Bees

Tolstoy (War and Peace First Epilogue, Chapter IV):

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life.

Wittgenstein (Culture and Value, p. 29e):

I can say: "Thank these bees for their honey as though they were kind people who have prepared it for you"; that is intelligible and describes how I should like you to conduct yourself. But I cannot say: "Thank them because, look, how kind they are!"--since the next moment they may sting you.

Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations 119):

We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

Throwing away the telescope

One last (probably) bit of Tolstoy:

The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had continually sought to find—the aim of life—no longer existed for him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared temporarily—he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at this time.

He could not see an aim, for he now had faith—not faith in any kind of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and happy he became. That dreadful question, “What for?” which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, “What for?” a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: “Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.”

War and Peace and Wittgenstein

These are all just coincidences, I suppose, but there are some striking similarities between some of Wittgenstein's acts and ideas and elements of War and Peace. Here are three.

The Tractatus contains seven main propositions, which are to be overcome in order to see the world right. On his journey towards enlightenment, Pierre passes through Freemasonry, which makes  much of the number seven:

our talk turned to the interpretation of the seven pillars and steps of the Temple, the seven sciences, the seven virtues, the seven vices, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Wanting to test his fear of death, Wittgenstein volunteered to serve at the front-line during World War I, where he made observations to help the artillery hit the enemy forces. In War and Peace, as Wikipedia puts it, Pierre "decides to leave Moscow and go to watch the Battle of Borodino from a vantage point next to a Russian artillery crew. After watching for a time, he begins to join in carrying ammunition. In the midst of the turmoil he experiences first-hand the death and destruction of war."

Here is Tolstoy on a proclamation made by Napoleon regarding the occupation of Moscow:

But strange to say, all these measures, efforts, and plans—which were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances—did not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way without engaging the cogwheels. (Book Thirteen, Chapter X)

And here is Wittgenstein on private sensation and nonsense: "Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism." (PI 271)

None of this is hugely significant, but I wonder whether Wittgenstein thought of Pierre when he was an artillery spotter. Even if not, both were involved in a Schopenhauerian project. 

Mulhall's magic

I talked a bit about Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle here and here. This is the last post I intend to write about it, and it's about the part of the book I like the most. Near the end, Mulhall refers to "the sheer wild particularity [...] of each individual thing harbouring a refusal to conform to or be exhausted by any of our orderings of things." He quotes Chesterton saying that, "A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree"

(Cf. Tolstoy:

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? 

Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.") More respectably, Chesterton writes that, "The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact, and its mystery.")  

Mulhall connects this with Wittgenstein on the two different kinds of plant whose seeds look identical but which reliably produce plants of the type from which each came. In such a case, Wittgenstein remarks, to insist that there must be a difference in the seeds, even though we cannot detect one, "only shows what a powerful urge we have to see everything in terms of cause and effect." The beauty of Wittgenstein's story is that it never goes beyond the observable (imaginary) facts, which makes it undeniable, and yet it is hugely discomfiting to the mindset it takes aim at. It's like Kant without the metaphysics (Kant aimed, as I see it, to show the Dawkinses of his day that science can never show religion to be false), or attacking positivism by being more positivist than the positivists. Basically, by actually sticking to the undisputed facts it reveals how much metaphysics there is in the view of many people who proudly think of themselves as sticking to the facts. 

And when we do stick to the facts in this way (cf. also Tractatus 6.53) we are freed from unjustified assumptions about the laws of nature and cause and effect. Focusing on the thing itself means bracketing the principle of sufficient reason, which means seeing things how Schopenhauer says we should see things if we are to perceive objectively and achieve peace.

Seeing the world aright

[What follows is little more than a bunch of quotes strung together. But they are good quotes.]

The desirability of seeing what is under our noses and thereby becoming free is a bit of a theme in 19th century European thought.

Here's Father Zossima, a favorite of Wittgenstein's, in The Brothers Karamazov (emphasis added):

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim taught me to love children. The kind, silent man used often on our wanderings to spend the farthings given us on sweets and cakes for the children. He could not pass by a child without emotion. That's the nature of the man.

This advice (there is more in the surrounding pages) is given as an alternative to the (allegedly) false wisdom of the day, which sounds very similar to today's dominant ideology:

The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says:

“You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community, as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. 

Plato might have agreed with this, too, so perhaps the 19th century has nothing to do with it, although the emphasis on perception seems very post-Kantian. Speaking of Plato, here's Schopenhauer:

Plato often says that men live only in a dream; the philosopher alone strives to awake himself.

And here is Schopenhauer again, sounding a bit Zossima-ish:

[W]hen some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.

But this is just the state which I described above as necessary for the knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality, surrendering that kind of knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, and comprehends only relations; the state by means of which at once and inseparably the perceived particular thing is raised to the Idea of its whole species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-less knowledge, and as such they are both taken out of the stream of time and all other relations. It is then all one whether we see the sun set from the prison or from the palace. 

Forgetting all individuality also sounds a bit like Zossima, who says:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side—a little happier, anyway—and children and 
all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.

Nietzsche, too, believed in something like objective perception of reality, although he seems to deny the possibility of any such thing. Nevertheless, he opposed the "narcotics" of alcohol and Christianity. Marx wanted to replace false consciousness with (true) consciousness. But that's all fairly familiar. Less familiar to me until recently is Tolstoy on a similar theme, talking about causes in history. The whole chapter (Book Nine: 1812, Chapter 1) is worth reading (along with the first chapters of the next two books, not to mention the whole novel), but here is one highlight:

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.

Tolstoy suggests that there is no one right way to understand what caused what, but he also raises the possibility of seemingly inevitable (and bad) events being prevented by ordinary people's refusing to go along with them. If we just realized this, and acted accordingly, how much better the world might be.

The big sky

I'm only now getting around to reading War and Peace, but I'm glad I am. Here are some good bits that I came across recently:

"That's a fine death!" said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkonski.

Prince Andrew understood that this was said of him and that it was Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire. But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once forgot them. His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon- his hero- but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it.

[...]

Though five minutes before, Prince Andrew had been able to say a few words to the soldiers who were carrying him, now with his eyes fixed straight on Napoleon, he was silent.... So insignificant at that moment seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood, that he could not answer him.

Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering, and the nearness of death aroused in him. Looking into Napoleon's eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain. 

Here's another bit:

Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French- all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm- was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors- that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.

No doubt this is irrelevant, but the buzzing fly in the first of these passages reminded me of this by Schopenhauer:

[C]ast our glance forward far into the future, and seek to present to our minds the future generations, with the millions of their individuals in the strange form of their customs and pursuits, and then interpose with the question: Whence will all these come? Where are they now? Where is the fertile womb of that nothing, pregnant with worlds, which still conceals the coming races? Would not the smiling and true answer to this be, Where else should they be than there where alone the real always was and will be, in the present and its content?—thus with thee, the foolish questioner, who in this mistaking of his own nature is like the leaf upon the tree, which, fading in autumn and about to fall, complains at its destruction, and will not be consoled by looking forward to the fresh green which will clothe the tree in spring, but says lamenting, “I am not these! These are quite different leaves!” Oh, foolish leaf! Whither wilt thou? And whence should others come? Where is the nothing whose abyss thou fearest? Know thine own nature, that which is so filled with thirst for existence; recognise it in the inner, mysterious, germinating force of the tree, which, constantly one and the same in all generations of leaves, remains untouched by all arising and passing away. And now, οἱη περ φυλλων γενεη, τοιηδε και ανδρων (Qualis foliorum generatio, talis et hominum). Whether the fly which now buzzes round me goes to sleep in the evening, and buzzes again tomorrow, or dies in the evening, and in spring another fly buzzes which has sprung from its egg: that is in itself the same thing

The buzzing fly echo might be pure coincidence, but Schopenhauer is far from irrelevant to Tolstoy. In the year War and Peace was published (1869), Tolstoy wrote:

Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before. ... no student has ever studied so much on his course, and learned so much, as I have this summer 

I don't know when he first read Schopenhauer ("some time in the 1860s," apparently) but if there was no Schopenhauerian influence on War and Peace then there is at least fertile soil there for a Schopenhauerian seed. The idea of the insignificance of greatness, of course, reminds me of the end of The World as Will and Representation: "to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways—is nothing." Perhaps Prince Andrew would seem likely to deny that the "lofty infinite sky" is nothing, but he continues: "All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!" And perhaps this sounds nihilistic, but he goes on to want nothing but to be brought back to "life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently."

Wittgenstein's interest in aspects surely must (although those words sound an alarm) have something to do with this kind of idea. There is something a bit ugly, though, in Schopenhauer's and Tolstoy's ways of making their point(s). "[T]his our world, which is so real [...] is nothing" is paradoxical, and so either mystificatory or cheaply clever. (I'm exaggerating the ugliness or cheapness or whatever we want to call it, but I think it's there. Or is my criticizing not just Schopenhauer's and Tolstoy's writing but some of their best writing a sign that I've gone off the rails?) And Prince Andrew leaves much unexplained when he both says, "There is nothing [...] but that. But even it does not exist..." and longs to live although "[T]here is nothing but quiet and peace." How does an enthusiastic desire to live square with the quasi-Schopenhauerian insight that "there is nothing [...] Thank God!"? And what are we to make of the idea that there is nothing but the sky and even it does not exist? The contradictions feel like a prelude, like something to be moved beyond. Which is what Schopenhauer and Prince Andrew intend, of course, but it means that the last words are far from being the conclusion. What matters is not the thought that expresses enlightenment (if that's what it is) but the life lived afterwards. And this means that the intellectual or theoretical route to this life cannot be the only possible one, cannot be essential. At this point, I suppose, you throw away the ladder and go and work in a garden. Whether any of this is helpful for understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy, though, seems doubtful. 

Proof that it is impossible to write

I always remember Kafka's subtitle "Proof that it is Impossible to Live," but not any proof that his story contains. It came to mind again when I read James Wood saying this about Michel Houellebecq's latest novel:

Is Houellebecq really a novelist, or is he just a novelizing propagandist? Though his thought can be slapdash and hasty, it is at least earnest, intensely argued, and occasionally thrilling in its leaps and transitions. But the formal structures that are asked to dramatize his ideas—the scenes, characters, dialogue, and so on—are generally flimsy and diagrammatic. “The Map and the Territory” can’t quite decide what kind of novel it is going to be, and moves around restlessly, picking up subjects and briefly favoring them, before returning them to their lightly disturbed corners. Nothing is systematically or rigorously examined—which is to say that nothing is subjected to the longevity of narrative.

This is about right, I think, but it also kind of misses what I take to be the point. The novel ought to be of interest to readers of this blog. Houellebecq mentions Wittgenstein and Heidegger in it, and discusses architecture, nature, and modern culture generally. I doubt it's intentional, but the title could almost be a reference to Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, in which:

The "net" in question is the net of language. In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net."

Houellebecq suggests that the map (or net) is more interesting than the territory, although in the end he seems happy enough that everything man-made ends up being reconquered by nature. Perhaps there's more to life than being interesting. So if we take the map (or net) as language, and the territory as the world it describes, then language is (it is claimed) more interesting than the world, but somehow inferior to it, in both power and value, nevertheless. That sounds as though it might be true.

So why is Houellebecq's novel such a mess? Why does it lack rigor and system? I think it lacks much in the way of characters, dialogue, etc. because that's the way Houellebecq is; his interests are more philosophical than those of most novelists, and he is diagrammatic when that is all he needs to be. It's his personality and his ideas that you read him for, not his characters or plots. The closest writer I can think of is Martin Amis, although Amis has nothing interesting to say (just a style of his own, which is no small achievement), but Houellebecq is something like a cross between Shaun Ryder and Dostoevsky (which means he's no Dostoevsky, of course, but still). Another way in which the book is a bit messy is that it's very hard to read. At least I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time, but I don't think this is a fault.

What keeps interrupting the flow of the book is the commercial language of technical specifications and branding. No one just drives anywhere, they drive in a particular make and model of car, with particular features that might appeal to a consumer, both those involving engineering and those that reflect a certain lifestyle. Houellebecq gives his take on the demographics, simultaneously buying into the marketing language, mocking it, and staring at it in horror. It is there, after all, so you can hardly ignore it. And it is not something wholly outside us. We all want nice cars, cheap wine, fancy cameras, or other things of this sort. The gods may have flown but the fetishes are snugly entrenched. What we might think of as human life (i.e. a certain romantic ideal of what that naturally means) is constantly attacked or blocked by these artificial interventions. They are more interesting in the sense that they stimulate us, attract our attention, and give us something to talk and think about. But they are less real and less valuable than natural things. They are less satisfying. Houellebecq is not satisfied and seems to write from an unsatisfied desire for something that doesn't exist in our world, or for a world that is different, something like the kind of world that Tolstoy or Dostoevsky wanted, although Houellebecq knows as well as anybody that he is not from their world, nor does he try to write as if he were. On the contrary, there are suggestions that parts of the novel are copied from Wikipedia, which is about as this-worldly (this time, this space) as you can get. The language of inauthenticity speaks us, if you like.

The last third or so of the book is reminiscent of a Fred Vargas novel (to be precise, An Uncertain Place), but it is the very end that I liked the most (as well as the earlier discussions of architecture, which after all has a relation to philosophy, as David Cerbone has noticed--see the end of this interview, which I just discovered). Here's the last paragraph of the novel, describing the videos that the artist protagonist Jed Martin has taken to making at the end of his life:

The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin's life can thus be seen—and this is the first interpretation that springs to mind—as a nostalgic meditation on the end of the Industrial Age in Europe, and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry. This interpretation is, however, inadequate when one tries to make sense of the unease that grips us on seeing those pathetic Playmobil-type little figurines, lost in the middle of an abstract and immense futurist city, a city which itself crumbles and falls apart, then seems gradually to be scattered across the immense vegetation extending to infinity. That feeling of desolation, too, that takes hold of us as the portraits of the human beings who had accompanied Jed Martin through his earthly life fall apart under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming in the last videos to make themselves the symbols of the generalized annihilation of the human species. They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle, before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants. Then everything becomes calm. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind. The triumph of vegetation is total.        

There are certainly echoes of Houellebecq's own work in this very novel here. It's both a nostalgic meditation on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry and an uneasy and desolate portrait of  life. But it isn't that desolate. The triumph of vegetation sounds at least somewhat desirable. The grass swaying in the wind sounds nice, even if it is the grass growing on our graves. The central idea seems similar to John Betjeman's at the end of "Beside the Seaside":

And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool. 

Similar too is the idea of stopping one's diary in Larkin's "Forget What Did":

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come
And when the birds go. 

Tarkovsky's Stalker also celebrates a victory of nature over violence and the power of human will in general. There are other examples (Coetzee's Michael K., for instance) of this kind of quasi-Buddhist, quasi-Christian (or post-Christian) ideal of a return to an unspoiled garden. It's rather Schopenhauerian. But Houellebecq puts it in a (to my mind suitably) cynical 21st century idiom.