Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought

8. Enjoyment and Its Discontents: On Separation from Nature in Levinas

161 EIGHT Enjoyment and Its Discontents On Separation from Nature in Levinas TedToadvine The radical break that Levinas’s philosophy represents with the history of ethics has seemed promising to environmental thinkers searching for a non-anthropocentric account of nature’s moral claim on us. For Levinas, the ethical command is the very epiphany of the face of the Other that confronts me from a height, from beyond being. Breaking with the entire tradition of Western philosophy in its tendency toward totalization and reduction of alterity to sameness, Levinas insists on the Other’s radical and noncognizable alterity and escape from every form of intentionality. The Other is not a category under which I might group similar specimens by identifying morally relevant characteristics ; it is not an object of thought or representation at all but rather the very interruption of representation. Nor is the ethical relation to be discovered as a matter of kinship, participation, or oneness, whether this is founded on ecological or phenomenological descriptions , since “man’s relationship with the other is better as difference than as unity.”1 The Other transcends me in a radical way, disrupts my sensible enjoyment of the world, and calls into question my very right to exist. And since the Other is beyond being, no revision of ontology, however radical, will provide us with insight into the nonworldly source of ethical orientation. Levinas’s approach seems to completely reverse the efforts to ascribe an “intrinsic value” to nature that have dominated much environmental discourse. As he writes, 162 Ted Toadvine “moral consciousness is not an experience of values, but an access to external being: external being is, par excellence, the Other” (DF 293). Yet this approach hints at the further possibility that nature confronts us with an ethical command by its very externality, by the radicality of its own alterity. Rather than cataloging morally relevant similarities , perhaps we should hearken to nature’s unfathomable depths, to the way its power outstrips us, to the alienness of a nonhuman gaze. If the alterity of the human Other can put our egoistic enjoyment into question so absolutely, is not nature even more radically resistant and aloof? For the environmental philosopher, the appeal of Levinas’s ethics is its apparent promise for recovering a certain anarchical natural sublime, thereby breaking definitively with pragmatic and utilitarian anthropocentrisms. Levinas’s own resistance to this extension of his thought are well known, as epitomized in his reluctance even to grant that nonhuman animals have a face—despite the apparent exception suggested by his own much-discussed account of Bobby, the Kantian dog (DF 151–53).2 When asked specifically whether “ecological problems, such as the destruction of the techno-sciences, also present the task of producing a relation to nature as the other of the human,” Levinas interprets the question in terms of his characteristic contrast between ethics and justice, in which the appearance of a third forces comparisons of our incomparable obligations—toward other human beings.3 In other words, Levinas recognizes obligations to nature only as a function of the ethical exigency not to approach the Other “with empty hands” (DF 26). As he writes, “Pure nature, when it does not attest to the glory of God, when it is no one’s, indifferent and inhuman nature, is situated on the fringes of this human world, and it is only understandable as such on the plane of the human world of property” (CPP 28–29). Consequently, the environmental crisis confronts us with obligations of economic justice but not with any obligations toward nature in its own right. In this respect at least, Levinas’s position converges with anthropocentric strains in contemporary environmental philosophy, such as those found in environmental pragmatism and environmental justice discourse.4 From Levinas’s own perspective, there seems little promise for anything like an ethical encounter with nature as such. Enjoyment and Its Discontents 163 The root of Levinas’s reluctance to grant ethical standing to nature can be traced to his account of our “separation” from nature, the accomplishment of independence and interiority in the midst of our dependence on and emergence from the natural elements. Separation is distinct from simple relation since, within separation, “the being that is in relation absolves itself from the relation, is absolute within relationship” (TI 110). But the notion of such a separation, of our “independence” from our natural surroundings, is antithetical to...