Concluding Oration to “Images of Nature: Ethics and the Environment” – Part 1 of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s “Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics” series
Delivered at the Trades Hall, Carlton, July 22, 2008I’ve talked often in the second half of the course about what I’ve called the three fundamental projects of modernity: science and technology (seen as one project), the capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. When I first talked about them I tried to show that the cultural drive that led to these three things becoming fundamental came from a peculiar ethical sphere, the sphere of Protestantism, with its work ethic and its essentially ascetic idea of duty.
[The moralistic drive of Calvinist Protestantism] was directed to the fulfilment of duty – not to live in the world, but to work in the world – for “the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs is the highest form which the moral activity of the individual can assume.” As Weber’s studies show, this resulted in the channelling of the full thrust of Christian moral motivation into inner-worldly activities that served as the driving force to implement the new developments of the modern world, particularly to capitalism, but also to science and technology and liberal politics. . . Redner, p. 176
To wind up I want to make some broad generalisations about the images of Nature that each of these fundamental projects of modernity imply. Given that each of the three fundamental projects is still with us, I want then to try to fulfil my promise from two weeks ago and say something about the particulars and perversities of the reactions taking place within each of the fundamental projects to the alarming environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.
My starting point for talking about all this is actually one of my endpoints from last week. We saw last week that for Redner culture is always technological, that technology for him goes part of the way to actually defining culture rather being external to culture or antagonistic to it, because culture, on Redner’s definition, is always made up of a technical, an ethical and a representational element. In a similar sense, I said last week, for me nature is always also culture. Nature and culture might in other words look like polar opposites, but the polarity, under close scrutiny, breaks down, in the same way the polar opposition between technique and culture breaks down. Our image of Nature is always a cultural image. There is no Nature which is strictly speaking or completely external to us (though of course there are physical systems that are more or less subject to human observation, understanding, influence and use. Nature is something that culture has always already gone to work on. That is, I understand, a vague slightly windy philosophical pronouncement. Let me give it now a more tangible meaning by saying roughly how the three keystones of modern culture, our societies’ fascination with science and technology, its economic system and its liberal democratic political system constitute or pre-form our image of Nature.
The claim that our image of Nature is always a cultural image is maybe most difficult to accept in the case of science. Science, according to a certain received picture, is the objective knowledge of Nature. And technology according to the same received picture is something like the objective mastery of Nature, based on the knowledge science provides us with.) But the received picture, I would argue, is distinctly one-sided. Nature in the case of science is already a cultural category in the sense that knowledge of nature and its physical laws is not only the object of scientific research, but also the object of society-wide expectations and meanings, expectations and meanings that get attached to the scientific enterprise of research into Nature from the beginning. The same is doubly true of technology, it is inseparable from the societal meanings and expectations it is imbued with, especially from the Industrial Revolution onwards, because technological innovation is the dynamo in many ways of the entire process of industrialisation and the industrial-scale domination of Nature. Industrialism, according to my thumbnail definition in Week 9, is best understood as technological innovation harnessed so as to enable the production of goods on a mass basis. Industrialism, in other words, is what supplies the field of expectations through which the projects of scientific representation of nature and technological manipulation of it are interpreted.
So can we speak of an overall image of Nature here? At the risk of overgeneralising you could say that the image of nature involved in the process of giving scientific representation a meaning through technical manipulation and industrial production is an image of nature as purely an object of domination. (You’d incur the risk of over-generalising of course because the image of nature as object of domination is hardly characteristic of science, technology or its industrial and economic applications in anything like the same way.) Another way of putting it would be to say that the image of nature involved in the process is thoroughly disenchanted. With scientific representation and technical manipulation as our main modes of relating to Nature, we have taken enormous strides away from the magical and mythical modes of relating to the nature which, in vastly different ways, enabled us to imagine ourselves as a part of it. This is not to say, however, that disenchantment, or an attitude of domineering instrumentalism, are in any way the inevitable or uniform products of scientific representations of Nature. If the disenchanted, rational, methodical investigation of the natural world which is both the cause and effect of modern science has on the one hand led to enormous possibilities of technological and economic use of Nature, it has, paradoxically, also led to an enormous expansion of our sensibility towards nature. It is through science that the variety, complexity and in a sense the depths of Nature are known in a new way. Science need not be the prelude to rampant instrumentalism. And anyone who looks at David Attenborough communing with tree ferns or canoodling with turtles and sees nothing but a prelude to the invasion of bulldozers and pharmaceutical companies; or who thinks Attenborough is just providing entertaining kitsch for stupefied cultural consumers should put down his social theory textbook and get a breath of fresh air. Scientific representation of Nature in this permutation has clearly made possible a sort of re-enchantment of Nature, a second secular enchantment that bears only a superficial resemblance to pre-modern mythic experiences of Nature, which themselves often bear only passing resemblance to each other.
