The Distortion of Nature's Image

Reification and the Ecological Crisis

Damian Gerber

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438473543, 9781438473550
• eBook ISBN: 9781438473567
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question.

The global ecological crisis is upon us. From global warming to the long-term implications of ocean acidification, air and water pollution, deforestation, and the omnipresent dangers of nuclear technology the future of our planetary home is threatened. Yet in the midst of the unfolding crisis, the conventional ideologies of the twentieth century and their representations of nature remain unchallenged by both the defenders of capitalism and capitalism's most radical critics. The Distortion of Nature's Image illustrates how the anti-naturalism of late capitalist society, in which nature is reified into the emptiness of mere matter, simply a thing to be dominated, is subtly complemented by the failure of the Left to go both beyond the historic limitations of Marx's ninteenth-century viewpoint and beyond anarchism's blind faith in "natural law." However, an alternative for comprehending nature and the ecological crisis as historical and social phenomena remains open in the dialectical naturalism of Western Marxism and Murray Bookchin's social ecology. By examining in closer detail how Bookchin's social ecology politicizes the concept of nature, as well as how precursory models in Western Marxist thought provide a foundation for this, Damian Gerber illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question.

CHAPTER ONE

Anti-Naturalism, the Bourgeois Enlightenment, and the Modern Origins of a Dialectical Naturalism

One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

—Albert Camus, Absurd Creation

The Becoming of Nature

It is a dialectical irony of history that the relationship of nature to civilization can never be grasped in its immediacy without being understood through the mediations of authority and tradition. Ludwig Feuerbach’s artless edification of sensual immediacy, criticized in the first of Marx’s eleven Theses on Feuerbach, blinds itself to this irony, missing the insight that what presents itself as nature is arrived at through the reifications of a cultural history. The illusion of immediacy therefore conceals a danger: recognition of biological immediacy might seem unavoidable as soon as philosophy tries to articulate the relationship between humanity and nature, and yet it is evident that a liberated human culture would not satisfy itself within conditions of mere instinctivism. It may well be that what pass for instincts themselves bear so much of the character of historical mediation—in other words, the stamp of acculturated mimesis, of what the concept of instinct would like to think lies beyond instinct as such.

This mediacy of the immediate must be borne in mind in appraising the approach of much bourgeois enlightenment philosophy toward conceptualizing nature. The nonconformity of the revolutionary aspirations of the bourgeoisie with prevailing monarchical, scholastic, or feudal reifications of “nature” is undoubtedly a contributing factor to the anti-naturalism of early German Idealism.1 In the postrevolutionary context of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel, a time of upheaval in which the ascendant class could not confidently rely on the authority of tradition nor on an appeal to the moral shibboleths that governed the earlier feudal relations, prominent attempts were made to justify its social outlook by preexisting philosophical means. The concept of knowledge in Kant and Fichte, entwined within the categories of the earlier Cartesian metaphysics, still reveals something of this history. Knowledge appears as that which exerts its power and its domination over its object as a process of allegedly rational becoming, distanced from a nature rendered as accidental and capricious. Such categorizing schemes are prefigurative. Nature takes on a number of conceptual associations not contained to merely external nature, but to inner nature; nature comes to resemble something divided off from the realm of productive human activity, both socially and psychologically.

To treat such negative associations of nature concomitant with the bourgeois enlightenment as a process of allegedly rational becoming, therefore, is to unjustly raise them above the suspicion of being less innocent than the mere categorization of nature’s in-and-for-itself that they would pretend to be. What follows is an attempt to explicate the ideological dimension of this dualistic categorization of nature, as manifest in Kant and Fichte. It is based upon the premise, owing something to the procedure of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, that philosophy, far from being immune from reification, is complicit in it through the means of conceptual identity. Such reification, which would expel nature to the category of a lifeless other to be determined by the instrumental forces of abstract labor, becomes itself a rationalization for the entrenched interests of the dominant class. It thereby denies to the subjugated social forces, and with them nature, the basis of an ethical mediation that would sweep away dominatory relationships and give birth to a society of true humanism and freedom, a society without the ecological and social burden of domination.

By removing nature from the very content and ground of ethical life, the dominant ideology of enlightened market society effaces the ecological basis of social relations and, as is already indicated in the ethical philosophy of Kant and Fichte, debases ethics into an act of merely subjective willing. Biological nature does not attain to subjecthood in its own right in Kantian and Fichtean ethics; nor is it, however, quite an object in its own right. Rather it appears as an externality, and in Fichte’s case, as a completely dominated and subsumed other. Despite the time that has elapsed between then and now, this image of nature still prevails today, particularly in many of the unexamined assumptions of the environmental movement, which tend to treat nature as nothing more than an assemblage of “resources,” as mere things to be “managed” from above. The legacy of this externalizing anti-naturalism is clearly inadequate in a time of ecological crisis, in terms of its social, psychological, and ecological implications.

Moreover, by engendering an anti-naturalist epistemology, the conceptual legacy of the bourgeois enlightenment endures as an obstacle to the task of adequately knowing nature outside of its reified concept. In construing nature specifically in terms of an epistemological dualism with subjectivity, the sense in which natural history is truly complementary in the unfolding of social history becomes unintelligible to us. Yet an intelligible account of social history’s enduring mediation through conditions of nature is essential not only to an undistorted view of natural history, but moreover to radical social movements that would aspire to institutionalize an authentic ecological ethics. In other words, we must seek to understand the ecological context of history and of social revolution.

Epistemology and the Bourgeois Image of Nature

The anti-naturalism enmeshed within the bourgeois nature-concept might first be elucidated at the most abstract level: within the prefigurative categories of Kant’s epistemology. A decisive feature of Kant’s philosophy, and the transcendental idealism that followed in its wake, is the assumption of a universal nonidentity between subject and object, a nonidentity posited as the very condition of all experience. Notwithstanding Descartes, throughout much of the earlier rationalist philosophy, such as that of Spinoza, subject and object were typically seen as unified through their determinate character, to say nothing of their mutual identity in the theory of universal substance. Even Leibniz’s monadology, often interpreted as a philosophy of subjectivism, nonetheless advanced a view of the subject as the objective essence of the cosmos—a notion resplendent in Leibniz’s idea of the “pre-established harmony” and his image of the monad as the mirror of the universe.2 What is historically significant in Kant’s philosophy, by contrast, is that a metaphysics of reason is elaborated on a ground that, originating in the conditions of a given social history, forgets itself and closes itself off from the very actuality of social determination within the kernel of the noumenal. Thus in Kant’s philosophy, subject and object are inclined to appear under the aegis of an eternal and unchangeable opposition. The subject is discovered to be the ground of all reason and reality, and through this appellation (drawn from Hume’s skepticism) a judgment is rendered on nature. Nature becomes the repository of all those qualities that Hume had turned over to ontology. It takes on the character of the capricious, the arbitrary, and in the last analysis, the Heraclitean flux that reason can only apprehend by negating its nonidentity and rendering it into the subject’s own categories of a priori consciousness.

The sublimated, yet strangely utopian element of this conception is most strikingly articulated by Kant’s later disciple Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer’s aesthetic idealism, subject and object are only ever united in the brain of the philosopher—in the subject’s representation, and thereby in her or his perceptive ordering of the external world according to the principle of sufficient reason (in other words, the relations of a cognitively grounded causality). Kant’s object, the “thing-in-itself,” for Schopenhauer takes the form of the irrational “will-to-life,” the fickleness of an ultimately incorrigible animality. This tension is only seemingly resolved in the state of aesthetic contemplation—the ordering of natural relations through the configurations of the intellect—and, more resolutely, through the absolute negation of nature qua the “will” in the state of nirvana. Thus, in the purely negative aesthetic state alone, consciousness reaches the heights of a positive image of utopia; the forms of music and art appear to it not so much as historical but rather as eternal Platonic Ideas, passing intellect through a stream of consciousness that in the totality of its movement gives intellect an abstract mastery over nature. This mastery, however, appears less as one of ideological domination and more as one of a tranquil contemplation, a utopian image that came into its own in the literary reflections of Proust. The utopian identity between this universality of distanced reflection and that of the cessation of nature’s caprice is even expressed by Schopenhauer spatially, as the overlapping of conceptual spheres in the realm of the intellect. In rendering himself more universal through knowledge, the gentlemanly subject is supposed to partake of that element of the divine that according to Cicero appeared as a residue in the exercise of right reason. As echoed by Proust’s narrator, it is precisely such a totality of reflection and documentation, symbolized through the metaphor of the picture gallery or museum, that constitutes the utopian accommodation of nature within the superstructure of bourgeois life.

The historical tension between subjective consciousness and all that is externalized from it is, however, never genuinely resolved in the bourgeois sphere of the picture gallery or the museum; for this regime of free leisure is founded on the denial of all that property of surplus labor to the many, which is the asserted right of the few. Something of the violence that this privilege entails finds its way into transcendental idealism’s rejection of ontology. As the regime of private property erects the fence and closes the door so as to muffle the suffering of those without property, so too Kant and Schopenhauer distance themselves from the reality of nature. This distancing is an essential element of their conception of reason. It is only through the most dramatic distancing of reason from the “in-itselfness” of the world—the transformation of nature into merely aesthetic concepts or, what is more or less the same thing, in the total assimilation of it into the Ego in Fichte’s philosophy—that transcendental idealism attains an identity between subject and object.

As a reflection of the vantage point of the enlightened bourgeoisie, this irresolvable tension cannot be properly comprehended without reference to its concealed, yet ultimately illusory, utopian promise. Ironically, the ideological hubris that taints Fichte’s championing of the domination of nature for its own sake—which we will soon come to in more detail—articulates in estranged form a potentially rational integration of humanity within its conditions of natural becoming. Only by completely reshaping nature in accordance with its underlying potentialities for reason—in short, by replacing its capricious aspect with an order that is rationally determined by a community of reasoned beings—could humanity redeem the historical promise of nature. This utopian image is given its most explicit and perhaps most poetic treatment in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, which were, as is well known, strongly influenced by Kant’s aesthetics. But its origins perhaps lie further back still, in Gottfried Herder’s theme of analogy, which his bitter opponent Kant felt obliged to add to his third Critique—in the aesthetic unity between nature, the “in-itself,” and the ordered, inner world of reason.

Yet in Kant, Fichte and Schopenhauer (and perhaps even Schiller), this concealed utopian hope of enlightened, universalistic liberalism never attains a concrete form; it is only ever present as a kind of abstract aesthetic unity. This abstraction, by the limit of its very form, subtly denies the principle of hope within itself—the concrete, socially integrated harmony between productive human activity and nature. The realization of such hope would require precisely the cessation of class antagonisms that the Ur-bourgeois competition of private interests would never permit to take place. In the midst of such repression and its historical context, reverence for nature is relegated to the domain of aesthetics and its actual despoliation at the hands of an ethically unhindered labor power remains securely in place. Failing revolutionary mediation, this image of natural subsumption beneath labor has since degenerated into ideology. By way of a perennial appeal to this image, it has become all too easy for the political and economic elites of capitalist societies to portray the actually existing degradation of nature as a necessary process in the pursuit of vague absolutes such as “progress” or “liberty.” Nonetheless, the assertion of an a priori antagonism between humanity and nature is an ideological archetype that nowadays seems very distant from utopia indeed. For it still bears the traces of the antagonistic society that subsumes human relationships beneath the predatory marketplace and reduces all creative human endeavors into the form of abstract labor.

Following in the wake of such allegorical impulses, it is unsurprising that Kant’s transcendental idealism construes the living reality of the world in terms of an essence no less arbitrary than that of the nature it wishes to expel, namely, the “reason” of an isolated subject and its various cognitive categorizations. At its best, as Adorno has demonstrated in a series of lectures, Kant’s philosophy finds the objective in the subjective, but even this is constrained into the purely cognitive categories of logic that make up the core of his epistemology.3 It is this socially mediated “limit” that emerges in Kant’s epistemic categories (in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s phraseology, a “block” on consciousness), a limit that fuels the motor of an epistemological anti-naturalism. This can be observed more closely in Kant’s characterization of the thing-in-itself.4

The Kantian “Block” and the Distancing of Reason from Nature

At the birth of the bourgeois enlightenment a wide social and historical rift opened, a rift that swallowed up all it could of the social relationships that preceded it. The colonial bayonets and guns of the emerging market order, however, effaced more than a diverse constellation of communitarian cultures. They effaced our very contact with the past, the utopian dreams and myths constitutive of feudalism and medieval communalism, the intricate lifeways of a “nature” subject to the mediating limits of scholastic philosophy, theology, and the prevailing power structure, as well as the natural terrors of famine and plague that still haunt our imaginations today. And yet, with the advanced development of industrial technology that capitalism promised, some form of ecological reconciliation, of an ordered nature made safe and hospitable for human beings, may have seemed possible in the ethical purview of liberal universalism. Such a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Anti-Naturalism, the Bourgeois Enlightenment, and the Modern Origins of a Dialectical Naturalism
• Chapter Two Nature in Marx and Anarchism
• Chapter Three Recovering a Dialectical Naturalism
• Epilogue
• Appendix Theses on Communalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover