Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself

1. The Real and the Good: Phenomenology and the Possibility of an Axiological Rationality

CHAPTER 1 The Real and the Good Phenomenology and the Possibility of an Axiological Rationality CHARLES S. BROWN In what ways can an encounter, conversation, or dialogue between ecological philosophy and phenomenology be fruitful? The issues driving ecological philosophy concern the ontological status of human and nonhuman nature, intrinsic value and humanity’s axiological relation to nature, and the boundaries and limits of the moral community. Although such questions seem to lie beyond the methodological restrictions of phenomenology ’s commitment to describe experience within an attitude of normative and ontological abstention, even a phenomenology that remains close to Husserl’s has much to offer ecological philosophy. To begin to discover the possibilities in such an encounter, we will first examine Husserl’s critique of naturalism.1 His critique helps us to see that the modern enframing of nature results in a conception of nature consisting entirely of extensional properties related to each other within a causal matrix. Such an enframing leads to moral, social, and political crisis as the value-free conceptions of rationality and objectivity supporting such naturalism dismiss the Good as subjective preference and thus remove questions of value from rational discourse. In reducing all reality to extension and causality, naturalism separates the Good from the Real, ultimately making moral philosophy impossible. The recognition of such an impossibility is apparent in the early-twentieth-century move away from normative ethics to metaethics. 3 Husserl’s critique of naturalism helps us to see that a great deal of modern moral philosophy, including some aspects that make the development of an ecological ethics difficult, is based on an uncritical appropriation of the account of objectivity developed to epistemically support naturalistic metaphysics. As we will see in the last part of the chapter, some aspects of Husserl’s theory of intentionality can be adapted to provide new directions for developing an account of an axiological rationality that would be open to the claim that there is goodness and value within nonhuman nature. Such a form of rationality, based in the dialectics of empty and filled intentions, would begin to provide a discourse in which the goodness and value of nonhuman nature could be registered, expressed, and articulated in a rational manner, thus providing an experiential , if not a metaphysical, grounding of an ecological ethics. Husserl’s rather passionate critique of the evils of naturalism make him a clear but unnoticed ally of contemporary ecological philosophers who have argued that there are important and largely unnoticed connections between our worldviews, metaphysical systems, and forms of rationality, on the one hand, and social and environmental domination, on the other. Such philosophers, often known as Radical Ecologists, typically are social ecologists, deep ecologists, or eco-feminists.2 According to their specific diagnoses, each offers suggested cures involving some kind of revolution in thinking that would produce the kind of spiritual metanoia needed to develop and sustain socially just and environmentally benign practices. Radical Ecologists share the conviction that the massive ecological damage we are witnessing today, as well as inequitable and unjust social arrangements, are the inevitable products of those ways of thinking that separate and privilege humanity over nature. The Radical Ecologists’ call to overcome this kind of thinking and replace it with a new understanding of the humanity-nature relation that would result in the emergence and maintenance of environmentally benign practices requires a rethinking of both the meaning of humanity and the meaning of nature in which normative and ontological issues are at stake. Such questions lie in the very interesting crossroads of metaphysics and value theory but also intersect with a Green political agenda and (forgive the term) a “spiritual” quest for the cultivation of a new state of humanitas3 that transcends the relative barbarism of homo centrus centrus.4 The Radical Ecologists see this damage as symptomatic of a deeper disorder embedded within the humanity-nature relation. It is embedded within the way nature and humanity are experienced in daily life, in myth, in literature, and in abstract thought. To the extent that the ecological devastation we witness today is the result of anthropocentrism, androcentrism, or a dualistic value-hierarchical worldview (as many have 4 Brown claimed), the ecological crisis is a crisis of meaning. It is ultimately the meaning of nature and humanity that is at stake. As such it can be managed , solved, or perhaps overcome by new myths or improvements in thinking that would...