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Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4722-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morizot, Baptiste, author. | Brown, Andrew (Literary translator) translator.
Title: Ways of being alive / Baptiste Morizot ; translated by Andrew Brown.
Other titles: Manières d’être vivant. English
Description: Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | “Originally published in French as Manières d’être vivant. Afterword by Alain Damasio. Actes Sud, France, 2020.” | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A powerful plea for a new understanding of our relationships with other animals and of ourselves”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021015849 (print) | LCCN 2021015850 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509547203 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509547210 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509547227 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental ethics. | Human ecology. | Human-animal relationships--Moral and ethical aspects. | Philosophical anthropology. | Life. | Human beings.
Classification: LCC GE42 .M6913 2021 (print) | LCC GE42 (ebook) | DDC 179/.1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015849 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015850
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Those who think the most deeply
love what is most alive.
Friedrich Hölderlin,
‘Socrates and Alcibiades’ (1799)
Foreword Creative Fire
Something has gone terribly wrong with the way we live on Earth. In small steps, over the course of centuries, we have turned the teeming planet into a mausoleum. We didn’t mean to. We were looking for safety, understanding, certainty, a way to simplify and control, a way to manage the chances and hazards of existence. But along the way, we somehow came to believe that we alone, of all the millions of flavours of being in this ever-unfolding experiment of life, are the only ones able to speak, to think, to speculate, to want, and to feel.
We have walled ourselves off and made ourselves exceptional. We’ve alienated ourselves from the rest of creation, and in doing so we have stripped ourselves of truth and meaning. Far from finding understanding, we have blinded ourselves to our larger purpose. Way short of making ourselves safe, we have put our very existence in peril. We live as if the planet is our wholly-owned subsidiary, when in fact things are exactly the other way around.
Baptiste Morizot has diagnosed this disease with poetic precision:
by dint of no longer paying attention to the living world, to other species, to environments, to the ecological dynamics that weave everyone together, we are creating from scratch a mute and absurd cosmos . . .
In extinguishing our own capacity for awe and attention, our own powers to engage in the widest theatres of being, we are also launching a new mass extinction.
Morizot has an answer to this culture of annihilation: we must turn our alienation back into a spirit of alien kinship. For a long time, we’ve devoted ourselves to dispensing with the need for presence. Western modernity has been predicated on ‘four centuries of devices that relieve us from having to pay attention to alterities’. But what if those alterities were themselves the key to our existence and the cure for our self-inflicted slide into absurdity? What if the noisy parliament of living things was not something to simplify, monetize, and eliminate, but rather was the source of work and purpose sufficient to keep us forever decoding it? ‘After all,’ Morizot writes, ‘there are meanings everywhere in the living world: they do not need to be projected, but to be found . . .’.
Many brilliant minds are right now engaged in the adventure of building a new-old culture, a culture of interdependence, reciprocity, and interbeing. Morizot is among the most lyrical of these pioneers. His philosophy is bracing, and his proposed solution to human exceptionalism is fiercely articulate. But this book goes well beyond philosophy. It is one of the most developed explorations I’ve seen of just what a ‘landing back on Planet Earth’ (to use Bruno Latour’s formulation) would look like. It’s a detailed dive into the complex, intractable challenges of returning to the community of living things. More than that, it’s a systematic account of the constant negotiation such work will involve. But it is also a deeply poetic love song for the ecstasy such hard and endless diplomacy brings. We must, as Robin Wall Kimmerer observes, learn how to become indigenous again. Morizot describes in beautiful detail just what that might look like and just how we might rejoin the work of composing the world in common with other creatures.
The view from the heights of this book is vertiginous and exhilarating. Morizot explores life at all gauges, from the cell to the entire biosphere. He peers through the longest lens of time, backwards across billions of years and forwards into an endlessly unfolding future. His words reawaken consciousness to all its possibilities. For Morizot, ‘the best analogy for understanding the evolutionary nature of the biosphere is that of a poetic fire: a creative fire’. This book is itself an instance of life’s poetry. It spreads the fire of creation. It is at once an adventure story, a personal odyssey, the deepest kind of philosophical meditation, a naturalist’s field guide to tracks and scat and chatter, an epic poem, a search for collective purpose, and a how-to manual for the restoration of the mind and soul.
Read these words and be shaken. Let them chill