Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Prometheus Redeemed? From Autoconstruction to Ecopoetics

 Prometheus Redeemed? From Autoconstruction to Ecopoetics K AT E R I G B Y Over the past decade or so, a lively and fruitful conversation with postmodernist and poststructuralist strains of thought has been taking place among theologians and biblical scholars. As indicated by the recent work of Catherine Keller and Mark Wallace, among others, this is a conversation that some ecologically inclined religious thinkers are also beginning to join, and in so doing to reframe: for everything looks different when viewed from the perspective of an endangered earth.1 In general, though, a certain mutual distrust between postmodernist and ecological thinkers still tends to prevail across the humanities and social sciences, not least in my own home discipline of literary studies, with the postmoderns commonly suspecting the ecologists of naı̈ve naturalism, and the latter accusing the former of persistent idealism—in either case, the other is deemed self-deluding. There are doubtless several dimensions to this discordance; including, I suspect, underlying differences in style and milieu. Intellectually, however , and at the risk of oversimplification, the primary bone of contention can readily be identified as the question of constructivism. Is the human condition, or more dynamically, are the possibilities of human becoming predominantly self-made, determined in the main by social relations, cultural conventions, and (as some would insist) the very words that compose our mental world? Or is not human life, for all its ramifying complexity of diverse languages, cultures, and societies, crucially dependent upon and powerfully shaped by that which is other-than-human; from microscopic organisms through to planetary systems and ultimately 234 兩 e c os p i ri t (again, as some would insist) a divine creative agency beyond and/or within the created order? And what are the implications—religious, philosophical , ethical, and political—of prioritizing that which we make (and over which we therefore imagine we have some measure of control) over that which we are called upon to respect as given, and hence as limiting no less than enabling our chosen undertakings? There is, I think, a well-founded ecosophical concern that constructivism, at least in its more doctrinaire guise, threatens not only the life of faith (what is God if not a phantasm of our own making?) but also our ability to keep faith with life; to acknowledge the giftedness of our existence in kinship and in relationship with the multifarious other creatures with whom we have been called into being on this our earthly home, or oikos. At the same time, I believe that there is also clearly some justification in the converse anxiety that an ecosophical insistence on that which is held to be naturally and/or divinely pregiven threatens to stymie the unfolding of human creative potential and emancipatory endeavor, which is perhaps itself naturally and/or divinely gifted. In this essay, I would like to address these concerns by initially taking a step back from the fray of current debate to consider one particular locus in the archaeology of constructivism that I have discovered in the work of a writer and amateur scientist whose complex contribution to the emergence of modern ecological thought is only now beginning to be more widely appreciated: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Starting with his extraordinary recasting of the figure of Prometheus, in whom both the emancipatory promise and the other-denying menace of modernity are fatefully entwined, I will then consider a number of contemporary philosophical responses to constructivism before returning to Goethe in order to contemplate whether, and how, in the postmodern present, Prometheus might in some sense be redeemed. Penned in the same year that certain uppity colonists in the New World dumped a shipment of tea into Boston Harbor in a symbolic gesture of defiance against the sovereignty of the mother country (I dread to think what has ended up there since), Goethe’s ‘‘Prometheus’’ summons an Old World figure of rebellion in order to issue a declaration of independence for humanity at large. This famous ode belongs to Goethe’s early work and was written in the context of what was possibly Europe’s first youth movement, Germany’s decade of literary ‘‘Storm k a te r i gb y 兩 235 and Stress’’ (Sturm und Drang). Here, the young poet sets myth to work in the cause of demystification, effecting in the process a remarkable protoconstructivist critique of religion. In the...