The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization

A manifesto for the future

Arran Gare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138597396
• eBook ISBN: 9781134866137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched 'scientism', has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and democracy undermined. The resultant trajectory towards global ecological destruction appears inexorable, and neither governments nor environmental movements have significantly altered this, or indeed, seem able to. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization is a wide-ranging and scholarly analysis of this failure.

This book reframes the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization.

1 The ultimate crisis of civilization

Why turn to philosophy

This book supports, further articulates and advances a new vision of the future that, I believe, has the potential to unite humanity to overcome the greatest crisis it has ever had to confront, the immanent destruction of the current regime of the global ecosystem. This is the regime of which humanity is part, in which it has co-evolved with other species and produced a stable interglacial period that, for 10,000 years, has been ideal for humans. This is the period in which civilizations have emerged and flourished, and which maintains the conditions for their existence. It has become clear that to continue on our present path will accelerate ecological destruction until massive environmental changes, for instance a runaway greenhouse effect, will bring about a switch from one global ecosystem regime to another that will render human life in most of the presently populated world all but impossible, just as overfishing of cod around Newfoundland produced a switch that has all but eliminated cod (Holling, 2010). Such regime changes are increasingly common, with an almost total collapse of ocean ecosystems expected over the next 50 years. It can and is likely to happen to the global ecosystem unless there is a drastic change of direction of civilization (Gare 2014a). The possibility of such regime changes are conceptualized in complexity theory as bifurcations, or more dramatically, as catastrophes. Conceived as ‘tipping points’, this is the main focus of research of Germany’s leading climate scientist, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who on the basis of his research published a paper titled ‘Global Warming: Stop Worrying, Start Panicking?’ (2008). It is inconceivable that ruling elites do not know that failing to deal with greenhouse gas emissions poses a threat to the lives of billions of people. It appears that many members of the new global ruling class who dominate the politics of nations tacitly accept climate destabilization as a Darwinian mechanism for culling excess human population, possibly serving as a weapon of mass destruction against Asians, with other vulnerable regions such as much of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Brazil and Australia being collateral damage. Spencer Weart in The Discovery of Global Warming (2016), has provided a continually updated hypertext explaining the advances in climate science showing why we face this threat.

If in two hundred years there has not been a catastrophic collapse of the current global ecosystem with all the complexity of its life, along with most of the world’s human population, and people are living civilized lives, living in ways that augment rather than undermine the resilience of their ecosystems, it will be because there will have been a major cultural, social and economic transformation of the whole of humanity (Klein 2014; Kovel, 2007). The destructive dynamics of globalized capitalism with its intensive and extensive expansion of commodification, its managerialism, its consumerism, its debasement of culture, its corruption of public institutions, pulverization of communities and subversion of democratic processes, its plundering of public assets, concentration of wealth, income and power in the hands of the global corporatocracy, and the domination of people and nations by transnational corporations imposing and then manipulating market forces, will have been overcome. For this to have been achieved, a new vision of the future will have captured people’s imaginations and inspired them to struggle for and achieve what two centuries earlier had appeared so unimaginable, where as one person observed, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Jameson 2003, p.76). While there are several contenders for this, the only vision at present to have this potential is the vision put forward by radical Chinese environmentalists and embraced at least in principle by the Chinese government, first as a goal of government policy in 2007, and in 2012, written into their constitution, the vision of an ecological civilization (Gare 2012a).

It is also becoming clear that what is standing in the way of articulating this vision and effecting this transformation are deep assumptions about humanity, its place in nature and its destiny inimical to such a future. These assumptions are embedded in and are continually reproduced not only by proponents of neoliberalism, neoconservatism and scientism, but by our institutions and forms of life, and are placed beyond questioning by the fragmentation of intellectual culture, making it almost impossible to comprehend the forces at work in modern societies and how their oppressive and destructive dynamics could be overcome. Only instrumental knowledge, the categories of economics, power politics, Darwinism and social Darwinism, are taken seriously. We live in a culture where, as Ulrich Beck aptly put it: ‘Concepts are empty: they no longer grip, illuminate or inflame. The greyness lying over the world … may also come from a kind of verbal mildew’ (Beck 2000, p.8).

Individuals from all spheres of life and from a variety of academic disciplines are beginning to question these assumptions and are struggling against this intellectual fragmentation. Fighting this verbal mildew, some are turning to philosophy. This includes ecologists. As David Abram observed almost twenty years ago:

The ecological crisis may be the result of a recent and collective perceptual disorder in our species, a unique form of myopia which it now forces us to correct. For many … the only possible course of action is to begin planning and working on behalf of the ecological world which they now discern. And yet ecological thinking is having a great deal of trouble taking root in the human world – it is still viewed by most as just another ideology; meanwhile, ecological science remains a highly specialized discipline circumscribed with a mostly mechanistic biology. Without the concerted attention of philosophers, ecology lacks a coherent common language adequate to its aims; it thus remains little more than a growing bundle of disparate facts, resentments, and incommunicable visions.

(Abram 1996, p.82)

Traditionally, philosophers concerned themselves with the major problems confronting their civilizations, struggling to overcome one-sided, fragmented forms of thinking that had led to disasters, enabling people to find meaning in their lives whatever the circumstances while providing them with the means to orient themselves to create the future. Philosophers are (or were) the ‘physicians of culture’, as Nietzsche observed. Philosophy was not just one discipline among others. It was the transdiscipline that questioned the assumptions and interrogated the values and claims to knowledge of all other disciplines, revealing their significance in relation to each other, integrating their insights, asking new questions and opening up new paths of inquiry and action. In accordance with its origins in Ancient Greece, the goal of philosophy was to provide the foundations for an integrated understanding of the cosmos and the place of humanity within it through which people could define their ultimate ends. It had the responsibility for engaging with the broader culture and its problems and contradictions, for investigating the relationship between culture, society and civilization, and for working out how people could and should live and how society could and should be organized. It was also an end in itself, the culmination and affirmation of the spirit of free inquiry urged by curiosity to question all received methods, beliefs and institutions in its passionate quest to understand the universe and achieve wisdom. For such reasons, as Karl Jaspers (1993, 144) interpreted Friedrich Schelling: ‘Philosophy must enter into life. That applies not only to the individual but also to the condition of the time, to history and to humanity. The power of philosophy must penetrate everything, because one cannot live without it’. Philosophy was central to the formation of individuals and society, and it was the core of the university.

The crisis of philosophy and the humanities

What those who turn to philosophy looking for guidance find, however, is that except in rare instances, philosophers who have the privileged conditions provided by universities to address this greatest of all challenges, have redefined philosophy. In Anglophone countries in particular they have transformed it into a multiplicity of subdisciplines and specializations that exclude the questions that challenged the greatest philosophers of the past and exclude engagement with the greatest challenges of the present as unscholarly. Environmental philosophy, usually characterized as environmental ethics, has been channeled into a minor sub- sub-discipline where, even if radical positions are adopted, they are impotent. Philosophy as a whole has continued its trajectory from the early Twentieth Century, where Robin Collingwood (1939) lamented, philosophers were producing ‘a philosophy so scientific that no-one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it, and so abstruse that only a whole-time student, and a very clever man at that, could understand it’ (p.51) while at the same time they were claiming philosophy as ‘a preserve for professional philosophers, and were loud in their contempt of philosophical utterances by historians, natural scientists, theologians, and other amateurs’ (p.50). Turning their backs on ethics, political philosophy and even epistemology, they reveled in the uselessness of philosophy. The consequences of this are with us in the present. As John Cottingham observed:

Philosophy is among the fastest-growing A-level subjects in Britain. This suggests that despite the pressure from governments to increase the teaching of technical, career oriented subjects, a lot of sixth-formers have a stubborn interest in more traditional enquiries about the meaning of life. … But frustration often ensues as the aspiring philosophy student climbs higher. The university study of philosophy in the anglophone world now offers little by way of a grand synoptic vision of human life and our place in the scheme of things. Instead, the subject has fragmented into a host of highly technical specialisms, whose practitioners increasingly model themselves on the methods of the natural sciences. By the time they reach graduate studies, most students will be resigned to working within intricate, introverted ‘research’ programmes, whose wider significance they might be hard pressed to explain to anyone outside their special area.

(Cottingham 2011, p.25)

Effectively, mainstream academic philosophers in Anglophone countries are proselytizing a debilitating, passive nihilism while denigrating and censuring any questioning of this nihilism, either from professional philosophers or anyone else, undermining not only philosophy but the humanities, the arts, universities, education, democracy and civilization, and the capacity of humanity to deal with the threats that are now facing it. Perversely, professional philosophers have aligned philosophy with anti-intellectualism and anti-intellectuals.

The contention of this manifesto is that the resurrection of philosophy, and along with it the humanities, the liberal arts and genuine science, will only be achieved by reviving natural philosophy. So, as well as being a manifesto for ecological civilization, this is also a manifesto for natural philosophy, or more precisely (distinguishing it from the naturalism of analytic philosophers), for speculative naturalism. This is the philosophy required to redefine the nature of humanity and its place in nature and the cosmos, to support, integrate and further develop disciplines and professions which have defied the fragmentation, overspecialization and dogmatism of current intellectual inquiry, to open the way to a post-nihilist culture. Only in this way can we achieve a comprehensive understanding of our current situation, open new horizons and enable people to envisage a future in which they will not be in a permanent state of economic insecurity and will have the liberty to augment rather than undermine the conditions for life, and to orient them to battle successfully for this future.

Speculative naturalism is distinguished both from the kind of philosophy that eschews speculation and focuses entirely on critical analysis, and from Idealism. Idealism developed largely as a reaction to the Cartesian/Hobbesian/Newtonian cosmology forged in the scientific revolution of the Seventeenth Century, while critical analysis developed as a reaction against Idealism. While eschewing speculation does not imply support for Newtonian cosmology, or support for speculative philosophy imply support for Idealism, in recent decades there has been a strong tendency to assume these linkages. The dominant figures in the tradition of critical analysis, or analytic philosophy as it is now called, particularly in the USA and other Anglophone countries, have vigorously upheld a reductionist naturalism based on largely Newtonian assumptions (without being aware of this), and defended the claims of mainstream science to be able to extend its methods to explain every aspect of reality, including human consciousness. That is, in the tradition of positivism and logical positivism, they have defended ‘scientism’, the view that science has a monopoly on the methods required to acquire and accumulate genuine knowledge, including defining what is genuine knowledge. Despite analytic philosophy itself originating in Austria and Germany, philosophy that is not analytic and naturalist tends to be labeled ‘continental philosophy’, with the usually tacit assumption that ‘continental’ philosophers (many of them in Anglophone countries) are continuing a tradition of philosophical thinking that upholds intuitions, claims to knowledge or forms of reasoning that transcend any naturalistic or scientific explanation. In doing so, it is upholding some form of Idealism. This is evident in the recent histories of continental philosophy by Braver (2007) and Redding (2009), both of which characterize continental philosophy as Idealist. At its worst, Idealism is seen to be speculative. Speculative naturalism not only brings into question the correlation between these oppositions but rejects this categorization as the root cause of the paralysis, trivialization and marginalization of philosophy, and along with this, the undermining of the arts and the humanities and the entrenchment of nihilistic assumptions of mainstream reductionist science in the broader culture and society. Acting on these nihilistic assumptions is now producing effects that threaten the future of democracy, civilization, humanity and the current regime of the global eco-system. Alive to these threats, speculative naturalists, many of them eminent scientists and mathematicians, are concerned to revive and reinstate ‘philosophy’ as the quest for a comprehensive understanding of humanity and its place in nature to challenge and replace the prevailing world-view, to overcome this nihilism and to avoid a global eco-catastrophe.¹

On the surface of it, the generality of the categories defining these oppositions and the difficulty of categorizing all philosophers in terms of these opposition would make such strong claims, and such a strong agenda, highly questionable. World-wide, philosophy in recent decades has been characterized by an immense diversity of ideas and approaches (Habermas1992b). It is possible to point to a whole range of philosophers who cannot be pigeonholed by these categories. This is particularly true of philosophies and philosophers lumped together as ‘continental philosophy’. Paul M. Livingston (2012) argues that poststructuralism has converged with the metalogic of analytic philosophy, while James Bradley (2012) has argued that ‘continental philosophy’ is an Anglo-American invention, and in fact French ‘continental philosophy’ has converged with analytic philosophy in denying any status to subjects. The structuralist reaction led by Claude Lévi-Strauss against neo-Hegelians, phenomenologists and proponents of hermeneutics have almost completely swept aside such Idealist and humanist philosophies, most importantly, the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. According to orthodox structuralism and poststructuralism, the world and human subjects are nothing more than the effects of those functional structures that define their behaviour. While structuralism was a form of reductionism, it was antithetical to the kind of naturalism promoted by Anglophone philosophers. Under the influence of Peirce, Scandinavian analytic philosophy has converged with phenomenology, hermeneutics and semiotics. Marxist philosophers are generally opposed to reductionist naturalism and to speculative Idealism and have developed a range of philosophical positions. Promising developments have included the dialectical critical realism of Roy Bhaskar which has been applied to the problems of dealing with climate change and achieving sustainability (Bhaskar 2010). The recent proponents of ‘speculative realism’ or ‘speculative materialism’ do claim to promote speculative thought while being anti-Idealist, although what they mean by ‘speculative’ is by no means clear (Bryant 2011; Johnston, 2014). This is an anti-Kantian philosophy very different from speculative naturalism. There is also an assertive group of philosophers promoting revolutionary developments within science who are influenced by process metaphysics, complexity theory and Peircian semiotics who do value speculation, although such philosophers are barely tolerated and have only a marginal influence. (Hooker 2011). However, from the perspective defended here, this diversity is symptomatic of the marginalization of philosophy and simply serves to disguise which ideas really dominate, and how speculative naturalism which could effectively challenge the dominant ideas, has been marginalized.

The two cultures and the triumph of scientism

It is not just the overt and explicitly defended views that are the problem, (although these certainly are a major part of the problem), but tacitly held assumptions that constrain the way people think and the way debates are framed, the way disciplines, universities and research institutions are organized, and the way some views are taken seriously by academics, people in power and the broader public, while other, often better defended views, are ignored and then forgotten. The tacitly assumed polar oppositions manifest the deep rooted Cartesian dualism that permeates our culture (Mathews 2003, p.173ff.) This is manifest in the disjunction between mainstream science, as defended by positivists, and the humanities and the arts as defended by Idealists. These are evident in the recurring debates between what C.P. Snow referred to as the two cultures, that of scientists and that of literary intellectuals, Snow’s debate with F.R. Leavis echoing the earlier debate between T.H. Huxley promoting scientific materialism and Mathew Arnold, who was aligned with the British Idealists, which in turn resonated with debates in Germany, France and Italy and the earlier critique by Idealists of Newton and of Goethe by Helmholtz. This opposition is manifest also in the opposition between neo-classical and institutionalist economics, mainstream and humanistic psychology and physical and human geography. It is also manifest in the opposition between orthodox, structuralist and analytical Marxism and Hegelian, phenomenological and humanist Marxism. The tendency to misrepresent philosophies as either analytic, naturalist and aligned with science or ‘continental’, Idealist and aligned with the humanities and the arts is a manifestation of these deeply held assumptions. Philosophies that do not fall on one side or the other of this divide tend to be ignored and marginalized. In all cases, this opposition has upheld a fundamentally flawed understanding of humanity’s place in nature. Because more recent philosophers questioning this divide, such as the speculative realists, are insufficiently radical in their thinking, they have not succeeded in overcoming such tacitly held assumptions and thereby escaping what has become an intellectual ghetto. Only other philosophers read their works.

The outcome of the struggle between these polar oppositions has been the triumph of mainstream reductionist science over the humanities, particularly in Anglophone countries. This is evident in the virtual self-destruction of the humanities in these Anglophone countries in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, legitimated and helped along by both proponents of the American form of analytic philosophy and of French structuralism and post-structuralism. In all cases, despite the differences between them, these developments were really the triumph of scientism. The triumph of analytical and structuralist Marxism over humanist Marxism was also a triumph of scientism over the humanities. While the humanities have not been so completely defeated in France, Germany, Italy and other European countries as in North America, Britain and Australia, the trend towards marginalization of the humanities is clear in these countries...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The ultimate crisis of civilization: why turn to philosophy
• 2 From analytic philosophy to speculative naturalism
• 3 Dialectics: from Marx to post-Marxism
• 4 The dialectics of speculative naturalism
• 5 Reviving the radical enlightenment through speculative naturalism
• 6 From the radical enlightenment to ecological civilization: creating the future
• Conclusion: ecological civilization and ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’
• Bibliography
• Index