A World Not Made for Us , livre ebook

A WORLD NOT MADE FOR US
SUNY SERIES IN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS
J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors
KEITH R. PETERSON
A World Not Made for Us
Topics in Critical Environmental Philosophy
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Peterson, Keith R., author.
Title: A world not made for us : topics in critical environmental philosophy / Keith R. Peterson.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2020. | Series: Suny series in environmental philosophy and ethics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019048729 | ISBN 9781438479590 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438479613 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism—Philosophy. | Environmental ethics. | Philosophy of nature. | Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Human ecology.
Classification: LCC GE195 .P479 2020 | DDC 363.7001—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048729
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For my parents
[The anthropocentric world view] corresponds to a certain dream image of the world, fondly framed by humankind at all times. It permits us to consider ourselves, in our capacity as a spiritual being, the crowning achievement of the world. In this manner we misunderstand not only the world but also our own being; and, rightly considered, this is not even to our advantage. Our task is to come to terms with a world not made for us —a far greater objective and one worthy of our power of self-determination.
— NICOLAI HARTMANN , New Ways of Ontology
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Environmental Philosophy: Anthropocentrism, Intrinsic Value, and Worldview Clash
PART I
Anthropocentrism and Philosophical Anthropology
1 Anthropocentrism, Dualism, and Models of the Human
2 The Unfinished Animal
PART II
The Intrinsic Value of Nature
3 The Problem of Intrinsic Value and the Primacy of Priorities
4 Environmental Values and Vital Priorities
5 Political Ecology and Value Theory
PART III
Ecological Ontology
6 Metascientific Stances and Dependence
Conclusion. A World Not Made for Us
Notes
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE
This book attempts to define the core principle that should inform collective thinking about the global ecological crisis, namely, the recognition of human asymmetrical dependence upon the more-than-human world. The implications of recognizing this principle of dependence are explored in the domains of philosophical anthropology, value theory, and ontology. The recognition of human dependence—if consistently honored across epistemological, ontological, and sociocultural registers—reminds those of us who have forgotten that we live in a world not made for us .
The title of the book expresses a basic tenet of environmentalism, one that curiously runs against the grain of much contemporary philosophy. This tension has been reflected in my own experience. Growing up in a relatively rural part of northeastern Ohio, I spent a lot of time in the woods filled with the impression that I was merely a small, incompetent actor in a far larger and immensely more complex scenario. I am sure this is an experience shared by many North American environmentalists. Unlike most of them, however, later in life I also spent a lot of time reading many human exceptionalist German and French philosophers. For a relatively brief but especially formative span of years, enamored with German Idealism, Heidegger and Derrida, central Continental anti-realists, I thought that there was no bigger idea than that humans give to the world all the meaning that they could ever discover in it. I was gradually dissuaded from acceptance of this core humanist axiom by becoming further immersed in environmental philosophy and environmentalism. The allegedly naïve feeling and experience of the independence and indifference of the more-than-human natural world to my wishes and dreams that had first come to me in the woods of my childhood unassumingly returned to its former prominence in my psyche. I consider it one of the greatest disservices of contemporary philosophy to have convinced many theorists to deny, ignore, or background this experience.
The path to the position presented in this book was just as idiosyncratic as the view it ultimately presents. Initially, the philosophy I studied trained me to be highly wary of claims about “human nature,” especially in regards to any forms of essentialism or determinism; yet the more I studied environmentalism, the clearer it became that some extended reflection on what was once called “philosophical anthropology” was needed to make sense of the ecological crisis. My search for intellectual allies led me to American philosopher Marjorie Grene, who introduced me to the more obscure German philosophical anthropologists whom, despite my Continental training, I had never read. While the social and political contexts of interwar Germany and late twentieth-century North America differed dramatically, thinkers from both these periods were wrestling with, and struggling to overcome, traditional, dualistically conceived categories. As is made clear throughout the book, Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s sophisticated critique of hegemonic dualisms played a large part in my attempts to bring humanistic and environmentalist traditions together. After researching and teaching courses on these thinkers for years, I found a way to integrate what appeared to be their otherwise unrelated projects.
Compared to the anthropological theories that impacted my understanding of environmentalism, integrating the idea that in order to pursue environmental social change we cannot avoid “values” talk was significantly more difficult given my philosophical training. Like most of my peers in graduate school, I was a good Nietzschean, congenitally suspicious of any talk of values. In an era that touted “family values” (Which ones? Whose family?), I reluctantly surrendered to the realization that values talk is not only useful in approaching environmental discourses, but absolutely essential if what environmentalists aim to do is generate social change. I started wrangling with the environmental ethicists’ distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value, but quickly realized that this dichotomy was of little use for understanding environmental values, as well as for thinking about the role or nature of values in ethics more broadly. On my way to becoming a more pluralistic Continentalist and committed environmental philosopher, I discovered Max Scheler’s remarkable book on ethics, Formalism , and soon after Nicolai Hartmann’s version of value ethics, which provided me with almost all of the questions and at least some of the answers I needed to begin to think differently about environmental value theory. I realized that if social change is what environmentalists want, they must articulate a cluster of values distinct from those instituted by the existing hegemonic culture, and they must explain why it is better for both humans and nonhumans to adopt this cluster of values. More specifically, I came to see that there is a link between value articulation and practice, between values and action, that needed to be reconsidered at much greater depth than had been done in existing discourses. Given the less than transparent relationship between values and actions, I came to see that the best that we can expect from ethical theorizing is some guidance through the thicket of moral conflicts and wicked problems that face us on a daily basis.
Yet more than merely offering some modicum of moral guidance, I came to realize that values talk also provides a very powerful way to synthesize otherwise divergent programs for responding to the crisis within environmentalism, an insight gleaned from my encounter with the work of ecosocialist Joel Kovel and ecocommunitarian anarchist John P. Clark. The impact of their ideas on this work will be evident in later chapters. Finally, my path to the realist, ecological materialist ontology and “metascientific stance” defined in this book was made significantly smoother by virtue of a timely encounter with recent realist trends in contemporary Continental philosophy, on the one hand, and more recent research in science studies on the other, both of which helped me to give a new spin to an older and long-forgotten body of work.
I hope that the distinctive way I approach these topics in this book allows environmental philosophers and environmentalists to better pinpoint and correct some of the weaknesses with current discourses about the environment. If it helps readers to consider more thoughtfully the conditions under which we must create our future lives together and what those best lives might look like, all the better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although some of this material has appeared in published form, almost all of it has been so thoroughly revised that it bears very little resemblance to the original. The following l