Religion and Ecology

Developing a Planetary Ethic

Whitney Bauman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537100
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Moving beyond identity politics while continuing to respect diverse entities and concerns, Whitney A. Bauman builds a planetary politics that better responds to the realities of a pluralistic world. Calling attention to the historical, political, and ecological influences shaping our understanding of nature, religion, humanity, and identity, Bauman collapses the boundaries separating male from female, biology from machine, human from more than human, and religion from science, encouraging readers to embrace hybridity and the inherent fluctuations of an open, evolving global community.

As he outlines his planetary ethic, Bauman concurrently develops an environmental ethic of movement that relies not on place but on the daily connections we make across the planet. He shows how both identity politics and environmental ethics fail to realize planetary politics and action, limited as they are by foundational modes of thought that create entire worlds out of their own logic. Introducing a postfoundational vision not rooted in the formal principles of "nature" or "God" and not based in the idea of human exceptionalism, Bauman draws on cutting-edge insights from queer, poststructural, and deconstructive theory and makes a major contribution to the study of religion, science, politics, and ecology.

1

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN DIALOGUE

What formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the causa prima.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

One of the most crucial insights of the last four hundred years, I would argue, is the one that Nietzsche articulates in the opening quote of this chapter. Philosophies and religions, science and matter are but different ways of trying to account for the worlds we inhabit: neither is transcendent to the other, but rather both exist always already together. There is no origin, no transcendent point from which either an idealist or materialist account of the world can recapitulate reality because eventually they must account for their own accounting and the ouroboros of thinking and being eats its own tail. Many of the thinkers I will deal with in this book are struggling with this same problem: how do we know about the world without transcendence if we ourselves and our very knowing are always already shaping the worlds we seek to know? In various ways, peoples have argued, there is no outside, no pure origin, no telos (or ultimate goal of the universe), and no thing in itself transcendent to the process of ongoing nature. And, still, we must begin to think, make judgments, and act in the world according to this knowledge that is now no longer “The Way Things Are,” but rather, at best, a multiperspectival, contextual account. Here in this chapter I want to begin telling the story of the relationship of Western science and religion from this perspective of always already being intertwined with each other. Many accounts exist narrating the dualistic split between the two and the effects of “the secular” that results from that split.¹ I will draw on these accounts, but what I want to do here in these next few pages is begin to narrate a planetary story of religion and science and their relationship to nature. As mentioned in the introduction, “planetary” is meant to challenge the monological logic of globalization. Such monological logic would have science and religion as two separate bodies of knowledge in some sort of opposition, conflict, or perhaps even as different, equally valid ways of knowing the world or as two separate ways of knowing that will eventually converge on a single truth about reality.² However, this book begins from the assumption that these two different methods for understanding the world are always already together. I am not trying to reenchant nature or bring religion and science together or even bridge the ontological gap wedged by the Cartesian Cogito, but rather I am assuming that there is no pure secular space, that religion and science are always already together, and that the gap does not exist. From this perspective, we might begin to see a history of religion and science that does not reinforce the split, but mends the wounds that have so long been reopened by the technologies of a secular, materialistic scientism, on the one hand, and a private, immaterial religiosity, on the other.

The main problem with the dialectic of the Enlightenment, as philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer intimated, is that the very foundations for the ideal and material do not exist.³ Thinking about biology and history, religion and culture, ideas and matter as always already together will be a different way of thinking than most of us in the contemporary one-fifth world are accustomed to, so I begin here with a brief description of a nuanced version of Agrippa’s trilemma (or the trilemma that results from attempts to make knowledge claims), then I move on to define the loci of concern for this chapter—religion, science, and nature—and finally toward a story of their historical relationship of mutual interaction. From this place, science and meaning-making practices help to cocreate planetary communities for which we can be responsible. Furthermore, they have long been involved in coconstructing the very planetary identities that are at the heart of this book.

A NEW VERSION OF AGRIPPA’S TRILEMMA: TOWARD PLANETARY KNOWING

In epistemology, or the study of knowledge, the question of how we justify any knowledge claim is often captured in what is known as Agrippa’s trilemma. In this trilemma the question of how to justify a knowledge claim is answered in one of three ways. The first two are representative of the type of dominology that globalization of sameness exemplifies. If we propose a planetary way of knowing over that of a global, then we must find a different way out of this trilemma than those that have been suggested by foundationalism and circularity, both of which end up in a form of solipsism. In a circular argument, argument A is based on B, B is based on C, and C is based on A again. Strangely, though credited with being a foundationalist, Descartes’s understanding of the cogito (the “thinking thing”) and the existence of God makes this type of circular argument. The cogito is posited and then becomes the foundation for a good creator God, which is then justified by the cogito. The circular argument, then, is beholden to solipsism. Solipsism keeps us locked into our own knowledge assumptions and identities through enabling us to background our relations with multiple earth others. In this case our identities and knowledge projections are like a boomerang that come back to affirm our original assumptions in a circular manner. No new information challenges the construction; the “I” or cogito can remain untouched because it is founded in the transcendent Creator, and the Creator is subsequently founded in the assertion of the “I.” In this manner, the I-God circle will construct all it senses in its own image: creating the world in the image of sameness.

Another option in the trilemma is foundationalism. In foundationalism a claim is posited sui generis or a priori, needing no other conditions or causes on its own to exist. Again, Descartes’s “Clear and Distinct Ideas” would be an example. Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” which sets the whole cosmos in motion but does not itself move, is also an example. Another example would be the idea of creatio ex nihilo or “creation out of nothing.”⁴ The purpose of a foundational claim is to stop the slippage of knowledge by making an assertion that cannot be questioned. From such a smooth place or foundation, knowledge claims force all reality to comply with their own assumptions. In other words, the foundational option leads to universalisms. Foundationalism operates (most often) by digging down to what is perceived to be a base of reality: whether material (as in scientific materialism) or ideal (as in the creation of the world according to divine laws by a good God). Think of a foundational claim as a river dam, which floods a valley creating a lake and controls the flow of water from one side to the next. These dams cover over the details and create realities (a lake) according to their own logic. Or, if in your childhood you ever enjoyed a Play-Doh Fun Factory, think of a foundational claim as one of the attachments that you press the Play-Doh through, thereby making it conform to a certain shape. Our foundational claims work in a similar way. Furthermore, these foundational claims also end up in solipsism, as the whole of reality is distorted to fit into the central foundation.

The logocentrism critiqued by Derrida and so many deconstructionists operates precisely in this foundational manner.⁵ In logocentrism all reality is made to fit into the confines of the logos—word, concept, telos, salvation narrative, or reason. Let’s take, for example, the narrative of Christianity. If one believes that the world is created by God “in the beginning” and is moving toward a salvific point in the future, then all life must fit into this (Christian) salvation narrative. This is a distortion of the realities of multiple human and earth others. This same sort of foundationalism gets taken up into understandings of scientific progress (replace revealed creation with natural laws and revelation with reason) and in ideas of economic development (replace fallen creation with primitive, and salvation with civilization). In fact, as Gayatri Spivak intimates with her juxtaposition of planetarity and globalization, globalization itself operates along the lines of this same type of foundational logic.⁶

The third option in the traditional trilemma is infinite regress. From this perspective there is no stop to the slippage of knowledge claims. All claims are “ultimately” unjustified and can be questioned ad infinitum. Socrates knew this well, which is why his pesky Socratic method annoyed so many Athenians during his day.⁷ Anarchism, dadaism, and deconstructionism, among other camps of thought, move toward this type of understanding of knowledge (from different contexts and toward different purposes, of course). Though the least popular option in epistemology, I argue that this is the only option that breaks our thinking and concepts open onto the contexts and contours of the worlds in which we live. It is, then, the only option that breaks us out of dominology. In other words, both circularity and foundationalism secure knowledge from changing contexts: they cut our knowledge claims off from reality and force reality to fit in to the claims made about reality. Infinite regress, on the other hand, highlights the fact that we are all contextual, perspectival, embodied, changing creatures and that our knowledge claims can thus never be justified in foundations or circular arguments; rather they are always made on shifting grounds.⁸ As Mary Jane Rubenstein notes, “The point is that there is no point: no end to the uncertainty and no solid ground on which to construct a doctrine of knowledge or, for that matter, of being or its truth.”⁹

In later chapters of this book, I argue that this same trilemma holds for foundations of identity markers such as gender, sex, and sexuality (chapter 4) and that the infinite regress model offers some contextual, open, and evolving models for gender, sex, and sexuality. It is only with such a model, a model that can be described as queer, that the violence caused by identity essentialisms gives way to creative, multipossible becomings of planetary identities. Further, a practice of such infinite regress in identity construction also opens us onto the rest of the natural world (chapter 6) and toward the possibility of evolving past our own humanity (chapter 7). Queer theory is at least, though much more than, a deconstructive or iconoclastic attempt to break down conceptual binaries and break apart the process by which concepts constrain and choke identities and life so that multiple identities and lives can become and exist.

However, before going into these issues of identities and ethics, we must spend the next few chapters closely examining the two seemingly stable sources for any knowledge claim (whether justified by foundation, circular argument, or applying the method of infinite regress), variously described as nature/science/material and culture/religion/ideal. Both circularity and foundationalism can ignore one side of the way in which humans know about reality. In other words, it is possible from a foundationalist or circular perspective to be a complete idealist or a complete materialist (though only, as I will argue, in theory, since both are always already together). One unhelpful solution that brings the ideal and material worlds together found in foundationalism and circularity is that of dualism. Foundational dualism often claims that one side of the spectrum—material or ideal—is really real. Circular reasoning forms dualisms through using the ideal to justify the material or vice versa. Only infinite regress takes both sides together as equal co-constructors of reality. As Rosemary Radford Ruether notes, we need both Gaia (material) and God (ideal) as human beings in the world. “Both of these voices, of God and of Gaia, are our own voices. We need to claim them as our own, not in the sense that there is ‘nothing’ out there, but in the sense that what is ‘out there’ can only be experienced by us through the lenses of human existence.”¹⁰ We can’t seem to escape the fact that we are always already natural-cultural or biohistorical creatures.¹¹ For this reason, the fields of “religion and science” and “religion and ecology/nature” become important sites for thinking about what it means to be humans within a planetary context. Let me begin the examination of these two different approaches to knowing the worlds around us—science and religion—with a few, brief operational definitions of what I mean by these terms. The following three terms have multiple meanings, and volumes are written on each, so the best I can do here is describe what I mean by religion, science, and nature within the context of this book and within the context of constructing planetary identities.

DEFINING THE TERMS: RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND NATURE IN A PLANETARY CONTEXT

Religion, again at its etymological root, is about rebinding and rereading. It is about putting together a meaningful world, given the information we have within our specific (evolving) contexts. To stick with the trope I have been using, religion is about meaning making. Following the (somewhat modified) argument of Martin Heidegger, among many others, religion is then one of the ingredients of worlding or enframing.¹² As such, humans are, if anything else, meaning-making creatures. If birds fly, dolphins swim, and dogs bark, humans make meaning and are made by this meaning. I am not arguing that humans construct meaning out of nothing and create worlds or that language creates reality. This would be a monological process of imposing meaning onto the entire planet. Rather, humans are born into worlds of coconstructed meaning. These meanings are coconstructed by biohistories of humans living within a larger earth community. Other animals, plants, and the rest of the natural world help humans make this meaning; just as a bird would not fly without gravity and the dynamics of air and a dolphin would not swim without the history of evolution leading to its specialized form and the ocean water in which to swim, so humans do not make meaning without the histories, languages, genetic evolution, stable climate, and surrounding earth communities that make meaning possible.

To say that humans are meaning-making creatures is not to suggest that all humans are religious in the sense of following a traditional world religion, but rather that we all—atheist, theist, or agnostic—make meanings out of our lives that place us into a wider context of human-other and nonhuman-other relationships. These meaning-making practices matter and matter to our bodies and the worlds around us: they shape our ideas about gender, humans, the more than human world and they shape our cultural institutions—legal, economic, and political. These ideas and institutions then shape the many bodies that make up our worlds. Following Durkheim, among many others, religions function as binding forces or glue in our societies and daily lives.¹³ Religion also functions to help us cope with existential matters such as life-transitions, illness, and death. As Thomas Tweed notes, religions provide us with both crossings (navigating sticky existential transitions) and dwellings (making sense out of the newfound worlds in which we find ourselves).¹⁴ Religion, then, can also be understood as any system that organizes our life into a meaningful daily existence. Consumerism, the free-market economy, environmentalism, and other such systems can be analyzed as meaning-making practices, and in this sense they are religious.¹⁵ To ask the further question about “why” these meaning-making practices have evolved can lead to a lot of interesting thought experiments. However, these must be understood as speculative and imaginative. There is no reason why life has evolved into birdsong and meaning-making creatures, or so I will argue, but rather this is the gift of life we have been given. It is the mystery of life, something that evokes wonder and awe, and it begs for what I will describe later as a viable, planetary agnosticism.

Finally, when I use religion here, I can never stress enough that religion is always already a Western construct in history and formation (just as are Western science and nature, which will be discussed below). Confucianism and Daoism may be more like philosophical systems than religions; Hinduism is more like a conglomeration of different local practices and beliefs that are inseparable from the larger culture of India; and many indigenous traditions are more like lifeways or socioscapes than religions. In Muslim nations such as Indonesia and countries such as India, one notices that daily life is much more affected by what Westerners might think of as the religious. Whether in dress, public call to prayers, daily devotionals to deities, etc., the secular as a separate space really doesn’t exist as it does in the West. As I will argue later in this chapter, it takes a split between humans and nature or religious thought and natural philosophy such as occurred in the history of the West to get such an understanding of “religion” as a separate realm from the rest of public life and culture. Hence the globalization of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Emergence of Planetary Identities
• 1. Religion and Science in Dialogue
• 2. Destabilizing Nature: Natura Naturans, Emergence, and Evolution’s Rainbow
• 3. Destabilizing Religion: The Death of God, a Viable Agnosticism, and the Embrace of Polydoxy
• 4. Destabilizing Identity: Beyond Identity Solipsism
• 5. The Emergence of Ecoreligious Identities
• 6. Developing Planetary Environmental Ethics: A Nomadic Polyamory of Place
• 7. Challenging Human Exceptionalism: Human Becoming, Technology, Earth Others, and Planetary Identities
• Notes
• Glossary
• Works Cited
• Index