Abstract
In this paper I address the question of what it is to be alienated from nature. The focus is alienation in the sense of estrangement, a ‘being cut off from’ a wider world. That we are so estranged is a claim associated with ecological critique of contemporary society. But what is it to be estranged from nature given that everything we are, do and produce, always remains within a wider nature? I explore the possibility that this might be understood with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’. I set the scene for this with some discussion of Honneth’s recent account of reification as a ‘distorted praxis’ and then, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and especially his later ontology of flesh, develop the idea of estrangement from the natural world as an inadequate participation in a ‘primordial’ perceptual relation. This idea of estrangement brings together various elements of ecological critique. However, I argue that although this idea of estrangement might inform and help to articulate such a critique, it cannot be the sole concern of an environmental political philosophy: other kinds of alienation within the humanised environmental context need to be considered too.
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Notes
I am grateful to Logi Gunnarsson, Tim Henning, Thomas Schramme and Steven Vogel for helpful discussion of these issues.
See Brown & Toadvine (2003) for useful discussion of the affinity between some environmental concerns and some ideas central to the phenomenological tradition.
See Taylor (2004) for illuminating discussion of this point.
For relevant discussion of the ‘backgrounding’ of nonhuman agency see Evernden (1993), Plumwood (2006) and Jane Bennett’s (2010) employment of Latour’s category of ‘actant’ (of which rational agency is a subset) as part of her theory of ‘vital materiality’, which is intended to recognize the ‘active participation in events of nonhuman bodies and forces’.
See Hailwood (2012) for more discussion of this point.
For example, consider gardening or landscaping as a practice that seeks to ‘work with’ the tendencies of growth and activity of the organisms and materials involved, as opposed to a practice that imposes a pre-ordained formal order.
Abram also refers to children placed for long periods in front of TV and computer screens, which, for him, distracts from the ‘early, felt layer of solidarity with other bodies and with the bodily Earth that provides both the seeds and the soil necessary for any more mature sense of ethics’ (Abram 2007,169) This is a different story to the NDD story as a story about human wellbeing: excessive immersion in a digital world is an obstacle to the development of an ethical sensibility appropriate to what we are calling adequate participation in the more than human flesh.
See also Toadvine (2009, 110f).
The issue here isn’t ecological relations in the sense of the sustainability of the systems of extraction and construction required to produce, run and maintain these things, although that is an issue of course.
Consider the privileging of ‘wilderness experience’, and valorising of ‘indigenous peoples’ as ‘closer to the earth’, in some of the flesh-oriented eco-phenomenological literature (for example, Abram 1996).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank participants in the New Thinking on Alienation workshops, funded by an AHRC Research Networking grant, members of the Religion, Ethics and Practical Philosophy research group at Liverpool and two anonymous reviewers for helpful discussion and comments on earlier drafts.
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Hailwood, S. Estrangement, Nature and ‘the Flesh’. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 71–85 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9468-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9468-6