Merlin Sheldrake is a British mycologist and writer known for his work on mycorrhiza. An ideal guide to their mysteries, he explored their potential for Human Flourishing during an intimate conversation with the Centre For Eudaimonia.
Fostering Fungal Flourishing
Drawing on his extensive research and his award-winning book Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake communicates insights into the ways fungi connect organisms, and shape our lives – from the decomposition of organic matter and the formation of symbiotic relationships, to the ways in which they can change minds, heal bodies and can even help us to avoid environmental disaster. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks – the ‘Wood Wide Web’ – is transforming the way we see ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over 90% of their species remain undocumented.
When we think of fungi, it’s probably mushrooms that come to mind. But mushrooms only make up the fruiting body component – analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungal networks extend their tendrils beneath our feet, contributing to the diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain almost all living systems. The more we learn about fungi, the less life makes sense without them. Fungi have moulded life for more than a billion years – providing the keys to understanding the planet we inhabit, and therefore the ways we think, feel and act. Fungi have evolved to problem-solve without brains, with their decentralised networks stretching traditional notions of ‘intelligence.’ In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, they have shaped human history; and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses.
But it’s not all Reishi and Roses: some fungi show callous precision when it comes to manipulating animal behaviour, with devastating consequences. They also throw our chaotic concepts of individuality and notions self-hood into question. However, by examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reconstructs revelations both with and about these unique organisms – moving smoothly between stories, scientific descriptions and philosophical issues that are carried along a score of melodic references from Prince to Tom Waits. The project poetically culminates in the fungal fanfare of eating his own words.
Despite a boundless youth unconstrained by the artificial silos between subjects, Merlin formally trained as a biologist, and has a research background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. His institutionalised interests range from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, and the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the connections that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. Himself a musician, his custom compositions include collaborative jingles – which is a human-family affair; Offspring of Rupert Sheldrake, it seems that fungal faith finds morphic resonance throughout this wholesome household.
Mycelium, the Sheldrakes explain, are the tissue that hold together much of the world. The filaments thread through both living and decomposing bodies – plant or animal. Each exploring tip is looking for water and nutrients, sending out chemical signals to other parts of the network. In some species, scientists have detected electrical waves, communicating the source of nourishment to nearby filaments. This network can store information. And when scientists have tried removing the food source and severing all the connections, new filaments appear and set out in the right direction – it is hard not to call this “memory.”
Similarly, Sheldrake is feeling his way towards expressive new vocabularies and visions. A great deal of ecological thought now asks us to take greater note of the interconnections and interdependencies that embed and sustain us, including those too large or small for unaided perception. The interpenetration of these systems raises questions about boundaries – it is difficult now to think simply in terms of inside and outside, or self and non-self. Sheldrake uses the term “involution”, coined recently to shift emphasis from the evolution of separate life-forms to the emergence of these sentient systems.
Presenting the Web Of Life Movie, narrated by Björk, this systemic story is given light and life through an extra-ordinary amount of magic and sensitivity. This is a film about the ways that we might partner with fungi to adapt to the radical changes of our times. It features astonishing fungal time-lapse photography from some of the best fungal photographers working today, including Steve Axford, Patrick Hickey, and Wim van Egmond. Much of this footage depicts aspects of fungal life that have never been captured in such high spatial and temporal resolution before. “It’s Björk doing David Attenborough, except with her own, inimitable intonation.”
Engaging Eudaimonic Exploration
The Centre for Eudaimonia at Linacre College undertakes interdisciplinary research into Human Flourishing and the Life Well-Lived with a special focus on human brain dynamics through its link with the Department of Psychiatry (University of Oxford) and Center for Music in the Brain (Aarhus University, Denmark). Professor Morten Kringelbach is the founding director and Erel Shalit Carlsberg Foundation Senior Research Fellow.
The Centre seeks to follow Aristotle and Bentham in conceptually distinguishing between the hedonic (involving pleasure and the avoidance of pain) and the eudaimonic ingredients of well-being, while acknowledging that there is a close empirical link between them; The concept of eudaimonia refers more specifically to a complete and fulfilling human life, according to the eudaimonic tradition. It therefore emphasises the process and content of a well-lived life, rather than focusing solely on happiness as an outcome. While happiness is not the main aim of living well, it is often a result of living a eudaimonic lifestyle.
The Centre for Eudaimonia convenes a team of local and international philosophers, psychologists, musicians, artists, social scientists, physicists, biologists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists under the collaborative goal of clarifying the underlying psychological, cultural and philosophical issues that connect these discussions to the contemporary investigation of neural mechanisms, emotional affects and cognitive states. The research teams use philosophical, anthropological and psychological analyses as well as precise neuroscientific paradigms that employ multi-modal behavioural stimuli including music, pharmacological interventions and deep brain stimulation.
The centre’s research into Human Flourishing takes inspiration from psychoanalytic sources such as Erel Shalit’s work, as well as the meaning of meaning-making from figures such as Carl Jung – following Jung’s dictum that “the least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Central to Jung’s original investigation into meaning is the idea of the daimon, the force that drives the concept of ‘individuation.’
This concept is closely related to eudaimonia, which etymologically consists of the words ‘eu’ (‘good’) and ‘daimōn’ (‘spirit’). Thus eudaimonia, lying at the root of human flourishing, is thought of by some – as an ‘attainment’ of an inspirational relationship to such a daimon, which shapes the Self and its Shadows during the process of individuation. Subjectively, as the potential wellspring of contentment, eudaimonia is an awareness of these processes, where the continuity and crafting of such aspects are enhanced by experience, learning, and introspection.
