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1 Ecological philosophy
Descartes and Spinoza
I view philosophy as a basic intellectual inquiry such that the conclusions one reaches within it should properly branch out into a total vision of the world in which man finds himself and of how he should conduct himself there.
(T. L. S. Sprigge, Chair of Logic and Metaphysics, University of Edinburgh, Inaugural Lecture, November 1980: Sprigge 1980, 39)
The ‘Study of Nature’, writes the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) in his Essay concerning Human Understanding,
… if rightly directed, may be of greater benefit to Mankind, than the Monuments of exemplary Charity, that have at so great Charge been raised, by the Founders of Hospitals and Alms-houses. He that first invented Printing; discovered the Use of the Compass; or made publick the Virtue and right Use of Kin Kina, did more for the propagation of Knowledge; for the supplying and increase of useful commodities; and saved more from the Grave, than those who built Colleges, Work-houses, and Hospitals.
(Essay 4.12.12)
The sentiment expressed here was by no means peculiar to Locke. The overriding motivation of early modern natural philosophy was the betterment of the human condition, conceived as progress. And undoubtedly the tremendous medical and technological developments made possible by the advances in our scientific understanding of the natural world that the early moderns set in train have, in the developed nations at least, significantly increased human wellbeing in terms of better health and longer life expectancy, more leisure time and other life-enhancing advantages. Nevertheless, such benefits have exacted a high cost. The radical philosophical, cultural and scientific developments of the early modern and Enlightenment periods are often seen as a turning point in humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Overturning the old mediæval order and heralding a world-view that continues to inform our understanding of what it means to be human and of the place of human beings in the world, this period – considered by some as the beginning of the Anthropocene1 – is regarded as the historical root of human alienation from nature that has nourished destructive practices and contributed to current social and environmental crises.2 As well as the global physical threats to human and nonhuman species from the degradation of the natural environment brought about through the polluting and climate-changing effects of overzealous industrialization and affluent lifestyles, recent research has established strong correlations between our sense of human alienation from the rest of nature and incidences of depression, suicide, juvenile delinquency, petty and violent crime, and other psychological and social disorders that plague the modern world.3
Cartesian dualism
Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton are just some of the philosophers and scientists whose contributions to the remarkable historical phenomenon known as the early modern scientific revolution utterly changed human understanding of the natural world. Generalizing broadly, the explanation of macroscopic natural phenomena solely in terms of the extension, size, figure and motion – the primary qualities – of elementary particles or corpuscles was the common goal. However, it is Descartes who is most often identified as the key player in the development of the conception of nature as nothing more than a physical machine, devoid of any psychical or mental characteristics. It was he who provided the philosophical justification for the mathematical conception of bodies as measurable and quantifiable, arguing that body is essentially res extensa. Extension, or extendedness in length, breadth and depth, is the ‘principal attribute’ of physical matter (Principles of Philosophy, Pt 1, §53: AT VIIIA 25; CSM I 210). Conceived thus, bodies are purely passive objects, devoid of feeling or activity. They function only as mechanical machines, subject entirely to deterministic rules of motion and laws of nature. Animals, trees, plants and even the bodies of humans differ from the inanimate artefacts of human construction only in their origin. The natural machines that God creates no more experience feelings or sensations than do the clocks, pumps and other machines that humans devise. Although Descartes attributes sensations such as hunger and joy to animals, these are given a purely physiological description. Hunger consists in nothing more than a contraction of the muscles in the stomach. Animal joy is interpreted only as the movement of particles from the heart to the brain (Cottingham 1998, 231–233).4 There is nothing here to suggest that Descartes thought that animals were capable of experiencing the world around them as a world of olfactory, tactile and other sensory qualities.
The removal of conscious or sensory experience from the world of natural things opens the way for fully fledged Cartesian dualism and its separation of rational, human minds from material bodies, including their own. As res cogitans, mind is an immaterial, active, free being whose essence or nature is constituted by the principal attribute, thought, or thinking (Principles of Philosophy, Pt 1, §53: AT VIIIA 25, CSM I 210). Essentially thinking, perceiving, experiencing and nonextended beings, minds are the exact antitheses of extended, unthinking bodies. This radical incommensurability of mind as thinking substance and body as extended substance entails that the essence of body can be known clearly and distinctly – and truly, since clarity and distinctness were taken as marks of truth – without invoking any reference whatsoever to features of the mind. Conversely, the essence of mind can be known, again clearly and distinctly, without the need to refer to any of the characteristics of body. This in turn forms the basis for Descartes’ argument that mind and body are really (not merely conceptually) distinct entities (Principles of Philosophy, Pt 1, §60: AT VIIIA 28; CSM I 213). On the assumption that God can create whatever he clearly and distinctly perceives – or in secular terms, on the assumption that whatever is logically conceivable is possible – it follows that God could create minds without also creating bodies and vice versa, could create bodies without creating any minds. In other words, mind and body can, at least in theory if not in actual practice, exist separately from one another.
Not without reason, therefore, did Genevieve Lloyd identify Cartesian dualism as a major contributor to the tragic alienation of humans from nature.5 Indivisible, immaterial minds are exempted from the mutability and corruption to which divisible, physical bodies are liable, and thus the mind’s possible disembodied immortality is secured. Even in the world of nature, where minds coexist in substantial union with their bodies, minds are afforded special status on the ground that they are capable of rational thought and of attaining knowledge of eternal truths and of God. Theoretically, these truths would still be intellectually accessible even if the body normally attached to the mind didn’t exist. Indeed, even if the entire material world were to cease, still the mind could in principle discover the eternal truths. The late Val Plumwood considered such ‘rationalist rationality’ as ‘deeply anti-ecological’ for it monologically and irrationally refuses to acknowledge the material nature on which it depends. Privileged, but disembedded, Cartesian monological reason is conducted at such a high level of abstraction that it is incapable of engaging with ‘the “chaotic” material, bodily, ecological and social order’ (Plumwood 2002, 18–20 passim).
From the privileging of the rational mind, it is a short, though not inevitable, step to the devaluing of the material and the placing of it beyond the circle of human ethical concern. While some have proposed in recent years that the ‘other’ be granted moral status precisely because of its ‘otherness’,6 Cartesianism veers towards a Platonist devaluation of the physical and a tendency to reduce the natural world to the status of an ‘other’ whose value is measured only in terms of its instrumental value to the human. Descartes himself evinces a disconcerting ambivalence towards the natural world. His personal preference is towards disengagement with his environment and from the people, animals and other living and nonliving things found there. He confides in a letter to his friend Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac that the ‘bustle of the city no more disturbs my daydreams than would the rippling of a stream’ (to Balzac, 5 May 1631: AT I 203; CSM III 31) and confesses that when he walks around the streets of Amsterdam, ‘I pay no more attention to the people I meet than I would to the trees in your [Balzac’s] woods or the animals that browse there’ (to Balzac, 5 May 1631: AT I 203; CSM III 31). When he does pay attention, his focus is on the instrumental value that others have with respect to his own comfort and desires. In further confidence to Balzac, he confesses to the pleasure he feels from seeing his own needs being satisfied.
Whenever I reflect upon the doings of passers-by I get the same sort of pleasure as you [Balzac] get when you watch the peasants tilling your fields, for I can see that all their work serves to enhance the beauty of the place I live in, and to supply all my needs. Whenever you have the pleasure of seeing the fruit growing in your orchards and of feasting your eyes on its abundance, bear in mind that it gives me just as much pleasure to watch the ships arriving, laden with all the produce of the Indies and all the rarities of Europe.
(To Balzac, 5 May 1631: AT I 203–204; CSM III 31–32)
This letter paints a picture of Descartes as a singularly solitary figure, preferring his own company to that of his fellow human beings or animals. There is nothing amiss in that, but the letter also hints at a less than salubrious self-centredness in Descartes’ delight in the activities of other human beings on account of the commodities their efforts provide for him. The same attitude is extended even to nature’s country streams and secluded valleys. These too, it seems, are valued for their utilitarian capacity to safeguard Descartes’ solitude by making even ‘the greatest talkers fall into reveries’ or ‘transport them into ecstasies’, for whether in reverie or ecstasy, the would-be vociferous fall silent (to Balzac, 5 May 1631: AT I 203; CSM III 31).
Nevertheless, Descartes was fascinated by the mechanical operation of natural processes, seeking out the secrets hidden in matter and publishing the results of his enquiries in scientific treatises, such as The World, The Optics, Treatise on Man, Description of the Human Body and The Passions of the Soul. The same delight in exploring the intricate workings of the natural world is found in Descartes’ follower, the Oratorian priest Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), who found in nature evidence of the wisdom and omnipotence of God. ‘[T]hose who have used only their eyes’, he wrote, ‘have never seen anything so beautiful, so fitting, or even so magnificent in the houses of the greatest princes as what can be seen with magnifying glasses on the head of a simple fly’ (Search after Truth, Bk 1, ch. 6: Malebranche 1979–92, I 64; LO 31). All the same, neither Descartes nor Malebranche offers us any explanation as to why God created the physical world at all. Descartes, for instance, merely asserts that ‘Nature’ teaches him that he has a body with which his mind is substantially united and that God would not have deceived him with respect to his belief that his sense perceptions are representations of an actually existing world (Meditation 6: AT VII 80–81; CSM II 55–56). However, neither of these assertions explains why God did not create only minds and their perceptions, without also creating any actual material bodies to which their perceptions correspond. God could have ensured that ‘Nature’ taught Descartes that bodies were merely figments of his imagination. All in all, the existence of bodies appears rather futile in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche. Both contend that minds alone are capable of experiencing pain or pleasure. Nonhuman animals, lacking souls, are only physical machines: arrangements of extended, figured, moving parts, more complex than, but analogous to, the machines that humans design and construct. Since animal machines feel no more pain that does a clock, we may with clear consciences, investigate and dissect them even as their hearts beat and their bodies move.7
The Cartesian picture of the natural world was taken forward in the latter half of the seventeenth century by Locke. In his hands, the distinction between the primary qualities of extension, figure, shape, motion and bulk of elementary particles and the phenomenal secondary qualities of bodies, such as their colour, feel, odour, sound and taste, was philosophically grounded, with explanation of the latter in terms of the former established as the most epistemologically viable hypothesis.8 Although he himself espoused dualism, Locke’s philosophy was instrumental in the formation of eighteenth-century materialism both in Britain and France.9 The basic Cartesian–Lockean model by which natural phenomena are to be explained by reference to the motion, number, size and shape of these interacting extended, solid, but essentially lifeless, particles remains with us today, whether it be in physicalism’s reductionist attempts to understand consciousness entirely in terms of the chemistry of the human brain or the physical and biological sciences’ reductionist attempts to understand life as an emergence from nonliving, nonexperiencing molecules and subatomic or elementary particles. And just as Descartes showed little inclination to try to imagine how the world might appear from the perspective of the ‘passers-by’ in the streets of Amsterdam, so too, barring some notable recent exceptions,10 physicists and other natural scientists even today appear disinclined to contemplate the possibility that there might be something that, to coin a phrase from Timothy Sprigge and Thomas Nagel,11 ‘it is like to be an atom, an electron, a quark …’, to experience the world from those perspectives.12
One might have expected that materialist philosophies, placing everything on the body, would value the physical above all. However, with the expulsion of the psychical from ground-level ontology, the human body has come to be viewed as a purely physical machine and the task of explaining our minds’ emotions, value judgments, spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities taken up by neuroscientists working on the assumption that the psychical dimensions of our being are in principle reducible to physical states of the body or of the brain. The mind’s conscious thoughts, emotions and sensations, its religious and aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth are seen as emerging, in a manner not yet fully understood, from the physical complexity that is the microphysical world of insensate matter. The richness of experienced life in all its social and spiritual complexity is thus subordinated to the physical and material that is consequently disenchanted and under threat of devaluation on account of its lifelessness.13
As an antidote to the Cartesian dualist and materialist–physicalist perspectives, ecological philosophers have been encouraged by earlier panpsychist philosophies, such as those expounded by Spinoza and Whitehead, that attribute equal ontological status to the physical as to the psychical. For the remainder of this chapter, we pay tribute to Spinoza and consider the influential role of his philosophy in the work of deep ecologist, Arne Naess.14
Spinoza
Spinoza’s...
