La Respiración:  Definición y características

In ‗Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature‘, Steven Vogel argues for what he terms ―postnaturalism in environmental philosophy: for environmental philosophy without nature‖ (2002, p.23). He uses as his starting point Bill McKibben‘s argument in The End of

Nature (1989): ―We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather,‖ writes McKibben. ‗By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature‘s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us‘‖ (in ibid, p.24). It is worth noting here that what McKibben means by nature—environments independent of human influence—is exactly what has been meant by most definitions of wilderness dealt with in this thesis. For McKibben, effectively, nature=wilderness—and in the strict, ―Received‖ sense of pristine and primordial, absolutely free from human habitation and modification as stated in ―Purity‖ definitions of wilderness, and advocated by philosophers like Holmes Rolston. Insofar as the word nature is used in this sense, the problem with wilderness is actually the problem with nature, per se. Vogel summarizes this nicely: ―There is no wilderness, and in that sense no nature, left‖ (ibid, p.27).

The equating of nature with the non-existent idealization that is the so-called Received Wilderness Idea is one of Vogel‘s reasons for arguing against the validity of a concept of nature for environmental philosophy, because in this sense, there is no longer any such thing. A mistake McKibben makes, however, is to speak of nature as though the primary meaning of the term is non-human environments in the purest possible sense, when in fact, as we have seen, it might just as well mean the artificial world in a simple, scientific definition. For Vogel, however, it is not just this purist idea of non-human nature that needs to be abandoned, but any idea of nature.

For Vogel, the problem with nature isn‘t simply that there is no longer such a thing, but that the concept itself is fundamentally equivocal and confusing, as it seems to mean two quite contradictory things at once. On the one hand, environmental philosophers encourage us to realize that we are a part of nature, but on the other, that nature is everything that is not human or human created. Vogel explains the difference in the following way:

On the one hand, the term nature can mean everything in the physical world, which is to say everything subject to physical/chemical/biological processes; the contrast term to natural in

this sense is supernatural, meaning that which somehow escapes those processes. But, on the other hand, natural can also mean that which occurs without any human intervention, and here the contrast term isn‘t supernatural but artificial. (Someone with a taste for natural foods or natural fibers isn‘t someone who doesn‘t like his or her food or clothing to have a

supernatural origin—it‘s someone who wants those things to have been produced with a minimum of human intervention.) (ibid, p.26)

Whilst both senses of nature make perfect sense in themselves, argues Vogel, in much environmental philosophy

the anti-anthropocentric assertion that we humans (a) are part of nature and (b) ought not to interfere with it (in McKibben‘s terms, ought not to ―end‖ it) seems to equivocate between them. . . . The problem is that neither meaning allows us to distinguish between those human actions that ―violate‖ nature and those that are in some way in ―harmony‖ with it: either we violate it all the time or violations of it are logically impossible. (ibid, pp.26-7)

The rationale for realizing our unity with nature is that nature is everything, but if nature is

everything, then we cannot destroy it. Yet the very same people arguing in this sense for realizing our unity with nature are also trying to protect it, because at the moment, we are

destroying it. Furthermore, this seems to imply that any human action or creation stands in distinction to the natural, and effectively destroys any potential for nature by replacing it with the human. All human action destroys nature. According to Vogel,

the concept oscillates back and forth between at least two strongly evocative but mutually exclusive meanings, and to get an environmental theory out of it seems to require

disingenuously trading on the ambiguity between them, or at least to pose such a danger of doing so that we would likely be better off simply avoiding the concept altogether. (ibid, p.29)

For Vogel, since there is no such thing as nature in the sense of wilderness, but at the same time, there is still an environmental crisis caused by certain kinds of environmentally destructive behaviours, one danger with lamenting the end of nature is a sense of resignation that ignores the real problems at hand.

The problem with referring to nature as the object of science, according to Vogel, is that this presupposes that there is some way in which we encounter the world unmediated by social practices, when scientific practices are precisely such mediating practices. In this, he follows the work of philosophers of science such as Latour (1987), Hacking (1983) and Rouse (1987) in arguing that ―science is above all a matter of practice—that the laboratory is a laboratory, as Rouse puts it—and that the entities it studies therefore have to be viewed again in a certain sense as constructed ones‖ (ibid, p.31). ―[E]ven that nature‖, argues Vogel, ―the nature

described by biology and chemistry, is something to which we have access only through the practical and socially organized activity of scientists, so that even the supposed ―substrate‖ requires transformative social practices in order to show up, and in this sense is no ultimate

foundation either‖ (ibid, p.32). The problem with this critique of nature as object of science, however, is that it assumes that what is meant is nature as foundation of the sciences in some way not already evident in the subject matter of individual sciences, or as some kind of metaphysical essence of being itself. Yet in everyday and scientific usage, all nature means is the general case of things—what things are and how they work—and no metaphysical assumption whatever is made. Fundamental to the scientific and empirical perspectives is that we can never know nature in some ultimate way outside of what we observe and our customary ways of making sense of things. Most scientists are extremely happy to tell us this. And if we are clear that this is what we mean when we are talking about nature in this way, then what is the problem?

Ultimately, argues Vogel, the problem with nature is an epistemological one, because ―nature can‘t tell us how to act unless we first have a way of figuring out what nature is and what it‘s saying – a way, that is, that gets to nature in itself and not to nature as interpreted in some social/historical context or other. But there is no such way; we have no access to nature in

itself, and never will. In fact, the concept makes no sense‖ (ibid, p.34). The trouble with applying this thinking to the concept of nature as object of science, however, is that in this general sense nature means nothing more than, if you like, ―the set of all things and possibilities‖. This entails that to have access to nature in itself would be a very extraordinary thing indeed—one achievable only by a supreme being, a God with the capital G. All that is meant in this sense of nature is that nature is just things, and real worldly possibilities, and therefore something we always have partial access to, as all this access is access to things and possibilities. This is how human existence can be conceived of naturalistically, without commitment to any idea of an ―in itself‖ besides what there is in this world. Effectively, nature in this sense just means ―World‖, or ―Universe‖—but in the sense of how they work as well as what they are.

For Vogel, all concepts of nature imply some kind of epistemological given or foundation, or a metaphysical origin or arche. Such conceptions, argues Vogel, are simply incompatible with the critical approaches that characterize contemporary philosophy:

Poststructuralism, for example, has made us rightly suspicious of any appeals to an ―origin‖ or ―foundation‖ or ―immediacy‖ underlying the linguistic or social processes of mediation within which we find ourselves enmeshed. From Heidegger‘s critique of ontotheology through to Foucault‘s genealogies, Deleuze and Guattari‘s rhizomatics, Derrida‘s notion of différance, and so forth, it has been marked by a strong antifoundationalism that rejects the very idea of a substrate on which and out of which social and linguistic processes develop. The deconstructive imperative that this suspicion engenders is an imperative to uncover, within everything that appears to be given, immediate, foundational—in a word, ―natural‖— the hidden processes of construction and mediation that produce that appearance. Such a deconstructive imperative inevitably moves towards what elsewhere I have called the ―critique of nature,‖ for nature more than anything else serves, especially in a secular age, as the origin of everything that is—the ultimate foundation—and so if there is no ultimate foundation, there is no nature. (ibid, pp.29-30)

From a scientific naturalistic perspective, this is a straw-man fallacy that does us the disservice of doing away with the word we most comfortably use to describe the general case of what there is for us in our world and how it works that science enquires into (hence the title of the world‘s most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal, Nature). Even throughout the history of philosophy, as we find beginning in Heraclitus, the very concept of archē tends always to be treated as an antinomy defining the limits of thought itself, that cannot itself stretch beyond the limits of thought as such, and certainly cannot be found within the world. Vogel‘s argument might still apply, however, to critiques of concepts of nature used in environmental philosophy.

The problem for Vogel is that so much environmental philosophy appeals directly to nature— that we should have respect for nature, for example, and its intrinsic value, beyond our anthropocentric claims—and that nature ought, therefore, in some sense or other, guide our actions, form the very basis of an environmental philosophy. The contradiction inherent in equivocating between the two concepts of nature that guide arguments for recognizing our unity with nature at the same time as recognizing and protecting nature as the opposite of what is human, reflects an even deeper conceptual incoherence. Vogel effectively critiques the very idea that we have a ―direct experience‖ of nature—the very idea that underpins the value of wilderness for so many, as reflected in the work of Shepard, Oelschlaeger, Abram, Turner, and Snyder (as discussed in chapters One and Three), to name a few.

―The deep problem for a naturalistic environmental theory remains the problem of the naturalistic fallacy‖, argues Vogel ―—which is to say, the problem of how it could ever be possible to read off from nature a set of ethical maxims for human action‖ (ibid). ―Nature always appears to us mediated through language, concepts, world views, and personal and social histories that are particular and contingent; it never appears nor could it appear as it is ‗in itself,‘ even if we could make sense out of that dangerous philosophical concept‖, he argues

But then the appeal to nature as a source external to human thought and experience that is supposed to guide that thought and experience turns out to be impossible and even incoherent as such: when we say that such and such a policy is right because that‘s obviously what nature requires, we forget that the ―obviousness‖ with which nature appears to speak to us is itself socially and historically mediated, and hence not quite so obvious after all. When the naturalist thinker persists, arguing that although, of course, when we talk about nature we do so in categories drenched in contingent history and sociality, still nonetheless behind that talk lies a ―direct experience‖ of nature which itself can‘t be talked about but nonetheless must be immediate and true, we hear (as so often in these discussions) what Derrida calls the moment of deferral, as each failed attempt to get to the ultimate foundation produces yet another claim that it‘s just around the next bend. No experience is immediate; all experience only becomes possible on the basis of prior history, culture, thought—and on the basis, too, of prior human transformations of those landscapes we call ―natural.‖ (ibid, p.30).

A problem with Vogel‘s argument here is that he confuses the immediacy of experience with the idea of grounding metaphysics, any theory of how things ultimately are, within immediate experience. This is a crucial error. What is critiqued in Hegel as well as in Derrida, for example, is the possibility of the being present of some person in time allowing them to have a knowledge that comes directly from what is being experienced for the senses and the mind in that moment. Knowledge is never ―just here‖ or ―just there‖—it has no location. But such critiques do not deny that there is such a thing as immediate experience, of having a sense of now at a particular time and in a particular place that reflects one‘s conscious existence in time—that would be absurd. If there were no such thing as the immediacy of experience, grammatical tenses in language—the difference between ―I do,‖ ―I did‖ and ―I will‖—just wouldn‘t make sense. Rather, both argue, in different ways, that knowledge itself is never immediate, never given in the immediacy of experience, for in its mediations, the immediacy of its moment is always deferred. What is immediate in our experience is always mediated by our concept of it. Whatever is written or said or thought of immediate experience is obviously not the same as immediate experience, but rather such a mediation of it that cannot be located within it. In an important sense, mediation itself is immediate, for we cannot locate anything outside it. This is why Hegel said ―substance is subject‖, and Derrida ―Il n’y a pas de hors-

texte‖. This is fundamental to the temporality of human existence for itself, which is nothing

if not intentionality.

Vogel describes his approach as a social constructionist one, where ―Construction must . . . be understood literally, as referring to the physical practices of transformation that can always be discerned to have been at work in the environing world we inhabit‖, rather than just conceptually, as ―discursive formations or paradigms or social imaginaries‖ (ibid, p.33). His justification for such an approach is that ―it is preferable to recognize the social origin of one‘s practices and ideas than falsely to believe that they derive from mysterious extra-social forces, whether these be the forces of God or of custom or of nature‖ (ibid, p.35). Against the charge that such a social constructionist environmental philosophy entails a form of anthropocentric idealism that denies the reality of nature in the sense of denying the reality of a world utterly external to, other than the human, Vogel argues that

The moment of realness and resistance, of ―otherness,‖ so often appealed to in critiques of social constructionism is in fact a characteristic of practice—it is just that which distinguishes practice from theory. A postnaturalist environmental theory certainly does not deny that moment of otherness and reality; what it does do, though, is to resist the temptation to hypostatize that moment and call it ―nature.‖ (ibid, p.37)

If Vogel is asserting that there is no such thing as immediate experience, however, what exactly does he mean by this moment of realness, of otherness that is practice, action? The immediacy of experience as mediation is what keeps knowledge an open possibility that in never exhausted. There is always something more, something else, something other to what is known, already assumed in the possibility of knowledge. As such, the immediacy of our experience as mediation is what keeps us making inferences about how things are—what keeps us guessing. The immediacy of experience is that it is always in mediation. And mediation itself is a practice, an action, that we cannot help but find ourselves in. But unless we are to fall into idealism, in each case, there must be something that is being mediated, responded to, transformed—and what is this if not our being in the world, and all that we encounter in it? The immediacy of mediation in experience always entails and reaches for

something beyond itself, in everything—there is always more. Does not the world keep telling us that we do not know the whole story, that we are wrong and uncertain about so many things? Does it not reveal itself in our thoughts and practices to be something that both contains them and us, and is at the same time beyond them and us, irreducible to them? Rather than being something immediate or something entirely constructed by our mediating practices with the world, is this not the world itself and the things within it, including ourselves beyond the immediacy of experience and its mediations, as its limiting factors? Rather than some definitively describable substratum, or some paradoxical emptiness or non- thing, do we not mediate by imagining what our concepts can never fully grasp, and therefore remain conscious to the possibilities of knowledge? Is not this limitation something immediate for our experience? Nature loves to hide, and has manage to hide itself from Vogel very well.

The importance of Vogel‘s critique in the context of this thesis and this chapter is that it shows us two critical ways in which the so-called Received Wilderness Idea stems from a conceptual confusion about nature. The first is that it tends to be understood from the paradoxical position that nature is both that which we are not and which has not been modified by us, which any human action upon destroys, which we must save from these actions, and that which we belong to, which we cannot help but act upon, and cannot destroy