A Braver New World?: Thoughts on Zizek's "Uneasiness in Nature"

“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” - C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1944).

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World? (1910).

No wonder Zizek is called the most dangerous philosopher today. He makes “egalitarian terror” sound like a water-downed version of totalitarianism combined with an improved version of democracy, when really, we shouldn't forget, that in order to be terrorized, someone or something has to do the terrifying- meaning they will be the ones presumably free from terror.

Zizek is interesting to read because he is difficult to pin down. That means that his Lacanian-Marxists views sometimes hook onto Chesterton's distributivist politics, but are released before they are latched onto his Catholicism. He carries the torch for Hegelian dialecticism to an extent, but is cautious about scientific progress, referring to it as an “ideological institution” that also needs to be checked (445). Because of these and other seemingly paradoxes, Zizek can be both a friend and enemy to a variety of worldviews. That being said, I find myself agreeing with him on some points, but largely disagreeing with him overall.

His problem, as I understood it, is finding a solution to the imbalance of scientific progress with the fallibility of our common sense, our will to believe against our notions of freedom and autonomy. In the realm of science, biogenetics has enabled scientists “with interventions into man's genetic inheritance, the domination over nature reverts into an act of taking-control-over-oneself” (435). But I'm not so sure about this. Isn't the case that someone always takes control of someone else? On a larger scale, a world-state, wouldn't this mean the power of one nation over another?

Zizek says the price we pay for curtailing science is the split between science and ethics. But this should be viewed as a good thing, for why should science be the only one to tell us about autonomy and freedom? Aristotle's magnanimous (great-souled) man is self-sufficient. Socrates proposes that we seek freedom in the city, even if the city will ultimately deny us both dialogue and life itself, for the unexamined life can profit nothing. In other words, science doesn't hold the keys to our ultimate notions of freedom and necessity. We need another Kant to critique the “scientism” of today.

Zizek shows how up-to-date science says it will soon create “a brain more powerful than a human brain.” And perhaps I am one of the ones whom Zizek blames for having my common sense interfere with scientific data, but I at least pose this question: For human intelligence to create an intelligence more intelligent than itself, wouldn't it have to be more intelligent than itself to begin with?

In terms of Zizek's critique that the Church's message of hope is defending life against death, it is here, that I find agreement and disagreement. Zizek should know (because of his admiration for a good ol' Chestertonian paradox) that the Church's message about life and death has been two-fold: It is the guardian of life and nature, because God created it and saw that it was good, and so has built hospitals, healed the sick and helped the poor, and blessed marriage, among other things. But it is also a religion that has its God, as its central image, dying a slowly death on the cross, has glorified martyrs and martyrdom, and entrusts its followers to bid all their cares to another world. Is then science the only one occupied with this so called death-drive?

As I am reaching my max word count, I'd like to skip over all the other points and questions of agreement and disagreement (Zizek neglects to mention for example that Darwin posited God as an alternative for the evolutionary process, regarding somethings he had difficulty explaining, such as the human eye). Zizek's solution to the problem of our ontology and scientific endeavors (and I think he goes beyond the ecological movement) is his egalitarian terror. Here is where philosophy, the wisdom of the past, “the democracy of the dead” (as Chesterton calls its), can offer an alternative. It is to replace Hegel's notion of “earth” with that old idea of “soul.” Today, the body has attributes that once belonged to the soul, and so is better understood as a mechanism, something that can be manipulated. This reduction of complex mental phenomena to mechanical models is what drives science to dissect and explain the human away. In the end, we may even find that it is no longer “man's control over nature,” but nature's control over man, as Zizek also mentions. 

Looking and Seeing in Mansfield Park (Volume I)

There doesn't appear to be anything that's interesting about Fanny Price in Volume I. When her aunt, Mrs. Norris meets her in Northampton, the narrator describes the ten year old girl as “small, with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty...and shrinking from notice” (10). Other than her countenance appearing to be pretty when she speaks, the reader is not immediately drawn to Fanny's physical appearance. Her girl cousins, Julia and Maria Bertram, find her uninteresting, “cheap,” and lacking a want of “genius and emulation” (15). Only Edmund is sensitive to Fanny and willing to cope with her shyness and newly found experience of making a home outside of her immediate family. The similarity of Edmund and Fanny's kind, gentle, and “excellent nature” allows the two to naturally seek out the other for help (12).

As with most of Austen's novels, it can be very predictable to discern how the apparent differences, disagreements, and distances will be reconciled in the end. However, Mansfield Park contains a variety of irregularities that are out of their natural order, so to speak. Fanny leaves her home to be raised by her aunt and her husband; Lady Bertram cares “more [for] her pug than her children;” Fanny's upbringing is influenced by a mixture of Lady Bertram's indolent, extravagant behavior while Mrs. Norris' “spirit of activity” and concern for money contrasts the behavior of her other aunt; Fanny's heart becomes divided in two between her brother William and cousin Edmund; and perhaps the most difficult part is how to raise Fanny properly and make it clear she is not a Bertram, while making her cousins not think to lowly of her and realizing that their “rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will be always be different” (9). In other words, how to make a family member feel welcomed to a new home and environment while still preserving the distinction that they can never fully be a part of that environment?

Perhaps a possible answer is marriage. Marriage prompted by attractive good looks, financial security, as is the case with the Crawfords, could afford a kind of inheritance to a new place or home. They are charitably welcomed to Mansfield Park, and are subsequently paired up with possible suitors. But Henry and Mary Crawford's arrival also upsets the plans of others, namely Mr. Rushworth and Miss Bertram's engagement. Even Fanny has a difficult time trying to adapt to the arrival of the Crawfords. For example, Fanny “has great pleasure” looking at Miss Crawford and admiring her beauty (50). When her harp arrives, the narrator notes, it “added to her beauty” as her playing it near a window surely becomes “enough to catch any man's heart” (52). Fanny judges physical and moral beauty different than others. While the other women think Mr. Crawford handsome, Fanny does not agree (81). And “she [Fanny] was a little surprised that he [Edmund] could spend so many hours with Miss Crawford and not see more of the sort of fault which he had already observed” (52). Whenever Edmund becomes concentrated on Miss Crawford, he forgets about Fanny, and also of the Miss Crawford's rude behavior. How can that be?

Perhaps, Edmund is an example of those of whom Julia speaks of when she says, “Those who see quickly, will resolve quickly, and act quickly” (49). Part of what this novel seems to concern itself with is who sees what, and what are people looking at or admiring and what kinds of actions or feelings do those observations prompt? Edmund may be too quick to act on his feelings for Miss Crawford because he doesn't take time to cultivate them; his feelings for her are prompted by instinct. On the other hand, he has spent time and leisure with Fanny that he “knows [her] looks too well” and is able to discern when she has a headache (57). But unless human interactions and activity were to slow down, then perhaps we don't have to worry about seeing quickly and acting quickly. But is this even possible? Can we only find time and leisure in the natural world because change seems to be much slower there?

It seems like that's the case with Fanny. She looks to nature for moral guidance and appreciation- “Here's harmony! Here's repose!” (89). If people attended more to Nature, they would be “carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene” (90). Fanny suggests that such an appreciation suggests that there is something outside of ourselves that warrants our merit, and can teach us to become better judges of character and morality. But only if we do not see too quickly and are not distracted by the urging request to hear another song (90); then can we experience harmony, something that Austen suggests, “all painting and all music” leave behind (89). 

Kant and the World of Reality and Experience

Immanuel Kant is a revolutionary and polemic figure in the history of Western philosophy. His idealism has commonly been seen as a reaction to Enlightenment assumptions that knowledge can only be grounded in human reason and science. Kant, without dismissing either discipline, attempted to place philosophy in dialogue with science, as he was very much moved by people like Rousseau and Hume: praising the former for his emphasis on the senses and the latter for his unprecedented skepticism. By attempting to synthesize our experiences of the world to the demands of reason, Kant believed he was doing for philosophy what Copernicus had done for astronomy.

It may be helpful to give a brief layout of Kant’s philosophy which he lays out in The Critique of Pure Reason in order to better understand his ideas about the sublime in Critique of Judgment. Kant’s beginning premise is that all human knowledge can be based on experience. Whatever data our five senses reports to us about reality is what we can know. But Kant was a skeptic, after the fashion of Hume who had argued that it is simply irrational to presume that our experience of reality corresponds to reality itself. In other words, if my senses report to me that I am seeing a waterfall, that doesn’t mean that in reality, I can know what a waterfall is. All I can know is my experience of the waterfall, as I perceive it through my senses. My experience of such objects is what Kant refers to as the phenomenon. However, besides my experiences of things there are the noumenon—the things as they exist in themselves, which we can know nothing about. In short, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on reality (Western Philosophy Russell).

Now, in Critique of Judgement, we can see similar methods of these two categories of knowledge operating at the level of understanding sublimity and beauty. What Kant says about the sublime, in terms of the mathematically sublime, is that its location does not reside in the external world (noumenon), but rather “only in our own ideas” (LABL 45). Speaking of sublimity in nature, Kant is consistent by saying it “does not reside in any of the things in nature, but only in our own mind” (LABL 46). These feelings provoked in us by the sublime, and registered by our senses, are our experiences (phenomenon) of such things, and not of reality. Since Kant was attempting cohesiveness between our reason and our imagination (the former demanding a limit to what we can know, while the latter entertains limitlessness), our mind can apprehend a “reflective judgment” about the object, but not the object itself (noumenon), regarding the sublime. As Kant says, this feeling (experience) of the sublime, arises from our “inadequacy of [our] imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason” (LABL 45). Our imagination and reason collide and produces a state of mind in which we place a value judgment on the object that is to be called sublime; but our state of mind is what warrants to be called sublime, not the object, since the object is part of the reality, which our reason can never fully grasp. Our minds can receive the data collected from reality through our senses, but we can only formulate concepts (such as sublimity) according to that data, and this helps us understand our experiences. But, according to Kant, things in themselves are unknowable.

Some critics have argued that Kant therefore denies the existence of reality, since that is the world containing the noumenon which are unknowable. But other critics believe that is not the case: the noumenon exists because it gives rise to the phenomenon which we experience. Perhaps it’s best to think that Kant contends there are two realities: the reality we experience and the reality itself. Because of Kant’s education in Leibnez philosophy and because of his attempt towards a conciliate epistemology between science and philosophy, I like to think the latter is true. Either way, Kant is a figure that continues to be controversial and influential for his profound genius.

Thoughts on "Kubla Khan"

In Biographia Literaraia Coleridge, speaking of the two cardinal points of poetry, nature and the imagination, says, “The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combing both” (LABL 689). Even in his preface to “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge admits to have composed the poem “with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease” (LABL 670). In several ways, “Kubla Khan” can be read in the same regard as a combination of opposites or cognate words that attempt to describe the indescribable. A vision in a dream, the poem’s supposed origins, even hints at the confusing of elements, which abound through contrasting imagery: measureless caverns and measurable fertile ground (ten miles); a “sunless sea” and “sunny spots of greenery” and “a waning moon;” and “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” (my emphasis, lines 4-6, 11, 15, 36).  

The poem also concerns itself with direction, angles, distance, and location. The ALPH river, (a cognate word derived from “Aleph?”- the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet signifying infinity) runs downward, away from Khan’s “pleasure-dome” through caves of ice that the poet is unable to measure, to “a lifeless ocean.” If a broad line can be drawn regarding the poem’s direction, it begins with pleasure (the stately dome), moves down to fecund ground, and sinks to a sterile ocean. Does pleasure have a natural purpose? Is pleasure separated and contained inside the dome because it doesn't agree with the fertile grounds?

 The sense of angles and distance no doubt resonate with images such as “deep romantic chasm” and “Huge fragments” (lines 12, 21). Coleridge also concerns himself with shapes. It’s tempting to associate the half-circularity of the pleasure-dome and the waning moon to the three circles weaved around the person at the end of the poem. These rounded/whole images are contrasted with the irregularity of the ice in the caves, as well as the hail-like grain that bursts up from the fountain. There is order and disorder, wholeness and incompletion.  

Norman Fruman in Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel, offers a sexual interpretation of the poem from the perspective that it is a poem embodying several ideas—“the power of art, an Oriental emperor, a wailing woman, an overflowing fountain—” and no single interpretation should be taken as the interpretation (Fruman 395). Nevertheless, the sexual interpretation, as Fruman notes, is grounded in that “opium deadens tactile sensitivity in many users and can lead to impotence. More often, regular use of opium simply diminishes the sexual drive” (Fruman 425). With that in mind, Fruman considers the sexually emblematic imagery: the demon-lover; the earth quickly panting, “the supposition that some kind of sexual encounter is being described;” followed by the bursting fountain, which Fruman asks “is there a more precise definition of sexual ejaculation?” (Fruman 397-98). There are several other examples Fruman offers for a sexual reading: the tabooed sexual terrain as juxtaposed by the words “holy” and “sacred river,” for example, and in the end suggests that “this poem does seem to derive from inner sources and aesthetic procedures so unusual for Coleridge as to justify the belief that the major block of images in the poem did derive from personal fantasies” (Fruman 402).

The poem is indeed perplexing and simultaneously a feast for the imagination and the mind. And I make reference to the sexual interpretation mainly to keep in line with the theme of the class. What can be more natural than sex? That being said, it can be argued that there is a distinction between a natural sexual reading (as exemplified by nature; nature is the one panting and bursting forth fountains), and a non-natural sexual reading, as seen by the woman calling to a demon-lover. The latter can be more properly described as eroticism, which is not natural; it is inventive, creative, and only humans (figuratively speaking) can copulate with demon-lovers, succubi, and incubi. Eroticism is part of the imagination. The sex act is natural, and takes place in nature. Eroticism, because it is human invention, then, can qualify as taboo because not all human inventions are in agreement with other human ideas such as holiness or sacred. Perhaps, this is why the poet has a difficult time with associations of pleasure and holiness, or more explicitly, "holy dread" (line 52). By contrast, it becomes problematic to think of nature (the earth) as bursting with such sexual imagery, yet also contain a "lifeless ocean" (line 28).

 On another note, despite its fragmentary style, as Fruman also notes, there is in fact a sense of order in "Kubla Khan", and evidence that Coleridge consciously produced the poem and altered words for poetic effect. But the ambiguities that abound are probably intentional of the poet’s part. Maybe we’re not supposed to know the meaning of this poem. Maybe the indescribable and the immeasurable attest to the limits of language. Finally, does the pleasure-dome in fact get built? Khan “decree[s]” it to be built, and yes, if the dome casts a shadow on the waves then it can be assumed to exist. But if we contextualize the poem in the vision where it supposedly takes place, and if we think of the line “I would build that dome in air,” as the poet (now only dreaming) but no longer seeing that vision, then can we say the vision was some sort of prophetic warning? Is this why the poem should end with such cautious language as “Beware! Beware!?” For who can eat honey-dew and drink “the milk of Paradise?”

"The Image of Man and Nature"

The Romantic Age has generally been seen as a reaction against a too narrow account of human experience in terms of reason alone, brought on by the scientific methods and ideals of the Age of Reason. This worldview tended to emphasize the mechanical, orderly, structure of the universe, among other things, and ignore feelings or thoughts that weren’t considered rational . Romantics such as Wordsworth sought to appropriate human nature with what they believed to be something greater than what science alone could tell us: namely, our passions and feelings regarding the natural world. But Wordsworth doesn’t dismiss rationality, structure or even methodology altogether for the sake of “the spontaneous overflow of power feelings” (LABL 435). He uses the language of science, to a certain degree, to describe his conviction and principal object for composing the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads. In the “Preface,” he states the poems were published “as an experiment” in “metrical arrangement” to rationally impart pleasure to his readers (LABL 433). As I read these words, my mind paused on the words “experiment,” “metrical,” and “rationally.” Science conducts experiments about the natural, material world. But the “Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of men,” and only a poet can undertake such an experiment (LABL 442).

The word “metrical,” besides implying poetic meter, also relates to quantities of measurement, thus recalling the language of science. In terms of the latter, I don’t know if Wordsworth would agree that our feelings and passions could be measured, but that they do need to be contained or controlled seems to be implied. The natural world is overwhelming for us, and since the Poet “considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other,” there are feelings and passions which create a sense of excitement ineffable for most people (LABL 442). Because “the end of poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure,” Wordsworth has to use poetic meter as a sort of restraint for our emotions (LABL 443). In this way, the person lost in excitement, has a sense of self-awareness and control, and thus doesn’t remain oblivious to the demands of reason and accountability.

Wordsworth is equally aware of his own feelings, recollected in long hours of tranquility and meditation. That he be accused of following spontaneity of feelings alone, or even impulses and instincts, as the word suggests, is an unfair critique. There is good poetry as well as bad poetry, and the former can be identified by having a value approach. Good poetry, according to Wordsworth, is produced by “a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply” (LABL 435). Several times does Wordsworth invoke the word “habit” to suggest a long, contemplated approach to thinking deeply about the human passions, which he believes can be traced back to “the primary laws of our nature” (LABL 434).

Our nature can best be understood by through the conditions of the humble and rustic life because that is where our passions “are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (LABL 434). And only the poet can describe these associations we feel to the natural world, because the poet studies “general nature,” as this knowledge is “one that cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance [a Burkean echo?]” (LABL 441). It is no wonder, then, why Wordsworth calls poetry “the image of man and nature” (LABL 440). As science gives us insight to the physical world, poetry reveals the emotional, passionate side of human nature, and, in turn, the beauty of the natural world. It even, as Wordsworth says, carries “sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself” (LABL 441). Poetry is the best tool for capturing the side of our nature which science would otherwise eclipse with its cold hard facts.

As I finished reading Wordsworth’s “Preface,” I was left with the intention of exploring, or better understanding, what in my mind seemed to be a bit confusing. As the title of this blog recalls, Wordsworth personifies poetry as the image of man. He says of the poems that he resorts to abstract personification of ideas when they “are occasionally prompted by passion” (LABL 436-437). I wonder if there is anything more to say about this other than Wordsworth felt prompted by his passions to include such an abstraction in his “Preface.” What I am more interested in, however, is sorting out his notion that a Poet writes as a duty, a “necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being” and “the Poet, although he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering” (LABL 440). Then Wordsworth says, “So that it will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes to give pleasure” (LABL 439). At one point it seems the Poet is obligated, and at another point the Poet seems to have a choice. I didn’t know what to make of that.

Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on "Nature"

One of the questions that Raymond Williams, in his essay “Ideas of Nature,” kept coming back to was whether or not humans have been included in the definition of the term “nature,” as it has been defined throughout history. He answers that nature eventually had to be separated from man, but I refer to Williams’ question because as I read the selections from Edmund Burke’s Reflections and the responses to it from Thomas Paine, I noticed how the texts contain an ambivalent understanding of the term nature, and how Williams’ question is very much relevant to both. Burke has in mind a hierarchical view of nature, one that should protect the nobility from relinquishing their right to rule. Paine offers a more democratic, so to speak, definition of nature, yet Paine’s idea of the term shares common principles with Burke’s.

What interested me about Burke’s use of the term nature is the variety of attributes he designates it with. Speaking of England’s monarchy and the established order of its constitution, he refers to this “entailed inheritance” as “the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it” (LABL 115). The operative word “or” can arguably posit two different interpretations of the word nature. One would be that this entailed inheritance is the result of a long tradition of critical thinking about our place in society, which suggests we are separated from nature. The other interpretation, and one that Burke identifies with, relies on us being included and following the pattern of the natural world. The nobility can and should rule because that is the course nature takes, according to Burke. In this sense, the natural world seems to be void of any agency. Whatever wisdom nature contains, Burke doesn’t seem to suggest there is a mind with volition behind it.

In fact, he claims nature acts out of an “unerring instinct, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” (LABL 116). Our reason [whether nature bestowed us with reason Burke does not specify] is subordinate to the natural world. The implications are that instinct—which is an impulsive, spontaneous response—in the natural world, defeats our mediated, reflective, conscious decisions. But not only does nature trump our reason, it, according to Burke, also “teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended,” which seems to me to account only for the nobility (LABL 116). This suggests, once again, a hierarchal principle that Burke believes can be traced back to history, following the course of nature. He admits, “each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of society, linking the lower with the higher natures…according to a fixed compact which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place” (LABL 117).

Much like Burke’s Reflections rely on a principle of analogy that compares society to the natural world, Thomas Paine’s selections from The Rights of Man also suggests “the laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle” (LABL 133). While Paine’s text seeks to disassociate with Burke’s hierarchical view of nature, it nonetheless shares with Burke an idea of commonality. Paine says “all men are born equal and with equal natural rights, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward” (LABL 136). Paine, like Burke, believes there is an essence about human beings that remains constant, although outward appearances of their mortal bodies decay and change. While Burke attributes that essence to the workings of nature alone, Paine suggests that nature has a created origin. For Burke, the nobility inherits the right to rule, but in Paine’s case, every man shares that right, which suggests that man can break the supposedly fixed order of the natural world. Every human birth should be equaled to the divine creation at the beginning of the world, even though humans descend from one generation to the next. This view echoes Burke’s notion that regarding the constituent parts of the state, the monarchy follows the principles of “succession by common law” by calling it now “succession by the statue law” (LABL 114-15). In both cases, Burke’s and Paine’s, the means to inheritance has changed, but there is an essence through that inheritance that remains constant. Where Burke and Paine part ways is in the way they suggest our human nature depends on that inheritance. Burke’s ideas that the nobility’s human nature is superior is contrasted with Paine’s views about our human nature is essentially the same. Comparing Burke and Paine made me reflect on the way they both traced an inheritance, similar yet different in some ways, to a long, antiquated past. Burke and Paine admit that nature hands down certain rights to man. Paine ascribes the origin of nature to a divine mind, but Burke seems to duck the question about nature’s origin altogether. The difference between the two implies how one defines human nature, and whether, like Williams asks, we share our ontology with the natural world.