I’ve hitherto argued that certain objectivistic commitments significantly underpin the violent behaviours responsible for our crisis situation. From Merleau-Ponty, we’ve seen good reason to believe that the objectivistic metaphysical assumptions of our default naturalism limit our capacity to appreciate the more-than-human world on its own, rich, terms. This is because naturalism—as a manifestation of ‘objective thought’—requires or presupposes transcendent or transcendental access to the modality of the in-itself. Naturalism, therefore, lacks the capacity for sufficient critical self-reflexivity about the irreducible intentional contribution of one’s situated and embodied grasp to the physiognomy of any world taken up. Given its narrow metaphysical remit, scientific naturalism is also problematically limited in the reductive terms that it can admit to the more-than-human ‘objects’ which furnish any such world. We’ve seen ecofeminists like Val Plumwood identify further problems with the terms natural scientists ordinarily extend to the more-than-human world, because those terms are largely underwritten by the sediment of a colonial logic which sets humans (qua subject) and nonhumans (qua object) apart in kind. Thus, according to the line of argument I’ve been pursuing, not only are more-than-human ‘objects’ misconstrued to be metaphysically distinct entities, the reductive terms ordinarily imposed on them are implicated in their continued exploitation.
I’ve also suggested that tackling the problematic imposition of ontological and epistemological violence outlined above requires the sort of radical reflection that can best be facilitated by rethinking our environmental crisis and its constituent aspects ecophenomenologically. Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenology shows particular promise for our task since it retains an account of the embodied habituality of perception, without requiring that perceptual habits be understood mechanically or deterministically. Thus, as I aimed to show in chapter two, there is a meaningful sense in which the radically-reflective Merleau- Pontian body-subject might literally learn to perceive better. For Merleau-Ponty, one perceives better where one more accurately expresses the more-than-human world’s meanings, without requiring that any such expression reflectively coincide with any (problematically objectivistic) world-in-itself. Since, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, new habits may be sedimented into one’s basic, embodied grasp of the world, Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenology offers promise that one might come to both perceive and relate to the world in more positive (and less objectivistic) ways at the level of praxis.
In this chapter, I want to explore how Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenology might provide resources to facilitate the task above. The chapter is split into three sections. The first explores
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how an ecophenomenology informed by ecofeminist (and new materialist) insights might foreground subject-object continuities as correctives to the problematic dualism manifested in scientific naturalism. Doing so will help us to attend to our ‘submerged mass’ by disrupting the tendencies towards possessing and controlling the more-than-human world—in both conceptual and behavioural senses—that a subject/object dualism ordinarily legitimates. In the second section, I explore how insights from the first speak in favour of adopting a new non-reductive onto-epistemological norm. The details will come later, but my basic argument is as follows: if the naturalistic supposition of ontologically primitive ‘subject’ and ‘object’ poles rests on erroneous (meta-)theoretical assumptions, then we should reject any correspondence theory of truth which relies on those assumptions. Since the world may, plausibly, be taken up under heterogenous schemes of description without individually exhausting the meanings available for expression, then it seems we should replace the naturalist’s totalizing ‘God’s Eye View’ with the ‘view-from-everywhere’. That is, the sum of all meaningful expressions of the world, including nonhuman ones. In the final section, I entertain some suggestions about how one might inculcate habits that facilitate the sustained possibility of seeing better. In doing so, I explore the roles of attention and, particularly, hesitancy—conceived as affective openness to the indeterminacy of perceptual habits—in entrenching a radically-reflexive praxis. I will ultimately argue that the indeterminacy of perceptual habits provides reason to be optimistic about the prospects for an ecophenomenological praxis under which one may genuinely begin to perceive the more-than- human world better.
4.1 Rethinking the Subject/Object Dualism
I’ve argued that we must disrupt our objectivistic conceptions of the more-than-human world if we’re to reconfigure human-world relationships outside the rubric of the latter’s domination. Plumwood holds that we must begin by addressing the exclusionary logic which legitimates hyperseparating ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ from the outset. A “non-reductive resolution”, she contends, “requires both that we reconceive ourselves as more animal and embodied, more ‘natural’, and that we reconceive nature as more mindlike than in the Cartesian conception” (1993, p.124). Nonetheless, I’ve suggested that any attempt to rethink ‘subject’ and ‘object’ terms with sufficient daring cannot begin from within a naturalistic remit without limiting nonhuman alterity via one’s imposition of the terms of a desituated ‘world-in-itself’. The task of uncovering subject-object continuities must, therefore, involve more than an uncritical appeal to the reality enframed by progressive natural scientists. Nevertheless, this admission needn’t make it impossible to address the more-than-human world on its own terms within an ecophenomenological remit. Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenologists outright deny the
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subject/object bifurcation which might otherwise foreclose the possibility of access to it. In this section, then, I explore some possibilities for subject-object continuity which emerge by engaging with the meaningful terms under which the more-than-human world seemingly makes itself available for expression by the radically-reflective ecophenomenologist.
Continuities may be recognised in a ‘top-down’ way, where one addresses ‘subjective’ or mindlike properties in more-than-human ‘objects’. Under a ‘bottom-up’ strategy, conversely, one addresses the materiality of mind or subjectivity. Beginning with the former, Plumwood argues that important continuities may be unearthed by taking care to recognise the agency, teleology, and intentionality ordinarily denied to material entities. Intentionality and agency are especially difficult to identify under scientific naturalism, where non-agentic efficient causation is typically considered to be the only natural (rather than implausibly supernatural) power. However, we’ve seen that natural science’s underlying assumptions and apparatuses reflectively distort or unfairly exclude some of the meaningful phenomena available for expression. Identifying where mindlike traits might be plausibly attributed to nonhumans outside of these narrow confines will prove useful for our groundwork in two ways: firstly, by disrupting the bifurcation which licences a subject/object, or mind/nature dualism; secondly, by problematizing the totalizing assumption that the ‘natural’ world consists entirely of determinate ‘objects’, which may be epistemologically possessed and controlled in the requisite manner to licence their habitual instrumentalization.
4.1.1 More-than-Human Intentionality
Let’s begin with intentionality. Both Merleau-Ponty and Plumwood (1993, p.131) follow Franz Brentano in understanding intentionality to be irreducible to representational consciousness. Unlike Brentano, however, they do so partly to avoid unfairly precluding entities like ticks from the sphere of mindedness. For Plumwood (like Brentano), intentionality refers to myriad criteria like goal-directedness which cannot be accommodated into mechanistic stimulus-response models. We’ve also seen Merleau-Ponty exemplify dung beetle and feline intentionality in this manner. In these cases, Merleau-Ponty contends, “we no longer see where behaviour begins and mind ends” (N, p.178). Although Merleau-Ponty argues that more complex forms of intentionality aim less at goals and more towards the interpretation of symbols (as occurs between language users, for instance), this observation cannot support a differentiation in kind. “[T]here is not”, Merleau-Ponty argues, “a break between the planned animal, the animal that plans, and the animal without plan” (N, p.176). As we saw in chapter two, behaviours undertaken throughout the intentional continuum cannot be adequately explained by causal imposition of the way the world currently, ‘objectively’ is, even apparently at the cellular level.
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Their trans-species attributions of intentionality shouldn’t, however, be confused with the sort of romantic anthropomorphic projectionism which is entirely divorced from rigorous scientific study. As Louise Westling (2014, p.83) notes, Merleau-Ponty’s account chimes with the work of influential contemporary microbiologists. ‘Niche construction’ theorists like Richard Lewontin (2000) and John Odling-Smee (2009), for instance, contend that even relatively simple organisms configure, select, and adapt salient features of the environment into which they ambiguously interlace and actively co-construct. Earthworms, for example, make soil more amenable to the water-intensive demands of their physiology by “tunnelling, exuding mucus, and eliminating calcite” (Odling-Smee, 2009, p.74). This process also provides structural and nutritional benefits for plant growth and, subsequently, the worms themselves.
Nonetheless, although they hold organism-environment dialectics to be mutually transformative, niche construction theorists remain largely beholden to the restrictive metaphysical assumptions of the naturalistic frameworks they employ. Odling-Smee, for instance, rightly criticises the “Newtonian residue” which requires standard evolutionary theory to understand organisms as “passive objects”, causally determined by a determinate external environment (2009, p.77). Nevertheless, Odling-Smee still attributes any “non- random work” in earthworm niche-construction to the mechanical effects of “naturally selected information carried in their genes” and the determinate physico-chemical properties of ‘objective’ stimuli on the worm’s chemoreceptors (2009, p.77). Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenologists, however, may more effectively address naturalism’s ‘Newtonian residue’ by understanding the earthworm to intentionally engage with the phenomena “motivated” (rather than ‘objectively’ efficiently caused) by the meanings specific to the Gestalt it co-configures (PP, p.31; p.50). By eschewing naturalism’s reductive presuppositions, Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenologists may thereby afford earthworms the irreducible intentional teleology they appear to possess, without extending them an implausible reflective consciousness.
Although Merleau-Ponty focuses on animal intentionality, he’s amenable to extending intentionality further (SB, p.123)43. Likewise, Plumwood appeals to the intentionality
43 In the Nature lectures, for instance, Merleau-Ponty began to speak of the world’s own intentional
‘logos’ that he would later (mistakenly, in my view) characterize as the self-expression of ‘the flesh’. Merleau-Ponty describes the “unfurling of the animal” involved in the development of axolotls, for instance, as being “like a pure wake that is related to no boat” (N, p.176). Passages like these lead Bannon (2014) to insist that the later Merleau-Ponty takes up a more-or-less Whiteheadian process metaphysics. I dispute Bannon’s interpretation in chapter seven. Nevertheless, the link is useful, given Plumwood’s (2002, pp.128-131) contention that process metaphysicians perpetuate anthropocentric hierarchism by conceiving stipulative humanoid properties (like atomic consciousness) to be universal norms to which nonhuman entities may be admitted by degree. Plumwood’s general charge chimes with
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exhibited by individual trees, which “appear as self-directing beings with an overall good or interest and a capacity for individual choice in response to their conditions of life”, or “[f]orest ecosystems [which] can be seen as wholes whose interrelationship of parts can only be understood in terms of stabilising and organising principles, which must again be understood teleologically” (1993, pp.135-6). Plumwood’s contentions are well-supported by recent plant science. Here, examples are more surprising, ranging from “kin recognition” behaviours between plants to “communication networks as extensive as whole forests in size”, through which information about predators is shared, and pre-emptive responses prepared (Trewavas and Baluška, 2011, p.1225).
The research cited above has, nonetheless, proven controversial amongst plant scientists. The plant physiologist Lincoln Taiz, for instance, accuses so-called ‘plant neurobiologists’ like František Baluška of “teleology, anthropomorphizing, [and] philosophizing” (Taiz, cited in Pollan, 2013). However, each of these ‘charges’ is revealing insofar as they speak to our concerns about the lack of critical self-reflexivity within naturalism. In the previous chapter, for instance, we problematized a natural science detached from all ‘philosophical’ commitments; not least when that science is couched in the sado-dispassionate and positivistic terms that Taiz thinks are uniquely suitable. Likewise, the charges of ‘teleology’ and ‘anthropomorphizing’ appear to assume the in-principle distinction between nonhuman ‘objects’ and humanoid ‘subjects’ that both Merleau-Ponty and Plumwood problematize. But Taiz’s problems run deeper than this. His main objection to Baluška’s attribution of plant intentionality revolves exclusively around apparently substantial differences between “electrical signalling” in plants and the “true neural mechanisms” of ‘higher’ animals (Taiz, cited in Pollan, 2013). Like many of his so-called ‘Alpi letter’ colleagues, Taiz simply doesn’t appear to be reflexive about the objectivistic (meta-)theoretical assumptions which underwrite his more fundamental commitment to mechanism. Hence, for reasons explored over the preceding chapters, his objections do little to undermine the plausibility of my present contentions.
In any case, whilst the attribution of nonhuman intentionality or mindedness remains controversial, it coheres with other murky or gradated boundaries between stipulative ‘natural kinds’ that many natural scientists already concede. These include the fuzzy living/non-living binary, which even Richard Dawkins acknowledges, and the animal/plant binary undermined by photosynthesising slugs (Morton, 2010, p.276; Angelin, 2015, p.346). These continuities might do important work in upsetting any charges of ‘anthropomorphism’ or ‘teleology’ which
my analysis of fleshy expression in chapter seven. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Plumwood courts a similar error through her panpsychism.
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rely on hard-and-fast distinctions. However, resonances between the implausibility of a straightforward subject/object binary and scientists’ wider taxonomic concessions seem to have been conveniently backgrounded for reasons we explored with Plumwood in the previous chapter.
Nonetheless, emphasizing nonhuman intentionality is important for two reasons. Most obviously, nonhuman intentionality problematizes the subject/object dualism which licences colonial relationships with the more-than-human world. Plumwood has argued, recall, that the dualistic restriction of mindedness or subjectivity pacifies nonhuman entities and, thus, erodes their capacity to resist objectification and commodification. Doing so, however, requires radically excluding a separable order of ‘objects’ which more-than-human intentionality problematizes. Simply put: even earthworms and forests don’t obviously differ in kind from human ‘subjects’ in the definitive sense to licence their denigration, even under neo-Cartesian mechanisms like the Differential Imperative.
Perhaps more importantly, sensitivity to nonhuman intentionality may disrupt colonialism because acknowledging other intentional realities―ontologically real meanings irreducible to one’s own―undercuts the very possibility of a totalizing onto-epistemological stance. Plumwood (2002, p.177) gives the example of a forest ecosystem whose irreducibly intentional goods are incompossible with the economistic or technoscientific schemas proffered by human parties. The latter not only construe the forest wholly in terms of their hegemonic interests (e.g. as a capital, fuel, or oxygen resource), their restrictive apparatuses also preclude things like narrative goods which, for entities like trees and earthworms, appear to be ontologically real, yet which reach into the future. Furthermore, since these narrative goods aren’t obviously discernable as things-in-themselves, they expose the limitations of taking positivistic apparatuses, for instance, to exhaust reality and to therefore arbitrate the terms under which environmental ‘issues’ are understood. This is because the physiognomy of intentional objects available for expression ultimately depends on the situated, partial, and exclusionary terms of engagement under which they are taken up.
Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty has argued, heterogenous intentional realities are truly different worlds, rather than divergent interpretations of the same determinate content. They cannot, therefore, be exhaustively enframed by even an ideal science without significant distortion. Uexküll’s ticks and Merleau-Ponty’s canines neatly demonstrate that the world’s basic configuration is intimately related to the embodied grasp that one has on it. Given our limited and partial openings onto the world, some of the meanings available there may differ radically from our own and some, as our ticks and canines also illustrate, must simply be
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beyond our ken. Nonhuman intentionality, in short, speaks against the project of anthropocentric mastery that is crystalized in the scientific naturalist’s appeal to a purified realm of determinate things-in-themselves. The naturalist’s objectivity of the God’s Eye View can only really be sustained by violently subsuming reality under a particular kind of problematically anthropocentric—and, if Plumwood is right, androcentric—conceptual scheme.
4.1.2 Panpsychist Problems
There may, however, be a problem with the “weak panpsychism” Plumwood takes the widespread distribution of intentionality to imply (1993, p.133; 2002, p.54). To explain: one way to understand our overall objection to scientific naturalism lies in its failure to “balanc[e] the recognition of continuity with the recognition of difference” (Plumwood, 1993, p.125). Naturalism typically fails to do justice to important ontological continuities in carnal embeddedness or material relationality between the interrogative (human) ‘subjects’ and the material ‘objects’ it hyperseparates. Naturalism is also hostile to difference because it levels down the character of material ‘objects’ to that of a certain objectivistic purview (ordinarily, that of extensional realism), and reifies the terms of epistemic engagement specific to that purview as if trans-historical, and universal (albeit, perhaps, with the usual Kantian caveats). Our attention to nonhuman intentionality is, therefore, motivated largely by a renewed attempt to juggle these requirements sufficiently well to engage with more-than-human entities in their
alterity.
However, by extending intentionality universally, we risk inappropriately overplaying continuity. Plumwood emphasizes that the panpsychist attribution of intentionality cannot be unproblematically equated with the universal extension of properties of human consciousness. This would constitute a sort of “strong panpsychism”, which assumes that “mind is either totally present in a human or humanoid form or totally absent”, and which Plumwood rightly rejects (1993, p.133; 2002, p.189). A related false dilemma appears to be behind Taiz’s charges above. Nevertheless, as Merleau-Ponty’s work helps to illustrate, we grasp our own intentionalities primarily as reflective consciousnesses operating within a certain kind of Gestalt structure. Ascriptions of nonhuman intentionality, therefore, at least risk being derivative and false extensions of humanoid consciousness, especially when, as in Plumwood’s panpsychism, one’s theoretical commitments require one to apply intentionality universally to divergent entities like neutrinos, marine ecosystems, or E.coli bacteria.
Given the likely implication of objectivistic sediment in the violence of our crisis situation, there may be good political reasons for generally beginning from an intentional stance, rather
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than one organised to exclude nonhumans from the intentional sphere. However, we must also
take care not to push this too far. Plumwood appears do so when her commitment to
panpsychism leads her to ascribe the same sort of teleology or narrative desire to whole mountains, stones, and glaciers that she does to snakes44. Plumwood claims, for instance, that
damming a glaciated valley is problematic because it prevents it from “telling its story” (1993, p.138). The attempt to engage with these entities on non-reductive terms is of great importance for environmental theory. Truly expressing the world is, after all, what radical reflection aims at. But by universally imposing atomic intentionality, one risks a theory-guiding, anthropomorphic projectivism that connotes a push towards the very onto-epistemological imperialism that Plumwood sought to mitigate by engaging with nonhuman mindedness. This is because, if nonhuman entities are ultimately recovered only on terms which largely reflect our own, then we’re likely to read our own meanings, intentions, and desires into them.
We previously saw glimpses of something like a tacit imperialism through Plumwood’s claims about cross-species translation, which resulted from her more fundamental commitment to naturalism. There, Plumwood’s interpretations of the snake’s dialogical interjections implied a problematic underlying anthropomorphism because Plumwood was