Back to resources

On-Line Philosophy Resources

from the Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy

Introduction to Phenomenology and the Environment

Introductory text

The text below, by Jane Howarth, is offered as an easy way into phenomenology and as an orientation toward its usefulness for thinking about environmental questions. (Added to the on-line resources for students on 405).

The most obvious cause of our current environmental problems is that there are too many humans for the planet to support. We are using up the world's goods and polluting it. A less obvious cause is that we have wrong attitudes towards the natural world. We regard it as a resource to be exploited and as a free waste-processing plant. What phenomenology can contribute to environmental thinking is two things: first, a critical investigation of these attitudes, second, an exploration of how we, as humans, deep down, experience and relate to the natural world.

What the relation between humans and the rest of the world is and ought to be is a traditional philosophical concern. The phenomenological philosophers believe that philosophy, at least since Descartes, has misunderstood this relationship. Their aim was to explain how the misunderstanding arose and to restore a proper understanding of the world and our place in it.

Edmund Husserl thought that there was a crisis in European thinking. The crisis he meant was not our current environmental crisis, but had he survived to see our present predicament he would doubtless have thought that the two crises were closely linked, the one he wrote of being the root of the present one.

The crisis, as Husserl saw it, essentially involves the natural sciences. The first target of Husserl's attack is positivism. Science aims to be positivistic, free from metaphysical speculation and value-free or value neutral. This is fine for science. The trouble starts when interpreters of science - philosophers - claim that science is the only source of truth or knowledge. That, argues Husserl, rules out of court alot of very important truth. 'Merely fact-minded science makes merely fact-minded men', he wrote.

One thing which is left out is value. A.J.Ayer's famous chapter in LTL gives an account of what claims we make about values mean. The value claims we make look like sentences: 'Causing pain to animals is wrong' 'One ought to use the earth sparingly', they look as if they are either true or false. In fact, Ayer claims, their grammar belies what they are really saying. When one makes these value claims, one is not saying anything which is either true or false. One is simply sounding off, exclaiming, expressing a taste or preference, as one might, when presented with breakfast, say 'scrambled eggs, Yuk!'. So, values are nothing more than personal likes and dislikes. These might be very strong; but they cannot be right or wrong, no likes can be better or worse than any others. This view is called 'emotivism'.

What is the connection between positivism about the sciences and emotivism about values? It is this. Positivism claims that science has a monopoly on truth. Only what can be scientifically investigated, ideally proved, is true. Only what can be scientifically investigated, ideally disproved, is false. Values cannot be scientifically investigated, they cannot be proved or disproved. Hence no claims about values are either true or false.

The human sciences can explore what people's likes and dislikes are. But this is a purely factual investigation into what values people hold and not an investigation of the values themselves. It may turn out that some values, construed as likes and dislikes, are shared by everyone, but this wouldn't show them to be right. Since this view of what values are is fairly widely voiced these days as something obviously true, it is perhaps worth mentioning that it is not the only account to be had of what values are. It is also a view which is hard to sustain in the face of gross iniquity, such as the torture of children. Husserl was writing as Hitler was rising to power. It is surely hard to sustain emotivism in the face of the holocaust. So, emotivism is not obviously true. Moreover, though put forward by positivists, it is actually in conflict with positivism, since the emotivist claim that values are mere likes and dislikes is not something which can itself be scientifically proved and so, according to positivism, not something which can be either true or false. Emotivism is criticised as an inadequate account of our values with respect to the human and social world; but it is held implicitly with respect to the natural world. That this is so shows itself in the charge of sentimentality levelled at those who suggest that their attachement to the natural world is based on something more serious than mere likes and dislikes.

According to positivism, science not only has a monopoly on truth, it also has a monopoly on reason. The sole method of rational investigation is scientific investigation. So, anything which might look like reasoning about values is not really reasoning.

Husserl invited us to look more closely at what scientific investigation is. Positivism aims to accept only what can be verified by observation. General theoretical claims, to qualify as scientific, must be testable by experiment and observation. Scientific knowledge is a system of statements in which the particular ones logically support, give reasons for believing, the more general ones. The most particular ones are observation statements, they report particular observations.

So, it is an ideal of the natural sciences that all theoretical claims be based on and answerable to experience. Husserl's claim was that, with the rise of modern science from Galileo and Newton, scientific concepts and theories had become highly abstract, divorced from the actual experience from which they are abstractions, and in need of 'anchoring' in experience. The task he set himself, and it is a philosophical not a scientific one, was to explore experience, the 'lived-world' of which science purports to give a general picture, discover the laws explaining how it works.

This is not a new philosophical enterprise, as Husserl was well aware. Descartes and Locke, in the seventeenth century, had set themselves the task of reconciling what physics said the world was really like with our experience of it. Galileo had said that the language of nature was mathematics. Only what is measurable is real. The aim to discover how the world worked was the aim to discover its mechanisms. This mechanistic conception of the universe has its clearest philosophical statement in the work of Descartes. The world is made up of two kinds of thing: matter, which is extended and mechanical, and mind which is conscious. The question arises: how can these two radically different kinds of thing interact. The general view was that the interaction was causal; but since the conception of cause was a mechanistic one, that claim was highly unscientific since minds, not being extended in space, have no surfaces to push or be pushed by matter.

Descartes and Locke were both concerned specifically to explain sensory perception and observation. The problem, in broad terms is this: the workings of the physical world, and that includes the workings of human bodies, can all be explained in terms of size, shape, motion, .... . But the world as we experience it, has other properties: it is noisy, colourful, it has smells and tastes. A dominant metaphor was that these properties are not properties of objects but are 'contents' of the mind. This clearly is a metaphor, since literally speaking, the mind has no extension and so it cannot have any contents. This metaphor of the mind as a container was used in psychology. The contents were said to be 'sensations'.

Husserl has no objection to physics: their abstractions are useful abstractions. Psychology, in contrast, he believed had gone badly wrong in its adoption of this metaphor and its belief in sensations as the basic units, the building blocks, of human experience. Merleau-Ponty offers a detailed criticism of scientific psychology based on the notion of sensation. One important criticism is that psychology so based has failed on its own terms to explain the workings of the mind. The notion of a sensation as the basic unit of experience raises problems within psychology which psychology has not answered satisfactorily. To this charge, the psychologists could legitimately reply that, there is much explanatory work yet to be done, but this is no grounds for giving up the task as they conceive it of explaining how perception, knowledge and action are 'constructed' out of sensations, the basic data or input of experience. But this response fails to meet a deeper challenge which Husserl and Merleau-Ponty make to psychology. This is, not just that psychology so far has had rather limited explanatory success, but that it cannot possibly succeed in explaining human knowledge and action because it is based on an erroneous account of what the basic data, the input into the human mind is.

The phenomenologists' diagnosis of this mistake in interpreting the basic data of consciousness is that psychology, rather than explore what it is like to be conscious, has drawn conclusions, based on what physics tells us the world is like, and what biology tells us the sense organs are like, about what basic conscious experience must be like. The task of phenomenology is to show that this conclusion is false.

Let us review the ground covered. Phenomenology presents science in a radically different light from how positivism presents it. Science, with its mechanistic account of how the world works, has had great success. But, in what does this success consist? Positivism would say the success consists in the truth of science. Phenomenology, in contrast, especially Heidegger, would say that the success lies in the fact that science is an instrument which enables us to manipulate and control the world technologically. The standard view of the relation between science and technology is that there is pure science on the one hand and technology consists of applying the findings of pure science. Heidegger rejects this orthodox view. He argues that science is through and through technological. That its abstraction, laws, concepts, its dominant metaphor of nature as a mechanism, are all guided by and geared to the aim of technological control over nature. This being so, science is not value free, it is laden with this value of humans as controllers of nature. To regard nature as mechanistic is to regard it from the very start as like an artifact, a machine, something we have made. But we have not made nature, rather, it has made us. This is perhaps the true message we need to get from evolutionary theory. So, for Heidegger, science is not a purely factual matter. Scientific theory and practice take for granted certain values. Are they values which we want to hold? In the light of the environmental crisis, we might well reply negatively to that question.

Husserl believed that science abstracts from the lived-world, ignoring the values involved in it, so, if not presupposing, at least paving the way for, our regarding the world as simply a means to our ends. He wants us to look again at the values which science ignores, the experiential basis of science, the life-world which involves activities constitutive of valuing.

The modern world view is that science tells us what the facts are. What use we make of the scientific information depends on what our values are. Values are what we determine and then project onto the world. Phenomenology argues that science already embodies a system of values, of the world as a commodity to be used by us however we want to, as having value only in so far as we can use it as an instrument to our ends. Phenomenology further argues that this world-view represents a 'falling' from a richer way of being on our part. Via this worldview, we have lost sight of something deep and precious in the way we are essentially situated, at home in the world.

The task is to weed out and challenge the screen of utilitarian values and concepts which distort our experience of the world. We need to take a fresh look at the world and at ourselves. We are not, as Descartes had it, pure consciousnesses which happen to be lodged in mechanical bodies. We are essentially embodied, essentially situated in a world of significance and value. Modern life may cover this up; but it still underlies modern 'alienated' living and close scrutiny and sensitive description can reveal the true nature of our 'being-in-the-world', our life-worlds which are not devoid of values.

THE LIFE-WORLD

The life-world, the world as we live in it rather than theorise about it, is one in which subjects and objects are essentially related to each other. Each activity in the life-world of a subject involves interaction with an object, and all objects in the life-world are objects for the subject. All consciousness is intentional is a leading thesis of phenomenology. But this thesis of intentionality is properly construed only if it is seen as a feature of the life-world. Intentionality is that feature of consciousness whereby consciousness is conscious of something. Brentano held that this was the defining property of the mental: all mental states are directed towards, about, of, objects. He also held that no physical state had intentionality: the colour of a tree or size of a mountain is not about or directed towards anything.

So, conscious subjects depend on objects and objects are first and foremost objects for conscious subjects. The objects of which science speaks, since science is based on human observation, are, or at least start out as, objects of consciousness.

It is part of the crisis that intentionality has not been properly understood. The intentionality of consciousness has been a problem since Descartes. Having divided the world into external objects and pure consciousness, the question arises: how can the latter be 'about' the former. The only available answers are that the objects cause intentional states or that the intentional states represent objects. But in neither case can there be any conceivable guarantee that the objects exist or that the representations are accurate, because all consciousness can ever encounter are the effects of the alleged causes or the representations of the alleged objects.

Another problem related to the problem of intentionality is the problem of value. Since, post Descartes, the world is regarded as a purely factual realm, values cannot come from objects in the world. So they must come from subjects - we are the source of values, we project values onto the world.

But this, claims phenomenology is a theoretical stance upon the world and ourselves. If we explore the lived world, we find that we cannot separate out so easily subjects from objects, values from facts. The Cartesian world view has prised them apart and worried ever since how they could be united. Why, the phenomenologists ask, prise them apart in the first place? They are related through and through. Moreover, if the relations which hold in the life world are properly investigated, it will emerge that neither subjects nor objects, facts or values are as presented by the Cartesian model. Phenomenology takes intentionality as fundamental, subjects and objects are first and foremost related to each other. Any account of either must pay heed to this relatedness.

The life-world is not one in which we gaze at value-free objects and decide on values, in the light of preferences or judgements formed by self-contemplation in isolation from those objects. In the lived world, objects are experienced as inviting, repellent, frightening, horrible, and preferences and judgements are formed on the basis of how the objects have affected us and what we have learnt to do with them.

It should already be beginning to emerge that phenomenology promises both a critique of much environmental thinking and an alternative, more eco-friendly, world view.

THE REDUCTION

Phenomenology aims to reveal essential features of this life-world or lived-world. The key notion is that we need to adopt a reflective standpoint from which we can take a non-theoretical, unprejudiced look at our experiences. The prejudices we should seek to avoid are the ones which, according to Husserl have given rise to the crisis. Overall, the claim is that, if we attend to our experience, our 'lived-world', we shall find that our experience is not one of passively receiving sensations caused by a mechanistic world, but one of interacting with a valuable and meaningful environment. The phenomenological aim is to describe these interactions.

Different phenomenologists recommend different ways of achieving this reflective standpoint. Husserl recommended that we put aside, bracket, our everyday belief that the world exists. This, he believed, would enable us to focus on and describe the world as we experience it. Husserl believed that we, as subjects, can take a stance which 'transcends' the world of objects, hence his phenomenology is 'transcendental'. Existential phenomenologists believe that no such transcendental standpoint is achievable. Heidegger believed that the reflective standpoint was not so easily achieved. The task of phenomenology, he thought, is to allow things to show themselves. But they cannot do this as long as we hold our everyday prejudices which 'alienate' us from the world. Heidegger's work was devoted to exposing these prejudices. Merleau-Ponty believed that Husserl's bracketing, also called 'the reduction', could never be more than partial. We can never put aside all our assumptions about the existence of objects. We may focus on some aspect of our lived-world, but we shall still be living in, taking for granted, other aspects.

What all three thinkers have in common is the belief that in ordinary living we ignore important features of our interactions with the world. These interactions, and the true nature of the participants in them, human subjects and the world of objects, are implicit in ordinary experience and can be made explicit from a suitable phenomenological standpoint.

If, as is claimed by some environmental philosophers, in modern life we have lost sight of what our proper relationship with our environment is, then phenomenology promises a way of bringing this into view again. In particular, the claim would be that our lived worlds incorporate all manner of activities which are constitutive of valuing it. A proper account of valuing can result from phenomenological enquiry.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION
A Phenomenological Fieldtrip

Phenomenologists insist that one should describe particular, concrete, actual experiences not imagined, remembered or possible ones. Just as some nature painters insist on painting from nature, so phenomenology of nature should be done from nature. So, go out and find yourself something to describe. You will probably be surprised at what hard work it is and at what emerges.

The aim is to uncover the experiential basis of anything we might say about what we are describing. If you are a natural scientist, you will likely begin your description using classifications - there is an oaktree, a limestone pavement, a woodpigeon etc. What enables you to classify things in these ways? How do you identify the items you classify? You may well have forgotten your original training in the field. It might be helpful to take someone with you who doesn't know an oak tree from a beech. What do you have to point out to them, what do they have to learn to distinguish to acquire field skills?

What will emerge, if you are patient, will be much more than you expect.

You recognise this sort of territory as the sort of place oak trees grow. How? What are the signs?

You spot a tree in the distance - it looks like an oak. So what shape is it? Are all oak trees exactly that shape? Are no other trees that shape? So how do you know it's an oak? Is there something distinctive about the colours? Is it moving in the breeze in a distinctive way? Would anything convince you that it wasn't an oak? - like walking round to the other side of it and finding it was a cleverly made sculpture. So, you have expectations of what other experiences of it would be like, how it would feel, what its other sides are like, what its leaves look like. These expectations are what Husserl calls 'horizons' of experience. What seems like a simple sight of a tree turns out to have 'implicit' in it all manner of other possible experiences, expectations, without which you wouldn't be able to identify this as an oak tree.

You notice an acorn. Clearly a sign of an oak tree. But what is involved in 'reading' that sign? You know it is a nut, the fruit of the oak tree. Recognising that involves knowing what nuts are. It also involves knowing that trees bear fruit which fall off and produce other trees. Probably you know that squirrels eat acorns, that acorns rattle when you shake them. All this is involved in your recognising an acorn.

You get closer to the tree and see its leaves. They have a very distinctive colour and shape. But would you be able to draw the shape, pick out the colour from a colour chart in the absence of the tree? Quite possibly not - your skills of identifying the leaf are activated by the whole experience.

What you are aiming to do is to reveal how much is involved in a seemingly simple experience, the recognition of an oak tree. Normally, we take such an experience for granted. The phenomenological aim is to stop taking it for granted and describe all the knowledge and perceptual and motor skills involved in even the simplest experiences of the world.

Notice, in particular, how much of your description will be about you and not just about the oak tree. Your experience involves your expectations and beliefs and abilities. Scientific classifications, which make no reference to these aspects of experience, are abstractions from the experience, they have abstracted the subject from the experience, abstracted from the lived world.

If you are an artist, you will find other things to describe. The graceful curve of the branches, the grandeur of the tree, the insignificance but enormous potential of the acorn, the play of light through the leaves, the dappling of the ground beneath. How do you recognise these things? - the grace, grandeur, play? How would you teach someone who didn't have your aesthetic sensibilities to recognise such things?

Suppose they don't see the grace. Maybe they need to focus on just one branch, not the tree as a whole. Perhaps you then move your arm in a graceful way making something like the same sort of shape the branch makes as it moves in the wind. Encourage them to move in that way, to feel the difference between that and jerky, graceless movements. What would they find graceful? - a ballet dancer perhaps. How do her graceful movements resemble the graceful branch? In this way we uncover the basis of our aesthetic beliefs about nature. What we find is implicit in our experience: what we have to learn in order to have experience. An ornithologist, a surveyor and a historian might have different stories ti tell, different skills to impart, different riches to uncover. Experiences are revealed, in this way, to be much richer and more complex than one first supposes. There are people who can deviate rather quickly from a phenomenological description. They take scientific classifications for granted, rather than exploring the experiential basis for those classifications. They refer to objects, and forces which are not actually perceivable. They appeal to general laws which explain the phenomenon instead of seeking simply to describe it.

In contrast, when the phenomenological description is concerned to describe the involvement of the subject in the description, either the psychologists take over and, as with the physical scientists, offer classifications and explanations rather than descriptions - this often takes the form of explaining the phenomena away. Alternatively, people feel they are talking about themselves and this induces either acute embarrassment or verbal excess. Both these spring from the same belief: that here anything goes, one can say whatever one likes, there are no rules.

So, are there rules and if so what are they? There are two rules of description. First, every description of an object experienced must be accompanied by a description of how the subject is experiencing it and every description of an experiencing subject must be accompanied by a description of the object being experienced. Second, one must hold firm to the phenomenon one set out to describe: one's description must stick to what is integral to experiencing the object in question. Being over-theoretical takes one away from one's experience; being over fanciful takes one away from the experienced object.

The best advice at this stage is probably to say don't be embarrassed, choose a phenomenon in which you are sufficiently interested to want to think hard about, to return to it again and again to articulate exactly what it is about the phenomenon that gives it the 'draw' it has for you: experiencing a spectacular sunset, a disused barn, a stretch of canal, a wild animal in distress, and then describe away. It is really at the next stage of phenomenology that the description is scrutinised and some bits of it might have to go.

The life-world is not merely factual, so do not avoid evaluative terms in your description if they seem appropriate - use metaphor, aesthetic terms, emotional language if it seems right. Don't be deterred by the thought that what you are saying is 'merely subjective'. That challenge is a remnant of the presupposition you are supposed to be dropping. If you think that what you are describing is an integral part of the phenomenon, then put it in. Phenomenologists believe that phenomenological description shows the presuppositions to be false of the life-world, so you must not be deterred from including something in your description on the grounds that it goes against the presuppositions.

The trouble with just saying 'describe away' is that one either can't get started at all, or, having started, one cannot stop. It may be that knowing where the description is heading will help in getting started, but it can be a danger - the description can be very 'thin' and so miss its mark if the description is too goal-orientated. The gaol, the second purpose of phenomenological description is to reveal essences. How is that done?

ESSENCES

The search for essences is the next, more theoretical, stage of phenomenology. The aim is to find essential features of phenomena, features which make them the phenomena they are. In selecting a phenomenon, one had what Husserl calls a 'theme' in mind. One selected that concrete phenomenon as a phenomenon of a certain kind, an exemplar of a theme. Suppose your concrete phenomenon was swimming in a lake. What is your theme? It might be swimming in any water. It might be swimming in a lake in contrast with the sea or a pool. It might be experiencing a lake, not necessarily swimming - boating or walking round would equally be exemplars of that theme.

When you search for the essence, what is essential to your description, what you are looking for are those features of the phenomenon without which it wouldn't be an exemplar of that theme. Having got the phenomenological description, revealing, making explicit what is implicit in the phenomena, we want to sort out what is essential and what co-incidental in the description. The move to essence seeks to avoid speculation, mind wandering, idiosyncratic associations which might get into the description.

Phenomenologists differ on how to discover essences. Husserl's method for finding essences is to work through your description systematically. For each element of the phenomenon you have described, you must try to imagine the phenomenon without that element. If what you imagine is still an exemplar of your theme, then the element is not essential to the phenomenon. If what you imagine is not an exemplar of your theme, then the element is essential to the phenomenon. For example, your encounter with the oak tree might have set your mind wandering off into a personal reverie about a chidhood picnic under a similar tree. If you included that in your description, this is where it gets deleted. The oak tree happened to remind you of that occasion, but it might not have. You can imagine encountering the oak without indulging in the reverie. The reverie is not an essential part of the phenomenon. Your expectation about what the tree would look like from the other side, however, is something which you cannot imagine an encounter with an oak tree lacking. So that is part of the essence of the phenomenon.

Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty found this aspect of Husserl's method unsatisfactory. They both thought that the discovery of what is essential in the lived-world is a more complex task. Heidegger believed that we need to strip away all our ideas and concepts which he believed normally 'distance' us from the world. Having done this the world of things, what Heidegger calls 'Being', would 'show itself'. The obvious question to ask here is: 'how would we know when we had succeeded?'. Heidegger gives no clear answer to that question. What he does, though, is to point to all sorts of ways in which our dealings with the world do involve some sort of 'distancing' or alienation or inauthenticity. These are easier to recognise than the pure encounter with Being with which Heidegger contrasts them. An example would be, on encountering our oak tree, regarding it only as potential shelving. Or, in case you're getting bored with the oak tree, think of the tourist, so jaded by the trip, that each view becomes just another lake and mountain, each work of art just another old painting. There is clearly something wrong with these responses. They involve a failure to experience what is there to be found. Much of modern life can seem to be like this. In our rush to get to work, we see only the car in front and miss the stunning sunrise; in our haste to catch a train, other people are just a queue. If we made ourselves aware of our alienation, we might better appreciate our environment. And if we appreciated it better, we might come to treat it better. That was certainly Heidegger's hope, though optimism about his fellowman was scarcely his strong point. Heidegger then gives us no clearcut way of revealing essences; but he does offer a thought provoking way of detecting the inessential with which we are so often concerned in our busy lives.

Merleau-Ponty sought to 'put essence back into existence'. One thing he meant by this was that Husserl's procedure for discovering essences by using imagination would not necessarily give the right answers. Pure imagination can lead us to ignore how very much our existence is embedded in the world. For example, take the phenomenon of going to bed in your own familiar house. You might imagine that it is not essential to this operation that the light switches are located just where they are: you could, after all, have them moved and you would adjust to the new places. Merleau-Ponty would recommend not just imagining the change but doing it. One does adjust, eventually, as one adjusts, eventually to a new car or new computer keyboard. If you make such changes, you will notice how your hands just move to the old position of the light switches, even while you are telling yourself that they are not there. Actual changes rather than just imagined ones bring to light much better the essential elements in our practical dealings with our familiar worlds. You can reflect on moving around your house and imagine that switching the light off just there is not essential. But move the switch and you will find your hands groping, your body disorientated, your mind distracted. The movement of the switch has changed the familiar phenomenon under scrutiny: that precise bodily movement was an essential part of it.

Phenomenology, as we saw, seeks to revise Cartesian ontology. It is still an ontology which distinguishes between subjects and objects: subjects are radically unlike objects, but they are essentially situated in a world of objects. What both subjects and objects are essentially can be adequately characterised only if we start by properly recognising their essential relatedness.

What is this essential relatedness and has it been discovered or presupposed by phenomenology? Take first the charge that phenomenology presupposes rather than establishes the essential relatedness of subjects and objects. The charge would be that, in accepting Brentano's definition of consciousness as intentional, and in insisting that all descriptions of phenomena make reference to both subject and object, phenomenology presupposes inter-relatedness. Given it aims at presuppositionlessness, that looks like a serious charge. The defence against that charge would go as follows. We might regard the inter-relatedness of subjects and objects as an hypothesis which describing the phenomena was testing. If we had found a phenomenon which couldn't be described according to the rule that one must always make reference to both subject and object, then that would have falsified the hypothesis. But we found no such phenomenon, and could not find one because the involvement of both subject and object is essential to any phenomenon. If we took away either all reference to the oak tree or all reference to our experiences, we would no longer be describing the phenomenon of encountering an oak tree. So we might see phenomenology as establishing the truth of the inter-relatedness claim rather than presupposing it.

Phenomenological description can expose a wealth of ways in which we relate to the world. Can it say anything general about the relationship? Husserl indicated that he thought it was not value free. Merleau-Ponty indicated that wonder in the face of the world underlies all our more practical dealings with it. It is Heidegger who perhaps is most explicit about what our fundamental, essential relation with the world of objects is. It is one of Care, of mindfulness, of dwelling. Our fundamental relation with the world is that we value it, or rather, our ways of relating to the world involve the activities which make up what valuing is. Notice the shift from 'value' as a noun to 'valuing' as a verb. If we use the noun, we expect a thing which we might find. The verb suggests activities which we might engage in, relationships we might forge.

In the debate concerning what kind of value the environment has, the chief dispute is between those who claim that the environment has instrumental value, its value lies in its ability to serve our ends, and those who claim it has intrinsic or inherent value, value in its own right and so should be respected whether it serves our ends or not. Phenomenology offers a way of exploring both of these positions. What are the phenomena involved in using the environment as a means to our ends? What are the phenomena of discovering and respecting values in the environment. If we explore those phenomena, we might develop a richer account of what this activity of valuing involves, how we use or abuse our environment, how we respect or disrespect it, and what in it we use, abuse, respect, disrespect.

So, the relation between subjects and objects is not value-free. It is rather what makes up the complex activity of valuing. Subjects and objects are internally related. That is to say, we do not depend on objects just for sustainance and entertainment. We are as we are because of the world we are in. We could not use, abuse, respect or disrespect if there were no world. We could not have the ends we do or use the means if we were not situated in the world. Any attempt to describe the life of a subject without reference to objects, or objects without reference to subjects will leave out of acount what is involved in valuing just as describing members of a team without reference to the team will leave out of the picture and make inexplicable notions such as team spirit, loyalty, co-operation or 'being on a roll'.

THE SUBJECT

The emphasis phenomenology place on the intimate relation between subjects and the world of objects is clearly relevant to environmental philosophy. The characterisations it gives of subjects and objects, based on the fact of their fundamental relatedness, similarly can be seen to shed new light on environmental issues.

Husserl's notion of a subject which 'transcends' the world of objects is perhaps of little significance environmentally. It might be taken to support those who believe that we can survive as brains in vats or as computer programs. However, there is no evidence that Husserl believed that transcendental egos could survive independently of their being selves in the world. Furthermore, he believed that, though people can live in radically different cultures, we all live in one and the same nature. He regarded it as unimaginable that different subjects should not recognise the same natural world. He is opposed, thereby to those who argue that nature itself is a 'cultural construct', with the possible implication that there is no such thing as nature itself to be respected for its own sake.

However, it is once again in Heidegger and especially Merleau-Ponty that the most environmentally significant notions of the subject are developed. Heidegger's name for human subjects is 'Dasein' literally 'being there'. It is, he thought, distinctive of the kind of being we have or beings we are that we are where we are and we are as we are in virtue of where we are. This is not to be construed geometrically but rather as involving being as we might say 'in place' in our environments. Our ability to interact with our environment is a more fundamental contact with it than our ability to think, conceptualise and theorise about it. Our ability to dwell in the world as our home is more fundamental, deeper, than our capacity to pass through places as tourists or commuters. Heidegger's emphasis is on practical rather than theoretical aspects of life. We engage with the world, and this engagement can be revealed, by phenomenological description, as the basis of all that we do. It can also be revealed to be, at heart, a caring engagement, though many of our activities disguise this care, alienate our caring or engaged selves, ignore the fact that we are Dasein.

Merleau-Ponty's notion of the subject is arguably the most significant environmentally. Merleau-Ponty more explicitly than Heidegger divorces being a subject from being conscious. He locates subjectivity in the body, the subject is first and foremost a 'body-subject'. The environmental significance of this is immediately obvious. It is our bodies which are the environmental problem: they consume and pollute and suffer from the results.

In the last section we saw how phenomenology puts emphasis on action rather than thought in its account of the relationship between subjects and objects. Merleau-Ponty goes on to emphasise the role of the body in action. The orthodox account of action, which Merleau-Ponty rejects, is that an action involves a conscious subject directing its body to move in certain ways in accordance with the wishes, desires, decisions which are features of consciousness or mind, mental activities. Merleau-Ponty invites us to pay attention to those features of our actions which are habitual. Much of what we do in the world is or relies on the fact that we have bodily skills which operate without our needing to pay conscious attention to directing them. We drive our cars, negotiate obstacles, play musical instruments, use sporting equipment, perform all manner of complicated tasks, as it were, on 'automatic pilot'. Our bodies know how to do things. Intentionality, that feature of subjects taken as central by phenomenology is, according to Merleau-Ponty, at root a feature of bodies: our bodies point, grasp, direct themselves towards or away from things. He argues that, without this bodily intentionality, we would not have intentonality of consciousness. Our consciousness of the world and of ourselves always has at its base, as phenomenological description reveals, bodily know-how.

Merleau-Ponty spends a great deal of time articulating and arguing for this position. He also devotes much space to detailed criticisms of the orthodox accounts, both philosophical and psychological, of action. It is perhaps sufficient here to report some of the more striking observations he makes about human activities in criticism of the orthodox view and in support of his own posiiton.

Consider any complex skill which you possess: driving a car, playing a sport or a musical instrument, using a computer, cooking, writing. With some of these, it might help if you cast your mind back to when you were learning the skill, or rather the large numbers of skills involved. In the early stages of learning to play tennis, I certainly found it hard to conceive how all the required elements could possibly be done at the same time. If one got one's feet in the right place, one forgot to watch the ball; if one got one's grip right, the feet got tangled up. If one watched where one's opponent was going, one lurched to volley a ball on its way out of court. If one concentrated on the back swing, the follow through went wrong, and anyway one missed the ball. Gradually, all these things come together. The feet learn to take care of themselves, one's eye learns to look, the grip takes care of itself. But all this can go badly wrong again if you turn conscious attention to each element. Learning a skill requires that the body takes care of itself. Anyone who plays a musical instrument knows about finger memory and how it can be upset by thinking about it. Many of the skills involved in our activities have to be performed unconsciously. Psychologists tend to think here of the unconscious mind. For Merleau-Ponty, these skills are unconscious or as he says 'pre-conscious', but bodily rather than mysteriously mental.

Second, Merleau-Ponty observes that such skills come into play only in a suitable environment. In the absence of a keyboard, one's fingers lose their memory. Miming is a different skill. This looks like a problem for any account of action in terms of consciousness directing bodily movement. Why should consciousness not be able to do that wherever the body is?

Third, as we saw earlier, habits in a familiar environment can become so entrenched that consciousness cannot countermand them. You know there is a power cut, but your hand still reaches for the light switch. If the action is directed by the mind, why can't the mind stop directing it?

It should be clear from these examples that, when Merleau-Ponty describes the body subject, he is not appealing to neurophysiology. He is interested in our bodies as we can become aware of them by phenomenological reflection on our life-worlds. He is concerned to describe not to explain. Phenomenological description of the body subject requires no special neurophysiological knowledge.

Merleau-Ponty's emphasis, then, is on bodily habits and skills. His descriptions bring one to ponder on how dependent one is on one's surroundings. In very practical environmental terms, one might think about habits which are environmentally friendly and those which are not. The easiest way of being economical with one's immediate environment would be to acquire entrenched bodily habits of switching lights and taps off, sorting one's refuse for re-cycling, re-using envelopes etc. But such habits will need an appropriate environment in which to develop and operate. One can arrange one's own home appropriately, but if the bottle bank is a car ride away, that could be a problem.

Merleau-Ponty argues that our basic bodily activities depend on our environment, that our mental activity all depends on our basic activities. Conceptual knowledge involves perceptual skills. Perceptual skills involve bodily skills, focusing the eyes, moving round the object. Objects have significance, they make sense to us, invite our classifications, appreciative gaze or touch, our responsive movements. If this is right, it seems that it could have great import for the environmental debate. By debate, one might convince people that a certain way of life or course of action is right, what they ought to do. But getting them to do it, if the environment is not amenable to their acquiring appropriate skills, might be an entirely different matter. Adjust the environment and the habits might follow.

Another consequence of Merleau-Ponty's position for the environmental debate is that part of the debate which concerns the ascription of instrumental value to the world of objects. Merleau-Ponty offers a rich taxonomy of instrumentality. Some instruments, tennis racquets, walking sticks, become part of the act, an extensions to one's body. Others such as keyboards are occasions for the act. Others are the raw materials that we act upon - the joiner's wood, the dressmaker's cloth. Others - such as a workshop or kitchen - form a context for our actions. And all these operate against a background of the rest of the world being out there, taken for granted. I am not currently paying attention (or wasn't before I began this sentence) to the trees, grass, sky ouside my window; but I would notice if they disappeared. So, using our environment as instrument, as means to our ends, is a complicated affair. The complexities not only concern the different kinds of means objects can be to serve our ends. Merleau-Ponty's work also casts doubt on the sharp distinction between agent and instrument, means and ends and the conception of ends often implicit in the claim that the environment has value as means to our ends. Ends are presented as something we consciously have or decide upon prior to going into action, using the environment as a means. This model is one which Merleau-Ponty implicitly challenges. We can formulate ends only if we possess bodily skills, and those skills can develop only in a certain sort of context. So our having the ends we do is dependent on environment. If that is so, is it so clear that the value of the environment can be just as a means to our ends?

Overall, the environmental message might be that, since our bodies are the problem, perhaps if we reflected more on ourselves as bodies and what they do, we might be better placed to solve some of the problems.

There is one last, but important point which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both make in their own ways, about being a subject in the world. Heidegger believes that as subjects we are capable not only of acting in and on the world of objects, we are also capable of a more reflectivee appreciation of it. He believes that the world, as well as showing itself as equipment or as raw material for our use can show itself to us as it is. We need to do some clearing away of the plans, theories, practices which operate to show the world as we want to see it. But having cleared that away, the world will show itself in its true light. Merleau-Ponty voices a similar thought. If we pause from our everyday concerns and classifications concerning the world, we can experience wonder, awe, respect for the world. It is there and it makes sense to us. Both Hediegger and Merleau-Ponty illustrate this point with reference to artists. Heidegger cites Van Gogh as capturing and conveying in his paintings the world showing itself. Merleau-Ponty cites Cézanne as bringing out, in his paintings, how the world is something to be wondered at.

Phenomenological description reveals a very different world of objects from those described by the natural science and science orientated philosophy such as Cartesian dualism. The world of objects is not a purely factual realm, a collection of separate individuals, standing in contingent, causal relationships and obeying mechanistic laws. Phenomenology reveals it as a world of significance and value. Objects stand in internal relations to each other. They form totalities in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts and the whole makes the parts what they are.

One sort of totality which Heidegger emphasises is an 'equipment totality'. Imagine a workshop: the hammer has the significance it has only because there are also nails and wood. The saw dust is a sign of wood and of the saw. Tools are for use on raw materials to be reshaped into artifacts. To describe the work shop in purely factual terms would leave these significances out of account. It would involve abstracting from the life world, ignoring those features of it which make it meaningful and valuable. Heidegger distinguishes between two ways in which objects can appear. They can be ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. In equipmental totalities, they are ready-to-hand. They become present-at-hand, mere things, when they break down, when they lose their significance as an integral part of the totality. For Merleau-Ponty too, objects form significant complexes. He emphasises also that they can often be ambiguous or indeterminate depending on the context or contexts they are in.

Those who seek to apply phenomenology to the natural environment point out that this approach may be more suitable to the study of ecosystems. They, too, are significant totalities with parts relating symbiotically to each other, properly regarded holistically, not as collections of separable items. Whether ecological science does, can or should adopt a more holistic, more phenomenological, model is too large an issue for this short chapter. Suffice it to say that the currrent models: the system of energy model and the system of information model both seem to be, in essence, mechanistic models and so to construe nature in the light of machines, albeit more complex machines than Descartes knew about. The issue is whether one can explain in mechanistic terms such features of the world as the normal size and lifespan of members of a species being dependent on their habitat, or that how an ecosystem will develop, spread, withdraw, increase or decrease in biodiversity, will depend both on what its constituent parts are and the greater whole of which it is a part. Phenomenology, it is argued, could be used as the basis for a more enlightened ecological science.

It is also claimed that phenomenological investigation of nature reveals value in nature which is not just value as an instrument for us to use as means to our ends. The complexities, harmonies, balances, robustness, fragility, integrity of ecosystems constitute a demand that we treat them with care, that we do not violate or manipulate them. Others might claim that these features of ecosystems at least constitute a practical warning: because of these features, it is extraordinarily difficult to predict the results of our interference with them - we upset them at our peril.

The world of objects in our life-worlds are revealed by phenomenological description as our home, our dwelling, our habitat. Merleau-Ponty emphasised the role of bodily habits and skills in subjectivity. He also emphasised how different contexts invite different skills, acitivate different habits. The world which we inhabit is significant to us at this very basic 'pre-conscious' level. It is necessary for our actions and so our lives to make sense. Not only action but perception depends on the world making sense to us. Mostly we feel orientated in our world, it is intelligible to us, not intellectually, but sensorily. Things look the right way up not upside down. Textures which feel rough usually look rough. Sounds indicate the direction and identity of their source. We are not simply located spatially in the world, but situated in a meaningful environment.

Heidegger, too, emphasises the role of action in our being in the world. He explores the relation between dwelling and building and concludes that they are, if not the same, at least intimately inter-related. Our way of dwelling in the world essentially involves building. Heidegger recommends that we build in such a way that our buildings reveal rather than disguise dwelling. Our buildings should allow nature and the significance it has as our home to show itself. Giving a clear account of this difference is a difficult task; but finding examples of buildings which do and those which do not demonstrate dwelling is not so hard. Heidegger's example is that of a river bridge integral to the life of the community residing at both sides of it, a meeting place, a way for the river banks to show themselves as possible dwelling places, etc. He contrasts this with a dam, part of a hydro electric power plant. This has the significance not of nature as our dwelling place but of nature as a resource, a potential source of energy, to be stored up, and used up by us so that we can make it possible to live as if nature was not our home, to forget how to dwell.

THE OTHERNESS OF OBJECTS
For Husserl, the otherness of objects consisted in the fact that our experiences of them can never be total. From whatever perspective we view an object, there will always be other perspectives which we don't have and cannot have at the same time. Objects always outstrip our powers to perceive them, and they may always defeat the expectations we have of them, surprise us.

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both believed that there was more to the otherness of objects than this. Merleau-Ponty included in his phenomenological descriptions of objects in the world, their 'aseity' or 'there-ness'. It is part of seeing a physical object, not only that we could touch it if we so chose, but also that it looks real. Of course, we can be wrong. Something that looks real might turn out to be a trick of the light. But that is no grounds for ignoring the phenomenon of 'realness' or aseity. It happens, and in the main it does not deceive us, and it is an important part of our sense of being at home in the world and not, for example, feeling as if we were in a perpetual dream or drug induced state.

He believed further that wonder was the appropriate state to direct towards the world once we appreciate this amazing combination it has of otherness from us and significance for us. Clearly, if this is our fundamental relation with nature, then it is not free of value. It is perhaps more like the point at which any valuing gets started. The practical import of this sort of valuing is perhaps that our first thoughts should be to leave nature alone, to respect it as other than us, and to consider very carefully before we stamp it with our mark, turn it into something constructed by us, an artifact.

In broad terms, Heidegger would agree with this. The point of disagreement between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger emerges more in their different styles and concerns. Heidegger believed that nature could and would show itself as it really is, but only to those who allowed it to. Heidegger believed that modern life, science, technology, industry, commerce, tourism, economics, entraps us so that we forget, lose sight of, become alienated from both ourselves and our world, live 'inauthentically'. Again it is hard to state clearly what the difference is between authentic and inauthentic ways of living. It is certainly hard to articulate how exactly things can 'show themselves' or how we would recognise it if they did. But we can recognise, in ourselves and others, examples of inauthenticity, alienation. Tourists rushing from viewpoint to viewpoint to return home too exhausted to develop their film. Commerce and politics requiring that fishermen throw their catch back to pollute the sea. Butter mountains, grain stores and wine lakes being destroyed while people are starving. All these surely involve a failure to recognise things for what they are, to treat nature mindfully and with care.

To speak, as we do, of nature as having only instrumental value, as merely a resource to be exploited, to regard any other value being attached to it as mere sentiment, phenomenologists would claim, is to forget two important features of the natural world. First, it presents itself to us as something other than an instrument, that bending it to our purposes often involves an obvious violation of something we know to be precious. Second, instrumental value is a much more complex thing than is perhaps generally recognised. To use nature as a means to our end, we need to have ends. But the ends we can have depend on the skills and habits we have developed. We have developoed these in a world of objects. To then regard these means and ends as separable is to distort the relation of instrument to user.

Phenomenology is likely to be challenged by both sides of the environmental debate. It will be claimed by those who regard nature as having only instrumental value that phenomenology has not provided adequate evidence of any other kind of value. By those who think that nature has intrinsic value, phenomenology will seem too anthropocentric, talking as it does of how objects present themselves to us.

Phenomenology has the same reply to both these objections. We need to look at the phenomena which underpin both of these kinds of value. A purely instrumental mentality is incoherent because it depends on an oversimplistic division of ends and means, and too simple a view of what using things as instruments involves. Such a mentality also risks entrapping us. As to intrinsic value, phenomenology is seeking to describe how we come to recognise it. Without an account of that, it is unclear what practical consequences could possibly follow from its attribution to nature or anything else. If you don't know how to recognise it, how can you possibly respect or protect it?

Applications

Phenomenology has applications both in theory and in practice. What are the practical applications? On a personal level, phenomenology can be life-enhancing. It encourages one to dwell on one's experiences, good and bad, and tease out what it is about them which makes them significant. It helps us to make sense of our lives and our relations with our environments.

Heidegger invites us to reflect on ways in which we are alienated. Older readers may reflect on how we, as a culture, are becoming increasingly alienated, or at least separated from nature. Our habits and skills, our expertise both in reading and acting in the world is very high in the world of artifacts and technology, much less so in the world of nature. In Heidegger's terms, we are increasingly enframed by technology. We take for granted the technological imperative and the technological fix. The world and the care distinctive of proper dealings with it are out of sight behind the technological interface.

Second, phenomenology could be a benefit to science. It might make the scientific investigator or observer more receptive to what they are observing. This might lead to good observations in support of or in opposition to established theories. It might also lead to devising new theories and hypotheses. In particular, some central concepts in ecology - ecosystem, niche, habitat, symbiotic relations - might be explored in the light of phenomenological discussion of internal relations between objects.

Third and relatedly, phenomenology can make us aware of the complexity of ways in which our lives are intimately tied up with our enviroments. We might thereby come to recognise this feature of any living thing. other beings with their environemnts. Some animals, our pets, clearly dwell, and in much the same way that we do. Might we have a more enlightened view of all animals and even plants if we attended more to how they dwell in their habitats? They do not experience the phenomena as we do; but we might use some of the concepts drawn from phenomenology to apply to other creatures' relations with their environments. Even non-living things, natural or artificial, might invite us to apply the terminology which phenomenology invites. The cliff 'protects' the cove, the mountain peak 'dominates' the range. The church 'nestles' in the valley, the spires 'dream' over Oxford's waking products.

Such descriptions, it will be objected, are metaphorical and not literal truths about the world. But what is literally true of the world is precisely what is at issue. Appreciating the aptness of these metaphors involves noticing precisely those features of the world which make it our natural home, which enable us to dwell in it.

Theoretically, phenomenology has metaphysical and ethical implications. It rejects the orthodox view of science as a full explanation of how the world works, presenting it instead as a highly selective world view which systematically excludes from consideration the ways in which the world presents itself to us as significant and valuable.

Environmental ethics, if it accepts the orthodox view of science, is then faced with the task of superimposing values onto this realm of 'pure' scientific facts. Some claim that nature has intrinsic value independent of our ability to recognise it. Others claim that nature has only instrumental value: its value lies in its ability to serve our ends. These two views might seem to exhaust the field: value is a feature of objects or it is created by subjects, value claims are either subjective or objective. Phenomenology rejects this dichotomy. Value, or rather valuing, is a feature of the ways in which we interact with the world. Articulating this is a hard task made possible only if we drop the orthodox picture of the world and values.

CONCLUSION

In summary, phenomenology has both practical and theoretical implications for our dealings with the environment. In practical terms, it can alert us to a crisis which concerns not only the quantity of our supplies but the quality of our lives. The phenomenological method of description, applied to how we relate to our environment, both natural and built, can itself result in a richer, deeper, experience of that environment bringing us to know better and be more attuned to it and it to us. What we learn from such investigations might aid us in planning our towns, managing our countryside, protecting our resources and our wild places.

Theoretically, phenomenology offers a worldview which might be of more use in debates about the environment than the orthodox one it challenges with its sharp distinctions between humans and the world, and between values and facts. Phenomenology offers us care as characterising our fundamental way of being in the world, largely covered up by modern life; ourselves as bodies situated in the world; the world itself as significant and meaningful.

Phenomenology has been applied to morality with respect to humans. Dreyfus and Dreyfus have developed a notion of moral expertise which involves a developed sensitivity to human situations and a propensity to act appropriately. It has been an implicit theme of this chapter that a comparable expertise with respect to the environment is a human capability which we should seek to explore in theory and develop in practice. This would be akin to an Aristotelian virtue, and, as such, an essential part of the good life for humans.

Reading
M. Hammond, J. Howarth and R. Keat: Understanding Phenomenology (see Reading Lists): Introduction, Section 1 "Understanding Phenomenology"; Conclusion, Section 2. "Phenomenology and Scientific Realism".

Reading 05_1 (Evernden).
Reading 05_2 (Dreyfus).Sartre "Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology" (see Reading Lists).
Reading 05_3 (Husserl The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology pp 3-17).
Reading 05_4 (Heidegger Being and Time pp 218 - 225).

Tutor
Jane Howarth
March 2001