Ways of Being Alive

Baptiste Morizot, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509547227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The ecological crisis is a very real crisis for the many species that face extinction, but it is also a crisis of sensibility – that is, a crisis in our relationships with other living beings. We have grown accustomed to treating other living beings as the material backdrop for the drama of human life: the animal world is regarded as part of 'nature', juxtaposed to the world of human beings who pursue their aims independently of other species.

Baptiste Morizot argues that the time has come for us to jettison this nature?human dualism and rethink our relationships with other living beings. Animals are not part of a separate, natural world: they are cohabitants of the Earth, with whom we share a common ancestry, the enigma of being alive and the responsibility of living decent lives together. By accepting our identity as living beings and reconnecting with our own animal nature, we can begin to change our relationships with other animals, seeing them not as inferior lifeforms but as living creatures who have different ways of being alive.

This powerful plea for a new understanding of our relationships with other animals will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the ecological crisis and the future of different species, including our own.

1
A season among the living

Episode 1: In the fog of the encounter

It’s the first day of winter. We set out quite late in the sunshine, feeling as heavy as at the beginning of the season, not yet sharpened by the snow, not yet woven by the white winds. The reason we’re here in the South Vercors is that we’ve had some information, heard rumours: certain clues seem to indicate that wolves have settled here, and that they may have reproduced. Has a new pack been born, inventing its territory along these familiar paths? Connoisseurs of the region have pointed out this valley on the map as a possible hotspot for wolf adventures in winter.

We tarry in the sunshine, moving along on our little all-terrain skis, perfect for tracking, as we follow the convoluted track of a fox and the imprint of its vertical leap in the snowpack as it chases a vole. At break time, sitting on the porch of a cabin, we dip our frozen sausage nibbles into the hot tea. It is tough going working our way up in the half-light of the undergrowth. We move over onto a ski slope so we can advance in the sunlight. The resort is closed for lack of snow, as has often been the case in recent years. Ski lift poles tilt like scaffolds from a barbaric past, or the totems of a forgotten cult. It’s like tracking through the ‘ruins of capitalism’. We climb up in the cold sunshine; the regular crunch of the skis composes a marching song which sets the pace.

We were planning to sleep in a cave in the valley. But the texture of the snow changes under our skis; our sealskins slip and slide, there’s no purchase. We decide to cut to the heart of the valley, taking the steep slope. The first part of our descent in the undergrowth is a state of grace, we glide between the evergreens levitating above the powder, in a silence broken only by the swoosh of the silky wing of the ski blade sending out its foam of snow. And then things get complicated, we get stuck in the undergrowth, we curse the wild rose bushes, we move in ski-boar formation, down dirty ice flows, forcing our way out of the claws of the brambles which knit us into the forest.

When we reach the bottom of the valley, there are no traces of the wolf pack, the snow is deep, the forest cover is still dense, the slope steep, it doesn’t look anything like the map. We exhaust ourselves for a few hours peering at the opposite slope trying to find the opening of the cave; it’s probably blocked by the snow. The sun is setting behind us. Our animal eye – the skin on the back of our necks and hands – senses it declining, in all its perfect slowness. Then there quietly rises the muted anguish of spending a night in the blizzard. We fall back on plan B: an unguarded hut on the plateau, behind the Tête du Faisan.

Orientation is difficult; you have to train your mind to be in several places on the map simultaneously, so as not to risk misinterpreting the landmarks. We finally arrive at the cabin, already occupied by the usual wildlife of mountain dwellers. On the way, traces of the whole guild of ungulates, mustelids and foxes, but not a single wolf print. With nothing to show for our day’s efforts, we’re empty-handed despite the landscapes we have devoured. In the language of a Siberian hunting people, the word for ‘luck’ means ‘silence of the forest’. Tomorrow we’ll make less noise.

We cook in the unguarded refuge, everyone shares their food, we are gently urged to taste all the Savoyard fondues, all the sausage dishes with white wine and onion, with the five different kinds of spirits that they’ve hoisted up in their rucksacks. We can’t say no, we’re welded to strangers against the stove; we’re just delighted it’s so cold outside, that we’re close to being far away from the rest of the world, and at ten in the evening the two of us go for a walk, in the immaculate snow, to knock back the white wine.

We advance awkwardly along a small trail of snow piled up at the side by the passage of snowshoes, heading north. A fat moon creates sharp outlines, clouds and horizons as clear as a print, as if a Japanese painter were refining the line of trees behind us with a calligraphy brush as soon as we turn our backs. We’re talking about sociology, or something of the kind, bundled up in down jackets and hats, two slightly tottering tipsy friends, grey on white, really quite merry.

And this is when it pierces the night. A perfect wolf howl, right next to us. We stand still as if struck by lightning, each pulls off his companion’s cap, we grab each other by the shoulders. Then, a wide-open silence, like when you wait for the response at Mass. So I answer. I howl the way I’ve learned to, to match the attitude, the shape, the particular curl of their native tongue. I mime it as best I can, like a mediaeval traveller on his way to the Levant who has learned to pronounce by heart a phrase of diplomatic greeting in the language of the mythical people of the Cynocephali, those wild humans with dogs’ heads reputed to inhabit the great steppes north of Lake Baikal, as told in Marco Polo’s Book of The Marvels of the World. But without understanding a single word of it.

Silence again, an almost loving silence, waiting for an answer to our attention. And he sings. A magnificent cry, very monotonous, almost too perfect. So I answer: one has to stay courteous, but how are we to escape this charade? Again he sings out, carefully modulating, louder this time, very close, just behind a ridge thirty metres from us. Then a second wolf replies, further to the south: a deeper, more solid howl, lower too, and we reply together, the hidden wolf and myself. A third wolf responds, over there to the southeast. But not very far away, a few hundred metres at most. The dialogue continues over a few more exchanges, he continues to reply with good grace.

So I make a ‘hush’ sign with my finger to my lips; let’s try and arouse his curiosity. Often wolves come to see who’s been howling, even if they know or suspect that it’s not a fellow wolf. In the silence, hands clinging to each other’s shoulders, we wait, scrutinizing with all the warmth of our eyes the ridge where he is bound to emerge. He howls again, pleadingly, and I bite my lip to stop myself replying. There is something solid about our waiting, the ridge pulsates, a single spruce tree inhabits it, and we can’t see the profile of a single figure. I then remember the first time I saw a wolf, it was a black wolf on a crest, it was his profile against the blue air that made him stand out, while his colour in the dusk made him merge with the sage bushes of Lamar Valley in Montana. But here we’re two hours by car from Lyon, on the Vercors plateau, a familiar mountainside where you don’t expect mythological encounters.

We run back to the cabin, the other travellers have come out onto the threshold. They’ve heard. I call out into the wind, a long, modulated, almost languid cry. And there, in front of us, a hundred metres away, in the dark, a whole polyphony answers: together, all this year’s cubs, the whole litter that was born at the end of spring. They sing in curlicues, excited, anxious, high-pitched, joyful, uncontrolled, without the perfect economy of adult singing, yapping, trilling, yelping, and all in rhythm. The echo confirms their number (and at the same time we smile at the disproportion: actually, the scientific dimension of this kind of experience is not its ultimate purpose, it often serves as a canvas for encounters of another type, another magnitude).

Once again I answer, we are all as silent as if we were hunting or in a temple, and the pack retorts again. This time it’s the cubs and a few adults, impossible to count. Then we all howl in chorus; no answer. Again, we sometimes hear the distant howl of an adult probably looking for the group, but the latter now falls silent. The wind turns and makes it difficult to determine the origin of the distant songs that sometimes reach us. The wolves gathered in front of us are no longer answering. The human beings, on the other hand, are in a state of silent exaltation: the howls gently took everyone outside of themselves, in an ancient wonder of bewilderment and gratitude. Standing by the stove, the mountain experts, who had previously been discussing the shape of snowflakes or the merits of their skis, stammer like children and, by a strange alchemy that I still don’t understand, people thank each other, as if we’d all given each other something, and then they laugh as they realize that none of us is the author of the gift. I suspect that this gratitude, one which cannot discover its source, which searches in vain for its recipient, is an unfortunate legacy of the monotheisms of our tradition, which have confined the idea of giving to that which is given voluntarily by an intentional God. So that the true daily gifts, the water which quenches thirst, the sun transformed into a fruit for our flesh, the beauty of the swift and of the light translated into landscapes by our immemorial eyes, are things for which we no longer know who to thank. (If you extricate the gift from the idea of intention, all immanent blessings become possible.)

In this shared emotion, there is something like reverent respect, curiosity and excitement. Welsh philosopher Martyn Evans defines ‘wonder’ as an ‘altered, overwhelmingly heightened attention to something that we immediately recognize as important – something the emergence of which engages our imaginations before our understanding, but which we will probably want to understand more fully over time’.¹

When we hear the song, we feel that we belong to this story, to this destiny shared by the living on Earth. And we sense that this heightened attention to something tinged with importance in its very mystery is an animal emotion. It is one of the first emotions, the one that filled the first animal faced with a strange and unknown form, emerging from a wood, or leaping out of the water it was lapping. The ability to be suffused by this emotion seems to be part of the equipment needed to tame the unknown, to invent a new source of food, a new nest, a routine.

Just imagine the conundrum that evolution had to face. Perhaps some six hundred million years ago, evolution used the brain to develop the first emotions, so as to allow animals more refined answers to the questions of the environment. The original reflex arcs work very fast, but they don’t make it possible to synthesize several contradictory pieces of information, even though that is life itself. A doe is on the edge of a precipice with its fawn, when a wolf appears. If the doe had only a flight reflex, an automatic reaction, she might jump; but she has a whole parliament of emotions to synthesize the fear of the wolf with the risk of the void, attachment to her offspring and her zest for life; she has as her guide the salt of lived experience, namely ambiguous emotions.

Among these emotions, it was necessary to invent one whose aim was to weigh up novelty, faced with the constant twofold risk of paranoia (any novelty is a danger to be avoided) and indifference (nothing new is interesting since I already know how to live). It was necessary to invent a burning curiosity for something even though I don’t yet know if I’m interested in it. It is this emotion that connects us to the new and the strange, and allows us to metabolize them.

Evolution causes living beings to vary all the time. All of today’s mammals come from an ancestor who, over fifty million years ago, looked like a mouse. So, from that point on, each line of mammals had to invent its odd diet and eccentric habits (from anteater to human, from whale to wolf). Each line has had to struggle to invent everything in the face of the environment in which it has settled. Consequently, the heightened attention to something new imbued with significance, something that transports us and to which we must invent a relevant response, is a vital emotion, widespread in evolution. It is the emotion that is designed to react with the most finely adjusted attention to novelty, so that it can take anything new seriously and integrate it by bending the space-time of life in a different way. Thus it can give the unprecedented, discreet event that occurs its enigmatic status, and find its rightful place every time, without considering it a priori as a danger to be avoided by reflex, or as negligible background noise. We share this emotion with all living beings that are ‘neophiles’, that is, curious about the new – and all living beings are neophiles at some point in their lives, since we are all born innocent. And while life is parsimonious in meanings, it is not stingy with new experiences: each living thing has had to encounter everything, and to consider everything. This emotion is part of the animal ascent of human animals, a shared past.

In human beings it is tinged with a twofold dimension – and I don’t know if this is shared by other living beings: the dazzle of reality that amazes us is simultaneously experienced as improbable and as perfect. One day, for the first time, you come across a seahorse. Your emotional reaction is ancient, it’s not constructed intellectually, it’s independent of any kind of knowledge and older than all of them. It’s like desire, tenderness for an infant, compassion for a vulnerable person. It’s an animal emotion, and within us it rises up to the surface of time. Biologist E. O. Wilson is amazed at these kinds of emotions: ‘The truth is that we never conquered the world, never understood it; we only think we have control. We do not even know why we respond in a certain way to other organisms, and need them in diverse ways, so deeply.’²

Despite the modern attitude which consists in trivializing the experience of the living world by erecting the sciences of ‘Nature’ into a machine for destroying miracles, this emotion is intensified when we learn that the maple tree in the street communicates with the lilies ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Introduction: The ecological crisis as a crisis of sensibility
• Chapter One: A season among the living
• Chapter Two: The promises of a sponge
• Chapter Three: Cohabiting with our wild beasts
• Chapter Four: To the other side of the night
• Epilogue: Adjusted consideration
• Afterword
• Credits
• End User License Agreement