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Environmental Values 17 (2008): 313–315. doi: 10.3197/096327108X343086
© 2008 The White Horse Press
Without Finality
Val Plumwood died earlier this year on 29 February. This issue contains an
obituary essay for Val Plumwood by Freya Matthews and a recent paper by Val
Plumwood herself reecting on the limitations of two dominant perspectives
on death offered by transcendental spiritual perspectives on the one hand, and
reductive materialist perspectives on the other. She claims that both are premised
on human exceptionalism. The rst offers a narrative of ʻalienated continuityʼ
of the self in a spiritual domain. The second offers a narrative of ʻreductive-
materialist discontinuity – the supposed nality of material death, or the narra-
tive of no narrativesʼ.1 The reductive materialist perspective is encapsulated in
what she calls the ʻFinality Thesisʼ, that is ʻthe claim that death is the nal end
of the storyʼ.2 Against this ʻnarrative of no narrativesʼ she offers an ecological
animistic materialism, which conceives of life after death ʻnot as the end of a
narrative, but another continuing narrativeʼ. Specically, it acknowledges that
the body belongs to a cycle of life processes, that it decomposes and decays as
the condition of further life: ʻBy understanding life as in circulation, as a gift
from a community of ancestors, we can see death as recycling, a owing on
into an ecological and ancestral community of origins.ʼ 3
Val Plumwoodʼs reections on death will undoubtedly be the occasion for
further reection and debate. Always robust in debate, I know that she would
want this to be the opening of a conversation and not itself the nal word. I had
two immediate thoughts on reading her paper. The rst is that while she may
be right that the two perspectives she outlines are important themes in many
Western philosophical theories and mortuary practices, there are also positions
within the classical philosophical tradition which are not so distant from the
view of life in circulation she outlines. Consider, for example, the materialist
position of Lucretius:
There is need of matter for the growth of later generations, all of which, nev-
ertheless, shall follow you when they have lived their lives; and in like matter
generations before you have died, and others shall die hereafter. Thus without
end one springs from another, and life is granted to no one as possession but
as a loan.4
The second is that while Val Plumwoodʼs argument focuses on the bodily nar-
ratives that continue after a personʼs death, there is a social and cultural dimen-
sion to the narratives of a life that is also important. The narratives of peopleʼs
lives are embodied in the projects and the relationships in which they engaged
and these also continue beyond their deaths. This fact gives us grounds for a
particular kind of concern about the future: ʻonce we recognise that the narrative
shape of a life matters, then we have concerns for the future that are grounded in
our own current projects and relationships rather than a purely impartial ethical
JOHN OʼNEILL
314
EDITORIAL
315
Environmental Values 17.3
Environmental Values 17.3
commitmentʼ.5 This narrative dimension to human lives grounds not just obliga-
tions to the future, but also obligations to the past. One immediate expression of
that obligation is the practice of writing obituary itself.
One of the difculties of writing an obituary lies in the recognition of the
need to do justice to the narrative of a personʼs life in its fullness. Freya Mat-
thewsʼs nely crafted and thoughtful obituary essay succeeds in doing just this.
In particular, it captures the way that Valʼs philosophical work was integrated
into her life and not something apart from it. It also acknowledges those aspects
of her character which were admirable even though they might not t into the
traditional list of virtues. In a message that accompanied her obituary essay Freya
wrote: ʻI included a bit about Valʼs famous erceness, as I didnʼt want the piece
to be hagiographic, as Val was quite consciously and unapologetically, as she
often put it, “too much”ʼ. Personally I found it was just those robust sides of her
character which made her such a delight in conversation. The last conversations
I had with her were during her period as Visiting Professor at Lancaster Univer-
sity. After a typically lively interchange at a seminar on feminism and logic6 we
went for a walk on Clougha, the local fell above Lancaster which is a personal
favourite of mine. The walk was not an occasion for the debates to cease. Rather,
the landscape itself proved the occasion for another debate about the virtues or
vices of the open, sheep-grazed, treeless moorland that we crossed.7
Obituary involves a recognition that we have obligations to those who have
died. They are the rst words in a conversation that is not just about honouring
and doing justice to a person in words, but continuing the story of her life. The
problem with what Val Plumwood describes as the Finality Thesis, that the story
of a personʼs life ends at the moment of death, is that it fails to acknowledge
both what we owe to those who have died and at the same time the ways the
future beyond our own deaths matters to us. The Finality Thesis, the narrative
of no narratives, fails to capture why past and future generations matter to us.
The focus of Val Plumwoodʼs criticism of the Finality Thesis is not however
primarily concerned with the relations between human generations but rather
with the body and ecological processes. It is the narratives of nature that she
emphasises and in particular the body itself as something that belongs of the
circulation of life. An insight of her essay is the way that particular perspectives
on death are embodied in mortuary practices, in particular in the ways that even
in death the body is kept separate from ecological processes that would benet
other forms of life. In contrast, she suggests an alternative set of practices:
ʻmortuary symbolisms and grave practices might aim to nourish rather than
exclude other life forms, afrming rather than demonising our transition to the
non-human in deathʼ.8 It was tting that her own funeral was the occasion for
this alternative mortuary practice. In death, philosophical theory and practice
were not kept apart.
JOHN OʼNEILL
JOHN OʼNEILL
314
EDITORIAL
315
Environmental Values 17.3
Environmental Values 17.3
NOTES
1 V. Plumwood, ʻTasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Deathʼ Environmental
Values 17 (2008): 323–331, p. 328. doi: 10.3197/096327108X343103.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 325.
4 Lucretius On Nature R. Greer trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) Book 3,
pp. 967–971
5 J. OʼNeill, ʻHappiness and the Good Lifeʼ, Environmental Values 17(2008): 125–144, p.
138. doi: 10.3197/096327108X303819.
6 The discussion of logic points to aspects of Val Plumwoodʼs work which are less well-
known but which deserve some mention. In the early 1990s while I was discussing some
of Val Plumwoodʼs work on ecofeminism and environmental philosophy in my teaching,
my colleague Geoffrey Hunter seeing her name spoke highly of her work on relevance
logic. This was not an interest that she kept separate from her more well-known work
on ecofeminism. Her work on non-standard logics informed her discussions of feminism
and reason.
7 In doing so we were continuing an older conversation I had had with Richard Sylvan
who in an unpublished essay had written the following about the Three Peaks Area of
the Yorkshire Dales which we could see from Clougha:
[T]he Three Peaks district is now prized for its recreational values, it is prized
for its comparative remoteness and wilderness, its fewness of people and absence
of industry, for the walks and wild meadows it offers. But it is a landscape far
removed from its pre-agricultural original. It has been almost totally stripped
of its native vegetation, and most habitats and much of its ecology destroyed,
the remainder substantially modied, in the former quest … for agricultural
advantage and optimal, or often excessive, grazing usage. The district remains
starkly treeless.
I discuss Richard Sylvanʼs remarks in J. OʼNeill, Markets, Deliberation and Environment
(London: Routledge, 2007), chapter 7.
8 V. Plumwood, ʻTasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Deathʼ, p. 329.
