Becoming a Place of Unrest

Environmental Crisis and Ecophenomenological Praxis

Robert Booth

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780821447420
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The key to mitigating the environmental crisis isn't just based on science; it depends upon a profound philosophical revision of how we think about and behave in relation to the world.

Our ongoing failure to interrupt the environmental crisis in a meaningful way stems, in part, from how we perceive the environment—what Robert Booth calls the "more-than-human world." Anthropocentric presumptions of this world, inherited from natural science, have led us to better scientific knowledge about environmental problems and more science-based—yet inadequate—practical "solutions." That's not enough, Booth argues. Rather, he asserts that we must critically and self-reflexively revise how we perceive and consider ourselves within the more-than-human world as a matter of praxis in order to arrest our destructive impact on it.

Across six chapters, Booth brings ecophenomenology—environmentally focused phenomenology—into productive dialogue with a rich array of other philosophical approaches, such as ecofeminism, new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. The book thus outlines and justifies why and how a specifically ecophenomenological praxis may lead to the disruption of the environmental crisis at its root.

Booth's observations and arguments make the leap from theory to practice insofar as they may influence how we fundamentally grasp the environmental crisis and what promising avenues of practical activism might look like. In Booth's view, this is not about achieving a global scientific consensus regarding the material causes of the environmental crisis or the responsible use of "natural resources." Instead, Booth calls for us to habitually resist our impetus to uncritically reduce more-than-human entities to "natural resources" in the first place.

As Booth recognizes, Becoming a Place of Unrest cannot and does not tell us how we should act. Instead, it outlines and provides the basic means by which to instill positive and responsible conceptual and behavioral relationships with the rest of the world. Based on this, there is hope that we may begin to develop more concrete, actionable policies that bring about profound and lasting change.

CHAPTER ONE

PERCEPTION AND UNREST

Man, as opposed to a pebble which is what it is, is defined as a place of unrest (Unruhe), a constant effort to get back to himself, and consequently by his refusal to limit himself to one or another of his determinations.

—SNS, 55–56

In my introduction, I mooted reasons for environmental philosophers to be wary of uncritically adopting epistemological and ontological assumptions from the natural sciences. In this chapter, I lay the foundations for an ecophenomenological investigation of the “submerged mass” of our crisis. I first identify and problematize some of the objectivistic prejudices that pervade science’s underpinning naturalistic metaphysics. Drawing principally from Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work, I argue that the “objective thought” which underpins naturalism is concerned primarily with reflective abstractions rather than phenomena-as-given. While this admission needn’t be problematic per se, I follow Merleau-Ponty in suggesting that naturalism’s basic onto-epistemological stipulations distort the phenomena upon which they are based.¹ The problem Merleau-Ponty identifies with objective thought is that it conflates the determinate Gestalt-objects in which perception concludes with the basic constituents of ontological reality. Over the next three chapters I take Merleau-Ponty’s argument further by suggesting that the problematic ways we enframe more-than-human entities under the influence of naturalism can be traced back, in part, to the mistaken reification of “objects” upon which naturalism is based. This chapter will provide basic resources for doing so.

My central contention is that any attempt to address more-than-human entities on their own terms must take seriously the coconstitutive perceptual horizons through which they are always uncovered. Any such attempt must suspend foundational commitment to naturalism’s objectivistic assumptions and attempt to go “back to the things themselves” (Husserl 2001, 168). I argue that progress in this project can best be facilitated through what Merleau-Ponty calls “radical reflection” (PP, xiv)—a sort of second-level reflection on the interplay between prereflective and reflective consciousnesses—when trying to glean the perceptual reality that underwrites our reflective accounts. Radical reflection may help foreground some of the background assumptions and apparatuses required for a situated body-subject to grasp a given more-than-human “object” as one does. It may also thereby help shed some light on our “submerged mass” by highlighting where our objectivistic misconceptions or unwarranted assumptions license behavioral violence against any entities subsequently uncovered.

Although, given one’s intractable inherence within the world investigated, Merleau-Ponty is surely right to claim that the process of radical reflection is incompletable, I argue that recognition of this “failure” is key to better engagement with the more-than-human world. This is because, since a fully transcendent or transcendental account is impossible, the committed Merleau-Pontian is tied to perpetual radical reflection as a matter of praxis. The Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenologist may, therefore, retain the robust critical self-reflexivity that Kant’s recognition of the correlation demands, without taking up the objectivistic Kantian baggage which motivates the “dialectic of the epistemological subject and the scientific object,” and which results in “making subject and object into inseparable correlatives” (SB, 199; 201).

1.1 OBJECTIVE THOUGHT

I begin with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of “objective thought” thought—so called because of the allegedly foundational “objects” it relies upon—latent within both dominant philosophical accounts of perception: empiricism and intellectualism.² Although it might seem strange to begin a critique of naturalism by evaluating models of perception, Merleau-Ponty provides reason to believe that an insular dialectic exists between the misleading accounts of perception relied upon by natural scientists and the ontological and epistemological claims they make. Given that our overriding concern is to address the assumptions and commitments that delineate scientific characterizations of the more-than-human world, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of empiricism. I do so because the ontological and epistemological terms that environmental philosophers inherit derive largely from natural sciences (e.g., ecological science, atmospheric chemistry, or evolutionary biology), which are empirical in method.

1.1.1 Empiricism

Merleau-Ponty’s critique of empiricism focuses on its mistaken reliance on “sensations” as the constituent atoms of perception. By “sensation,” Merleau-Ponty means what we might now call qualia: discrete, nonintentional, internal phenomena, from which perceptual experience is purportedly constructed. According to the empirical account, in perceiving a telephone box, an epistemic subject is more or less directly acquainted with the self-contained sensation of “redness” in consciousness. But sensations aren’t limited to simple scenarios. Sensations (or some other kind of “pure impression”) are also ordinarily taken to be the source of the atmospheric chemist’s observations about carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, albeit via specialized measuring apparatuses and subsequently contextualized within a complex theoretical framework. This is because, as Thomas S. Kuhn emphasizes, in attempting to discern the world’s basic ontological character, the “scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments” (1970, 114).

However, despite our “commonsense” conviction in sensations, Merleau-Ponty argues that we experience no such phenomena. Furthermore, since we treat sensations as perception’s fundamental constituents, “once introduced, the notion of sensation distorts any analysis of perception” (PP, 13). Thus, if the empirical account of perception is as intimately related to naturalistic metaphysics as Merleau-Ponty suggests, any subsequent ontological and epistemological stipulations that rely on it will be similarly distorted.

Reflection upon perceptual experiences suggests that we aren’t directly acquainted with such discrete phenomena, with constant and self-contained qualities, because perceptual qualities are determined via their diacritical relationships within a perceptual field. Even a white patch, Merleau-Ponty argues, possesses its “brightness” and “shape” only relative to (the perceived color of) its particular background, which also codetermines areas “belonging” to it, and so on (PP, 3–4). This diacritical codeterminacy becomes most obvious in optical “illusions.” In Edward Adelson’s “Checkershadow Illusion,” for instance, the background of squares A and B (B “belongs” to the lighter squares “on” the checkerboard, but is also “overshadowed” by a cylinder) means that we perceive B to be lighter than A. Once the background features are bracketed out by a uniform gray box, however, A and B present themselves as the same shade. The self-sufficiency of sensations is further undermined through Merleau-Ponty’s observation that “synaesthetic perception is the rule” (PP, 229); carpets lack the same “redness,” Merleau-Ponty argues, if found not to be woolly to the touch. Further examples are commonplace in our experience and the language we use to describe perceptions more accurately: the wet green of a spring lawn or the cold gray of steel, for instance.

Merleau-Ponty’s point here is that empirical appeals to sensation misunderstand how perceptual objects are constituted. If sensations were “fully developed and determinate,” at any given moment one should expect to experience a “field of vision”; a “segment of the world precisely delimited, surrounded by a zone of blackness, packed full of qualities with no interval between them, held together by definite relationships of size similar to those lying on the retina” (PP, 4–5). One doesn’t, Merleau-Ponty contends, because experience is of a unified “perceptual domain” in which individual objects are charged with irreducible meanings codetermined by their relationships within a whole “phenomenal field” (PP, 47, 54). Contextualizing perception in this manner allows us to explain the phenomena just mentioned because, in this holistic context, each (apparently discrete) element “arouses the expectation of more than it contains” (PP, 4). One expects square B in the Checkershadow Illusion to be “darkened” by the cylinder’s shadow, but not to the extent that it becomes one of the “dark” squares. Likewise, it is essential to the carpet’s specific redness that one expects its woolly texture. Even objects lying outside one’s “field of vision” retain existence within perception, Merleau-Ponty argues, as things one expects to see should one turn around (PP, 6). If these expectations were frustrated, the meanings constitutive of one’s perceptual field would change. One’s world would—literally—be different. This is exactly what happens once one brackets squares in the Checkershadow Illusion.

It will be useful, as far as the phenomena allow, to disambiguate which factors contribute to the respective diacritical backgrounds of “objects” perceived. Most straightforwardly, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that empirical appeals to sensation misunderstand the interplay between features of our experience (e.g., interrelationships of color and/or texture) in allowing perceptual objects to stand out as they do. But there is another, more significant, contributory feature to their backgrounds: our active contribution, as a situated body-subject, to their characteristic features. I expand upon this important point in section 1.3, but Merleau-Ponty’s basic contention is that the meaningful objects grasped in the preceding examples are essentially related to the abilities, projects, and commitments of the body-subject(s) in whose perceptual horizon(s) they show up. Merleau-Ponty’s carpet’s phenomenal redness, for instance, is partly determined by the expectations generated by his irreducibly intentional relation with it as “something on which to stand.” This explains why its meanings (here: its color) would change should his expectations be frustrated by its coarse texture. Equally, the objects behind one’s back exist within one’s perceptual field as things (books, perhaps) that one might intend to soon appropriate. Finally, the squares in the Checker-shadow Illusion change shade depending on the expectations of someone hoping to navigate the scene before them. Since our expectations codetermine the intentional character of worldly entities, this explains why, as the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka observes, as a matter of phenomenal priority, things often look “attractive or repulsive before [they look] black or blue, circular or square” (Koffka 1925, 320; PP, 24).

Merleau-Ponty is suggesting, then, that meaning, and not some more determinate constituent, is phenomenologically basic. This observation clashes with our default assumption that phenomena retain determinate qualities regardless of the fields in which they participate. Nevertheless, since this sort of “objective thought” is incompatible with the phenomena upon which it relies, when addressing the entities revealed in perception, “we must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon” (PP, 6).

To clarify this stronger claim about indeterminacy, we should explore where a shift in expectation corresponds to a more extreme shift in the figure-background relationship. Merleau-Ponty’s paradigm example is of seeing a shipwreck. Since one doesn’t expect to see mast poles protruding from the dunes—one might be out for a stroll, not hoping to appropriate a vessel—despite perceiving the relevant scene, one fails to see its elements as a ship. The immediate perceptual content is indeterminate and its elements only subsequently “fuse” to form a concrete structure (i.e., function as elements) as one approaches and a feeling of “uneasiness” (PP, 17) is resolved. Afterward, one cannot help but see the poles as belonging to that concrete structure. So, how could one miss these obvious clues as to the unity of the object? The answer is simple, Merleau-Ponty thinks, once we suspend objectivistic prejudice. The reasons for association between elements didn’t precede the perception of the whole object as unified within the context of the overall field: “our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have” (PP, 67).

Negative support for this claim comes through Merleau-Ponty’s observation that rival empirical explanations are unfeasibly fortuitous or circular. The reasons for association between perception’s allegedly atomic constituents must remain absent, Merleau-Ponty explains, because distinct sensations cannot be thought of “as the same” without sacrificing their essential qualitative “this-ness” (PP, 15). Appealing to “extrinsic connections” with other sensations is also circular since “de facto proximities or likenesses” cannot plausibly cause perceptual atoms “to associate; it is on the contrary, because we perceive a grouping as a thing that the analytical attitude can then discern likenesses or proximities” (PP, 14, 16). Thus, the shipwreck experience previously outlined cannot be understood by appealing to “the same sensations differently associated” (PP, 16); it must involve a more fundamental shift in meaning generated by a shift in expectations. Merleau-Ponty puts this thought as follows: “When we come back to phenomena we find, as a basic layer of experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning: not sensations with gaps between them . . . but the features, the layout of a landscape or a word, in spontaneous accord with the intentions of the moment, as with earlier experience” (PP, 21–22).

Merleau-Ponty uses the evidence cited to vouch in favor of Gestalt theory, and not some reductive empirical alternative. According to the Gestaltists, the furthest possible reduction in perceptual analysis is to the meaningful interplay of figure and background, rather than to discrete, context-independent sensations. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that this irreducibility is not a contingent truth about factual perception, but “the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all” (PP, 4). Sensations simply couldn’t collectively “form” our perceptual objects since seeing anything at all requires perceiving meanings bound up within a specific field. I expand on Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the Gestalt in section 1.3. For now, it should suffice to say that, given that empirical sensations are incompatible with perception itself, we should jettison them from our account, since “the structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is” (PP, 4).

1.1.2 Objectivistic Prejudice

Merleau-Ponty thinks that empiricism makes what the Gestaltists call an “experience error” (PP, 5) by reflectively transposing the qualities of things perceived into perceptual consciousness. But this error isn’t restricted to card-carrying empiricists. In an everyday sense, we know that we experience red carpets and telephone boxes, for instance, and erroneously believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with a determinate “redness” in our experiences of them. A related error also appears to be behind the usual binary yes/no question about whether the squares in the Checkershadow Illusion “really are” the same shade. By beginning from the presumption that A and B are determinate things, one passes on this prejudice to one’s perceptions. Thus, we typically think that the primary constituents of perception themselves must retain (or just be) field-independent qualities.

However, as Kuhn helps emphasize, since perception provides our only means of access to the more-than-human world, the experience error has ramifications beyond perceptual analysis, because the insular dialectic it legitimates licenses an erroneous belief in the corresponding ontological determinacy of the things deemed responsible for our perceptions. The substantive problem here is that “we make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end up by understanding neither” (PP, 5). Since perception ends in objects, Merleau-Ponty argues, we may discern the world’s physiognomy only by returning, as far as possible, to the perceptual phenomena themselves.

Taken this far, Merleau-Ponty’s critique amounts to suggesting that a tacit adherence to empiricism’s objectivistic presuppositions leads us to misconceive the targets of our concern, because we mistake perception’s resultant “objects” for its fundamental constituents. More problematically, these objectivistic presuppositions license neglect of the diacritical background essential for any such objects to present themselves as they do. But Merleau-Ponty contends that the distorting influence of objective thought spreads further than this since, largely because of the experience error, the discrete objects finally registered in perception come to occupy a privileged ontological position. Objects, reflectively purified of their diacritical relationships, become the fundamental ontological constituents of the more-than-human world (PP, 71). Once conceived as such, Merleau-Ponty thinks, we become prone to overlook our objectifying tendencies and the reflective character of any objects we uncover by granting them the status of objects-in-themselves. That is, in conceiving of entities as objects we take ourselves to be acting in accordance with th...