Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself

11. Taking a Glance at the Environment: Preliminary Thoughts on a Promising Topic

CHAPTER 11 Taking a Glance at the Environment Preliminary Thoughts on a Promising Topic EDWARD S. CASEY Everything that happens and everything that is said happens or is said at the surface. —Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense The surface is where most of the action is. —J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Can things have a face? —Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in. —Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic” I An ethics of the environment must begin with the sheer and simple fact of being struck by something wrong happening in the surrounding world. It is by noticing that something is out of joint—does not fit or function well—that a response is elicited and an action induced. Responsive action begins with what John Dewey called the “problematic situa187 tion.” Unless this situation is apprehended in its very problematicity, it will remain noxious, troublesome, harmful. People will go on being persecuted and tortured, chemicals will circulate freely in the air, and food and water will be poisoned—unless attention is given to what is awry in these circumstances. Not that notice is enough; the full force of ethical action requires reflection and consultation: in a word, followthrough . But the first moment of noticing is indispensable; without this, nothing will happen, nothing will ensue. In what follows I will examine this first moment of ethical responsiveness : the moment of the glance. My claim is that the human glance, meager as it seems to be, is indispensable for consequential ethical action. This is so despite the fact of its almost complete neglect by ethical theorists , who tend to find in it something merely trivial—at most, a predecessor to significant action but not part of this action itself. And yet it is of enormous significance, both in delimited interhuman settings and in the broader field of environmental ethics. Beyond its special virtue as the opening moment of ethical action, there are several other contributions of the glance to ethical life: 1. The glance provides direct access to the other person: to his or her mood, thought, interest, attitude at the moment: what the other feels right now; this is crucial for ethics, since (as Scheler has argued) ethical values are conveyed by emotions as their “bearers” (Träger): to get a glimpse of a particular emotion is to gain a concrete sense of what ethical issue is at stake. 2. The glance catches a sense of less manifest aspects of the other, e.g., her darker thoughts; as when I glancingly realize that the other person is far more disturbed at a deeper level than her previous behavior may have indicated. Here the glance exercizes its penetrating power, its ability to go under the manifest phenomenon —yet without any interpretative activity on my part. 3. This is not to mention certain telltale signs which the glance picks up instantly and which may be pertinent to ethical activity: class, gender, race, way of dressing (betokening niche within class), even educational level; these are external indicators of the other person’s identity, history, and present milieu; they are often (I don’t say always) evident in a glance. When they are, they are immediately present to me in their delimited but sharp signification. 4. Not to mention, either, the exchange of glances that may be extremely relevant to ethical matters; in this dense dialectic, the other shows herself only insofar as she engages my glance with 188 Casey hers; and it is the engagement itself, its duration and quality and direction, that becomes significant for ethical thought and action. In these four ways—of which I here give only the most cursory descriptions—the glance can be said to give witness to the other: to testify to her or his compelling and demanding presence in the ethical field. It also welcomes that other into the same field of interpersonal relations. Witnessing and welcoming are in effect the twin pillars of the ethical relation in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Despite his discerning discussion of this relation, Levinas nowhere attempts to spell out the exact ways by which these two basic actions are accomplished. I submit that they are realized in the four-fold way I have just outlined—the way of the glance. The glance fills the void left...