The most senior survivor on this planet is the Bristlecone pine, living safely within a border of its own material past that both connects it with  and protects it from the outside world. The high deserts of the Southwest, where they grow, host small stands with trees averaging 1,000 years old. A few individuals, in the White Mountains of the Eastern Sierras, are about 4,000-5,000 years old, topped by long-lived deep green needles, pale purple catkin berries, and prickly ovoid cones in dark purple. At their core is a ribbon of living tissue, the color of honey, winding up the elephant-grey, irregular trunk to produce this bristling crown for the oldest single organisms known on earth. It is this ribbon that keeps the pine alive. It connects soil with sky and the first day of the tree’s life to every day thereafter. This pine is the only species to maintain a continuous individual identity at all stages of growth. The wood around the ribbon of living tissue, called xylem, or bark, is connective tissue that died in the storms and droughts over the centuries; but, being very dense, it protectively jackets the living part of the tree for up to 10,000 years without falling away. Thus, upon a dry cold alpine slope, a ten-inch-wide stream of live wood embedded in trunk four feet in diameter has correctly balanced the nutrition it supplies from the roots to the top with the amount the top can supply down through the xylem for four millennia.

Living beings do this at every moment, even those that live the shortest lives. The mass of petrified wood guarding the living pine from beetles and other insects, from fungi, and from lightening is only a durable instance of the permeable boundaries between anything we can conceive as a core self and the rest of nature. The living ribbon in the Bristlecone requires the dead wood just as it requires roots and crown and just as it requires dolomite soil and dry air. The idea of the ecological niche, that material context in which each organism supports the life of other organisms in a favorable location,  first conceived by scientists who grew up among the bioforms of art nouveau and  with the nineteenth-century idea of a life-world that was more than merely material forces, stands as a limit to what we now call the immune self—the idea of the human as a microbe-resistant fortress castellated by vaccinations and vitamins. The deep, resinous casing of xylem defending and supporting the life-ribbon of the Bristlecone is a visible specimen of the interdependence of life. As tough and tangible as it is, it shows the ambiguity of individual and world as a corpus, inevitable in both its segregative and integrative jobs, just as are its roots and flowers and our nerves and digits. 

This boundary is bi-valve or dialectical, as all boundaries and thresholds in all hierarchies are to some degree. This can also be described as coinciding identities. The living tissue within, the dead tissue without, and the organic system including it are three identifiable entities, each of which may be seen in its hexic, organic, and system-level organic natures. Thus this pine is a monad, a self-contained principle of life to which all of nature is related by hunger for the necessities of survival, each thing needing all other things. This is a level perspective on organisms at every level of complexity and even on all of nature. All of these elements struggle and join, separate and co-operate, for the sake of their lives and perhaps for life itself. 

For each element there is an inward and an outward relationship across the border. The living tissue in the Bristlecone is the inside serviced by the dead tissue outside itself. For a beetle or a fungal spore, the inner tissue would be its outside meal service if it could reach it; meanwhile, it has no luck against the petrified wood, which will however not retain this privileged status forever. Instead, it will over long ages become nutrient minerals for organic and inorganic nature. The fact that it helps the Bristlecone organism for a very long time by being very dead, rather than by being alive, is singular merely because of our short perspective on the length of natural processes. At any given moment, each organism functions within a bi-valve boundary between it and the outer world, whatever the density and dimension of the boundary. What the Bristlecone does for its biological nutrition, we humans do for our moral lives, which are nourished by our interdependence with one another, with other living creatures, and with the world.

Our life as moral agents is to be understood not so much the one against the many as it is the inward self reckoning of its life amidst the outward world from the point of view of good and evil. All identities can be blurred and co-mingled in various ways, but firm identity is just as much one half of the product of the bi-valve boundary as is shifting identity. If it were not, we could not call the boundary permeable. It would be always forever petrified, always transparent and never translucent or opaque. Having identified the two directions the self takes in response to threat as going outside its border to engorge itself on the opponent or staying on the inside to nourish its identity along with the identity of its opponent, humans as moral agents can be said to stand in the inward position pressured by two interlocked strategies in order to live along with what is outward. Although our skin and bones will die, the relationship of what is within them to what is outside them while alive is the field in which our lives always have a moral aspect. In the Bristlecone, what is to our eyes the markedly ponderous shell supports the glowing life within. The relationship works vertically and horizontally, as each year’s dead bark adds a ring to the protective matter and as the live wood climbs a little higher, pushing its live crown a little further from its live roots.

To conceive of moral life as a living ribbon threaded continuously, even when severely pinched, through all the other parts and functions of human life, seems a great deal easier than to devise lucid and final definitions of autonomy and interdependence. The meeting-point of the outward and inward worlds is within the person, inside us, not at the brow ridge covering the frontal lobe. There is nothing singular or exclusive about moral awareness. It is just a fresh combination of the usual elements, just as a living body holds a fresh combination of its own parasites, bacteria, prions, predators, genetics, evolutionary experiences, organs, blood, and nerves, into its own way of doing things—these being, for example, the way that for one plant it is “logical” to produce tiny flowers in bracts behind palmate leaves and for another to produce a trumpet-shaped flower above lanceolate leaves. Moral awareness becomes alarmingly queer only if it is thought to be a copy from a mold for which the evidence has long since ceased to exist, or if moral prescription describes one or more things that do not in fact exist. It looks like both free will and determinism, or autonomy or heterogeneity, because the same familiar cognitive and intellectual events in these constructions of the human spirit are present in moral life combined in an unfamiliar way. Moral phenomena are a ribbon running through all the other parts of life, and semi-life.

Moral life is marked by the historical accumulation of experience amid transitoriness. These rub against one another as persons respond to their feelings of moral obligations, as the amount of pressure they exert on actors at different historical moments rises and falls. Human self-awareness does not lie inertly ready like a body of propositions or facts in a text. It grows from and with the accumulation of memory, that is, past, or, broadly, historical experience. As objects and events in the world come to our attention, they do not simply determine moral life. Their power over the will is far too simple to account for our butterfly’s flight from material determinants in search of moral force. As complex as they are, so much more are we. Not only will we make our moral values by use of facts and things, we make them while making facts and things—in our artefacts, narratives, and actions—as the Bristlecone makes its outside world into its enduring connective tissue. This transmutation goes on unceasingly, at each moment re-calibrating the importance of some with respect to the others. Moral life always existed since it commenced, as a loud inward struggle, the bright ribbon of which connects the world to us and our knowledge to moral assent. Like physical life, moral life is always a going concern, a trans-historical and trans-tribal effort of humanity amid the unceasing forces of nature. This effort, made by memory and will to work together, takes outward things and events into moral knowledge, which both requires and nourishes moral agency, to sustain the living tissue of moral life.