(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Arne Johan Vetlesen. The Denial of Nature. Environmental philosophy in the area of global capitalism. Routledge, 2015
Anyone who really wants to become a philosopher, writes Edmund Husserl in his Cartesian meditations, once in a lifetime, must fall back on themselves, and in themselves try to throw away all the sciences that have so far been accepted and try to reconstruct them.
Far out in the rather abstract texts of American Wittgenstein specialist Cora Diamond, a vibrant section may suddenly emerge in which the American philosopher expresses a strong personal feeling, often related to her defense of animals or the need to use emotion in ethical discussions – and a vibrant, soft and human element suddenly lights up in the gray sea of philosophical discipline. The emotion, which can come from a novel or an experience, it turns out, should govern both what we have read and what we should read. It's as if Diamond needs to dive deep into the ethical Wittgenstein reservoir to feel entitled to pick up a fairly ordinary feeling, which can have both temperature, ethos and resentment before she can continue. This feeling justifies her language and reflections. After all, it's just the experience, what she knows is true for her, she has to fall back on. What else can a philosopher build on, other than the truth he / she knows as something fundamental in itself?
Being a philosopher is, as Husserl correctly states, trying to try out all past truths and re-describe the world, rebuild it – but from what? From the place it speaks strongly and truthfully to us. No other starting point exists. The exercise separates the true philosophers from the epigones of thought. It takes courage to make such a move.
Such a courage shows Arne Johan Vetlesen in his latest work, The Denial of Nature. This makes the book an important and important work. When Vetlesen, in short paragraphs within the book, falls back on himself and his experience, he not only lets go of the professional language he mastered; he takes, as one who wants to become a philosopher, a thorough settlement with his role models, with the masters, who have given him the language, and then tries to put the world back together.
It is both a difficult book and a personal book Vetlesen has written. It is a source of discussion for professionals, and it is a reservoir for lay people. If you first get through the first two chapters, a sea of rich, applicable philosophy opens up.
The first part of the book is perhaps the most problematic. Here Vetlesen promotes a psychological explanation for why we destroy nature. With the support of Freud and Melanie Klein, he believes that our destructive behavior towards our livelihood is comparable to the child's aggression towards the mother, yes, that we simply become destructive due to our dependence on nature, which invokes our vulnerability – and that we in a self-reinforcing mechanism get rid of guilt in a mixture of self-hatred and conscious over-consumption.
An equally plausible explanation for our destructive behavior on the biotope may be that we as a species under the pressure of evolution simply became too successful, that the desire, the will and the ability to manage – to succeed – when we became many and technologically efficient enough , hoping to multiply even more, turned into a destructive force, which we at the individual level do not see.
It is in the second part of the book that Vetlesen's confrontation with his predecessors takes place. Since Descartes, Kant and Hegel, philosophy has stood outside the world, the life and the nature it has expressed itself, Vetlesen writes. It is the demand for unambiguous, rational statements about the world, coupled with the view of nature as a dead object made available to man, that has made the destruction of nature we now experience possible. In Descartes, Kant and Hegel's worldly, rational and cerebral philosophy, nature has no value in itself. But neither does Vetlesen's role models, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, the last Vetlesen's own mentor, give nature any intrinsic value that must be safeguarded. The anti-natural rationality we also find in these capital-critical philosophers is the same that permeates capitalism and bureaucracy, where everything has been turned into goods, money, law and contracts, and which has now colonized the world of life.
The way Vetlesen attacks the radical, philosophical tradition, to which the left has been linked in one form or another throughout the post-war period, reflects his deep respect for and debt to the same tradition. For the uninitiated reader, the interpretation may be perceived as somewhat elaborate.
Our destructive behavior towards our basis of life is to compare with the child's aggression towards the mother, yes, that we simply become destructive due to our dependence on nature, which invokes our vulnerability.
But then it happens! In the middle of the detailed argument that characterizes the parting with the role models, Vetlesen suddenly turns around and tells about the walks in the woods with his three-year-old son, who greets the crow and says goodbye to the trees with the child's usual close and intimate relationship with nature. Only three years later, this behavior has been learned. Family, friends and the outside world have enrolled the boy in reason. With its assertive rationality in place, the once open child has lost contact with nature, and with it the motive for safeguarding it.
Next, Vetlesen will describe how an eagle he meets puts him in a wondering, respectful relationship with the animal, similar to the majestic mountain he will later experience; he has encountered something different, something bigger than himself. And in the description of how time becomes concrete in the hut in time with the wood stove, which after a long, cold night must be fired up again for the coffee to boil and the boy to get warm, we hear the echo of the Greek pre-Socrates Heraclitus who visits while standing inside the kitchen and warms up, and says to the guests: "Just come in, also here, by the stove, are the gods."
But one thing is to believe that nature has an inherent value and to feel close to this value, which Vetlesen believes is necessary for us to want to protect it. Another thing is to prove this, the intrinsic value of nature, ontologically, as what actually is – is in such a way that we must relate to it as reality. This is the book's project. This is where philosophy must stand the test. When the world will be put together again.
In clear and thorough discussions, Vetlesen reviews key thinkers in modern eco-philosophy in search of the ontological basis of ecology. Vetlesen's canon consists of Paul Tayler, Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston and Hans Jonas, where the humanist Jonas, from whom the author has drawn strong impulses, is the one who responds weakest, and the eco-centrist Rolston the one who responds most in line with Vetlesen's demands for fact-based, critical realism.
Homes Rolston's argument is as follows: An individual, animal as human, survives only in interaction with other species and with their environment, and this interaction requires that the ecosystem, as a whole, remain intact. If the ecosystem is destroyed, life there is destroyed. Like animals, man is a product of the biosphere; the value we are and have developed comes from – is in itself – a biosphere product. Our mental abilities also come from the natural processes. When the chimpanzee experiences pain, that pain is independent of human language – as is the joy of the cows when they are released in the spring. Man can judge correctly, or he can misjudge his surroundings, yes, he can actually also understand the value of the whole of which he is a part. But nature creates value independently of us, as it did before we arrived, and will continue to do so, if we do not understand its message, when we are no longer here.
Rolston's argument that nature has an objective, inherent value is the one that holds water best. The problem with this ontology, which Vetlesen does not discuss, is its inherent determinism – that we, after all, are still just blind pilots controlled by genes in a world we can not really understand. When Vetlesen in the book's epilogue introduces "pan-psychism", the notion that everything in the world is in possession of a kind of psychic reality, it can be a kind of answer to this determinism.
But before that, Vetlesen takes a stand against the all-consuming technology, which in partnership with capital is the force that most threatens the globe, and therefore must be understood.
The ability of technology to remove us from time and place, night and day, outside and inside, hot and cold, light and dark, has made us insensitive to the here and now of life, to the vulnerability of nature and the specific, Vetlesen slices. Together with capital, which empties the world of value by turning it into a commodity, technology has colonized our world of life. When we still resort to it and its empty products again and again, it is because technology gives us security in an insecure world; it is what we know. In this way, our trust in technology dazzles with the fact that the resources it and capital use to meet our needs are limited, yes, depleted.
With or without our consciousness, our material bodies are at all times in communication with the world, the living as non-living, and the one with us.
Vetlesen acknowledges that we are immersed in technology, and sees no other option than that we must preserve the last remnants of wild nature in reserves so that we do not close again for the much-needed conversation with our origin. Here, Vetlesen creates an artificial distinction between nature and culture, disregarding the fact that the nature in the city – the houses, the bodies, the flowers and the animals – is in itself a miracle to enter into a dialogue with, if one only allows for it.
From a rich wealth from points of view, Vetlesen hunts throughout the book for that instance, that experience, which will open us up to the intrinsic value of nature in such a way that we take care of it. Closest comes Vetlesen such an instance in panpsychism, a "democratically" woven way of understanding the world, which in several disciplines is about to have a renaissance.
Personally, I react to the concept's Eurocentric character, and the somewhat vague that is meant by "psyche", but it is irrelevant here. Pan-psychism is about the fact that all life, all that is, including the mental, originates from matter: All that is, interacts and shares space, time and constituents. Vetlesen's reference is Freya Mathews: When the world is understood from the outside, as the now outdated philosophers do, its reality can neither be understood nor grasped. With or without our consciousness, our material bodies are at all times in communication with the world, the living as non-living, and the one with us.
A new rationality – a new field of understanding and knowledge – is with this approach opening up in academia. Had Vetlesen orientated himself towards phenomenology, he would, for example, have been able to follow lines from the Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll's exploration of what it means for a living being to have an outside world, to the American perception researcher James Gibson's exploration of how all biological beings develop knowledge in his direct dealings with the outside world, and on to the Dutch anthropologist and ecologist Tim Ingold's research on how people who experience themselves as a physical part of their surroundings develop different understandings than those who are outside.
From a completely different point of view, object-oriented philosophers such as Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman (the latter chooses the term "polyp psychism") work with positions where the world – and nature – are understood independently of the limited (Kantian) human subject. While the Italian Roberto Esposito in recent years has taken apart concepts such as "immunity", "community", "person", "body" and "things" in the search for new understandings of politics. How our worldview is about to change is perhaps most evident in the pioneering work of anthropologist Philippe Descola. Beyond nature and culture (2005), where the Western, naturalistic approach is equated with other, more life-friendly worldviews.
In this international the work of finding new ways to understand and relate to nature and ourselves, to prevent the destruction of the biotope, includes Arne Johan Vetlesen, together with Arne Næss, as a significant contributor. Freudian explanations and Christian guilt aside, The Denial of Nature – The denial of nature – is such a rich, so honest and sincerely written book that it will only by virtue of its ethos leave deep traces.
When the economics and social sciences have one day gone through the same paradigm shift that philosophy, anthropology and biology are about to make, the world will be experienced so differently that we will also have to act differently. There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who describes what every child today knows: that the biosphere, with its geology, atmosphere, nature and richness of life, is the only basis of the economy. Everything else is theories designed to legitimize robbery and destruction. So maybe we need to make nature sacred, we will be able to take care of the beautiful and brutal cathedral we are part of.
Kiøsterud is an author. ekio@online.no
