wilke sabine.pdf

From natura naturata to natura naturans:

Naturphilosophie and the Concept of Peforming Nature

Sabine Wilke

In their introduction to a collection of essays in environmental philosophy, Bruce V.

Foltz and Robert Frodeman claim that it is time to rethink nature and that today’s

commonly accepted use of the scientific understanding of the environment as the basis

for environmental philosophy needs to be reexamined. Foltz and Frodeman wonder

whether or not it is wise to link philosophical reflection about nature to the findings of

the positive sciences whose results are notoriously subject to revision (see 4-5). Indeed,

the deference to the findings and paradigms of the natural sciences within

environmental circles is noteworthy and should be questioned critically. Most so-called

interdisciplinary approaches to environmental problems take a scientific and problem-

resolution framework. That may be satisfactory for narrowly conceived issues where

immediate resolutions are sought for pressing problems, but as soon as larger cultural

and historical concerns are addressed, a wider and deeper framework is needed such as

embodied in philosophical reflection. Foltz and Frodeman turn to Heidegger and his

claim that modern science is bound up with the modern project of the technological

domination of nature (see 5) and, for that reason alone, cannot be idealized as a neutral

model to guide our thinking of nature. According to Foltz and Frodeman,

phenomenological models (such as Heidegger’s ontology) provide a new and different

“metaphysics” of nature in terms of offering a mode of reflection on the being of nature

that shows itself and withholds itself (see 6). They could have easily turned to other

contemporary critics of modernity such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

who have also formulated a wide-scale critique of the process of enlightenment in the

context of its collapse in fascist Europe and contemporary science’s sell-out to models of

dominating nature. I don’t want to pursue either line of thinking in my essay but rather

work through some alternative philosophical models of rethinking nature that were

developed in response to Kant and that try to conceive of nature not solely in terms of

its object status—as it is commonly viewed in scientific inquiries, but highlight its

capacity for action and for a more subjective form of identity.

With Kant’s Copernican turn, knowledge, action, and judgment were squarely

placed within the constructive and synthetic faculty of the individual human intellect

and its pursuit of freedom. After Kant, modern philosophy can no longer reconcile

theoretical reason and rationality with an all-encompassing metaphysics. Moreover,

practical reason is devoid of direct contact with communal conceptions of life. In fact,

“modern thinking has relentlessly severed the making of aesthetic judgments from the

imitation ( mimesis ) or figural representation of the natural object, from the expression of

moral imperatives and the dictates of political engagement, as well as from

preestablished identities and fixed determinations of the self” (De Vries 1). Kant’s

influential analytic of the sublime in his third critique models this type of critical

thinking by placing the sublime not into natural objects (or by defining the sublime as a

property of natural objects) but as residing in our ideas. Kant claims that:

[. . .] one immediately sees that we express ourselves on the whole incorrectly if

we call some object of nature sublime, although we can quite correctly call very

many of them beautiful; [. . .] We can say no more than that the object serves for

the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind; for what is

properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only

ideas of reason [. . .]. (129)

Kant’s transcendental critique seals modern philosophy’s turn to a philosophy of

subject, which has prompted many environmental critics to shun the tradition of

German Idealism in their rethinking of the relationship between nature and the human

world. In a companion piece to this paper I have presented a thorough analysis of the

eco-critical positions that deal with nature and its presumed unproblematical existence

vis a vis the constructionist position (working through Kant and his modern critics such

as Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse that present a dialectical model for

rethinking nature in more active terms). In essence, dialectical conceptions of nature

address both, the fact that nature “out there” really exists and the fact that it is always

perceived through history and culture. A dialectical notion of nature highlights the

historical, social, and cultural regimes that have produced what we call nature today

without losing sight of the fact that there is a real object beyond these constructions—

just not one we can ever hope to recover and that may not have existed in a primary

state. In this paper I would like to present some philosophical positions from within the

German tradition that have not had much currency in the English-speaking world. I am

thinking of the tradition of Naturphilosophie that understood itself as a needed

counterpart to Kant’s critique of reason and develops further the thinking of natural

objects outside of Kant’s paradigm of transcendentalism. I claim that within German

idealism there is a tradition of thinking about nature that embraces the idea of nature as

active, as a subject-object that should be remembered when raising the issue of

rethinking nature within a context of environmental philosophy. How this tradition

could be made fruitful for today’s discussions will be one of the tasks of my

contribution.

Early on in the discussion of environmental perspectives on culture, Carolyn

Merchant made the claim, coming from an eco-feminist perspective, that the modern

world emerged on the basis of a repression of pre-modern knowledge of nature as

living organism:

In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma and its

connections to science, technology, and the economy, we must reexamine the

formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a

machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature

and women. (xxi)

Merchant presents a detailed account of how, between 1500 and 1700 “the organic

conception of the cosmos gave way to a mechanistic model” (42), how this mechanistic

model was reinforced and how it accelerated the exploitation of nature (and women)

(43), how from then on nature was manipulated by machine technology (68), and how a

new mechanistic order mandated what she calls the “death of nature” (193):

The rise of mechanism laid the foundation for a new synthesis of the cosmos,

society, and the human being, constructed as ordered systems of mechanical

parts subject to governance by law and to the predictability through deductive

reasoning. A new concept of the self as a rational master of the passions housed

in a machinelike body began to replace the concept of the self as an integral part

of a close-knit harmony of organic parts united to the cosmos and society.

Mechanism rendered nature effectively dead, inert, and manipulable from

without. (Merchant 214)

Merchant claims, however, that the organic view of nature did not disappear entirely

with the rise of mechanism, but that it was instead accommodated. She turns to the

Cambridge Platonists of the 1650s and 1660s who advocated a wise use of nature so that

its abundance would not be exhausted, a position that seems similar in many ways to

today’s managerial approach to ecology (see Merchant 252). This organismic

perspective has remained as “an important underlying tension, surfacing in such

variations as the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, American transcendentalism,

the ideas of the German Naturphilosophen, the early philosophy of Karl Marx, the

nineteenth century vitalists, and the work of Wilhelm Reich” (Merchant 288).

Others have pointed to a need of an environmental vision that imagines land as

agent and have emphasized the erotic component of the relation between humans and

the land. Gretchen Legler, for example, wishes to install nature with its own form of

desire and, correctly, points to the fact that Cartesian objectivity rests on reason

separated from the body (see 24). In that same vein, others have theorized a desire for

ecology, a desire for belonging to networks of the land that stems from a loss of unity

with the land (Campbell 135). How could we rethink nature and the environment as a

process rather than as a constant or a given (see Buell, The Environmental Imagination 8)

and how could we grant more agency to nature? Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R.

Wallace encourage us to identify alternative threads in the history of literary and

philosophical attitudes toward nature in the West, threads where nature is granted

more agency (see 9) and where the environment is conceived as an active subject, as an

epistemological category that organizes around itself otherwise unrelated disciplines

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