Unsettling Nature

Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination

Taylor Eggan

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780813946856
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity's displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis's homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought—and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being.

Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology—along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world—produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature's defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger's phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"—an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.

Part I

Chapter 1

Martin Heidegger and the Coloniality of Nature

Through our questioning, we are entering a landscape; to be in this landscape is the fundamental prerequisite for restoring rootedness to historical Dasein.

—Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger may well be the twentieth century’s greatest thinker of being, but he is also one of that century’s foremost philosophers of home. The rhetoric of home stands at the very center of Heidegger’s work, from his early analysis of Dasein in Being and Time to his exploration of dwelling in the late essays. Indeed, the philosopher’s lifelong project sought to wrest humanity out of its exile in the postindustrial age of technology, and to manifest a radical homecoming to being. Such a homecoming did not, for Heidegger, entail the construction of a new philosophical edifice so much as the “destruction” (Destruktion) of the European ontometaphysical tradition, which understood being strictly in terms of beings. Metaphysics—whose main analytical instruments included schematization, calculation, and a claim to objectivity ensured by rational logic—had long ago fallen under the spell of discourse that understood being as the constant presence of physically manifest entities. Metaphysics had thus also long since forgotten to ask the crucial question, “How does it stand with being?”1 For Heidegger, relearning how properly to pose the question of being goes beyond issues of grammar and syntax. Such relearning requires a new mode of existing; it requires us to inhabit an essential mode of “dwelling” (Wohnen) that the ontometaphysical tradition had rendered obscure. Only in rediscovering how to dwell—that is, in rediscovering how to be at home in the world—can we return to ourselves and restore our primordial residence in the “house of being” (Haus des Seins).

This chapter begins and ends with the question of home, of dwelling. Heidegger’s thinking harnesses phenomenology in order to lead us home to our most essential dwelling in being.2 But where, exactly, does such dwelling take place? The question of the “location” of dwelling is a difficult one, and one that always haunted Heidegger. He felt particularly deflated by persistent misunderstanding of Dasein, the term he used to refer to human being in its particular capacity as a being (Seiende) that thinks about being (Sein). Dasein is the ordinary German word for “existence,” but its literal meaning, “being-there” (or “being-here”), has fueled much confusion. Where exactly does Dasein, as a being-there, dwell? Heidegger frequently guards against all literally spatial understandings of the Da of Dasein, as when he complains about its rendering in French as être-là, a literal translation of “being-there” that fails to signify Dasein’s colloquial meaning as existence (existence in French). With this rendering, Heidegger complains: “Everything that was gained as a new position in Being and Time is lost. Are human beings there like a chair? . . . Dasein does not mean being there and being here [Dort- und Hiersein].”3 Gaston Bachelard falls prey to this mistake when he asks: “Where is the main stress . . . in being there (être-là): on being, or on there? In there—which would be better to call here—shall I first look for my being? Or am I going to find, in my being, above all, certainty of my fixation in a there?”4 But for Heidegger there can be no fixed “hereness” or “thereness” of being. Dasein dwells in a more abstract location: not a specific place but rather an “openness where beings can be present for the human being, and the human being also for himself.”5

Aside from the topological challenge of locating Dasein’s proper dwelling place, there is also the matter of the dark side implicit in what Theodor Adorno once termed Heidegger’s “homey murmurings.”6 The recognition of Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism has led some critics to draw damning connections between his concept of dwelling—itself frequently paired in his writing with the notion of homeland (Heimat)—and the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden, which invokes an exclusive definition of German identity based on the pairing of blood descent (Blut, blood) and loyalty to the homeland (Boden, soil).7 For scholars such as David Harvey and Neil Leach, the concept of dwelling marks an implicitly fascist strain in Heidegger’s thinking.8 Others, such as Hannah Arendt, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Herbert Marcuse, denounce such criticism for its ad hominem thrust, its failure to engage rigorously with Heidegger’s writing, or else its attempt to “discredit ideas explicit in the later thinking largely on the basis of the political engagement apparently present in the earlier.”9

There are thus two major issues with Heidegger’s home(l)y articulation of dwelling: the topological difficulty related to “where” Dasein dwells, and the ideological difficulty related to dwelling’s disturbing political resonances. Neither issue has been satisfactorily resolved, and they continue to cause trouble for those scholars who draw inspiration from his philosophical works. Rather than seeking to resolve these difficulties, however, this chapter puts further pressure on them. Instead of exonerating or condemning Heidegger, my purpose here is to pry his work open further and demonstrate how the link between Dasein and dwelling in his thinking functions as both crux and crisis point.

Prying Heidegger open in this way requires echoing and amplifying ongoing debates within the environmental humanities. Crucially, it also requires going beyond these debates, and indeed, beyond the pale of the explicitly “ecological.” Thus, after offering a brief evaluation of the philosopher’s foundational influence on the disciplines of ecophilosophy and ecocriticism in the next section, the following section turns to recent work in decolonial theory and Black studies. This recent work situates Heidegger within a historical lineage of modernity/coloniality and shows how his analysis of Dasein recapitulates the coloniality of being. Whereas Heidegger takes Dasein to be a universal figure for the human, these scholars convincingly argue that “the colonized is not this ordinary Dasein.”10 The final three sections of this chapter expand the frame to consider how the coloniality of being, as embodied by Heidegger’s articulation of Dasein in Being and Time and other early writings, relates to the philosopher’s shifting elaboration of the topology of dwelling across the longue durée of his career. In particular, I examine Heidegger’s anomalous use of the word landscape (Landschaft) and read this term—one of many in the philosopher’s proliferating topological lexicon—as emblematic of the crisis in Heidegger’s ongoing struggle to articulate the proper place of human being, the Da of Dasein. Landscape represents Dasein’s proper dwelling place, in the sense that it is the place where Dasein is most fully in being. Yet as the privileged domain of Dasein, which is an already exclusive category of human being, landscape also proves improper—a doubly exclusive dwelling that recapitulates the coloniality of Nature.

As a whole this chapter reevaluates the utility of Heidegger’s work for present and future ecological thinking. It also develops a heuristic that later chapters will draw on and elaborate further. This heuristic not only affords a strategy for reading landscape for its ideological function. It also specifically locates this ideological function vis-à-vis the colonial matrix of power that grounds the coloniality constitutive of modernity.11 At its most ambitious, then, this chapter situates the Heideggerian understanding of dwelling-in-landscape within the long history of modernity that has, from the sixteenth century to the present, animated and given voice to one of the sustaining narratives of the (settler) colonial imagination.

A Heideggerian Ecology?

It has become a commonplace among scholars in the environmental humanities to cite Heidegger as a foundational antecedent to the ecophilosophical and ecocritical vanguards of the 1970s and 1980s. Energized by the momentum of the environmental movement, which had grown steadily since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, these vanguards answered Carson’s call for an ideological challenge to Western culture’s anthropocentrism. For many of those who responded to Carson’s call, Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology seemed indispensable for the task. Among philosophers, Heidegger proved central to the founding of deep ecology in the 1970s,12 and he remains a significant figure for eco-phenomenology.13 Among literary critics, Heidegger’s influence has proven equally significant. Heidegger has most obviously left his mark on Jonathan Bate’s seminal study The Song of the Earth, as well as on work that responds to Bate.14 Heidegger has also left a more oblique but no less profound mark on other crucial works of first-wave ecocriticism, such as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests.15 Heidegger’s name also appears consistently across numerous essays reprinted in important ecocriticism anthologies,16 as well as in key appraisals of the growing discipline,17 which at the very least demonstrates his ongoing relevance to ecocritical discourse.

What has made Heidegger indispensable to the environmental humanities? Perhaps most important has been his critique of anthropocentrism, as well as his call for an ethics of “letting-be,” in which humans would cultivate care for and preserve fellow beings. These principles stand at the very heart of deep ecology, the central precept of which emphasizes the inherent worth of all living entities. Michael Zimmerman, the leading authority on Heidegger and ecology, cites as further reasons for the philosopher’s appeal “his meditation on the possibility of an authentic mode of ‘dwelling’ on the earth, his complaint that industrial technology is laying waste to the earth, [and] his emphasis on the local place and ‘homeland.’”18 For ecocritics, there is also the matter of Heidegger’s use of language and his later emphasis on poetry. Heidegger was an enthusiastic reader of Hölderlin and Rilke, and his writing on poetry and poetics has enabled a notion of Heideggerian “ecopoiesis” as itself a mode of saving the earth.19

Yet despite the celebration of Heidegger threaded throughout ecophilosophy and ecocriticism, dissenting voices have emerged from within both. One of the first to question the philosopher’s eco-cred was Michael Zimmerman. Zimmerman initially expressed his concerns in a 1993 essay in Environmental Ethics,20 and he later revisited these concerns in his contribution to Brown and Toadvine’s anthology Eco-Phenomenology.21 In the earlier essay he emphasizes two points that weaken Heidegger’s compatibility with ecological thinking: first, his relationship to National Socialism, and second, his failure to see humans as animals. In the later essay Zimmerman explores the even more problematic possibility that “Heidegger’s own thought—despite his own personal or political preferences—is consistent with modernity’s project of the technological domination of nature.”22 Zimmerman’s questioning ultimately leads to ambivalence rather than outright dismissal, leaving Heidegger’s utility for ecological thinking up for debate.

The debate Zimmerman started recently resurfaced in the pages of the premier journal of ecocriticism, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), when Greg Garrard published a controversial article titled “Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism.” Though Garrard echoes Zimmerman’s concerns about Heidegger’s connection to National Socialism, he also makes the more forceful claim that, regardless of the philosopher’s flirtation with Nazism, Heidegger’s project is doomed from the get-go, since “there is no question of Being” in the first place, and further: “Once the mood music of ‘saving the earth’ is set aside, we can see that Heidegger’s ‘question of Being’ is actually so contemptuous of mere beings, and so suspicious of science as a mode of enframing, that ecological crisis could not but fall into the realm of the ‘inessential.’”23 Garrard’s appraisal of Heidegger’s ongoing value for ecophilosophy and ecocriticism is obviously bleak. Two years after Garrard’s essay, ISLE published a response by John Claborn, who dismisses Garrard’s major claims as “problematic” and urges ecocritics to recuperate Heidegger, using his work to develop a (re)new(ed) “eco-ontology.”24 The exchange between Garrard and Claborn is important at the very least for its having taken place at the very heart of contemporary ecocritical discourse. The high visibility of such an exchange suggests that now more than ever, Heidegger’s foundational influence on the contemporary environmental humanities is primed for reevaluation.

As my own reevaluation should indicate, I seek to develop Garrard’s critique further. Yet unlike Garrard, who I think discards Heidegger before registering the full extent of his centrality to eco-phenomenology, I see the need to carry the critique of Heidegger into environmental philosophy at large. In doing so I follow Michael Marder, whose recent collection of essays on Heidegger seeks to understand how the philosopher’s politics function in concert with his ecological thinking. Like Marder, I am interested in how the political and ecological converge in Heidegger’s topology of being. However, my own reading of Heidegger differs quite drastically from Marder’s, both in terms of the texts I choose to emphasize, my methods for reading them, and my fundamentally critical conclusions.25

Heidegger and the Coloniality of Being

Beyond the realms of ecophilosophy and ecocriticism, a reevaluation of another sort has been taking place in two seemingly remote outposts of academia: decolonial theory and Black studies. As outlined in the introduction to this book, decolonial theory stands at the forefront of the analysis of the global paradigm of modernity/coloniality. And though not often articulated explicitly within a decolonial framework, the work of many scholars in contemporary Black studies has felicitous affinities with decolonial thinking. This section briefly outlines the particular affinities that relate to the critique of Heidegger’s philosophical project. Put briefly, just as the ontometaphysical tradition had been plagued by the forgetfulness of being, as Heidegger claimed, decolonial and Black studies scholars argue that the reception of Heidegger, not to mention Western philosophy more broadly, has been plagued by the “forgetfulness of coloniality.”26

Decolonial thinking begins from the observation that modernity and coloniality were born together in the sixteenth century and have shaped world systems from that point to the present. Developing from the foundational work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who originated the concept and analysis of coloniality, a contingent of scholars based throughout South America and the United States have extended Quijano’s work to consider specific modalities through which coloniality is expressed. The extension of Quijano’s work has thus giv...