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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 4

Passages in the following are taken more or less verbatim from Environment and Philosophy (Vernon Pratt, Emily Brady and Jane Howarth, London, 2000, Routledge) by permission.

There is not much agreement about what the Romantic period is - what its dates are, what its characteristics are.

It falls anyway around the end of the 18th Century, and the limits I tend to recognise are set by the Sturm & Drang movement in what was to become Germany from 1770, and 1830.

I see it as a reaction to the thrust of scientism in the 18th Century - a pause called in the programme of limitless extension of Newtonian science.

A leading diagnosis of our present condition is that somehow human beings have set themselves apart from nature, and it is this that leads to the dangerous ways we have of exploiting the world about us. Understood properly, human beings are part of nature. If we understood that we would understand that destroying the prairie or exterminating the wolf or polluting the sea are all forms of self-mutilation. Insofar as we are part of Nature our well-being is an aspect of the well-being of Nature as a whole. John Donne's famous lines refer most obviously to the community of human beings to which he is urging we should all remember we belong. But - it is said - there is a wider point to be made. As human beings we are parts not only of the community of humanity but of the community which makes up nature as a whole. "We are all One Life", in the words of Coleridge (quoted in M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford, 1953, p.65 .He is speaking in appreciation of the Hebrew poets - see Salinger in Blake to Byron, p.189). So the bell tolls for us not only when a fellow human being dies but at the destruction of any member of that vastly wider community which is Nature itself.

The rhetoric here, which will be familiar, covers a range of views which differ quite seriously from each other. At one pole the idea that human beings are part of nature is little more than a reminder that 'he who shits on the path will find flies on his return', as the Yoruba proverb has it. In one sense such a reminder might be the most important thing to reiterate and amplify: Be careful! Think of the medium and long term consequences of what you do! It only needs we human beings to adjust our behaviour (including the behaviour of our states and corporations) in the light of that admonition and the human-made threat to our survival would be removed.

At the other pole, the unity that is proposed to embrace in one Nature human beings on the one hand and all that rich variety of things that are usually located in the 'environment' on the other is of a more intellectually challenging character, and it is this that we shall now explore.

The most sustained development of the idea that "we are all one life" comes in contemporary philosophy from a school of thought which calls itself 'deep ecology', associated first and foremost with the name of Arne Naess. This school adds to the idea of unity the notion of 'self-expression' as a goal: the unity that is Nature is motivated by a drive towards self-expression.

These concepts are not new, however, and it is interesting to approach them through an earlier movement of thought, namely the discontent, voiced towards the close of the 18th Century, with what had become of 'science': the 'romantic' movement.

Arne Naess

What you have in this movement is an attempt to reject the conception of the world and of the human place in it that had been sponsored (as the Romantics saw it) by the pioneers of Modern science (such as Bacon and Descartes) in the 17th Century and carried through as the 'Enlightenment' into the 18th C. .Part of the benefit to us of exploring Romantic thought is that it gives us the occasion to review the mind-set it was reacting against - the mindset of the Enlightenment. In spite of the best efforts of the Romantics, large elements of the Enlightenment conception are part of our outlook today, and some of the critics of contemporary thought, the proponents of deep ecology for example, may be regarded as renewing the Romantic critique.

The perspective of the Enlightenment was to regard Modern science in its earliest days as having generated an unprecedented increase in knowledge in the fields of mathematics, astronomy and physics, and as having the potential of generating the same kind of revolutionary progress as it was applied elsewhere. The Enlightenment thinkers saw their age as one in which Modern science, having been launched in spectacular fashion by the pioneers, was now advancing towards maturity - advancing through its application to every field where knowledge for human beings was held to be possible. The general attempt to apply science throughout the entire domain of human knowledge is sometimes called the Enlightenment project.

Towards the end of the 18th Century, a reaction set in. It took the form not of the rejection of science, but of the demand that science should reform. It is not clear that it got very far.. It sponsored new concepts that became influential, and science certainly took a turn as the century turned. (Foucault calls the turn a revolution indeed, one that rivalled the birth of Modern science in significance) What is unclear is whether the new direction was one which the Romantics would have welcomed.

Credits

Arne Naess photo courtesy Sigmen Hendriks

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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
Part of a module of the MA in Values and the Environment Lancaster University
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