The General Theory of Not Gardening
This is from the November, 1990 Harper's Magazine.
THE GENERAL THEORY OF NOT-GARDENING by Leszek Kolakowski. From
"Modernity on Endless Trial," a collection of Kolakowski's essays that the
University of Chicago Press will publish next month. Kolakowski teaches
philosophy at the University of Chicago and at Oxford University.
"Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not-gardening without a theory is
a shallow, unworthy way of life.
"A theory must be convincing and scientific. Yet to different people,
different theories are convincing and scientific. Therefore, we need a number
of theories.
"The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden. However,
it is much easier to have a theory than actually to garden.
Marxist Theory
"Capitalists try to corrupt the minds of the toiling masses and to poison
them with their reactionary 'values.' They want to 'convince' workers that
gardening is a great 'pleasure' and thereby keep them busy in their leisure
time and prevent them from carrying out the proletarian revolution. Besides,
they want to make them believe that with their miserable plot of land they are
really 'owners' and not wage earners and in this way win them over to the
side of the owners in the class struggle. To garden is therefore to
participate in the great plot aiming at the ideological deception of the
masses. Do not garden! Q.E.D.
Psychoanalytical Theory
"Fondness for gardening is a typically English quality. It is easy
to see why this is so. England was the first country to take part in
the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution killed the natural
environment. Nature is the symbol of Mother. By killing Nature, the
English people committed matricide. They are unconsciously haunted by
feelings of guilt, and they try to expiate their crime by cultivating
and worshiping their small, pseudonatural gardens. To garden is to
take part in this gigantic self-deception. You must not garden. Q.E.D.
Existentialist Theory
"People garden in order to make Nature human, to 'civilize' it. This,
however, is a desperate and futile attempt to transform being-in-itself
into being-for-itself. This is not only ontologically impossible; it is
a deceptive, morally inadmissible escape from reality, as the distinction
between being-in-itself and being-for-itself cannot be abolished. To
garden, or to imagine that one can 'humanize' Nature, is to try to
efface this distinction and hopelessly to deny one's own irreducibly
human ontological status. To garden is to live in bad faith. Gardening
is wrong. Q.E.D.
Structuralist Theory
"In primitive societies life was divided into the pair of opposites
work/leisure, which corresponded to the distinction field/house. People
worked in the field and rested at home. In modern societies the axis
of opposition has been reversed: People work in houses (factories,
offices) and rest in the open (gardens, parks, forests, rivers, etc.).
Such distinctions are crucial in maintaining the conceptual framework
whereby people structure their lives. To garden is to confuse the
distinction between house and field, between leisure and work; it
is to blur, indeed to destroy, the oppositional structure that is the
basis of thinking. Gardening is a blunder. Q.E.D.
Analytical Philosophy
"In spite of many attempts, no satisfactory definitions of 'garden'
and of 'gardening' have been found; all existing definitions leave a
large area of uncertainty about what belongs where. We simply do not
know what exactly a garden and gardening are. To use these concepts
is therefore intellectually irresponsible, and actually to garden
would be even more so. Thou shalt not garden. Q.E.D."
BB-Posted: Fri, 09 Nov 90 01:44:25 +0000
From: janeeyre@milton.u.washington.edu (Marianna Wright)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,rec.gardens,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: The General Theory of Not-Gardening
Keywords: theory, gardening
Date: 7 Nov 90 17:28:47 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle