Abstract

Nature as modernity conceives it—solid, self-contained and self-subsistent, autonomous in its operations—is pure exteriority, without face and without inner life. This solid opacity makes of nature a mirror for our own approach to it, and thus as Marion as argued, renders nature an idol. For nature to possess an interiority, for it to face us, it must have another side turned away from us, i.e. turned toward a depth from which it arises, and from which it is “given.” Such givenness would not be the mere factuality of empiricism, but something closer to what the Renaissance called natura naturans, or better yet what Heidegger (after the ancient Greeks) calls physis. For environmental philosophy to address these issues, would require a phenomenology of this radical mode of givenness, a Gegebenheit beyond the Husserlian notion, and akin to the Geben from which Heidegger understands his later key concept of Ereignis.

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