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Chapter 11 Ecotones and Environmental Ethics: Adoriio and Lopez Romand Coles Hegel, in one of his many perceptive moments, described the modern age as the site of a continual struggle between faith and enlightenment.1 Put simply, the enlightenment attempts to posit the self as the ground of truth and being, while faith seeks truth and being in terms of a larger absolute Being in which it is submerged, by an act of pure faith in the beyond. The struggle between these two positions is seemingly interminable because, to the embarrassment of each, neither can address the penetrating claims of the other. Reason and the self are themselves principles in which the enlightenment hasfaith, and the enlightenment (increasingly) is aware of the emptiness and weakness of its efforts to come to terms with the larger whole in which it finds itself. Faith, on the other hand, is always making arguments and continuallydiscovering (and unable to account for) the unsightly aspects of the self and reason in its own voice. The erosive effects of each with regard to the other diminishes their respective persuasive powers but offers little that is truly constructive. While Hegel brilliantly sketches the terrain upon which we are still struggling two hundred years hence, his solution, the movement toward absolute Spirit, has satisfied few. Often the various philosophical and practical efforts to come to terms with the ecological crisis exemplify how stuckwe are in the dynamic Hegel described. On the one hand we find a pervasive discourse that sticks very 226 Ecotones and Environmental Ethics 227 closely to the contours of enlightenment. Here, in works like Ophuls's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, we find affirmed a reason that is essentially instrumental and rooted in the primacy of the survival of the self—in this case the entire human species.2 Though Ophuls and the genre to which he belongs advocate ethical value changes that would embrace a larger whole, their reasonsfor doing so are instrumental:these new values are ultimately grounded in the self (either individualor social), whose singular survival and ethical centrality remain privileged and unquestioned starting points. RichardWatson exemplifies this reasoning when he writes, "There are very good reasons for thinking ecologically, and . . . to preserve a rich and balanced planetary ecology: human survival depends on it."3 On this reading it is senseless mysticism to speak in ethical terms whose significance transcends the human realm. In marked contrast to this is a discourse that submerges itself in and privileges a totalitybeyond a self that had long been viewed as the locus of value and good sense. Though a variety of voices resound from this position , "deep ecologists" such as Sessions, Devall, and Naess have attempted to gather them together around this theme: "The 'real work' can be summarized symbolicallyas the realization of self-in-Self where 'Self stands for organic wholeness." 4 The self finally finds its meaning with respect to a mothering totality. Within this Self, all beings are endowed with "equal intrinsic worth." While we can do much to conceptualize the factual interrelations between beings and the whole, finally, the ethical insights are grounded in "meditative intuitions"of "Earthwisdom," 5 which in myview closely approximate Hegel's "faith." I do not mean to dismiss flatly either of these positions; valuable insights have emerged from both, and in the margins of these texts one often finds voices that go beyond their central themes. Yet on the whole they tend to be philosophically and practically unsatisfying. On one hand, they lead to a reductive instrumental rationality that perpetuates a logic deeply entwined with our current ecological and social crises. On the other hand, they lead to a vague holism that offers few persuasive arguments— claims that might allow us to develop basic, specific ethical impulses with at least a modicum of intelligibility,coherence, and sufficient space for distinct selves. Both positions (Ophuls's instrumentalismand the deep ecologists' holism) are dangerous in that they perpetuate the hubris—reason's and faith's—that has led to so many human and ecological disasters throughout history.6 Instrumental reason's hubris is to place the self at the center in a way that ceaselessly threatens to objectify totally the surrounding world—no matter how intricate and interconnected it conceives this world to be. Faith's hubris is to believe that its "meditative intuitions"constitute a pipeline between it and Truth, and this truth is frequently con- [3.17.6.75] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 17...

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