831
mind were echoed from Aristotle to Kant whose vast bodies of work laid out arguments for and against sensory perception versus the pure inherent understanding of
propositions akin to physics, mathematics, and music that are free of human meddling or definition. Again, this echoes the inflection of the individual as a potential
non-local bifurcation point within the broadest reach of natural selectivity.
In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), certainty,
judgment, and all claims to knowledge are relegated to a mysticism that ultimately
prevails throughout experience and artistic expression, usurping the sterile refutations within philosophical disciplines, which are by definition endless. American
philosopher Edmund Gettier III (b.1927) posed a fundamental problem, ordained by
the very maelstrom of wavering confidence in human introspection concerning the
presumed laws and unmistakable gravitas of any and all alleged certainty. Whereas,
ecology changes everything; the a priori and a posteriori approaches to pragmatism
are both quantified but, more importantly, qualified. We can concede, within that
aviary of a world, that the semions of avifauna are beyond our ken. We can only
hope to understand. And therein, the word hope embodies a far more realistic and
relevant approach to the world, where humans are concerned. It is a hope that entails
some level of grasping the end, or the context, the framework of life histories. In the
case of ornithology, it is clear that the statistically average person’s complex relationship with birds has broadened out into what we may suggest is the matrix of all
avifauna and of humanity. It is no chance encounter resulting simply in pleasure or
consumption. Rather, a vast mating ground of aesthetics, curiosity, cosymbiotics,
and deep affiliation.
In considering the great gatherings within mythological time spans, spearheaded
by a Mahavira or St. Francis, we dream of, and put much stock in the taxocoenotic
visions of interspecies relationships. Science does not normally aggrandize the
components in the guise of articulated reunions, but that is precisely what they are,
whether at a watering hole or in the codependent configurations of a wasp and a figtree.
12
We have earlier mentioned St. Eustace, going from the hunter to a pacifist/
vegetarian, of the great vision of Isaiah, of wolves and lions and lambs taking pleasure in each other’s companionship. But we, aside from Isaiah or Eustace themselves, omitted from the picture that we engender, an endogenous peril that resides
most paradoxically within the same Thinker. There is no closure drawing upon this
problem, particularly at present, and certainly since the rise of Nazism. The
Anthropocene has forensically forecast every gap in Renaissance and Romantic
logic: in all those other organisms that so readily demonstrate a presocial or eusocial
set of prevailing orientations versus that anomalous peril represented by Homo sapiens. These rules of decorum come naturally to slugs and hippos; although we do not
deny that ants and termites have been fighting over, it would appear, territory, for
millions of years.
12 See, for example, the summary of Ficus-specific wasp co-evolution, in “The story of the fig and
its wasp,” by Katie Kline, May 20, 2011, esa, https://www.esa.org/esablog/research/the-story-ofthe-fig-and-its-wasp/, Accessed February 14, 2020.
96.2 The Poetry of Taxocoenosis
mind were echoed from Aristotle to Kant whose vast bodies of work laid out arguments for and against sensory perception versus the pure inherent understanding of
propositions akin to physics, mathematics, and music that are free of human meddling or definition. Again, this echoes the inflection of the individual as a potential
non-local bifurcation point within the broadest reach of natural selectivity.
In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), certainty,
judgment, and all claims to knowledge are relegated to a mysticism that ultimately
prevails throughout experience and artistic expression, usurping the sterile refutations within philosophical disciplines, which are by definition endless. American
philosopher Edmund Gettier III (b.1927) posed a fundamental problem, ordained by
the very maelstrom of wavering confidence in human introspection concerning the
presumed laws and unmistakable gravitas of any and all alleged certainty. Whereas,
ecology changes everything; the a priori and a posteriori approaches to pragmatism
are both quantified but, more importantly, qualified. We can concede, within that
aviary of a world, that the semions of avifauna are beyond our ken. We can only
hope to understand. And therein, the word hope embodies a far more realistic and
relevant approach to the world, where humans are concerned. It is a hope that entails
some level of grasping the end, or the context, the framework of life histories. In the
case of ornithology, it is clear that the statistically average person’s complex relationship with birds has broadened out into what we may suggest is the matrix of all
avifauna and of humanity. It is no chance encounter resulting simply in pleasure or
consumption. Rather, a vast mating ground of aesthetics, curiosity, cosymbiotics,
and deep affiliation.
In considering the great gatherings within mythological time spans, spearheaded
by a Mahavira or St. Francis, we dream of, and put much stock in the taxocoenotic
visions of interspecies relationships. Science does not normally aggrandize the
components in the guise of articulated reunions, but that is precisely what they are,
whether at a watering hole or in the codependent configurations of a wasp and a figtree.
12
We have earlier mentioned St. Eustace, going from the hunter to a pacifist/
vegetarian, of the great vision of Isaiah, of wolves and lions and lambs taking pleasure in each other’s companionship. But we, aside from Isaiah or Eustace themselves, omitted from the picture that we engender, an endogenous peril that resides
most paradoxically within the same Thinker. There is no closure drawing upon this
problem, particularly at present, and certainly since the rise of Nazism. The
Anthropocene has forensically forecast every gap in Renaissance and Romantic
logic: in all those other organisms that so readily demonstrate a presocial or eusocial
set of prevailing orientations versus that anomalous peril represented by Homo sapiens. These rules of decorum come naturally to slugs and hippos; although we do not
deny that ants and termites have been fighting over, it would appear, territory, for
millions of years.
12 See, for example, the summary of Ficus-specific wasp co-evolution, in “The story of the fig and
its wasp,” by Katie Kline, May 20, 2011, esa, https://www.esa.org/esablog/research/the-story-ofthe-fig-and-its-wasp/, Accessed February 14, 2020.
96.2 The Poetry of Taxocoenosis