In the open to Process and Reality, Whitehead writes that,
All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living– that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested from its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. (xiii – xiv)
I have been haunted by this passage ever since I first read it. What Whitehead is, in effect, saying is that all things live from death. While I would not go as far as Whitehead in claiming that all things live from death– I don’t think this is true of rocks, hydrogen atoms, and stars –it is certainly true of organic beings. To live is to live from death, because to live is to eat. With the exception of sunlight and chemicals used in photosynthesis and chemosynthesis, eating is the transformation of other organic matter into the patterned matter of the organism.
Eating is a set of operations that de-forms another organic being and re-forms that being into wood, leaves, bark, muscle, bone, blood, and nerves. Even trees and grass are a kind of carnivore in the way they eat the microbes of the soil. However, because there is no such thing as an unformed matter, a matter that does not have an intrinsic structure of its own, the deformation of organic beings and their reformation into cells for another organic being is never simply the unilateral or hylemorphic imposition of a form upon these materials. That which is eaten contributes something of its own to the machine that eats, contributing form to the organization of the vampire. I will be different depending on my diet. My cells will have different powers, different capacities, depending on whether I live from the death of these organic beings or those organic beings. I will even think differently depending on the death that I live from, this food affecting my moods and ability to cognize in this way, those foods affecting my moods and ability to cognize in that way. Those who suffer from depression and anxiety disorders are advised to maintain a particular diet.
read on!
This is what Whitehead means by “objective immortality”. It is not that the organic being is preserved as itself, but rather that its being contributes differences to the being of the being that consumes it. The dead continue to contribute their differences, making the beings that live from them different than they would otherwise be. Days after I had buried my beloved cat Tabby in the back yard, a tiny forest of trees began to sprout from her grave, growing in that particular location and not in others. Something of those trees is Tabby. Had those seeds grown elsewhere, those trees would have a different pattern or structure, their cells would be of a different nature. A becoming-cat of the tree. This “objective immortality” that is carried on in the reapers of death is an instance of what Alaimo calls “trans-corporeality”.
Between Heidegger and Whitehead, we thus have two very different conceptions of death; two conceptions of death that are not necessarily opposed, but which are simply different. With Heidegger we have an individualist conception of death. In Heidegger I know that entropy, dissolution, absence, is my ultimate destiny. I am a being-towards-death, a being that knows that death is my ultimate destination; but above all, I am a being that knows that only I can die my own death, that no one else can die it for me. This being towards death thereby individualizes me. In knowing that only I can die my own death, I come to the realization that all of my decisions, all of my decisions, are my own; that no one else can make them for me and that I can never attribute them or pass them off on someone else. For each and every thing, it was always I that chose this thing. My being-towards-death thus leads me to take responsibility for my being. I’m not here doing Heidegger nearly the justice he deserves.
By contrast, in Whitehead we get a collectivist notion of death. Here my being is not a being-towards-death– though it can be that too –but rather my being is a being-from-death. I am a being that lives from death. And while our being is ultimately solar in the sense that that which lies at the base of the food chain derives its nourishment from the light of the sun, plants as well as us live from the death of countless other beings. Insofar as we live from countless other beings, we are thus a crowd of other beings. There is thus a truth of metempsychosis. We are solar, we are bacteria, we are trees, grasses, cows, lambs, fish, and eels. Even the air I breath is of the trees. It is for this reason that the Japanese, before their meals, say “itadakimasu“, thanking their food, not God, for imparting its life-force on to them. In Whitehead’s being-from-death we thus realize our trans-corporeality, or the manner in which we live from a crowd of other beings. Rather than an individualist conception of death that subtracts us others, this being-from-death draws us ineluctably to the awareness of how we are bound up with others.
It is clear then, that while ethical questions might ultimately be bound up with questions of life and death, they can’t be bound up with the rejection of death. This is because there can be no question of extricating ourselves from death. In our being-from-death we are inextricably and necessarily bound up with death. The question then is not one of whether or not to renounce death, but rather of how we ought to live with death. As Derrida said, it is a question of how to eat well. Perhaps we could say that there is a nihilistic way of being-from-death that betokens “hyper-death” through the bio-catastrophe that it invites: ecological monoculturalization, factory farming, the devastation of fisheries, etc. Then, perhaps, there would be an ethical way of living from death. I scarcely know how to even pose these questions. Eating well does not amount to having a “well appointed” table, but rather would be a way of eating that says “itadakimasu” and really means it, seeking to preserve the biodiversity of the planet and its fecundity for producing difference. It would be a way of living-from-death that does not produce absolute death or the utter annihilation of that from which we live.
October 18, 2012 at 7:25 pm
wow, I was unaware of this excellent quote from Whitehead…it does remind me a lot of Bataille…who i guess also wanted to exted the eating/shitting relationship to the earth
October 18, 2012 at 7:35 pm
You say: “While I would not go as far as Whitehead in claiming that all things live from death– I don’t think this is true of rocks, hydrogen atoms, and stars –it is certainly true of organic beings.”
And, why is this not true of rocks, hydrogen atoms, and stars”? From everything I’ve studied over the past 30 years about cosmology everything about us including the rocks, hydrogen atoms, and stars that we see were formed from the death of earlier giants, great Red Stars, in the universe eons ago. The whole process of galaxy formation, as well as the formation of solar systems, all the way up and down is built upon the death of former things. I do not think there is some distinction between the organic/inorganic as for death, per se. This would be to define what death means for an organic entity as compared to an inorganic, and to split these types of entities into a dualistic camp. And who will show us the actual chemistry distinction between organic and inorganic? This is to presume we are part of the old materialist perspective on static material dead matter and living breathing organic matter. Hasn’t this conception been challenged repeatedly?
Sorry if it might sound like I’m arguing. I’m not. Just trying to think through such statements and understand the differences between these conceptions of reality as seen in Whitehead and Heidegger. And OOO and a Transcendental Realist perspective.
October 18, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Given that such things are not autopoietic systems, they’re not alive. Therefore it doesn’t make sense to talk about them as dying.
October 18, 2012 at 10:23 pm
I think your on the right track with your your statement:
“Perhaps we could say that there is a nihilistic way of being-from-death that betokens “hyper-death” through the bio-catastrophe that it invites: ecological monoculturalization, factory farming, the devastation of fisheries, etc.” I like it that your moving into the ethical dimensions of your philosophical flat ethics. I’m intrigued….
But in your estimation of the Sun: it may not be alive in the sense of organic life, but that it is an autopoetic system is a different matter. As we all know the Sun is a gigantic nuclear reactor. As Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela relate, and as you have iterated in other excellent posts, we can define autopoeisis as:
“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of process of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. It follows that an autopoietic machine continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations.” (Maturana & Varela 1980; p.79)
Does this not reflect the processes going on within the nuclear reactions that keep the Sun a unified self-reproducing entity? Are all autopoetic systems to be equated under the auspices of ‘being alive’? It seems to me that there are many systems in this wild universe that are both autopoeitic and not ‘alive’ in your sense. Either way your right on your other points, and I want belabor such an issue… it’s not worth that. This is a friendly post not some debate to prove I’m right… I’m not really out to do that, Levi :) I’m just an old codger like Socrates or even Diogenes, a dog after a bone…
Thanks for many good reads and ideas… you always keep the apodistra (Orwell) flying!
October 20, 2012 at 4:23 pm
“The question then is not one of whether or not to renounce death, but rather of how we ought to live with death…” (Larval Subjects)
Seems to me too pessimistic.
Vis-a-vis the threat of entropy, I think we can identify a possible therapeutic location of human happiness, that is, in the knowledge that the Real is foreclosed, a la Laruelle. This knowledge is of an object-oriented kind, not necessarily in the order of things Harman gave to the in-themselves of things and objects, but rather the kind of order that everything saturated by matter does not have to be necessarily null, reducible to the fascism of entropy. That everything does not promise anything is understandable from the point of absolute contingency. Yet it is also the same absolute which tells us that everything does not have to be as it is. As Meillasoux puts it, if everything is contingent, nothing possesses of absolute reason why it has to exist as it is. As such, even solar decay cannot reduce us to real imprisonment in the world, ‘real’ in the sense that its unilateral combustion ascertains extinction. As Nick Land argues elsewhere, “It is only because our bodies are weak and die that it is impossible for there to be a perfect cage, or for the sun to be interminably locked in fascist health. To be protected by something more than zero is the final term of imprisonment (Thirst for Annihilation, 139).”
An impossible thing happens here: we are in-existent or we are ghosts, in/consistent zeroes, un/presentable entities (I think this is somewhat close to Badiou’s position) resulting from contingency. We therefore cannot be perfectly totalized and/or imprisoned by the unilateral Void courtesy of the dying sun. Paradoxically, because we can die (which is the ultimate source of human hope and transcendence, that which protects our existence from being “protected by something more than zero,” which means the possibility of living an eternal life) entropy cannot perfectly imprison us, whatever it connotes (either we are beings-toward-death or we are beings-from-death). Extinction is not-All; otherwise, if it is All, we must also be capable of living in eternity, an imagined logical necessity that is absolutely prohibited, as Meillasoux would argue, by the ultimate logic of absolute contingency.
As I put it elsewhere, the Void cannot absolutely void the subject, besides the fact that the subject is mortal which renders the void’s threat of extinction logically useless. Nonetheless, there are ethical dangers that ought to warn us against embracing this position. But it has life-enabling purposes as well. At the end of the day (Hegel would emphasize the wonder of the night), it is an enlightened humanity that will decide, enlightened from a position where light has to have minimal or negligible significance. Similarly, Laruelle has interesting words: “Human beings have a problem which only they can solve: what to do with the World? Salvation or rebellion? Exploitation or therapeutic? Consumption or consummation?” (Future Christ, 113)
Just a thought.
October 22, 2012 at 7:35 am
[…] From Larval Subjects, a contemplation of the facts that, on one hand, we are each, individually moving towards our own, singular death, and on the other hand, we all live from death; and “Insofar as we live from countless other beings, we are thus a crowd of other beings. “: Living from Death: on Eating […]
October 22, 2012 at 8:49 pm
[…] end with an excerpt with this essay, “Living from Death: on Eating” by Levi […]