COLERIDGE'S PERCEPTION OF NATURE & MODERN ECOLOGICAL STUDIES

The modern environmental view of nature holds that nature is a dynamic balance stemmed from a long period of geological and natural evolution between animals and plants, organic substance and inorganic matter, the earth and other planets. It is a physical existence and a vigorous organic substance as well (Xun, 1994, pp.218-219).

Despite of humans’ superior competence and specialties to other species, it does not mean that they have the exclusive privilege to willfully manipulate, enslave, abuse, invade, or deprive the rights of other species to live free.

Samuel T. Coleridge, known as “the great ecological  prophet” foresaw this problem a century ago. His poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was not accepted after publication for a long time because of the grotesque and mysterious plot in it. The characters, objects, scenery in the poem are enveloped by a supernatural power. Thepoem was considered a sermonic story of religion and mythology, attempting to warn or preach to people what is sin or crime and punishment and why they are closely  associated with karma. Few or even no one can perceive the far-reaching meaning of the relation between man and nature contained in the poem—“oneness or harmony in nature and man”. The “consciousness of being proactive” indicated in Coleridge’s poem a century ago corresponds to the global motif humans attend to today—

the relation between man and nature. In this sense, with such “a centurial echo”, Coleridge is in undoubtedly a great proactive ecologist. Back then, however, the only one who backed him is Charles Lamb, a well known British writer, who commented that “for such a poem, what we can do is only to feel, taste, and meditate, but not to discuss, describe, analyze or criticize”  .

With the improvement of science and technology, mankind has become the master of nature and uses its own standards to think about all things. People have cha nged their reverence from nature to science. As Liu (2003) thoughtfully pointed out, when people regard nature as “the conquered, utilized and possessed object,” and no longer hold a special reverence for nature, “their internalized nature has been  unfortunately ‘alienated’— the split between sense and sensibility, abstraction and specification, epistemology and logical thinking, intuition and logical deduction” (p.23). It is the alienation of mankind’s internal nature that has stimulated the alienation of man and nature. Thus “sensible” mankind has begun the process of alienating, restricting and conquering nature. These days, with the worsening global ecological environment, land desertification, air and water pollution, low vegetation coverage, the destruction of atmospheric layers, energy depletion, endangering rare species and frequent occurrence of wars and diseases, the human race has added unbearable burden on the Earth at  unprecedented speed and scale, and paid a full price for their blind and unscrupulous actions. More shockingly, behind the natural ecological crisis are the material greed and insatiable appetite for wealth, which have deprived people of their innate nature. The crisis in spirit is becoming more dreadful. The overflow and prevalence of various doctrines have actually made people confused and get lost about beliefs, ethics, morals and the meaning of life. Meanwhile, more and more individuals feel depressed and become decadent as they seek for individualistic survival. The wilderness will no longer be T. S. Eliot’s literary fiction and imagination. It is now almost the reality of many human societies.

Money worship, materialism, hedonism, pragmatism, utilitarianism and individualism have repeatedly become the obstacles to the spiritual ecosystem of human health.

Human beings should bear in mind that the collapse of natural ecology will destroy human beings, and in turn will severe the imbalance of spiritual ecology because the balance of spiritual ecology is an extremely important part of the whole ecological system and it even determines the whole level of the Earth’s ecology. Martin Heidegger held the view that the nature of the new era is determined by non-deification and the disappearance of God and gods from the world. The earth has become a “lost planet”, and people are “uprooted  from the Earth” and lose their own “spiritual homeland” (1993, p.195). Martin Heidegger thereby issued a serious warning to us that the loss of spiritual ecology causing the destruction of human being may precede the destruction brought by any advanced civilizations. With a heavy mood, James Joyce (1985), the celebrity of stream of consciousness, once pointed out that materialism, which shared the origins with the Renaissance, “had destroyed people’s spiritual function and obstructed their further improvement. Modern people have conquered space, the earth, diseases, and ignorance, but all these great victories are only a drop of tears in the melting pot of the spirit!’’. In order to alleviate and solve ecological crisis and avoid the occurrence of disasters, mankind should be first of all deal with the relationship between man and nature. Starting from alleviating the conflicts and confrontations between man and nature, we should readjust the value system of our modern society and recover the human spiritual ecology in a workable way. The western contemporary thinker Ervin Laszlo has, when analyzing human’s ecological predicament, thought that the extremity of survival lies not in the Earth’s natural ecology, but in people’s inner heart as well as their choices of attitudes towards life and ways of living.

He wrote: “The biggest limitation of human being is not external, but internal. It is the limitation of people’s will and comprehension that obstruct our advancement toward a brighter future rather than that of the Earth” (2004, p.15). The scientific method of solving the ecological crisis requires comprehensive exploration and humanistic encouragement. It is not enough to rely solely on the improvement of science and technology and management.

It is time to fully consider the variable of “people’s inner nature” in saving our endangered ecosystem.

(From LI Shumin, Coleridge's perception of Nature in the Rime of  the Ancient Mariner and modern ecological studies (2018), Studies in Literature and Language, 16(1), 25-30)

 

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