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Introduction
- State University of New York Press
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Introduction Natural order is everywhere apparent. There are kinds, processes, sequences, and cycles. Yet, many thinkers regard nature as a collage, its elements bound by spatial and temporal relations only. Must, should, and ought cannot derive from is if this is so, because no thing constrains another if each might be joined to any other. This has material and practical consequences. There should be no roles in systems having corporate identity—no pitchers and catchers, for example—if no team is more than the sum of its members. Ecology cannot be a description of the complementarities and constraints intrinsic to nature, if nature is an array of self-sufficient atoms or events. It follows that environmentalism—respect for nature’s alleged constraints—is merely an ideology, one that competes with many others to organize thought and practice. The appropriate response to ecological arguments is, therefore, political, not scientific: oppose this ideology with another, usually one that celebrates our biblical right to Earth and its wealth. But ecology is a hypothesis about the character of systems and their relations, not an ideology. The complementarities and mutual dependencies it describes locate each species within a niche where its freedom is constrained. The system of niches, dependencies , and material norms tolerates gradual change and adjusts to catastrophic change, but it punishes reckless abuse. The prudence ecologists commend is resisted for practical reasons: poor people want more than subsistence; the rich want comfort. But intellectual vanity is complicit. Philosophers justified our oblivion to natural norms before Western societies were transformed by the industrial revolution. They argued that nature has no intrinsic form: nothing 1 within it does, can, or should resist us. The differentiations and organization we ascribe to things express our ways of thinking about them, not the character and structure of things themselves. Let will and clever thinking transform our circumstances in whatever ways satisfy us. Each step in the argument having this conclusion seems innocuous, though we see it in retrospect as the slippery slope to an error. Descartes is our point of reference. He sought ideas that exhibit their structure, as the clear and distinct ideas of triangles or circles do. Certain features are essential to such ideas: they are necessary in the respect that changing them introduces contradictions, or content is altered so that the idea of a circle becomes the idea of an ellipse. And equally, there is necessity in the deductive relations of ideas, as theorems derive necessarily from premises or axioms.1 Necessities of these two sorts—the essential structures of ideas and demonstrative arguments—track necessities that God inscribes in the material world. For he would not mislead us by making necessities essential to ideas and inferences if they were not intrinsic to the affairs about which we think.2 But why would God be excessive? Why double the effort by making a material world that parallels the domain of thought and its clear and distinct ideas? God could have stopped when he had created thought and thinkers. The coherence of our thinking is guaranteed if we think of the world as structured by necessities; it isn’t required, as Malebranche observed,3 that there be a material world corresponding to our clear and distinct ideas. Berkeley agreed: ideas have no external referent, except for ideas or structures they intimate in God’s mind.4 Hume dispensed with God, arguing that no idea has an extra-mental referent or ground. Dog and cat signify congeries of sensory data, not extra-mental entities. Modalities that Descartes ascribed to the contents or relations of ideas—necessities ascribed to the essences of geometrical figures or to the relations of causes and effects—were treated in a similar way: they were credited with logical or psychological content, but no reference beyond our thinking; the necessity that causes have effects is merely our expectation that we shall perceive one of two regularly joined impressions when the other is perceived.5 Kant feared that Hume’s psychologized notions of must and ought imply that experience might turn chaotic or immoral, with only expectation or inclination to hold the place where necessity and obligation once stood. Yet, Kant, too, denied that either necessity or obligation is a feature of nature itself. For we know nothing of things-in2 THE CAGE [44.222.116.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:19 GMT) themselves. The only necessity Kant emphasized is the “transcendental ”—but still psychological—requirement that mind must apply certain rules when...