Ethical Responses to Nature's Call

Reticent Imperatives

James Magrini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429770326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökologie

Arguing for a renewed view of objects and nature, Ethical Responses to Nature's Call considers how it is possible to understand our ethical duties - in the form of ethical intuitionalism - to nature and the planet by listening to and releasing ourselves over to the call or address of nature.

Blending several strands of philosophical thought, such as Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology, W. D. Ross's prima fa thics, Alphonso Lingis's phenomenological ethics traceable to The Imperative, and Michael Bonnett's ecophilosophy, this book offers a unique rejoinder to the problems and issues that continue to haunt humans' relationship to nature. The origins of such problems and issues largely remain obscured from view due to the oppressive influence of the "Cultural Framework" which gives form and structure to the ways we understand, discourse on, and comport ourselves in relation to the natural world. Through understanding this "Cultural Framework" we also come to know the responses we continue to offer in answer to nature's call and address, and are then in a position to analyze and assess those responses in terms of their potential ethical weight. Such a phenomenon is made possible through the descriptive-and-interpretive method of eco-phenomenology.

This renewed vision of the human-and-nature provides direction for our interaction with and behavior toward nature in such a way that the ethical insight offers a diagnosis and provides a potentially compelling prescriptive for environmental ills.

Part I

Eco-phenomenological issues

Transcending the metaphysics of presence

1 Introducing eco-phenomenology

Methods, problems, and proposed solutions

Prologue: the need for eco-phenomenology

We introduce what might serve as an epigraph for our study by turning to Rainer Maria Rilke, who in his Letters to a Young Poet offers the following profound – and, shall we say, “eco-phenomenological” – advice, urging him to “draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.”¹ The main and persistent challenge that eco-phenomenology faces is that humans on a global level should and, beyond, need – hence the sense of exigency – to demonstrate a new or renewed attitude toward the natural world (Nature) in order to arrest its looming destruction, to which, in many ways, we are heedlessly contributing. This is a “fact” grounded in scientific validation and corroboration as is evident in the most recent climate report released to the public on November 25, 2018, which is titled the Fourth National Climate Assessment and contains two volumes, with Volume I assessing the physical science underlying the study and Volume II focusing on the impacts and risks for the US. The conclusions are devastating and forecast a bleak future for not only the country, but also the world, the planet, if serious collective action is not taken immediately: “Global warming is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.”² It is the case, as the report authors warn, that in order to “avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades,” humans must aggressively act now in an ecumenical, purposeful, and informed manner. However, although this report emerged from the Trump administration, the president himself stated flatly that he does not believe it, this because he dogmatically clings to an anti-scientific worldview and is a radical climate change/global warming denier. Here, although this lack of belief is frightening and flies in the face of logic and even common sense, it is the notion of “belief” that is of great interest to us in our pursuit of ecophenomenological solutions to the types of issues contained in this important scientific document.

Let us recall Wittgenstein’s brilliance as related to this issue of belief. When faced with a king who steadfastly anchors himself to the belief that the earth is flat, Wittgenstein asserts that all the scientists in the world presenting “facts” refuting the king’s belief that the earth is flat would have absolutely no effect on altering the king’s belief; facts would be powerless to change his mindset or, better, his worldview. Thus, what Wittgenstein ultimately shows is that in order to change the king’s mind, his beliefs, as opposed to the presentation of facts, a total change to his entire worldview or overarching belief-system would be required – in terms related to our study, this would require a change to the king’s attunement. Eco-phenomenologist David Wood states emphatically that the value of incorporating phenomenology into environmental philosophy lies in its potential to transform our mindsets, views, and moods, – i.e., attunement – working to reveal the “wealth of subtlety” contained in our ordinary experience of the natural world without “reductive schematization.”³ However, it is not the case that phenomenology only seeks to reveal the dangers of the schematization of original experience, in a purely diagnostic manner, it also, in a prescriptive manner, seeks to incorporate the insights gleaned from the understanding of the richness and complexity of our “lived” or pre-theoretical modes of Being-in-the-world, which phenomenology puts us back in touch with, in ways that re-attune us to new ways of living productively and ethically with the natural world. Because eco-phenomenology dives beneath the everyday modes of inhabiting the world with others – ways that are antecedent to the schematization of that experience – it “responds to the dullness with which we often live our ordinary experience.”⁴

Deep Ecology and phenomenology

Deep Ecology

Deep Ecology was established by Arne Naess and highlights an expanded view of the human’s spiritual consciousness through understanding its deep and ineluctable connection to the Earth. According to Naess, we are inextricably bound within the earth’s web of life, and so it is inevitable that we should, in contradistinction to the current stance we have taken toward nature, “develop a broad and deep concern for life conditions in general.”⁵ According to Naess, since environmental problems can be directly traced to our anthropocentric behaviors, if we follow the principles of Deep Ecology, it is possible to transcend our anthropocentric attitude and move toward a “position of biocentric egalitarianism,” and so potentially avoid “environmental catastrophe.”⁶ Deep Ecology is a form of environmental philosophy (ecophilosophy) focused on normative issues, expressing a “value priority system only in part based on results (or lack of results) of scientific research.”⁷ Naess claims that Deep Ecology should be separated off from ecological movements that exclusively embrace science and strict scientific methods, for it seeks to address more fundamental issues comprising the human-and-nature relationship, and so as opposed to “factual,” it is speculative and provides “a kind of sofia wisdom,” offering “value priority pronouncements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe.”⁸ However, Naess is clear that Deep Ecology is not philosophy in an academic sense, i.e., it is neither systematic nor ideological, but rather is both descriptive and prescriptive in nature and it shares these traits with eco-phenomenology.⁹ The area of political philosophy is one of its concerns, for as Naess argues, the ability to reassess our current norms through the practice of Deep Ecology holds the potential to influence politics in and through a change of mindset on the part of those involved.

Deep Ecology rejects the human-in-the-environment model and adopts a relational, total field model, where all organisms are “knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations,”¹⁰ i.e., the relationships are symbiotic and foundational, highlighted by diversity. Deep Ecology looks for ways to enhance the natural “potentialities of survival, the chances of new modes of life, the richness of forms,” embracing the necessity of humans and nature to “coexist and cooperate in complex relationships, rather than [enhancing our] ability to kill, exploit, and suppress.”¹¹ Symbiosis, as understood by Naess, inspires our identification with other forms of life, for they have an influence on our potential for our deepening sense of selfhood, i.e., “we increasingly see ourselves in other beings, and others see themselves in us,” and in this way the “self is extended and deepened as a natural process of the realization of its potentialities in others.”¹² Along with diversity, complexity is recognized, because it is argued that the attempt to understand nature in terms of a complex organic system will enlighten human beings about the complex biospherical relations and therefore inform the ethical ways we interact with nature, facilitating a deeper understanding of the effect we have on both enhancing and disturbing – and ultimately destroying – Nature. Deep Ecology embraces biospherical egalitarianism, which indicates that we should strive to acquire a deeper sense of respect and veneration for non-human life forms and the planet itself. This sense of veneration is linked to an intrinsic view of values, where nature is valuable independent of its instrumental usefulness for our purposes. For Naess, biospherical egalitarianism is bound up with the idea of “Self-realization” in a universal sense, where the “large comprehensive Self (with a capital ‘S’)” associated with nature – reminiscent of the Hegelian “Absolute” – “embraces all the life forms on the planet.”¹³

If we examine the difference between Shallow Ecology and Deep Ecology on the issue of pollution we find that a “shallow” approach, according to Naess, seeks exclusively to purify the air while attempting to limit further pollution by proposing laws that regulate and restrict the use of technologies and modes of manufacturing that contribute to polluting the atmosphere. But in Shallow Ecology, such actions, guided by a latent and insidious anthropocentricism, are limited to confronting and battling pollution, with the central aim of perpetuating human thriving, health, and affluence in the developed countries. Importantly, in Shallow Ecology there is no critical thought regarding the ethical or philosophical ideas that underlie the vast amount of heedless and wanton pollution of the environment, whereas the philosophically inspired Deep Ecology is committed to “articulate the fundamental presuppositions underlying the dominant economic approach in terms of value priorities.”¹⁴ Deep Ecology focuses on the way pollution affects not merely the human denizens of the earth, but rather the entire biosystem, and calls for a “high priority fight against the economic conditions and technology responsible for producing [pollution].”¹⁵ In short, in order to effectively combat the deep causes or motives responsible for modes of comportment that include embracing technologies causing pollution, we need to understand those motives by means of critical philosophical reflection. For example, as we discuss in Chapter 2, the project of sustainable development is traceable to a “shallow ecological” response because its normative concern for sustaining the health of the planet and the preservation of its vast resources has its origin in the preservation of homo sapiens, i.e., it is “anthropo-centric in the sense that all its recommendations are justified exclusively in terms of their effects upon human health and basic well-being.”¹⁶ Sustainable development lacks the relevant philos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Preface
• PART I: Eco-phenomenological issues: Transcending the metaphysics of presence
• PART II: The ethical call of Nature: Reticent imperatives
• Bibliography
• Index