Table Of Content

CREATURELY COSMOLOGIES: WHY METAPHYSICS MATTERS FOR ANIMAL [AND PLANETARY] LIBERATION- A PROCESS/JAIN ENCOUNTER A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Claremont School of Theology In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Brianne Donaldson Claremont, California May 2013 This dissertation completed by BRIANNE DONALDSON has been presented to and accepted by the faculty of Claremont School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Doctor of Philosophy Faculty Committee Philip Clayton, Chairperson Roland Faber Matthew Calarco Paul Zak Dean of the Faculty Philip Clayton May 2013 ABSTRACT CREATURELY COSMOLOGIES: WHY METAPHYSICS MATTERS FOR ANIMAL [AND PLANETARY] LIBERATION- A PROCESS/JAIN ENCOUNTER Brianne Donaldson The main thesis of this project is that metaphysics—as uniquely exemplified in the creaturely cosmologies of Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and the Indie tradition of Jainism—subvert dominant modes of thinking about and acting toward creaturely life. These “creaturely cosmologies” undermine the anthropocentrism that currently undergirds the majority of disciplines, discourses, and institutions. This explicit and implicit anthropocentrism not only exacts a deadly toll on animal bodies that do not conform to its narrow criteria of value and ethical consideration, but normative anthropocentrism also serves to disenfranchise and de-realize any population or cultural expression that does not conform to its increasingly mono-logical call. The original contribution of this project is in bringing critical animal theory—a largely secular discipline—into dialog with two metaphysical systems representing very different contexts and cosmological commitments, both of which center on creaturely experiences of perceptive becoming, rather than the human. This project investigates how Whitehead’s actual occasion and the Jain soul, or jlva: (1) extends the scope of creative experience to all entities in the universe; (2) describes how every becoming, including our own indeterminate development, takes place between the entanglements of the past and potential futures; and (3) demonstrates how this dual-directional becoming can function methodologically to inspire increasingly inclusive action, co-feeling, and conceptual realities that counteract loss. Every creaturely becoming is a bridge between what is and what might be, an experimental practice of freedom and direct intra-action amid entanglements toward total liberation, alternative globalizations, and ecological societies. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project bears the influence of numerous creatures and provocations. I thank my dissertation committee—Philip Clayton, Roland Faber, Matthew Calarco, Paul Zak, and Christopher Key Chappie—not only for their careful reading of the finished product, but more so for their ongoing influence on my own thought that percolates through and beyond these pages. I am especially grateful for the friendship of Saadullah Bashir, the mentorship of Dr. Jay Martin, and the companionship of my creaturely family, who each offered a distinctive form of support and presence as I found my footing on this path. CONTENTS Chapter ONE INTRODUCTION 1 1. Life Between Idealism and Realism 1.1. Idealism 1.2. Realism 1.3. Leveling the Binary 2. Creaturely Cosmologies of Becoming 3. Indeterminacy and Flexible Epistemologies 4. Liberation as Dysfunctional Metaphysics 4.1. Why Do Metaphysics Matter? 5. Forging Experimental Alliances 6. Methodology TWO FROM FRAMEWORKS OF RECOGNITION TO FRAMEWORKS OF RELEVANCE 34 1. The Evolution of Critical Animal Studies 1.1. Identity 1.2. Difference 1.3. Indistinction 2. A Cosmological Gap in the Field 3. From Who or What to How 3.1. Beyond the (Post)Phenomenological 3.1a. Derrida 3.1b. Butler 4. Performativity as Cosmological Provocation 5. Receiving the Strangest THREE SUBVERSIVE DEMOCRACIES: THE STRANGE CREATURE OF PROCESS THOUGHT 75 1. Subversive Affirmations of a Panexperiential Universe 2. Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature 3. The Basics of Process 3.1. Process and Pragmatism: Redefining the Live Creature 3.2. Process and Physics: World Shaping through the “Agential Cut” 4. An Ethico-Politics of Experiential Becoming 4.1. Flat Ontology or Ethical Hierarchy? 4.2. Animal Ethics in a Process Perspective 5. A Third Alternative: Moving in Two Directions at Once FOUR DISRUPTIVE SOULS: EMPIRICAL REVERSALS IN JAIN COSMOLOGY 111 1. Who are the Jains? 2. Empirical Reversals 3. Disruptive Souls in Ancient India 3.1. Between Karmic Indeterminacy and Omniscience 4. The Three Jewels of Jainism 4.1. Plural Epistemologies as Right Knowledge 4.1a. Anekantavada 4.1b. Nayavada 4.1c. Syadvada FIVE DIRECT INTRA-ACTIONS AMID ENTANGLEMENTS: BECOMING AS A BRIDGE TO REWORLDING 139 1. The JFva: Between the Empirical and Transcendent 1.1. Animal Liberation and Ahimsa 1.2. Ahimsa as Practices of Freedom 2. The Actual Occasion: Between the Concrete and the Conceptual 2.1. A Becoming-Idea 2.2. Becoming the Actual Occasion 2.3. Recognizing Our Partners in Reworlding SIX PROVOCATIVE LIFE: (RE)CONFIGURING FUTURES WITHOUT LOSS 188 1. The Cost of Becoming Is Perishing 1.1. Perishing as Disease and Cure 2. A Post-Secular Provocation 2.1. Whitehead’s God-as-Event 2.1a. Unifying Permanence and Flux 2.1b. Salvaging the Lost Past 2.1c. Provocative Folds into the Present 2.2. The Omniscient, Liberated Siddha 2.2a. Karmically-Bound Omniscience 2.2b. Karmically-Liberated Omniscience 2.2c. Ahimsa Between the Folds 3. Futures of the Forgotten Past EPILOGUE 209 BIBLIOGRAPHY 218 1 Chapter One Introduction The Panther In the Jar din des Plantes, Paris His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movements of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at time, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly —. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. — Rainer Maria Rilke When it comes to liberating animals and ecosystems from the blight of human interference, perhaps nonviolence is not the answer. In a provocative thought experiment titled The World Without Us, reporter Alan Weisman speculates that human wars are often an unexpected source of ecological restoration and species re-population. The absence of people, for example, has transformed the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea into a barbed wire preserve with “mature stands of kaimyo oak, Korean willow, and bird cherry growing wherever land mines have kept people out.”1 After the last exchange of prisoners in 1953, this demarcated strip has been slowly filling with new 1 Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: Picador, 2007), 232. 2 inhabitants. “One of the world’s most dangerous places became one of its most important—though inadvertent—refuges for wildlife that might otherwise have disappeared,” writes Weisman.2 “Asiatic black bears, Eurasian lynx, musk deer, Chinese water deer, yellow-throated marten, an endangered mountain goat known as the goral, and the nearly vanished Amur leopard cling here to what may only be temporary life support.”3 Of course, Weisman’s claim does not hold in all cases. When the U.S. dropped Agent Orange over the forests of Vietnam, for example, everything was laid to waste. But in the borderlands between North and South Korea where rice paddies are reverting to wetlands and ring-necked pheasants can be regularly spotted, the DMZ is a surprisingly hospitable buffer zone. After humans disappear from the earth, possibly by some combination of virus, natural calamity, or nuclear annihilation, Weisman speculates that it will not take long for creeping vines, moisture, and critters to infiltrate the fundament of human structures. Water will freeze and burst the pipes, saplings will explode through asphalt, mice and woodpeckers will burrow through the dry wall. Between lightning strikes that fell skyscrapers to arboreal reclamations of polluted farmland, these acts of “entropic vandalism” will hearken in a new generation of biodiversity currently stymied by our plastics, heavy metals, and chemical toxins. “ . .. [T]he time it would take nature to rid itself of what urbanity has wrought,” Weisman quietly asserts, “may be less than we 2 Weisman, The World, 234. 3 Weisman, The World, 234. 3 might suspect.”4 From the Panama Canal to the Great Wall of China, nature will quickly begin to heal the wounds homo sapiens have inflicted on the planet.5 1. Life Between Idealism and Realism Weisman’s imagined future illuminates one side of two conflicting philosophical perspectives regarding the so-called “nonhuman” world, namely realism and idealism. Philosophical realists, like Weisman, posit a world independent of human thought, observation, and action. Idealists, on the other hand, claim that the universe is, to put it simply, dependent on the conscious mind of humans for its form and value. Both of these are metaphysical views—or explanatory frameworks—that describe the nature of reality. Between these camps of idealism and realism, nonhuman life has been trapped since the earliest recorded philosophies. There is, however, nothing self-evident about the two positions. The idealism of ancient India for example, is not the same as Plato’s ideal forms. And in the post- Enlightenment west, yesterday’s realism is today’s idealism. The challenge for us is to see what is at stake in the distinction as we imagine our kinship with planetary life and potential futures. 1.1. Idealism Philosophical idealism has many conceptual, historical, and geographic layers, a complexity I can only hint at here as a preface for the two creaturely cosmologies I explore in this project—one deriving from ancient India and one from the margins of the (post)modem west. For the sake of this project, I want to explore two primary themes 4 Weisman, The World, 24. 5 Weisman, The World, 222. 4 with which the Ideal has been synonymous: Ideal as transcendent immateriality and Ideal as transcendent mentality.6 As immateriality, idealism emphasizes a “better” or transcendent state over and above the changing morass of the lesser real. Numerous ancient Indian philosophies, for example, described the power of an ideal “higher self’ that is obscured when one over identifies with the ego, elements, senses, mind, and emotions that comprise the “lower self.”7 The dualism of Seer and the Seen is a core aspect of most Indian philosophical traditions that held the two as intractably connected perspectives rather than antagonistic opposites. In the west, medieval idealism—in its dominant forms—rendered the split as an unbridgeable separation between material beings and religious belief in a perfect, other worldly, and supernatural deity, or Ultimate Being, the core of monotheism. No one could reach the magisterial heights of the omniscient, omnipotent, ever-present Divine. However, the essential spirit of the human was the closest manifestation, the second in line of the classical Great Chain of Being as nearest to divinity, overshadowing everything else in the lower links. In the case of Plato’s ideal forms, God was the ideal over humans, and these (human) ideals served as transcendent laws under which all 5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also refer to these two aspects of idealism as “objective idealism and subjective idealism” when they write “The Universals of contemplation, and then of reflection, are like two illusions through which philosophy has already passed in its dream of dominating the other disciplines (objective idealism and subjective idealism). Moreover, it does no credit to philosophy for it to present itself as a new Athens by falling back on Universals of communication that would provide rules for an imaginary mastery of the markets and media (intersubjective idealism).” What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 7. 7 Christopher Key Chappie, Yoga and the Luminous: Pantahjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 3.