Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought

J. Baird Callicott, James McRae, J. Baird Callicott, James McRae

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438452029
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought provides a welcome sequel to the foundational volume in Asian environmental ethics Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought. That volume, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames and published in 1989, inaugurated comparative environmental ethics, adding Asian thought on the natural world to the developing field of environmental philosophy. This new book, edited by Callicott and James McRae, includes some of the best articles in environmental philosophy from the perspective of Asian thought written more recently, some of which appear in print for the first time. Leading scholars draw from the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions of thought to provide a normative ethical framework that can address the environmental challenges being faced in the twenty-first century. Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist approaches are considered along with those of Zen, Japanese Confucianism, and the contemporary philosophy of the Kyoto School. An investigation of environmental philosophy in these Asian traditions not only challenges Western assumptions, but also provides an understanding of Asian philosophy, religion, and culture that informs contemporary environmental law and policy.

SECTION III

Environmental Philosophy
in Japanese Traditions
of Thought

CHAPTER 13

The Japanese Concept of Nature in Relation to the Environmental Ethics and Conservation Aesthetics of Aldo Leopold

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STEVE ODIN

INTRODUCTION

Taoism, with its metaphysics of nature as creative and aesthetic transformation, and East Asian Buddhism, with its view of nature as an aesthetic continuum of organismic interrelationships, have been sources of inspiration for environmental philosophy, recently consolidated in an anthology edited by J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, entitled Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy.¹ Here I focus especially on the concept of nature in Japanese Buddhism as a valuable complement to the environmental philosophy of Aldo Leopold. In this context I clarify the hierarchy of normative values whereby a land ethic is itself grounded in a land aesthetic in the ecological worldviews of both Japanese Buddhism in the East and Aldo Leopold in the West.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF ALDO LEOPOLD

The Land Ethic

One can point to various sources for the newly emerging field of “environmental ethics,” for instance, the Romantic movement, beginning with Rousseau and running through Goethe and the Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly), continuing in America through the Transcendentalism of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau as well as later conservationists such as John Muir and Gary Snyder. However, the locus classicus for environmental ethics as a distinctive branch of philosophy is widely regarded by those in the discipline as a volume by Aldo Leopold entitled A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949, and in particular the capstone essay of this work called “The Land Ethic”.² According to Leopold’s threefold division of ethics, “The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals. . . . Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society.”³ It is here that he makes a significant leap by enlarging the field of ethics to include a third element: namely, man’s relation to the land. In Leopold’s words:

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. . . . The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity.⁴

Leopold defines ethics in terms of his key notion of “community.” An individual is always contextually located in a social environment, or as Leopold puts it, in communities of interdependent parts that evolve “modes of cooperation,” called symbioses by ecologists. However, while in the past ethical discourse has been confined to the human community so as to pertain solely to the relation between individuals and society, environmental ethics extends this over into the realm of the “biotic community” of soil, plants, and animals so as to include the symbiotic relation between humans and the land. He writes:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.⁵

Leopold goes on to argue that “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”⁶ Further, his land ethic redefines conservation from maximizing the utility of natural resources to “a state of harmony between men and land.”⁷ For Leopold, the principles of a land ethic not only impose obligations in the legalistic sense, but entail the evolution of what he calls an “ecological conscience,”⁸ understood as an “extension of the social conscience from people to land.”⁹ According to Leopold, then, a land ethic reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects an inner conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.¹⁰

THE CONSERVATION AESTHETIC

In Aldo Leopold’s ecological worldview, his “land ethic” is inseparable from what he calls a “land aesthetic.”¹¹ As Leopold writes in the original 1947 foreword to his work: “These essays deal with the ethics and esthetics of land.”¹² It is significant that Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac ends with an essay entitled “Conservation Esthetic.”¹³ For Leopold, it is the beauty or aesthetic value intrinsic to nature that places a requirement upon us to enlarge ethics to include the symbiotic relation between humans and land, to extend the social conscience from the human community to the biotic community, and thereby to establish an ecological harmony between people and their natural environment of soil, plants, and animals. The importance of this land esthetic as the ground for a land ethic is further indicated by Leopold in his 1948 foreword to A Sand County Almanac, where he asserts that the essays contained in his work “attempt to weld three concepts”: (i) “That land is a community the basic concept of ecology:” (ii) “that land is to be loved and respected an extension of ethics”; and (iii) “that land yields a cultural harvest” or, as he alternatively puts it, an “esthetic harvest.”¹⁴ According to Leopold, the norm for behavior in relation to land use is whether or not our conduct is aesthetically as well as ethically right. The beauty of the land is, therefore, one of the fundamental criteria for determining the rightness of our relationship to it: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.”¹⁵ Hence, the architectonic structure of A Sand County Almanac suggests a kind of Peircean hierarchy of normative values whereby environmental ethics is itself grounded in the axiology of a conservation aesthetics.¹⁶ In other words, our moral love and respect for nature is based on an aesthetic appreciation of the beauty and value of the land. Along these lines, it should be noted that Eugene C. Hargrove has pursued a similar line of reasoning, arguing that not only the land ethic, but the historical foundation of all broad Western environmental sentiments is ultimately aesthetic.¹⁷ Indeed, this aesthetic foundation for a land ethic is one of the deepest insights into the human/nature relation developed in the ecological world views both East and West.

JAPANESE BUDDHISM—AN ASIAN RESOURCE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

The principles of environmental ethics articulated by Aldo Leopold find a powerful source of support in the concept of living nature formulated by traditional Japanese Buddhism. A profound current of ecological thought runs throughout the Kegon, Tendai, Shingon, Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren Buddhist traditions as well as modern Japanese philosophy. In what follows I briefly present the Japanese concept of nature as an aesthetic continuum of interdependent events based on a field paradigm of reality. In this context I show how the Japanese concept of nature entails an extension of ethics to include the relation between humans and the land. Moreover, I argue that the land ethic is itself grounded in a land aesthetic in the Japanese Buddhist concept of nature as well as for Aldo Leopold. I further seek to clarify the soteric concept of nature in Japanese Buddhism wherein the natural environment becomes the ultimate locus of salvation for all sentient beings. Finally, I argue that the Japanese Buddhist concept of nature represents a fundamental shift from the egocentric to an ecocentric position, i.e., a non-anthropocentric standpoint which is nature-centered as opposed to human-centered.

THE FIELD MODEL OF NATURE IN ECOLOGY AND JAPANESE BUDDHISM

The environmental ethics of Aldo Leopold arises from a metaphysical presupposition that things in nature are not separate, independent, or substantial objects, but relational fields existing in mutual dependence upon each other, thus constituting a synergistic ecosystem of organisms interacting with their environment. According to Leopold’s field concept of nature, the land is a single living organism wherein each part affects every other part, and it is this simple fact that imposes certain moral obligations upon us in relation to our environment. As J. Baird Callicott argues in “The Metaphysical Implications of Ecology,” at the metaphysical level of discourse, ecology implies a paradigm shift from atomism to field theory.¹⁸ In this context he underscores various metaphysical overtones in the “field theory of living nature adumbrated by Leopold.”¹⁹ Callicott, following the insights of Leopold, argues that “object-ontology is inappropriate to an ecological description of the natural environment,” and adds, “Living natural objects should be regarded as ontologically subordinate to ‘events’ . . . or ‘field patterns.’”²⁰ According to Callicott, in the worldview of ecology, as in the New Physics, organisms in nature are a “local perturbation, in an energy flux or ‘field’” so that the “subatomic microcosm” is analogous to the “ecosystemic macrocosm,” “moments in [a] network” or “knots in [a] web of life.”²¹ He further points out that for the Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess, ecology suggests “a relational total field image [in which] organisms [are] knots in the biospherical net of intrinsic relations.”²² It should be noted that in the Western philosophical tradition, the field concept of nature implied by ecology has received its fullest systematic expression in the process metaphysics and philosophy of organism developed by A. N. Whitehead, which elaborates a panpsychic vision of nature as a creative and aesthetic continuum of living field events arising through their causal relations to every other event in the continuum.²³

The primacy accorded to “relational fields” over that of the “substantial objects” implicit in the ecological world view is also at the very heart of the organismic paradigm of nature in East Asian philosophy, especially Taoism and Buddhism. In his article “Putting the Te back into Taoism,” Roger T. Ames interprets the key ideas of te and tao in the Taoist aesthetic view of nature as representing a “focus/field” model of reality with clear implications for an environmental ethic.²⁴ Likewise, Izutsu Toshihiko in Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism has clearly explicated what he refers to as “the field structure of Ultimate Reality” in traditional Japanese Zen as well as Kegon (Hua-yen) Buddhism, in which each event in nature is understood as a concentrated focus point for the whole field of emptiness (kū) or nothingness (mu), comprehended in Buddhist philosophy as a dynamic network of causal relationships, in other words, the process termed “dependent coorigination” (engi).²⁵ Moreover, this traditional Zen and Kegon Buddhist field model of reality has been reformulated in terms of the concept of basho or “field” (locus, matrix, place) in the modern Japanese syncretic philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and the Kyoto School: namely, what Nishida calls mu no Basho, the field of Nothingness.²⁶ Nishida’s concept of basho or field was itself profoundly influenced by Lask’s scientific Feldtheorie (field theory). As Matao Noda has observed: “In this connection the modern physical concept of field of force, taken by Einstein as a cosmic field, seems to have suggested much to Nishida.”²⁷

The primacy of basho or relational fields in modern Japanese philosophy has been developed specifically with regard to the human/nature relationship in the ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), Nishida’s younger colleague in the philosophy department at Kyoto University. In his work Ethics as Anthropology (Ningen no gaku toshite no rinrigaku) Watsuji calls his “ethics” (rinrigaku) the science of the person, based upon the Japanese concept of human nature as ningen, whose two kanji characters express the double structure of selfhood as being both “individual” and “social.”²⁸ Accordingly, the “person” as ningen does not mean simply the individual (hito), but the “relatedness” or “betweenness” (aidagara) in which people are located. In his book entitled The Body, the Japanese comparative philosopher Yuasa Yasuo clearly expresses the relation of Watsuji’s concept of person (ningen) as the life-space of “betweenness” in which people are situated to the general idea of basho as a relational field or spatial locus. He writes: “But what does it mean to exist in betweenness (aidagara)? . . . Our betweenness implies that we exist in a definite, spatial basho (place, topos, field).”²⁹ However, Watsuji’s ethics based on the double structure of personhood as ningen does not emphasize the spatial locus of relationships between individual and individual or between the individual and the social only; rather, he further extends his moral considerations to the relationship between the individual and nature. In his work entitled Climate, an Anthropological Consideration (Fūdo ningengakuteki kosatsu), Watsuji...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I: Environmental Philosophy in Indian Traditions of Thought
• Section II: Environmental Philosophy in Chinese Traditions of Thought 131
• Section III: Environmental Philosophy in Japanese Traditions of Thought 245
• Afterword: J. Baird Callicott, “Recontextualizing the Self in Comparative Environmental Philosophy”
• Contributors
• Index