope to the snow-
covered mountains, from the dying Euphorbos to the uprooted olive tree.
It is not the objective event, the fact qua fact, but an “image”: the fact
as manifestation of something far greater than itself. The object, event
or fact becomes transparent; what in such transparence is visible, is a
primum and not a tertium. Both comparison and narrative, the mountain
and Penelope, the olive tree and the dying youth, object, event or fact,
serve this primum and its transparence. Call this primum whatever you
like, physis, the way of things, as the first Greek philosophers called it, or
Goethe’s unknown correspondence, or life, or the structure of human
existence. Each of these terms is but a name and preliminary. In the
context of this inquiry I prefer not to chose a term whose connotations
predecides the philosophical problem, into which this study cannot enter
though it intends to lead to its threshold.

The comparison, whatever it does for the narrative, has to be understood
from what the narrative itself achieves as poetry. The story itself, with
or without comparison, is life manifested; “existence” as the whole of a
dynamic structure, made translucent in visible images. The story pro-
ceeds, events change; but this change itself is but a change of aspects, in
each of which this dynamic structure is visible as a whole. To this end
the metaphor serves the narrative in manifold ways.

Now to another example. Hermes, as Zeus’ messenger, flies over the
sea like a mew. (Odyssey, 5, 50.)

Down he stooped to ocean
And the billows lightly skimmed
In form a sea mew, such as in the bays
Tremendous of the barren deep her food
Seeking, dips oft in brine her ample wing.

Even though the metaphor is sensitive to the slightest touch like a
butterfly’s wing and has lost in the translation most of its shining colors,
it may be said: The God does not catch fish. The poet follows the mew
beyond the limits of a comparison and transgresses the tertia. Why?
Certainly for the sake of perceptible concreteness: the fishing mew lives
before our eyes. But the fishing means more. It gives the swiftness
playful ease, power without labor. Hermes would catch fish if he pleased
to do so. The flight of Hermes over the sea preludes the hardest part
of Odysseus’ journey. The next day Odysseus will start building the
clumsy raft, which later will break in the storm. The mew catching fish
is a contrast to the helpless raft. The gods are living in perfect ease.
Heavy clumsiness is man’s lot. Small words carry hardness
into the image of ease; there are the momentous peaks of the waves, there
was-a few verses before-the rod which, at Hermes’ whim, blinds the
eyes of men or awakens a sleeper. Here the comparison supports the con-
trast. God’s ease helps the events to yield the picture of man’s lot.
One other instance, by which many a modern interpreter was shocked.
Odysseus, home in the guise of a beggar, observes the misdemeanor of his
maids, but must master his rage. He turns over and over in his bed
pondering upon the way to outwit the impudent suitors. (Odyssey, 20, 25.)

As when some hungry swain o’er glowing coals
A paunch for food prepares, from side to side
He turns it oft and scarce abstains the while.

The function of the comparison is simple: the roasting of the “paunch for
food”-in the Greek text a “blood sausage”-unites in one and the same
image Odysseus turning over and over and the ripening of a plan, to be
considered carefully, though with the craving impatience of a hungry man.
For the critics, though, the blood sausage is encrusted with connotations
that disqualify its roasting from serving as a comparison to spiritual dis-
tress. But this encrustment is of posthomeric origin.

The comparison, however, achieves more-not through common tertia,
but through a latent difference in which the movement inherent in the
blood sausage deviates from the development in the narrative. The
blood sausage by being turned over and over will finally be done. We
know it. It is not so with the plan. Odysseus, despite all his turning
over and over does not find the solution. Athena comes, promises to
help, and bids him fall asleep.

Some critics benevolently excuse such deviations from the strictly
comparable with an abundant fantasy that carries the poet beyond his
purpose. The critics are mistaken. Such deviations are frequent in
Homer as they are in Shakespeare. They are devices of art, not blunders.
The deviation is intended to show how events could or should have de-
veloped but actually did not. A harassed hero is compared to a lion-
the lion is killed-the hero fights his way through. The function is ob-
vious: the hero could hardly escape, all odds are against him. Any actual
happening in life is concrete and brimful of “being” together with a halo
of possibilities that could or should happen. These possibilities, though
not actually occurring, belong, to the concrete reality. Their non-occur-
rence is present as danger in the case of the lion, as exigency in the case of
Odysseus’ plan.

A review of such deviations leads through diverse shades to extreme
cases, in which the comparable disappears in the contrarious.
In Iliad, 11, 86, the difference has almost absorbed the similitude. The
“as-so” of the comparison is replaced by a “when-then” of time.

But what time his repast the woodman spreads
In some umbrageous vale, his sinewy arms
Wearied with hewing many a lofty tree,
And his wants satisfied, he feels at length
The pinch of appetite to pleasant food,
Then was it, that encouraging aloud
Each other, in their native virtue strong,
The Grecians through the phalanx burst of Troy….
(William Cowper.)

Despite the “when-then” the battle effort of the Greeks is still compared
with the woodchopper’s toil. But the image aims altogether at the dis-
crepancy. The discrepancy stresses the fighting spirit and staying power
of the Greek-but moreover brings before our eyes the milder aspect of
life and all that the Greek words for desire, sweetness, and pleasantness can
convey to the image of the resting woodman. This is in the midst of a
battle and without any other relation than the sameness of the hour.’
Homer takes the utmost care that in his image of war, peace is present;
life being neither war nor peace, but both of them together.
The so-called effect of contrast, relevant to all art, is question, not
answer. Why contrasts? Just for a change? To avoid monotony?
Or to increase the effect? None of these formulas reaches the poet.
Homer sees to it that he makes translucent in his images and their
changes all the opposites, in between which life moves man to and fro.
By minute, hardly perceptible movements of his brush he makes the hard
and the soft, the dark and the bright, the heavy and the light, courage and
fear, splendor and futility, stand close by one another, inescapably con-
joined in the “way of things.” Life, in being “in between”2 them, is all
is con-of them. By their being “grown together”-”concretum”-life
crete. Homer has a thousand means at his disposal. He avoids any
“chorismos,” any isolation of opposites. Countless poets made their
heroes in armour and helmet shine like the sun, the moon, or the stars.

Homer, however, in describing the Trojans forming their battlefront, makes
Hector for a moment emerge from, and disappear into again, the crowd of
nameless warriors as the moon emerges from a cloud, brightly shines, to
be darkened again by another. Now the image lives, transparent as an
image of life itself, which for the best is but moments of splendor between
hours nameless and dim. Where the nature of events resists, as does the
monotonous sequence of fights in the Iliad-the stiffest subject-matter a
poet ever moulded-Homer interrupts his report and devotes a few verses
to the country of the slain warrior and to the days of his happiness. Or,
(Iliad, 13, 1) Zeus sitting on Mt. Ida looks down at the battle round Troy
and turns his sparkling eyes away to the peace-loving people of Thrace,
‘the milk-feeding, the justest of men.” (Iliad, 22, 145) In the midst of a
breathless passionate report of Achilles’ pursuit of Hector, the poet makes
the heroes rush past the two sources of the Skamander river and dwells
upon their description, though these sources have nothing to do with the
course of events: smoke rises from the hot spring, ice cold is the other;
here are the earthen pots in which in times of peace the women of Troy
and their pretty daughters wash their shining garments.

Such sentences prompted some interpreters to present Homer as a sort
of pacifist. He is, however, neither a war-monger nor an appeaser but a
poet trying to make life and the whole of its forces transparent in war as
well as in peace. Shakespeare, in “King John,” takes over from an earlier
tragedy the plot as well as the greater part of the scenes and verses. He
creates one figure: the bastard. Over against him kings, cardinals, lords
and city people, even the plot, are shown up as only a petty world of mean
politics and business transactions.

Certainly the contrast increases the effect. Gottfried Hermann says
with respect to the Skamander passage of Homer in his commentary on
Aristotle’s Poetics, “The image of peace makes the fight still more terrible.”
He thinks of Rembrandt, in whose pictures “light gets such force from
shadow and shadow from light, as each of them never could have for
itself.”

Yes-and yet, it is not the aim of Homer to make the fight still more
terrible, nor of Rembrandt to make darkness still darker. Moreover,
there is in art as well as in poetry a way of opposing contrasts that does not
intensify. Darkness and brightness can be contrasted and yet remain
unsubstantial and void, if mere routine knowledge of the effects of contrasts
puts them side by side. Their force is the secret of the great. They
succeed in conjoining the dark and the light in a nameless whole, that is
both dark and bright or hard and soft-or in whose context the dark be-
comes dark and the bright bright. To them the contrast is but a means of
making visible this nameless whole.

In Iliad, 11, 547-557, 557-564, two comparisons follow each other. The
first compares Aias to the pugnacious lion, the other to the stubborn ass.

The development of the battle is reported by a change of comparisons.
Aias, the one, attacks the many, the great man assaults the lowly folk-
like a lion dashing to the front, eager to fight; but a host of dogs and
shepherds with spears and torches protect the herd, and the lion retires
growling. Aias retreats like an ass who, under the blows of powerless boys
who try to push him on, quietly grazes in a meadow and moves on appeasing
his hunger when and how he pleases. Even retiring the one forces upon the
many the law of their action. The two comparisons are each a complete
picture. They follow each other immediately. Homer has us jump from
the picture of the battle to the lion, from the-lion to the ass, from the ass
to the next phase of the battle in an astonishing detachment from the
materiality of the facts. But it is through this detachment, that he is
able to seize on the dynamic structure in which the mere facts have their
living concreteness. Many a critic has blamed Homer for so swift a
transition from a lion to an ass, or has even suggested that either the lion
or the ass should be eliminated from the text. But the violent change from
lion to ass affects only the materiality of the facts. The poet’s concern,
however, is not facts as facts, but life itself shining through facts. A minor
poet, of course, should be on his guard in having his Aias suddenly change
from a lion into an ass. Only a poet with such power of transparence can
afford to deal so lightly with the materiality of the objects.

Iliad, 16, 751-776, uses three comparisons for one battle scene. Tone,
color and emotion are intense and passionate. Hector and Patroclos,
Greeks and Trojans fight for the corpse of Kebriones. Patroclos is com-
pared to a lion who breaks into the stables and is struck in the breast.
His own fighting spirit destroys him. But Patroclos is not even wounded.
The deviation suggests that Patroclos, too, by his way of fighting will
find death later, though not now. This impending death casts its shadow
through the inaccuracy of a comparison. A touch of the poet’s masterly
brush: and future and past are implicated in the color of the present.
Now Hector jumps off the chariot, both heroes are like lions that fight
for the carcass of a stag on the top of the mountains. Both are hungry
and both “magnanimous.” The masses of the Trojans and Greeks rush
upon each other.

As when the East wind and the South contend
To shake some deep wood on the mountain’s side,
Or beech, or ash, or rugged cornel old
With stormy violence the mingled boughs
Smite and snap short each other, crashing loud;
So Trojans and Achaians, mingling slew ….

Interpreters who cling to the similarity of material facts relate the
pointed boughs to the pointed spears. The true tertia, however, are not of
this sort, either here or elsewhere. Wind and wood give the unfettered
rage, passion, force, and disorder. Now follows immediately the picture
of the dead man. Here he lies in the midst of hurled spears, flying arrows
and stones, in a whirl of dust-”a tall man, longly spread, his horseman-
ship forgotten.” So Homer joins life and death.

Homer’s pictures even of battles aim at the whole of human existence.
The course of events which he reports varies the aspects. The variation
enhances the transparence. This whole is an impact of forces or move-
ments or ways that are present in one another. It is in between the
“momenta” of this whole that life is alive. This “knowledge” is Homer’s
wisdom. That he is able to make this knowledge visible is his greatness
as a poet.

The use of comparison and contrast are not details of a technique.
Polykleitos, the sculptor, insists that nothing is more difficult than “the
work coming to the nails,” obviously meaning the last treatment of the
surface. This is the secret that lets even a fragment, if it is of a master’s
hand, outshine a second rate work, though complete. What holds for the
small part holds the more for Homer’s poems as wholes. In both the small
and the large, Homer’s wisdom is a kind of knowledge, and knowledge
means knowledge of some kind of truth. What is this truth? Poets lie.
They invent their stories.

According to an old definition “truth” is a concordance between “in-
tellectus” and “res.” But what is, in the case of a poet’s truth, this
“res”? It is not a fact that at any time has been or happened. If we
grant, as I think we must, to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” or “An-
thony and Cleopatra” a considerable amount of truth, we do not say:
“So it was,” but rather “So it is”-meaning that the facts or events,
though they may be the poet’s invention, represent an “it” that “is.”
What is this “it” and what does this “is” mean? Since, however, this
language implies the basic question of what once was called “ontology,”
I carefully avoid it and say instead of “So it is,” “Such is life,” although
from a philosophical point of view this terminology has great disadvantages.
Let us assume that in the case of Homer or Shakespeare the “it” means
life, not this or that life, the life of a girl, or a youth, or an old man, but
life as an impact of forces, movements, and that this impact is not an
aggregate, but the whole of a dynamic structure whose different features
are related to, and present in, one another. They cannot be isolated,
since day owes to night that it is day, and life and death are fettered to
each other by an iron necessity. Let us assume that this whole is the “it”
in question.

Homer’s truth is concordance with this “it” that shines through the facts
he reports. Though this “it” is called “life” life is not a phenomenon
that occurs in some places in a lifeless world. If it is called the structure of
human existence, human existence stands for the life of plants and animals,
which is swayed by no different powers-and thus stands for nature herself,
which throughout is alive. Hence, nature can disclose herself in man,
and man in nature. Wind and waves, trees blossoming and withering,
stars and clouds accompany the human melody, repeat and vary it in their
own way-as the same in all its ever changing variations. The cosmos
Homer mirrors is the human soul, the soul the cosmos; both mirrored in
each other tell the same eternal story. If there are gods in Homer, these
gods are forces and powers of life itself, the ways of things. They them-
selves are the bright and the dark, the shrewd and the powerful, chastity,
bashfulness, lust, desire. Since they are living personalities of distinct
shape, and not pale abstractions, they seem to be and are many; but they
are related to human existence, and if they are different, immortal, and
never aging, they are so only to represent in their very otherness the
transientness in which they have no share. They are as powers of life
elevated above this life, as living beings enmeshed in life, full of action and
passion and deeply human-only that their wounds heal again and their
being is new everyday and untouched by whatever experience they have.
As there is no danger, their life is play. Though, as powers, they are
eternal, they are, as persons, embraced by Fate and Necessity to which
even they must submit-between play and seriousness, power and fate.
But so is life. This ambiguity is their charm, this charm is full of wisdom.
Though they are many, there is in their manyness still the unity of a
structure that they rule as powers and represent as persons, crossing one
another, avoiding, outwitting, and rallying with one another-death and
life interlaced, brute force and soft sweetness together the way of things;
an eternal order, one and unique. The relation of god to man in the
Iliad may well be the poet’s most personal creation. The immortal gods
behave “as if” they were mortal-mortal man acts as if he were immortal.
God’s play is his seriousness. The two “as if’s” are opposed to each
other. The counterpoint of Being and Becoming is but one and the
same song. Here the poet reaches beyond the philosopher.3

The horses of Achilles weep over the dead Patroclos’ glamorous youth;
grief, transiency, love, devotion, embracing man and beast because bound
together in life itself. Wherever Homer speaks of death, life and its
splendor stand close by. Death stands beside every life. Sweet and
bitter, bright and dark, hard and soft are present in one another. Homer
takes care that no one of them is isolated passion is accompanied by
deliberation, the glorious by the inglorious, courage by fear, enduring by
weakening. In all the battles of the Iliad, Homer reports facts for the sake
not of facts but of the shining life, that lights up in the one and is quenched
in the other. This and that town far away has born him as his father’s
pride. He as no one else knew how to curb the horses and now the earth
drinks his blood. Man moves in between knowledge and blindness; blind
are the many, but Homer’s most brilliant heroes, Achilles and Hector, are
altogether those who know, whereas Agamemnon, Menelaos, Aias merely
stumble in the dark. Achilles, in the splendor of his victory, talks to the
Trojan boy who in vain begs for his yet unworthy life, about his own ap-
proaching death, the death of the so much better man. Taking leave of
Andromache, Hector foretells Troy’s fall. As Achilles, in his implacable
rage, refuses to help the Greeks, he rises above the particular situation,
above this war against ‘Troy. He knows human futility. But behind
this knowledge of Hector and Achilles the blindness of the many still lurks
so that the concrete distinctness of action and speech brings to light the
whole of mortal life which forever is in between knowledge and blindness,
might and futility, the one in danger and the other in need. It is this
transparency we have in mind, whenever we feel inclined to admit that
poetry can be concerned with truth, by saying, “So it is.”

Homer is motion throughout: acting and suffering, passionate change.
But this whole, that becomes transparent though it has no name, does not
move. It holds all living beings in its iron bands. Homer lets the days
follow one another. Rosy fingered dawn announces the day, the sun rises
and sets, and the paths of mortal men grow dark again. He usually uses
the same verses whenever a day begins or ends. Not casually-the way
of things made manifest in restless change remains what it ever was and
ever will be.

Homer’s wisdom, his truth and his beauty have one and the same source.
It is his wisdom to know this truth; it is his greatness as poet to make it
manifest in visible images.

It might be that from this statement, if it is correct, some conclusions
could be drawn. It may have some bearing on the history of Greek
philosophy or on the mysterious problem of “quality” or “value” in art-4
or even on the level on which an inquiry into the “meaning of truth” might
discover a less poor meaning of a less poor truth. All such conclusions,
however, are beyond the scope of the present study.

GRADUATE FACULTY,

NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH,

NEW YORK CITY.

4 Cf. the author’s article “Die Gleichnisse Homers und die Anfang der Phi-
losophie” in die Antike, Leipsig, 1937; and “Traktat vom Schonen,” Frankfurt arn
Main, 1935.

KURT RIEZLER.

The post Homer’s Contribution to the Meaning of Truth appeared first on EcoTopia.

A Moral Equivalent of War

paul — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 18:06:35 +0000

By Paul Lee

Over one hundred years ago, William James delivered a lecture at Stanford University where he was a visiting professor. Not exactly a fish out of water he did not have a high opinion of his peers. This is what he says in a letter to a friend:

“The drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum—the historic silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen—and the social insipidity.”[1]

Stanford was not the Harvard of the West as far as he was concerned. The lecture should have been given at Harvard as it was one of the most famous James ever gave. The lecture came to be known as “The Moral Equivalent of War” when it was published in l910. In l906, the title was: “The Psychology of the War Spirit.” An earlier version was given at the Thirteenth Universal Peace Congress in l904.[2] An accompanying talk was entitled: “The Energies of Man.”

What is remarkable about the talks and the texts is their defining one of the central themes for the century and not only a theme, but a task and a challenge. It is not surprising that the address was delivered around the time of an earthquake, the famous San Francisco earthquake, to underline the point that ideas have consequences. The earthquake hit Stanford, as well, and almost shook James out of bed. He is thought to have said: “Let ‘er rip!” That’s how I first heard it, but, according to his letters, he said, “Now, go it!”[3]

It was a very idiosyncratic Yankee response, reminiscent of his appraisal of the Grand Canyon: “equal to the brag.” I especially like that one.

Ah, William James! He looms so large over the American intellectual landscape. Harvard, of course. Our leading philosopher and psychologist. The founder of Pragmatism, the quintessential American philosopher and the author of the immensely popular: The Varieties of Religious Experience, again uniquely American, in the tradition of Protestant sectarianism, or what is known as the Left Wing of the Reformation, beginning with the Anabaptists, where the operative theme is the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed, a very deep spiritual impulse in the American character.[4]

James called this free spontaneous behavior “civic virtue”. He imputed it to the breast of every American as a spark to be blown on and it would ignite into the flame of voluntary work service, the great American ‘can do’, the envy of Europeans. It is Pragmatism put to the test as a secular expression of sanctification; it is Spirit-driven. Will you permit me that association? I want to take the impulse to civic virtue back to the Radical Reformation as its original source when people spontaneously affirmed themselves in the power of the Spirit without any external authority or sanction.

I would like to think that James thought of this Spiritual inspiration as the basis for the moral equivalent of war, that salubrious phrase that defined a century and more as the Holy Grail of political aspirations. Notice it is not pacifism, in which case it would be the moral equivalent to war, where ‘moral equivalent’ doesn’t make much sense. No, the ‘of ’ is important, although moral equivalent still takes some explaining; it at least means the application of wartime energy to peace time means, even though we still stumble on the notion of the morality of war and then wonder what a moral equivalent might mean.

James appreciated the virtues of war as though he had the Erich von Stroheim of The Grand Illusion in mind. He wanted to transpose the virtues of the warrior to peacetime—hardihood, courage, the willingness to sacrifice oneself, loyalty, devotion to a cause, the unreflective striving for what is noble, etc., what Plato meant by thymos, that vital center of spirited courage that represented the warrior class.[5] James summed it up in the idea of voluntary work service. He wanted the youth of America to summon this spirit of the patriotic soldier to take on and share the shit-work of society, work that the underclass is saddled with for a lifetime, and pitch in and help. Get the childishness knocked out of them. That’s the idea. Put some mettle into their spine and make them proud and mature and adult and ready to face the responsibilities before them. American youth on the march. I can hear the stomp and tread of their feet in unison accompanied by Nelson Eddy singing: “give me some men [and women] who are stout hearted men [and women] and I’ll soon give you ten thousand more….” Everyone a Canadian Mounty riding proudly into the fray, albeit without the uniform, and without the horse, but with tools for the job, like rakes and hoes, turning weapons into plowshares.

I once visited a park in Pittsburgh and at a central fountain area I was stunned to see the very epitome of this notion of American Youth in full scale bronze, a young man standing vigil over the place, looking like the Eternal Boy Scout. I still have the picture I took of this youth, hoping to use it sometime for an essay such as this. Some years ago I found a poster showing an Uncle Sam Pied Piper leading a Children’s Garden Army to dig and to plant and to hoe, their garden implements over their shoulders, as though they were the first recruits to respond to William James’ summons. The Uncle Sam figure reminded me of Alan Chadwick with whom I developed the famous organic—biodynamic/French Intensive—garden at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In fact, the Uncle Sam/ Pied Piper figure looks like Chadwick but for the goatee. He had just that effect on the students at the university in the late ‘60’s, Pied Piper and Johnny Appleseed combined, inducting them into a vision of an organic life-style, the very embodiment of “flower power.”

I was introduced to the theme of a moral equivalent of war by my colleague, Page Smith, the American historian. He had been a student of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, at Dartmouth. Eugen was an admirer of William James and the theme of voluntary service. Eugen had been involved in the youth movement and camps devoted to voluntary service in Germany, along with Helmuth von Moltke, the great German martyr of the Second World War, who was executed for thinking about the future of Germany after the defeat of Hitler, having organized the Kreisau Circle at his family estate where such discussions were held.

Earlier in the century, at the same time as William James, another figure, in Austria, Joseph Popper-Lynkeus, was deeply involved in thinking along the same lines as James, in an uncanny example of synchronicity.[6] Popper-Lynkeus, who took the name of the seer of the Argonaut expedition in ancient Greece, Lynkeus, the man who piloted the Argo, in search of the Golden Fleece, adding it to his own name, was an inspiring figure of the time, even though he worked as a boiler engineer.[7] Freud wrote an appreciative essay about him but never wanted to meet him in the fear that the man would not match his expectations. Einstein and others revered him, maybe for the following reason: he postulated a youth army, a Nahrpflicht, in opposition to the Wehrpflicht; a nourishment army instead of a conscription war army. It was his version of a moral equivalent of war. He calculated how many youth it would take, and how long, to provide the fundamental essentials of social life for everyone in the state—clothing, housing and food.

Popper-Lynkeus formulated a fundamental principle of moral/social behavior, a formulation that has had a great influence on me and one I have taken to heart, making it an inspiration for my work with the homeless in Santa Cruz.[8] So it is a unique confluence of comparable forces that inspired a Viennese social reformer and a German professor—Rosenstock-Huessy– inspired by William James, to further the cause of voluntary work service.

It is a remarkable story how Page Smith and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, while at Dartmouth, teamed up, one an undergraduate who was to become one of the great educators and historians and one a professor of philosophy, sociology of knowledge, theology, etc., who was without peer in his unique stature as an intellectual. It is very difficult to define Eugen, a polymath, whose knowledge and spirited teaching held a generation of Dartmouth students in thrall. Page never got over the encounter and carried a lifelong devotion to Eugen; in fact, he would get tears in his eyes on the mention of his name so sentimental was the bond.

It all started when another young admirer of Eugen’s—Frank Davidson—a Harvard student, who got it into his head to propose a leadership training camp for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He presented his idea to Eugen. They could secure a farm near Dartmouth and bring the vision of William James into a corps that was an excellent expression of the theme but for a few extenuating circumstances. Corps recruits were often delinquents who were given the chance to join the Corps as an alternative to going to jail. The Corps demanded a ‘means test’, which meant you had to be poor in order to gain entrance. The Corps, run by the army, had become a welfare holding tank for indigent youth. Frank Davidson thought the Corps could be well served by middle class college youth imbued with the spirit of William James’ vision of a moral equivalent of war if given the chance to prove their point.

Listening to his proposal, Eugen sized him up and asked him if he had ever worked. The son of wealthy parents, his father a noted New York lawyer and friend of the Roosevelts, Frank said no. Well, go and work then, Eugen demanded. And come back and see me in a year. Typical Eugen. And Frank did just that.

He managed to sneak into the corps, circumventing the means test, proving you were poor, and became something of a spy, observing what went on at the camps, noticing that on weekends the corpsmen would conduct raiding operations on nearby towns where they would steal what they could and commit other forms of mischief.

He reported back to Eugen and eventually the decision was made to open Camp William James, in Tunbridge, Vermont, as a leadership training camp for the Civilian Conservation Corps. They had the blessing of Elenore Roosevelt and Dorothy Thompson (the most famous woman journalist at the time and the wife of Sinclair Lewis). The sons of William James were present at the dedication. It was the most idealistic application of James’ theme: middle-class college students willing and eager to identify with the underclass and share the arduous work of the society; idealistic in the best sense of the word.

And then the war began and after being named the first camp director, Page Smith, and others, were drafted. It was short-lived, maybe six months, but the camaraderie and devotion to a shared cause never left them as one of the great unfulfilled experiences of their lives.

Eugen prophetically foresaw the impact this experience had on his students and how some day it would bring about in a new configuration what the war had aborted.

The next step in this furthering of the story, the next episode, is for Page, while a professor of history at UCLA, to write to Hubert Humphrey and propose something like the Peace Corps.[9] Humphrey relays the idea to J. F. Kennedy and the rest is history. The Peace Corps was first proposed, almost off-handedly, by Kennedy, at a campaign appearance at the University of Michigan, where it lit a fire among the students in the audience and they fanned it into a flame that refused to be put out. Harris Wofford tells the story in his book: The Kennedys and the Kings. Sargent Shriver was nice enough to mention the historic precedent of Camp William James in his Colliers Encyclopedia article on the founding of the Peace Corps.[10]

So we had a legacy forming around the idea and especially Page Smith’s involvement with it when we teamed up and started the William James Association in Santa Cruz to bring about the re-establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The year was l973. We had both left the university, I for want of tenure and Page in protest over my being denied.

We had had a run at the theme while we were at the university. It is a story I tell elsewhere but the rudiments are this: when Page invited his old professor, Rosenstock-Huessy, to teach at Santa Cruz, he brought with him his companion, Freya von Moltke, the widow of Helmuth von Moltke. She heard I had proposed a student garden project and she had a friend coming to visit her who was a professional gardener—Alan Chadwick.[11] He would eventually be called “the world’s greatest gardener” by E. F. Schumacher, the new age guru and author of a popular book: Small Is Beautiful. He ought to know about gardeners. He was the head of the Soil Association of England and an expert on gardening procedures. Chadwick impressed him as the icon of the New Age spirit and it turned out that our little experiment in organic gardening at the university was in tune with one of the most famous biodynamic gardens of the time in Scotland—Findhorn.

Chadwick worked in the same tradition of food and flower production–biodynamics, developed by Rudolf Steiner, as an organic alternative to industrial agriculture and gardening. I think our garden was the first organic garden at a university in the country introducing through Chadwick the French Intensive and Biodynamic systems of flower growing and food production. It was a sign of the times—“Flower Power”—was in the air, wafting down from the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco on a cloud of you know what—we all got a whiff of it– and the students took to the effort with an unalloyed passion. We developed something like a garden army in association with the students at Santa Cruz and the experience of the Garden Project prepared me for what was to come.

It was as if we were carrying through the spirit of Camp William James, and Page Smith, the Provost of Cowell College, was one of our most enthusiastic supporters. The Chadwick Garden was the background for our eventual collaboration. I still remember the day, after we had left the university, when Page came into our kitchen and sat down and proposed that we start the William James Association as a nonprofit corporation with the task of re-establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps. With anyone else I would have gulped, but not with Page. He had a commanding air about him that gave one the impression that anything was possible. He had been a major in the army and he looked like a cross between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, at six feet two and a handsome Roman nose.

I had had some experience with a nonprofit, having started one in anticipation of the termination of my teaching career, thinking it would give me something to do. I called it USA, University Services Agency, and I organized it with two friends at the university who were campus chaplains, one Lutheran and one Roman Catholic, Herb Schmidt and Jerry Lasko.

I had had two professors at Harvard Divinity School who had given me a line on voluntary associations and nonprofit corporations and especially their religious roots: James Luther Adams and George Hunston Williams. Adams, who had introduced my teacher, Paul Tillich, to American students, taught social ethics and was an enthusiastic proponent of voluntary associations and their legal form—nonprofit corporations. Williams, a Unitarian colleague of Adams, taught church history, and had written the major work on the so-called left wing of the Protestant Reformation, which he called the Radical Reformation, the sectarian wing, in distinction to the orthodox churches.

He dated its origins in l525 on a night when a Roman Catholic priest was re-baptized, whose name was George Blaurock, the first Anabaptist. Thus was established, so I came to appreciate, the principle of voluntary association for purposes of freedom of worship. This prepared the way for the significant contribution to American religious institutions under the banner of the free spontaneous behavior of the redeemed, a phrase I coined to characterize the dynamic of the sectarian movement in this country that so powerfully informed the spirit of voluntary work service William James called upon for his moral equivalent of war.

We went to Washington, D. C., Mr. Smith and me. We made the rounds of Senatorial Offices. We met with old colleagues from Camp William James, Frank Davidson and Jack Preiss, who had written a book documenting the experience.[12] We met with Don Eberley, who had devoted his life to promoting voluntary service. Frank took us to lunch at the Cosmos Club. That was a treat. We didn’t get anywhere, but we weren’t discouraged. The time was not especially right what with a Republican administration that identified the theme as Democrat.

And then a strange set of circumstances occurred upon our return. Eloise Smith, Page’s wife, knew I was a friend of Richard Baker-roshi, the Abbot of Zen Center, in San Francisco, who was a close friend of then governor—Jerry Brown. She told me to tell Baker to tell Brown to appoint her as Chair of the newly formed State Art Council. So I did and he did and he did. The day Eloise’s appointment was to be announced and the Smiths were waiting in Brown’s office for him to finish his State of the State Address, they hear him mention the formation of a California Conservation Corps. “ Did you say C.C.C.?” Page asked Brown, when he entered the office from his address. After hearing Page detail our involvement in the effort and our center in Santa Cruz, Brown said, “O.K., go ahead and organize it.”

Page came back beaming with his “guess what?” So we set about with the work of organizing the Corps. We planned an encampment at an old former C.C.C. Camp in Mendocino County and invited Chadwick to come and give the main talk to inspire the troops. He didn’t disappoint, although Page and I raised an eyebrow over the response of some of the state bureaucrats in attendance who didn’t know what this force of nature called Chadwick was about or what it meant and I was reluctant to offer the explanation– that Chadwick was ordained from on high to replant the vital root of existence in the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society.

We designed the uniform. We thought about this and that and then the new Director of the Corps appeared in our office in Santa Cruz to introduce himself and express his appreciation for what we had done to get things started. Now this turned out to be another one of those moments that life dishes up and you don’t know what to make of it. What? Heidegger on the “uncanny”? Unheimlich.

A little too close to home? The serendipity of Eloise’s appointment and the announcement of the three C’s was enough to hold us for a long time but here came another on the wings of the first. He introduced himself as Boyd Horner. I asked him what he had done before he took on his current appointment. He said he worked for the blind in Washington D. C. I refrained from making a smart alec remark about Washington politicians. I asked what he had done before that. He said he had studied for the Rudolf Steiner Priesthood in England. The what? I didn’t know there was a Rudolf Steiner Priesthood? I was flabbergasted. I thought the Corps would be a vehicle for Chadwick’s organic gardening and farming effort, but I was the only one who thought it might be an appropriate vehicle for extending Chadwick’s organic vision, although Page certainly concurred. We had kept the Steiner connection a kind of open secret at the university. It was bad enough being organic, which the scientists on the campus thought was another hippy plot to further embarrass them. We were going to have a California Conservation Corps with an occult Steiner priest at the head? Are you kidding? Was this going to be the famous moonbeam in the governor’s office?

They sent me to England to recruit. To Emerson College, the center for Steiner Studies in Great Britain, in Tunbridge, outside London. I thought that was amazing. That was the name of the town where Camp William James took place, in Vermont. I wasn’t sure where to start. Steiner gymnastics? Steiner cuisine? Steiner geometry? Steiner dance called eurythmics? The principal, Francis Edmunds, had visited our Chadwick Garden a number of times so we knew one another. That helped. But it was a pretty weird place. Any resemblance between Steiner and Dracula was completely coincidental. I went into a local pub and had a beer and after they identified me as a Yank and from California, they asked me what I was doing there and I told them I was a visiting recruiter at Emerson and they ducked as if a bat had flown in the window.

I was asked to give a talk to the school and the faculty. I had one all worked out that described the force-fit the Chadwick Garden had been at the university, what with the triumph of physicalism over vitalism, which I detailed, and how Steiner’s hero, the vitalist Goethe, had pretty much set the theme of the conflict in his opposition to Newton and his physicalist mechanics, over a theory of color. It was a good sketch and they sat there in stunned silence which took me by surprise. For a moment I thought I had put them to sleep. I had to sit down and wait out their stunned response.

Well, needless to say, even without disclosing the occult stream lurking in the nether regions, this format for the Corps was not going to work even with the support of the moonbeam governor. As they say in the South, that dog don’t hunt. Horner was replaced. And so were we as far as any further influence or input. But it was fun while it lasted and we turned to other pursuits.

I organized a Land Reform Conference, the first of its kind, at least in Santa Cruz. By then I had worked out the sketch for the theme of the century as I thought about the application of the vision of James.

We’re getting a little ahead of the story, so first let me outline the themes as I saw them emerge in its historic context under the inspiration of a moral equivalent of war.

The Children’s Garden Army is the first volunteer organization that exemplifies James’ vision. An account of it is available on google: United States School Garden Army. The slogan was “Follow the Pied Piper.”

The next ideological step from William James is one I would not have thought of but for a quote I read in a picture book on Gandhi. I was at Harvard when Erik Erikson was working on his Gandhi book. We became friends when I had to work on Freud as a condition for passing my PhD orals. He had just come to Harvard and somehow I found my way to him to help me on my Freud studies. He was wonderful. Very kind. Very receptive and somehow particularly interested in me because I was Paul Tillich’s Teaching Assistant and Tillich was one of the leading intellectuals in the land. I decided that I would introduce him to Tillich, and so we arranged a dinner party at our house for the Tillichs and the Eriksons. They fell into one another’s arms as though fate had brought them together. They quoted Heine to one another in front of the fireplace. I can’t remember what we had for dinner but I had somehow obtained a case of Lafite Rothschild wine. I think it was a l959 vintage. We drank that and it was sublime and gave the evening its particularly ecstatic cast, making it the most memorable dinner party in our experience.

I never got to discuss Gandhi with Erikson to any extent but when I read the quote where Gandhi states that satyagraha is the moral equivalent of war, I thought, of course. It was an insight I cherish. Militant nonviolence, in the name of an ultimate concern, where one is willing to accept the price, the penalty to be paid, for noncompliance with evil. That’s the meaning of satyagraha in a nutshell, which, literally, means to be grasped by the force of truth and the truth is the moral equivalent of war. I remember Erikson making an emphatic point about the misunderstanding of Gandhi as a pacifist. Gandhi was not a pacifist. He was a militant nonviolent advocate, where violence was turned on its head, against itself. It was a version of militancy that disarmed and took one by surprise as Gandhi did the British and as a consequence overthrew the British yoke: this little spindly man in a cloth wrap, sandals, and a pair of glasses. I remember seeing a photo of Gandhi’s remains, after he died, not his ashes, but what he left behind, just the above and maybe a notebook and pencil. He was a mahatma, a great soul and he inspired generations after him.

Whether he read William James or not, I was never able to find out. He must have or someone told him about the theme: the moral equivalent of war, as though James anticipated him and gave him the formulation: the principle that revolutionized India.

He went into seclusion as I remember the story and waited for the revelation. He somehow knew it would be revealed to him– what steps to take to overthrow the British domination. And the message came. Walk to the sea and pick up some salt. And in that moment and from then on no Indian would pay the salt tax and the British would be overthrown. And not a shot fired.

Gandhi saved some of the salt he picked up. When he had tea with the British Viceroy, as though to celebrate India’s independence, he reached over and poured a bit of the salt from that day into the cup of the British Viceroy and into his own. Then he said he would like to offer a toast: To the Boston Tea Party! The British Viceroy lifted his cup and laughed.

When I received a copy of Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth, from W. W. Norton, Erik’s publisher, I was asked to comment on the book. This is what I wrote: “Freud’s letter to Einstein on human aggression is the background for this study of a visionary solution, a moral equivalent of war, held out as grounds for hope, in the message of aggressive nonviolence; it is Erikson’s letter to Konrad Lorenz in the name of the friendly beast.”[13]

What Gandhi did, by his example and his teaching, but more than that, by virtue of his person, was to transmit a spiritual substance into the historical process which we have identified as the moral equivalent of war and an exemplar of William James’ vision, although he did not have a nearly naked little Indian man in sandals in mind. We are astonished at the sequence of figures who are inspired by Gandhi’s spirit and who have received the transmission of his legacy.

The first to express this was the man to whom Gandhi picked as his successor and to whom he transmitted his spirit in a direct and personal way: Vinoba Bhave. It is a pity that he is so little known in the West and that his work in succeeding Gandhi did not become as famous and familiar as his mentor. But it is important for us and our tracing of the theme of a moral equivalent of war. Bhave applied the theme to land reform, whereas Gandhi had applied the theme to civil rights and political revolution.

Bhave began the Land Gift movement (Bhoodan) in India when he began his famous walk throughout India calling upon wealthy landowners to give a portion of their land to the landless. It is because of Gandhi and Bhave that we have identified two successive movements, civil rights and land reform, to add to the theme of voluntary work service as the 20^th century expressions of a moral equivalent of war.

So I had two Indians practicing the theme to relate to two Americans who took their lead from them in the same spirit: Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez.

The explicit theme of voluntary work service and the trajectory to Camp William James, the Peace Corps, Americorps and now the national service corps effort of the Obama administration gave rise to two attendant themes: civil rights and land reform, as exemplified in the work of King and Chavez. It was a simple step to add Chadwick and his organic gardening as a type of land reform to complement Chavez, bringing it back to where we started—a three acre plot on a slope at the entrance to the University of California, Santa Cruz.

It was a great moment for me when Eugen and Freya came for lunch and a set of circumstances were set into play that has occupied much of my life. I am grateful to have been included in the process that started at Camp William James and directed us to a ray of hope in a very dark century. I would like to think that what began then has come to fruition here and renders prophetic Eugen’s words in his essay included in I Am An Impure Thinker, “Teaching Too Late, Learning Too Early”:

“But let me also hope that some years from now, the word spoken out of season tonight may ripen into the maturity of timeliness.”

[1] A letter to his brother, Henry James: The Letters of William James, Vol I, p. 241.

[2] The talk has been generally referred to as “The Moral Equivalent of War.” The provenance is cleared up in: Genuine Reality, by Linda Simon, p.335

[3] Letters of William James, Vol. I, p 248.

[4] George Hunston Williams: The Radical Reformation

5 Paul Tillich gives the authoritative account of thymos in his Courage To Be.

[6] cf. Josef Popper-Lynkeus: The Individual and the Value of Human Life, l995. William James is mentioned on p. 70. The best article on Popper-Lynkeus is by Paul Edwards, in his Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[7] I asked Eugen if he knew of Popper-Lynkeus and of course he did and he mentioned their mutual interest in the Argonauts, Argo being the name of Eugen’s publishing company.

[8] cf. my Quality of Mercy, Homelessness in Santa Cruz, l985—l993. On line at www.ecotopia.org

[9] I have tried to run down the letter and have called the Humphrey Archive in Minnesota, to no avail. I heard Humphrey speak when I was a college student at St. Olaf and thought he was the most inspiring, charismatic, figure, I had encountered. He exuded civic virtue.

[10] Another line of influence I have found out about thanks to my friend Anne Flaten Pixley is the work her father did with volunteer students building a Lutheran church at Hovland in Northern Minnesota. As a result of the experience, her father, Professor of Art at St. Olaf College, Arne Flaten, wrote to Humphrey and proposed something like a Peace Corps.

[11] Cf. Paul Lee: There Is A Garden In the Mind. Alan Chadwick and the Origins of the Organic Movement in California, 2010.

[12] Jack Preiss: Camp William James.

[13] There is a large literature on what has come to be called “reciprocal altruism”, a term coined by Robert Trivers, the sociobiologist. A notable development is the center at Stanford devoted to compassion and altruism directed by my friend and neighbor, Joel Finkelstein.

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Circle Trail

paul — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 21:24:34 +0000

Start anywhere for a virtual tour of the Circle Trail.

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Ecology Hall of Fame

paul — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 20:26:44 +0000

Dedicated to heroes of the American environmental movement.

We are pleased to present our six charter inductees:


Alan Chadwick	Henry Thoreau	Rachel Carson	John Burroughs	John Muir	Aldo Leopold

Additional people honored in the Ecology Hall of Fame:

Edward Abbey — Author
Archie “Grey Owl” Belaney — Personality
David Brower — Activist
John Denver — Singer
William O. Douglas — Supreme Court Justice
Rosalie Edge — Activist
Celia Hunter — Activist
Robert “Bob” Marshall — Activist
Eugene Odum — Ecologist
Ed Ricketts — Biologist
Theodore Roosevelt — President

Living Legends of the environmental movement:

Lois Gibbs — Activist
Julia Butterfly Hill — Activist
Ruth Patrick — Biologist
Pete Seeger — Singer, Activist
Gary Snyder — Poet
Terry Tempest Williams — Author, Activist

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Pogonip

paul — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 19:31:34 +0000

Pogonip offers a wide variety of habitats and microclimates, including open meadows, dark cool forests, creek beds, and three virgin stands of redwood. Within the park there are miles of hiking trails and endless sites for informal picnics. The Circle Trail Route follows Spring Trail, Brayshaw Trail, and Golf Club Drive. Dogs should be kept on leash, both because they make the deer nervous and harder to see and because many parts of Pogonip are prime poison oak habitat. Dog owners regularly contract poison oak dermatitis after their pet has frisked about in Pogonip.

Among the many magnificent trees in the Pogonip is one whose grandeur has earned it it the name The Sacred Oak. It dominates a meadow that slopes down to the right of the Spring Trail about 300 yards north of the Brayshaw Trail junction.

For more information, see the Pogonip website sponsored by the Pogonip Foundation.

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Who Killed Cock Robin?

paul — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:08:07 +0000

An Earth Day 2000 Address by Paul Lee

The Ballad of Rachel Carson
and the Historical Origins of
the Environmental Crisis and
Earth Day

An Earth Day, 2000, Talk, by Paul A. Lee, PhD

In the summer of l969, I took a wilderness canoe trip with Gaylord Nelson, the Senator from Wisconsin. It was part of Senator Nelson’s effort to pass a Wild Rivers’ Bill to save some of the waters of Northern Wisconsin. I should have told him about our organic garden at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and our remarkable gardener–Alan Chadwick–whom E. F. Schumacher called “the world’s greatest living gardener”, because, when months later I saw the Senator announce Earth Day on the Today Show, I thought, oh boy, our garden has prepared the way.

And, indeed, it had. When Earth Day arrived we were ready for it, as though we had staked out a small space of a few acres to reaffirm the integrity of organic nature within the very stronghold of those responsible for undermining it. I was asked to give a talk at University of California/Berkeley and Senator Nelson spoke from the same podium the next day. I helped organize the Earth Day celebration in Santa Cruz and I remember getting a Rauschenberg Earth Day poster which someone eventually pinched from my office wall. The event marked an historic moment when countless Americans stopped for a weekend and thought about the unforeseen consequences of industrial society and its ravaging effect on the environment, on organic nature, on the whole earth. I was teaching philosophy at University of California Santa Cruz and I thought of Earth Day as the end of Existentialism, the philosophical movement that, among other things, protested industrial society and the predicament of human existence in it. Now we had a new beginning. It was possible to re-affirm the integrity of organic nature and to celebrate the earth as our home instead of our dump. The re-affirmation of the goodness of creation was implied when we planted our garden in this best of all possible worlds.

Rachel Carson had sung the Ballad of Cock Robin in her Silent Spring in the early 60′s, bringing to the attention of Americans the unforeseen consequences of pesticide use (DDT) on robin and other bird populations. Man Against the Earth, had been an early title. In her Scripps College Commencement Address, she said: “Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature”….”now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune–it may well be our final tragedy–that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself.”

When she completed the manuscript to Silent Spring she said: “and last night the thoughts of all the birds and other creatures and all the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness, that now I had done what I could–I had been able to complete it–now it had its own life.”

I used the Ballad of Cock Robin, sung by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, as a way of characterizing the intellectual sources for thinking about the environmental crisis. Three terms are employed: “Physicalism,” the predominant ideological trend of modern science and the Sparrow in the Ballad; “Vitalism,” the Cock Robin in the Ballad, defeated by Physicalism as a sentimental defense of the integrity of organic nature or the “life force,” and “Existentialism,” which, it occurred to me, could be seen as the consequence of the defeat of Vitalism, as the Ballad calls the Dove: Chief Mourner.

The dates make the construction plausible. Physicalism defeated Vitalism in l828 with the artificial synthesis of urea. Existentialism began in l841-42 in the Berlin Lectures of Friedrich Schelling in his rejection of Hegel. It was a great class. Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Italian Renaissance; Bakunin, the anarchist; Engels, the colleague of Marx, and Soren Kierkegaard, my special favorite, were in attendance. Kierkegaard was disappointed and went back to Copenhagen and carried through the Existential protest in a radical way, although they were all mourners. They mourned the fate of human existence in industrial society. Estrangement, alienation, thingification, daylight saving time on the assembly line, as though a second reality had developed, robbing people of their humanity, a con job, Biedermeier half truths, the death of God, the hollow reverb of the soul before it disappeared into the obtuse obscurity of anonymity. Kafka’s door closing on the entrance to the Law. Waiting For Godot. Subject-object sat on a wall, subject-object had a great fall and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, could not put subject-object together again.

Our student garden at UCSC was only a few acres, but by l970 it was flourishing as a tribute to the principle of plenitude of Chadwick’s production methods–the French Intensive, the food production system developed around Paris and the Biodynamic, an esoteric form of organic food production. He kept the latter a secret until after Earth Day because he knew it was a force-fit on a hostile campus, a form of Vitalism with a vengeance, developed by Rudolf Steiner, whose center, at Dornach, Switzerland, was a watershed for the occult and mystical tradition, with Goethe celebrated in his central building of his own design known as the Goetheanum. The story has it that Chadwick’s mother was an Anthroposophist and Alan met him on a visit to their family estate–Pudleston–where Steiner gave him some lessons in raspberry production.

The scientists on the campus were already annoyed about “organic”. They thought it was just another hippie plot to discredit the reputation of the new campus where everyone dropped acid and smoked pot in the redwoods. They would have freaked out over Chadwick’s Steiner connection, a clairvoyant, who looked like a pinched version of Alfred E. Newman of Mad Comics : “Me worry?” It took a while, but I finally developed the nerve to read about Steiner and dip into his writings, late at night, with a flashlight under the covers. I was teaching at Crown College, (which was devoted to the natural sciences,) and one evening at a colleague’s home, while stepping it off to the dining room, a chemist said to me: “Do you know the garden has done more to ruin the cause of science than anything else on this campus?” What?…”By the way…..” What was he talking about? It was an “uh oh” experience.

I came to realize I was caught between Chadwick, the organic gardener, with roots back through Steiner to Goethe representing the Vitalist tradition and Kenneth Thimann, my boss, the Provost of Crown College, an internationally renowned Physicalist botanist, who was strictly scientific, experimental laboratory, all the way, his way or the highway, with roots back to Newton and Galileo. Vitalism and Physicalism was perfectly personified in Chadwick and Thimann, the organic gardener and the experimental laboratory botanist. They were somewhat new terms to me, representing paradigms, as Kuhn would have or should have called them, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that made a big splash at the time. His strictly formalistic analysis assumes the Vitalist demise and the Physicalist victory without even mentioning them as illustrative cases of the revolution. Physicalism was the revolutionary paradigm that supplanted Vitalism in the development of the sciences in the mid-l9th century. The structure of the scientific revolution was a Physicalist Revolution, pure and simple, at the expense of everything Vitalist, a term of contempt in the mind of the victorious Physicalist.

“The new cosmos–a complex of matter and forces proceeding mechanically from spiral nebula to everlasting ice–took such a firm hold on the imagination of Europe that labels like spiritualism, spiritualist, spiritualistic, were employed to describe those who believed it was anything more, and even Vitalism and Vitalist to distinguish those who held that life, as such, had any purpose or significance.” Owen Barfield: History of English Words

The defeat of Vitalism and the victory of Physicalism as the reductionist trend in modern science, reducing everything to physical and chemical forces, turned on a simple experiment that was credited with the defeat–the artificial synthesis of urea. Everyone who knows me knows the date–l828. I was thrilled when I stumbled on it. I thought: “urea, I found it”–the historical origins of the environmental crisis! Friedrich Woehler did it. He is known as the Father of Organic Chemistry where the word “organic” is identified with artificial synthesis, thereby undermining the argument in behalf of the integrity of organic nature and its independent distinction from inorganic nature–Vitalism. The organic was collapsed into the inorganic when Woehler heated up ammonium cyanate and got organic urea. You didn’t need a kidney anymore to get synthetic urea! You have to realize what a stupendous development this was that organic nature could be bracketed, in effect, and copied, whatever the chemical composition turned out to be, mimicked, with inorganic nature. On the level of chemicals they were considered to be identical—natural and synthetic; organic and artificial; no difference. A simple product of the experimental laboratory supplanted and replaced organic nature, in this case, a kidney in the making of urea. The consequences are stunning in its symbolic significance given the products of synthetic urea. You get artificial fertilizer (synthetic urea is a high nitrogen) and plastics (poly-ure-thane). Plastic soil in which to grow plastic food for plastic people. The artificial and synthetic culture of industrial society as a world above the given world of nature had achieved its conquest of organic nature.

Take the urea experiment as the symbolic experiment of the rise and triumph of industrial society thanks to better living through chemistry and the products of the experimental laboratory. Monsanto is just around the corner with Agent Orange and Roundup. DDT is on the way. You know the list once the outlines of the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society come into focus with Earth Day.

From then on “organic” meant plastics–well, anyhow, artificial synthesis. Get it? Might as well start calling factories plants. “Where you going today, honey?” “Oh, down to the plant.”

“For the chemistry of the living organism is fundamentally identical with that of the laboratory and the factory.” J. Loeb

Well, if they can take an inch, there goes a mile and eventually the whole earth. The integrity of organic nature was undermined as a consequence of the refutation of Vitalism. Take my word for it. The organic was collapsed into the inorganic through artificial synthesis, because, after all, when you get down to it, things are just chemicals and physical forces in simple or complicated combinations.

And they wanted to get down to it–the development of industrial society as a world above the given world of nature–better living through chemistry–and the unending promises of the experimental lab, right down to the human genome. Physicalistic Science took over what counts for knowledge, and I mean with a vengeance. All Vitalist sympathies were proscribed. There were holdouts. We had Bergson extolling elan vital in the salons of Paris, and Albert Scweitzer saying the hell with it and going to darkest Africa to think about “the reverence for life”; it was a short list.

Frank Lloyd Wright extolled organic architecture–you could be a Vitalist and wear a floppy ascot tie and a cape and act smart if you wanted to be a megalomaniac and think you were the greatest architect who ever lived. It was the perogative of artists. Mr. Rodale started a publishing company, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, around the old meaning of organic, and he carried the torch. You’ve got to give him some credit.

So here was Chadwick representing a failed and buried Vitalist tradition, sneaking onto the campus of the Physicalist stronghold like a Trojan Horse, only instead of Achilles’ lance, he had a Bulldog spade. He dug through the crusted hardpan of the campus and developed one of the most fertile and productive gardens in the world. I’ll never forget going up there at dawn and picking flowers with all the lovely coeds; I’ll never forget them, either. They were halcyon days.

We took Goethe’s motto for his Italian Journey as our own–Et in Arcadia Ego, and “I am in Arcadia,” that Arcadian garden, an old European affirmation of the goodness and sweetness of life from the point of view of the grave. Poussin painted it–The Arcadian Shepherds–four youths looking at the motto on a tomb in an overgrown garden. Let our garden be our grave, we said. There is a notion that gardens had their origin on graves.

I was guided back to Goethe by Steiner, and especially his book: Goethe the Scientist. I found out that Goethe, the Vitalist, had tried to refute Newton, the Physicalist, in his optics, or theory of color. Goethe carried out extensive experiments trying to show the vital meaning of color, (call it the spiritual meaning of color–”green, green, I want you green”) against the dead reduction of color of Newton’s Physicalism. And Goethe turned to botany in his opposition to physics, knowing it was an endangered (Vitalist) science, about to be subordinated in the experimental lab to physics and chemistry.

Goethe in despair over his anticipation of the triumph of industrial society and the end of Old European culture dropped out one day and walked to Padua, what came to be known as his Italian Journey. Padua was site of the oldest botanical garden in the Western world (Pisa disputes this) and there he saw a plant (or the Italians thought he did)–a palm, Chaemerops humilis, and the Italians renamed it “Goethe’s Palm”, the urplant, a typically German idea about the form of plants. It was metaphysical. He meant something like the vital root of vital roots. The Italians were so honored by Goethe’s visit to their old garden that they built a glass case to enshrine the palm. I went to the garden in l976 with my pal, Rolf Von Eckartsberg, and thought, well, what do you know, the vital root of existence squirreled away under glass to wait out the rise, triumph and fall of industrial society now in its late stage of self-destruction as a world above the given world of nature.

In terms of what counted for knowledge, there was no place for any of this at my University. Chadwick was thought to be a nut because he planted by the moon although the Chancellor defended him because the Chancellor was a farmboy whose father planted by the moon. That was a lucky break. Chadwick placed a box of the most exquisite produce at his door every week as an offering for his support.

There are a number of steps I have enumerated for myself after finding the key in l828 and the defeat of Vitalism. This summary of the history of ideas and movements is simply to indicate the character of the Physicalist trend after l828 and its ever narrower confines, as it eliminates features of life and substitutes artificial and synthetic for organic:

1. Helmholtz and the law of the conservation of energy and his two students, Brucke and DuBois-Reymond, who formulated the Physicalist Oath, taken in blood, in order to smoke out any closet Vitalists; Brucke was the teacher of Freud and it was in his lab that Freud formulated his early theory of consciousness as a “qualitative leap in the neurone” while dissecting the nervous system of a certain order of fish (was the qualitative leap a somersault?)

2. The Vienna Circle under Carnap and Logical Positivism, the philosophy of Physicalism, and their call for the “elimination of metaphysics” which included, when you throw the baby out with the bathwater, ethics, aesthetics, religious language, etc., anything that eluded confirmation under experimental laboratory protocols and the strictures of mathematical logic.

3. Reductive behaviorism and the elimination of consciousness (not even Freud’s definition satisfied the nonsense test)–Pavlov to Skinner and positive and negative reinforcement (turn up the heat in the Skinner Box).

4. Cybernetics, or artificial intelligence and the computer revolution (can machines think?), where simulation rules the day.

5. Synthetic psychosis or synthetic mysticism with psychedelics; I helped coin the term, I’m ashamed to say, after advocates of psychotomimetic and mysticomimetic struggled over the meaning of hallucination which they failed to define. Hey, at least it brought consciousness back to the table.

Each of these movements need to be fully characterized in order to fill out the point, the point being the nails they represent in securing the coffin lid on the dead corpse of Vitalism. The theme of “elimination” and “synthetic” and “artificial” and how it is carried through is all part of a reductionist self-destructive syndrome it is our historical fate to suffer. My favorite account of this trend, begun by Galileo in the period of the Renaissance, is by Hans Jonas, who hit the high notes of formulation just right. He knew how to put it:

“From the physical sciences there spread over the conception of all existence an ontology whose model entity is pure matter, stripped of all features of life. … The tremendously enlarged universe of modern cosmology is conceived as a field of inanimate masses and forces which operate according to the laws of inertia and of quantitative distribution in space. This denuded substratum of all reality could only be arrived at through a progressive expurgation of vital features from the physical record and through strict abstention from projecting into its image our own felt aliveness. In this process the ban on anthropomorphism was extended to zoomorphism in general. What remained is the residue of the reduction toward the properties of mere extension which submit to measurement and hence to mathematics. These properties alone satisfy the requirements of what is now called exact knowledge: and representing the only knowable aspect of nature they, by a tempting substitution, came to be regarded as its essential aspect too: and if this, then as the only real in reality. This means that the lifeless has become the knowable par excellence and is for that reason also considered the true and only foundation of reality. It is the “natural” as well as the original state of things. Not only in terms of relative quantity but also in terms of ontological genuineness, nonlife is the rule, life the puzzling exception in physical existence.”

Here’s what Steiner has to say in his Riddles of Philosophy:

“An example that shows how the results of natural science influenced the conception of the world is given in Woehler’s discovery of l828. This scientist succeeded in producing a substance synthetically outside the living organism that had previously only been known to be formed by an organ. This experiment seemed to supply the proof that the former belief–material compounds could only be formed under the influence of a special vital force contained in the organ was incorrect. If it was possible to produce such compounds outside the living body, then one could draw the conclusion that the organism was also working only with the forces with which chemistry deals. The thought arose for the materialists that if the living organism does not need a special life force to produce what formerly had been attributed to such a force, why should this organism then need special spiritual energies in order to produce the processes to which mental experiences are bound?”

I laughed out loud and then winced when I read the famous Russian biologist, Oparin’s, definition of life: “the qualification of dead matter.” Life, for Physicalists, had become a subtle hoax of matter, a ludibrium materiae.

My favorite episode in this Physicalist takeover is Fermi’s worry about destroying the universe in the smashing of the atom, in a squash (sic!) court at the University of Chicago. He did the math and figured, oh well, it’s worth the chance, let’s do it. The Fermi Team went ahead with it, although they had a suicide squad standing by outfitted in special suits. Again, when they blew the bomb, Fermi worried about igniting the nitrogen in the atmosphere. The Wayward Reaction. There is substantial reason to believe that in unforeseen ways, the wayward reaction happened, anyhow. Oppenheimer said: “We have seen death.”

We have been suffering the Wayward Reaction ever since. Earth Day gave us a little Neo-Vitalist blip of hope on the radar screen of the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society. Chadwick symbolized grounds for hope in our garden of a kind of second chance, when no one thought there was one. Hope against hope. Hope can be too strong. Hope can break the heart.

In my worst moments I think of the environmental movement as “the death rattle” of defeated Vitalism. The corpse of defeated Vitalism was laid to rest, beginning in l828, and all the successive blows I have enumerated were supposed to nail down the coffin lid. But the coffin came unglued, much to everyone’s surprise, and the corpse sat up and we get this, what?, thirty, fifty, seventy-five year, death rattle, known as the Environmental Movement? It took us by surprise, Earth Day did. It was a seizure, even though we were ready for it in our secret biodynamic garden at a university in California overlooking Monterey Bay, where we replanted the vital root of existence.

I had a big insight when I went back into the Greek meanings of words at the outset of Western culture and thought about their transformation. How could the mystery of death, the great imponderable in the ancient world, turn into the mystery of life in the modern world–the reverse of imponderables? This is the theme of Jonas’ first chapter in the Phenomenon of Life. He indicates the shift in the time of Galileo, probably following Husserl, one of the great critics of Physicalism, who clearly identifies Galileo with the mathematization of nature.. Galileo throws the mathematical net over nature and mathematical physics becomes the principle science of sciences upon which the other sciences are grounded, determining what counts for knowledge. It is an immense shift from the ancient view to the modern view.

The Greek word for nature is physis. It means what grows, what is best called a plantation. Watch what happens. It goes to physic, which I like as an herbal tonic (especially if you need to you- know -what), and then it goes to physics, dead things in space, with Galileo and the mathematization of nature when mathematical physics took over from botany and set the stage for chemistry. So much for nature.

Now take the Greek word hyle, meaning forest, the background for physis. It goes to mater ( not too bad), what’s the matter, as in maternal, as in mother nature, as in materia medica, the professional practise of medicinal herbs, the vital roots of health care, and then to materialism, the dead stuff underlying the dead things in space.

“Yet there is one word that Aristotle could not avoid

using when he spoke about the unspeakable–hyle. He

is the first to give the word its philosophical meaning

of “matter.” But hyle in Greek does not originally mean

matter, it means forest. Let us repeat that: hyle is the

Greek word for forest. The cognate of hyle in Latin is silva.

The archaic Latin word was sylua, phonetically close to hyle.

It is strange that the Romans should have translated the

Aristotelian hyle with the word materia when the Latin

language possessed such a cognate. But even the word

materia did not stray very far from the forests. Materia

means wood–the usable wood of a tree as opposed to its

bark, fruit, sap, etc. And materia has the same root–yes, root–as the word for mater, or mother.”

Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, by Robert Pogue Harrison

I entered the herbal industry as a second career after the university and came to realize that the botanical basis of health care, herbs, were supplanted by synthetic drugs (for the reasons adumbrated above). Herbs were identified with refuted and rejected Vitalism. Earth Day and the re-affirmation of the integrity of organic nature was partly responsible for the recovery of medicinal herbs in what I call the herb renaissance.

Here’s what one of my favorites, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, has to say about this issue in an article: “Liturgical Thinking”:

“Physis means “plantation” in Greek; Plato called God a planter or physis ! The word comes from a verb which means “living growth”! Physics, however, in the Renaissance, became what it is today: the science of dead matter. For the first time in the history of thought, dead matter was held to have preceded living growth. In a living universe, too, we may have to cope with corpses. But the mechanical “natural science” after l500 tried to explain life out of its corpses by making nature primarily a concept of dead mass in space! Only recently have we discovered that the term “nature” between l500 and l900 was used in a sense or with an accent unheard in any other epoch: mass, quantity, space, i.e., dead things, filled the foreground of scientific thought. Physics was held to explain chemistry, chemistry biology, biology psychology, psychology philosophy. Dead things were to explain the living; personality by adrenalin in the glands.”

Jonas again:

“Modern thought which began with the Renaissance is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation (from the ancient world where death is the riddle). Death is the natural thing, life the problem.” “To take life as a problem is here to acknowledge its strangeness in the mechanical world which is the world; to explain it is–in this climate of a universal ontology of death–to negate it by making it one of the possible variants of the lifeless. Such a negation is the mechanistic theory of the organism…. Vitalistic monism is replaced by mechanistic monism, in whose rules of evidence the standard of life is exchanged for that of death.”

Physicalism, of course, is under attack, not least of all by the new physics, chaos math, fuzzy logic, certain aspects of socio-biology and all of the neo-Vitalist features of some of the sciences, such as immune memory in immunology. Arthur Koestler wrote about it in his last book, Janus, A Summing Up, before he and his wife committed suicide. I read it as if he had written it for me. He knew what was going down. No one checked his Vitalist sympathies. Other relevant sources are: Michael Polanyi, in Personal Knowledge ; F. A. von Hayek, in his account of the rise of the French engineer as a new type of human being; Armytage in his Rise of the Technocrat; Tillich, in his anti-industrial society writings (from whom I picked up my mantra on the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society); Erich Heller in The Disinherited Mind.; Eric Voegelin, in all of his writings, but, most pointedly, in his essay in Social Research: “The Origins of Scientism.” There are many witnesses, many mourners.

Here’s Tillich:

“I would say the most universal expression of the demonic today is a split between the control of nature by man, and the fate of man to fall under the control of the product of his control. He produces, and then he falls under the power of what he has produced, the whole system of industrial existence. It has liberated him, it has given him contgrol over nature and now it puts him into a servitude in which he loses more and more his being, his person. This form of dehumanization was what we fought against in Germany; we must continue this fight now on a much larger basis.”

It was Rachel Carson who continued the fight on a much larger basis when she sang the Ballad of Cock Robin in Silent Spring and bemoaned the effect of DDT on robin populations. It was the wakeup call that lead to Earth Day. In reading a biography of Rachel Carson last summer I was stunned to find out that Biodynamic gardening was associated with the origin of Carson’s interest in DDT. Marjorie Spock, Dr. Spock’s sister, had gone to study biodynamic gardening in Dornach at the Steiner Goetheanum and came back and started a biodynamic garden with Mary (Polly) Richards, at Brookville, Long Island. The year was l957. Because of lots of mosquitoes that season, the authorities started aerial spraying DDT over the area, sometimes as often as l4 times a day, including their biodynamic garden. And Marjorie called Rachel.

Rachel Carson’s Ballad of Cock Robin

Who killed Cock Robin? (Vitalism)

I said the Sparrow (Physicalism)

With my bow and arrow (Artificial synthesis of urea)

Who will be Chief Mourner?

I said the Dove (Existentialism)

Because of my love

And all the birds of the sky fell to sighing and sobbing

when they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.

Bibliography

The literature on the subject is extensive; here are some of the leading sources:

Hans Jonas: The Phenomenon of Life

Thomas Kuhn: The Stucture of Scientific Revolutions

Edmund Husserl: The Crisis of the European Sciences

Armytage: The Rise of the Technocrat

Erich Heller: The Disinherited Mind

Ernst Cassirer: The Problem of Knowledge

Erich Voegelin: Published Essays

The discussion over the defeat of Vitalism as a result of the artificial synthesis of urea is carried on in the Journal of Chemical Education. McKie’s article is of special interest in an effort to debunk the smoking gun aspect of the urea experiment in defeating Vitalism. After McKie urea is thought to be a non-issue as the symbolic moment of closure on Vitalism.

Paul Tillich: The Spiritual Situation in our Technical Society

E. J. Dijksterhuis: The Mechanization of the World Picture

Goethe’s Italian Journey

Rudolf Steiner: Goethe the Scientist

Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge

Many of the philosophical issues, like Logical Positivism, Physicalism, Vitalism, etc., are discussed in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards.

Rachel Carson: Silent Spring

Linda Lear: Rachel Carson, Witness For Nature, is the biography that tells about Marjorie Spock, p. 319; Rachel followed their suit to stop the spraying with keen interest. The judge threw out 72 uncontested admissions and denied their petition. It took three years to exhaust appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court (l960) declined on a technicality to hear the case with William O. Douglas dissenting.

Elizabeth Ring: Rachel Carson: Caring For the Earth

Craig Waddell: And No Birds Sing

Carolyn Merchant: The Death of Nature

Robert Poque Harrison: Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

email: drpalee@aol.com

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Florence the Goose

paul — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:04:30 +0000

Florence is a goose. I think of her as my goose although I don’t own her. She belongs to me in my imagination, although she is a real flesh and blood and feathers goose. She lives in the park a block away, where there is a pond. It is called West Lake Park. When is a pond a lake? When you call it one. I met Florence when I was walking my dog, Esme, an Airedale. Esme is a wonderful dog with great high spirits. In fact, we called her “Christmas-every-day” Esme, when she was a puppy, because she acted like it was Christmas every day and all the presents were for her.

Esme didn’t bother Florence. Her name was Florence, I was soon to find out. I warned Esme to stand aside when Florence approached. Florence hissed in that expiration of breath that geese do when they want to make a threatening sound. It was the first sound I imitated when I talked to Florence. I hissed back at her. She liked that. I saw her coming. It was clear she was heading for me and was going to introduce herself. I braced myself for my encounter with a goose. It was perfectly clear that she was going to talk to me. It was an odd experience, understanding everything Florence said, including her name. She marched right up to me and said, “Haaaaaaaaaa.” I heard: “My name is Florence Nightingale…”
What a name for a goose. She was demanding and authoritative, knowing exactly what she wanted me to do. I understood her perfectly.

She asked me to kneel down. I did. Then she asked me to pet her. I did. She asked me to pet her back. I did. She asked me to pet her neck. I did.
“Now stroke it,” she said. Then she did a wonderful little ballet with her neck, snaking it about in a sinuous movement of graceful charm. I told her how beautiful she was. She asked me to tell her how beautiful she was and I was glad to oblige. I said: “Oh, Florence, you are sooo beautiful! Oh, how beautiful you are! You are the most beautiful goose in the world; what a beautiful goose you are.”
She was very pleased.
“You can call me Flo,” she said.
After I kneeled down and petted her, Flo backed up into my lap. This was unnerving. Here was a goose backing up into my lap in a clumsy but determined way and I didn’t for the life of me know what was going to happen next.
She said: “Pick me up.” She wanted me to walk around with her in my arms. I was reluctant. We had just met. I thought to myself: “I don’t even kiss geese on the first date.” I didn’t want to pick her up. I was afraid to pick her up. I thought she might poke me with her beak. Her beak was hard and orange and too close to my face for comfort.

Once my daughter, Jessica, had a pet chicken. A little red hen. She pecked Jessica’s eye, because she thought it was a bug. Her vision was not impaired, but her eye was red for a while. My friend, Page Smith, keeps lots of chickens and was pecked in the eye by a chicken that used to ride around on his shoulder. His eye was red for a long time. So I didn’t pick up Flo even though she wasn’t a chicken. I enjoyed stroking her. I enjoyed talking to her. It was the first time I had talked to a goose. One time I had talked to a duck. My wife and my daughter and I were vacationing in northern Wisconsin. We were lying on the grass out on our point next to the lake. A duck flew down out of the sky and landed near us and walked over to us like a new found friend. The duck never told us its name, but squawked away in the most entertaining manner, obviously enjoying our company. It walked around us cheerily for what seemed like hours telling us things.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to extend our hospitality to the duck beyond our encounter on the grass.
Finally, I said: “Would you like to see the house?” The duck seemed pleased beyond measure.
“Would I?”, the duck said. “You betcha!”
We walked the duck across the grass and up to the house. We went up the steps of the back porch and entered the kitchen.
“Oh, so this is the kitchen,” said the duck, or something to that effect.
“Yes,” I said,
“this is where we cook and have most of our meals, although we also have a dining room.”
“A dining room?” The duck seemed strangely impressed and intrigued; this was all news to a duck. We walked the duck into the front room. I pointed out the art work and told the duck the artists were friends of ours. The duck liked the artwork. Then we walked the duck out onto the back porch. The duck said “Thank You.” She enjoyed the visit and our hospitality. She said goodby and flew away.

We loved the visit from that duck, as though some boundary had been crossed in a unique event of human being and bird meeting on common ground. We named the duck Greta. Florence reminded me of that duck. Canadian geese once flew overhead. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was cars honking at a drive-in movie. How could they build a drive-in movie in the cranberry bog without our knowing it? Overnight! And why are they all honking their horns-because they want the movie to start? But it was in the middle of the day. Then I looked up. They flew so slowly. Honking all the time. It was slow motion. They were so huge, lumbering along in the sky in their fine v-formations. They were black and white. Florence was snow white. It was like petting smooth snow. Smoothing out snow. Not a ruffled feather. Smoothing out the relations between human beings and geese. Me and Flo. Florence was worried about the plight of the homeless in Santa Cruz. The year was 1985 and Jane Imler had gone on a fast to the death to call for the opening of a public shelter for the homeless. The City Council refused to act in her behalf. She was going to starve to death. I had been thinking about the homeless when Florence walked up to me.
“You’re worried about the homeless, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yes,” I answered. I thought, “This goose can read my mind.” And then she made her proposal. Florence said
“Well, why don’t you invite the homeless up here to the park? They can sleep here overnight and you can pick me up and carry me under your arm and we’ll go around and wish everyone a “Goodnight” and tuck them in.”
Florence said “Go ahead! It can be you. You can do it. Just stick your neck out!” As she said that, she did a beautiful ballet movement with her neck to show…

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