And here is another highly pertinent recent paper, this one by Ted Toadvine whose works we have read earlier here, that develops the necessary critique of notions such as
@marduk's that we can understand the being of Nature relative to our own experiential being in wholly objective terms.
"Naturalism, Estrangement, and Resistance:
On the Lived Senses of Nature"
Ted Toadvine
1. The Ambivalence of “Nature”: Naturalism
or Estrangement
Environmental philosophers have regularly endorsed two apparently contradictory views of the human-nature relationship over the last half century. The first is that humans are not exceptional; however distinctive we may be as a species, our being is a part of and continuous with the rest of nature. Despite the differences in their points of departure—Darwinian evolutionary theory, Deweyan pragmatism, Leopoldian ecology, Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenology, Whiteheadian process philosophy, and so on—environmental philosophers have converged on some variant of this thesis, which we might simply term “naturalism.” Naturalism in this sense rejects dualistic claims of human ontological exceptionalism: we possess no otherworldly soul or essence that escapes the natural order. Although environmental thinkers disagree on how nature is best understood, they are united in agreeing that it is all that there is, and so we, like everything else, are included within it. It is because this naturalism is so widely shared that environmental philosophers can, as we see repeatedly in particular debates, accuse each other of failing to sufficiently appreciate its consequences. One well-known example would be J. Baird Callicott’s contention that the very idea of wilderness “perpetuates the pre-Darwinian Western metaphysical dichotomy between ‘man’ and nature, albeit with an opposite spin” (Callicott 1998, 348). Another would be Andrew Light’s charge that labeling restoration projects as human artifacts implies a pernicious nature-culture dualism. Once we reject the “overall ontological view about the separation of humans from nature,” then the kinds of objections to restoration that Eric Katz has raised fall to the side (Light 2000, 100). Presumably, what environmentalists should learn, then—though it is apparently a difficult lesson—is that humans are fully a “part of” nature.
But at the same time, environmental theory has been motivated by the conviction that human beings—at least in industrialized societies today—are estranged from the rest of nature, with our current environmental “crisis” as the most obvious result. Indeed, for many environmental thinkers, such estrangement is part and parcel of the crisis, what ultimately drives it, and therefore what environmentalism must seek to redress. Anna Bramwell collects together nicely some of the common scapegoats for this “unnatural” turn:
'Given the paradox that natural man behaves unnaturally, what went wrong? Various explanations put forward have in common the tendency to point to a guilty party. There are several different guilty parties in common usage. These are Christianity, the Enlightenment (with atheism, skepticism, rationalism, and scientism following on), the scientific revolution (incorporating capitalism and utilitarianism), Judaism (via either the Jewish element in Christianity or via Capitalism), Men, the Nazis, the West, and various wrong spirits, such as greed, materialism, acquisitiveness, and not knowing where to stop (Bramwell 1989, 24).'
Despite this bewildering diversity of explanations (along with all the others that failed to make the list), the fact of our estrangement from nature seems essential to environmentalism as a normative position, that is, to its claim that something wrong needs fixing. And this is precisely where the air of “paradox” noted by Bramwell becomes salient. For, if humans are fully a part of nature, how is it possible—logically or ontologically—for them to behave unnaturally? How can we, while fully remaining parts of nature, estrange ourselves from it? And yet, endorsing our own seamlessly natural status would seem to entail that everything that we do and create—from nuclear waste to plastic trees—would be just as natural as anything else. If our being fully a part of nature excludes our being estranged from it, environmentalism would seem to have lost its foundation to criticize what hitherto had seemed self-evidently unnatural (e.g., agriculture, or industrial monoculture, or GMOs, and so on). More than one environmental philosopher has been caught up in this woolly tangle, expressed succinctly by Catherine Roach:
'Are humans, then, no different from any other species? If not different, then would not our skyscrapers and even our toxic waste dumps have just as much right to exist as a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam? If all parts are equal members of a whole, what are our criteria for decision making and for promoting any one course of action over another?' (Roach 1996, 61)
Of course, there are several reasonable responses to this apparent paradox that try in various ways to minimize the difficulty, such as efforts to “naturalize” our estrangement (for instance, by making it the consequence of our idiosyncratic evolutionary development) or to reject it while providing
an alternative basis for evaluating the environmental consequences of our behaviors. The latter is Callicott’s approach when he writes:
'If we are a part of nature, then we have a rightful place and role in nature no less than any other creature—no less than elephants, or whales, or redwoods. And what we may do in and to nature—the transformations that we impose upon the environment—are in principle no better or no worse than what elephants, or whales, or redwoods, may do in and to nature. (Callicott 2003, 439)
2. Unrestricted and Pure Nature: From Verbal Equivocation
to Ontological Duplicity
One response to this apparent paradox would see in it no more than an equivocation on two different conceptions of nature. As John Stuart Mill noted more than a century ago, the concept of nature alternates between two principle yet conflicting senses: on the one hand, nature connotes “the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them;” in simplest terms, it is “a collective name for all facts, actual and possible.” In this first sense, which Mill considers the correctly scientific one, nature includes humans and all of their activities. Yet this conflicts with “the common form of speech by which Nature is opposed to Art, and natural to artificial.” In other words, and more precisely, nature in its second sense names “what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man” (Mill 1961, 370). In short, we use the term “nature” in two conflicting ways, the first of which wholly includes us, while the second wholly excludes us. Following Donald Crawford, we may call these two senses “unrestricted nature” and “pure nature” respectively (Crawford 2004, 313–19).
This simple distinction would seem to resolve the apparent paradox according to which humans are both part of nature and estranged from it, since it is in relation to two different conceptions of nature that we are, on the one hand, essentially included within its scope as “unrestricted” nature, and, on the other, essentially separated from it as “pure” nature. Neither the concept of wilderness nor the condemnation of restoration projects as artifacts entails a metaphysical dichotomy, since, although both ideas rely on the contrast between “pure” nature and artifice, neither contradicts our inclusion within “unrestricted” nature. The objection that “pure nature,” in this sense of a nature purified of all human agency, does not actually exist misses the point. We may very well accept Bill McKibben’s lament for the “end of nature” in the wake of climate change while continuing to affirm the applicability of the distinction between the natural and the artificial within our everyday experience. That a continuum exists between the relatively natural and the relatively artificial is perfectly consistent with recognizing that the two mutually exclusive poles are abstractions. Our woolly paradox is thus diagnosed as mere equivocation, and the cure simply requires greater care with the meaning of our terms. But the difficulty cannot be resolved quite this simply, since it immediately raises a deeper question: why does our conception of nature divide into these two conflicting senses? Perhaps this is no mere contingency of our linguistic history but instead discloses something essential to nature itself. As Kate Soper writes,
'We have thought. .. of humanity as being a component of nature even as we have conceptualized nature as absolute otherness to humanity. ‘Nature’ is in this sense both that which we are not and that which we are within.' (Soper 1995, 21).
The juxtaposition of “unrestricted” and “pure” nature, the ineliminable tension between them, and the difficulties that we have in distinguishing them suggest that the tension here lies not in our use of language but in the matters themselves, that is, in the paradoxical way that we encounter nature. Rather than aiming too quickly to resolve the paradox, perhaps we should accept it on its own terms, accept that it reflects a tension within our very experience of nature, and explore the implications of this tension. Since the experience of nature is our guide, this task requires the tools of phenomenology.
What phenomenological description reveals in this case is that the division of nature into two conflictual senses is not mere verbal equivocation but has its ontological foundation in our being and in the being of nature; in other words, the verbal equivocation is a clue to what turns out to be fundamental ontological duplicity that is the source both of our continuity with nature and of our separation from it. Of course, this means that neither of the two definitions of nature that we have already introduced will be satisfactory, so one goal of our inquiry must be to come to a richer conception of what the term “nature” names. To do so will require, first, providing an account of the experiential foundations of these two senses of nature, unrestricted and pure nature. We find that, when clarified phenomenologically, these two senses do not remain unaltered; in particular, both the “naturalism” and the “estrangement” with which they are associated must be reinterpreted. Secondly, our phenomenological description reveals that these two senses of nature are not exhaustive. Although the first two senses of nature correspond to ways that nature discloses itself within our immediate experience, there are also ways that nature shows up only indirectly, only as the interruption of or resistance to experience: first, as a quasi-transcendental resistance that is constitutive of every perception; and, secondly, as a resistance internal to and constitutive of reflection itself, a resistance that marks its possibilities and limits, its compass. Clarifying these additional senses of nature allows us, lastly, to examine the question of our inherence in and estrangement from nature in a new light. Only at this point will we be able to appreciate the fundamental and constitutive paradox of ecophenomenology as it is founded in and emerges from the
phusis of our pre-reflective lives.
3. Experiential Foundations of Unrestricted and Pure Nature
3.1 Phenomenological Realism
Fundamental to the phenomenological approach to nature is the position that existence correlates with experience; in other words, it is meaningless to invoke a nature beyond the bounds of any actual or possible experience. In negative terms, this is a rejection of the realist view that nature subsists as an experience-independent reality. Such a view falls prey to what Merleau-Ponty calls the “unquestioned belief in the objective world,” that is, the conviction that the world as we encounter it pre-exists us in a determinate and complete way, simply awaiting our discovery (Merleau-Ponty 2012,5–7, 334). In positive terms, this requires us to reinterpret what is meant by “real.” When I perceive the “real” shape and color of a cube placed on the table in front of me, I do so because my body prereflectively accounts for my spatial perspective and movements relative to its sides, for the lighting and configuration of the background, and so on. At the level of perception, my body knows which presentations count as disclosing the “real” color and shape of the object, since it is oriented toward these as toward a norm that maximizes the clarity and richness of the visual field (and similarly with the other senses). The real, as I live it perceptually, has a richness and depth that allows for limitless exploration [that is] confirmed inter-sensorially, intersubjectively, and across time. When a perception fails to live up to these expectations, I no longer perceive it as real but as a play of the light, a passing appearance, a temporary illusion. For any of us, to perceive what is real—and this is the foundation for conceptualizing the real—means opening the world through senses that reflect human interests and desires, that operate at a human spatial and temporal scale, and that are informed by our cultural training and our personal habits. These are not screens between us and the real, but precisely the conditions for anything to show up for us at all. To have a world is to experience it from some point of view, according to its temporal unfolding, and through the embodied activity of meaning-making. Reality is precisely the meaning that is unfolded for us through this ongoing event. The prejudice of the objective world is possible only because the agency of our body in interpreting and synthesizing this meaning is forgotten. The realist has not truly imagined a world without anyone to experience it, a world seen from nowhere, but has merely failed to account for her own presence and perspective in this world’s disclosure. . . ."
continues on pg. 186 at this link:
Naturalism, Estrangement, and Resistance: On the Lived Senses of Nature (2017)
.
