Abstract
Our global ecological crisis is frequently traced to the set of ideas loosely termed “modernity.” Fred Dallmayr puts it thusly: “the roots of the problem reach . . . at least as far back as the onset of Western modernity and its attendant separation of ‘man’ and nature.” This separation was exemplified by Descartes’s “stark dualism or opposition between human thought or reason, on the one hand, and external matter or nature, on the other.” As a result of this separation, “mind or reason was purged of any ‘naturalistic’ premises, while nature itself was demoted from a partner or ally to a detached target of analysis and manipulation.” Nature became “a mere resource, utensil, or instrument for human and social benefit” (p. 1). Two recent volumes, Dallmayr’s Return to Nature? and William Ophuls’s Plato’s Revenge, present versions of this argument and offer alternative philosophical frameworks. Dallmayr’s book is a rich, indispensable addition to the growing field of environmental political theory. Ophuls is much more attentive to actual political implications, but his book suffers from internal tensions and lack of depth. Moreover, both books, though Ophuls’s especially, tend toward what John Meyer calls a derivative view of the relationship between conceptions of nature and conceptions of politics. This is the view that conceptions of biophysical nature or the cosmos can more or less dictate to political theory or politics. 1 A derivative view radically constricts the independence of the political and has anti-democratic overtones; moreover, it is also fundamentally unrealistic—conceptions of nature are too broad and contestable to guide politics, and whatever influence they have is shared with various other factors, such as political ideologies, institutions, and processes; cultural practices; class relations and modes of production and distribution; and environmental conditions themselves. Derivative views often naïvely assume that a better conceptualization of nature could solve the environmental crisis.
As Meyer notes, the natural world and our understandings of nature still play a significant role in politics. Meyer sees a constitutive role for nature in politics: “humans are inescapably natural beings, whose thought, actions, and potentialities are inextricably interdependent with and embedded within the world.” 2 More concretely, the natural world imposes ecological, biological, and, if one thinks ecocentrically, moral constraints on human activity. Nature also provides opportunities, in the form of human faculties and material and nonmaterial goods. Moreover, human political, economic, and other activities affect the natural world and our conception of it. Yet within these parameters, politics can take a variety of directions and forms, even with regard to ecological issues. Nature does not, should not, and indeed cannot dictate political values, practices, and institutions. Even the “right” conception of nature does not necessarily yield an ecologically optimal politics. Political actors could interpret or co-opt seemingly “green” worldviews to promote ecologically destructive ends. The realm of the political remains open ended. Dallmayr’s book, while reflecting a derivative approach, does leave the door slightly open to a constitutive approach.
With an extremely impressive degree of conceptual and textual depth, Dallmayr presents a philosophical counter-history contesting Cartesian dualism—as well as Hobbesian materialism—and offering a seemingly more ecologically congenial and holistic conception of nature. Although some of Dallmayr’s philosophers—Spinoza, Emerson, Thoreau, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—are familiar in green discourse, he also addresses thinkers such as Leibniz, Schelling, and Dewey, who are less discussed in an environmental context. Furthermore, he weaves a narrative that compellingly draws together Spinoza, German idealism, Romanticism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and existentialism, and also connects the resulting tradition with Aristotelian conceptions of nature. Reflecting his interest in comparative political theory, Dallmayr includes a chapter on Indian and Chinese philosophy. Dallmayr rightly notes that any attempt to address our ecological crisis must draw on insights beyond Western thought. He also shows commonalties between Asian thought and the Western protagonists of his counter-history.
Overall, Dallmayr sketches out a metaphysics that is non-dualist and holistic, focusing on “the parallelism or . . . correlation and mutual interdependence of mind and matter, spirit and world” (p. 70) within an overarching, creative, self-generating God, nature, or Being. Nature is not mechanistic, but is organismic and self-organizing. Nature is endlessly creative and unfolding rather than existing as a final product or object; it is both subject and object (pp. 40–41, 43). This view also has moral dimensions: “human life [is] embedded in a complex network of relationships, all of which require cultivation and responsiveness” (p. 142). In short, Return to Nature? is required reading for environmental political theorists and other scholars interested in philosophy’s engagement with the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
Dallmayr sets out to explore “how to bring nature back into modern and contemporary awareness, not just as a topic of esoteric philosophical discussion, but as a leaven of human reorientation and renewal” (p. xii). In dealing with the environmental crisis, we should “invoke possible philosophical remedies” He argues that “the first requisite of this ‘ecological’ effort is that the rigid divide between ‘man’ and nature must be cancelled in favor of wholeness or a more holistic relationship” (p. 2).
Yet Dallmayr does not live up to his promise of addressing the environmental crisis. There is insufficient synthesis in his narrative of various thinkers. He repeatedly revisits the same concerns about dualism and the relationship between spirit/mind and world/matter/nature, but provides too little of his own voice in drawing and accumulating insights along the way. Most problematic, however, is his derivative approach, that is, his invocation of “philosophical remedies.” As noted earlier, though a new philosophical perspective would help change our thinking about nature, remedies for the ecological crisis also entail sweeping changes in everything from technology to capitalism to eating habits and energy use to the influence of money in politics. Dallmayr barely addresses the role of the political as a sphere of decision making embracing these myriad concerns. Indeed, his account remains fairly abstract.
Admittedly, Dallmayr’s philosophical analysis already offers a sufficiently valuable contribution and one should not expect forays into policy. However, he comes to the precipice of some troubling philosophical and political questions but draws back. Dallmayr’s philosophers endeavor to articulate “a unity in diversity or a nondivisive ‘difference’” (p. 61). Of constant concern throughout is whether a more holistic, organic conception of spirit and nature would lapse into an abnegation of particularity and/or individuality, with disturbing implications for human freedom and even the independence of politics itself. For example, Spinoza’s notion of “only one infinite and all-embracing ‘substance,’ which we commonly call ‘God’ (or else ‘nature’)” (p. 16), suggests determinism and the denial of freedom (p. 125). Yet, Dallmayr hesitates to adequately explore this issue. In discussing Heidegger, he says that “the question arises how the free independence of nature relates to human freedom and ultimately to the freedom of the basic ground of beings (or Being as such),” but adds that this issue “transcend[s] as such the concern of the present pages” (p. 128).
Furthermore, holistic, organic, self-organizing conceptions of nature and spirit do not necessarily inspire a greener politics. They can be invoked to support humanity’s technological conquest and transformation of the biosphere as another step in nature’s self-creation and evolution, especially if we regard human beings as part of nature. This comes through in one of the book’s appendices, Dallmayr’s remembrance of ecotheologian Thomas Berry. Dallmayr quotes Berry’s critique of Teilhard de Chardin: “While he rejected the mechanistic worldview in favor of a more organic-spiritual worldview, [Teilhard] fully accepted the industrial and technological exploitation of the planet as a desirable human activity” (p. 162). Yet why leave this issue to a relatively brief and incomplete discussion in an appendix?
What saves Dallmayr from a full-blown derivative view is that he sees limits to our knowability of nature. Nature, he suggests, significantly escapes our rational understanding, whether sensory data or a priori knowledge, and may be best understood intuitively, artistically, or experientially (pp. 46–52, 53–75, 90, 104, 106, 133–39). Such epistemic constraints not only limit our ability to successfully manipulate nature but also undermine any effort to apply a blueprint of nature to politics. Thus, Dallmayr leaves some room for the independence of the political and for a constitutive view of nature and politics.
Ophuls’s Plato’s Revenge displays thematic similarities with Dallmayr’s book. Ophuls argues that ecology and its organic view of nature lead us to a holistic, mutualistic ethic (p. 35), in which “the liberal fiction of separation collapses” (p. 40). He blames modernity for a materialistic ethos devoid of meaning, virtue, or community (pp. 5–7, 13–18), detached from and hostile to nature (pp. 28–29), and encouraging of unchecked, ecologically destructive appetites (p. 19).
Ophuls goes much further than Dallmayr in exploring political dimensions but unfortunately commits himself to a much more explicitly derivative approach. He aims at “a natural law theory of politics grounded in ecology, physics, and psychology” (p. x) and argues that we should “model the governance process on the basic physical and biological principles that ‘govern’ natural processes” (p. 151). He blithely proclaims, “By discovering and appreciating the moral order implicit within the natural world, we can derive ethical principles that will serve as a basis for polity and society” (p. 22).
Claiming to offer “a provocative essay, not a scholarly treatise,” Ophuls implicitly dismisses contemporary ecological thought: “Rather than joust with contemporary specialists in environmental affairs, I therefore decided from the outset to rely on time-tested classical authors who have eloquently and cogently grappled with the core issues of politics” (p. xi). True to his word, he largely ignores almost three decades of environmental political theory, including critiques of the derivative approach.
Ophuls does pursue a wide-ranging exploration of canonical political philosophy, ecological science, Jungian psychology, and particle physics. He is refreshingly unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries or, for that matter, ideological biases: he frequently cites Burke, who, perhaps because of his conservatism, has been woefully underexplored by environmental theorists.
However, the book, in marked contrast to Dallmayr’s, does not engage its sources in significant depth. Ophuls’s appeal to a moral order in the universe is presented without seriously engaging the philosophers and social theorists who have long contested such an idea or seriously engaging the argument—developed most notably by John Stuart Mill in his 1874 essay “Nature”—that using nature as a moral model means adopting not only nature’s order but also its violence. We are instead treated to quotes from scholars and historical figures ranging from Einstein to Lao Tzu, as if the author has taken too many Great Books courses. Ophuls also indulges in numerous sweeping generalizations. To cite just one example, he claims that the advent of civilization was “a tragic fall from primal grace” in which “liberty was replaced by authority, equality by hierarchy, and fraternity by disunity” (p. 2).
Despite Ophuls’s title, Plato plays a fairly limited role. Plato inspires Ophuls’s emphases on the reform of inner consciousness, and on an aristocratic society guided by myth and metaphor in the absence of complete knowledge (he refers to Plato’s parable of the Cave) (pp. 119–20) and structured according to “individuals fulfill[ing] social roles rather than aggrandiz[ing] private interests” (p. 42). However, the title might just as well have Aristotle’s Revenge, Rousseau’s Revenge, Jung’s Revenge, or Thoreau’s Revenge. Furthermore, Ophuls pays insufficient heed to both the deficiencies and possibilities in Plato as an ecological thinker. He does not adequately engage the Platonist tradition’s privileging of ideas and mind over the natural world and, on the other hand, does not look to Plato’s remarkably prescient discussion, in Book II of the Republic, of the social ills of overconsumption and economic growth.
Ophuls initially advocates a decentralized society of small Jeffersonian republics. Large, complex societies or urban centers are unmanageable, dysfunctional, nonresilient, given to self-interest and lack of community, and bureaucratic and authoritarian (pp. 136–45). Only “small, simple, face-to-face societies” can be ecologically responsible and truly democratic (p. 132). Such societies would emerge from the ground up, after a change of metaphor away from the Modern myth of progress: we must “make ecology the master science and Gaia [the hypothesis that Earth is a self-sustaining living organism] the ruling metaphor” (p. 135), and also adopt an ecologically oriented civil religion (pp. 157–59).
Besides the question of whether a dispersed human population would really be ecologically preferable to large, high-density urban areas, a number of political problems arise. How is such grassroots change going to happen, especially given that ecological ideas and metaphors have been circulating for decades and our crisis has only gotten worse? Ophuls resorts to the assertion that the ecological crisis will make his program necessary and inevitable (p. 161), either through a revolution in individual consciousness (pp. 177–78) or a major upheaval (pp. 162–63). But would such change come swiftly enough to address pressing crises like climate change? And how would small, simple communities deal with the complexities and scale of global ecological problems and avoid a collective tragedy of the commons?
Is Ophuls, who cites Rousseau’s notion of the general will (p. 140), really hoping for a Great Legislator or, perhaps, a modern version of Plato’s Guardian class? Ophuls proclaims that “ecology will have to be the master science and guiding metaphor of any future civilization” (p. 43). However, only a relative few are competent to truly respond to reason (p. 17), to think beyond the concrete, the present, and the dramatic (pp. 73–75), and therefore to truly understand the environmental crisis. Ophuls says that “the proper function of government is to facilitate, not dominate; to make the rules, not play the game.” But since we have “a surfeit of passion and a deficit of reason, a substantial degree of governance is indispensable” (p. 131). Ophuls thus maintains that an “aristocracy” or “oligarchy,” “a genuine elite” (pp. 99–100), is needed to understand complex systems and think abstractly (pp. 116–17) and, it seems, to put the insights of science and philosophy into practice and rely on the assent of the rest of the population through stories, metaphors, myths, and neo-Platonic noble lies (pp. 116, 124, 126). In fact, he ultimately turns from his own Jeffersonian leanings and embraces a decentralized empire (pp. 182–84). Would a green imperial aristocracy actually pull the strings and grant local communities only the appearance of self-determination? In fact, politics in any meaningful deliberative sense seems largely erased, as Ophuls makes the outrageous, derivative claim that “once adopted, the new level of consciousness will almost automatically generate the requisite practical measures” (p. xiii). At the very least, the reader is left to puzzle out the relationship between aristocracy and local democracy and the ultimate role of politics.
Though Ophuls seemingly goes much further into political applications, he closes off the possibilities for politics much more so than Dallmayr does. Dallmayr makes fewer political claims for his ecological conception of spirit and nature and thus leaves more room for a truly green politics.