The general amazement that nonhumans possess “human” traits isn’t surprising. A reader of Darwin’s books—they aren’t difficult and were sold at railway stations when they first appeared—can only conclude that a sustained effort of active ignorance and repression could have made stories about signing bonobo chimps as newsworthy as they are. As for the capitalist ideology that claims Darwin as its man—it’s astounding given the staggering amount of evidence Darwin amasses to show that the ecosystem is not about blind, aggressive competition and six-pack ab-style “fitness.”73
Perhaps aesthetic contemplation is a general trait, rather than a human, or the human, one. Even if it’s restricted to a few life forms, should we deem it a “high” achievement or a default mental mode? Many philosophers dispute that nonhumans can contemplate. The supposedly exclusively human ability to contemplate is the cornerstone of Schopenhauer’s bleak view of the Universe as a gigantic restaurant: we can escape only by denying our will to live, for which we find a model in artistic contemplation.74 It’s also the cornerstone of Neoplatonism: through art and philosophy, man rises from the brutish to the angelic. Environmentalism sometimes suggests that consciousness is a shameful anthropocentric crime. What if consciousness were not “higher” but “lower” than we have supposed?
Neuroscientists Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch discuss training robots to the insect level; conversely, maybe humans could be trained to the mouse level.75 Perhaps sentience isn’t a “higher” function, but the most general (the “lowest”) function. Some AI philosophers claim that machines can be self-aware.76 Is even this necessary? Does consciousness have to be intentional? Does it have to be consciousness of some x, as both pro-AI and anti-AI philosophers suggest?77 Perhaps consciousness is simply a recursive feature of the “on” state—less than self-consciousness, to be sure, yet providing a platform for it.78 There is something like this in the idea of Buddha nature—in theory, a worm could become a Buddha, as a worm. The ecological thought should not set consciousness up as yet another defining trait of superiority over nonhumans. Our minds are hugely quantitatively different from other terrestrial minds but perhaps not qualitatively.79
Marx wrongly asserts that humans alone create their environment. Everyone is at it. Atta, the leaf-cutting ant, has towns of millions housing domesticated fungi that don’t live anywhere else on Earth.80 Corals live symbiotically with algae. Coral builds its own world, as do trees.81 Why distinguish between conscious and unconscious behavior or, as Marx puts it, between “the worst architect and the best of bees”?82 John Searle, an anti-AI philosopher, gets so excited about the idea that intelligence must be recognizable as such that he assumes we recognize it when it’s wrapped in a specific package—say, a human skin.83 Philosophers of consciousness either say, “We do not really know exactly what intentionality is, but we will” (these fall into the pro-AI camp), or, “We don’t really know how biochemistry produces consciousness, but we will” (these fall into the anti-AI camp). Language about problems that have almost been solved switches on my ideology warning light. What if this unsolved status were a symptom of blindness to the lowly simplicity of consciousness? What if consciousness, like Nature, was one of those “less than” phenomena of the mesh?
We assume that consciousness is a special bonus prize for being more “highly evolved”—a suspicious idea from a Darwinist point of view. Perhaps being super isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If we use science only to justify our superiority to other beings, the most we shall offer them is a condescending sympathetic hand. Yet as soon as we try to exit the model that puts humans at the top, we run into trouble. The ultimate philosopher of superiority was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche threw down a significant gauntlet: he reduced living to asserting mastery, and mastery to domination. What happens when you try to rise above his argument? You fall prey to his logic of mastery. Nietzsche’s idea eats away at all positions that strive to overcome it. How do we get out of this trap? By crouching low and crawling away, like a sensible small mammal, or like Danny in The Shining.84 We should think like losers, not winners.85 Consciousness then becomes a property of lowliness and weakness, rather than of power. If an earthworm can be Buddha, then not all people are humans. Personhood is strange strangeness.
Humans choose each other for meaningless, nonutilitarian, aesthetic reasons. Since Freud, we have grown used to associating art with sexuality. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection brings these two spheres of life even closer: think of a peacock’s tail. There is in evolution not just random mutation and sheer redundancy—the earflaps and the rudimentary and vestigial organs—but also pure semblance, the realm of the aesthetic, “seeming” without “meaning.” Humans specify nonhumans as members of this realm, to make them seem improper. To parrot, to ape—the names themselves pertain to semblance. When Dave, my sister- and brother-in-law’s parrot, laughs at a comedy on television, is he really laughing? Or is he just imitating the canned laughter he hears and playing it back, like a sample? So am I myself laughing at the comedy? Is there anything like a single independent mind behind my laughing? Can I tell? That’s the trouble with pure semblance: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.”86 Canned laughter relieves us of the burden of a response: to this extent, our response is already semblance. Darwin tells of a parrot who had recorded the lost language of a human tribe.87 Evolution itself is a text that organisms “play back” automatically. We can “read” swim bladders in the form of lungs. Darwin asserts that what is hidden in life forms is right there on the surface, which is why it is so hard to see: the nearness of descent is “hidden ... by various degrees of modification.”88 Isn’t evolution ridiculously obvious, asks Darwin, when you consider how humans breed horses and pigeons? Like Marx’s commodity and Dickens’s London, evolution is an open secret.
The worrying thing isn’t that pure semblance is an illusion. At least then you would know that it truly is an illusion and that there was a non-illusory reality within or behind the illusion, even if you couldn’t access it. You could still say the illusion was false. The trouble with pure semblance is that it’s like an illusion. You can’t tell whether it’s an illusion or not. We’ve seen how living beings are chimeras, made of other creatures’ parts. The other sense of “chimera” has to do with fiction: “an unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.” 89 Monstrousness and illusoriness go together.
Given all this, the only thing to do is to treat beings as people, even if they turn out not to be. This is how director Werner Herzog gets it wrong in his film about Timothy Treadwell’s life, Grizzly Man.90 Egged on by devotees of deep ecology, Treadwell made documentaries about grizzly bears in Alaska for schoolchildren, only to eventually be eaten by the bears. Treadwell treated bears as if they were cuddly humans. Herzog’s devastating documentary reveals the horrifying consequences of disappearing into one’s Nature fantasy, which for Treadwell appeared both as an escape from something all too human and as the ultimate stage performance. Treadwell closed the gap between humans and bears. But Herzog seems only too ready to keep it wide open. At least Treadwell was consistent. The bears who ate Treadwell weren’t the ones whom he knew in his Alaskan sojourns—might this not prove Treadwell’s point or at least weaken Herzog’s? A fate worse than being eaten by wild bears in Alaska could well be Herzog making a documentary about you. Herzog’s view of animal indifference and cruelty is as mistaken as Treadwell’s view of animal sympathy. We’re supposed to judge Treadwell from the cold distance of Herzog’s bleak existential gaze—to regard Treadwell like hungry bears.
Herzog’s bleakness, ironically, is far closer to wilderness-speak than Treadwell’s cuddliness. Don’t we have, in this pairing—cuddly closeness and the cold, sadistic gaze—the coordinates of conventional fantasies about strange strangers? Lewis Carroll was right in “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to show how pity for the living world is an aspect of a sadis
tic relish for devouring it: the Walrus weeps for the oysters as he pours them down his greedy throat.
In The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Mark Bittner, a Beat-ish, easygoing fellow who house-sits for the wealthy, decides to feed the parrots who congregate in San Francisco, not out of any deep sense of their identity, but just because he likes them.91 Did the parrots fly there from somewhere else, or did they escape from cages in the city? No one is sure. I’ve heard environmentalists saying that Bittner should never have fed the parrots, as they weren’t “natural” (that is, native). What happened to the huddled masses, yearning to be free? Shouldn’t this ultimately apply to all strange strangers? Are we not all migrants? Don’t we have an infinite responsibility for the neighbor? Bittner himself is a kind of parrot. The ecological thought thinks neither cuddliness nor wildness but uncanny familiarity. Remember John Clare’s mouse, her “young ones hanging at her teats” (“Mouse’s Nest,” line 6): vulnerable, squirming life, experienced with honest wonder; a disturbed concern that undercuts rubbernecking fascination.
The deep green objection is that the parrots aren’t really animals and that the film’s view is anthropocentric. Here that we run into one of the greatest obstacles to the ecological thought, the sign saying, “No anthropocentrism.” It’s a dead end. The danger in political and philosophical thinking is to reckon that we have seen beyond ideology, that we can stand outside, say, “humanist” reality. This idea is itself humanism. Anthropocentrism assumes an “anthro” that is “centric.” The problem resides not so much in the content as it does in the attitude that comes bundled with the accusation. The idea of anthropocentrism is that the “human” occupies a privileged nonplace, simultaneously within and outside the mesh. One accuses others of anthropocentrism from that place.
Everything we think becomes suspect, as we assume that there is a Nature from which our thinking can deviate. And deviancy must be punished. The position of hunting for anthropocentrism is anthropocentrism. To claim that someone’s distinction of animals and humans is anthropocentric, because she privileges reason over passion, is to deny reason to nonhumans. We can’t in good faith cancel the difference between humans and nonhumans. Nor can we preserve it. Doing both at the same time would be inconsistent. We’re in a bind. But don’t despair: kings felt less for peasants than they did for pheasants. The bind is a sign of an emerging democracy of life forms.
Putting strange strangers in a box damages them. One box is the “anything-but-human” one—the Gaia box, the “web of life” box, or the “more-than-human world” box. Another is the “all sentient beings are really just like humans” box. Another, newer, subtler box is the “sentient beings are neither human nor nonhuman” box. If there is no true self, then perhaps there is a nonself. There are many terms for this in contemporary philosophy, such as assemblage, cyborg, postidentity, or posthumanity. Likewise, if there is no Nature, perhaps there is a non-Nature, a world of interlocking machines, or a world where all was one and therefore God—pantheism, or philosopher Arne Naess’s deep ecological version.
Naess claims, “identification [with the natural world can be] so deep that one’s own self is no longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or organism. One experiences oneself to be a genuine part of all life.”92 The “ego or organism,” doesn’t delimit “One,” but one can mysteriously still “experience oneself.” Thus there is a nonself. Ideas like this merely “upgrade” the self. (To detect this, try substituting “England” or “Englishness” for “the natural world” and “life.”) Ideas that there is a nonself and that there is a non-Nature domesticate the strange stranger. A true reductionist would stick with the idea that there is no self, not that there is a nonself. And isn’t the self a paradox in any case? The phrase “I am me” shows how slippery the so-called self is, in “itself.” There is no guarantee that the me who is telling you that I am me is the same as the me about whom I’m saying, “I am me.”
Remember the Menger sponge, the fractal cube infinitely filled with infinitesimal holes: “an infinitely porous, spongy or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns.”93 The mesh isn’t really a sponge—you can’t wash your back with it. And the strange stranger is not a spongy self—you can’t squeeze it. Menger sponges are good for thinking with—just don’t expect to see one “over yonder” any time soon. They are infinite. Consider the ancestor of the Menger sponge, the Cantor set. There are infinitely many points in the Cantor set; likewise, it contains infinitely many no-points. There is not something there; there is not nothing there. The ecological thought is not an unthinkable mystery—that would result in theism or nihilism. The ecological thought opens onto “un-thinking.” Yet this doesn’t mean that we should stop. It means that “thought” and “beyond thought” are not as opposed as we might think. It doesn’t hurt that life forms tend to express DNA in fractal geometries that approach infinity. DNA plots branches, blood vessels, heartbeats, and forests like this.
Infinity implies intimacy: “To see a world in a grain of sand ... Hold infinity in the palm of your hand” (Blake, Auguries of Innocence, lines 1–3).94 Immediately following this cry of the heart, Blake’s poem flips between animal cruelty and social misery. That’s the paradox of the ecological thought: “A dog starv’d at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state” (lines 9–10). Blake shows us infinity on this side of reality, not “over yonder” in some abstract ideal realm. The ecological thought concerns itself with personhood, for want of a better word. Up close, the ecological thought has to do with warmth and tenderness; hospitality, wonder, and love; vulnerability and responsibility. Although the ecological thought is a form of reductionism, it must be personal, since it refrains from adopting a clinical, intellectual, or aesthetic (sadistic) distance. Believing in an ineffable Nature or Self is wrong. But so is claiming that there is a thrilling, infinitely plastic post-Thing out there waiting to be completely manipulated. Both the Nature people and the post-Nature people have it in for, well, people. The ecological thought is about people—it is people.
Coexistence means nothing if it means only the proximity of other machines or sharing components with other machines. Upgraded models of “post-Nature” deprive us of intimacy. The ecological thought must think something like Georg Hegel’s idea of the “night” of subjectivity, the “interior of nature.” At the bottomless bottom, subjectivity is an infinite void.95 When I encounter the strange stranger, I gaze into depths of space, far more vast and profound than physical space that can be measured with instruments. The disturbing depth of another person is a radical consequence of inner freedom. It’s a mistake to think that the mesh is “bigger than us.” Everything is intimate with everything else. The ecological thought is vast, but strange strangers are right next to us. They are us. Inner space is right here, “nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet.”96 Rather than a vision of inclusion, we need a vision of intimacy. We need thresholds, not spheres or concentric circles, for imagining where the strange stranger hangs out.
If the mesh were really a “thing” separate from its interconnected members, then we would be out of trouble, because there would be something “over yonder” we could admire from a distance. All we have to go on are unique manifestations. How can we know what’s what? The trouble with pure appearance is that we can’t reduce it to straightforward truth. How can I ever really know that there isn’t a key in your neck or that I’m not a robot? Can I ever successfully tell the sentient sheep from the android goats?
At the fairground in Steven Spielberg’s movie AI: Artificial Intelligence, humans line up at a circus to destroy androids, in what they suppose is a harmless exercise of sadism on mere machines. The ringmaster Lord Johnson-Johnson shouts, “Let he who is without ‘sim’ cast the first stone.”97 He means that humans have a right to destroy machines, but in quoting Jesus, the circus master disturbs us. “Sim” (simulation, semblance) resembles “sin.” Humans think that they are natural, that is,
without sin/sim. Yet if they truly considered the androids as mere machines, wouldn’t it be unsatisfying to destroy them? Surely the sadistic fun comes from at least imagining that they are sentient? Jesus means that none of us are without sin. By extension, none of us are without sim.
Precisely because we can’t tell whether the AI beings are alive and sentient, we should deem ourselves responsible for them. To project our wishes onto them is to betray them, for then they become representations of racist fantasies (a minstrel robot is shot out of a canon). The same principle applies in Blade Runner. Since we can’t tell whether the replicants are humans (or whether we are replicants, or whether humanness itself consists of replicant-ness), we’re responsible for them.
Consider the inverse fact: intense experiences often seem not to be happening to “us.” They redefine who “we” are. Which came first, the psychological symptom or the subject “of” that symptom? Wordsworth grapples with this in his long poems. As a point of comparison, consider a scene in Star Trek: First Contact, in which a cyborg “Borg” queen grafts a piece of skin onto Data, the android, to introduce him to a world of sensations.98 It is as if the zero level of identity is sheer sensation. But wait a minute—why does Data gasp with pleasure, or pain, or both, when the queen blows on the skin, the hairs wafting gently under her breath like seaweed? Doesn’t this imply that he already has a psyche? Inner space seems to have existed before it was filled with “objects” such as sensations. Traumas become traumas only after the fact. It is like Einstein’s view of matter as the curvature of space: in essence, the psyche is this minimal distortion. Both the surface and the depth of our being are ambiguous and illusory. In his autobiographical poem The Prelude, when Wordsworth tells how his former self had powerful experiences (the “spots of time”), there are descriptions of the experience being missed, or less than expected, or blank.99 Wordsworth improved on most eagerly affirmative Nature writers before they were even born. It is far more faithful to say, “The experience was so intense, I wasn’t even sure I was having it, or whether there was a me to have it at all. For days afterward, I just felt empty and weird.”
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