Naturalizing Heidegger , livre ebook

Naturalizing Heidegger
SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
——————
J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors
Naturalizing Heidegger
His Confrontation with Nietzsche, His Contributions to Environmental Philosophy
David E. Storey
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Storey, David E., 1982–
Naturalizing Heidegger : his confrontation with Nietzsche, his contributions to environmental philosophy / David E. Storey.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in environmental philosophy and ethics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5483-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5484-9 (ebook)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Environmental ethics. 3. Philosophy of nature. 4. Environmental sciences—Philosophy. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. I. Title. B3279.H49S755 2015 193—dc23 2014008387
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Traditional Reading of Heidegger’s Relevance for Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
Chapter 2
The Question concerning Biology: Life, Soul, and Nature in Heidegger’s Early Aristotle Lecture Courses
Chapter 3
Life and Nature in Being and Time
Chapter 4
Back to Life: Organism, Animal, and Umwelt in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
Chapter 5
Nature in the Later Heidegger: Earth, Physis , Technology, Machination, and Poetic Dwelling
Chapter 6
Nature and Nihilism: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Nietzsche
Chapter 7
Naturalizing Nietzsche: Life, Evolution, and Value
Chapter 8
Engaging Environmental Ethics
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the editors and reviewers at SUNY Press for publishing my work and for their feedback and support in bringing this project to completion. I am grateful to the following publishers for granting permission for material to be republished here. A version of chapter 2 appeared as “Heidegger and the Question Concerning Biology: Life, Soul, and Nature in the Early Aristotle Lecture Courses,” in Epoché: a Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 1 (Fall 2013). A version of chapter 7 appeared as “Nietzsche’s Non-Reductive Naturalism: Evolution, Teleology, and Value,” in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 23 (2012): 128S–52. A small portion of chapter 7 will appear in the journal Philosophy in Review in a book review of Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity , edited by Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson.
Heartfelt thanks go to Professor John Van Buren for his guidance and mentorship over the years, for helping me become a scholar, and for going above and beyond the call of duty to help me bring this project to completion. I am deeply indebted to Professor Michael E. Zimmerman, whose work shaped my own and who supported me in this project before we had even met. I also want to thank Paul McNellis, S.J., for first introducing me to philosophy; the philosophy departments at Fordham University and Boston College; my colleagues and friends Eleanor Helms, David Zoller, Adam Konopka, and Shane Wilkins, for being such excellent and supportive conversation partners throughout the years; my old friends Brian Johnson, Patrick Lazarus, Chris King, John Haley, Sean Knight, John Andiola, Jonathan Steets, Kyle Corigliano, Eliza Bent, Tania Rudnitski, and Chris Sterback for keeping me grounded and sane; Sal Giambanco, for unexpected inspiration; and Ronald Tacelli, S.J., for believing in me when it mattered most. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Francis and Susan, for their boundless love and support.
Introduction
N aturalizing Heidegger ? Given that Heidegger is a phenomenologist, and that phenomenology is traditionally opposed to naturalism, any attempt to naturalize Heidegger’s thought might at first seem, to use his own phrase, “a round square and a misunderstanding.” But it all depends on what we mean by naturalism.
My argument in this book is that resources from the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche can help us build a nonreductive naturalism that can support an environmental ethic. But what is a “nonreductive” naturalism? Why should it support an environmental ethic? Why Heidegger? Why Nietzsche? Why both of them together?
To answer these questions, I want to start with a more basic one: Is value natural ? We could phrase the question in other and more precise ways: Are the values we ascribe to nature created or discovered? Do living things value or have value? Do animals? Does nature itself? Though it may be a crude form of the question, it is arguably the basic question of environmental philosophy, and it raises fundamental axiological and metaphysical questions that reach deep into the heart and history of Western thought.
While the question is old, it gains new significance in the modern world and new urgency today. One of the mainsprings of modernity is the emergence of a new conception of nature in the seventeenth century. In the most general sense, this shift from the medieval to the modern is the move from a teleological to a mechanistic conception of nature. In his magisterial study, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science , E. A. Burtt conveys just how seismic this shift truly was:
For the dominant trend in medieval thought, man occupied a more significant and determinative place in the universe than the realm of physical nature, while for the main current of modern thought, nature holds a more independent, more determinative, and more permanent place than man… . For the Middle Ages, man was in every sense the center of the universe… . The entire world of nature was held not only to exist for man’s sake, but to be likewise immediately present and fully intelligible to his mind. Hence the categories in terms of which it was interpreted were not those of time, space, mass, energy, and the like; but substance, essence, matter, form, quality, quantity—categories developed in the attempt to throw into scientific form the facts and relations observed in man’s unaided sense experience of the world and the main uses which he made it to serve. 1
So long as the teleological conception held sway, be it the Greeks’ eternal cosmos or the Christians’ divine creation, the notion that there was a necessary connection between the normative and the natural was generally taken for granted. But with the advent of the mechanistic view, the strength and status of that connection was thrown into serious doubt and has been ever since.
One would have thought that the modern decentering of humanity would be a victory for nature. In a dance, when one partner becomes less self-centered and more aware of and attuned to the other’s movements, the result tends to be better for both. However, it appears that the opposite occurred: the mechanistic worldview enabled humans to exert unprecedented control over nature. Why? Part of the answer may be that in the traditional view, nature was seen as subordinate to humans, but it was still taken to be good. In the modern view, nature is no longer subordinate, but it is no longer seen as good. Morally, the mechanistic universe is neutral and acentric, and so, given our tendencies to preserve and care for ourselves, our kin, and our kind, humans again became the center; the difference was that now, we were armed with new and more powerful tools to manipulate nature to conform to our own ends, whatever they happened to be. With the material constraints of technological immaturity, the moral constraints of something like natural law, and the mental constraints of a teleological vision of nature overcome, we were free to remake nature as we saw fit; and this appears to be more or less what we have done over the last three hundred years.
The basic question takes on new urgency today because we are surrounded by the results of organizing human affairs according to this new conception of nature: the myriad messy health, energy, economic, ecological, atmospheric, moral, and perhaps even spiritual problems we call the environmental crisis. The increasingly conventional wisdom is that to address the environmental crisis we need major changes in personal lifestyles, professional practices, and public policies, and it is often said that these changes demand a change in values. But the challenge to rethink our values entails rethinking the worldview from which they flow. It entails, in other words, rethinking our view of nature and our place within it, and this means reckoning with metaphysics. And it is safe to say that the regnant metaphysical framework of our age is something called “naturalism.”
Naturalism is said in many ways. It could mean “methodological” naturalism, which eschews metaphysical claims and merely purports to study “empirical” phenomena, things that can be observed with the senses or their instrumental extension. It could mean “metaphysical” naturalism, which makes the stronger claim that only such phenomena are real. According to Keith Campbell, “metaphysical naturalism affirms that the natural world is the only real one, and that the human race is not separate from it, but belongs to it as a part… . The natural world is the world of space, time, matter, energy, and causality.” 2 Though naturalism, in this broad sense of materialism, is nothing new—Democritus and Lucretius were, a