The Thing

“I” am not one, but two (at least): The duality of Trigg’s concept of the human body is that although the body is the site of experience and ultimately of meaning, it has its own unconscious, containing repressed elements of a prehuman past. The coherence of lived experience and identity is always—at least partly—an imposition on the world, a partial negation of what is really there. If this sounds like a Lacanian move, it is. In Trigg’s book, twentieth-century phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty rub shoulders with psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. The subject’s “prehistory” is precisely that terrain that psychoanalysis seeks to chart, and for Freudians like Lacan, the coherence of embodied subjecthood is a conceit. In Lacan’s “mirror stage,” the infant—bodily uncoordinated and utterly dependent on others to meet its needs—achieves a sense of self-coherence and competency by mimicking its mirror image or another person it projects itself onto, thereby pulling itself out of its nursling dependency, this identification with an outside image acting as an organizational gestalt. This identification provides a useful but false sense of completeness, and is irreversible, for after this moment, every self-recognition will only ever be a misrecognition. “Underneath” the body’s apparent completeness, a necessarily occulted incompleteness or lack of actual coherence resides, “necessarily” because this glossing over of bodily incompleteness initially and forever subtends the ego’s integrity. The egoic subject’s original body, a chaos of flailing limbs and mysterious organs, is fundamentally unrecognizable.⁸

Trigg’s “unhuman phenomenology” borrows from the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) tradition in calling out this conceit, but his approach is unique. Trigg wants to decenter the human subject (usually centered in phenomenological description), rendering accessible an excessiveness within the human body, a force that buttresses the human subject’s bodily experience while remaining irreducible to it. The “un-” prefix indicates his “alien phenomenology’s” concern with the repression of nonhuman elements within the human body, which tends to keep them out of experiential bounds, and the occasional irruption of those elements within bodily experience, i.e., the uncanny.

Why horror, then?

The nail embedded in the foot, the loss of a fingertip at the kitchen cutting board, the broken bone: In these moments, the fragile contingency of bodily being is felt acutely, and we brush up against a presence inside us that we can only call “life itself,” a force which animates our flesh while simultaneously being “not us.” Our ordinary sense of bodily ownership is disturbed. We are rendered temporarily unfamiliar to ourselves, our blood and bones typically being inside us, invisibly supporting our various worldly projects. Such accidents are not only deformations in workaday subjective experience but point to the possibility that workaday subjective experience is based on a sense of unity and coherence that can be broken at any time. Perhaps subjectivity itself is the accident, and the original deformation is the appearance of biological life. This is the stuff of cosmic horror. Horror is philosophically productive for Trigg because it is more often in moments of horror or terror that we are confronted with the fragility of bodily-egoic consciousness, set adrift in a cosmos unmoved by human presence, our egoic identities a cover for a basic biological impulse that temporarily sustains us.

But the breakability or porousness of subjective experience is, of course, not only the stuff of horror. To cast the meaning of the accident in religious language: We depend upon a power that does not depend on us. Tantalizingly, Trigg gestures toward the idea that, for some, partial dissolutions of egoic identity are simply strange and curious rather than horrific. He notes that although philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft independently arrive at the discovery of an anonymous force that pulses within the life of the individual human subject, this disturbance of the egoic subject’s boundaries is met with strikingly different reactions:

In both thinkers, the specificity of the human body as an individual thing is contrasted with a corporeal ontology that is fundamentally alien. If this augmentation of the bodily self produces a sense of the uncanny in Merleau-Ponty, then it is only a question of temperament that the same structure is read as outright horror in Lovecraft.⁹

In her book Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman, political philosopher Jane Bennett also remarks on how different temperaments react in opposing ways to what Trigg calls the “augmentation of the bodily self.” “Influx and efflux”—a phrase from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” borrowed from the Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg—deals with the concept and experience of the “I” as a porous entity. “Subjectivity” and “interior” do not name properties of a unitary subject for Bennett. Instead, she avers that “a swarm of nonhumans are at work inside and as us; we are powered by a host of inner aliens, including ingested plants, animals, pharmaceuticals, and the microbiomes upon which thinking itself relies.” Whitman, attuned to material nature’s vivaciousness and the human body’s dependence on and openness to it, is Bennett’s guide in tracing the “influence” of these forces that participate in an individual’s subjectivity while not being strictly located within it.¹⁰

Influx & Efflux

Bennett’s overall project is in line with the new materialist critique of the subject/object // culture/nature dichotomy so common to Western metaphysics—a dichotomy that they argue undergirds human destructiveness and diminishes our understanding of both humans and nonhumans. And like much new materialist writing, her book is simultaneously poetic and political. By attempting to render in language the ineffable, material forces that course through bodies—or attending to writers who do—our grammar and syntax are stretched to their limits in discovering what exceeds their capacities, a process Bennett calls “writing up.”¹¹ Although inevitably imperfect, “writing up” imaginatively transmits to others a sense of a lively and teeming world within which our inescapably ecological selves are ensconced. What kinds of political formations follow from democratic congregations of such capacious and sympathetic bodies? What is a democracy that consists of bodies that consist of other bodies?

I began with a literary anecdote from Bennett’s book: D. H. Lawrence’s critical response to Walt Whitman’s invitation to influx, to participate in a form of cosmic breathing by taking in everything, letting the self go, and becoming part of the earthy, divine flow that one already is. Lawrence saw this inhalation as pollution. Bennett also compares Whitman to the French surrealist thinker Roger Caillois, noting that a fascination with the temporary diminishment of subjectivity (followed by an inrush of something other) runs through the work of both, but whereas Caillois writes of the experience of self-loss as life-reducing, typically tinged with horror, and even pathological, Whitman writes of such loss as joyous self-surrender: “If Whitman accents the ecstatic joys of merge, Caillois investigates its existential horrors.”¹² Both Trigg and Bennett seem to suggest that self-porosity is experienced as an existential threat to the self who doesn’t want it, whereas to the self who does, it is gift and release, even revelation. Same process, different affective register.

I now turn to a particular description of oneness with nature that Richard M. Doyle calls the “ecodelic insight,” which carries forward a tradition of accentuating the immanent and ecological character of the sacred, a tradition that has been as much informed by literary-philosophical romanticism as by the geological and biological sciences. An inflection point in this modernization of religious feeling was the publishing of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Thinkers in its wake had to either ignore or attempt to square themselves with “the new prestige of evolutionary science.”¹³ The Anglican bishop of Tasmania J. Edward Mercer wrote in his 1912 book Nature Mysticism: “It may be said, by way of special preface, that the nature mystic here portrayed is essentially a ‘modern.’ He is assumed to have accepted the fundamentals of the hypothesis of evolution.”¹⁴

This science-driven immanentization and ecologization of the concept, if not the experience, of the sacred continues with Doyle, whose Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere bridges a phenomenology of the immanent sacred with questions around personhood, subjectivity, and egoic identity.¹⁵ The main thrust of the book is that humans and psychedelic plants are in evolutionary cahoots, that psychedelics’ unique rhetorical power to persuade the individual of their connection to the cosmos and to instill a sense of awe at this very interconnectedness is symbiotic. Such plants aid the development of humans’ cognitive-rhetorical capacities by revealing to us an ecstatic vision of our intra- and interspecies connectedness. And, by fueling a desire to communicate this revelation of cosmic belongingness to other humans, psychedelic plants promote their own sexual selection—we want to cultivate them because they bond us to each other and everything else.

For Doyle, psychedelics are a media outlet for communicating the radical news of human imbrication within material and meaning-making networks beyond the human, a media outlet that allows for us to be interpellated, or hailed, as ecological beings who are always surrounded and sustained by many others. Doyle points out that although psychedelics help to communicate this “good news,” they are not necessary to provoke what he calls “encounters with immanence,” “a periodic recognition of the dense imbrication of organism and environment.”¹⁶ The apotheosis of this “periodic recognition” is a species of epiphany that he calls the “ecodelic insight,”

the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient . . . a sudden apprehension of immanence, a connectivity that exceeds the rhetorical capacities of an ego . . . a transpersonal, even transhuman interpellation.¹⁷

Like Trigg and Bennett, Doyle takes account of the strangeness and even horror that may accompany the revelation of the dense interconnection of embodied human subject and material nature:

Such a vision can be discouraging and even frightening to the phantasmically self-birthed ego, who feels not guilt but a horror of exocentricity. It appears impossible to many of us that anything hierarchically distinct, and larger and more complex than Homo sapiens—such as Gaia—could exist, and so we often cry out as one in the wilderness, in amazement and repetition.¹⁸

That something like Gaia should seem “impossible to many of us” conveys a sense that not everyone gets this connectedness, or wants to, and we cannot fault them for it because feelings of revulsion or horror would be psychologically normal for an intact ego in such an encounter.

I would argue that concepts like “Gaia,” “Universe,” and “Everything” are necessarily abstractions that communicate the complexity and ever-emergent, even abject or monstrous, character of something that would otherwise remain ineffable for us; such concepts could act as defenses for feelings of isolation or fragmentation. The irony of “everything” is that it always leaves something out. “Nature” is another such term, but nature is a freakish, queer thing, a profligate and excessive phenomena. If nature is not even One with itself, how can we become one with nature?

Doyle’s eclectic and highly intellectual spirituality, like Mercer’s “nature mystic” nearly a century prior, is greatly informed—in fact, made possible—by Darwin’s cosmo-vision. Freud, too, was an ardent reader of Darwin, and sought to make his science of psychoanalysis consonant with evolutionary theory. And, like Mercer and Doyle, Freud not only took up the phenomenology of religious experience in much of his writing but, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), dealt with a description of oneness not unlike Doyle’s ecodelic insight, if only in order to explain the experience purely in terms of psycho-physiological cause.¹⁹

I do not want to claim that the ecodelic insight or any other form of oneness experience is simply the enactment of the primal fantasy of a return to origins, which is how Freud dismissed his Catholic friend Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling,” which Freud defines as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” Rolland thought this dramatic felt-sense of interconnection to be the experiential core at the heart of religion, and Freud admitted that he himself lacked the necessary disposition for it, writing, “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself.”²⁰

Contemporary psychoanalysis seems to have turned a corner with regard to religion and spirituality, and I would suggest that psychoanalysis is a potent tool for thinking both critically and capaciously about ecological spiritualities. Analyst Paul Marcus argues that religion and psychoanalysis are two of the “great narratives of subjectivity,” both seeking to account for human self-consciousness, and seeking treatment for the wound of self-consciousness—the sense of separation (from each other, from God, from Nature) that egoic awareness inevitably produces.²¹

Psychoanalysis is not only a discourse forged in relation to institutional religion and the phenomenology of religious and mystical experience, but it has also long paid attention to the binary oppositions—subject/object, religious/secular, interiority/exteriority—that are central to thinking through the oneness encounters that may be the ecospiritual analogue to the traditional conversion experience. And with regard to material nature, psychoanalysis provides an ideal frame for thinking about egoic attachments to bodily processes and material objects.

It is here that a critical difference between the analyst and the ecospiritualist emerges: For the analyst, there is no such thing as a neutral relationship between the subject and the subject’s body, viewed as an object that the subject feels they are in possession of (“My body,” we commonly say). As Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, “the subject has a relationship of having with the body,” and this egoic attachment to body informs attachment to other natural or material objects in the subject’s environment. An ego seeking their own dissolution—the desire to become one with everything—may covertly be a narcissistic maneuver, betraying a desire both for mastery over body and environment, and for cosmic significance.²² As these desires are necessary for psychic development (and so, perfectly natural), it is not hard to imagine that they could show up within the discourse and practice of nature-centric spiritualities. In a less paranoiac fashion, it could be claimed that a psychological maturity has been reached in figures like Whitman, Merleau-Ponty, and Doyle, because in them, an anxious, mastery-seeking bodily possessiveness has been worked through.

All we need ask is this: When we hanker for Oneness, for union with the Whole, what are we hankering for, and why? Psychoanalysis could be the most apt conceptual frame through which to think about individual temperament in relation to ecological spiritualities and the oneness-with-nature encounter that seems to be their experiential/mystical component. If the body, as extension of its surrounding material environment, is to be taken seriously as a “ground” of spiritual experience or religious meaning, then the ego’s bodily possessiveness also needs to be taken seriously. Of course, the body is also that ensouled vehicle that is subject to disease and accident, that dies and rots, and so any discourse of oneness must incorporate abjected aspects of corporeality, too. (Consider the Tibetan sky-burial, for instance.)

The practiced nature mystic is perhaps half Lovecraftian in their approach, amenable to the occasional terrible surprise, to bouts of nausea and panic and stupefaction. In a mature ecospirituality, I would expect any talk of an immanent sacred to acknowledge a hankering for (self-)transcendence, to nod to the corpse, to admit that looking for an exit from the horrors of material nature is normal and that sitting with them can be a religious practice, literally binding us to earthly processes (“religion,” from religare, from the Latin leig, “to bind”), and a joyful and participatory yes! to this binding perhaps marks a conversion to some form of ecological spirituality.