The Ecological Self

Freya Mathews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000385830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

Environmental disasters, from wildfires and vanishing species to flooding and drought, have increased dramatically in recent years and debates about the environment are rarely far from the headlines. There is growing awareness that these disasters are connected – indeed, that in the fabric of nature everything is interconnected. However, until the publication of Freya Mathews' The Ecological Self, there had been remarkably few attempts to provide a conceptual foundation for such interconnectedness that brought together philosophy and science.

In this acclaimed book, Mathews skilfully weaves together a thought-provoking metaphysics of the environment. She connects the ideas of the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza with twentieth-century systems theory and Einstein's physics to argue that the atomistic cosmology inherited from Newton gave credence to a picture of the universe as fragmented, rather than as whole. Furthermore, it is such faulty thinking that presents human beings as similarly disconnected and individualistic, with the dire consequence that they regard nature as of purely instrumental rather than intrinsic value. She concludes by arguing for an ethics of ecological interdependence and for a basic egalitarianism among living species.

A compelling and fascinating account of how we must change our thinking about the environment, The Ecological Self is a classic of ecological and environmental thinking.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a substantial new Introduction by the author.

1

Atomism and its ideological implications

1. Two Metaphysical Archetypes

As I sit writing this I gaze from time to time out of my study window. My study is in the old quarter of the university, and overlooks a pleasant quadrangle. A magnificent African Cussonia tree dominates the scene, its large sprays of leaves massing layer upon layer right up to the eaves of the sandstone buildings. Yet the leaves are individually delineated, if I take the trouble to pay attention to them—thousands and thousands of them clearly outlined one against another. The blocks of sandstone, too, in the walls of the building opposite, are well-defined, as are the slate tiles that make up the roof. Stray petals from a large blossoming prunus tree just out of view float past the window, dusky pink against the sky. At first I think they are butterflies, but no, they are petals, turning over and over as they find their way to the ground. Through the windows on the opposite side of the quad I can see books standing in line along snatches of shelves, and below, the cracks in the pavement indicating the boundaries of the stone slabs, the individual planks and lengths of metal piping that make up the scaffolding on which a man is standing, chisel in hand. The university is forever engaged in restoration. There are many, many petals lying flattened on the ground.

It is a world of things, objects, individuals—manifold in their forms, variegated in their hues, intricate in their arrangement, yet none the less invariably ultimately individuated. If I look closely enough I can always find the boundaries, the outlines, the petal that has its separate being within the heart of the flower.

Such, at any rate, has been the presupposition of our thinking, of western thought in general, and of our philosophy in particular: that the world is made up of a plurality of discrete individual substances: the world has been viewed, since classical times, as an array of individual objects which are logically mutually independent but bound in a web of causal ties. That this individualistic bias is merely a contingency of our culture is evidenced by the fact that in many human cultures it has been transcended: ideological, or perhaps experiential, factors have inclined these cultures to a flow view of things—the familiar eastern view of the world as a unity in which the appearances of plurality and diversity are no more than ripples on the surface of an oceanic continuum.

The ideological correlates of these two opposing views of the structure of reality will, in this and later chapters, come under scrutiny, and elements of the ideological motivation for the individualism espoused by western culture will be disclosed. It is not within the scope of this book to examine in any detail eastern systems of thought per se, and their ideological origins and implications. But it is my basic aim to articulate, in a purely western idiom and frame of reference, certain insights which, while typically associated with eastern metaphysics, are now germinating independently in western soil.

Individualism, or, as I shall call it, substance pluralism, is a metaphysical archetype, an archetypal representation of the basic structure of the world. It portrays the world as a set of discrete, logically and ontologically autonomous substances. Its rival is the archetype which represents the world as a single universal substance—substance monism. Both of these archetypes are founded on the presupposition that the world is substantival, where by ‘substantival’ I mean that it is ‘substantial’, concrete, that it is not an abstraction or a phantasm, but an actual, physical (though not necessarily material) reality. The notion of substance which is central to both these archetypes then has a double aspect: to qualify as a substance a thing must be substantival, must exist in the concrete as opposed to the merely abstract mode; furthermore it must be capable of so existing independently of any other thing. A substance is a thing which is ontologically autonomous, capable of ‘standing alone’, its identity in no way logically interconnected with the identities of other things—all others could fail to exist without this in any way affecting the identity of the substance in question. It is in this sense that a substance is capable of ‘standing alone’—it is capable of existing in an otherwise empty possible world. To say what a given substance essentially is, which is to say, to identify it, thus involves no reference to other substances.

Substances may be simple or compounded out of other, constituent substances. A simple substance is one which cannot be divided into parts which themselves qualify as substances. A simple substance is necessarily an ontological unity: it is indivisible. Simple substances may be considered the units of substantival reality.

Individual substances are, clearly, to be distinguished from logical individuals in general. A logical individual is anything that can be picked out as a logical subject of predication: instances would include not only ordinary material objects, but waves, properties, states, styles and abstract entities such as numbers and sets. Since material objects, as ordinarily understood, are logically though not causally mutually independent, they would appear paradigmatically to satisfy the criterion of ontological independence. Provided the logical possibility of a closed material system, for example a particle in inertial motion, is allowed, no additional problem attends the logical possibility of a universe consisting of just that particle. Such a particle qualifies for substance status. Contrast this apparent autonomy of material objects with the ontological status of other logical individuals. However: a particular wave crest could not exist independently of the wave, or the field, which subtends it. Particular properties cannot achieve instantiation in isolation, but only in nexes, so properties do not satisfy the criterion of logical autonomy. Nor do states, since the states of systems cannot be actualized independently of systems. And styles could scarcely be realized in a universe from which their exemplifiers were absent. On the face of it then, the candidate most likely to succeed in the substance stakes is the material body.

In accordance with these considerations, the substance-pluralism archetype tends to be read as an ontology of material bodies. The complex substances are the macro-bodies of the sensible realm, the simple substances are the indivisible units of which these bodies are constituted, the tiny parcels of matter known since classical times as ‘atoms’. Atoms stand in causal relations to one another, but these relations are logically contingent, imposed from without; the atoms themselves could exist independently of such relations. Relatedness does not, in other words, belong to their essence. Logically speaking, the entire universe could consist of a single atom, and its uniqueness would make no difference to its identity. Relations between the atoms, and their arrangement in space and time, are contingent. Order may be superimposed on the atomistic manifold, but no order is logically implicit in the manifold itself. Not only are the atoms not intrinsically related to one another, they are intrinsically inert: they embody no intrinsic principle of motion, motion being imposed on the atomistic manifold from without.

Atomism, then, is the traditional theoretical elaboration of the substance pluralism which is so entrenched in common sense that it is not generally recognized as a metaphysical presupposition at all. It has served as the unquestioned metaphysical framework both for ordinary thinking and for classical science. Its assumptions so saturate our western way of thinking that they have scarcely been formulated, let alone challenged, by philosophers: philosophy itself has been, and continues to be, carried out largely within a broadly atomistic framework. It is for this reason that I focus my attention, in this book, on traditional atomism, rather than on other logically possible elaborations of pluralism. I shall content myself with seeking to demonstrate some of the metaphysical and ideological inadequacies of this dominant pluralist theory, rather than attempting to refute the possibility of any variant of pluralism whatsoever. The principal aim of this book, however, is to explore the philosophical implications of the alternative—monistic—metaphysical archetype. The implications of monism have been so neglected in our philosophical tradition that I think this exercise would be a worthy one even if there were no independent grounds for accepting monism and rejecting pluralism. As it is, I think there are such grounds, though I do not think they are necessarily conclusive. In this first chapter I try, as I have already indicated, to highlight the metaphysical and ideological inadequacies of at least the dominant version of substance pluralism, and in Chapter 2 I provide both scientific and metaphysical arguments in favour of a particular version of substance monism.

It is to be the thesis of this chapter that the pluralist bias which was already present in the western outlook received its definitive authorization through the atomism of Newtonian science. And it is a further thesis that such atomism has, and has historically been taken to have, certain social and normative implications. We shall look at these implications, both as they have been historically perceived and as I take them actually to be—where these two sets of propositions do not always coincide. But before launching into this investigation of the Newtonian worldview, I would like to consider in general terms the relation between metaphysics, or cosmology, on the one hand, and ideology, or normative thinking, on the other.

2. The Role of Cosmologies in a Culture

What, in the first place, distinguishes cosmology from metaphysics? Cosmologies depict the large-scale structure, origin and evolution of the concrete world. The domain of cosmology is the actual world, and then only the actual world in its outlines. In so far as an entity is capable of being actual, it may be included in a cosmology. For example, cosmologies may include not only ordinary concrete items such as material objects, but also forces, fields, minds, spirits, even deities, since all these entities are capable of being actual, of constituting an actual world. The domain of metaphysics, in contrast, ranges over not only the actual world, but also any abstract and possible and ideal realms which may exist. A metaphysic tells of the layering of reality, where the actual may be only one of the layers, others being the abstract, possible, perhaps even spiritual layers transcending the realm of the actual. Questions about the relation of universals to particulars, the ontological status of numbers, the status of possible and necessary beings, problems concerning the classification of substances, belong to metaphysics. Questions about the constitution and structure of the actual world belong to cosmology. A metaphysic and a cosmology may overlap, since the identification of the substances that constitute the actual world is part of the programme of a comprehensive metaphysic, and it is this metaphysic of the actual world, this general outline of a cosmology, which is, I think, relevant to culture.

Is there a perennial human need, which cosmology can meet, and which, unmet, may lead to dangerous cultural dislocations? Is cosmology integral to the worldview a culture embodies, where the currency of such a worldview is a prerequisite of social and psychological integrity within that culture?

Cosmologies have in the present century been dismissed by social critics, particularly those in a broadly Marxian tradition, who have lumped them together with religions and mythologies as outmoded instruments for the ideological legitimation of social orders. Cosmology has likewise been rejected on empiricist grounds—as being beyond the scope of verification procedures—by analytical philosophers in the empiricist tradition of Hume, Russell, Carnap, Ayer, et al. For both these parties, though for different reasons, the rise of science and of scientific methodology has spelt the extinction of cosmology as a cultural force. This is ironical, because science itself has seen a renaissance of cosmological speculation in the second half of the twentieth century, a renaissance the implications of which social critics and philosophers alike have underrated.

Do cultures in general then need to be informed with cosmologies? The anthropological record suggests that cultures do invariably compose stories to account for the origin and nature of the universe. Such cosmologies have typically been cast in animistic form, and so have fallen within the classifications of religion and mythology. The pre-Socratic culture of ancient Greece was the first to depart from this anthropological norm, and to frame its cosmologies in purely materialist, non-animistic idiom. The post-Hellenic epochs of western culture have witnessed the gradual rise to dominance of this materialist view. But materialist or not, the cosmological impulse has been active in our culture as in others. Its apparent universality suggests that it is innate to human culture, and presumably then of evolutionary significance. What could its adaptive function be? Primarily, perhaps, one of orientation—a cosmology serves to orient a community to its world, in the sense that it defines, for the community in question, the place of humankind in the cosmic scheme of things. Such cosmic orientation tells the members of the community, in the broadest possible terms, who they are and where they stand in relation to the rest of creation. Some conception of a cosmic scheme of things is active too in the prescription of a system of norms, or at least in contributing to the normative tone of the community. For its system of norms circumscribes the aspirations of the community, and aspirations are proportional to expectations. Expectations, in turn, depend in part upon information, the conception of the environment. The conception of the local, empirically accessible environment helps to shape expectations in perfectly obvious ways, but since the nature and stability of the local environment depends on more remote, cosmological factors, the shaping of expectations is not independent of cosmological considerations either.

Consider, for instance, a community in the grip of a cosmology which represents the world as hostile to human interests: this world is represented as inhabited, say, by powerful and malevolent spirits which are nourished on the energies of their human playthings. The degraded status of human beings within such a scheme of things could not fail to influence the normative thinking of its unfortunate denizens: they could be expected to be pessimistic characters, with low individual and collective self-esteem, low expectations of successful interaction with the environment, and low standards of happiness, excellence and self-realization. Appeasement and placation strategies would be likely t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introductory Remarks
• 1 Atomism and its ideological implications
• 2 Geometrodynamics: a monistic metaphysic
• 3 System and substance: alternative principles of individuation
• 4 Value in nature and meaning in life
• Bibliography
• Index