“Even the Worms…”

Abstract

In this paper, we explore Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Singapore’s Cloud Forest; two artefacts that heighten an awareness of life forms beneath the earth’s surface. We take a line from Fredrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy—“even the worms find sensuality”—and demonstrate its profundity through Beethoven’s landmark composition. Singapore’s Cloud Forest acts as a foil in our advocacy for an aesth-ethical consideration of the hitherto silenced voices of flora and fauna, noting a turn from misanthropic, revengeful tendencies, to a philanthropic call for generous inclusion. Our analytic method explores looking sideways as a means of bringing disparate artefacts into a polyphonic examination. We explore these works through a process ethics lens, operationalizing A. N. Whitehead’s process philosophy. To conclude we propose four ethical responses of lamenting, acting, reflecting, and expressing joy without borders.