"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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This is an idealistic position because humankind cannot return to a primitive or
instinctual way of life. Livingstone points to the instinctual when he calls the San
“symbiotic man about / the business of getting on with the earth” (LZ 44). By instinctual I
mean an innate and unconscious natural response to the physical world (the Earth). In
ecological terms this may be described as at-oneness or atonement, a sense of athomeness
or belonging within the natural framework. This (idealistic) view presupposes
a nondualistic being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s dasein) and is best explained by
phenomenology which valorises the subjective and innate perception of the phenomena
which make up the world. The work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908-1961) is often used by literary and philosophical ecologists. David Abrams argues
that Merleau-Ponty’s thesis points to the apprehension that humankind is of the Earth
(Livingstone 1986: 105) and not just on it:
His thesis of the primacy of perception suggests that all of our thoughts and our
theories are secretly sustained by the structure of the perceptual world. It is
precisely in this sense that philosophies reliant upon the concept of “horizon”
have long been under the influence of the actual visible horizon that lies beyond
the walls of our office or lecture hall, that structural enigma which we commonly
take for granted, but which ceaselessly reminds us of our embodied situation on
the surface of this huge and spherical body we call the Earth.
Yet we should not even say “on” the Earth for we now know that we live within
the Earth. (in Macauley 86-7)
Modern humanity is in danger of losing this instinctual understanding of our place
within nature. Or, to put it another way, we no longer have an innate ecological
sensibility. The intellectual advocates of ecological literary criticism all stress the
importance of the imagination. Perhaps imagination can, if not replace, at least offer a
corrective to humanity’s severance from instinctual understanding and so lead us to what
David Macauley calls “a new ecological sensibility” (3).
I will use David Suzuki’s explanation of ecology as “a new way of thinking about
the world – as sets of relationships rather than separated objects” (198) as my basic
definition of the term. Suzuki’s definition includes the idea of ecology as the study of the
interconnections or symbiotic sets of relationship of all things in the world and the human
race as active agents endowed with consciousness. Following Livingstone, I include the
concept of symbiosis (Greek sym (together) and bios (livelihood)) which points to a
mutually beneficial partnership between organisms of different kinds. In The Symbiotic
Planet: A New Look at Evolution Lynn Margulis states: “Symbiosis, the term coined by