Re: Doreen said to get the list going

**C* U* <c*@sbcglobal.net>**

I don't know who sent me this or when, but I saved it because I  
thought it was priceless.
Carolyn Ulrich
***************
The General Theory of Not Gardening

This is from the November, 1990 Harper's Magazine.

THE GENERAL THEORY OF NOT-GARDENING by Leszek Kolakowski. From  
"Modernity on Endless Trial," a collection of Kolakowski's essays  
that the University of Chicago Press will publish next month.  
Kolakowski teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and at  
Oxford University.

"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 self-deception. 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 ontologically  
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 modern 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."

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