Why it definitely matters how we encounter nature

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 279-296

  Note, Nicole ^a  

^a VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350746139     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200931331     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: State University or New York Press, 1996).
2. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durkham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
3. In defining a plurality of accesses I defer to Iris Murdoch as quoted in Mick Smith's interesting article.
4. See Mick Smith, "Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas," Environmental Ethics 29 (2007): 23-42.
5. Murdoch, and implicitly Smith, describes ethics as "an exercise in attempting to see and respond to the world as it is'" (p. 25;
6. emphasis added). My view is that doing so is impossible by definition because how we see the world will always depend on our mood, and none of these moods will reveal a reality that is more real than another. On the other hand, as I note later in this article, I fully agree that there are certain ways of dealing with the world that favor our ethical ability.
7. Elizabeth Willott and David Schmidtz, eds., Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
8. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 37.
9. This may be the reason why science is looking for commonalities, regarding any non-commonalities as idiosyncratic events, i.e., as not pertaining to "fundamental knowledge."
10. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 84.
11. Ibid., p. 89.
12. Ibid., p. 100.
13. Apparently, in order to build up sciences, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and several others believed that the main point of science was to extract nature's secrets: Bacon insisted on the need to force nature, to 'squeeze and mould her' out of her natural state, to have her obey and yield her secrets.
14. See Frederick Ferre', Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics (Albany: State University or New York Press, 1996), p. 118.
15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: As Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 42.
16. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: As Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 42.
17. For those philosophers who follow his readings very strictly, this may seem a deviation, since Levinas' philosophy is clearly confined to the realm of the human being; the human "Other" being the only source for generating ethics. I depart slightly from this idea.
18. Ibid., p. 43.
19. Ibid., p. 43.
20. Ibid., p. 43.
21. Ibid., p. 51.
22. Arnold Burms and Herman Dedijn, De Rationaliteit en haar Grenzen: Kritiek en Deconstructie (Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 1986), pp. 70-71.
23. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 99.
24. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 99.
25. Smith, "Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics," p. 27.
26. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98.
27. Michael Welsh, "From the Interpersonal to the Environmental: Extending the Ethics of Levinas to Human Ecology," Human Ecology Review 2 (1998): 49-57.
28. Ibid., p. 51.
29. According to Welsh, these three qualities are: (1) transcendence of the philosophical isolation of autonomy, while still allowing the other to be subject to use; (2) the erotic is initiated by a never insisting caress; and (3). through the erotic, fecundity comes to being.
30. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 255.
31. I assume that there is a close relationship between both in that the gradual shift from an instrumental stance toward the experience of alterity will decrease an excessive degree of instrumental use, context permitting.
32. Welsh, "From the Interpersonal to the Environmental," p. 54.
33. Ibid., p. 53.
34. Walter T. Stace, The Teaching of the Mysticies (New York: New American Library, 1960), pp. 10-12.
35. Ibid., p. 15.
36. Mysticism in the Hellenistic world referred to "secret" religious rituals. In early Christianity it holds a similar connotation, referring to "hidden" allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, for instance. F. C. Happold, Mysticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 18.
37. See, in this regard, Phyllis Windle, "The Ecology of Grief," BioScience 42 (1992): 363-66.
38. Burms and Dedijn, De Rationaliteit en haar Grenzen, p. 71.
39. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 50.
40. In this sense, the boundaries between ego affirmation and existential affirmation overlap.
41. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 52.
42. For the sake of completeness, I should note that in addition to existential affirmation, we can also find moments of meaninglessness in nature. I have chosen not to elaborate on this aspect, even though it is necessarily interwoven with the subject that concerns us here.
43. Arnold Burms, "Individual Autonomy and a Culture of Narcissism," Ethical Perspectives 5 (1998): 280.
44. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 199.
45. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 199.
46. I especially thank Erik Claes for helping me place most of these thoughts in a broader framework.