Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself

8. The Primacy of Desire and Its Ecological Consequences

CHAPTER 8 The Primacy of Desire and Its Ecological Consequences TED TOADVINE Environmental ethicists are invariably led to construct a philosophy of nature, since the question of whether anthropocentrism is a sound basis for environmental policy rests on the plausibility of attributing intrinsic value to nature. Thus runs the dominant line of reasoning in Anglo-American environmental circles, and the battle lines are drawn by implication: either humans project values on an objective and valueless factual world, or nature enjoys some valuable and/or valuing status in its own right. Recent trends seem to favor the latter direction, toward a philosophy of nature that, on the rebound against earlier anthropocentric views of “man-apart-from-nature,” insists on inserting the human subject within a continuum of value originating within the ecosystem or the natural organism itself.1 But perhaps this movement toward a continuity with nature, a homogeneity or kinship between the human and the natural , is wrongheaded. This problemmatic tendency is also apparent in recent phenomenologically oriented approaches to environmental philosophy , for example, in recent attempts to establish a kinship of the human and the natural on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeality and later ontology of flesh. Is environmental ethics best served by adopting this “humans-as-a-part-of-nature” paradigm? Or, to pose the question theoretically rather than practically, is a perceived teleological continuity between humans and nature a suitable basis for attributing value? And perhaps we should throw our net wider still: Is the question of “intrinsic value” the right question? The intrinsic value of nature becomes an issue within a worldview that conceives culture and nature dialectically; the naturalization of 139 culture and the culturization of nature are simply modalities of this dialectic. But perhaps the possibility of an ethical response to nature lies with the impossibility of trimming its claws for adoption as our sibling or household pet. Perhaps, as I will suggest here, an ethical response to nature becomes possible only when we are faced with the impossibility of reducing it to the homogeneous, the continuous, the predictable, the perceivable , the thematizable. What is called for is not a new philosophy of nature, but an ethics of the impossibility of any “philosophy” of nature. The basis for such “impossibility” is phenomenological, but in a way that stretches this method, perhaps to the breaking point. As resources for an “impossible phenomenology” of nature, I will draw on analyses of corporeality , desire, and flesh in Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. What I develop here is by no means a complete view, but has two aims: first, to suggest that the current “kinship” view is neither satisfactory nor our only alternative in providing an ethical ground for the relation with nature; and, second, to indicate the direction in which an alternative “phenomenology of the impossible” could be developed. Beyond the Dialectic of Intrinsic Value J. Baird Callicot and Holmes Rolston, III, occupy dialectical poles in the intrinsic value debate. “From the scientific point of view,” Callicot asserts, “nature throughout, from atoms to galaxies, is an orderly, objective, axiologically neutral domain.” A sound environmental ethic should, on Callicot ’s view, adopt this scientific perspective, with the consequence that “value is, as it were, projected onto natural objects or events by the subjective feelings of observers. If all consciousness were annihilated at a stroke, there would be no good and evil, no beauty and ugliness, no right and wrong; only impassive phenomena would remain.”2 Callicot holds that this state of affairs does not exclude intrinsic value; it merely requires that we understand this notion in terms of the projection of the subjective observer, such projections being explainable in “Humean-Darwinean” fashion (Callicot, 162). While Callicot is content to return to a Humean empiricism, Holmes Rolston seems to favor a teleological interpretation of nature drawn straight from Aristotle. What science shows us, Rolston argues, is that “the organism is a spontaneous, self-maintaining system, sustaining and reproducing itself, executing its program, making a way through the world. . . . Something more than physical causes, even when less than sentience , is operating within every organism. . . . [This] is the modern equivalent of what Aristotle called formal and final causes; it gives the 140 Toadvine organism a telos, or end, a kind of (nonfelt) goal.”3 As an “axiological, evaluative system,” this living individual is an intrinsic value. But our duties do not stop at the individual...