Abstract
Many are looking to foster a relationship between ecology and philosophy as it becomes clear that the reality of our contemporary age, as well as the future that we are rushing headlong into, is determined in large part by the environmental crisis. This attempt is not unprecedented as the environmental movement and some form of environmental studies have been around at least since the writings of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. The legacy of the relationship between ecology and philosophy has been and continues to be led by the discipline of environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics.1 In this way philosophy prescribes ethical and aesthetic norms on the basis of facts given by scientific ecology, but philosophy itself tends to remain unchanged by the encounter. There may be some change, often favorable (a favorite is replacing the Western subordination of ethics to reason with principles from Eastern philosophy and religion), but what remains after this change is still a philosophical system, in this case based on ethics as first philosophy, developed apart from scientific ecology.
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Notes
Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 50–51.
See Arne Naess, “Spinoza and Ecology,” Philosophia 7:1 (March 1977): 45–54.
Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 66, 67.
See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Chapter 1;
and Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), Chapter 1. It is quite possible that Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism, the idea that nearly all post-Kantian philosophy suffers from an antirealism that holds matter and some form of mind necessarily exist together, was developed after reading §46 of
Husserl ‘s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
Ted Toadvine makes the same argument regarding Nature and environmental sciences with special reference to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. See Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009).
Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Mediation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 144.
Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 38.
I provide here just a sampling of the texts. Bruce V. Foltz’s Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (New Jersey: Humanities Books, 1996) provides a study of Heidegger’s considerations of the environment and nature. Toadvine’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature does the same with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The edited collection Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, eds. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), includes a number of essays on particular phenomenologists, and a few, notably by David Wood and John Llewelyn, on the general notion of an ecophenomenology, but these both fail to engage with the ecosystem concept. There are a number of books that engage with related ecological issues, including the edited collection Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice, eds. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), which considers different ideas of boundaries, human/ animal, living/dead, but does not include any essays that engage with the ecosystem concept.
Brett Buchanan’s Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008) provides an interesting study of the of protoecolo-gist Jacob von Uexkiill’s notion of the Umwelt and the differing forms of influence it had on Heidegger, Merelau-Ponty, and Deleuze, who of course was not a phenomenologist. While this doesn’t provide much in the way of an ecological philosophy, it does provide a resource for bridging the gap between animal-philosophy and ecological philosophy. In terms of the structure we’re tracing here, the limit of philosophy and science, none of these works moves beyond the phenomenological drive to subsume science into itself.
There is, however, Robert Frodemen’s Geo-Iogic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), which is a work that, while sharing a different theoretical orientation, is in the same spirit as this work. Instead of a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology Frodemen present a kind of unified theory of phenomenology and geology. While his work is then not of particular use here, it does give witness to the perversity of nature and the infinite task of thinking from nature.
John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); and Seeingthrough God:A Geophenomenology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004).
John Mullarkey makes this point about Llewelyn’s philosophy writing, “Each and every being has a claim on me on account of the ‘that it is’ rather than the ‘what it is’ of each; the ontological rather than the ontic. There need be no qualitative similarity (having consciousness, sentience) between us, and yet there remains an ethical responsibility all the same.” John Mullarkey, “A Bellicose Democracy: Bergson on the Open Soul (or Unthinking the Thought of Equality),” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, eds. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), p. 178.
See Iain Hamilton Grant, “The ‘Eternal and Necessary Bond between Philosophy and Physics’: A Repetition of the Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy,‘ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10:1 (April 2005): 43–59.
For Žižek’s criticism of the ideology of ecology and his own attempt to recast the problem of nature alongside of ecology, see “Unbehagen in der Natur,” in his In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008). For Žižek’s indebtedness to Schelling, see his reading in Slavoj Žižek’s, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York: Verso, 2007); and for an account and criticism of that reading,
see Iain Hamilton Grant, “The Insufficiency of Ground: On Žižek’s Schellingianism,” in The Truth of Žižek’s, eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), pp. 82–98. For an interesting comparative study of Žižek’s and Heidegger’s thoughts on nature, which argues that they share a vision of a fundamentally not-whole nature,
see Michael Lewis, Heidegger beyond Deconstruction: On Nature (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), pp. 105–127.
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 194.
Grant, Philosophies of Nature, pp. 19–21. My understanding of Grant’s exten-sity test, along with his reading of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and its limits, is dependent on conversations with Daniel Whistler, who also constructed this block quote. See Daniel Whistler, “Language after Philosophy of Nature: Schelling’s Geology of Divine Names,” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, eds. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 335–359.
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 169.
Lévêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere (Plymouth, UK: Science Publisher, Inc., 2003), p. 4.
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© 2013 Anthony Paul Smith
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Smith, A.P. (2013). Philosophy and Ecology. In: A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331977_4
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