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The Future Lives in Everything: Care, Conatus and The Road

Christopher Groves What place does the future have in human experience? A certain tradition, of which contemporary Western societies are the heirs, has long viewed it as a territory to be mapped, controlled, conquered. To this way of thinking, the future is most easily imagined as a linear axis along which the trajectories of economic variables, of social change, of and so on unfold. The future of planning, projection and forecasting feeds into our experience of the world around us. Yet this future co-exists with others, rooted in more intimate dimensions of experience. To uncover these dimensions and the kinds of future-orientation to which they give rise, it is necessary to reach down beneath the assumptions and habits of minds on which the planned, forecasted future rests and which mark it out as a more or less domesticated zone populated by our short- and long-term goals. To do this, a thought experiment is called for. And luckily, we have an example of such an experiment to hand. Cormac McCarthys 2007 novel The Road can be read, I suggest, as exactly such an investigation of the existential significance of futurity. The novel has already been subject to a great deal of interpretation, which has found within it Emersonian transcendentalism,1 post-9/11 reflections on the American experience of trauma,2 and environmentalism.3 Across most of these interpretations, the idea that there is, in McCarthys post-apocalyptic world, no future, precisely in the sense of a mappable, colonisable territory across which individual biographies and human history will continue to unfold, is often encountered. On the contrary, the future has vanished along with the past, and there is only the present left. Temporally speaking, there is thus no real possibility to move either forwards or backwards, no chance for a return to the past nor any real hope for the future; all that is left is the immediate present, the next piece of bread, the next shelter, the next violent encounter that they have, somehow, to survive.4 The world depicted in The Road is one in which the perfect disaster of Ulrich Becks imagination has finally occurred. It is one in which Becks oft-repeated claim that the novel hazards of modernity, which cross boundaries invisibly and spread globally (typified by radioactive fallout and persistent, bioaccumulating pollutants), are democratic by nature, capable of affecting those who are responsible for creating them as much as distant, innocent victims, is proven to
1 Schaub, Thomas H., Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthys The Road, Renascence 61, no. 3

(2009): 153167. 2 Rambo, Shelly, Beyond Redemption? Reading Cormac McCarthys The Road After the End of the World, Studies in the Literary Imagination 41, no. 2 (2008): 99119. 3 Monbiot, George, Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?, The Guardian, October 30, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/30/comment.books. 4 Rune Graulund, Fulcrums and Borderlands. A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthys The Road, Orbis Litterarum 65, no. 1 (2010): 5778.

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be true.5 The entire biosphere has been reduced to ash by unimaginable firestorms, triggered by some natural or human-caused disaster, we do not know which or what. The book deliberately avoids, however, the themes and narrative structures that characterize environmental disaster novels, which often depict disaster as the sum total of small decisions and failures to read the signs. Such narratives dwell on causation or at least correlation between a variety of self-destructive human activities and disaster with disaster as the finale.6 John Brunners The Sheep Look Up (1972) is particularly good example, in which a tragic narrative driven Becks rampaging transboundary hazards, propagated by human folly, lead to the destruction of North America in firestorms. We ought to call the brigade she exclaimed. Is it a hayrick? The brigade would have a long way to go, the doctor told her curtly. Its from America. The winds blowing that way. In McCarthys book, however, there is no attempt at this kind of narrative, which typically relies on current scientific projections of possible futures in order to deliver warnings to the present. There is no explanation, simply the piecemeal elaboration (through flashbacks) of the immediate and longer-term aftermath of an event that seems to have created an almost implausible conflagration. In the ten or so years since the event, the human race has dwindled, through starvation, illness (exposure to the ash which blankets everything is hazardous) and cannibalism, down to a scattering of individuals and groups who wander the landscape in search of leavings from a vanished civilisation. The book concentrates on the wanderings of a man and his young son, aged around ten, born at around the time of the disaster. McCarthy takes pains to describe for us a world which Mark Fisher has suggested takes on the characteristics of the Gnostic conception of the material world, degraded and abject, a burned-out husk that approaches [...] total entropy and inertia.7 The theme of entropy is undoubtedly a central driving force behind McCarthys depiction of the post-event times. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. The counterspectacle here is the opposite of the becoming of which the trouts markings described in the books final paragraph are maps. Rather than evolutionary processes, which imply bifurcation, complexification and organisation, we are confronted by a global reversion to zero.
5 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Theory, Culture and Society (London: Sage

Publications, 1992). 6 George Monbiots reading of the book as an environmental warning ignores this signal difference between The Road and books within this genre see Monbiot, op. cit. 7 Mark Fisher (2010) The lonely road, Film Quarterly, 63(3), pp. 1417,

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However, Fisher is incorrect, I think, to describe McCarthys vision of the world as Gnostic. Gnosticism enforces a metaphysical dualism of substances, divine sparks and clods of matter, whereas McCarthy gives hints of a different, more neoplatonic metaphysics at work. Immediately after the passage I just quoted, he adds to the entropic drumbeat of the foregoing lines the mysterious (and much discussed) closing sentence The salitter drying from the earth. This term salitter originates with Aurora [Die Morgenrte im Aufgang] by the 16th-17th German neoplatonic philosopher Jakob Bhme, an author from whom McCarthy also takes the epigraph that opens his earlier novel Blood Meridian. It refers to a matrix of generative and creative natural forces which is the common denominator of what is conscious and alive and of what appears inanimate and inert,8 and which also achieves highest expression in human consciousness. This principle is, in neoplatonic fashion, immanent in the world, as opposed to being entirely separate from it. Further, it may be drying from the world in McCarthys book, but it is not entirely extinguished. That this is so is apparent from the moment when the protagonists find mushrooms, or more specifically morels, beneath a dead rhododendron in an incinerated wood.9 Morels, as well as being a prized edible fungus, are a saphrophytic species, one which helps to decompose dead organic matter and fertilise the soil. If the counterspectacle of entropy threatens to choke off all of the becoming and unfolding of nature, then it is evident that there are still good places, as the boy puts it, where the salitter, in which the creative potential of nature is embodied, have not entirely evaporated. The idea of a generative tendency, immanent to living (and, in the case of Boehme and other later philosophers who belong to the same intellectual tradition, such as Franz von Baader and F. W. J. Schelling, non-living) entities has been associated with anti-mechanistic, vitalist tendencies within the philosophy of biology. Vitalism tends to be thought of as a dualistic metaphysics, however, in which a life-principle is added to inert matter. If it is to be genuinely immanent in matter (as the Boehmean tradition suggests it must be), this principle must arise from the organisation or structure of matter itself. This stricture characterises the concept of a generative tendency employed by the 20th century German philosopher Hans Jonas. The key characteristic of living systems, for Jonas, is that their behaviour cannot be explained without purposiveness, without a governing principle of self-preservation and development (conatus). All living creatures are characterised both by internal complexity and, going from plants to animals, an increasing degree of independence from their environment. Independence, however, is bound up with dependence, which means that the condition of living creatures is what Jonas calls needful freedom.10 The more independent a creature is (animals possess central nervous system and are mobile, whereas plants do and are not), the more numerous the uncertainties to which it is subject. Purposiveness comes with the
8 Lawrence M. Principe and Andrew Weeks, (1989) Jacob Boehme's Divine Substance Salitter: its

Nature, Origin, and Relationship to Seventeenth Century Scientific Theories, British Journal of the History of Science, 22, pp.53-61. 9 I owe this observation to Dr Paul Nieuwenhuis. 10 Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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boundary between organism and environment which characterises unicellular creatures: this boundary and the conditions internal to the organism that help sustain it must be sustained for the creature to survive. With purposiveness comes potential for change and therefore uncertainty. The condition of living beings, as described by Jonas, is one in which the future remains, to some extent, open. What has happened does not fully determine what will happen.11 The degree to which the future is open increases with the complexity of the organism. Human beings are, for Jonas, different from other living creatures in the sense that they are able to reflect on and thus place themselves at a distance from their past and possible futures in deciding what to do next, and can thus select among a range of different purposes. In contrast to the entropic landscape McCarthy describes, then, the morels remain as bearers of the salitter, the purposiveness, in which natural processes are integrated in the maintenance of what Jonas calls needful freedom. As living entities, they hold open a minimal crack in the future which increasing entropy appears to be inexorably closing down. What of the boy and his father, and the significance (if any) of their wanderings? I want to suggest that the concept of life described by Jonas can help us understand the significance of a number of elements of their experiences as well, and indeed the moral framework which McCarthy develops in the novel. In the post-disaster world, in which entropy appears to be winning, human purpose appears to have been extinguished. Without organised societies, there can be no more history, no recording of actions. Yet at the same time, the father insists on the reality of a moral order, even without any societal institutions, and to which his son, like his conscience, insists he be true. How can such an order have meaning in a world where, as the old man Ely they encounter insists, there is no god, either in the sense of a truly transcendent being who grants purpose to creation through his will or in the incarnate sense used by Christ where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.12 The father insists, however, in response to Eli that there is god, a warrant (the word he uses early in the book when thinking of his son) for his view of the world and the sense of who he is which comes with it. What can this mean? Jonas suggests that there is a warrant for morality even in the absence of god, in the shape of the purposiveness of natural beings, the salitter that remains. Without going into too much detail,13 this warrant allows for a distinction between the bad guys and the good guys in the world of The Road which maps the moral categories to which the son (in particular) strives to be true. Importantly, it does not provide a maximalist, teleological version of goodness. Instead, it allows for a minimal distinction between good and evil
11 Chris Groves, The Futures of Causality: Hans Jonas and Gilles Deleuze, in Causality and

Motivation, ed. Roberto Poli (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010), 15170. 12 Matthew 18:20 (KJV) 13 For a fuller account, see Vogel, Lawrence, The Outcry of Mute Things: Hans Jonass Imperative of Responsibility, in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 167185.

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based solely on the experience of futurity left to those who inhabit McCarthys world. In the rest of this essay, I will explore what this distinction means. Much has been written about how the past is fading from the present of The Road. Just as nature seems incapable of sustaining life any more, so have the supports of individual identity in culture been lost, and even language itself seems to be under threat. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Loss can no longer be mourned. Without the webs of meaning that link objects and people together within a culture, the possibility of feeling what Martha Nussbaum has called the upheaval of thought, the disruption of identity consequent on loss of attachment.14 The symbolic dimension of the past is as prey to entropy as is the natural complexity produced by billions of years of evolution. For this reason, the stories that the father tells his son as a way of weaving a last thread of cultural continuity are, as he recognizes, hazardous at the same time as being necessary: becoming involved with the past, either through invoked memories or simply through imagination risks awakening dynamics of mourning or melancholy (in Freuds sense) or mere fantasy. When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? Nonetheless, emotional attachment, love, and the meaning it contributes to human life remains at the core of The Road. This meaning is evoked through a sensitivity to futurity that McCarthy discovers on the far side of the event that appears to have destroyed history. This sensitivity extends to evocations of the futurity of things, the sense in which everyday objects serve as anchors around which the thickness of quotidian futures is woven. Objects which offer themselves for use, contemplation, and so on reinforce the sense of being able to trust the world which, according to
14 Martha Craven Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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attachment psychologists, develops out of the safe space created by good enough caregivers during childhood.15 They reinforce our expectations that the future into which we are moving is one in which we shall remain at home. Although the decay of even the remnants of civilisation is destroying this possibility, the father in The Road remains sensitive to the connection between meaning and futurity. At one point, he recalls an occasion years after the cataclysm when he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. Here, the expectation of future continuity is felt as encoded in the material being of the books, the shelves on which they stood and the rooms that contain them. Embodied in the products of purposive human action is care for the future, for continuation. Surrounded by such objects, and the forms of life they sustain my computer on which Im writing this, a coffee mug, the prints on the walls of my office and my own shelves of books this sense of continuity inevitably holds a tinge of conservatism. Embodied in things as they are is an expectation that things should continue as they are. But in the world McCarthys novel as a kind of thought experiment describes, care for the future is shorn of any conservatism, and, perhaps paradoxically, the consequences is that its significance for human life stands forth more sharply as a result. Without the future nothing means anything we cannot escape the fact that the value of the smallest thing is indeed predicated on a world to come and without acts and objects that embody a future there is no future. Just as the salitter drying from the world represents the loss of the hesitation between past and future that characterises, in Jonas philosophy, all living beings, the threat to the human present is a threat to care for the vulnerable, singular futures of what we care about and to the specific things and activities that sustain them. Attachments, and the webs of activities and objects which sustain them, hold open the future. The singular future of things and people we care about draws from us active caring, a drive to extend our agency towards them and their needs, rather than to curtail it at the edge of the boundaries which liberal political philosophy has always suggested define our individuality.16 From the mechanics and woodcraft skills displayed by the father to the tender bathing and caretaking of his son when he falls ill, care in the novel is a force which both wedges open a gap between present and future and grants shape, as a sculptor or woodcarver does, to the future which arrives through it. In its diverse forms it bears ritual significance that extends beyond the immediate benefit it brings:
15 Inge Bretherton, The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, Developmental Psychology 28, no. 5 (1992): 759775. 16 C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38.

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The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Continually we are reminded of how the day-to-day survival of the pair reaches beyond survival, through the inescapable symbolic dimension of care, its creation of new meaning and potential even as it concerns itself with simply sustaining what exists. Although even the names of things one believed to be true risk dissolution, the care of the father for his son, and of the son for his father, holds open a gap through which novelty can creep or explode. The creation of absurd card games, swimming in an icy pool, firing a flare pistol all bear witness to this excess of the present which is futurity. Without uncertainty, there is only death; but uncertainty untamed also threatens death. Creativity transforms uncertainty into security, love and even delight. This capacity for bringing unlooked-for novelty into the world was described by Hannah Arendt as characteristic of the human condition, a capacity she called natality, embodied by the birth of children, works of art and political action 17. The fathers care for his son does not therefore promise a grand story of redemption, only the everyday care of a father for his child who, his father eventually realises, he cannot kill as he promised he would should he himself die, in order to spare him from a worse fate in the post-cataclysm world. Everyday care is, however, arguably more important for sustaining a concrete sense of integrity, futurity and tangible hope than affirmations of lofty moral ideals, as Tzvetan Todorov has argued in relation to the stories of inmates of Nazi and Soviet concentration and labour camps.18 The narratives the pair create between them of their journey to the warmer South where there might even be, suggests the boy, other children are sustained by this tangible yet precarious tissue of care as fragile yet tenacious as the morels they discover which is itself threatened by the fathers own fear-driven, violent responses to possible or real external threats as much as it is by these threats themselves. At many points, the son asks his father for reassurance that they are the good guys, wanting to be told that they are different from those who, they know, steal from and even kill others for food. We are not cannibals, he is told. In the most horrific sentences of the book, it is apparent that others, who have resorted to cannibalism, treat women as incubators for babies who will be used for meat once they are born. The bad guys, then, are marked out as people for whom, in Graulunds words, there is nothing beyond the immediate present, for whom there is nothing which cannot be instrumentalized, degraded into mere matter to be used for survival. Even their own children, the embodiment of Arendts natality, the power of new potential, of unforeseen beginnings, of an open
17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998). 18 Tzvetan Todorov, Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (Holt, 1997).

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future, are sucked into the maw of the desire to survive at all costs. These others embody and extend the entropy that has engulfed the world. This degree-zero degradation they embody, and which so disgusts the father and terrifies his son, is a denial of the responsibility that, according to Jonas, is the moral demand which accompanies the human experience of futurity the need to care, not only for objects of attachment and those objects and activities which sustain them, but for care itself, for the potential of building, creating purpose even in the face of entropy. Jonas writes, with reference to the technological societies we inhabit today, that it behoves us to ensure that never must the existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of action.19 It is this essence, as well as the existence, of humanity that is threatened in The Road, as the prospect of accepting the need to eat ones own children in order to continue to exist reveals. It is in this sense that the boy is the word of god, as the father says, and is himself a promise, a tabernacle (a container for the divine presence), is carrying the fire. The continuity build by the deeds and words of the father is both paternal and maternal, a teaching of both independence and care for the vulnerability of the cared-for. The boy incarnates a promise that what Jonas calls the essence of humanity, its natality, its capacity for creative responses to uncertainty upon which trust, love and flourishing depend, will be sustained. McCarthy has, in the past, been described as a nihilist, for whom the difference between good and evil ceases to have stable meaning. In The Road, however, it is evident that nihilism characterises only the bad guys, for whom the possibility of care, of creation, of resistance to the cold clasp of entropy has ceased to have significance. Those who preserve the breath of God, the fragile remnants of Boehmes salitter, are those who hold open the future and charge it with potential, with possibility, incarnated in those for whom they care and the practices with which they care for them. As Mark Fisher notes, there seems to be no possibility of society left in The Road, and perhaps as he states, a suspicion of collectivity (or even a blindness towards it why do the father and the boys mother not seek out and cooperate with their neighbours in the face of the cataclysm?20) is evident. Yet the basis of society remains, in the resources of care that appear to be embodied by the boy and by the family group who find him after his fathers death. The role of ideas and images of redemption in the book has been much discussed by commentators. Yet there is no great promise of redemption evident in the finale of the book, no obvious prospect that human society can necessarily arise anew from the ashes or that the results of such a future would be good. Everything remains uncertain. At the same time, the boy stands for an unimaginable future, one which exceeds the limits of the present entirely, and one in which there is no grief, no mourning and no melancholy for the past world which has been lost. The one secure anchor for the finale is a moral one. The thought experiment at the heart of McCarthys novel distils from it a moral distinction whose truth withstands even
19 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: in Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 128. 20 Fisher, op. cit.

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the almost total entropification of nature and meaning begun by the invisible cataclysm. We cannot finish on this note, however. The power of the ending of the book, beyond the events of the final few pages, resides in the ambivalence of its plangent final paragraph. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. The loss of an object of attachment is the loss of something irreplaceable, something sui generis. Here, McCarthy evokes, in its full concreteness and uniqueness, the singularity of the vanished world as something whose intrinsic value lies in its value as a limit. Some environmental ethicists insist that the meaning of nature is its independence, its resistance to our attempts to fully understand it and manipulate it. The maps of the becoming of the world are also mazes, unimaginable concatenations of ramifying contingencies that exceed all human comprehension. Within the limit staked out by nature, the narratives of human identity and agency find their proper matrix and armature. If a human world should become possible again far beyond the limits of the present described in the book a world without grief, without mourning and without melancholy would the lack of need to grieve for the loss of the old world in its specificity, and the mysterious stories woven therein, be something worthy of regret? Here, even the moral bedrock reached by McCarthys Jonasian exploration of the experience of futurity is haunted by loss, by a constitutive trauma21. References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Theory, Culture and Society. London: Sage Publications, 1992. Bretherton, Inge. The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology 28, no. 5 (1992): 759775. Gilligan, C. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Graulund, Rune. Fulcrums and Borderlands. A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthys The Road. Orbis Litterarum 65, no. 1 (2010): 5778. Groves, Chris. The Futures of Causality: Hans Jonas and Gilles Deleuze. In Causality and Motivation, edited by Roberto Poli, 15170. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010. Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: in Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
21 Cf. Rambo, op. cit.

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. The Phenomenon of Life. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Monbiot, George. Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already? The Guardian, October 30, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/30/comment.boo ks. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rambo, Shelly. Beyond Redemption? Reading Cormac McCarthys The Road After the End of the World. Studies in the Literary Imagination 41, no. 2 (2008): 99119. Schaub, Thomas H. Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthys The Road. Renascence 61, no. 3 (2009): 153167. Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Holt, 1997. Vogel, Lawrence. The Outcry of Mute Things: Hans Jonass Imperative of Responsibility. In Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, 167185. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.