[From Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Bruce Foltz

and Robert Frodeman, eds. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004): pp.

13-31.]

The Uncanny Goodness of Being Edible to Bears

James Hatley

From food are born all beings which, being born, grow by food. All beings feed upon
food, and when they die, food feeds upon them.
Taittiriya Upanishad

One would be apt almost to imagine them [Ephemera] created merely for the food
offish and other animals.
William Bartram

But nothing can bless us apart from its being acknowledged in its own right.
Henry Bugbee

1. Intimate Incongruence: The Humane and the Inhumane

in Predatory Space
All too often, Wendell Berry cautions, the slipperiness, the bewilderment, and so the very
wildness of the distinction between the human and the natural is repressed in our Western
understanding of the good. By insisting on an intractable opposition between the human
and the natural, our culture initiates, in Berry's own words, a "human disaster," leaving us
"divided against ourselves" and thus reduced in "our largeness, our mystery."1 But even if
this stance is to be repudiated, its rejection cannot occur simply through a joyous and
unproblematic reunion with nature, as if it and we were merely of one cloth, or, better, of
one mind and body. For even as we are in some sense indivisible from the non-human, or
the more-than-human, as David Abram would have it, Berry behooves us to take seriously
how the natural order also differs, often uncannily, from our "all too human" one (PW, p.
139). Ultimately we human beings come to insight concerning the very condition of our
humanity through an intimate involvement in the natural order, even as this involvement
inevitably leads to moments of troubling and even catastrophic incongruence between that
order and ourselves.
 Berry points out such moments of intimate incongruence in the feelings of discomfort,
difficult)', or danger that occur as those cultivating the earth come into daily contact with
the natural: "rain on your cut hay, or floodwater over your cropland, or coyotes in your
sheep" (PW, p. 141). In a less agrarian mood, it could be added: deer in the tulips, ants on
the picnic table, and hurricanes on your doorstep. How, then, are we to respond in a
praiseworthy manner to such discomforts, difficulties, or dangers? Negotiating the boundary
between the natural and the humanwhich proves to be in reality a complexity of
boundaries, an intertwining of one order with another in numerous dimensionsis no
easy matter. Conflict and complication are inevitable, and only those who are willing to
cultivate a sensitivity of judgment in regard to uncannily incommensurable and competing
claims will have any chance of responding faithfully to the various sides of this ontological
watershed, and so to one's human existence in its problematic wholeness.
Finding ourselves in the position of being prey to an animal predator is a telling case of
the natural world's provoking discomfort, difficulty, and danger within a human and
humane context.2 Hardly anything could be more intimate than our becoming the food,
and so the very body, of another animal in the wilds; yet hardly anything could be
imagined to be more terrifying and inarguably inhumane. While we may enjoy observing a
certain level of predator)' interaction in nature, such as that between bald eagles and
salmon, or robins and worms, our appreciation of this phenomenon becomes far less
pronounced when we become its possible object. Further, our resistance to such a
thoroughly natural phenomenon is expressed not only in our individual attempts to prevent
other animals from seizing our flesh, but also in a massive social and cultural appropriation
by human society as a whole of the space surrounding it in such a manner as to eradicate
the possibility of human "victimization" by animals and plants and even natural
occurrences. Not only wolves but also mosquitoes are hunted down and eradicated as pests,
and not only in urban but also in rural areas; poison ivy is habitually cleared from places
of human habitation; and the burgeoning of plant growth along almost every roadside in
America is regularly mowed. What gardener has not gazed with equal doses of wonder and
horror at the capacity of a vine like Virginia Creeper not only to colonize the entire space of
one's cultivation but also to go after one's own house?
And so we methodically cut away the numerous tendrils of the innumerable beings
wishing to take a bite out of our own bodies or possessions. But the relative success of this
endeavor should not fool us into assuming that the underlying predatory nature of the
earthly space we inhabit no longer makes its claim upon us. We may be able to suppress
predation, but we can hardly undo it. And in truth, our appropriation of nature does not so
much eliminate predation as codify it in asymmetric terms: we make over the space in
which we live as if humans had become inedible and everything else is revealed to be more
or less available for ingestion. In this process of domestication, the space in which we would
dwell is rendered humane; our surroundings come to afford us an opening to pursue our
lives without the teeth and appetites of other creatures intervening.
But what would ensue if we were to let down our defensive posture in regard to the
natural predatorif only for a momentand desist from our ongoing domestication of
predator)' space, allowing the animal who eats a chance to address us more fully? What
would we find if we were once again to step into a space where we would willingly become
edible, a space that might even be termed inhumane? What would come of our own sense of
ourselves as human and humane beings, once we entertained this thought, and attempted
to live out the sentiments expressed in the quotation above from the Taittiriya Upanishad?
In the establishment and maintenance of wilderness areas, as well as other spaces
consecrated to a more rigorous maintenance of the natural order by humans, we find not
only the opportunity for such questions, but also their celebration,5 In wilderness we willingly
enter into the risk of being killed and eaten by wild animals. And when this risk becomes an
actuality, while we must mourn its event and enact policies that would keep its re-
occurrence at bay (as in the relocation of problem animals or the eradication of dangerous
ones), we also continue to encourage the flourishing of the very fauna by which the threat
of our being eaten is constituted.
Why might so radical a form of deference be practiced in regard to creatures whose
activities present a threat so fatal and so inhumane? Here one adopts a stance of
patiencefor the sake of the good, one willingly suffers and even welcomes a threat to one's
own well-being, rather than insisting on hostility or, at the very least, indifference to that
threat. And if that threat should materialize as an active attack, one remains firm in the
conviction that one ought not bear ill will toward the very being who has attacked. An
example of this remarkable, and perhaps questionable, virtue is found in those who have
survived attacks by predators but remain sympathetic with the plight of the animal who
has mauled and even feasted upon them. In Mark of the Grizzly, Scott McMillon recounts
the stories of nearly a score of assaults on humans by grizzly bears and comes to a remarkable
conclusion:
None of the survivors I talked to harbors a consuming vengeance towards bears,
which surprised me a little. I expected to find someone like that and the guy may be
out there, nursing wounds and grudges, aiming them at bears, hut through thousands
of miles and dozens of interviews, I couldn't find him. Rather, most of them became
or remained advocates of letting wild grizzlies be grizzlies.'1
Certainly those who fear grizzly beats and oppose the reintroduction of these giant
omnivores into wilderness areas currently lacking them present a view of the good that is
understandable, both morally and viscerally. When we take our family into the woods, it
would seem reasonable that we would not want to even imagine doing so at the cost of their
becoming the prey of the grizzly. But how then are we to take the testimony of Kelley
McConnell? Kelleys mother was killed as she tried to keep a rogue black bear from
mauling him; yet he returns to the scene of that devastating attack a year later and
expresses his concern for bears, his desire that they continue to populate the earth, and even
his sympathy for the particular bear who killed his mother.' How does this vision
compute morally?''
Wilderness seems to be the one place left on the earth where human beings might be
eaten, and no one takes exception to it. In noting this, the emphasis is to be put upon
might. While we would take exception to situations where wild animals undoubtedly would
treat us as food, we do not take exception to at least some situations where wild animals
might treat us as food but probably will not. Paradoxically, many who enter the wilderness
welcome the threat of being eaten by a bear or mountain lion, even as they fear its occur-
rence and act in ways designed to keep it from happening. In this act we come face to face
with that troubling, yet intimate, incongruence of the human and the natural described by
Berry.
As this example makes clear, to become attentive to the interaction of the human and the
natural is also to become aware of a tension at work between the categories of the humane
and the inhumane. In taking our first, tentative footsteps into natural space, into the space
in which predator)' relationships between ourselves and animals revert to a rough
symmetry, the question of the inhumanity we confront is curiously doubled. In the first
instance, one can think while entering a wilderness area of how inhumanely one would be
treated if attacked by an animal. Whether the animal is a vicious human or a morally
oblivious grizzly bear7 is irrelevant to this sense of the inhumane. Rather than worrying
about the state of mind of the one who attacks, we feel viscerally that human beings simply
should not die in this manner, no matter who is perpetrating the event. In claiming this,
we seem to be asserting an implicit corollary to the Fifth Commandment, one that is
incumbent upon the victim rather than upon the aggressor: Thou shall not be killed by
being consumed. This sense of the inhumane is at least partially involved in our cultural
insistence (as pointed out above) on rendering predatory space asymmetrical.
But in a second sense of the inhumane, one can also think of how the creature who
might be preying upon us would indeed be a killer but not a murderer. The decision of a
wild (as opposed to domesticated)*1 animal to eat us, or at least to attempt to do so, occurs
in a context in which morality, or at least humane morality, is simply not relevant.9 In this
sense of the term, "inhumane" refers not to the violation of a moral law, but to the sustaining
of a natural order, in which our moral laws are not rendered null and void but found to be
inappropriate to the situation at hand. In considering its surroundings, and thus humans, as
its food, the bear acts inhumanely but commendablv. Unlike humans, who find
themselves in intimate incongruence with nature, the bear is seamlessly woven into the
natural world, in which one flesh eating another is the very condition by which any flesh
finds itself living.
The acknowledgment of this difference can be seen in the ways in which human beings
alter their normal sense of what is moral for the sake of animals, ['or instance, advocates for
wildlife, even those who are committed vegetarians, would agree that returning a bear or
other predator to the wild without training her or him to hunt for food (should this be
needed) would be unethical. In reaching this conclusion, humans reveal that they consider
a bear's preying on other animals, at least in the wilds, an implicit good. We desire that the
bear follow the dictates of its stomach. What might make a bear's eating others less than
commendable, at least to our mind, is when the bear steps over that boundary which we
would set up, dividing the human from the natural, and eats us as well. And yet we will
return bears to the woods where the threat of their eating us is implicit, even if rare.
Yet, curiously, a third sense of the inhumane, perhaps the one most commonly assumed
by those using this term, is not at play in this tension between humans being treated
inhumanely and non-humans acting inhumanely. Wilderness, at least insofar as it offers the
prospect of being eaten by other animals, is not inhumane in the manner that murderers and
torturers arc. To be eaten by a bear does not carry the same sense of inhumanity as to be eaten
by a fellow human. In this latter sense of the term, a human acts with impunity, as if he or
she were not morally responsible for other humans. In being inhumane in this sense, one
acts as if the tie between oneself and other humans no longer mattered. One becomes
scornful of the obligation to be humane, and so becomes a pariah."1

2. Eating and Being Eaten: Food Is Not Merely a Means

The relationship between the first two senses of the inhumane identified above now
needs to be thought out. What does the inhumanity of my being eaten by an animal have
to do with the inhumanity of the animal who eats me? In raising this question, I must be
careful not to use this distinctionbetween the one who eats and the one who is eaten
simply to divide myself from the bear, to put her or him safely on the outside, as if the bear
were after all merely a natural being and I am not. For if Berry's thesis of an intimate
incongruence holds, the bear's interest in eating my flesh is not simply something that is
foreign to me, even if the bear, unlike me, cannot be considered a fully responsible moral
agent fully subject to moral law. In speaking of the bear as inhumane by its failing to be at
least a human moral agent, I must be wary of simply excusing myself from the order in
which the bear lives, as if the entire issue of my own eating and being eaten, of flesh
ingesting flesh, were wholly irrelevant to the significance of my being human.
What, then, might my being edible to a bear have to do with me as a moral being? Given the
manner in which we have traditionally structured our ethical discourse (particularly in our more
Kantian moods), the answer is nothing at all. For in thinking of goodness, philosophers have
argued in the past that the bear is itself not a rational being (at least in the Kantian sense of
rational) and so not morally considerable. We can happily eat its flesh, but ours remains
sacrosanct. The asymmetry of predation described above is given its philosophical grounding.
But even within more recent discourses where the bear's appetite might come to matter
whether it be for the sake of its own life projects or for the sake of its pleasure at being able to
feedhow might we make sense of the claim that at least at times some people are ready to
embrace the goodness of the bear's appetite for their own human flesh? It turns out the question
at issue not only involves whether the bear is morally considerable, but also whether its appetite in
some way commands me in my own flesh. The tendency within the philosophical tradition is to
argue in some manner that my flesh, even if it is edible to the bear, also serves as the grounding
for my own life, which is an end in itself transcending any reduction of it to a mere means. The
bear cannot feed on me, because that would be a reduction of me to an object for consumption.
Seemingly, my humanity would disappear, if my edibility to the bear became a morally
significant category.
But even if humans, in the normal course of events, ought not to be eaten by hears, is being
eaten by a bear (or eating one, for that matter) actually the same as being used by a bear (or
using a bear) merely as a means to an end? To conclude that eating another being necessarily
involves its reduction to a mere means ignores the testimony of many non-Western cultures that
one's relationship with one's food should be structured primarily as sharing with it, in the very
act of eating and being nourished by it, a communal participation in life that crosses over the
boundary between the human and the non-human. One does not use one's foodone partakes
of and in it. Barry Lopez, in Of Wolves and Men, reports how hunting tribes have called the
meat they eat "medicine."" The Taittiriya Upanishad says as much as well.12 The goodness of
the relationship between the animal and the human is actually informed by eating the animal,
by ingesting the inhuman. And in doing so, one implicitly acknowledges the relationship not
only can be reversed, but inevitably must be." When the remains of the Dalai Lama's parents
are fed to hungry vultures in Scorcese's Kundun, we "Westerners" are startled by its sense of
what constitutes a proper human "burial." As that graphic act demonstrates, to be edible
involves the animal, as well as ourselves, in a communication of life that transcends merely
being a means to sustenance and opens up a particular way for compassion, and so for goodness,
to be expressed. In fact, approaching the animal we would eat, as if it were merely a means for
our own life, would be itself an unethical act, an arrogant and presumptuous forgetfulness
of our irretrievable involvement in all other flesh, in a community shared with non-human
others. And perhaps, in a limited sense, the converse is true as wellto be human and to expect
not to be eaten by other animals would be an act of hubris, a failure to acknowledge the
goodness of the order of living flesh, in which we are intractably enmeshed.
McMillion mentions the machinations of Stan Hawkins, a state legislator from Idaho, who is
dead set against letting grizzlies back into the wild areas of that state. In his crusade against
"killer" bears, he has gone so far as to propose bills not only banning grizzlies but also "mak[ing]
it illegal for a wolf to eat a deer in the winter" (MG, p. 248). To be so ungenerous within the very
order of eating would be astounding to indigenous societies, but makes sense to a Kantian
bent on absolutely distinguishing ends-in-themselves from means-to-ends. For a Kantian the
very fact that humans are edible to animals seems a moral absurdity that needs to be
counteracted at every turn. Humans happen to be edible, but that edibility is not only morally
irrelevant but also morally offensive.
It would seem as if our ethical discourse is obsessed by its abhorrence of predation and so
of our implicit edibility. Classically, goodness is signified in terms of the lamb lying down with
the lion, and evil inevitably is characterized by bestial metaphors. Eating makes goodness queasy.
For example, we speak of humans who sexually assault others as sexual "predators," as if their
inhumanity were entirely of one kind with the inhumanity of animal predators.14 To ingest the
other's body becomes a decisive mark of evil: They have eaten my people as if they were bread.
The Assyrian came down like a wolf upon the fold. And our ultimate vision of edibility as moral
evil is summed up in no less a cultural icon than Hannibal Lector, the infamous, mostly fictive,
psychiatrist, who is capable of serving up a flautist's tenderloins as entree to the local
symphony board. Goodness must have nothing at all to do with being a prey with being a
rational creature who would be used by the other merely as a means for nutrition. As observed
above, it would be as if a being who is capable of the good is never to be eaten at all.
But the issue of wild beings eating human beings and of human beings being edible is
more slippery than that. As Berry would remind us, humans and nature are indivisible, and yet
divergent. For humans, like all other natural organisms, are involved in eating other living
beings, although preferably non-human ones. Without the ingestion of the other's flesh, human
flesh would quickly be no flesh at all.15 Perhaps even more telling, in a world shorn of
ingestion, life itself would cease to exist. And it would be hard indeed to imagine a world
in which life reached any complexity at all by remaining purely geophagous.l6 The very term
'nature', whose etymological root suggests springing forth, gestation, and being born, alludes
indirectly as well to an order of nutrition, in which I not only come from another's body of my
own species, but also am sustained in my body, in the wake of its birth, by the numerous
bodies of yet other species. In the words of the Upanishad, "From food are born all beings,
which being horn, grow by food." In confronting the natural order as it is articulated in the gaze
of the animal predator, we come face to face with another sort of goodness than that of the
strictly human and humane, one in which all creatures, including humans, are involved in
generating and nurturing the flesh of all other living creatures. As the Taittiriya Upanishad
suggests, food is not only a metabolic but also a metaphysical category, in which our ability
to distinguish between merely being a means to an end, and being an end in itself, is itself
radically undermined. To take seriously the matter of our edibility leaves us in
dispossession of our very flesh, in a bewildered questioning of our humane insistence on being
invulnerable to ingestion, in awe of how our very matter is destined to be rendered as another's
sinew, stalk or cilia.
In a similar vein Rolston has argued that the relationship between what he terms
intrinsic and extrinsic value in the natural world is paradoxical. On the one hand all the
creatures of any ecosystem are never "mere instruments, for each has its integral intrinsic
value."17 I take Rolston to be arguing here that every wild creature is a self-maintaining
organism, whose manner of flourishing takes place in a particular way or style of being, and
so promotes particular values within an ecosystem. Hawks inhabit flesh in a manner quite
different from that of mice or trees. On the other hand, the very creation of these
heterogeneous values in a variety of entities is precisely what allows the building up of an
ecosystem as a meta-entity, in which diverse entities sustain one another in intricate
relationships. The very fact that an ecosystem involves creatures sustaining one another by
means of their intrinsic values by their particular manner of being flesh reveals that
"intrinsic value exists only as embedded in instrumental value." Intrinsic value can only
appear in an ecosystem as a quality which is also to be "sacrificed" and "transported to
another organism" (VW, p. 64). And yet in being so sacrificed, further intrinsic values arise.
In my view, eating and being eaten are exemplary in regard to the point Rolston makes
about the ambiguity, the bewilderment, of the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic
value. Our being edible undermines the Kantian's insistence on making an absolute
distinction between means and ends. This undermining stems not from the reduction of
all intrinsic values to extrinsic ones but from certain slipperiness at play between them,
such that intrinsic values do not emerge except in the context of extrinsic values, and
extrinsic values always lead to the engendering and nourishing of yet further intrinsic
values. We only get to be a human, or a bear, or a microbe by eating others! As Rolston
points out, the very fact that a ground squirrel can nourish a marsh hawk with its rodent
"muscle and fat" shows how they are "somatically kindred" (VW, p. 64). That other living
entities can nourish our own, all so human flesh as well indicates the same kinship, a
sympatry of shared organic origins.

3 The Uncanny Gaze of Edibility

If I now attend to the phenomenological situation of humans when they enter the wilds, a
space in which the slipperiness between other creatures being food for me and my being food
for them is allowed its fullest expression, I find myself called upon to revise the commandment
promulgated above: Thou shalt not be killed by being consumed. For predation turns out to be
not so ninth inhumane as uncanny.18 To look into the eyes of a creature plotting to feed itself
upon me is to find myself claimed in a way that is quite unsettling. The stalking bear's gaze
reminds me that my flesh is not only my own but also a mode of becoming a bear. As Kristeva
argues, the uncanny precipitates a crisis in which the very capacity to fix a boundary marking
out the difference between one's own and the other's own is undermined, by the logic of a
doubled lapse or confusion. In the uncanny I am placed utterly outside of myself, to the point that
/ am an other and/or the other is so utterly inside me that no space remains where I can be
merely myself.19 In merely the threat of being eaten, one finds oneself in the situation that the very
body that sustains one's own life suddenly is also the body that is to be ingested, in order that
another's life might be sustained. What was most intimate becomes most strange, and what was
most strange becomes most intimate.
One looks (or imagines oneself looking) into the face of one's predator to find its body and its
animation already taking root in the very coursing of blood through one's own veins. In that look
the claim of the animal to one's flesh makes relative one's own claim to oneself, or at least to
one's body. In using the term "makes relative," the sense meant is not that of rendering one's
claim to oneself and one's body as an arbitrary or contextual one. Rather, one's claim to oneself as
an embodied being is found to be underpinned by the claim which one's kin (one's bodily
relatives in the animal and plant kingdoms) also makes upon one's body. More uncanny than the
Heideggerian sense of the uncanny, meeting the predator's gaze involves more than undergoing
a general anxiety about being nothing at all.2" This gaze submits me to the flesh of the other
such that my very body is revealed as the capacity to be the body of a bear, as well as that of a
human. In having my flesh claimed by the bear, I would not simply be nothing, but would
become the bear. My relatives in the flesh share my flesh.
My edibility renders me abject to the bear. By using this term, I mean to suggest, via the
thought of Kristeva, a relationship to a boundary such that the very notion of the boundary,
through which the other remains exterior to oneself, is threatened. The threat of the abject
does not occur in the first instance in regard to another entity out there, but in regard to the
very distinction between oneself and any other possible other. Distinction itself wavers. In
abjection, one's very flesh is revealed to have at its origin a lack of origin, a failure of
particularity that is scandalous and yet irretrievable. Kristeva's development of this term
focuses on the relationship of a mother with her unborn child. In abjection, according to
Kelly Oliver, "the mother cannot tell whether this other in her [the fetus/child] is her or
not; and either alternative seems equally impossible."21 Similarly, in regard to one's
edibility, one becomes abject to all other mouths, all other hungers. Flesh maintains itself
by eating and being eaten. In that conjunction there is no easy way to untie the other's
investment in my flesh, or my flesh in hers or his. While abjection in gestation involves
the sundering of one's flesh to become both oneself and the other (one's child), in edibility it
involves being ingested by the other to become the other (or, contrarily, ingesting the
other to become oneself). My flesh does not provide for itself merely out of its own flesh,
but always requires the other's flesh to sustain its life. In the act of ingestion, one's body both
is and is not one's own.
In being of flesh, one finds that one's very life is already the articulation of all other flesh.
Before one can be oneself, whether that self be human or bear, one's body is already
inextricably interwoven with all other bodies. This condition, which Rolston addresses in his
discussion of "nature as source," Merleau-Ponty simply calls la chair, flesh. For Merleau-
Ponty this term names a pre-personal, but hardly impersonal, chiasmic field in which every
being is gestated or built up in its particular, phenomenal body22 by means of the
phenomenal bodies of all other living beings. In speaking of the particular creatures of
flesh sustained by this universal or elemental flesh, Merleau-Ponty points out: "There is not
the For Itself and the For the Other.,. They are each the other side of the other. This is
why they incorporate one another."2'
The peculiar structure of flesh as a chiasmic field finds one aspect of its lived or
phenomenological sense in what I term the plethoric.2'1 In the plethoric one finds that
before conscious assent could even be posed as an issue, let alone be given, one has
already assented to the articulation of every other living creature's flesh within one's own
as well as one's own flesh within that of every other living creature. To be caught up in this
condition is not something that happens after one already exists, but is the very structure
by which one can even come to exist as a particular, living being. In the plethoric, the very
condition of lived particularity is revealed to be gestation and nutrition. I only come into
contact with myself through my body, which in turn is built up i n a variety of dimensions
only through its being interwoven with and into other bodies, which are themselves in turn
interwoven with yet other bodies. In this universal intertwining of flesh with flesh, there is
no first self, no primordial entity sufficient unto itself, but instead a continual intertwining
of all entities into all other entities so that all may exist.25 Before the teeth of the natural
other can bite into me, before my skin, muscle, sinew, and bone could be violently
appropriated by the animal's hungry mouth, before a polemos could be articulated in
which each of us, bear and human, are merely rivals to each other's life, there was already
what Merleau-Ponty terms a "co-functioning" of each body of flesh with and in the other.
One is, as the author of the Taittariya Upanishad argues, always already both the food and
the eater of food.
In the plethoric, my flesh already assents in its energeia, in the very stirring of itself in
regard to itself, to the animation of every other being that has, that does, or that will exist.
Aristotle can be interpreted as understanding the order of eating as a translation of prime
matterindeterminate possibilityfrom one species to another, in which each species
offers its own particular mode of ordering a featureless passivity that would take on
whatever qualities are actively communicated to it. Prime matter in fact functions as food
for each soul's particular mode of energeia. While this interpretation of Aristotle's account
of prime matter in terms of food draws attention to the malleable anonymity of one's own
flesh (at least insofar as it becomes matter for another's flesh), more also needs to be said
about the heterogeneity of flesh as food. Within the context of the plethoric, my flesh as
food not only offers an indeterminate possibility for another's animation to find its weight, its
matter, but also suffers a primordial and irretrievable interweaving of itself with every
animate existence that eats. No being who lives comes to be except through its gestation in
a flesh, in which not only a particular edible other but also all the other others are also
already implicit in its being. Put in other words, food is contagious with the heterogeneity
(rather than merely the indeterminacy) of possibility, leaving the particular human soul
inextricably involved with all others who eat or have eaten.
The plethoric as a mode of irretrievable involvement in others carries a commanding
although uncanny ethical significance, if by ethics we mean a constraint on how we are
called to interpret or treat the actions of other living beings. Because the animal other is
always already involved in the generation of my flesh, I cannot and ought not interpret its
hungered approach toward me in the first instance as violence.26 The patience we exercise
with bears and other predators in regard to their hungers, even if that hunger is directed
toward our own flesh, is virtuous. And in adopting a mode of patience in regard to the hunger
of other animals, I also am called to humility: I am obliged to keep in mind that any
deferral of the animal's hunger for my own flesh is merely temporaryinevitably in my
death my flesh finds its way again to the world's many hungry mouths.

4. Making Humane Sense of the Uncanny and Uncanny Sense of the Humane:
The Goodness of the Carcass
Having come some distance in the attempt to take seriously one's human kinship with
the inhumanity of the bear who freely eats and is freely eaten, it is important to remember
that after all we humans are called in a way that the bear is not to limit our notion of the
edible. Whatever its significance, the abjection of edibility does not abolish that realm of
ethical responsibility, described by thinkers like Kant or Levinas, in which the human
other who faces me is revealed not only as a natural other, a creature with whom I share
flesh, but also as one who is inviolable, who prohibits absolutely my murdering of her or him.
Whether we wish to characterize the revelation of the inviolable through the ability of the
other to present reasons for how she or he acts (Kant), or through the expression of the
other's face before me (Levinas), or yet in another manner, a humane ethics must
intervene to insist upon the exceptionality of human responsibility and human beings. Only
within the question of the humane, where the inviolable is so urgently at issue, can a notion
of the inhumane appear that involves moral betrayal of, and intentional violence against,
the other who faces or addresses me. The grizzly bear who would eat the yearlings of a
grizzly sow is not acting inhumanely in this sense, even though the very fact that such an
act is not inhumane in this sense allows for its own divergent sense of inhumanity. Bears
are inhumane in a manner that is beyond the humanly inhumane. For this reason, it can
be claimed that their claim upon us as their food is uncanny. Or more than human.
How then might our humane notion of the inviolable find a way to come to terms with
the natural, yet inhumane, goodness of our own edibility? And how might we, as suggested
above, adopt a humble bearing before the animal's inhumane and natural hunger for us? As
suggested above, one aspect of this humility would involve our not bearing a grudge
against the animals who would eat us. Yet another limited answer to this question is
suggested by the way in which we humans are invited within the wilds to approach its
non-human dead in an act of reverence. In The Lost Grizzlies, Rick Bass's treatment of the
edible animal carcasses his party discovers in the San Juan Mountains subtly questions the
inviolability of the human corpse buried within more civilized precincts (at least within
those of the Western tradition).27 With historical roots at least as deep as the tragedy of
Antigone, the Euro-American notion of the inviolable corpse utterly precludes its being
fed upon by the beasts of the earth. The heroine of Antigone argues that the very foundation
of what it means to be humane is given in this division of carcass from corpse, of predatory
from non-predatory space. Only in a space where corpses can remain intact, at least until
they are buried in consecrated ground or burned (and thus short-circuiting the whole issue
of edibility), can we be assured that the respect that is owed humans has been given its due.
What would Antigone make of the young Buddhist girl in Bertulocci's Little Buddha, who
affirms that her grandfather was honored in being eaten by a tiger?
In the North American wilderness, Rick Bass reminds us, the inheritors of Antigone's
legacy find the means not only to preserve but also to revere a landscape of carcasses. In
these places we finally admit that there is so much eating happening on the earth that in
actuality the inviolable corpse can be given no truly inviolable resting place. The corpse
will have always already been a carcass! Bass raises the issue of how carcasses are
characteristic of the wilderness experience, when he reports how his fellow-hiker Douglas
Peacock would prefer upon dying to become a carcass rather than a corpse. In his
particular manner of combining disconcerting idiosyncrasy with profound moral
critique, Peacock carries around in his wallet a card with instructions for his burial.
What these instructions amount to is Peacock's insistence to remain in the order of
edibility as an act of ethical responsibility:
Being of sound mind but dead body, I do hereby bequeath my mortal remains to
feed the Grizzly Bears of North America. Respect my body. Do not embalm! (A little
mustard would be appreciated.) Please put me in a deep freezer if I must be held for a few
days. Should my family refuse In claim me, or should I be indigent at the lime of my
demise, please explain to the County that I can be mailed to a wilderness (as evidenced by
the presence of grizzlies and/or wolves]. Please remove my eyes, kidneys and heart for the
living, but retain my liver because I think Grizz would like that most. I love you all. See you
in the Spring! (LG, pp. 123-24)
Peacock's desire to be eaten by bears involves the recognition of the goodness, rather than
the perversion, of being edible to other forms of life. This attitude of respect for those who
would eat one bespeaks a type of moral insight that confounds the logic of a purely
asymmetrical predation, of the values of an eater who would not be eaten.
As Bass's and his compatriots' "citizen's search" (LG, p. 110) works toward their elusive
goal of encountering the remnant of grizzlies in the San Juan Mountains, carcasses, at
least those of non-human animals, abound (LG, pp. 81, 113, 150, 160). Each sighting of a
carcass, often of the skeleton of an elk that has been preyed upon, draws attentive and
reverent contemplation:
We stop and look at some ancient moldering bones that stick up from the moss and
dark mulch on the trail's edge. Years of twigs and fir needles and forest rot have
covered (he bones. . . . An elk. We piece the scapula and a femur and tibia together
and place a few ribs back in their proper position. ... Without saying a word, we pass
around the great skull and admire it. Moss has grown on the bald pate, and the antlers
are worn by the teeth of squirrels and porcupines. The old boy died in the fall, and
on the trail. Almost certainly he fell to a predator. (LG, p. 150)
In a landscape of carcasses, death is exhibited as part and parcel of eating and edibility.
Antlers are gnawed on by porcupines, and the forest rot slowly consumes the remnants of
flesh and bone. In a further passage Bass encounters an elk skull and asks, How did you die?
As he looks for more bones, he witnesses a whole mountainside of edibility in which "balsam
root" thrives at a meadow's edge, while juncos, cracking open seeds, "feed in the firs all
around me," and chipmunks are "running through the tall grass, cutting stems so that the
seed heavy tops fall over like trees crashing in the forest, and the chipmunks fill their
cheeks with seeds, gorging like little bears." At this moment Bass finds himself "a junco
too, as if the whole world is made of nothing but juncos" (LG, p. 160). "The earth is a
miracle," he exclaims. At least part of this miracle has to do with how death feeds life and life
feeds death, of how balsam root and elk, bone and cracked seed and chipmunks' tittering
both nourish and arc nourished by the meadow, in which all living beings are interconnected
to all other living beings through cycles of eating and being eaten. In becoming a carcass, the
elk has not been reduced to a piece of rotting meal (at least here within the wilderness), but is
given back to the matrix from which it has arisen along with all those who will come to eat its
flesh. This alteration of the human landscape of corpses buried in cemeteries (or disposed of
through cremation) in favor of a natural one in which edible flesh is strewn about a
flourishing earth reminds us of an order beyond the humane in which all flesh, even the flesh
we cure with formaldehyde and seal up in stainless steel coffins, comes not to dust but to
living soil and the nurturing of all other living beings. And surprisingly, upon our entry into
this altered landscape of carcasses, we find ourselves generally fascinated with rather than
disgusted by this state of affairs.
Bass's descriptions of carcasses also suggest that our respect for wilderness necessarily
involves a respect for predation. In considering the lessons these carcasses teach about
predation, we may find that the uncanniness of our edible flesh lends us moral insight. As
Bass's entire narrative makes clear, entering attentively into the San Juan Mountains
involves a thorough reorientation of his bodily senses. This transformation is intimately tied
to his awareness of the bear not only as a being who can be sensed and tracked by Bass, but
also as one who can sense and track and consume Bass, as well as other animals in his
surroundings.2" The threat of the bear, as well as the caution and prudence that the author
is called upon to exercise in regard to the bear, is not taken as an imposition, but rather as
an opportunity to accord recognition to another entity's differing mode of life. Without
this recognition, Bass would argue, humans remain ignorant of what we have been called
upon by the wilderness to respect. In an important sense, those who walk into a wilderness
and fail to notice they are prey, also fail to have consideration for the bear as bear, or the
wilderness as wild. That one is of flesh, that one's flesh both makes one hungry and submits
one to other beings as a potential source for food, brings one into deep intimacy with the
bear, as well as with the bear's prey. Only in humbly undergoing this reorientation of one's
space can one now find a reverence and compassion for the bear that is truly attentive to the
space the bear occupies. The mode of this recognition has a different ethical force than the
more abstract argument of ethical holism, in which predation is justified in terms of the
interests of the survival of the species of both predator and prey. Such considerations,
although they may be true, are remote from the actual phenomenological situation of being
edible.2'' Paying attention to this situation and its uncanniness leads to another sort of
appreciation of what goodness entails in the wilderness.
In this transformation of perspective, we humans move to a notion of covenant with
the predatory species living in the wilderness environment. In covenant, we find ourselves
continually in transition between two spacesone in which predation is asymmetrical and
the other in which predation is reflexive. Only if we have the courage, the reverence, and the
wisdom to move from a space in which we are not potentially prey to one in which we can
become prey, can we find ourselves addressed by the goodness of the bear and ultimately
by an aspect of our own goodness that we otherwise would forget. In the words of Rick Bass:
"I believe that, to the eyes of God and to the spirit of those mountains, man is nearly
indistinguishable from bear, and that it is more than a metaphor to say that we may as well
be looking for ourselves" (LC, p. 99).

NOTES
1. Wendell Berry, "Preserving Wildness," in Home Economics (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 141. Henceforth PW. In his words: "Our problem, exactly, is
that the human and natural orders are indivisible, and yet are different."
2. This question is raised in a different contextnamely, in that of the cityin my essay
"Where the Beaver Gnaw: Predatory Space and the Urban Landscape," in Gary Backhaus
and John Murungi, eds., Transformations of Urban and Suburban Landscapes (Lanham,
Md: Lexington Books, 2002), pp. 35-54. The discussion there supplements what follows
here.
5. Cronin, Callicott, and others have criticized the concept of "wilderness" over the last
decade as being essentially genocidal, romantic, and illusory. See J. Baird Callicott and
Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1998). Perhaps those made uneasy by the word would be happier with
another term here. The argument that follows docs not assume that nature can he addressed
only by preserving wilderness areas but does assume that wilderness areas (whatever they
may be called) arc needed if wild animals arc to be given as much leave as possible to act
out their particular manners of embodiment, their particular ways of being earthly
creatures. All too many of us have continued to conceive the wilds as essentially the great
empty, a place simply shorn of civilized values or technological comforts. This is, as Snyder
has pointed out, an essentially negative account of wilderness that leaves unthought the
significance of the more than human(e) world (hat also lies within and without its bounds
(Gary Snyder, "The Etiquette of Freedom," in The Practice of the Wild [New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1990], pp. 8-18). As Snyder goes on to argue, we must cultivate a positive
conception of wildness and wilderness, if we are to become sensitive lo a realm where
animals behave as they find fit, or better, in that manner they are peculiarly fit to find. In
Snyder's own words, the positive conception of the wilds lies beyond "eating berries in the
sunlight" and also includes "the ball of crunched bones in a scat, (he feathers in the snow,
the tales of insatiable appetite" (Practice of the Wild, p. 110). hi the question of edibility
being raised here, humans are asked to become more attentive to how animals act of
themselves rather than how we wished they would act. And in becoming more attentive to
animals in this manner, might we not also become attentive to aspects of our own
humanity that transcend an easy accounting for in humane terms?
4. Scott McMillion, The Mark of the Grizzly: The Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the
Hard lessons teamed (Helena. Mont.: Falcon Press, 1998), pp. 247-48. Henceforth MG.
5. See the excerpt "Bear Attack" from the video National Geographic Explorer: Bears,
in which Kelley McConnell talks about his sentiments for a bear that killed his mother and
nearly killed him as well in northern British Columbia on August 14, 1997.
6. In March 2002 my father inadvertently met the son of a man who was killed in fall of
2OOl by a grizzly bear in the Blackfoot River drainage of Montana. Sitting down in a cafe
counter next to my father and his friends, the son began talking about his feelings of loss
concerning the death of his father. What astounded my father was when this man pulled not
only a picture of his father out of a wallet hut also of the bear who killed him and was later
put lo death by the authorities! In many cases not only the death of a loved one but the
death of the bear who killed the loved one is mourned, oral least pondered over, by those who
survive.
The recent deaths of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard in October 2003 by a
bear-mauling in Alaska also fit this pattern, although it must also be observed that Treadwell
was rashly indifferent to the danger that bears, and particularly brown bears, presented to
him in the wild. In the past Treadwell spoke of how he would be honored "to end up in
bear scat," even as he insisted bears were not all that dangerous. See Sherry Devlin, The
Missoulian, October 12, 2003, C1; see also Timothy Treadweil and (Jewell Palovak, Among
Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).
7. It should be remembered that while grizzly bears, as well as other species of bears,
may be predatory, this is not always or usually the case. While polar bears are perhaps best
documented as consistent and wily stalkers of prey, whether it be human or not, many
species of bear, including grizzly bears, are omnivores. Further, bear attacks against
humans are often triggered, particularly in the case of sows, as defensive reactions rather
than predatory assaults. See James Gary Shelton, Bear Encounter Survival Guide
(Hagensborg, B.C.: Pallister, 1997), http://www.direct.ca/cabc. See also Stephen Herrero,
Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002). For a
discussion of the eating habits and constitutional aggressiveness of brown bears (which is
the species of which grizzly bears are a part) over their evolutionary and recent history, see
Thomas McNamee, The Grizzly Bear (New York: Lyons and Burford, 1997), pp. 22-40.
8. This may sound like an odd qualification, since it would more likely seem the animal
is rendered a non-agent due to its being an animal rather than its being wild. But insofar as
domesticated animals are regularly trained to respect human life (or to become a threat to
it!), they function at least as quasi moral agents in a manner that wild animals may not.
Different standards would be adopted to judge a grizzly bear attack and the attack of a
trained dog.
9. As McMillion puts if, "Holding a grudge against bears would be like holding a
grudge against automobiles because one of them cracked your head open or broke your
leg on an icy street" (MC, p. 248), But the comparison of the bear attack to an automobile
accident is not totally accurate. For we do not say that automobiles should be in accidents,
but we would say that the bears should eat other animals because it is part of the natural
order to do so. Further, even if the bear, like the automobile, is not capable of murder,
those who suffer this animal's attack have been killed or mauled in a manner that is radically
different from an accident. The bear who would kill us wants our body and perhaps our
death, and we are to be submitted to its intention violently and inhumanely. From our
perspective, the bear looks upon us and attacks us, at least in some instances, as if we were
merely food! Because the automobile does not desire to kill us (or eat us!), it is not possible
to think of it as inhumane. But the term is deserved in a circumscribed sense for a bear
whose very constitution as a being requires that It would intend to eat a fellow animal
including those who happen to be human.
10. The manner in which the inhumanity' of human beings is confused with that of
animals, as well as the manner in which this notion of the inhumane finds its own ethical
significance, will be given further treatment below.
11. Barry Lope/, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 92.
Lope/, distinguishes between two senses of this termone sacred and one phar-
macological. In either sense, one's food is not to be characterized as simply an inert
substance one shoves into one's mouth: a mere means to fuel one's metabolic furnace. Even
the pharmacological sense suggests a kinship between eater and eaten that is expressed in
how the food animates (or deadens! [one's own life.
12. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, eds.. The Upanishads: Breath
of the Eternal (New York: Mentor Books, 1957), p. 55: "From food are born all creatures,
which live upon food and after death return to food. Food is the chief of all things. It is
therefore said to he medicine for all diseases of the body."
13. Understanding the act of eating in terms of gift giving and receiving rather than in
those of using something as a means to an end would do much to advance the argument
being made here. Recently the thought of Lewis Hyde has come to my attention
concerning this approach' sec The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New
York: Vintage Books, 1983). Particularly suggestive is his argument that gift giving
fundamentally ties one into an exchange with other beings that is interminable. Further,
Hyde points out that gift traditions in cultures such as the Northwest Indians arc deeply
tied to the notion of food. The term "potlatch," for example, has been translated as "to
nourish" or "to consume," as well as nominatively as "big feeder" or "place to be satiated" (p.
9).
14. In confusing sexual abuse with animal predation, we fail to mark the difference
between moral betrayal and nurturing ingestion. For a thoughtful consideration of how our
notions of the beast within leads us astray from a fair-minded consideration of animals,
see Mary Midgley, "The Concept of Beastliness" in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds.,
Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp.
93-106. See also Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 25-50. Midgley points out that the notion of beastliness inevitably
suggests a lack of order in animals that is simply not true. Paradoxically, animal ethologists
have determined that wolves have more ingrained constraints against killing recklessly than
do deer: "Where murder is so easy, a species must have a rigorous inhibition against it or
perish" (p. 97). She adds, "Wolves, in fact, have been traditionally blamed for being
carnivores, which is doubly surprising since the people who blamed them normally ate
meat themselves, and were not, as the wolf is, compelled by their stomachs to do so."
15. This claim might be considered inapplicable to anyone who practices vegetarianism: it
could be argued that one who does not eat meat can hardly be considered to be dependent
upon the flesh of the animal other to be who one is. Several replies need to be made to this
assertion: (1) Whether one is a vegetarian or not, one's very flesh is, or rather, should be,
destined for reintegration into the very order of edibility by which one's vegetables are
grown. In the larger view, compost is made up of animal as well as vegetable matter. At the
very least, one's flesh is destined to be decomposed by bacteria. So even if one does not eat
animals, something out there is eventually going to eat oneself. And in eating vegetables,
one is eating matter that has been nourished by the decaying bodies of animals, even the
human animal, as well as plant matter. (2) Without edibility, in which eons of eating,
including predation, has fueled evolution, one's very flesh would not have come to exist as
it does. (3) Vegetables may lack consciousness, but they do not lack animationthey too
must be considered part of the order of flesh. The mastication of plant tissue may not
affect the consciousnessif there be anyof the plant, but it would lie quite a stretch to say
that the plant's objective capacity to live is indifferent to this use of it,
16. But, as Robert Frodeman has suggested in discussion, one should not underestimate
the significance of the edibility of the earth itself.
17. Holmes Rolston III, "Values Gone Wild," in Susan Armstrong and Richard
Botller, eds., Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1993), p. 64. Originally found in Inquiry 26 (1983): 181-207. Henceforth VW.
18. The turn here to a phenomenological approach raises the question of the
significance of edibility by asking that we become attentive to how we humans actually
undergo the condition of being edible. If we are to make sense of the intimate in-
congruence of the human and the natural, we must search out ways of knowing that help
us to understand the intimate aspects of this relationship, as much as the in-
commensurability of it. Phenomenology, with its turn to the manner in which our
encounter of the world actually takes place a/ready in and of the world, allows room for a
description of this intimacy. In developing this analysis, I am particularly appreciative of
the work of David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous [New York: Vintage Books, 1997])
and David Strong (Crazy Mountains [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1995]), both of whom argue that we best come to know the more than human world in the
first instance as a mode of our co-involvement in and with it. As Abram argues, our
relationship to the natural world is one that is always already embodied and so participatory.
In my mind Kristeva's notion of the abject opens up a particular aspect of this embodied
participation in others that would be underappreciated, if not ignored, by a more objective
critique of edibility. Further, to my mind Rolston, with his emphasis upon how natural
values emerge both as an outcome of our own consciousness of our body and our
observation of other bodies, is not so far from a phenomenological approach. What
phenomenology might add to Rolston's critique is a more elegant and comprehensive
manner of raising and understanding the slipperiness a! play between extrinsic and intrinsic
values. I would add that Strong, in his use of the Heideggerian language of "things,"
remains oddly oblique, at least in his diction, to speaking phenomenologically about
creatures who must eat one another in order to he.
19. See Julia Kristeva's discussion of the Freudian uncanny in Strangers to Ourselves,
trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 182-92,
20. See my discussion of the Heideggerian versus Kristevian notions of the uncanny in
"Where the Beaver Gnaw" (in the section headed "How One Dies"),
21. Kelly Olivet, Reading Kristeva (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 57.
22. The claim here is not being made merely about objective bodies, the body as an
envelope (although this too is involved), but about the body as a "participatory openness"
(Abram), an inextricable intertwining, a "correlational coexisting" (Strong), a coming lo
itself by means of all that environs it.
23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p, 263.
24. This concept is introduced in my essay "Recursive Incarnation and Chiasmic Flesh:
Two Readings of Paul Celan's Chymisch," in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of
Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), although there it is termed the
plethora. The plethoric suggests an orientation, in which one is filled to excess,
overloaded, engorged with the flesh of all other living beings,
25. This claim is reminiscent of the Buddhist notion of paticca samuppada, dependent
co-arising. Sec Joanna Macy's treatment of this concept in her World as Lover, World as
Self(Berkeley, Calif.: Parallax Press, 1991), ch. 8.
26. In "Recursive Incarnation," I argued that Merleau-Ponty's very turn to a phe-
nomenological view of the body is effectively an ethics. His analysis implies that we most
often flee being in touch with the co-functioning of our bodies with other bodies, because
this co-functioning so deeply undermines our complacent view of being the center of our
world and in complete control of our own embodiment. But to be embodied is uncannily
precarious. By demonstrating the futility and fundamental dishonesty of this mode of
flight, phenomenology serves to bring us into a posture of humility in regard to all other
beings. To live in the delusional state of an autonomy that is utterly impermeable to other
bodies is to cultivate insensitivity to the other's sensitivity, inattentive ness to her or his or
its pangs of hunger.
27. Rick Bass, The Lost Grizzlies (London: Constable Press, 1996). Henceforth LG.
28. Consider how Bass finally meets his candidate for one of the lost grizzlies, when
both Bass and the bear are equally intent on stalking a deer. They stumble onto one another
because of their mutual interest in pursuing oilier creatures of flesh!
29. As Henry Bugbee, the teacher of both David Strong and myself, has argued in regard
to wilderness: "We are not there as seen by ourselves, as parts within a whole. No, we are
there as on the spot with respect to the meaning of what we behold.... From within the
lived relationship in which the presencing occurs must arise the sense of the occurrent, if at
all"; "Wilderness in America," journal of the American Academy of Religion 42. no. 4
(1974): 614-20.