• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
 Beautiful Soul Syndrome
Timothy MortonHegel held that philosophy wasn't just about ideas, it was about attitudestowards ideas. These attitudes were kind of as yet unthought ideas, ideasthat hadn't yet been fully realized consciously. If, as Donald Rumsfeld hasclaimed, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknownunknowns, there are also, as Zizek adds, unknown knowns—things that weknow, but we don't know that we know them: the unconscious, if you aregoing to be psychoanalytic. So once you realize what your attitude towardsan idea is, that attitude itself becomes an idea, towards which you have yetanother attitude which you'll need to figure out—and so on in a dialecticalprogression that Hegel calls the phenomenology of spirit. Philosophy,therefore, is the history of philosophy, and history is inextricable fromphilosophy. Thus it's a pleasure to be talking today about the history of environmentalism, and in particular about an attitude towards certain ideas
 
 2within environmentalism, an attitude that maintains its grip precisely to theextent that it hasn't been fully thought, consciously. This is the attitude I amcalling Beautiful Soul Syndrome, or BS for short. Yes, that is a joke. And it'sa pleasure to explicate the history of this idea, which is doubly Romantic, asit were, because the name Beautiful Soul was first developed by none otherthan Hegel himself to describe a certain attitude he found typified inRomanticism.
1
And within Romanticism there developed theenvironmentalism within whose ideological framework we are stillstruggling today.First, though, a word about “prehistory,” as I note that our lectureseries is entitled “A Cultural Prehistory of Environmentalism.” Prehistoryseems nicely poised between history and nature, as if it indicated a timebefore history as such, or as if it was a prior history that is continued in thesequence of events we acknowledge as historical. We know the ideologicaluses of prehistory to describe “primitive” or “non-Western” societies, ausage to which Hegel himself was prone, as when he designated Africa asoutside of history, locked in a perpetual prehistoric cycle whose spell could
1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit 
, trans. A.V. Miller,analysis and forward by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 383–409.
 
 3only be broken by an imperial incursion. Prehistory, then, is a rathersuspect term, but it also works in a strange way, because it suggests, as inmy second tentative definition, a history of which we are not yet properlyconscious. This pre-historical condition is, I suppose, the condition of mostecological knowledge—we are as yet unaware of the extent to whichDarwin, born two hundred years ago, had already historicized nature, layingthe groundwork for a truly natural history by outlining in broad terms thealgorithmic processes according to which this history might proceed. Andindeed this history is not simply a story we are telling about something thatis not historical in essence. For DNA is a code, and codes are languages,and history is not only events but also the inscription of events, and so isevolution, because that's how evolution works—through constantrewritings of the DNA sequence.This rewriting proceeds without a teleology, which is why Marxloved it so much that he wrote Darwin a fan letter, and which is why it'struly historical, because every single contingent event counts, and nothing isan analog, metaphor, or metonymy for anything else. Our lungs evolved
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...