Beautiful Soul Syndrome

Timothy Morton

Hegel held that philosophy wasn't just about ideas, it was about attitudes

towards ideas. These attitudes were kind of as yet unthought ideas, ideas

that hadn't yet been fully realized consciously. If, as Donald Rumsfeld has

claimed, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown

unknowns, there are also, as Zizek adds, unknown knowns—things that we

know, but we don't know that we know them: the unconscious, if you are

going to be psychoanalytic. So once you realize what your attitude towards

an idea is, that attitude itself becomes an idea, towards which you have yet

another attitude which you'll need to figure out—and so on in a dialectical

progression that Hegel calls the phenomenology of spirit. Philosophy,

therefore, is the history of philosophy, and history is inextricable from

philosophy. Thus it's a pleasure to be talking today about the history of

environmentalism, and in particular about an attitude towards certain ideas

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within environmentalism, an attitude that maintains its grip precisely to the

extent that it hasn't been fully thought, consciously. This is the attitude I am

calling Beautiful Soul Syndrome, or BS for short. Yes, that is a joke. And it's

a pleasure to explicate the history of this idea, which is doubly Romantic, as

it were, because the name Beautiful Soul was first developed by none other

than Hegel himself to describe a certain attitude he found typified in

Romanticism.1 And within Romanticism there developed the

environmentalism within whose ideological framework we are still

struggling today.

First, though, a word about “prehistory,” as I note that our lecture

series is entitled “A Cultural Prehistory of Environmentalism.” Prehistory

seems nicely poised between history and nature, as if it indicated a time

before history as such, or as if it was a prior history that is continued in the

sequence of events we acknowledge as historical. We know the ideological

uses of prehistory to describe “primitive” or “non-Western” societies, a

usage to which Hegel himself was prone, as when he designated Africa as

outside of history, locked in a perpetual prehistoric cycle whose spell could

1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller,

analysis and forward by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 383–409.
 3

only be broken by an imperial incursion. Prehistory, then, is a rather

suspect term, but it also works in a strange way, because it suggests, as in

my second tentative definition, a history of which we are not yet properly

conscious. This pre-historical condition is, I suppose, the condition of most

ecological knowledge—we are as yet unaware of the extent to which

Darwin, born two hundred years ago, had already historicized nature, laying

the groundwork for a truly natural history by outlining in broad terms the

algorithmic processes according to which this history might proceed. And

indeed this history is not simply a story we are telling about something that

is not historical in essence. For DNA is a code, and codes are languages,

and history is not only events but also the inscription of events, and so is

evolution, because that's how evolution works—through constant

rewritings of the DNA sequence.

This rewriting proceeds without a teleology, which is why Marx

loved it so much that he wrote Darwin a fan letter, and which is why it's

truly historical, because every single contingent event counts, and nothing is

an analog, metaphor, or metonymy for anything else. Our lungs evolved

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from swim bladders in fish.2 There's nothing lung-y about a swim bladder,

nothing predictive or teleological about it, nothing superior about a lung,

nothing metaphorically suggestive of breathing in the swim bladder, and so

on. Like history, the more you find out, the more ambiguous things

become. All the way down to the DNA level, things are highly ambiguous.

DNA as such lacks an essence—it's made up of all kinds of viral code

insertions so you can't tell which bit is original—the question of originality

is meaningless, to some extent. DNA as such isn't very DNA-ish. And it's a

text, so you can reread it and rewrite it. That's what viruses do—they tell

your DNA to make copies of themselves. So DNA doesn't contain a little

picture of you. In the same way, to study historical events is to study an

ever-ramifying, increasingly complicated mesh of interconnected

circumstances that don't quite add up to each other.

So the more we know about so-called nature, the more unnatural it

seems. Do you think a virus is alive? A virus is a macromolecular crystal

that contains some RNA code. It doesn't reproduce as such, it only tells

your cells to make copies of it. The cold virus is a huge twenty-sided

2
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996), 160.

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crystal. If you think the rhinovirus is alive, then you probably should admit

that a computer virus is also alive, to all intents and purposes. A computer

virus also tells other pieces of code to make copies of itself. The life–non-

life boundary is not thin and it is not rigid. We have a very protein-centric

view of life as a squishy, fluid, palpable thing—we're still living with the

remnants of that other Romantic view, Naturephilosophy, with its fantasy

of protoplasm or Urschleim. Your DNA doesn't stop expressing itself at the

ends of your fingers. A beaver's DNA doesn't stop at the ends of its

whiskers, but at the ends of it dam.3 A spider's DNA is expressed in its

web. The environment, then, from the perspective of the life sciences, is

nothing but the phenotypical expression of DNA code. This includes

oxygen (anaerobic bacterial excrement). And it includes iron ore (a

byproduct of archaic metabolic processes). You probably drove or flew

here today using crushed liquefied dinosaur bones. You are walking on top

of hills and mountains of fossilized animal bits. Most of your house dust is

your skin. The environment is beginning to look like not a very successful

upgrade of the old-fashioned term nature.

3
See Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford and

New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

 6

What the heck am I doing, then, as Professor of Literature and the

Environment? Well, I suppose that's my job, making things difficult and

complicated that appeared to be simple and straightforward. In part this is

merely about bringing us up to speed with contemporary life science and

with contemporary capitalism, which is now embarking on an inner

colonization of life forms and their DNA, and which is now developing the

technology to tell bacterial cells to produce plastic, not bacterial cells. It's

called Life 2.0 and as Zizek points out, if you call it Life 2.0 you've conceded

that nature was really Life 1.0—life as such is always already a form of

artificial life.4 But we're nowhere near up to speed with this and have no

real idea of what it means, beyond some posthuman platitudes about

cyborgs. In the words of another great Romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley,

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”5

So nature and environment are not such good words, because they're

not so accurate. There are, however, other reasons for finding these terms

problematic, and that's where Hegelian philosophy comes in, because, as

you'll recall, Hegelianism claims that ideas also come bundled with attitudes,

4
See Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 440.
5
Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman

and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2002), 530.
 7

attitudes that may even be encoded into the ideas themselves, like

operating software, so that the idea is unthinkable as such unless you also

plug in some kind of attitude towards it. Like a vanishing point in a

perspective picture, ideas select for certain ways of being understood. This

is a strange feature of ideas, which some call ideology. Ideology is not a well

understood term, because we think it means belief, which we think means

an idea you are holding onto tightly—these two assumptions are

themselves ideological, unfortunately, and obscure what ideology actually is.

The horrid thing about ideas, says ideology theory, is that they come

bundled with attitudes, as Hegel claims, so that the attitude is as it were an

automated feature of the idea—it just kind of pops up when you have it. In

other words, the attitude isn't a subjective state that is somehow

independent of the idea you're thinking. That's why attitudes are hard to

get rid of: they're hardwired into “that” side of reality, rather than “this”

one. If it was just a matter of prejudice, then we'd all have grown up long

ago and we wouldn't have any need for cultural prehistories of anything.

But as Marx saw, the attitude that sees attitude as prejudice (we call this

attitude the Enlightenment) suffers from its own bind spots, which have to

do with an illusion of freedom and autonomy.

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The critique of attitudes is the subject of William Blake's poetry,

which is why he makes such an interesting ecological poet, though not a

nature poet and not an environmental poet by any stretch of the

imagination, for he saw immediately that nature codes for a certain attitude

that he found regressive and oppressive. His Songs of Innocence and of

Experience are wonderful, deceptively simple attitudes, or as he says

“contrary states of the human soul,” which you can teach undergraduates

to read by telling them to put a speech bubble around them. In England in

the 1970s there was a common newspaper competition called Spot the Ball.

A group of soccer players appear in a photo, all positioned differently, and

you have to put an X where you think the ball is. Blake's songs, by contrast,

are Spot the Player. There's the ball, hanging in space, and you have to

figure out the position of the player—the attitude—that must have

determined the position of the ball. So, for instance, “The Tyger” is not

really about tigers, and only superficially about whether God could have

created evil things. It's about how the kind of attitude that sees things as

autonomous external objects (objectification) imagines God to be an all

powerful tyrant to whom we must kowtow, the Universe as a mysterious

place of powerful sublimity that makes us tremble with fear, and so on. It's

about a state of mind that reduces reality to a set of rhetorical questions

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along the lines of “Is the Pope Catholic?” “What immortal hand or eye /

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (“The Tyger,” 23–24) implies an answer

that somehow “we all know very well” (my ideology warning light blinks on

now), like those Discovery Channel shows about the awesome destructive

powers of Mother Nature.6 Unlike the speaker in its mirror poem, “The

Lamb,” the narrator of “The Tyger” is too scared and tongue-tied, and

oppressed by his ignorance, masquerading as worldly wisdom and

“experience,” to be able to see how he's caught in an attitude of which he's

not conscious. Innocence, for Blake, doesn't mean ignorance, but simply

never having harmed anyone whatsoever, a state that gives you a lot of

power. Experience, funnily enough, is the ignorant one—it tells lies in the

form of the truth.

And this is where we need to revisit the notion of nature. Nature

seems incontestably “there”—as many have reminded me, because what I

need, as a theory guy, is a good strong dose of it to set me straight. Karl

Kroeber, in Environmental Literary Criticism, literally says that what so-called

postmodern theorists need is a night out in a Midwestern thunderstorm, a

6
William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman

(New York: Doubleday, 1965; revised 1988).

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kind of ritual hazing that sounds horribly like waterboarding in 2009.7 But is

the “thereness”—I'll go further and say the “over-thereness”—of nature

actually a lie in the form of the truth, like one of Blake's Songs of Experience?

What kind of attitude (what kind of lie) is this truth enabling?

Ironically, I claim that the attitude that nature enables is the dreaded

dualism, Cartesian and otherwise, from which nature-speak in all its guises

from Romanticism to environmentalism has sought to extricate itself.

Nature is over there; the subject is over here. Nature is separated from us

by an unbridgeable ontological wall, like a bullet proof plate glass window—

plate glass being the Romantic-period invention that enabled shops to

display their wares as if they were in a picture frame, aestheticized, and

therefore separated ontologically from the viewer, belonging to another

order of reality altogether. Now this mention of plate glass is not

accidental, because plate glass is a physical byproduct of a quintessentially

Romantic production, the production of the consumerist. Not the

consumer, but the consumerist, that is, someone who is aware that she or

he is a consumer, someone for whom the object of consumption defines

7
Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 42.

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their identity, along the lines of that great Romantic phrase, invented once

by the gourmand Brillat-Savarin and once again by Feuerbach, “You are

what you eat.”8 Now this phrase implies that the subject is caught in a

dialectic of desire with an object with which it is never fully identical, just as

Wile E. Coyote never catches up with Roadrunner in the cartoon. If Wile

E. Coyote ever did catch Roadrunner, he would eat Roadrunner, at which

point Roadrunner would cease to be Roadrunner and would become Wile

E. Coyote. There is in effect, then, a radical ontological separation between

subject and object. And yet and at the same time, consumerism implies a

performative identity that can be collapsed into its object, so we can talk of

vegetarians, hip hop fans, opium eaters, and so on.

These performative styles are outlined by myself and Colin

Campbell.9 One style stands out, and that is a kind of meta-style that

8
Ludwig Feuerbach, Gessamelte Werke II, Kleinere Shriften, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer

(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972), 4.27; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of

Taste, trans. Anne Drayton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 13.

9
Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1987); “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in

Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in John Brewer and Roy

Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge,
 12

Campbell calls bohemianism and I call Romantic consumerism. This kind of

consumerism is at one remove from regular consumerism. It is

“consumerism-ism” as it were, that has realized that the true object of

desire is desire as such. In brief, Romantic consumerism is window-

shopping, which is hugely enabled by plate glass, or as we now do, browsing

on the internet, not consuming anything but wondering what we would be

like if we did. Now in the Romantic period this kind of reflexive

consumerism was limited to a few avant-garde types: the Romantics

themselves. To this extent Wordsworth and De Quincey are only

superficially different. Wordsworth figured out that he could stroll forever

in the mountains; De Quincey figured out that you didn't need mountains, if

you could consume a drug that gave you the feeling of strolling in the

mountains (sublime contemplative calm, and so on). Nowadays we are all

De Quinceys, all flaneurs in the shopping mall of life. This performative role,

this attitude, is all the more pervasive, leading me to believe that we haven't

1993), 40-57. Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5, 9, 50–51, 57, 107–

108; “Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic

Period,” in Timothy Morton, ed., Cultures of Taste / Theories of Appetite: Eating

Romanticism (New York and London: Palgrave, 2004), 1–17.

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really exited from the Romantic period—another sense in which

“prehistory” isn't quite right for what I'm describing, but extremely right in

another sense, namely that we're still caught in an attitude that we don't

fully understand or become aware of.

Romantic consumerism can go one step higher than the Kantian

aesthetic purposelessness of window-shopping, when it decides to refrain

from consumerism as such. This is the attitude of the boycotter, who

emerges as a type in the proto-feminism of the Bluestocking circle in the

1780s and 1790s, and which Percy and Mary Shelley, and many others,

continued. The specific product boycotted was sugar, which was

sentimentally described as the crystallized blood of slaves. By describing it

thus, the boycotter turned the object of pleasure into an object of disgust.

In order to have good taste you have to know how to feel appropriate

disgust, how to turn your nose up at something. So the zero degree

performance of taste would be spitting something disgusting out, or

vomiting. So the height of good taste performativity is abstaining from

sugar, and spice if you are one of the Shelleys, who held correctly that spice

was a product of colonialism. (Their vegetarianism was thus not only anti-

cruelty, but also anti-flavor.)

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The attitude of the boycotter is that she or he has exited

consumerism, but one could just as easily claim that this attitude is itself a

form of consumerism, as I've just argued. It's a performance of a certain

style of aesthetic judgment. So thinking that you've exited consumerism

might be the most quintessentially consumerist attitude of all. In large part

this is because you see that the world of consumerism is an evil world. You,

having exited this world, are good. Over there is the evil object, which you

shun or seek to eliminate. Over here is the good subject, who feels good

precisely insofar as she or he has separated from the evil world.

I am now describing Hegel's beautiful soul, who claims precisely to

have exited the evil world. Now the twist that Hegel applies here is so

beautiful that's it's worth pausing over, and perhaps adding a remark or two

on torture, and possibly on Dick Cheney, who seems to be preoccupying

us all at present. Hegel does not claim that the world may or may not be

evil—he doesn't claim that what is wrong with the beautiful soul is that it is

prejudiced and rigid in its thinking. The world is not some object that we

can have different opinions about. No: the problem is far subtler than that.

The problem is that the gaze that constitutes the world as a thing “over

there,” is evil as such. This is so brilliant that it's worth repeating. Evil is not

in the eye of the beholder. Evil is the eye of the beholder. Evil is the gaze
 15

that sees the world as an evil thing over yonder. Clearly we're in Bush–

Cheney territory here, and Al-Qaeda territory, with their platitudes about

the axis of evil and evil America and so on. Evil is the materialism that sees

evil as a lump of nasty stuff over there that I should be hell bent on

eliminating. There are really only two options: quietism, which is to

withdraw passively from the evil world; and terrorism, which is to fly a

plane into it. There is some truth, then, terrible to say, in the horrifying way

in which the Bush administration has classified certain forms of

environmentalist action as terrorism—its own kind of lie in the form of the

truth, as it were. Unfortunately, the kind of environmental fundamentalist

that sees the world as an essentialized living Earth that must be saved from

evil, viral humans is the very type of the beautiful soul, whose gaze is evil as

such. Ironically then, this kind of environmentalism is not spiritual, if by

spiritual we mean that it transcends the material world, but is instead

deeply committed to a materialistic view that sees evil as a concrete thing

that must be eliminated.

Now this kind of environmentalism is a form of anti-consumerism,

which in my view puts it at the summit of consumerism, not beyond it, but

at its very peak. It is indeed the most rarefied and pure form of

consumerism on Earth at this time. And as such it is plagued by Beautiful

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Soul Syndrome, because it sees consumer objects, and consumerisms (all

the various styles), as so many reified things over yonder, from which it

distances itself with disdain. So how do we truly exit from the Beautiful

Soul? By taking responsibility for our attitude, for our gaze. And on the

ground in slow motion, this looks like forgiveness. We are fully responsible

for the present environmental catastrophe, simply because we are aware of

it and can understand it. No further evidence, such as a causal link that says

humans brought it about, should be required. In some sense, looking for a

causal link only impedes us from assuming the direct responsibility that is

the only sane and ethical response to global warming and the Sixth Mass

Extinction Event (the two ways in which our current emergency appears to

us). This means that it's worse than a waste of time to keep trying to

convince people that environmentalism is a right way of thinking—a right

attitude. The current ecological emergency should have proved to us once

and for all that the attitude of environmentalism—that there is a “world”

that is separate from me, that nature exists apart from human society—is

not only wrong, but dangerously part of the problem, if only because it

provides a very good alibi and impedes us from actually doing anything

about our dilemma. The message of ecological awareness should be not

“We Are the World” (that awful charity song) but rather, “We Aren't the
 17

World.” And never were: there never was a nature; letting go of a fantasy

is even harder, of course, than letting go of a reality.

I can't have a “debate” about torture, because I don't think that

torture is a thing over yonder that you can have different opinions about,

like a flower arrangement. It isn't a matter of aesthetic judgment (“Is it

appropriate under circumstances? What is the precise threshold of pain

that constitutes it…”). To see torture thus is to be subject to Beautiful Soul

Syndrome, in which things appear as alienated from me. Torture is

something for which I am directly responsible. The only sane response to

Abu Ghraib was that we did it, we are responsible. This goes beyond, at

least at a certain limit of thinking, rounding up and punishing scapegoats,

even if we prove that they are directly responsible for torture. Because our

own reluctance to speak up at the time (the dark time, between 2001 and

2005—the other bits were dark, too, but that was really dark) also

implicates us, even if we are victims of an abuse of power that made us

afraid and paranoid.

Beautiful Soul Syndrome wants to induce in us the correct aesthetic

appreciation of the world. But this aesthetic attitude can never truly

become an ethical one. I'm with Kierkegaard on this, Kierkegaard who

brilliantly and terrifyingly showed how insidious Beautiful Soul Syndrome

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can be in his narrative of the seducer in Either/Or.10 In effect,

aestheticization is synonymous with evil because it always holds the world

at a distance from which to size it up, evaluate, assess. Thus the attitude

that says “We need more evidence on global warming before we act” is

joined ironically by the attitude that says, “If only you could experience

nature in the raw, you wouldn't have these evil beliefs about destroying it.”

They are both examples of Beautiful Soul Syndrome, because they both

require a certain aesthetic distance, an evaluative pseudo-contemplative,

“meditative” stance that always contains aggression somewhere in there.

Here is a Buddhist lama writing about Beautiful Soul Syndrome in what I

hold to be the definitive passage on the affinity between contemplativeness

and violence. The lama is recounting the words of a visitor from the city of

Birmingham to his monastery in southern Scotland. The visitor was a little

hesitant to do any actual meditation:

10
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. and intro. Alastair Hannay

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 243–376.

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Well, it's nice you people are meditating, but I feel much better if I

walk out in the woods with my gun and shoot animals. I feel very

meditative walking through the woods and listening to the sharp,

subtle sounds of animals jumping forth, and I can shoot at them. I feel

I am doing something worthwhile at the same time. I can bring back

venison, cook it, and feed my family. I feel good about that.11

I have recently been accused of not knowing what nature is because I have

never killed an animal that I've subsequently eaten. This is a criterion that I

am happy not to have fulfilled. Heideggerianism, which is the quintessence

of the contemplative ecophenomenological mode in which a lot of nature-

speak now addresses us, is marked by a trace of violence, an unspeakable

violence towards the world it so lovingly appears to reveal to us. The very

worn insides of the peasant shoes about which Heidegger rhapsodizes so

beautifully in his essay on the origin of the work of art are made from

11
Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (Boston:

Shambhala, 1993), 35–36.

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leather, which is animal skin.12 You can imagine committing a murder in a

beautiful, mindful, Heideggerian way. This is pure Beautiful Soul Syndrome,

because it sets up reality on a pedestal to be admired and scorned, and sets

up your own experience that way, as an object of aesthetic contemplation.

Aesthetically powerful descriptions of the natural world, then, are not only

a bit of a waste of time, but might actually unwittingly aid the “other side”

of the contemporary coin, which for sure sees the world as an exploitable

resource or as objects of instrumental reason (the difference between a

cow and beef would be the application of this instrumentality).

Ecological ethics, then, cannot be grounded in aesthetics. But there's

a further problem. If you beat up on the Beautiful Soul and leave it bleeding

to death in the street, are you not also a victim of Beautiful Soul Syndrome?

However much you try to slough off the aesthetic dimension, doesn't it

always stick to you ever more tightly? At a certain limit of thinking, then,

transcending Beautiful Soul Syndrome means forgiving the Beautiful Soul,

recognizing that we are responsible for this Syndrome, whether we think of

ourselves that way or not. The only way out of the problem is further in,

12
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.

Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 15-87 (33–34).
 21

which means jumping into our hypocrisy rather than pretending that finally

we are totally disillusioned and are now thinking outside of ideology,

without attitudes. This is a test case for our ability to progress in our social

collectivity, because thinking this means dropping various support concepts

that provide the background against which regular thinking takes place:

concepts such as nature, environment, world, life. Taking full responsibility for

the planet means dropping these concepts. We can't have our cake and eat

it too. Having your cake and eating it too is called consumerism, which is

Beautiful Soul Syndrome. The only way out is in and down. Which is why I

have chosen to call my approach to ecology dark ecology.

Dark ecology realizes that we are hopelessly entangled in the mesh

of interconnectedness, without any possibility of extricating ourselves. Dark

ecology finds itself fully responsible for all life forms, because like a

detective in a noir movie, it has realized that it is complicit in the crime.

Dark ecology is ironical, introverted and introspective, attitudes that are

routinely shunned by masculinist, heteronormative environmentalism.13

Dark ecology is melancholic because melancholy is the medieval humor that

is closest to the Earth, it being the Earth humor, and likewise because

13
See Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA (forthcoming).
 22

melancholy is that residuum of our unbreakable psychic connection to our

mother's body, which stands metonymically for our connection with all life

forms. The irony of dark ecology is like being caught in your own shadow.

Hegel disliked Romantic art because its ironies reminded him of the

Beautiful Soul. He describes this irony in hauntingly environmental terms in

his lectures on aesthetics. Environmental awareness is, finally, a sense of

irony, because it is through irony that we realize that we might be wrong,

that identity might not be as solid as we think, that our own gaze might be

the evil that we see.

The University of California, Davis