ANIMISM

The concept of animism best describes my approach to the more than human world, even though I think it is philosophically problematic. Animism, following Descola, is the idea that all beings are alive, though differently bodied. Trees, humans, birds, mountains, gods all have different bodies and those differences shape their approach to and experience of the world. But we are all equally alive. I believe, for instance, that mountains are alive and can communicate with us. 

The philosophical problems kick in because the category “mountain” and where a given mountain starts and stops are human inventions. Understandably, the philosophical response (see Whitehead, for instance) is to find some kind of small unit that is sentient in some sense, and which makes up the mountain.  But the problem is that this loses the reality that the mountain, or the pasture or the creek speaks to us. It’s the mountain that moves us, not some small unit that we don’t experience.

I couple my animism with a rejection of the possibility of a divine being who exists eternally outside of the system, outside of the cycle of birth and death to which all beings are subject. Thus I reject any theistic or panentheistic approach as not true to my core experience that we are all beings who are subject to the cycle of birth and death. 

It's easy to argue that this position rejects the Jewish imagination of the divinity; that’s the argument that David Seidenberg makes in his wonderful book The Kabbalah of Ecology. But I wonder if our ancestors, back when they worshipped YHVH and his consort Asherah, back when they worshipped Baal and Mot, the God of Death, didn’t believe that the Gods were part of the world as a whole in the same way that thunder and snails and mosquitoes are.