David Lorenzo Cardiel reviews philosopher Michael Marder’s The Phoenix Complex.
Michael Marder, The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature (MIT Press, 2023), 308 pp.
Whereas nature promises an ostensibly limitless outpouring of births, our philosophical, scientific, and technological outlooks are spellbound by death. (…) The default condition of our thinking, if not of our being, is a necroepistemology that sees the world through the prism of death cleansed of life, the death, which nonetheless passes for life itself, plus the cutting-edge research on how to delay aging and to satisfy the ever-growing demand for immortality (for the ultrarich).
There is something revelatory about Michael Marder’s thought. His elegant, refined prose and elevated literary gifts are an inviting veil that is ultimately lifted. It lives up to the high standard of his previous books, Through Vegetal Being (Columbia University Press, 2016), written with Luce Irigaray, and more recently Philosophy of Passengers (MIT Press, 2022). In those books he pursued lines of thought that had often gone unnoticed or had only been touched upon with timidity: the study of the plant kingdom, of its intelligence, of the ontology of plants; or the perspective of the passenger, which, raised to an almost metaphysical level, engenders novel inquiries into the nature of the human being and the process of living.
Marder has returned to the international philosophical scene with The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature. Marder engages in a reflection centering on the idea of the “phoenix”, which represents the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Marder studies an array of mythic accounts of this cycle, including Egyptian accounts of Osiris, the first resurrected, who restores the cycle of life that his brother Seth had broken through his crime, and Indian mythology with its notion of samsāra or the cycle of reincarnation. He links this to other religions that involve modified presentations of the notion of reincarnation, from Christianity to Taoism, the religion of Chinese antiquity, as well as beliefs in pre-Columbian America.
Marder suggests that reincarnation, a notion reconstituting the order of the “natural”, which Marder places on the table and questions with overflowing intelligence, was a central concept for the great civilizations of human history. He argues that in our Western context, which is heir to the Enlightenment and modern science as we conceive it, reincarnation has been replaced by other ways of understanding nature, called necroepistemology by Marder: studying the world from a still, paralyzed life, limited to a framework so narrow that it strangles life itself.
The term necroepistemology was coined by the American philosopher and specialist in Iberian Literature, Elizabeth Spragins, who draws on Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics as inspiration for her own concept. Marder expands on Spragins’s essay A Grammar of the Dead: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean. He writes: “Nonanalytic philosophy, heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger and existentialism, is enthralled with death. Technology implements prevalent scientific and philosophical perspectives on a planetary scale, seeing death everywhere. Nature is accessible to our understanding as an a priori lifeless “sum total or aggregate of natural things.” The default condition of our thinking, if not of our being, is this necroepistemology that sees the world through the prism of death cleansed of life, the death, which still passes for life itself, apotheosized in today’s cutting-edge research on how to delay aging and to satisfy (for the ultrarich) the desire for immortality. This is paradoxically twinned with apocalyptic sentiments, the “endism” that recurs throughout our zeitgeist.
Marder traces major currents of thought, investigating the concept of physics and nature as understood by pre-Socratic thinkers. He invites the reader to accompany him on explorations of India and ancient Egypt, or follows the migrations of Jewish and Christian traditions, Roman philosophy, and the wanderings of European romanticism. He charts the relationship between psychology and nature. This long historical depth makes this essay special. It combines modern science, including its latest discoveries, with the perspectives of ancient religions traversing the intervening ages to examine the processes of life, nature and regeneration. This process of beginning and end, like an infinite and unstoppable Ouroboros, ranges from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Not even political processes escape this cyclical destiny.
The Phoenix Complex recapitulates the vision of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche or Leo Tolstoy who critiqued both science and philosophy. He reminds us that if we arrest our gaze to study the particular without preserving the sincere effort to understand the “whole”, we are stopping life itself, and lose the ability to reflect it in its splendor. Knowledge becomes stagnant and, with it, we ossify ourselves. Reading this dazzling treatise rekindled my sense of mysteries. It evoked the feeling of an initiation.
In keeping with this hermetic tone, Marder also examines the current scientific quest to achieve immortality, a contemporary manifestation of a persistent human obsession, in whose pursuit we forget to value the existential gifts of being alive. Instead, we focus on the limitation of our days, the aging process and the apparent randomness of illness. We might recall the Epic of Gilgamesh, when the king of Uruk goes in search of the wise Atrahasis, survivor of the flood, to reveal to him how to obtain the source of eternal life. The Mesopotamian hero retrieves the plant that grants eternal life from the bottom of the sea, but a snake snatches it from him. Previously, Gilgamesh had met the tavern goddess Siduri, who warned him that immortality is the exclusive property of the gods and can never be achieved by humans. She recommends, instead, living day to day, following routine, customs, enjoying the experience of good health, and the joy of being able to contemplate a new dawn.
When the snake devoured the plant of immortality, it shed its skin and renewed its body. Is this the current direction of technological attempts to evade death? If we transfer our minds to digital data banks, or reverse physical aging, do we utterly redefine biological life, with its evolutionary patterns of inheritance and adaptation? Will we at last (if we haven’t already) irretrievably overthrow the dynamics of environmental and contextual alterations, including inevitable aging, destroying relations of natural balance between species? Whilst the goal for human being to enjoy greater health, and as a peaceful an existence as possible is reasonable, immortality completely overthrows the cycle of life. This problem is a central concern in The Phoenix Complex.
Immortality is a process that, obviously, breaks the principle of the Phoenix, since it extracts the subject that would achieve such alchemy (call it science or foolishness) from the process of life itself. Marder criticizes this rupturist tendency, as contrary to existence itself. The Phoenix Complex is an impressive work. Overflowing with literary charisma, it offers the reader an intelligent, calm challenge, provoking deep personal reflection on generation and regeneration.
David Lorenzo Cardiel is a natural philosopher, lecturer, literary critic and writer. He researches scientific and humanist questions relating to ethics, ancient cultures (Europe, India and Asia) and ontology. He is known for his articles, press columns and reviews in some of the major specialized and non-specialized media of Europe and America.
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