Ecological Ethics and Living Subjectivity in Hegel's Logic

The Middle Voice of Autopoietic Life

W. Kisner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137412119
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

By interweaving Hegelian dialectic and the middle voice, this book develops a holistic account of life, nature, and the ethical orientation of human beings with respect to them without falling into the trap of either subjecting human rights to totality or relegating non-human beings and their habitats to instrumentalism.

1

Introduction: Life, Mechanism, and Dialectical Logic

This chapter provides a brief history of the rise and persistence of mechanism from the seventeenth century up to the present day. Beginning with the rise of modern science and the shift from the Aristotelian understanding of nature to the Galilean one, the essential determinacies of mechanism are explicitly elaborated by Descartes in his notion of res extensa. The initial mechanistic model, extended to animal life through crude analogies with clocks, wheels, and pulleys, gave way to more subtle and nuanced forms, ultimately finding its way into biological conceptions that are claimed to have gone beyond mechanism. This, I argue, is due to a failure to explicitly conceive of and criticize mechanistic determinacy in its own right. Instead, the latter is uncritically taken up as a pregiven conceptual resource found readily available within the cultural lexicon after the seventeenth century and then employed to frame various phenomena. Thus mechanistic determinacy persists as a conceptual frame in spite of disdain for crude seventeenth-century analogies. This indicates the need for an explicit critique of mechanistic determinacy per se, above and beyond merely replacing or supplementing it with different conceptions. The dialectical account of mechanism and life provided in Hegel’s Science of Logic satisfies this need, and does so in such a way that the relation between mechanism and life is clarified.

Theorists in the field of biophilosophy such as Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, and Humberto Maturana have made fascinating and productive connections between the phenomenological tradition on the one hand and the biological and cognitive sciences on the other. However, these approaches are unfamiliar with the kind of logical derivation of categories provided by Hegel and so do not explore the potential contribution that such a derivation can make to the philosophy of biology. This neglect is due in part to quasi-Kantian or empiricist assumptions that thought is a formal structure whose content must be independently and externally given – or, in short, an assumed dualism between reason and nature – and in part to the assumption that theoretical inquiry must begin with the givenness of experience and then draw subsequent inferences about the structures that frame that givenness or make it possible.

Following Hegel, I will argue that both of these assumptions are mistaken and only serve to block other avenues of inquiry that would circumvent the problems generated by them. The arguments presented here will indicate the broad range of possibilities opened up by a systematic derivation of categories as well as the specific ways in which it addresses philosophical problems that arise within theoretical biology and the phenomenological inquiries associated with it on the one hand and the ethical problems regarding human relations to non-human beings on the other hand. This is offered not in an attempt to subvert phenomenological approaches or to interfere with empirical research, but rather to address and resolve problems arising within them in such a way as to complement them within an overall philosophy of nature that justifies the intrinsic character of life as living subjectivity as well as an ethical orientation implied by it.

The account of life presented here argues in defense of an ecological ethic that is philosophically as well as biologically grounded. However, unlike other forms of holistic environmental ethics such as deep ecology, it does not subordinate human ethics to a non-human totality like the biosphere or Gaia. On the other hand, neither does it justify its normative claims by attributing a merely human-centered instrumental value to species and ecosystems. The approach taken here is distinctive in that it can justify both intrinsic value in non-human species and their ecosystems as well as an irreducibly human sphere of rights and obligations. Furthermore, it does so in such a way that demonstrates a necessary connection between these two levels rather than merely juxtaposing them in an avowed pluralism or politicizing both, as is done often enough when theorists wish to maintain both inter-human and biocentric ethics.¹ The ethic defended here is thus a qualified anthropocentrism. By following a logic of category derivation within Hegel’s philosophical project (with certain corrections and modifications I present as necessary to overcome shortcomings in Hegel’s arguments), we can avoid both the misanthropy implied in environmentalist aversion to anthropocentrism as well as sheer human dominance within a world defined in purely instrumental terms.

In framing the ontological character of living process in terms of the middle voice, as opposed to remaining limited to the active and passive voices into which most modern European languages have settled, I follow previous work in both the field of linguistics as well as in philosophy that has shown middle voiced or “medial” processes to be heterogeneous. That is, the middle voice can be divided into various forms of mediality and so is not uniform. Hence some forms of the middle voice are more appropriate to living process than others. However, unlike previous work done on the middle voice, through category derivation we can see the necessity of the specific medial form appropriate to life as well as why it is appropriate given the ontological clarification of life such derivation provides. Thereby the linguistic aspects of middle voice gain clarity with respect to their ontological implications, and category derivation itself gains clarity with respect to the kind of medial process it is. We will see that rendering the medial character of thought explicit with regard to its engagement in category derivation mitigates against certain misunderstandings that tend to arise when thought is limited to the active and passive voices alone.

Through the connections made between philosophy, biology, and linguistics, this book is interdisciplinary in its aims while philosophical in its orientation and grounding, providing the necessary clarification of categories invariably presupposed within theoretical biology and a logic that connects them to each other and to the various forms of the middle voice, bringing these together in an account of life, ecology, and human normativity. What follows is an introductory discussion of the specific kinds of ontological and ethical problems this book claims to address and resolve, the usefulness of appealing to the middle voice, and the philosophy of nature envisioned along with an indication of some of the relevant literature.

Ontological problems

The problem of providing a satisfactory answer to the perennial question “What is life?” is as well known as it is longstanding, and the various questions associated with it persist. Are living beings merely certain kinds of machines or are they something more? If so, what is that “more”? With the vanquishing of vitalism along with teleology in the modern era the prevailing paradigm defaulted to mechanism, leaving the onus upon those dissatisfied with this paradigm to provide a better account of life. What constitutes “better” can be variously imagined as a conception of life that is more empirically or phenomenologically accurate, that generates a more productive program for scientific research, that resolves the metaphysical dualism separating humanity from the rest of nature, that is both logically consistent and compatible with scientific knowledge, or that effectively demonstrates the mechanistic conception to be inadequate in some way.

Expressed negatively, any such “better” conception must avoid naively relying upon the very mechanistic presuppositions it purports to go beyond. At the same time, it must avoid relying upon unproven metaphysical speculation. It cannot be just be a matter of avowal on the part of its advocates, since this will not be persuasive to anyone but the converted. But to effectively challenge the mechanistic paradigm, it must address that paradigm on its own terms. In other words, if further characteristics are added to the mechanistic model that would purportedly make something alive as opposed to inanimate, those characteristics must be somehow shown to be necessary, either logically or empirically or both. Otherwise it would very likely fare no better than vitalism.

Any attempt to propose a better understanding of what life is has to overcome the suspicion that what is proposed is imposed rather than discovered. In other words, it has to lay to rest the old Kantian distinction between what something is in itself as opposed to the way it appears for us. Mere rejection of the idea of things in themselves does not resolve the ontological issue, since we still must show that our account of things reveals something about what they actually are and is not just something we have imposed upon them. This presents a problem of access: how do we ensure that we do indeed have genuine access to that which we are describing or explaining? How do we ensure that our account of things does not merely reflect something in us more than it does something in them? Even if phenomenology gives up on certainty and settles for likely stories, it cannot resolve the problem of access, a problem Heidegger refused to sidestep but could not resolve.² Even if empiricism settles for probability within a verificationist paradigm, it will still be saddled with the observer’s standpoint, presenting problems which become critical in Maturana/Varela.³

Although empiricists might well say that they have no need for ontology since they are merely attempting to describe given appearances in a way that facilitates prediction and control, if they are assuming conceptual determinacies in their descriptions that are neither derived nor clarified in their own right then subsequent observations based upon them will tend to appear in those terms in such a way that escapes notice. Hans Jonas pointed out, for instance, that the modern rejection of final causes is not based upon empirical observations but rather is a predetermined interpretive assumption that subsequently guides all observations.⁴ Heidegger argued in a similar vein that the modern paradigm replacing the Aristotelian conception of nature is not itself something empirically given, but rather is a hermeneutical structure that determines in advance how phenomena will appear.⁵ And at the dawn of high modernity Kant asserted that nature now must follow the lead of rational conceptions and show herself in their terms.⁶ This then leaves the non-empirical aspects of such conceptions in need of clarification in their own right, a clarification that cannot come by way of empiricist verification or phenomenological analysis.

A related problem is the question as to whether – and, if so, to what degree – any conception of nature or life may be determined by cultural variables such as gender, language, class, or history. On one extreme are those who claim that scientific truth about nature is completely objective and value free. On the other side are those who claim that all universal claims, scientific or otherwise, are determined or inflected in some way by cultural variables, making them at best naive or at worst a veneer for some form of social domination or arbitrary privilege. If one does not wish to merely give up on universal claims, as I do not, then the problem becomes one of how to justify them against such suspicions.

Ontological problems resolved

Ontologically, the “more” that constitutes life above and beyond mechanism is shown to be necessarily implied within mechanistic determinacy itself in such a way that the latter is unsustainable in its own terms. When the implications within mechanistic determinacy are made explicit, we get a determinacy that can no longer be adequately characterized in mechanistic terms. Such a determinacy is a new category – that of life. The clarification of mechanistic determinacy thereby prevents naïve reliance upon it as a foundational conception. In this way also there is no metaphysical dualism between mechanism and vitalism insofar as neither are simply pregiven and juxtaposed, and the mechanistic conception has been shown to be inadequate, not by independently given empirical or phenomenological reasons, but by virtue of its own logical implications. Insofar as it is a matter of following a logic implied within the category of mechanism itself, we need not depend upon either metaphysical speculation or clarion calls for a new vision. The account rests upon logic rather than speculation or avowal, and this logic is shown to spell out the determinacies of being as well as conceptual necessity.

By itself, the derivation of ontological categories does not settle the empirical issue of deciding which description is the most accurate, nor does it give us a better research program for the empirical sciences. Without the prior clarification of ontological determinacies, however, it will be difficult if not impossible to decide how best to match descriptions which presuppose such determinacies with what is empirically or phenomenally given. We can certainly articulate a phenomenology in terms of which things can appear in radically non-mechanistic ways, but the ghost of Kant’s “in itself/for us” distinction will always hamper such phenomenological investigations, leaving us uncertain as to whether its descriptions give us what things are in themselves or only as they appear for us. The Hegelian approach, however, can lay to rest the residual Kantianism that separates what things actually are from how we understand them to be, and thereby justifies confidence that genuine ontological clarification can indeed take place. Likewise, since Hegelian methodology suspends the mere assumption of determinacies in order to systematically derive them and show their necessity, the cultural variables mentioned above are also suspended. Merely asserting that they are “always already” determinative therefore constitutes a failure to understand and follow that methodology, and therefore also commits the straw man fallacy when leveled as critique.

By spelling out the logic of life determinacy, I show that not only are we understanding what life is “in itself,” universally, but we also see how life determinacy necessarily includes an ecosystem in which it lives and becomes “for itself” as a living subjectivity that reproduces itself through its species. Thereby the character of emergence, helpfully categorized at the empirical level by Terrence Deacon,⁷ is clarified ontologically with respect to the emergence of life from mechanism.

Ethical problems

The ethical problem has often been understood to be a matter of demonstrating that living beings and/or their ecosystems possess an intrinsic value over and above a merely instrumental value. This can variously take the form of imputing rights to animals and/or ecosystems, connecting environmental problems with various forms of social domination along gender lines, or calling for a holistic vision to replace atomistic or dualistic conceptions. The extension of rights to non-humans is fraught with the difficulty of justifying it on behalf of beings that, unlike human beings, cannot speak and so cannot claim rights. Above and beyond this basic problem, it also raises the question of how best to conceive the relation between such non-human rights, if granted, and human rights.

The conce...