How often have you described yourself as "spiritual but not religious"? Maybe organized religion doesn't speak to you, or seems confining. Perhaps you suspect that some grand intelligence informs the workings of the universe, but "God" or "atheist" aren't words with which you are comfortable. Maybe cosmic coincidences seem to you more than just random, although not in the manner of intelligent design. How do you reconcile empiricism and wonder?
The Belgian playwright, essayist, amateur botanist and Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) found himself in a similar philosophical conundrum 100 years ago. In the midst of a historical period abounding with invention - consider the telephone, the camera, the automobile and airplane, not to mention the general theory of relativity - Maeterlinck argues for a kind of mystical science. As a sequel to his enormously successful 1901 essay, "The Life of the Bee," which sold an astonishing 250,000 copies, Maeterlinck's 1907 essay "The Intelligence of Flowers" (nicely translated here from the French by Philip Mosley) melds religious intuition and scientific observation. He describes numerous examples of intelligence in flowers as they seek to reproduce, and by analogy insists that the "genius" observed in the behavior of flowers resembles the wisdom of people.
Ideas come to flowers in the same way they come to us," Maeterlinck writes. But flowers don't think, which Maeterlinck knows. As a result, while he insists upon the brilliance of individual species - one orchid is even described as "truly Machiavellian" - he acknowledges that the individual flower is not a sentient being. Of the eelgrass, Maeterlinck writes "the whole genius rests in the species, in life or nature ... and the individual on the whole is stupid."
But what a botanical species "knows" nonetheless provides a basis for a theory of everything: "[W]e follow the same path as the soul of this great world," Maeterlinck argues. Endorsing neither religion nor evolution, Maeterlinck puts forth a kind of spiritualism grounded in experience. In short (although his phrases rarely are), Maeterlinck writes that everything alive is intelligent. He also notes that the vanity of human history indicates we have misunderstood our place in this intelligent universe: Nature makes plenty of errors, Maeterlinck observes (as he records the trials of various plants), and so perfection isn't ever ours, and never was. If nature isn't perfect, then maybe there isn't a God, he implies.
As a poetic treatise on the behavior of flowers, offered in grandiloquent rhetoric, "The Intelligence of Flowers" would be worth reading if only for the phrases Maeterlinck parades: One flower shoots its seeds, a "vegetal artillery"; another, an orchid known as "stinking mud" has a lower petal "decorated at its source with bronzed caruncles, with Merovingian mustaches, and with ominous lilac buboes." Most of the descriptions of the flowers attribute human sensibility to botanical form and function, although some rely upon more purely mechanistic language, of pulley and lever, for example. Here, of course, is where Maeterlinck's philosophy falters: He finds what he's looking for, and in combining his metaphors, he generates an associative argument. Plants remind him of people, and so people must be like plants, he reasons. It's not the best thinking.
But the timeliness of Maeterlinck's project seems apparent 100 years after the fact. Once again, or still, or maybe always, we struggle with how to reconcile scientific knowledge with individual experience, while the dominant metaphors of each discourse seem to exclude the possibility of the other. What Maeterlinck knows is that Darwin had it right, that species adapt; what Maeterlinck wants, and attempts extravagantly here, is to explain the wonders and the errors of adaptive nature as they relate to human experience. "Our mind draws from the same reservoirs as does that of nature," he writes. "We are of the same world, we are almost among equals. We no longer mix with inaccessible gods."
That the intelligence of flowers provides Maeterlinck with a theory riddled with contradictions - mostly as a result of his metaphoric reasoning - seems less important than the fundamental truths of the metaphors unto themselves. As a result, "The Intelligence of Flowers" is happily welcome once more, in this centenary reissue. |
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