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When it comes to gardening, I’d rather read about it than do it any day. We are featuring some unusual gardening and botanical books this month. To whet your appetite for reading about gardening, here is a short essay by the distinguished Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski.
THE GENERAL THEORY OF NOT GARDENING*
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 selfdeception. 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 onto logically 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 modem 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.
*Apologies to the folks at University of Chicago Press, who never responded to my request to use this.
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