Abstract

This dissertation lays out the groundwork for a phenomenological approach to environmental ethics. Beginning with Edmund Husserl's transcendental critique of scientific objectivism and culminating in the metaphysical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, my analysis makes successive "reductions" of the objective scientific account of the global environmental crisis. I place the value-neutral data of the positive sciences within the context of the experiential realm of the Lebenswelt, which is both related to subjectivity's essential corporeality, and ultimately inscribed in the primordial and ethically significant realm Levinas has named the elemental. Proceeding from the objectivist view, which stems from the mathematical projections of the natural sciences, to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called an ontology of the flesh, the central thesis of this work is that we have a palpable, embodied responsibility for the mortal suffering of the other, and that this responsibility is central to environmental ethics. ;The mainstream environmentalist position, exemplified by the Club of Rome's Beyond the Limits, is outlined in part I, along with the well-known work of Hans Jonas and Niklas Luhmann's critical account of environmental ethics in his Ecological Communication. ;Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences marks the philosophical point of departure for Part II. My analysis also demonstrates the relevance of the later work of Martin Heidegger, especially his inquiry into the metaphysical essence of modern science and technology, for a genuinely ethical assessment of the predictions of global ecological catastrophe. In my reading of both authors, I bring the critique of the "constructed" objectivist world-picture to bear on a particular development arising from within that world-picture: namely, the threat of a planetary environmental crisis. ;The positive task of this dissertation, elaborating a concrete experiential content for an ethical responsibility for the crisis, is worked out in Part III. My argument follows several of the key themes dealt with in works by Merleau-Ponty and the Czech phenomenologist, Jan Patocka. The latter's articulation of an ethics of the "natural" world and the former's insistence on the primacy of embodied lived-experience are shown to lead to Levinas'svi disclosure of a primordial corporeal responsibility for the other as the ultimate structure of subjectivity