Bestiality

Alphonso Lingis

Sea anemones are animate chrysanthemums made of tentacles. Without sense organs, without a nervous system, they are all skin, with but one orifice that serves as mouth, anus, and vagina. Inside, their skin contains little marshes of algae, ocean plantlets of a species that has come to live only in them. The tentacles of the anemone bring inside the orifice bits of floating nourishment, but the anemone cannot absorb them until they are first broken down by its inner algae garden. When did those algae cease to live in the open ocean and come to live inside sea anemones?

Hermit crabs do not secrete their own shells, but instead lodge their bodies in the shells they find vacated by the death of other crustaceans. The shells of one species of hermit crabs are covered with a species of sea anemone. The tentacles of the sea anemones grab the scraps the crab tears off when it eats. Since sea anemones have stings on their tentacles, the crab is protected from predator octopods, which are very sensitive to sea anemone stings. When the hermit crab outgrows its shell, it locates another empty one. The sea anemones then leave the old shell and go to attach themselves onto the new one, as the crab waits. How do sea anemones, blind, without sense organs, know it is time to move?

Small nomadic bands of people have long lived in the rain forests of the world. But until recently only two commercial ways were found for humans to live off the rain forest without destroying it—tapping rubber trees and collecting Brazil nuts. Rubber has many essential uses in industry, and Brazil nuts have always commanded good prices on the export market. But there are so many species of trees intermixed in the rain forest that rubber tappers and nut collectors often had to walk for an hour from one tree of a species to the next. It early occurred to settlers to cut down the wild forest, and plant plantations of rubber trees and Brazil nut trees. The Brazil nut plantations always failed. The trees grew vigorously, flowered, but [End Page 56] never produced any nuts. Only fifteen years ago did biologists discover why. The Brazil nut flowers can be pollinated by only one species of bee. This bee also requires, for its larvae, the pollen of one species of orchid, an orchid that does not grow on Brazil nut trees. When did Brazil nut flowers come to shape themselves so as to admit only that one species of bee? What we know as Brazil nuts are kernels which, on the tree, are enclosed in a very large wooden husk containing hundreds of them. The Brazil nut tree is hardwood, and the husk about its seeds is of wood hard as iron. There is only one beast in Amazonia that has the teeth, and the will, to bore into that husk. It is a medium-sized rodent, and when it bores through the husk, it only eats some of the seeds. The remaining seeds are able to get moisture, and push their roots into the ground. Without that rodent, the nuts would be permanently entombed, and Brazil nut trees would have died out long ago.

There is perhaps no species of life that does not live in symbiosis with another species. When did celled life, with nuclei, come to evolve? Microbiologist Lynn Margulis established that chloroplasts and mitochondria, the oxygen-processing cellular energy-producers in plants and animals, were originally independent cyanobacteria that came to live inside the cells of plants and animals. Colonies of microbes evolved separately, and then formed the symbiotic systems which are the individual cells, whether of algae or of our bodies.

Human animals live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria, 600 species in our mouths which neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies, 400 species in our intestines, without which we could not digest and absorb the food we ingest. Some synthesize vitamins, others produce polysaccharides or sugars our bodies need. The number of microbes that colonize our bodies exceeds the number of cells in our bodies by up to a hundredfold. Macrophages in our bloodstream hunt and devour trillions of bacteria and viruses entering our porous bodies continually. They replicate with their own DNA and RNA and not ours, they are the agents that maintain our borders. They and not some Aristotelian form, are true agencies of our individuation as organisms. When did those bacteria take up lodging in our digestive system, these macrophages take up lodging in our bloodstream?

We also live in symbiosis with rice, wheat, and corn fields, with berry thickets and vegetable patches, and also with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil that their rootlets enter into symbiosis with in order to grow and feed the stalk, leaves, and seeds or fruit. We also move and feel in symbiosis with other mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. [End Page 57]

Let us liberate ourselves from the notion that our body is constituted by the form that makes it an objective for the observation and manipulation of an outside observer. Let us dissolve the conceptual crust that takes hold of it as a subsistent substance. Let us turn away from the anatomical and physiological mirrors that project it before us as a set of organs and a set of biological or pragmatic functions. Let us see through the simple-mindedness that conceives of the activities of its parts as functionally integrated, and it as a distinct unit of life. Let us cease to identify it with the grammatical notion of a subject or the juridical notion of a subject of decisions and initiatives.

How myopic is the notion that a form is the principle of individuation, or a substance occupying a place to the exclusion of other substances, or that the inner organization, or the self-positing identity of a subject is an entity's principle of individuation. A season, a summer, a wind, a fog, a swarm, an intensity of white at high noon have perfect individuality, though they are not substances nor subjects. The climate, the wind, a season have a nature and an individuality no different from the bodies that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken in them.

The form and the substance of our bodies are not clay shaped by Jehovah and then driven by his breath; they are coral reefs full of polyps, sponges, gorgonians, and free-swimming macrophages continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood, and biles.

Every animal has its modes of being in a pack; it is not a substance with its own properties. What would a wolf all alone do? A whale, a flea, a rat, a fly? What would be a cry independently of the population that it calls or that bears witness to it? Schools of fish, flocks of birds, prides of lions are not lower forms of society, rudimentary beginnings of the political and economic order of the polis. They are movements and affects, differentials of speed that compose, intensities that materialize their force.

A pack of wolves, a cacophonous assemblage of starlings in a maple tree when evening falls, a whole marsh throbbing with frogs, a whole night scintillating with fireflies exert a primal fascination on us. What is fascinated in the pack, the gangs of the savannah and the night, the swarming, is the multiplicity in us—the human form and the non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal and vegetable, conscious and unconscious, movements and intensities in us that are not yoked to some conscious goal or purpose that is or can be justified in some capitalist program for economic growth or some transcendental or theological fantasy of object-constitution or creativity seated in us. Aliens on other planets, galaxies churning out trillions of stars, drops of water showing, under the microscope, billions of squiggling protozoa are mesmerizing. What is mesmerized [End Page 58] in us are the inhuman movements and intensities in us, the pulses of solar energy momentarily held and refracted in our crystalline cells, the microorganic movements and intensities in the currents of our inner coral reefs.

Movements do not get launched by an agent against masses of inertia; we move in an environment of air currents, rustling trees, and animate bodies. Our movements are stirred by the coursing of blood, the pulse of the wind, the reedy rhythms of the cicadas in the autumn trees, the whir of passing cars, the bounding of squirrels and the tense, poised pause of deer. The differentials of speed and slowness liberated from our bodies do not block or hold those movements only; our movements compose their differentials, directions, and speeds with those movements in the environment. Our legs plod with elephantine torpor; decked out fashionably, we catwalk; our hands swing with penguin vivacity; our fingers drum with nuthatch insistence; our eyes glide with the wind rustling the flowering prairie.

These movements have not only extension; they surge and ebb in intensity. They are vehement, raging, prying, incandescent, tender, cloying, ardent, lascivious. It is by its irritability, its fear, its rage, its languor, its exuberance that an octopus in the ocean, a rabbit caught in our headlights, a serpent in the grass, a cat on the couch, a dolphin in the ocean become visible to us. Our movements become irritable with the insistent whine of a mosquito, fearful before the fury of a hornet whose nest we have disturbed, languid with the purring of a cat, exuberant in the sparkling of the coral fish in the tropical surge.

A tune is nowise launched by an advance representation of the final note, and its evolution is nowise purposive. In singing a tune or in sauntering or patterning one's finger movements through one's hair into a kinetic melody, one is also not controlled by another movement. Tunes do not imitate but answer refrains that start and stop in the streets, in the fields, and in the clouds.

Crickets in the meadows and cicadas in the trees, coyotes in the night hills, frogs in the ponds and whales in the oceans, birds in the skies make our planet continually resound with chant. Humans do not begin to sing, and do not sing, in dead silence. Our voices begin to purr, hum, and crescendo in the concerto and cacophony of nature and machines.

Le Clézio was long puzzled by the particular features of the singing of the Lacandon Indians in Chiapas—a music of cries and noises, without melody nor harmony, repetitious, made in solitude and clandestinity in the night, a music made with a monophonic bamboo tube, a pipe with but two holes, a drum, a scraper, a shell, a bell, a music that does not seek to be beautiful, that is not addressed [End Page 59] to anyone. Then, during long rainy season nights, Le Clézio heard how the songs of Indians leave behind the chains of words and meaning and pick up and join the basso continuo of the frogs, the dogs, the spider-monkeys, the agoutis, the wild boars, and the sloths in the tropical night.

Insects sing with their torsos, their legs, and their wings; human animals sing with their throats, their chests, their torsos, their legs, and their fingers. Human animals sing with the terrestrial, oceanic, and celestial animals, and with the reeds and the ant-hollowed branches of didgeridoos, the catgut strings and the drum-hides, the brass and the bronze. Around the campfires of hunter-gatherers from time immemorial humans sing with their bodies, the dances of the Maasai compose visual melodies against the staves of elephant grass, in the black slums of Salvador in Brazil people are sauntering the samba into the geometrical diagrams of cars moving in the streets, with the pulsating movements of the cats and dogs of the alleys. In the imposed silence in university libraries, the bodies of students are bent over books, but how much of their bodies sing—their ant-antennae feet rhythmically tapping the floor, their hummingbird fingers dancing elegant melodies in their hair.

We assign special importance, in everyday life, to purposive or goal-oriented movement. Yet most movements—things that fall, that roll, that collapse, that shift, that settle, that collide with other things, that set other things in motion—are not goal-oriented. How little of the movements of the bodies of octopuses frolicking over the reef, of guppies fluttering in the slow currents of the Amazon, of cockatoos fluttering their acrobatics in the vines of New Guinea, of terns of the species Sterna paradisaea scrolling up all the latitudes of the planet from Antarctica to the Arctics, of humans are teleological! How little of these movements are programmed by an advance representation of a goal, a result to be acquired or produced, a final state! They do not get their meaning from an outside referent envisioned from the start, and do not get their direction from an end-point, a goal or result. Without theme, climax, or denouement, they extend from the middle, they are durations.

How even less are these movements initiatives by which an agent posits and extends its identity! They are nowise the movements by which a conscious being seeks to maintain and consolidate and stabilize itself; even less integrate itself.

In the course of the day, our bodies shift, lean, settle, agitations stir them, most of the movements of our arms and hands are aimless, our eyes glide in their sockets continually buoyed up and rocked by the waves of the sunlight. Even most of the movements to which we assign goals start by just being an urge to move, to get the day going, [End Page 60] to get out of the house. We leave our house for a walk in the streets, a stroll along the beach, a saunter through the woods. In the Ryongi Zen Garden in Kyoto, for five hundred years each morning the monk rakes again the sands into waves. The campesina in Guatemala occupies her hands with the rhythms and periodicity of her knitting as she sits on the stoop gossiping with her friends; the now old Palestinian who will never leave this refugee camp fingers his prayer beads.

Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its teleology and continues as a periodicity with a force that is not the force of the will launching it and launching it once again and then once again; instead it continues as a force of inner intensity. The carpenter climbs up the roof to nail shingles; almost at once his mind lets loose the alleged objective and the rhythm dum-dum-dum-DUM dum-dum-dum-DUM continues his movements as it does the dancer in the disco, and the force he feels in those movements is not the force of his deciding will, but the vibrant and vital intensity of his muscles on the grip of his fine, smoothly balanced hammer he likes so much. The rhythm of his hammering composes with the rhythm of the wind currents passing in which he hammers and the falling leaves and when he pauses he, alone in the neighborhood, registers the nearby tapping of a nuthatch on a treetrunk.

The movements and intensities of our bodies compose with the movements and intensities of toucans and wolves, jellyfish and whales. Psychoanalysis is there to sanction as infantile every intercourse with the other animals which it so quixotically interprets as representatives of the father and mother figures of its Oedipal triangle. But one is not aiming at an identification with the other animal. Still less is one identifying the other animal with another human.

The hand of the child that strokes the dolphin is taking on the surges of exuberance that pulse in its smooth body while the dolphin is taking on the human impulses of intimacy forming in close contact with the child's face. The woman who rides a horse lurches with the surges of its impulses, while the horse trots with her prudent programming. The movements of her body are extending differential degrees of speed and retardation, and feeling the thrill of speed and the soothing decompression of retardation. These movements are not productive, they extend neither toward a result nor a development. They are figures of the repetition compulsion; one strokes a calf each night on the farm, one rides a horse through the woods with the utterly noncumulative recurrence of orgasm. [End Page 61]

The parents of their first baby feel all sorts of feelings about that baby—astonishment, curiosity, pride, tenderness, the pleasure of caring for a new life, and the resentment the mother feels over the father's unwillingness to share also the tedium and distastefulness of nursing the baby and cleaning its diapers, and also the jealousy the father feels as the woman he so recently chose to devote himself to exclusively as she him now pours most of her affection on the baby. What does the baby feel, aside from hunger and discomfort? Whatever feelings simmers in that opaque and unfocused body are blurred and nebulous. Brought up in a State orphanage, he or she would reach the age to be transferred to the car or tobacco factory assembly line with still opaque, blurred and nebulous feelings. Brought up in an American high-rise apartment where the parents stay home weeknights watching action movies on television while fondling their gun collection, and go for rides weekends through a landscape of streets, boulevards, underpasses, and highways, seeing only other cars outside the window, the baby would reach sexual maturity with the feelings of Ballard and Vaughan in J. G. Ballard's Crash.

Is it not animal emotions that make our feelings intelligible? The specifically human emotions are interlaced with practical, rational, utilitarian calculations which tend to neutralize them—to the point that the human parent no longer knows if she feels something like parental love, finding her time with the baby dosed out between personal and career interests, not knowing how much concern for her child is concern with her own image or her representative. It is when we see the parent bird attacking the cat, the mother elephant carrying her dead calf in grief for three days, that we believe in the reality of maternal love. So much of the human courage we see celebrated is inseparable from peer pressure and the craving for celebrity and for the resultant profit, that it is the bull in the corrida that convinces us of the natural reality of fearlessness.

Is not the force of our emotions that of the other animals? Human infants are tedious at table, picking at their food, playing with it, distracted from it; they pick up voracity from the puppy absorbed with total Zen attentiveness at his dish. They come to feel curiosity with a white mouse poking about the papers and ballpoints on father's desk. Their first heavy toddling shifts into tripping vivacity with the robbins hopping across the lawn. They come to feel buoyancy in the midst of the park pigeons shifting so effortlessly from ground to layers of sundrenched air. They come to feel sullenness from the arthritic old dog the retired cop was walking in the park and that they try to pet. They contract righteousness and indignation from the mother hen suddenly ruffled up and her beak stabbing when they try to remove a chick. They pick up feelings of smoldering wrath [End Page 62] from the snarling chained dog in the neighbor's yard and try out those feelings by snarling when they are put under restraints or confined. Temper in a human infant dies away of itself; it is from finding reverberating in himself the howling of dogs locked up for the night, the bellowing of tigers, the fury of bluebirds pursuing hawks in the sky, that his and her rage extends to nocturnal, terrestrial, and celestial dimensions.

The curled fingers of an infant ease into tenderness from holding the kitten but not tight, and rumble into contentment from stroking its fur with the pressure and periodicity that are responded to with purring. In contact with the cockatoo who, though he can clutch with a vice-grip around a perch while sleeping and chews up his oak perch in the course of a month, relaxes his claws on the arm of an infant and never bites the ear he affectionately nibbles at, and who extends his neck and spread his wings to be caressed in all the softness of his down feathers, the infant discovers that her hands not just retractile hooks for grabbing, but organs to give pleasure. In contact with the puppy mouthing and licking his legs and fingers and face the infant discovers his lips are not just fleshy traps to hold in the food and his tongue not just a lever to shift it into the throat, but organs that give, give pleasure, give the pleasures of being kissed. In feeling the lamb or the baby skunk extending its belly, its thighs, raising its tail for stroking the infant discovers her hands, her thighs, and her belly are organs to give pleasure.

Far from the human libido naturally destining us to a member of our species and of the opposite sex, when anyone who has not had intercourse with the other animals, has not felt the contented cluckings of a hen stroked on the neck and under the wings rumbling through his or her own flesh, has not kissed a calf's mouth raised to one's own, has not mounted the smooth warm flanks of a horse, has not been aroused by the powdery feathers of cockatoos and the ardent chants of insects in the summer night, gets in the sack with a member of his or her own species, she and he is only consummating tension release, getting his rocks off. When we, in our so pregnant expression, make love with someone of our own species, we also make love with the horse and the calf, the kitten and cockatoo, the powdery moths and the lustful crickets.

Orgasm proceeds by decomposition of the competent body, the body upon which have been diagrammed and contracted the efficient operations for functioning in the environment of kitchen utensils, tools, machines. It begins in denuding oneself. Clothing is not only a defensive carapace against the heat, the cold, the rain, the sleet, and the importunate impulses, curiosity, and advances of others, and protection for our flesh from the grime, dust, and harsh edges of the [End Page 63] implements we manipulate and machines we operate. Whenever we go out in the street, or open our door to someone who knocked, we see someone who has first washed off the traces of the night, the anonymity and abandon of the night, from his or her face, who has rearranged the turmoil of his or her hair, who has chosen clothing for his or her departure into the public spaces. All clothing are uniforms. He and she dresses punk or preppie, worker or executive, inner city or suburban, she or he dresses chic or one wears the worn leather jacket of an outdoorsperson, he dresses up in business suit or dresses down in jeans, she puts on a pearl necklace or a neckchain of Hopi Indian beads. He or she also dresses today like he or she did yesterday and last year; she maintains the two-piece crisp look of an active woman with responsibilities, a business executive. He keeps his masculine, outdoors look even when visiting the city or coming to our dinner party; he does not put aside his plaid shirt and jeans for a tie-dyed hippie t-shirt or an Italian designer silk shirt. When we see her, wearing a t-shirt or sweat shirt with Penn State on it, we see someone who is not only dressing in the uniform of a college student, but who has dressed her movements, thoughts, and reactions with those of a Penn State freshman, a dormitory rat or a sorority sister. We also see in the uniform the uniformity of a series of actions, undertakings, thoughts, opinions, feelings maintained for weeks, months, years, and predictable for the weeks, months, years ahead. We see the time of endurance, and respond to it.

Now he or she undresses before our eyes, and under our embrace. In denuding him and herself, he and she takes off the uniform, the categories, the endurance, the reasons and the functions. Of course in the gym-built musculature we see another kind of clothing, body-armor, uniformization, a body reshaped to fit a model. But in the slight sag of the full or undeveloped breasts, in the smooth expanse of the belly, in the contour of the ass, in the bare expanse of the inside of the upper thighs, we see flesh, carnality, and our eyes already caress it to make contact with what makes it real and tremble with its own sensuality and life. This carnality, this naked flesh is only real in the carnal contact with it, dissolute and wanton.

As our bodies become orgasmic, the posture, held oriented for tasks, collapses, the diagrams for manipulations and operations dissolve from our legs and hands, which roll about dismembered, exposed to the touch and tongue of another, moved by another. Our lips loosen, soften, glisten with saliva, lose the train of sentences, our throats issue babble, giggling, moans, sighs. Our sense of ourselves, our self-respect shaped in fulfilling a function in the machinic and social environment, our dignity maintained in multiple confrontations, collaborations, and demands, dissolve, the ego loses its focus as center of evaluations, decisions, and initiatives. Our [End Page 64] impulses, our passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility. The sighs and moans of another that pulse through our nervous excitability, the spasms of pleasure and torment in contact with the non-prehensile surfaces of our bodies, our cheeks, our bellies, our thighs, irradiate across the substance of our sensitive and vulnerable nakedness. The lion and stallion mane, the hairy orifices of the body, the hairy bull chest, the hairy monkey armpits, the feline pelt of the mons veneris, the hairy satyr anus exert a vertiginous attraction. We feel feline and wolfish, foxy and bitchy; the purrings of kittens reverberate in our orgasmic strokings, our fingers racing up and down the trunk and limbs of another become squirrelly, our clam vagina opens, our penis, slippery and erect and the oscillating head of a cobra, snakes its way in. Our muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstantiate into ooze, slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions, into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganisms of the night air.

Human sexuality is not just what priggish suburbanites call animal sex, the random and mindless copulation of their domestic dogs; it elaborates, we are told, all the refinements of eroticism. Lust enlists all the Platonic eros which craves beauty and immortality, the beauty that looks immortal and the immortality of beauty; it elaborates the skills and the arts of seduction, the teasing and provocative usage of language, metaphor and metonymy, synecdoche and irony, the no that is a yes and the yes that is a no, the specific pleasure in appearance, simulacra, and masquerade, the challenge and purely imaginary stakes of games. The consummately feminine look, Baudelaire said, is "that blasé look, that bored look, that vaporous look, that impudent look, that cold look, that look of looking inward, that dominating look, that voluptuous look, that wicked look, that sick look, that catlike look, infantilism, nonchalance and malice compounded" (1256).

Not a female body perfectly adapted to the function of childrearing, or nurturing, or winning the World Tennis cup. Not the woman who proves her flawless intelligence in pursuing a successful career, the woman who demonstrates her integrated emotional composition, unblemished by erratic outbursts, in attaining to high political responsibility. A woman not striding in sensible walking shoes, but pirouetting in stork heels, or gliding in water-buffalo sandals; not wearing laundromat-washed t-shirt and jeans, but clad in the silk made by moths and chains of Polynesian shells dangling in the way of her movements. Not muscled arms and bloated, milk-full breasts, but satiny breasts and a belly not destined for pregnancy and stretch-marks. An abdomen not emitting the gurglings of digestion and a derrière not smelling of defecations, a woman who survives on celery stalks and champagne, or brown rice and water. One does not [End Page 65] see the female, one sees the feminine, obeying nothing but aesthetic laws of her own making. An astral woman who appears in the crowd like a mirage, and who drifts effortlessly through doors to wander in rose-gardens and crystal pools the moonbeams create wherever she turns.

Males in the Middle Ages became erotic objects in the ostentatious garb of knights and in tournaments taking place in an enchanted world of sorcerers, stallions, dragons, and rescues, and in the siren songs of outlaw gypsies, predators on the organized feudal world. The male erotic objects on the silver screen are 18th century cavalry or naval officers who gamble away fortunes, duel and dance, and bandidos, or 20th century outlaws and high-society conmen. The starched white uniforms of naval officers, with their gold epaulets and the hats, capes, and mirror-polished boots of cavalry officers with never the least trace of the muck of the barracks and the gore of the battlefield make them appear as astral men who appear from the outer spaces beyond society like mirages. 19th-century bandidos and 20th-century outlaws and high-society conmen stud their black uniforms with silver and their bloody hands with precious jewels. They prowl in the outer region of sorcery and necromancy, consecrated in that other religion of amulets, talismans, luck, fate, omens, curses, spells, werewolves and vampires.

But in this the courtesan, specialized in the rites of eroticism, is in symbiosis with the resplendent quetzal whose extravagantly arrayed glittering plumage serves no utilitarian function; the cavalry officer is in symbiosis with the coral fish whose Escher designs do not outline the functional parts and organs of their bodies and whose fauviste colors are no more camouflage than are this white jodpurs and scarlet cape. The ceremonies and etiquette with which courtship was elaborated among the courtesans in the court of the Sun King were not more ritualized that the rituals of Emperor penguins in Antarctica; the codes of chivalry in medieval Provence not more idealized than the spring rituals of impalas in the East African savannah; the rites of seduction of Geishas in old Kyoto not more refined than those of black-neck cranes in moonlit marshes.

Humans have from earliest times made themselves erotically alluring, as pietist and frigid old Kant noted, by grafting upon themselves the erotic splendors of animals, the glittering plumes of quetzal-birds and the filmy plumes of ostriches, the secret inner splendors of mother-of-pearl oysters, the springtime gleam of fox fur. Until Versailles, perfumes were made not with the nectar of flowers but with the musks of rodents.

And today, in our internet world where everything is reduced to digitally coded messages, images, and simulacra instantaneously transmitted from one human to another, it is in our passions for [End Page 66] animals that we learn all the rite and sorceries, the torrid and teasing presence and the ceremonious delays, of eroticism. The dance floors cleared of vegetation and decorated with shells and flowers that birds-of-paradise make for their intoxicated dances, a cock fight exhibit the extravagant and extreme elaborations far beyond reproductive copulation into the eroticism that humans have composed with the other animals.

The Neanderthal cave paintings of Cosquer, Chauvet, and Lascaux demonstrate that the most ancient gods of humanity were other animals, perceived by hunter-gatherers as not bound by taboos, more sacred and more demonic than humans. Noble animals—tigers, lions, jaguars, eagles, condors, cobras, animals of courage. The caves of Lascaux contain but one depiction of a human—a stick figure with the head of a bird. Who cannot but be struck with these images and carvings of lion-headed humans, half-human-half-bull, half-human-half-stag, human with the head of a fox, ibis, or cat, in the ancient art of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South-East Asia, and America?

Human animals are sometimes gregarious as chimpanzees, sometimes solitary as orang-utans, sometimes timorous and obedient as sheep, sometimes proud and beautiful as panthers.

Humans, naked, with such slow-developing maturity, so easily intimidated by one another, can sustain a deep layer of life-long fear and instinctual prudence. They acquire useful skills, acquiescent dispositions, and deferential postures and attitudes. These they pick up from others, pass on to others. They are jealous of rights, take on responsibilities that make others dependent on them. They learn to be useful, serviceable, servile. Feeling themselves under accusation, they elaborate justifications for everything they feel and do.

When such humans armed themselves in the service of their expanionist polis, nation, or religion, they rode thousands of horses to uncomprehending death under their feet. It was the vultures that came to bury their bodies in the sky. The Dutch, English, French, Russians, and Peruvians sailed as far as To Pito O Te Henua for slaves, and when these slaves sickened and died, they threw them into the ocean, where the sharks came to make them live again in their bodies. Today, the homing pigeons and the dolphins as conscripts of human warfare have been consigned to obsolescence; human armies fly at great heights in the stratosphere and at great distances at sea to launch the missiles of destruction, and it is viral and bacteriological life that is conscripted to spread their species hatred on the battlegrounds.

The global capitalist free-trade economy now in place guarantees that industrial powers will not again wage world war against one another. They are dismantling their thermonuclear and biochemical [End Page 67] arsenals. Instead the Third World War their industrial might is waging is a war on the world—on the great components of Nature—the fertile continents, the oceans, the stocks of fresh-water 70% of which are piled up in the now melting ice of Antarctica, the atmospheres, the ozone shield, the ultraviolet-reduced light that generates life. The destruction of these components of Nature since the second World War has already been equal to the destruction that a third, thermonuclear World War would have wrought. Each year sees the genocide of 17,500 species of plant and animal life.

The noble impulses—of physical splendor, of the great health that knows itself in the great quantities of corruption it absorbs and transfigures into vigor, of the thirst for truth that opens upon woe, hell, hatred, disgrace, cripple, the world—this world, oh you know it!—of the thirst for justice which transcends itself into mercy—these noble impulses are nowise contrived to serve human needs and wants, human whinings. They are nowise contracted to serve one's self-consolidation and self-aggrandizement; they are forces that expend themselves without return, impulses to give in the superabundance of exultation without calculation of profit and loss.

Socrates, who claimed none of the intellectual or moral virtues, at his trial reminded his judges of his courage which they all knew, proved three times in battle. Aristotle made courage the first virtue, for without courage, neither truthfulness nor magnanimity nor friendship nor even wit in conversation are possible. But Socrates erred in then setting out to formulate the ideas and beliefs—his arguments for immortality—that would make courage itself possible. For courage, courage, as the word indicates, is the force of the heart, and sociological studies are there to show that the same number of people who think that their death is the gateway to eternal bliss die bravely and die cowardly as those who think their death is just annihilation. Courage rises up in us, we are inclined to say, from our animal nature. But the courage of the torero rises in his confrontation with the black bull; the courage of the divemaster rises in respect for the damselfish, but a few grams of matter jellied in sea-water, who nonetheless attacks him, the courage of the pilot of the Cessna rises fraternally to the condors soaring at 18,000 feet over the desolation and glaciers of the peaks of the high Andes.

Our ethics, from Socrates, whose physical ugliness Nietzsche noted and made much of, to John Rawls, has not known what to make of physical splendor. Our ethics, which has built up so extensive a vocabulary, has not given a name of virtue to the compulsion of a man to acquire the strong and proportioned musculature of bulls and elk, the compulsion of a woman to move with the grace of a panther. This compulsion does not derive from ethical culture, but arises on invitation from nature, in whom the primal drive for beauty decorates [End Page 68] with designs and colors as splendid as that of a pheasant the shells of blind mollusks, and which arrays such a carnaval parade of coral fish, butterflies, and birds. The drive creative of beauty is so fundamental in nature that all our interest in nature is a marvel at her beauty. The servile among us want only to be efficient and dress in uniforms; those who commerce with sunfish and dragonflies, leopards and eagles recognize the nobility of physical splendor in humans too.

The male emperor penguins huddle on the ice shelf under raging blizzards for nine months of the Antarctic winter, all their metabolic processes devoted to keeping warm in -70 degree temperature the egg the female emperor penguins have given over to their care. When the egg hatches, they nourish it with the secretions of their throats until the winter breaks and the females can return with krill from the open seas. House wrens in Pennsylvania gardens hurl themselves shrieking into the eyes of predator cats that are climbing to their nests. The stings of bees are barbed, and the bee can detach itself from the enemy it stings only by tearing fatally its own body. Every bee that stings an importunate suburbanite gives its life for the life of the hive. The other animals give not of their surplus to the less fortunate; they give of the nourishing fluids of their own bodies, they give their very life. They do not think to imagine a prestige that repays them on another level for gifts given freely. They do not think to imagine an infinite repayment beyond the death they give that others may life.

Our theoretical ethics from Aristotle to Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida has not ceased to find intelligibility in gift-giving only by reinterpreting in an economy of equivalent exchange, even it that means it has to calculate prestige as recompense with interest. The impulse to give without calculation and without recompense, when it rises up compulsively in us, as it does every day, we have contracted in our commerce with animal nobility. How rarely do humans find the courage to say those fearful words I love you—fearful, because we are never so vulnerable, never open to being so easily and so deeply hurt, as when we give ourselves over in love of someone. But from early infancy we have come to understand that instinct—in our kitten that so unreservedly gave itself over to its affection for us, in our cockatoo that in all her excitement upon seeing us wants nothing but to give us all her tenderness and affection.

How awesome the thirst for truth, when we contemplate it sovereign in the great scientist, the great explorer! Here is someone contemptuous of honors and wealth, craving to open her mind to the most tragic realities, to the cosmic indifference of the universe to the wishes of her own species and to herself, craving to know with the wounds, rendings, and diseases of his own body the expanses and alien populations of oceans and tundra, rain forest and ice sheets. [End Page 69] Human culture sets itself up as the compensation for those who limit their curiosity and their research only to funded projects that will benefit the human species. It is not from human culture that those consumed with the thirst for truth learn to program their lives. It is from the albatross that leaves its nest to sail all the latitudes of the planet and all its storms and icy nights for seven years before it touches earth again, and only to give its mature strength to raising offspring like it. Nietzsche wrote, you, researchers and consolidators of knowledge, have, like spiders, only turned the ways of the universe into a spider web to trap your prey. It is because your soul does not fly, like eagles over abysses.

How awesome, the thirst for justice, when we contemplate it in a man like Gandhi, Ché Guevarra, Nelson Mandela! They knew before they began that at the end of the path they were blazing lay assassination, ambush and extermination, a life tortured from youth to old age in dungeons. Of the sandinista guerrillas who made a blood pact to fight for liberation of Nicaragua in 1959, only one, Tomas Borgé, was not gunned down in the jungle, and he was captured and held in Somoza's prisons for years. After the sandinista victory in 1979, Tomas Borgé, was selected by his comrades to be Minister of Justice. A few months later, his subordinates informed him that among the captured agents of Somoza's Gardia Nacional were identified the three men who had tortured him during the decades of his incarceration. He went at once to the prison where they were held and ordered them to be brought before him. He looked intently at them, and verified that they were indeed his torturers. Then he ordered them to be liberated. No reasoning, reckoning, calculation of how to most profitably manage one's life in human society, has ever provided the motivation for the thirst for justice to which a human sacrifices his life—so often in vain!—and even less for the justice that liberates its enemies. "Justice, which began," Nietzsche wrote, "with everything is paid for, everything must be paid for, ends by winking and letting those incapable of paying their debt go free: it ends, as does every good thing on earth, by overcoming itself. This self-overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself—mercy." This justice that overcomes itself the noblest and most courageous humans contract, Nietzsche went on to say, from their commerce with lions, who are always covered with ticks and flies that seek shelter and nourishment there. The lion does not rage against them: "What are my parasites to me? . . . May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!"

The Pennsylvania State University [End Page 70]

Alphonso Lingis is Professor of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of many books including Excesses (1983), Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), Abuses (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994) and Sensation (1996).

Reference

Charles Baudelaire. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.