This is an interview by Matthew Calarco, author of How Not to Be Human: The Inhumanist Philosophy of Robinson Jeffers
1.Who is Robinson Jeffers, and how did you first become interested in his poetry?
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) is a poet who lived and wrote for most of his adult life in Carmel, California, a small town poised right on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. During the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Jeffers appeared on the cover of Time magazine and was frequently ranked with the great modernist poets of his era, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Over time, though, his work fell out of favour with literary critics and then into relative obscurity. Today, there is a resurgence of interest in his work among scholars in literary theory but also and especially in the environmental humanities. One of the chief reasons for this resurgence is that Jeffers’s poetry challenges the human-centredness (or anthropocentrism) of the dominant culture in profound ways that remain relevant to our contemporary context.
I grew up near the ocean in southern California and spent my formative years bodyboarding, bodysurfing, and simply being in the ocean and reflecting on its significance. Like Jeffers, spending time thinking about the more-than-human magnificence and beauty of the ocean led me over time to adopt a non-anthropocentric view of the world and the place of human beings within it. When I first read Jeffers’s poetry as a young man, I felt that I had found a kindred soul. He expressed a vision of the coast, the planet and the cosmos that aligned very closely with the one I had been developing.
2.You are trained as a philosopher and teach in an academic philosophy department. Isn’t it unusual for a professional philosopher to write an entire book on a poet?
It is indeed somewhat unusual for a philosopher to write an entire book on a poet. That said, I am far from alone in taking poetry seriously in terms of its implications for philosophy. As I note in my book, philosophy and poetry have generally maintained a close relationship over the past 2,500 years. There have been many great philosophers who wrote philosophy in poetic form (e.g., Parmenides, Empedocles and Lucretius), and some of the most influential contemporary philosophers have written whole books on poets or at least have given serious and sustained attention to poets (Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Alain Badiou, to name a handful of the most prominent examples).
I see no reason in principle for philosophers to avoid engaging with poetry and many compelling reasons for affirmatively engaging with it. Among these reasons, the most important for me is that both poetry and philosophy try to help us see the world in fresh ways that are intended to make an impact on life as it is lived on a day-to-day basis. Even though they do this in different ways, there is much to be learned from bringing the two discourses together.
3.Your book centres around Jeffers’s inhumanist philosophy. What does Jeffers mean by the term ‘inhumanism’, and what role does it play in his writings?
Inhumanism is the name Jeffers gives to the philosophical vision underlying his poetry. This vision is grounded in the idea that human beings must overcome their narcissism and immaturity and learn to see and affirm themselves as but one part of a broader, more-than-human reality. While many of us would acknowledge the truth of this perspective in the abstract, Jeffers believes that we fail to bring this truth into our concrete individual and collective practices. If we were to make this outward turn beyond ourselves as individuals and as a collective, Jeffers argues that we would be less violent and far healthier people at the psychological and cultural levels. One can read his entire poetic corpus from this perspective, that is, as a variety of attempts to show us the grandeur and beauty of inhuman things and what it might look like to live affirmatively from within this purview.
4.You argue that Jeffers is concerned with the widespread existence of evil in the world. How does he, as a poet, try to help us understand and deal with evil in our everyday lives?
As I just noted, Jeffers’s work is dedicated to helping himself and the reader turn outwards to the inhuman beauty of things as a means of salvation and health. That said, Jeffers is not naïve about the multivalent nature of inhuman realities. Alongside the majesties of the planet and the cosmos, the world has its fair share of evils (violence, cruelty, pain, useless suffering and so on). One of Jeffers’s tasks as a poet is to consider whether it is possible to affirm the value of existence in light of the widespread existence of such evils. I argue in the book that Jeffers ultimately rejects pessimism (i.e., the position that, because of the world’s evil, existence is not worth it and that it would have been better never to have been born) and finds affirmative reasons for living in engaging with and contemplating the beauty of things. I also show how this affirmative vision of existence gives rise to a basic rule of conduct that helps us to navigate the challenges and difficulties of existence.
5.Why should people read Jeffers’s poetry today?
We live in an era in which traditional ways of finding meaning and value have crumbled and dissolved beyond recognition. Jeffers lived through two World Wars and a host of other rapid and painful social transformations, and he was acutely aware of what it is like to lose the foundations for one’s values. His philosophical inhumanism starts from a clear-sighted recognition of the limitations of traditional humanism (the main source of value and meaning in the recent past) and seeks to uncover another foundation for life in the inhuman beauty of things. I believe this is still a compelling vision for 21st-century readers and that Jeffers’s message – while overlooked by several generations of critics – is coming to be better appreciated in our contemporary context, plagued as it is by widespread ecological, social and economic crises that have grown out of the humanist tradition. Jeffers’s work helps us to see more clearly how we are currently situated in the larger scheme of things and how we might build our lives anew in relation to the many challenges human beings face today.