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2. The Ec(h)ological Conscience: Reflections on the Nature of Human Presence in Great Plains Environmental Writing
- University of Nebraska Press
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2. The Ec(h)ological Conscience Reflections on the Nature of Human Presence in Great Plains Environmental Writing william slaymaker Since Aristotle, philosophers have modeled human behavior on what could be discovered in nature. The “natural” became the standard for human thought and action. Aquinas made this paradigmatic strategy an important part of Roman Catholic dogma. The British linguistic philosopher G. E. Moore argued that such naturalistic normative propositions could be either true or false, because they were imprecisely structured and expressed. Accordingly, the attempt to derive what ought to be and what we ought to do based on what naturally exists was especially flawed, and he labeled such thinking “the Naturalistic Fallacy.”1 Similarly, some literary critics and aestheticians, such as the nineteenth -century British art critic John Ruskin, have objected to graphic, rhetorical, or any aesthetic ploys and strategies that would intrude the human into nature. Ruskin’s term for mirroring human emotive and affective states in natural scenes and animal behavior was “the Pathetic Fallacy.” Ruskin and his intellectual sympathizers thought it was false to make nature a parabolic reflector of human emotions and states of mind. Unlike the Naturalistic Fallacy, the Pathetic Fallacy is not based on an error in logic but on an improper aesthetic judgment. Ruskin and like-minded critics claim that the Pathetic Fallacy is an The Ec(h)ological Conscience 27 invasive form of personification and an exaggerated rhetorical use of the tropological figure traditionally labeled prosopopoeia.2 Creative writers utilizing nature and the environment, even those with advanced degrees in the natural sciences, usually pay little mind to these theoretical objections. Rather, scientifically trained writers often project themselves into nature, evincing sympathy and empathy with what they environmentally experience. They focus on, amplify, and echo landscapes and their human, animal, and vegetable inhabitants . Anthropomorphism abides in their work, illogically some have argued and immorally others would claim. The debate about the legitimacy of anthropomorphic portraits of animals itself has a long and complex history. Eileen Crist’s Images of Animals offers an academic overview of the opposing sides. In her study of linguistic representations of the animal mind and behaviors by naturalists, ethologists, and sociobiologists from Charles Darwin to E. O. Wilson (mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century), she concludes that while many scientifically trained nature writers have eschewed anthropomorphism , this approach “discloses the nature of animal life with the power and internal cohesion that real worlds possess.”3 In her view, ascribing emotions and intentions to animals is acceptably affective and thus an effective way to write about nature. Using affective anthropomorphic language reduces human-animal distance and constructs a normative natural world in which humans are less likely to be alienated or remote from the nonhuman other. It seems quite natural for writers, especially those with substantial scientific backgrounds, to thrust their points of view into the scheme of the palpable world and just as logical and ethical to derive what ought to be from what is. Such naturalistic strategies in the creative narrative essay lead nature writers to portray human consciousness and moral conscience as reflections or echoes of animal and even plant behaviors. And since most nature writers with extensive scientific qualifications accept a Darwinian evolutionary paradigm as an explanatory model of what exists in the biological world, mirroring the human mind in nonhuman beings and events appears quite natural, even if they are only a dim or even distorted reflection of what appears to the human [54.226.94.217] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:53 GMT) 28 sensing pl ace eye and impinges on the human ear. Echoes are never perfect reproductions of original sounds, just as mirrors disfigure images. Still, we recognize our own and other voices and sounds in the mutations of the original. Further, we delight in perceiving what we think is a part of human history, even though it is really natural history that has been manifoldly but recognizably transcribed as a part of the process of translating, transforming, and inserting the alien other into human mental processes, which then record what we think exists. How could it be otherwise for nature writers? How else could a nature writer think or write? How could it be false—a Pathetic or Naturalistic Fallacy—to make nature into a symbol or metaphor of how humans think and live? Projecting the conscious and conscientious self into an unconscious...