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Environmental Philosophy
Introduction: Uncovering the Conceptual Roots of Environmental Devastation
Since the 1970s, an interdisciplinary movement has been gaining momentum at the intersection of phenomenology and environmental philosophy (Brown and Toadvine 2003b: 239–48).1 Eco-phenomenology is inspired and guided by the idea that uprooting and replacing some of modern philosophy’s deeply entrenched but environmentally destructive ethical and metaphysical presuppositions can help us to combat environmental devastation at its conceptual roots. This radical or deep ecological approach is moving from the margins to the center of the environmental movement, thanks both to its inherent philosophical appeal and to the unhappy recognition that, although environmental destruction continues to accelerate, “[p]hilosophy has yet to find an effective voice in our struggle with the environmental crisis” (Brown and Toadvine 2003a: x). On the basis of recent UN and WorldWatch reports, Erazim Kohák, a leading neo-Husserlian eco-phenomenologist, assesses the stakes of our environmental crisis starkly: “our civilization – originally European, then Euro-American, today global – appears to be well on its way to self-destruction” (Brown and Toadvine 2003a: 19). Christian Diehm summarizes a few of the disturbing statistics: “More than half of the earth’s forests are gone, and they continue to be leveled at the rate of sixteen million hectares [or 39.5 million acres] per year, accompanied by an anthropogenic extinction rate nearing one thousand times the natural or ‘background’ rate” (Diehm 2003: 171). Many eco-phenomenologists maintain a desperate optimism despite this massive erosion of global biodiversity, believing we now have not only the correct diagnosis of, but also the necessary treatment for, our environmental crisis. This radical ecological diagnosis holds that “environmental destruction and crisis are caused by core beliefs within our worldview that sanction, legitimate, and even encourage the domination and technological control of nature,” while the eco-phenomenological cure suggests that these core beliefs can be changed, since “the insights of eco-phenomenology hold the promise of bringing about a dramatic shift in our current understanding of ourselves and of our place in the natural world” (Brown and Toadvine 2003a: xiii, xx–xxi).
Why should phenomenologists feel particularly called upon to respond to our environmental crisis? Because the anti-environmental assumptions most frequently singled out are mind/world dualism and the fact/value divide, and the phenomenological tradition has been working for over a century to help us think beneath and beyond these conceptual dichotomies entrenched in our habits of thought.2 Mind/world dualism and the fact/value divide seem obvious when one is theorizing from within the modern tradition (where they have functioned as axioms since Descartes and Hume at least), but phenomenologists argue that these conceptual dichotomies fundamentally mischaracterize our ordinary experience. By failing to recognize the integral entwinement of self and world basic to our experiential navigation of the lived environment, modern philosophy effectively splits the subject off from objects (and other subjects), thereby laying the conceptual groundwork for the modern worldview in which an intrinsically meaningless objective realm (“nature”) is separated epistemically from – and so needs to be mastered through the activities of – isolated, self-certain subjects. This worldview functions historically like a self-fulfilling prophecy, its progressive historical realization generating not only the political freedoms and scientific advances we cherish, but also unwanted downstream consequences such as our escalating environmental crisis. Although environmental devastation is a predictable side effect of our collective historical effort to master an ostensibly meaningless world of objects, we tend to ignore the conceptual connections between our modern worldview and the environmental crisis. This is not only because the modern worldview is so deeply entrenched that it usually passes unnoticed, but also because modernity’s definitive divorce of mind from world creates a number of irresolvable pseudo-problems (including most species of skepticism) which distract philosophers, diverting our intellectual efforts away from pressing real-world problems such as our mounting environmental crisis.3
The phenomenological critique of modernity just sketched remains controversial, of course, but eco-phenomenology is not primarily a critical movement, content to uncover environmental devastation’s conceptual roots. Its more important, positive aim is to undercut and replace them. How do eco-phenomenologists seek to uproot the mind/world and fact/value dichotomies inherited from modern philosophy? First, phenomenological approaches seek to begin from – and so return us to – the experience of a pre-differentiated, mind–world unity. By thus methodologically undercutting mind/world dualism, phenomenology hopes, second, to recognize the reality of environmental “values,” the alleged “fact” that certain pro-environmental values are “always already in the world” and so simply await the appropriate phenomenological approach in order to be discovered and made the basis of a new environmental ethics. How, then, are we to understand and evaluate such radical claims, which seek to undercut and replace views near the core of the modern philosophical tradition? What kinds of arguments can be given in support of these eco-phenomenological views, and what problems do they bring in their wake? How significant are their different formulations in competing eco-phenomenological approaches? These difficult and interesting issues will be our primary focus in what follows.
From Ontological Method to Eco-Phenomenological Ethics
Eco-phenomenology seeks to get the mentalism out of environmentalism. By recognizing a pre-theoretical level of experience in which we do not yet distinguish ourselves from our worlds (a dimension of practical, everyday experience eclipsed by the modern tradition’s emphasis on detached, theoretical contemplation), and attempting to do justice to this fundamental layer of experience by incorporating it into their methodological points of departure, phenomenologists seek to undercut and transcend the dual-istic mind/world divide. Indeed, such methodological points of departure as Husserl’s “life-world,” Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” Merleau-Ponty’s “motor-intentionality” (and later, “flesh”), and Levinas’s “il y a” (the “anonymous” existing not yet differentiated into an individual “existent” and its “existence” or world) were formulated precisely in order to capture and express a mind/world unity, a basic level of experience at which mind and world remain integrally enmeshed. This is precisely the point (to take the most influential of the above examples) of Heidegger’s recognition that a human being is always a “being-in-the-world.” For, in Heidegger’s famous formulation, “in” signifies pragmatic involvement rather than spatial inclusion (“being-in-the-world” means “being-in[extricably involved with]-the-world”), and “world” refers not to the totality of physical objects, but rather to the holistic nexus of intelligibility organized by our identity-constituting life-projects (a sense of “world” conveyed in such expressions as “the world of the parent,” “the runner’s world,” or “the world of the tree-sitter”).4 There are, of course, important differences and disagreements between the competing approaches that constitute the phenomenological tradition (Langer 2003: 106). Indeed, Heideggerians argue that phenomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre, and Levinas still presuppose the concept of “subjectivity,” and thus that their methodologies tend to ramify rather than undermine Cartesian dualism. The fact that most contemporary Husserlians, Sartreans, and Levinasians would take such an argument as a criticism suggests, however, that the eco-phenomenological claim that this broad methodological agreement obtains across the phenomenological tradition is probably as uncontentious as any substantive generalization concerning a broad and diverse living tradition is likely to be.
If eco-phenomenology’s methodological principle concerning phenomenological approaches to the environment is thus relatively uncontroversial (at least for phenomenologists characterizing their own schools), the same cannot be said for the eco-phenomenologists’ competing “ethical” principle, which represents a more original development of the phenomenological tradition. This ethical principle, stated broadly, holds that phenomenological approaches undercut the fact/value dichotomy, enabling eco-phenomenologists to recognize the non-subjective reality of environmental “values” (see, e.g., Marietta 2003: 121–4; Llewelyn 2003: 57; Langer 2003: 112– 14; Embree 2003: 40–1). In order not to beg questions concerning the metaphysical baggage attendant on the concept of “value,” however, let us instead specify that ecophenomenologists are all committed to some type of ethical realism. I say “some type,” because we can discern a significant disagreement within the eco-phenomenological movement concerning how best to articulate and defend the ethical realist view, a disagreement which – reactivating preexisting fault lines within the tradition – implicitly divides the eco-phenomenological movement into two different, competing approaches. Put simply, and so perhaps controversially (but by way of anticipation of the rest of this chapter), we could say that Nietzscheans and Husserlians gravitate toward a naturalistic ethical realism, in which “good” and “bad” are ultimately matters of fact (hence their naturalism), and our “values” should be grounded in and reflect these proto-ethical facts (hence their ethical realism). (One may have difficulty recognizing Husserl himself in any naturalistic ethical realism, given his notorious antipathy to “naturalism” as he understood it; nevertheless, we will see that this moniker aptly describes neo -Husserlian eco-phenomenological approaches.) Heideggerians and Levinasians, on the other hand, articulate a transcendental ethical realism, according to which we can indeed discover what really matters (hence ethical realism) when we are appropriately open to the environment, but what we thereby discover is neither a “fact” nor a “value” but rather a transcendental source of meaning that cannot be reduced to facts, values, or entities of any kind (hence transcendental ethical realism). As we examine these two eco-phenomenological species of ethical realism, moreover, we will notice that they generate two importantly different kinds of ethical perfectionism (by which I mean views that hold that ethical flourishing, broadly conceived, is best served by identifying, cultivating, and developing the significantly distinctive traits or capacities of the entities under consideration), and that these competing views have conflicting practical implications. The naturalistic ethical realism leads to an eco-centric perfectionism which stresses the need to acknowledge and develop universal traits of nature, even at the expense of human concerns, while transcendental ethical realism is capable of generating a more humanistic perfectionism, one which emphasizes the cultivation of distinctive traits of Dasein, and so, I will suggest, yields more acceptable ethical consequences.
The Meaning of the Earth
In order to understand these two eco-phenomenological approaches to ethical realism, as well as the roots and implications of their differences, let us trace these differences back to an ambiguity implicit in the eco-phenomenological motto, “Back to the Earth Itself.” This is, of course, a clever twist on the famous battle cry of Husserlian phenomenology – “Back to the things themselves!” (Zu den Sachen selbst!) – in which the crucial Sache, the phenomenological “heart of the matter” or “sake” (Llewelyn 2003: 59), has been replaced by “earth.” This substitution, a specifying instantiation that delimits the horizon of phenomenological concern, implies both that the earth is the heart of the matter for eco-phenomenology and that eco-phenomenology is for the sake of the earth. “Earth” is problematic as a singular term, however, because ecophenomenologists are not simply referring to the third planet from the sun in our solar system. Rather, “earth” is a philosophical term of art for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, although the term has almost completely opposed senses for the two thinkers. Indeed, the basic divergence in the eco-phenomenological movement can be traced back to and illuminated in terms of this basic philosophical disagreement between Nietzsche and Heidegger over the meaning of “the earth.”
In Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra repeatedly urges his audience to “Remain true [or “faithful,” Treu] to the earth.” The precise meaning of “earth” in Nietzsche’s slogan can best be understood from the term with which it is contrasted: “otherworldly” (überirdischen, literally “overearthly”), meaning that which is above or beyond the earth, or meta-physical (Nietzsche 1954: 125). In Nietzsche’s conceptual vocabulary, the otherworldly is something impossible for human beings to attain, our vain desire for which leads us to consider even the best we can achieve insufficient and unsatisfying. Nietzsche’s main examples of the otherworldly are the Platonic “forms” (according to which, for instance, nothing we ever encounter or create in this world will be as beautiful as the perfect “form” of beauty) and the Christian “heaven” (conceived as a place some will go to after this life, compared with which our world is a mere “veil of tears”). According to Nietzsche, this unfulfillable desire for the otherworldly generates the nihilism of “resentment” (Ressentiment). The exact inverse of the “sour-grapes” phenomenon (in which something desired but out of reach is deemed undesirable), nihilistic resentment denigrates what we living human beings can attain in the name of something we cannot; our “earthly” aspirations are devalued by comparison to unfulfillable “otherworldly” dreams. It is precisely in order to root out this source of nihilism that Zarathustra will “beg and beseech” his audience:
Remain faithful to the earth,... serve the meaning of the earth... Do not let your gift-giving love and knowledge fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls.... Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do – back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning. (Nietzsche 1954: 188)
“Remain true to the earth” is, in other words, a naturalistic slogan. Nietzsche calls for us to aspire to that which is attainable (albeit attainable in principle, not easily attainable). His philosophical goal, stated simply, is to revalue the world (that is, to give it new values and, in so doing, restore its value) by recognizing and (in a post-Kantian, neo-Darwinian spirit) embracing the limits of possible human knowledge. We “remain true to the earth,” then, by maintaining ourselves within the bounds of the knowable.
For Heidegger, to put the contrast sharply, “earth” refers to something cognitively unattainable, something that can never really be known. In his famous essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935; cited as Heidegger 1971), Heidegger maintains that for a great artwork to work, that is, for it to “gather and preserve” a meaningful “world” for its audience, it must maintain an essential tension between this world of meanings and something he calls “earth.” Earth, on his analysis, both sustains this meaningful world and resists being interpretively exhausted by it, thereby allowing the artwork quietly to maintain the sanctity of the uninterpretable within the very world of meanings it conveys. “Earth,” in other words, is one of Heidegger’s names for that which gives rise to our worlds of meaning without ever being exhausted by them, a dimension of intelligibility we experience primarily as it recedes from our awareness, eluding our attempts finally to know it, to grasp and express it fully in terms of some positive content. Heidegger contends, nevertheless, that we can get a sense for the “earth” from great works of art such as Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, where, in the worn opening of one shoe and in the hole in the sole of the other, thick, dark paint conveys the insides of the shoes, interior spaces we cannot see because they are hidden by what the painting conveys: not just the visible exterior of these shoes, but the entire world of the peasant. Admittedly, Heidegger’s rather poetic way of putting these crucial points makes them easy to miss:
From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth... In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain [i.e., “earth” makes “world” possible] and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field [i.e., it is also constitutive of “earth” that it resists “world”]. (Heidegger 1971: 33–4)
On Heidegger’s reading, Van Gogh’s painting teaches the very “truth” of the work of art, the essential tension in which “earth” simultaneously makes possible and resists being fully expressed by “world.” This notion of earth is thus very close to the later Heidegger’s central conception of “being as such” (Seins als Solche), a phenomenological “presencing” (Anwesen) that makes historical intelligibility possible without ever being exhausted by it. (These are difficult notions, obviously, but ones which, I will show, remain crucial for any eco-phenomenological appropriation of Heidegger.)
In sum, then, Nietzsche’s conception of “earth” leads in a naturalistic direction, while Heidegger’s points toward his phenomenological understanding of the transcendental condition of historical intelligibility (and so of all meaning and, more broadly, all mattering). This difference, we will now see, makes itself felt in the two different approaches implicitly competing within the eco-phenomenological movement.
Naturalistic Ethical Realism in Eco-Phenomenology
We can recognize the influence of Nietzsche’s conception of earth on those ecophenomenologists who tend toward a naturalistic ethical realism by adopting an ecological framework within which the good is ultimately a matter of fact to be discerned by the appropriate phenomenological approach. Thus neo-Husserlian ecophenomenologists such as Charles S. Brown contest the scientistic divorce of “the Good” from “the Real” and instead seek to renaturalize ethics by recognizing the non-subjective reality of the good. For, when we abandon the idea that there are moral facts of the matter to be discovered and realized, Brown complains, procedural issues in ethics take the place of substantive ones, and “the good” thereby becomes “secondary to the right” (Brown 2003: 9). Brown thus rejects the long-standing trend by which ethics has become an increasingly formal, proceduralist endeavor (such that, reversing the old consequentialist slogan, the means come to justify the ends); he protests that “the Good has been so conceptually severed from the Real that goodness itself is often dismissed as an empty concept reflecting only personal preference” (ibid.: 7). To avoid such ethical relativism, neo-Husserlian eco-phenomenologists suggest we must recognize an important dimension of “lived moral experience” in which we discover our “prereflexive axiological consciousness,” the fact that “[w]ithin our pre-reflective experiences, we regularly find the world and the things within it to be infused with value” (ibid.: 9–11).
Now, within the phenomenological tradition, there are at least two ways to take the claim that, as Lester Embree puts it, “the world in which one finds oneself is always already fraught with values” (Embree 2003: 39). Taken as an ontic claim (concerning our everyday experience of entities), the idea is that, for example, ripe apples show up looking good to us, clear-cut forests looking bad. Taken as an ontological claim (concerning what such ontic facts reveal about the structure by which reality is disclosed to “Dasein,” that entity whose being is an issue for it), the idea is rather that entities only show up for us at all because we care about them in some way (as Heidegger argues in Being and Time (1927)). This latter, ontological claim complicates the ethical realism assumed by the former, ontic one, however. For, if entities only show up within the horizons of my concerns, then unless there is some universal concern, the values entities possess when encountered pre-theoretically cannot be made the basis for a non-relativistic ethics. The ripe apple, for example, may not look good to someone who has eaten too much, or who simply dislikes the taste of apples, and Brown himself maintains that “[c]lear-cutting large tracks of old-growth forest may appear as good from the perspective of business and profit” (Brown 2003: 11). Thus, although entities and events show up within our worlds as already mattering to us in various ways (our pre-reflexive experience is always already infused with “value,” if you will), appealing to these “pre-given values” will not help us escape the charge of ethical relativism unless these values are both universal and substantive. There may be “no separation of factual information from meaning and value” in our ordinary experience of the lifeworld (Marietta 2003: 122), but among the values that show up in this “pre-thetic” lifeworld, we still need to be able to distinguish between the entrenched sedimentations of pernicious traditions, on the one hand, and truly universal values (if there are any) on the other. Given the conflicting values embedded in our lifeworld, and the fact that pre-reflexive experiences are often shaped by, and so tend to reinforce, all manner of preexisting prejudices, Brown’s own faith that the ethical wisdom “pre-given” in the lifeworld will eventually resolve all of our conflicts seems rather optimistic. The next two questions, then, are, first, whether there are any universal horizons of concern, and thus any “values... that actually do hold for all subjects” (Embree 2003: 40), and if so, second, whether these universal “values” are substantive enough to ground an eco-phenomenological ethics.
The neo-Husserlian eco-phenomenologists try to answer “Yes” to both questions. What makes their naturalistic ethical realism so interesting is their further contention that our pre-given world of “background values” can itself be peeled back to reveal “an axiological transcendental” (Brown 2003: 13), that is, a proto-ethical substrate of nature they believe can function as the ground for a new eco-phenomenological ethics. For such naturalistic eco-phenomenologists as Kohák, Brown, Diehm, Ted Toadvine, and David Wood, the very notion of something’s being “good” is ultimately rooted in the objective conditions required to sustain and enhance the life of an organism, while the “bad” comes from those conditions which diminish or eradicate such life. As Kohák influentially maintains, “good and evil does have an ontological justification: some things sustain life, others destroy it” (Kohák 1993: 31). Brown suggests how one might develop Kohák’s view of the intrinsic value of life into a full-blown ethics: “Why are we so sure that dishonesty, fraud, rape, and murder are evil? Because they each, although in different ways, retard and inhibit the intrinsic purposes and desires of life” (Kohák 2003: 14). It is easy to understand why a naturalistic environ-mentalist might find such a view attractive. Yet, one need not believe the “rape is in our genetic interest” view some sociobiologists defend in order to be skeptical of the claim that what we in the West take to be ethically good (or bad) is what serves (or undermines) the “intrinsic purposes and desires of life” – even assuming, concessio non dato, that we can make adequate sense of that phrase, something Kohák does only by making “Husserl’s phenomenology an anticipation of evolutionism in sociobiology” (Kohák 2003: 28).5 The sociobiology literature is replete with less controversial studies of behaviors we would condemn as immoral among humans that seem to have been advantageous from the perspective of Dawkin’s “selfish gene.” (Perhaps that should only surprise the prudish; as Freud explained in Totem and Taboo (1913), societies do not morally prohibit acts no one wants to commit.) Indeed, both Nietzsche and Freud argue that Western civilization is premised on the repression and sublimation of the very innate purposes and desires of life to which the naturalistic ethical realists appeal, and that ethics functions, at least in part, to codify and enforce this very repression.
So, instead of assuming that our core values are natural (which would be to mystify rather than to naturalize the ground of ethics), we should admit that, insofar as we can articulate an ethics in conformity with the “intrinsic purposes and desires of life” (which Nietzsche too called for), the resulting naturalistic ethics is likely to differ significantly from the core value system we have inherited from the Judeo-Christian-Kantian tradition, with its familiar proscription of “dishonesty, fraud, rape,... murder”, and so on (and its defense of pity and compassion for the weak, Nietzsche would add). Naturalistic eco-phenomenologists thus seem more forthright when they suggest, for example, that an ethics that does justice to “life” may require not only “an attitude of moral regard and respect for some nonhuman others” (Brown 2003: 10), but even – and as one of its “basic principles” – “that the human population needs to be reduced by several billion” (Embree 2003: 47). If we cannot expand our core value-system to accommodate such differences, they may render the adoption of a naturalistic eco-phenomenological ethics unlikely, undesirable, or both. At best, Marietta may be correct to see in this ethics a “rejection of humanistic ethical concerns – which thinkers of our day are not ready to accept, but at which thinkers in the future might not blanch” (Embree 2003: 125).
To turn to our second question, is the notion of the “intrinsic purposes and desires of life” sufficiently substantive to ground an ethics? Insofar as it is, should we adopt this ethics? Nietzsche argues that a naturalistic ethics of life will not resemble our Judeo-Christian-Kantian value system; some will go further and worry that it may not justify any value system at all. This worry about the indeterminacy of an ethics of life is suggested by the fact that, the more specific the values that are supposed to follow from “the intrinsic purposes and desires of life,” the more dubious their derivations seem. To add another example: when Kohák asserts that the human attachment to a “home-land” is justified by the fact that we are embodied entities (Kohák 2003: 28), it sounds as if he is rationalizing a politically disastrous and thus ethically suspect attachment. We are not salmon, after all. The underlying worry here is that the “axiological transcendental” (which holds that ultimately the objective conditions that generate life are good while those which diminish it are bad) is too general to be of much help in resolving real-world environmental disputes, especially once we have made room at the ethical bargaining table for nonhuman organisms, as the view suggests we must when it posits life in general as its fundamental value (see Thomson 2004). It was, moreover, just such an emphasis on the fundamental value of life itself that led Nietzsche to his controversial doctrine of the “superman” (or “trans-human,” Übermensch), his neo-Darwinian idea that evolution is not over, since humanity too “is something that shall be superseded” (Nietzsche 1954: 124; Richardson 2002). Nietzsche’s own pursuit of a naturalistic ethics of life, in other words, brought him to the conclusion that if what we most value is the continuing survival of life itself, then humanity not only will but should be superseded.
Nietzsche’s conclusion brings out what may be the most serious objection to the naturalistic ethical realism we have been examining. What if a rigorous ethical observance of the underlying conditions that sustain and enhance life actually ends up undermining what human beings prize most highly: art, literature, religion, culture, and the like? Here the naturalistic eco-phenomenological perspective, true to its Nietzschean roots, threatens to degenerate into a defense of the “post-human” (see Foucault 1973: 386–7; Pearson 1997; Fukuyama 2002). For, insofar as naturalistic ethical realism generates an eco-centric ethical perfectionism in which the preservation of life in general is the highest value, it cuts against a more humanistic perfectionism, according to which what matters ultimately is that we cultivate the distinctive talents and capacities which have thus far been associated almost exclusively with the human species. Thus, a perspective that gains much of its appeal from its attempt to put other forms of life on an equal footing with the human species risks losing that appeal by devaluing the highest achievements of humanity, even advocating the overcoming of the human as such – whether through continued evolution or technological innovation (or the latter understood as the former). The human fear of such a coup d’état by our technology (given popular expression in the Terminator and Matrix series) is not groundless (as these examples drawn from science fiction might suggest), but reflects a growing anxiety about the place of technology in our lives, an anxiety best understood in terms of the Heideggerian critique of technology appropriated and disseminated by transcendental eco-phenomenologists such as myself.
Transcendental Ethical Realism in Eco-Phenomenology
It is no coincidence that, “[o]ver the past decades, environmentalists have consistently focused more on Heidegger than on any of the other phenomenologists” (Langer 2003: 112). Heidegger’s “later” (post-1937) philosophy in particular has proved an incomparably rich source of phenomenological reflection for ecologically minded philosophers, thanks to both his incisive philosophical critique of, and his suggestive treatments for, the nihilistic worldview underlying phenomena such as environmental devastation.6 As I argue (in Thomson 2005a), the later Heidegger’s ontological critique of “enframing” (Gestell, our nihilistic, “technological” understanding of the being of entities) builds upon the idea that we Dasein implicitly participate in the making-intelligible of our worlds, indeed, that our sense of reality is mediated by lenses inherited from metaphysics. Here Heidegger historicizes Kant’s discursivity thesis, which holds that intelligibility is the product of a subconscious process by which we spontaneously organize and so filter a sensibly overwhelming world to which we are fundamentally receptive. For Heidegger, however, this implicit organization is accomplished not by historically fixed categories, but rather by a changing historical understanding of what and how entities are (an ontotheological understanding of both their essence and existence, to take the most famous example), and this “understanding of being” is supplied by the metaphysical tradition. Metaphysics, as ontotheology, temporarily secures the intelligible order both ontologically (from the inside out) and theologically (from the outside in), thereby supplying the most basic conceptual parameters and ultimate standards of legitimacy for each of history’s successive “epochs” or constellations of intelligibility. We late-moderns, for example, implicitly process intelligibility through the ontotheological lenses inherited from Nietzsche’s metaphysics, and so we ultimately understand the being of entities as eternally recurring will-to-power, that is, as forces coming together and breaking apart with no goal other than their own unlimited self-augmentation. The result is an unnoticed “enframing” of reality, by which we tend to reduce every entity we encounter to the status of an intrinsically meaningless “resource” (Bestand) merely to be optimized as efficiently as possible, leveling all attempts to say what matters to us down to empty optimization imperatives (such as the ubiquitous: “Get the most out of your potential!”). Thus we come to treat even ourselves (modernity’s vaunted “subject”) in the terms underlying our technological refashioning of the world, as just another resource to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency. Now, to take but one telling example, for every individual who goes out for a nature hike in the United States, thousands drive to indoor gyms in order to “get their exercise” on a treadmill, seeking to optimize their health by going nowhere fast, often while watching television or otherwise diverting their attention through technological means.
While many eco-phenomenologists recognize Heidegger’s ontological critique of technology as a deeply revealing understanding of the precise metaphysical roots of our worsening environmental crisis, others ignore it and so, unknowingly, fatally reinscribe Nietzsche’s metaphysics into their environmentalism. Indeed, the very naturalistic eco-phenomenological view we examined seeks to ground the “intrinsic value” of living organisms in an implicitly Nietzschean understanding of life as “a spontaneous, self-maintaining system, sustaining and reproducing itself, executing its program” (Toadvine 2003: 140), thereby failing to recognize that this ontological understanding of life as a self-reproducing program clearly is borrowed from, and so inevitably reinforces, our nihilistic Nietzschean ontotheology. Of course, however insightful and revealing Heidegger’s critique of technology is, if he gave us only this diagnosis with no reason to hope for a cure, his critics would be right to accuse him of fatalistic quietism. Fortunately, the later Heidegger’s influence on environmental philosophy stems from a second source as well, namely, his complementary efforts to elaborate a positive philosophical treatment for the nihilism that results from the fact that we implicitly interpret intelligibility through the lenses of our age’s reigning Nietzschean ontotheology. This treatment includes Heidegger’s calls for such ecologically suggestive phenomenological comportments as “dwelling” (wohnen) and “releasement toward things” (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen), to which we will return shortly.
Michael Zimmerman, a leading neo-Heideggerian environmentalist, is best known for persuasively connecting Heidegger and deep ecology (Zimmerman 1993a). This is rather ironic, however, since he quickly reconsidered his advocacy of this connection (Zimmerman 1993b; Zimmerman 2003). Zimmerman’s reversal can be explained in part by the fact that his own important work on the “Heidegger controversy” (Zimmerman 1990) made him acutely aware of the political risks of enlisting a philosopher maligned as an “unrepentant fascist” as the prime philosophical ally for a radical environmental movement similarly accused of “eco-fascism,” risks which presumably would only be heightened if it were widely known that (as Zimmerman 1997 shows) the development of the environmental movement itself was intertwined with the rise of Nazism. I have argued that Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 in order to attempt to enact his own long-developed philosophical vision for a radical reformation of the university (Thomson 2005a). It seems likely, however, that Heidegger’s stunningly naïve belief that the Nazi “revolution” could be led to a “second, deeper awakening” in which it would discover its own “inner truth and greatness” was reinforced by the misleading sense of Nazism he absorbed from the German youth movement, a movement pushing for educational reform which drew a great deal of its strength from the student hiking associations, which in turn were rooted philosophically in German Romanticism. Indeed, the great Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin became, in effect, an exemplary hiker, thanks to the way in which his legendary, heartbreaking walk back home to Germany through the French countryside captured the imagination of subsequent generations. Nietzsche, an early admirer of Hölderlin and a passionate proponent of the culturally restorative powers of youth, frequently celebrated hiking as a stimulus to philosophical innovation. Nietzsche, in turn, inspired the Stephan George circle, one of whose members, Norbert von Hellingrath, brought to light Hölderlin’s later poetry, the very poetry which (taking us full circle) proved formative for Heidegger’s own philosophical vision of a spiritual revolution, first of Germany, then, later, of the world. Although such romantic influences on environmentalism deserve careful study, the fact that the historical rise of environmentalism is permeated by the politically dangerous dream of philosophical revolution does not allow either simply to be dismissed (Thomson 2003, 2005b).
Of course, Zimmerman’s dramatic reversal of his own well-known case for taking Heidegger as the prime philosophical ally for the deep-ecological movement cannot be understood simply as the politically prudent strategizing of a leading philosophical environmentalist. Philosophically, it turns rather on Zimmerman’s adoption of Thomas Sheehan’s (Sheehan 2001) contention that the later Heidegger never meant to disseminate an understanding of “being as such” (Seins als Solche) that was any different from his own earlier understanding of the “being of entities” (Sein des Seienden). Yet, Heidegger himself admits that his own earlier failure to recognize precisely this difference was “disastrous” philosophically (Heidegger 1989: 250), and those of us who believe Sheehan is wrong on this crucial point will also think it a serious mistake for Zimmerman to follow him here. Deprived of the central notion of “being as such,” Heidegger’s later thought would indeed suffer from many of the problems Sheehan and Zimmerman diagnose – and numerous others. (For instance, Heidegger could not account for “historicity,” the vertiginous fact that our bedrock understanding of what is changes with time, and, most seriously, his later positive project would lose much of its force and appeal.)7 Hermeneutic generosity alone thus suggests we recognize the notion of “being as such” at work in Heidegger’s later thought and see what follows for eco-phenomenological appropriations of his work, rather than claim that he lacks this crucial notion and then enumerate the resulting problems for taking him as an ally of environmentalism.
The main reason the later Heidegger became dissatisfied with (and so mostly stopped using) the word “being” (Sein) is that it is ambiguous between “being as such” and “the being of entities.” This ambiguity proved “disastrous” not only because it allowed Heidegger to mistake the “being of entities” for “being as such” in his early work (leading him to believe he could “recover” a “fundamental ontology” from beneath history, a false belief which fueled his political ambitions (Thomson 2005a)), but also because the ambiguity obscures three connected insights central to his later thought: first, that “being as such” makes possible the historical succession of different metaphysical understandings of the “being of entities”; second, that metaphysics, as “ontotheology,” systematically obscures and forgets “being as such”; and thus, finally, that metaphysics systematically elides its own condition of possibility (which means that the metaphysical tradition can be deconstructed by immanent critiques that help reveal “being as such” and so point beyond this tradition). The later Heidegger thus abandons the locution “being” as disastrously misleading, but he nevertheless makes clear that the notion of “being as such” must be understood as implicit in his later concept of the “fourfold.” Indeed, this fourfold of “earth, heavens, mortals, and divinities” simply unpacks the four quadrants of “being” when it has been “crossed-through,” and so is meant by Heidegger as another way of developing and conveying his post-metaphysical insights into “being as such” (Heidegger 1958: 81–5). Because “releasement to things” is the later Heidegger’s name for a phenomenological comportment receptive to this fourfold, and “dwelling” is another (slightly earlier) name for a comportment open to “being as such,” these eco-phenomenologically suggestive comportments simply cannot be understood without recognizing the role of “being as such” in his later thought.
Here we encounter the transcendental ethical realism the later Heidegger pioneered, according to which we discover what really matters when we are appropriately open to the environment, but what we thereby discover are neither facts nor values but rather “being as such,” a transcendental source of meaning that cannot be reduced to facts, values, or entities of any kind (Dreyfus and Spinosa 1997). For, as Zimmerman sees, “letting things be” means “allowing them to manifest themselves in terms of their own inherent possibilities” (Zimmerman 2003: 79), while the “fourfold” poetically names the interwoven horizons of this phenomenological self-showing, the “presencing” which Heidegger understands as made possible by all the grounds (including the past) which bear us up us without being completely within our control (“earth”) as well as the projects which open the future (“heavens”), and which can thus matter most deeply (“divinities”) to we finite and so reflexive entities (“mortals”).8 Similarly, to “dwell” means to be at “home” with “being as such,” albeit an unheimlich dwelling in which one is outside any metaphysical understanding of the being of entities (pace Langer 2003: 114), attuned to that temporally dynamic phenomenological “presencing” metaphysics both presupposes and elides. These comportments will thus be crucial to any deep eco-phenomenological appropriation of the later Heidegger. For, when we adopt these comportments, and so become attuned to the phenomenological “presencing” whereby “being as such” manifests itself, we come to understand entities as being richer in meaning than we are capable of doing justice to conceptually, rather than taking them as intrinsically meaningless resources awaiting optimization. Such transformative experiences, in which we recognize entities as being more than resources awaiting optimization (and so learn to approach them with care, humility, patience, gratitude, even awe), can become microcosms of, as well as inspiration for, the revolution beyond our underlying ontotheology Heidegger thinks we need in order to set our world aright.
Wood suggests that, in order to transcend the nihilistic metaphysics of our age, ecophenomenologists “need a model of the whole as something that will inevitably escape our model of it” (Wood 2003: 217), which is what both Heidegger and Levinas give us with their respective understandings of “being as such” and “alterity.” Given the proximity of Heidegger and Levinas on this crucial matter, it is revealing to observe that the same refusal to recognize the notion of “being as such” in Heidegger’s later thought helps motivate the popular move beyond Heidegger to Levinas in pursuit of the “ethical” perspective Heidegger is supposedly missing. This too is ironic, since Levinas’s ethics is essentially a sensitivity to alterity (“ethics is the other; the other is ethics,” as Levinas told Derrida), and Levinas’s notion of alterity (as a radical other who issues aporetic commands both necessary and impossible to obey) is much closer to the later Heidegger’s understanding of “being as such” (as a temporally dynamic presencing that simultaneously elicits and defies conceptual circumscription) than most Levinas scholars acknowledge. Of course, these Levinasians are simply following Levinas himself, whose notorious animosity toward Heidegger (an extreme instance of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”) distorted his own understanding of the profound conceptual debts he owed to Heidegger’s thinking. Nevertheless, as Wood pointedly observes: “If you’re going to be a Levinasian” (that is, someone who practices a Levinasian ethics of reading), then “you couldn’t possibly read Heidegger in the way Levinas reads Heidegger” (Wood and Dalton 2002: 12).
Levinas, Heidegger, and the Ethical Question of Animality
Rather than endlessly restaging the old debates between the masters, however, we do better to follow the spirit of the eco-phenomenological movement by working creatively to appropriate their thinking for ourselves. In this spirit, Christian Diehm (2003) makes a noble attempt to rehabilitate Levinas’s notion of alterity, purging it of its anthropocentrism so that it can serve the cause of animal rights. Edward Casey, however, points out insurmountable textual obstacles to this well-meaning hermeneutic endeavor, stemming from Levinas’s (barely secularized) belief that only the face of the other human person can grant us access to alterity (albeit a paradoxical mode of access in which alterity is “manifest” but “non-apparent”). Levinas did well to ask himself, “Can things have a face?” Unfortunately, as Casey shows, “Levinas himself would doubtless have to conclude that either there is nothing like a face in the environment... or the face is all over the place: in which case, its meaning will be so diluted as to risk losing any ethical urgency. Otherwise put, ethics is human or it does not exist at all” (Casey 2003: 192–3). Casey’s sharp critique of Levinas is convincing on this point, but Diehm does well nonetheless in what I take to be an attempt to show that the conceptual resources of a great philosopher often exceed the narrow conclusions that philosopher, as an idiosyncratic individual, actually drew from them.
We could use the same strategy to ally Heidegger (more convincingly than Levinas) with the animal rights movement, building on John Haugeland’s “unorthodox” argument that “Dasein” and “human being” are not coextensive, since the reference of “Dasein” is, in principle, broader. Haugeland (Haugeland 1982, 1992) argues that corporations, for example, could qualify as “Dasein,” but I would suggest extending the term to (at least some) nonhuman animals. In my view, Being and Time’s revolutionary conception of the self not as a thinking substance, subject, ego, or consciousness, but as a Dasein (a “being-here,” that is, a temporally structured making-intelligible of the place in which I happen to find myself) promises us a philosophically defensible, non-speciesist way of beginning to draw the ethically crucial distinctions between (something like) “lower” and “higher” forms of life missing from the ecocentric views considered above (as well as from more famous non-speciesist ethical views like Peter Singer’s sensation-centered consequentialism). Without such distinctions, these positions tend to generate anti-human consequences that render their widespread acceptance extremely unlikely, leading to a practical dead-end in which even as creative a philosopher as Wood is willing to suggest a seemingly “eco-fascist” solution to the global environmental crisis, in which benevolent eco-centric dictatorships temporarily abrogate decision making from less rational, democratic states (Wood 2003: 231). Yet, such antihuman implications and antidemocratic conclusions can be avoided, and without falling back into illegitimate, speciesist reasoning, if we understand “rights” (with the progressive strand of the liberal tradition) as political protections owed to all agents capable of reflexively pursuing life-projects, since the pursuit of such life-projects gives one the kind of world that both desires and deserves protecting (Tooley 1972). The suggestion, put provocatively, is that ecophenomenologists should answer the question “Which entities deserve intrinsic rights?” with: “All Dasein,” that is, all entities whose being is an issue for them, and only these entities (although other entities could, of course, deserve rights instrumentally, in virtue of their relations to Dasein, including relations of eco-systemic interdependence).
On this neo-Heideggerian eco-phenomenological view, what counts (in contrast to the naturalistic, neo-Nietzschean and Husserlian positions considered earlier) is not life per se, but rather a life that has a temporally enduring world that matters to it explicitly. Heidegger did well to escape the gravity of his age far enough to recognize that being a Dasein is not an all-or-nothing affair, since there are degrees of “having a world.” Still, as Llewelyn observes, “Heidegger’s phenomenology... does not entail this... thinking of the non-human other. It only enables it” (Llewelyn 2003: 58, 62). The simple tripartite distinction Heidegger famously proposes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics between the “worldless” rock, the “world-poor” animal, and the world-disclosing “Dasein” really only inaugurates the more difficult labor of drawing fine-grained distinctions on a much fuller continuum. We might imagine such a continuum of Dasein as stretching, for example, from:
(1) “worldless” inorganic matter; to (2) similarly “worldless” invertebrate organisms (lacking a nervous system and so physiologically incapable of sensation); to (3) simple vertebrate organisms (possessing the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, and so somewhere between being “worldless” and “world-poor”); to (4) “world-poor” entities like the lizard on the rock and cow in the field (sentient but not reflexive, apparently permanently immersed in perceptual immediacy); to (5) the “near-Dasein” of such entities as the chimpanzee (whose self-awareness is demonstrated, for example, by a remarkable capacity to incorporate an explicit understanding of its role in a complex social group into a creative plan to accomplish difficult, temporally distant goals); to (6) the partial Dasein of such entities as gorillas (who conveniently demonstrate their possession of a world by learning our languages); to (7) the potential Dasein of young children (who combine capacities like (6) with the potential for (8)); to (8) the “rich world” of full Dasein (including not only normal adult human beings but also whatever other entities – be they organic, android, or alien – possess a reflexive self-understanding making them capable of experiencing not merely pleasure and pain but also immense suffering and sublime elevation, and of developing and pursuing a self-understanding which gives meaning to their lives from within); and, perhaps, to (9) entities with even richer worlds than human Dasein – who could deny the possibility?
This suggested elaboration of a graded “continuum of Dasein” remains too simplistic and speculative, of course, and perhaps its implicit hierarchy is marked by a residual anthropocentrism. But the same “criticisms” hold even for extreme, eco-centric perspectives, which yield such anthropomorphizing confusions as Klaver’s belief that a stone can have “being-in-the-world” (Klaver 2003: 159–62) and Diehm’s idea that, in all organisms, “the horizon opened by need is, minimally, a horizon of self-concern, an openness to experience,” such that mere “being alive... is appropriately... characterized as being-for-itself” (Diehm 2003: 181). Such implicitly anthropomorphic descriptions – which seek to bestow upon simple organic (and even inorganic) entities reflexive capacities such as “self-concern,” “being-for-itself,” and even “being-in-the-world” (in other words, Dasein) – generate a hyperbolic, neo-Levinasian extension of ethical concern in which (as Casey argues) ethical duties, multiplied to infinity, become uselessly “diluted.”
Moreover, although Marietta’s claim that “we are no more able than the ape to transcend the biological realities that affect our lives” (2003: 129) is false (since it ignores the transformations made possible by our scientific and medical technologies), the continuum I sketch may err in assigning a lesser degree of Dasein to chimpanzees, for example; certainly we should not precipitously foreclose that important empirical question, or others like it, which we should be able to address more precisely as we perfect techno-empirical means (such as f MRI and PET scans) allowing us to share more directly in the experiences of others, thereby opening up new domains for ethno-anthropological exploration (enabling us to work to cross the inter-species line, rather than expecting other animals to do so, for example, by learning sign language). While we struggle to decide which entities are sufficiently Dasein-like to deserve intrinsic political rights (again, other entities may deserve such rights instrumentally, in virtue of their relations to Dasein – including relations of eco-systemic interdependence), however, the burden of proof should be on the side of higher primates, elephants, dolphins, and other species we reasonably suspect might possess Dasein-like capabilities. The practical consequences of even this fairly minimal expansion of our current conception of rights would be immense, and would surely be recognized by the naturalistic eco-phenomenologists as an enormous step in the right direction. The point of the continuum, then, is simply to suggest that we could articulate “degrees of Dasein” with more subtlety than Heidegger himself ever did, and thereby work toward a nonspeciesist way of distinguishing between different kinds of life, as in fact we must if we are ever to find equitable ways of resolving the inter-species ethical dilemmas that will inevitably arise in a universe of scarcity, where life continues to live on life.
In the end, the contrast between the naturalistic and transcendental eco-phenomenological approaches comes down to two different understandings of what it is about life that makes it most worth living – in other words, to two competing versions of ethical perfectionism. Naturalistic ethical realism, we have seen, generates an eco-centric perfectionism that emphasizes the flourishing of life as such, even at the expense of the human, and so courts the charge of eco-fascism. Transcendental ethical realism yields a more humanistic perfectionism, yet avoids speciesism by seeking to protect the cultivation and development of those importantly distinctive traits and capacities belonging, by right, to all Dasein. I suggest that eco-phenomenologists should prefer this Heideggerian version of the transcendental approach, not only because it reveals serious problems with the naturalistic approach (including eco-fascism, the call for a post-human condition, and the reification of Nietzschean nihilism), but also because (as we saw in the case of animal rights) the neo-Heideggerian approach promises to help us draw nearer to the loftier eco-centric goals of the naturalistic approach while avoiding its problems.
Notes
1 This chapter is a significantly shortened and revised version of Thomson 2004.
2 Leading analytic philosophers have recently set their sights on the same dichotomies; see, e.g., McDowell 1994 and Putnam 2002.
3 Heidegger’s first law of phenomenology, the law of proximity or “distance of the near” (Heidegger 1992: 135), states that what is closest to us in our everyday worldly environment, like the prescription on the glasses through which we see (or Poe’s purloined letter), is furthest from us in terms of our ability to attend to and comprehend it explicitly.
4 On Heidegger’s radical challenge to Cartesian dualism, see Guignon 1983; Richardson, 1986; and Dreyfus 1991.
5 On the debate over the sociobiological account of rape, cf. Thornhill and Palmer 2000 and Travis 2003.
6 Dreyfus (1992) shows, moreover, that Being and Time’s claim that entities reveal themselves most fully when encountered as “hands-on” (zuhanden) equipment in contexts of practical use makes the early Heidegger look (from the perspective of the later Heidegger) to be caught up in the penultimate stage of the increasingly nihilistic “history of being” that culminates in “enframing.”
7 Once Heidegger abandoned his earlier quest for a “fundamental ontology” (that is, a transhistorically binding understanding of “the meaning of being in general”), he could no longer appeal to such a notion in order to explain what makes possible Western history’s succession of epoch-grounding understandings of “the being of entities” (a succession that, in the early work, he conceives of as a retrogressive falling-away from an originally complete “fundamental ontology”). I suspect Sheehan is misled by passages in which Heidegger seems to equate “being as such” with “enowning” (Ereignis), but this is not Heidegger’s considered view, and passages can be found alongside these that more carefully distinguish these two key terms of his later thought (put simply, Ereignis is how “being as such” takes place), as I show in Thomson 2003.
8 As this sketch implies, the middle and later Heidegger’s conceptions of “earth” are different; most importantly, the ineffability of the middle concept of “earth” passes to “being as such,” which is conveyed by the entire later fourfold. For a lucid, literal reading of Heidegger’s “fourfold,” see Wrathall 2003.
References and Further Reading
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Casey, E. S. (2003) Taking a glance at the environment: Preliminary thoughts on a promising topic. In C. S. Brown and T. Toadvine (eds.), Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (pp. 187–210). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Diehm, C. (2003) Natural disasters. In C. S. Brown and T. Toadvine (eds.), Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (pp. 171–85). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Dreyfus, H. L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Dreyfus, H. L., and C. Spinosa (1997) Highway bridges and feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to affirm technology. Man and World, 30(2), 159–77.
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