Abstract
This chapter argues, provocatively, that among all those who proposed a new ontology during the general revival of ontology at the start of the twentieth century, Hartmann was the only thinker to have actually developed one, and one that may fulfill the promise of an ontology of nature. Hartmann’s critical ontology effectively challenges anthropocentrism because his conception of a stratified reality acknowledges the asymmetrical dependence of humans on nonhuman biotic and abiotic nature. Given that, for Hartmann, all relations (organic, psychological, material, cultural, etc.) count, his ontology can form the non-reductive basis for a critical environmental philosophy.
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- 1.
With the exception of passages from New Ways of Ontology, all translations of Hartmann are my own.
- 2.
Introduction to Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology Axiomathes (Peterson 2012) 22: 291–314.
- 3.
Although I will not argue the claim here, I hold that most competing ontological approaches are inadequate to serve as a basis for such global orientation.
- 4.
The terms “dependence” and “independence” have been carefully chosen. They are to be contrasted with common historical categories like “unity” and “separation” (Deep ecology, Romanticism), “continuity” and “discontinuity” (naturalism), “identity” and “difference” (rationalism, German Idealism), “part” and “whole” (reductionism/holism). Discussion of the history and idiosyncrasies of these categories, and their differences from those chosen here, will ensue elsewhere.
- 5.
For one brief assessment of phenomenology, see Hartmann 1940, 535 note, and 536–37.
- 6.
For his extension and critique of Scheler’s ethics, see Hartmann Ethics, 1932, 3 Vols. This claim is directly linked to his opposition to the regnant “anthropocentric megalomania.” See Vol. 1, 243.
- 7.
- 8.
This anecdote comes from Predrag Cicovacki. See Cicovacki 2002, 3,1: 3. The phrase “inner truth and greatness” is of course Heidegger’s.
- 9.
- 10.
“The great majority of the sciences unequivocally maintain the direction of the intentio recta. Science is just as much oriented by the natural attitude from which it has arisen as is ontology” Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965 [4th ed.]),(Hartmann 1965, 47).
- 11.
For one of the earliest and best discussions of the topic, see Routley 1979, 36–59.
- 12.
See Richard and Val Routley 1980, 189. Val Routley becomes Val Plumwood after 1982, and Richard Routley becomes Richard Sylvan.
- 13.
In 2006 Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la Finitude appeared, and in it he developed a critique of “correlationism” in post-Kantian philosophy and argued for a new sort of realism (Meillassoux 2008). The critique of correlationism asks whether we should continue to accept the central assumption of Kantian and virtually all post-Kantian philosophy, namely, that “we never grasp an object ‘in-itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject...we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object” (Meillassoux 2008, 5). The conceptual links between the critique of correlationism and the critique of anthropocentrism have not been explored by Meillassoux, which has had the thoroughly disappointing consequence of perpetuating Continental anthropocentrism, apparently contrary to its original intent. This becomes abundantly clear in some recently published sections of his book The Divine Inexistence, where he seeks to demonstrate “the necessary superiority (de jure and not de facto) of the thinking being over all other beings” (Harman 2011, 209, Appendix).
- 14.
See Plumwood (1993, 41–67) and (2002, 97–122) Plumwood implies that these categories are often employed ideologically, but does not distinguish between genuine ontological categories and purely ideological fictions, or genuine categories and their (non)ideological uses. She tends to preserve the pairs as dichotomous but rejects the dualistic reading. Thus Hartmann can be used to supplement Plumwood to provide a level of ontological detail that she does not provide, and Plumwood can be used to supplement Hartmann’s basic nonanthropocentrism with insights from critical liberation theories.
- 15.
Derrida makes a point of this in The Animal That Therefor I am (Derrida 2008).It should be noted, however, that his conception of dualism there is purely formalistic, rather than substantive and power-infused, as is Plumwood’s.
- 16.
This strategy has to be regarded as a failure. Anthony Weston resisted such talk from the beginning, see his more recent The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher (Weston 2009). Meanwhile McShane(2007, 29: 43–61), Callicott (2005, 279–297) and Rolston (2003, 143–153) continue to argue for such a view. There are other, more productive moves. Plumwood discusses many of them in Environmental Culture. One strategy is to develop a new axiological perspective, which this author has begun (Peterson 2010, Vol. 21, 3: 81–101).
- 17.
This is not to say that Hartmann provides a complete response to Plumwood’s logic of domination. In fact, although it could be readily argued that Hartmann does not commit the individual errors that lead to a logic of domination, it is clear that he does not recognize the “logic of domination” as a systematic phenomenon.
- 18.
This phrasing of the same point made by Hartmann derives from Ray Brassier’s chapter, “Concepts and Objects” (Hartmann 2011, 63).
- 19.
Similar to what Hartmann calls the “Kantian error.” This move makes the pairs subject-object and principle-concretum coincide, transforming ontological principles into subjective conditions of experience. See Hartmann 2012, 332–334.
- 20.
See Hartmann 1952, 14, 19–20.
- 21.
Two versions of monism include Naess’s “Ecosophy T,” where a metaphysical Identity is posited between human and nature; and popular scientific ecologism, where the human is regarded as ecosystem member only different in degree from other members. For a serious and profound attempt to develop a metaphysical pluralism for environmentalism, see Richard Sylvan’s impressive Transcendental Metaphysics: From Radical to Deep Pluralism (Sylvan 1997).
- 22.
This reveals the antinomy at the core of the idea of an ontological principle, and this antinomy, like all genuine antinomies for Hartmann, is really irresolvable. Slavoj Žižek has recently called this one form of the apparently ubiquitous “parallax” structure. See Žižek 2006, 7.
- 23.
See, for example, Paul Taylor’s much anthologized “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” (Taylor 2003, 77).
- 24.
First discussed in the essay “Kategoriale Gesetze,” Philosophischer Anzeiger, 1925–26, 1, 201–266, and later incorporated into Hartmann 1940, 375–521.
- 25.
- 26.
This is the only “pure case of superformation” between strata, where the totality of the higher stratum takes up all of the categories of the lower stratum within itself (Hartmann 1952, 82). This equivocity in the concept of superformation has led some authors to see in Hartmann a “solution” to the “problem” of supervenience and emergence. See Dahlstrom 2012, 349–365. I have argued elsewhere that this attempt fails for a number of reasons (Peterson 2016).
- 27.
An analogous relation of two “preferential trends” is discussed in Hartmann’s Ethics.
- 28.
Hartmann follows Max Scheler to some extent in his claims about the “impotence” of spirit. See Scheler’s Man Place in Nature (Scheler 1961).
- 29.
Hartmann would fully acknowledge the non-ultimate status of the “laws of nature” proposed by the sciences. He could agree with the contemporary correlationist that “law” is a metaphor, and that the rhetoric of “laws of nature” has often been used to legitimate social oppression and inequality. This does not show, however, that the regularities we come to know and depend on in the structure of the world are themselves rhetoric or metaphor. See Sect. 1 above.
- 30.
Hartmann anticipated this objection himself (Hartmann 1952, 100–102). Whether any particular act of employing nonhumans as means to human ends is justified is another question. The ontological description only shows that we cannot accomplish anything without the existentially necessary physical and biological orders in place, and that many environmental problems have resulted from the denial of this fact. The entire framework of neoclassical economics is built on this denial, as it decouples economics from the physical and biological world. See, for instance, Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010, 1209–1218.
- 31.
For a history of the concept, see Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010, 1209–1218.
- 32.
- 33.
Hartmann’s text was historically important for the founder of “general system theory” Ludwig Bertalanffy. See Bertalanffy 2003.
- 34.
- 35.
“We are not dealing here with ‘stratification’ at all…but only with spatial-dynamical containment and being-contained.” Ibid. This is also why these types of determination have to be considered “horizontal,” rather than “vertical” (Hartmann 1950, 490).
- 36.
For an analysis of views she calls “nature skepticism” and “nature cynicism,” see Plumwood 2006, 11, 2: 115–150.
- 37.
This is Hartmann’s own self-assessment (Hartmann 1965, vii).
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Peterson, K. (2017). Stratification, Dependence, and Nonanthropocentrism: Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology. In: Kuperus, G., Oele, M. (eds) Ontologies of Nature. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 92. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66236-7_8
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