This article has been accepted for publication in Taylor & Francis Journal of Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Issue 12.1, Winter 2020.
AUTHOR’S ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT:
Nature and Experience, edited by Bryan E. Bannon, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, 242 pages.
In the introduction to Nature and Experience, Bannon explains that phenomenology, as a tradition, challenges the dualism inherent in categories such as “nature” and “experience.” Using phenomenology’s insight regarding the co-constituting relationship between meaning and background, he writes (echoing Merleau-Ponty) “Nature is the background on which all meaning is possible, we draw the substance of our lives from it, but can do so only as a result of relations between an affected and an affecting body” (xviii).
Phenomenology, as a return to “the things” themselves, is ideally situated to discuss human-nature relationships and to challenge the dualisms often held between ourselves and our environment. Questioning how we experience the world—in this case, the natural world—can be seen as the possibility to retrieve a relationship to nature that has been largely lost among developed urban communities. It is then not surprising that the field of environmental phenomenology, or eco-phenomenology, has become a prominent approach within environmental philosophy. Environmental phenomenology, one might say, is an inevitable next step for phenomenology in a time marked by climate change and environmental disaster. In this regard, Nature and Experience should be considered timely as it adds in fruitful ways to the development of both the fields of phenomenology and environmental philosophy.
The volume consists of three major sections. The first section, called “Phenomenology of Nature” discuses “how phenomenologists think of nature itself…and the human relationship to it” (x). The second part, “Metaphor, Agency, and the Human Relation to Nature,” “takes up some of the perennial concerns of environmental humanities scholars” (xii). The last section, “Practicing Phenomenology” provides essays of a more applied variety, focusing on education, decolonization, and aesthetics. The collection includes essays by Bryan E. Bannon, David E. Cooper, Janet Donohoe, Tom Greaves, Simon P. James, Guobjörg Rannveig Jóhannesdóttir, Irene J. Klaver, Barbara Muraca, Tim Christion Myers, Bryan Smyth, Elise Springer, Mark Thorsby, Kyle Powys Whyte, and a collaborative essay by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Zachary Shefman, and Kristina Welch. Below, we discuss merely a few of these contributions, which are representative of the larger ideas at play within the three different sections of the book.
The essays in this collection show how interdisciplinary phenomenological approaches are suited to examine the wickedly complex problems the world is facing today. Additionally, this collection makes accessible some of the general tenets of phenomenology as they inform environmentalism. The overall arc of the collection explores how phenomenology might shed new light on old philosophical dilemmas that are increasingly relevant in a time of climate disaster.
A poignant example from the first section is Donohoe’s contribution “Towards a Phenomenology of Nature.” Working with Husserl’s idea of genetic phenomenology, she utilizes concepts such as “homeworld,” “alienworld,” and “lifeworld.” The essay ultimately attempts to put our place on this earth into perspective by understanding the lifeworld as an approach to the environment. Referencing Husserl, she postulates that our spatiotemporal experience is inherently founded upon “layers of sedimented history” (29). She claims there is a need for us to re-approach the concept of nature through a lens of renewal and critique. If we can get away from a dualistic stance and uphold phenomenological thinking as a method of peeling back the layers of history that inform relations within our lifeworld, we might be better suited to harmoniously share our lifeworld with the others that inhabit it (25). The essays in this section tend to be the most technical. They describe different phenomenological theories in support of their arguments, and additionally provide context for the second and third sections.
In the second section, Thorsby’s essay “Intersubjectivity, the Environment and Moral Failure” asks, in a straightforward tone, the most important question anyone who opens this book is probably already asking themselves: How is the continuation of a vast global environmental moral failure possible? Why is such an enormous problem able to persist without much, if any, real placement of accountability? In an attempt to answer some of the most pressing questions of our time, he postulates that within a community, certain intersubjective habits can be generated passively and therefore fail to register as immoral (75). Thorsby hopes that by recognizing moral failures such as anthropogenic climate change and species extinction as the products of intersubjective relations, we might better confront them. This project sets up Springer’s essay, “Metaphor and Weather: Thinking Ecologically about Metaphor, Experience, and Climate,” which uses metaphor as a device for understanding the problem of climate change. Accompanying the other essays in this section of the book, Springer highlights the significance of the environmental humanities within today’s academic community. These essays challenge the reader to reevaluate experiences often taken for granted in order to better question how humans are failing or succeeding in terms of ecological stewardship, and to better understand why that is the case.
In the last section of the book, Kyle Powys Whyte applies the language of collective continuance to a series of case studies highlighting Indigenous peoples around the globe who are affected by issues of environmental justice with “Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism.” His core argument positions settler colonialism at odds with indigenous people’s ability to prosper. He writes, “…the settler homeland establishes collective continuance through rather unsustainable means; deforestation, extraction, water and air pollution, commodity agriculture, urban sprawl, widespread automobile adoption and so on” (172). All too often, this industrial way of making a settled land a homeland—of establishing collective continuance for the settler, comes at the cost of the collective continuance of the people already inhabiting the settled land. Whyte reminds us that the historical layers of our experience, in America and elsewhere, include pre-colonial ecologies, and that the burdens of ecological degradation fall most harshly on Indigenous peoples. His reflection is undertaken, again, by adopting a phenomenological mindset in order to question reality. Whyte, along with the other authors in this section, applies the phenomenological mode to the sciences, arts, and aesthetics in order to reshape the way nature can be considered within those disciplines. In turn, the act of reshaping has the potential to influence society and culture at large.
As with most collections, the different essays are not always evidently connected. Yet, the intent of the book is, in the curator’s words “to demonstrate a variety of ways in which phenomenological thinkers engage with environmental issues” (xvii). The volume guides the reader through an introspective evaluation of relations (xviii). Environmental degradation is persistent and is a part of the socio-eco-political fabric that binds its causes and solutions. Nature is that fabric, woven of relations. The essays included in Nature and Experience all help to illuminate how phenomenological thinking might help us better understand nature’s tapestry, and with it, our place in the world.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17570638.2020.1719671
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