The Non- Worldly Grounding of Environmentalism

Lester Embree

 

 

Abstract

 

The approach of the history-oriented “new” philosophy of science is extended to the political movement called “environmentalism”. An empirical model is presented to show that environmentalism is made up of four kinds of purposive efforts, those against pollution and overpopulation and those for preservation of species and conservation of ecosystems, but then these are reduced to two, which are wrong inputting and right out-taking by humans with respect to the environment This model is then examined phenomenologically to explore how believing is justified by evidencing and how justified believing can directly justify valuing and there justify willing against or for such matters.. Finally, the question of how such justification can be ultimate is raised and answered a la Husserl with reference to conscious life in its transcendental or, better, non-worldly status.

 

Keywords: Environmentalism; Empirical model; Population; Action.

 

 

Recent decades in the philosophy of naturalistic science have followed Thomas Kuhn and others in taking the history of science seriously. This is not confined to Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy and even the origin of this new philosophy (Embree, 1984: 215-228) of science has itself come under such history oriented consideration (Brown, 1978). Once one has some insight into how an endeavor actually works, including what goals are pursued in it, one can attempt to discern whether of not what it is about, how it proceeds, etc., are justified and indeed ultimately justified. Or at least it will be less likely one not know what one is talking about. Such an approach can be extended from the small and highly professionalized endeavor of science to the huge and largely amateur endeavor of environmentalism. In the following exposition, an empirical model of recent environmentalism in the United States is offered in the first section, how it can be justified is sketched in the second section, and then how it can be ultimately justified is discussed in the third section.

 

 

A Model of Environmentalism

 

The following model has been built and tested in relation to the teaching of four Freshman Seminars on environmentalism at Florida Atlantic University during the 1992-1995. Some historical work was of course studied, but most of the material considered came from magazines for or friendly to the environmental movement, such as Buzzworm, Science, Scientific American, National Geographic, and World Watch; from magazines and newsletters of environmental organizations such as Audubon Society, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club, news magazines such as The Economist, The Nation, and Newsweek; and from scores of video tapes. Several boxes of excised articles and videos accumulated as the seminar evolved during four years. As this mass of material began growing, the need was felt to ascertain the main issues. After some pondering, these seemed to be four, and subsequent reading, reflecting, and teaching found nothing that did not fit easily under what appear the best labels for them: (1) “pollution,” (2)”overpopulation,” (3)”preservation,” and (4) “conservation.” These four main sets of issues were eventually reduced to two and fit into a basically ecological view of the interaction of a species with its environment. For discussion with small groups of beginning college honors students, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1975), and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) worked well for the first three issues, magazine articles were used for the fourth, and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971) was used to pull everything together. These are of course popularly written classics in the recent American discussion of environmentalism. One is hardly an educated person today if one has not read these books. The model of the four issues held up to such an extent that it has been initialized for mnemonic purposes into “POPC” (pronounced as “popsy”). A few comments about these issues from the seminar context may not be amiss here. Pollution of course signifies dirtying or contaminating and includes spiritual pollution among its connotations. Young humans easily recognize the folly of fouling one’s own nest, as do the young of many species, and American college students today are well along in deepening this insight. Problems come when one tries to consider large areas, the planet even, as the nest and seeks to teach corporations not to foul it. Carson’s book shows the impact on wildlife of misapplied chemical pesticides. One goes on easily from there to physical pollution involving asbestos in construction, heavy metals in soil, tetraethellead in the air, nuclear power plant waste with a 70,000 year half life, etc. Interesting cases of biological pollution include the introduction of exotic organisms, e.g., the melaleuca tree and the Australian pine into Florida. Pollution is the putting of stuff into an ecosystem that it is difficult or impossible for that system to process.

The issue of overpopulation tends to focus on homo sapien sapiens. Some believe that the current ca. 6,000,000,000 humans is already three times what Earth can sustain. Fantasies by economists about how rapid modernization could compensate for the population explosion are difficult to believe. Charming complications include how the taste for meat in the wealthy north has the sheer weight of cattle, pigs, etc. exceeding that of humans on the planet and the crops that might have fed starving humans in the poor south being used to grow meat for export. It is a teacher’s delight to see bright students ask if human overpopulation is not actually another form of pollution in the above definition. So much of this stuff directly and indirectly degrades the ecosphere into which it is put. Overpopulation seems only to deserve separate consideration because it is plausibly the worst form of pollution and its causal connections with other forms, e.g., smog, are relatively easily traced. Students can be assured that Earth will survive, although the future of the species highest on the food chain seems less sure, but then maybe she would be better off without the most ecologically disruptive of her species. And it is not easy to get nations that became rich through exploiting poor nations and whose populations now grow very slowly to help poor nations with population control.

Preservation can be comprehended as focused on more or less wild ecosystems. Leopold’s description of nature changing through the seasons of the year are amazing and delightful for Florida students who only experience only one change of season, which starts when the tourists fly down from the north. Students in southeast Florida are happy neither about the sickness of the Everglades to their west nor about the dying coral reef system to their east. The intrinsic value and rights of organisms not to die out at the rate of ninety species a day was easily recognized by the sample of college students observed.

Conservation might be defined as taking no more stuff from an ecosystem than it can spare. Its opposite is squandering and the fact that Americans consume five times more than other Earthlings is upsetting for students to contemplate. “The Three R’s of Environmentalism,” i.e., Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, structured the fourth phase of the seminar. Students readily grasped that if we reduced what we take out of the environment, there will be less eventually to go back in and that reusing and then recycling mean even less taken out and put back in. Furthermore, just as overpopulation is a form of pollution, preservation of wilderness is a form of the conservation of resources. Figure 1 summarizes the POPC model:

 

(Figure 1)

               Wrong and Right Human Action on the Environment Pollution Clean Disposal

Pollution	Clean Disposal
Overpopulation	Population Control
Extinction	Preservation
Squandering	Conservation

 

 

Environmentalism comes down to right and wrong out taking and inputting of stuff, conservation (preservation included) being right out taking and pollution (overpopulation included) being wrong inputting. These are activities of humans, who make up the most disruptive species in the ecosphere, but also the one with the greatest potential for selfunderstanding and selfmodification of behavior.

 

 

The Reflective Justification of Environmental Action

 

Environmentalism is a popular political movement involving many million Americans. There is some national leadership by ten major organizations to which masses of people belong by paying dues and getting magazines, but the long term hope lies in vast numbers of small local groups because, while there are large problems that need big studies and federal laws, most of the concrete problems of pollution and preservation are, as ecology would lead one to expect, local.

Environmentalism is of course considered correct by those engaged in it, but it can still be examined with respect to its justification. After all, there are even some philosophers who wonder if we are justified in believing that the world exists. The attempt to discern if environmentalism is justified can be done phenomenologically and as such it can be done in two stages, which can be called prephilosophical and philosophical according to whether the justification does or does not strive to be ultimate. That the attempt to discern the justification of environmentalism can be done phenomenologically signifies that one relies upon reflectively observing, analyzing, and describing the effort as it is an encountering directed at objects and, correlatively, on objects as encountered by it. Husserlian phenomenologists call this noeticonoematic reflection. Most phenomenologists begin from their own individual or personal lives and emphasize cognition, but it is possible to reflect on the communal action of a group and to do so whether or riot one belongs to that group. A multimillion person political movement like environmentalism is a group in this signification. Here one reflects through representational awareness involved in reading texts, including the popular and semipopular literature characterized above. Analysis can be practiced in various ways. When the concern is specifically with justification, the analysis is in terms of what can be called a “stack” of components in the encountering process and their correlates in the objects as encountered. This analysis can be described briefly. (See Figure 2)

 

encountering │ encountered

Action, willing, or praxis │││

Evaluation or the pathic│││

Believing or the doxic │││

Awareness, observation, etc. │││

 

 

The generic expression “encountering” can be specified according to the component of interest predominating in a given case, so that there are volitional encounterings, evaluative encounterings, doxic encounterings, and observational encounterings, “encountering” not having the reflexive connotation that “experience” and consciousness have. And correlative to the encountering there is the object as encountered, which can be qualified as volitionally encountered, evaluationally encountered, etc., the uses, values, belief characters, and manners of givenness, etc., of the objects as encountered being then also reflectively discernable. All four abstractly distinguished strata are included in every concrete encountering and all four kinds of characteristics can be discerned in every concrete object as encountered, although—again —different components are of interest or predominate on different attitudes. To relate environmentalism to this “stack,” pollution, for example, is the object of negative environmental action. One acts against it. One seeks at least to reduce the inputting of stuff into the ecosystem such that the system can receive it without damage to itself. Negative action is in general a predominantly volitional encountering. Reflective observation can discern the component of striving within the negative action and, correlatively, the ends and means use characteristics in the object as encountered. Under, so to speak, the striving component that is most prominent in encounterings called actions, there is a stratum best called valuing. This analytically discernible component can be positive or negative and, correlatively, pollution, for example, is bad, more is worse, less is better, etc. There is thus occasion for a reflective value analysis as well as a reflective endsandmeans analysis and, interestingly, one can observe that there are positive and negative intrinsic and extrinsic values parallel to positive and negative ends and means.

Delving deeper, one can reflectively discern a stratum within action of believing and, correlatively, causal connections of objects as believed in. Causal connections are not the only matters that can be believed in, but they are central for the belief stratum in practical life. Finally, and at the bottom of any practical encountering, there is always some sort of awareness, including the observation that can justify believing. But how does phenomenological justification work, if at all? Many who ponder such matters are prepared to accept that observation might justify believing. This is the core of traditional British Empiricism, which accepted mental processes—here called encounterings—as observable, and also positivism, which did not; phenomenology uses this principle to include not only encountering but also ideal objects, e.g., propositional forms, as observable. Many researchers are also probably prepared to accept that valuing might be able to justify willing. Thus, if one is eating strawberry ice cream and asked for a reason, “Because I like it” counts as a sensible response. Few, however, seemed disposed to take seriously the thesis that justified believing might justify valuing. There ‘seem to be too many cases to adduce against this principle and reference to how difficult it is to overcome habits, habits of believing about relations between believing and valuing included, is rarely persuasive. Nevertheless, one might consider that if an existing belief in a causal connection, e.g., between an apple eaten a day and the doctor kept away, is undermined, e.g., it is shown that apples cause cancer, then apples would no longer be extrinsically valued by us in relation to our own intrinsically valuable health and we would cease using apples as means to health as an end. Would we not consider such a change in feeding habits justified basically by the revised belief about a causal connection? For positive action, e.g., to preserve wilderness, if we have observational evidencing that wolves will make an ecosystem healthier, we are right to believe in that causal connection. And if we rightly value healthier ecosystems intrinsically and thus causes of health extrinsically, then we are right to will the restoring the wolves. It is not the aim of the present section to defend this analysis of how environmental actions can be justified. Some efforts in that direction have been made elsewhere. The purpose here is to show how a reflective analysis of the justification of positive and negative environmental action might be done. Some efforts in that direction have been made elsewhere (Embree, 1995: 51-66).

 

 

Ultimate Justification

 

Assuming that an analysis of justification of the sort just sketched for environmentalism stands up to examination by means of further reflective observation and analysis of the pertinent matters themselves, how might it be considered prephilosophical? Some of Edmund Husserl’s motivation is instructive. After attacking the theory of logic descendent from John Stuart Mill whereby logic was reduced to a subdiscipline of psychology because it was about ideas, which were considered parts of the mind and thus in psychology’s field of inquiry, Husserl described pure logic as a discipline exclusively about the forms that propositions and theories could take. But then, when he went on to describe the processes of thinking and observing in which such objects and forms are constituted, he was accused of relapsing into the psychologism he had just refuted. Somewhat analogously, the above talk about evidencing, believing, valuing, and willing seems psychological or, insofar as collective practical life is concerned, sociological or even a peculiar sort of politics. The above analysis of collective practical action is peculiar or at least distinctive because it focuses on justification rather than causal explanation. But does this focus and also the higher level of analysis and the more general terms deployed suffice to make such a peculiar sociology or political science philosophical? Husserl believed that the positive sciences and philosophy in the emphatic signification of first philosophy are different. In his broad signification, him, philosophy includes the special or positive sciences (second philosophy) as grounded in first philosophy. First philosophy, however, is different from second philosophy because it has no place for unexamined presuppositions. The assumption that conscious life is in the world is such a presupposition, as is also the assumption that the world exists. This is metaphysics in the modern signification whereby Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophia is also called his metaphysical meditations. This line of thinking can also be extended from philosophy of science to the philosophy of environmentalism. For all its status as a reflective analysis and indeed a phenomenological examination of the justification of environmentalism as communal action devoted to clean disposal, population control, wilderness preservation, and resource conservation, the analysis sketched above is still prephilosophical. It is not yet part of phenomenological first philosophy or metaphysics. There are at least two circumstances under which such a justification might be considered fully philosophical, namely: ultimacy and intelligibility. Recourse to a nonworldly ground might make a justification ultimate. One such recourse to a nonworldly grounding of environmentalism is widely recognized. This is in the notion of environmental stewardship. Earth belongs to God and humans are required by God to care for her. A transcendent divinity is the nonworldly ultimate source of justification. For many, even the existence of the world is grounded in its Creator, who alone exists absolutely. Stewardship is plainly an improvement over millennia of biophobic practices, but the nonworldly grounding called stewardship fails to meet the other condition for being fully philosophical. If we believe in God and believe the Bible is from God and if we accept a newer rather than older interpretation of the prescribed tasks for humans with respect to Earth, then we have nonworldly justification for acting against polluting, squandering, etc. But efforts to prove the existence to God have not been successful, the authorship of the Bible might as easily be human as divine, and is the new interpretation really more accurate than the old one? Can we really be sure of our instructions as game keepers and gardeners? Philosophy requires grounds better able to survive examination. An intelligible and thus different nonworldly justification for environmentalism, one that is therefore fully philosophical, can be worked out phenomenologically even though Husserl himself did not allude to the environmentalism of his time (Dominik, 1992). Historically, phenomenology is like Kant’s philosophy, except that unobservable subjective conditions for the possibility of objects are not somehow deduced from forms somehow believed to be imposed on sensuous materials, but are rather matters that are reflectively observable. One can take a phenomenological account and look to the matters themselves that are referred to in it and observe whether they are as alleged. Phenomenology can be revised on the same basis. Dorion Cairns, for example, overcame the epistemological emphasis whereby philosophy culminates in a philosophical knowledge about knowledge rather than ultimately justified action, including action on action (Cairns, 1984: 27-43). If the intelligibility condition for a philosophical grounding can thus in principle be met, the remaining condition concerns the ultimacy of the ground used in grounding environmentalism.

When phenomenology is qualified as “constitutive,” objects as justifiably believed in, valued, and willed are reflectively related to the evidencing, believing, valuing, and willing in which they are intended to. When they are thus considered reflectively, it is possible to distinguish correlative components in the encountering of objects in parallel with those of objects as encountered. But can conscious life serve to ground environmentalism? Now conscious life is, unless a special effort is made, reflectively observed in what Husserl usually calls the natural attitude. It is often better, however, to call this the worldly attitude, if only because such an attitude is originally cultural rather than naturalistic. Conscious life is not only accepted by the reflective observer in this worldly attitude but also accepts itself as part of the world, i.e., as fundamentally located the space, time, and causality of the one nature that is believed to exist in itself. This is so obvious that it should be philosophically suspicious. How else might conscious life be considered? While the rest of the conscious life reflected upon continues to accept itself as worldly, the reflective observer, i.e., the phenomenologist, can suspend or neutralize her own believing in the worldly status of that life. Then her reflective theoretical attitude is reduced from being worldly or “natural” to being transcendental and the world is purified—for her—of its character of being believed by her to exist in itself. What instead appears is a situation consisting of the world as correlate of conscious life and a conscious life that can then be explored as condition of the possibility of the world. If no observable condition beyond conscious life in this role cannot be conceived, then conscious life in this non-worldly status is ultimate. And if the justification of action indirectly by evidencing is reflectively observable in this new attitude, then it is ultimate justification. Husserl went on sometimes to assert that conscious life has a being more fundamental than its being in the world, indeed an absolute being in relation to which the being of the world is relative being, but not all constitutive .phenomenologists accept this ontology. It is difficult to see how Husserl’s position might be the case when positive being is the correlate of positive believing and the best one might have when refraining, i.e., when the being in the world of consciousness life is believed in neither positively nor negatively, is neutral being. One does not have to go along with Husserl about the absolute being of transcendental consciousness. Nevertheless, conscious life is nonworldly while reflected upon in this refraining way and can thus be used in the grounding role that it could not perform when believed part of that which it would be used to ground. The nonworldly grounding of environmentalism centrally includes resisting the great temptation to engage in argumentation, especially causal argumentation. That sort of thinking dominates in everyday and also positive science and disciplined practical life and the number of philosophers who recognize nonargumentative modes of philosophizing is small. Yet if one refrains from argumentation, causal argumentation especially, one can more easily observe, analyze, and describe how action is justified by justified valuing, how justified valuing is justified by justified believing, and how observing in the broad signification, i.e., evidencing, is the final justifier. Such a reflective analysis can be the basis for principles used in argumentation but is not itself a product of argumentation.

Sometimes Husserl seems to say (and often others do read him to say) that conscious life in its nonworldly status is a numerically distinct conscious life, but closer study shows that he is actually referring to one matter that can have two statuses for the reflective investigator-worldly and nonworldly-depending on the attitude one takes up towards it, and on this interpretation his account can be verified phenomenologically. When conscious life is reflected upon refrainingly in the way sketched and is thus neutral for the phenomenologist, it cannot be an assumption used as a premise for arguments to justify anything. But of course phenomenology is not a philosophy that relies fundamentally on argumentation. Formal logic is for phenomenology a special science that can formally unify all knowledge, but it cannot be assumed in the effort to ground itself. The grounding effort is characteristic of “first philosophy” or, in one signification, metaphysics, rather than the “second philosophies” such as logic, physics, sociology, etc. The refraining from accepting the worldliness of conscious life, along with a devotion to thorough intelligibility, is what makes constitutive phenomenological first philosophy possible.

The second philosophies mentioned are positive sciences in that they are naively world accepting sciences, while the first philosophy in question neither accepts the world naively nor attempts to ground the world in part of itself. Practical efforts, such as environmentalism, are also naively worldaccepting and accept themselves as parts of the world. As interested in ultimately grounded justification, however, phenomenological philosophy as first philosophy differs from all “positive” endeavors in questioning rather than unquestioningly accepting the world and the worldliness of conscious life. It is possible phenomenologically to ground and ultimately justify the world and all the worldly disciplines and even some political movements such as environmentalism.

 

 

WORKS CITED

 

Brown, Harold I., 1978. Perception, Theory, Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Cairns, Dorion, 1984. “Philosophy as a Striving toward Universal Sophia in the Integral Sense”, Lester Embree, Lanham, MD, eds., Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America.

Dominick, Raymond, 1992. The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Embree, Lester, 1984. “The History and Phenomenology of Science is Possible”, Stephen Skousgaard, ed., Phenomenology and Human Destiny, Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America.

Embree, Lester, 1995. “Phenomenology of Action for Ecosystemic Health or How to Tend One’s Own Garden”, Don E. Marietta Jr. and Lester Embree, Lanham, MD, eds., Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism, Rowman & Littlefield.