The English title of the book by Baptiste Morizot that I just finished reading is Ways of Being Alive (Polity Press 2022, original French 2020). It is a wonderful mixture of many kinds of writing with a foreword by Richard Powers and an afterword by Alain Damasio, who presents a nice summary of the main arguments of the book. I’m not trying to do that, but will write down a few quotes that I stopped at for some reason. The titles of the chapters can give an idea of the spectrum of the book, which begins with wolf tracking: Introduction: The ecological crisis as a crisis in 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.
The first quote is from chapter three, and I am not sure why I marked exactly this one:
“The problem of mesoethics comes down to reappropriating the power to transform the territory of life that transforms us. ‘Build the environment that builds you, modulate the environment that modulates you’: this is the inscription over the gate to the mesoethical path.
Diplomatic ethics is the permaculture of the self – not an intensive and interventionist agriculture practised on oneself: it is based on an understanding of the ecology of passions, a channeling, an irrigation and a potentiation of desires. ‘I’ am a permaculture forest-garden, where classical ethics wanted me to be an impeccable formal French garden, where romanticism fantasised about an English garden, and neoliberal morality demands that I be a bit of a high-yield monoculture.” (Morizot 2022, 155)
The other quote is from chapter four:
“More than appealing to the love of Nature, or brandishing the fear of the Apocalypse, it seems to me that one way, better adjusted to the challenges of the time, amounts to trying out many approaches, practices, types of language, processes, devices, and experiences that can make us feel and live from the point of view of interdependences. Make us feel and live as a living creature in the living world, also caught in the weft, sharing ascents and ways of being alive, a common destiny and a mutual vulnerability.” (Morizot 2022, 217)
And a third quote from the epilogue:
“By what specific aspects of animism, then, could we permit ourselves to be affected, when we are the heirs of a naturalist modernity (that cosmology which contrasts ‘Nature’ on one side with humans on the other)? It seems to me that the relationships between animists and animals, plants and rivers are of a kind to allow humans to make contact with non-humans, to allow a sustainable ‘commerce’ with them, in the old meaning of this word, which designates negotiated interaction, as peaceful and mutually beneficial as possible, in a cosmopolitan, contingent context, always at the risk of discord and conflict./–/ In animist cultures, the invariant of these relationships, what characterises them all, is not an abstract egalitarianism, but rather the fact that they always require consideration, even when hunting to kill and eat monkey, even with a so-called ‘pest’ animal, or with a raspberry bush or a grove of wild trees that we do not use. This is what we have lost and neglected in late modern dualism.” (Morizot 2022, 232-233)
And with that dualism he refers to the dualism of considering nature as a resource on the one hand and as sacred on the other, but also the distinction “between our moral relation towards people (ends in themselves) and instrumental relation towards everything else (means for ends in themselves).” (Morizot 2022, 237)
He ends his epilogue as follows: ” What must be reinvented by this is a cosmo-politeness: it’s a matter of rediscovering and inventing adjusted consideration for the other forms of life that make the world, so that we can at last be just a little bit cosmopolite.” (Morizot 2022, 241)