The ones who express their (sometimes justified) concern for the protection of primitive cultures thus do not seem particularly troubled by the crumbling of European cultures in all that is specific to their own essence.
Mr Raymond Ruyer535 writes: ‘Intellectual ecologists long to protect the environment but are oblivious to the fact that man’s surroundings are, above all, composed of other men. They strive to protect nature but forget that the foremost kind of nature is an ethnic one. In Switzerland, they recently joined forces with the industrials to reject a “xenophobic” draft legislation that would have restricted the immigration of foreign workers. They also forget to protest against mental pollution. They stand alongside those who systematically degrade all beliefs and worship and are far less troubled by the ideological colourants that are subject to the whims of both anarchists and fanatics passing themselves off as educators. They are filled with admiration for the rites and superstitions of savage societies yet demolish the rites and myths that still subsist in the traditional liturgies of Western societies’ (Contrepoint, September 1974).
In Ce qu’est et comment se determine la physis536 (a text that was included in Questions II, Gallimard, 1968), Martin Heidegger537 demonstrated that although the notion of nature could help create a kind of metaphysics, it is the opposite process that is normally developed.
Man Has Stolen the Key to the Bottomless Pit
Some ecologists have chosen to blame a certain religious tradition, holding it responsible for the ‘massacring of nature’. It is indeed true that the Bible establishes man as the lord of creation (Gen. 1:28–29), since he is seemingly alone to possess a soul. And yet he is a powerless king. The true ruler of the world is actually Yahweh himself, and the human king’s primary sin lies in his desire to reign, to assert himself at nature ‘s expense by means of an absolute act of creation that would render him equal to God.
At this stage, it is necessary to draw a distinction between the world and nature. The differentiation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ takes place within the world. On the other hand, the world contrasts with the ‘otherworld’, the Hinterwelt of the metaphysicians. This is why the Bible seems to hold ‘nature’ in high esteem while targeting this world with a process of devaluation. However, ‘nature’ is but the garden into which man was cast to attain salvation. It constitutes the very framework in which man can choose to save or damn himself. Man is not the master of ‘nature’, but merely its tenant. He is banned from creating a super-nature in it (i.e. from giving birth to something other than himself), a super-nature that would allow him to erect a monument to his own glory.
The only ‘good-natured’ savage that one has ever heard of was actually Adam. In the Garden of Eden, before entering the history that resulted from original sin, Adam existed in a natural state. As remarked by Mr David Banon,538 ‘his sin would prove to be a cultural act, since he ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam relinquished natural laws for the sake of a prideful conquest of artificiality. His relationship to nature will henceforth have to mediated: he shall labour to nourish himself both materially and spiritually’ (in Les Nouveaux cahiers, Autumn 1974).
Moses — who is described in the Zohar as being ‘solitary’ (Tiphareth), in contrast with Canaan, which is defined as ‘lunar’ (Mal’ut) — finds himself prohibited from entering the Promised Land because, as stated in the Bible, he is alleged to have struck a rock instead of speaking to it as he had been told to.
Basing his stance on the Keli Yakar rabbinic commentary, Mr Emmanuel Lévyne539 explains: ‘Why bestow such severe punishment for an apparently minor sin? Where is the crime in striking a rock? When acting upon nature using means that were derived from it, you see, Moses had indulged in the evil of violence and technology. […] By striking the rock, Moses had made it clear that he could not do without violence and technology in order accomplish his mission’ (Le judaïsme contestataire et révolutionnaire,540 Tsédek, Issy-les-Moulineaux, 1974).
One thus encounters, throughout the Scriptures, the very same warning addressed to mankind, the same reproach for having discovered and used the ‘key of the bottomless pit’ (Apocalypse 9:1), the same denunciation of the ‘pride’ that sometimes drives man to become like Faust and Prometheus.
Metaphysics and ‘Naturalism’
In Anti-Nature (PUF, 1973), Mr Clément Rosset541 has most rightfully criticised the manner in which ‘naturalistic’ philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Rousseau) set out to create sense in places where, prior to the advent of man, there was none to be found. He contrasts this ‘naturalistic ideology’, whose presence he denounces even in doctrines that claim to avoid it altogether, with the ‘artificialist’ philosophies embraced by Empedocles, the Sophists, the Atomists, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Balthasar Gracián.
He writes: ‘The notion of nature turns out to be one of the major veils that separate man from reality by replacing the chaotic simplicity of existence with the orderly complication of a world’.
In the final part of his book, he criticises modern ‘naturalists’ and their attacks against culture, a culture that they accuse of being alternately ‘factitious’ and ‘alienating’.
He makes the following remark: ‘The term “factitious”, used for depreciating things as artificial, does not relate to the notion of falseness (falsum), but that of facts (factum): what is rejected is not, above all, the falseness of existence, but its factual aspect’. He then goes on to add: ‘What is highly remarkable is how the Latin word ‘factum’ managed to express the twofold meaning of what exists (real fact, contrasting with both illusion and dreaming) and what is fabricated (artificiality, which contrasts with nature); it is an etymological duality from which one can reasonably infer that reality has always been indistinguishable from artifice, and that nature has never represented anything more than a dream’.
Mr Rosset goes on to write: ‘The criticism of the “consumerist society”, as undertaken by the Frankfurt school, is essentially based on two implicit requirements — that of purpose and that of nature. Within the former, one criticises the consumption of industrial goods for lacking ‘sense’ and depriving those who indulge in it of an ‘authentic’ purpose or a ‘meaningful’ destiny. […] Within the requirement of nature, which current societal structures are accused of deteriorating and attempting to dissolve, the needs awakened by society in the individual are considered artificial and in contradiction with his natural needs’.
‘In other words, culture smothers nature, in harmony with a scheme whose direct inspiration stems from the naturalism of both Antiquity and the 18th century; the freedom enjoyed by the individual in his aim to satisfy desires whose apparent requirement only becomes urgent through the artifice generated by society (and its leaders) is synonymous with alienation, signifying the loss of both his own essence and genuine nature, which have been robbed of their ability to express themselves in a direct manner through the pressure exerted upon them artificially by the interests of certain social groups’.
The ‘naturalistic’ ideology thus comes across as a simple ‘sub-Aristotelian lamentation’, one that conveys an inability — or reluctance — to establish meaning where some is to be found (i.e. in man and by man) and, correlatively, betrays an almost obsessional frenzy to create some significance in places (‘nature’) where, prior to the rise of man or outside the latter, none could ever be found.
These observations do not, of course, imply that ‘nature’ is to be pillaged, nor that we should remain indifferent to existing misuse. The fact that man feels the need to preserve the capital embodied by his environment and to avoid ‘spending’ it in the space of a single generation (through immediate consumption) is evidence of this.
All Domination Must Be Compensated For
Our need for landscapes is a proven fact. Doctor René Held, a neuropsychiatrist, is absolutely right when stating that ‘in order to preserve his mental sanity, man must not feel severed from his own biolog
ical origins. It is a need that dates back to his ontogenesis and is lost within the nightly expanses of the most ancient phylogenetical times. Just like any other animal, the Homo Sapiens, a mammal belonging to the line of primates, cannot live in the absence of exchanges with the other elements of the ecosystem. […] The privation and alteration of landscapes can be a source of concern for man and perhaps even cause the latter anguish, fostering his decline’ (in Science et vie,542 April 1971).
It is furthermore remarkable that European peoples, who have outdone all others in their domination of ‘nature’, are also the ones who, within their ancient religions, surpassed everyone else in their profound exaltation of our world. This exaltation of a world essentially designed to mirror diversity gave birth to polytheism and pantheism. ‘Mythology is nature’s poetic costume’, August-Wilhelm von Schlegel used to say. According to Jakob Boehme543 ‘nature is the body of God’ (Ernest Renan’s letter to Edmond Schérer dated 7th November, 1859 is also expressive in this regard).
The ecological problematic, just like the social one, is a genuine issue. It is not a matter of knowing whether one is ‘in favour of’ or ‘opposed to pollution’; for there are none who support it. The real question is that of finding out whether man should seek to resolve the problems that stem from the transformation of his ecosystem by transcending it all or by regressing.
Pollution represents one of the negative effects of technological and industrial progress; there have also been others (from our human perspective), some of which have been gradually absorbed. It is now up to this very same technological progress to eliminate the nuisances that it has produced. Throughout history, every novation began by simultaneously generating both advantages and drawbacks; and it is only in a second phase, thanks to a traditional retroaction effect, that the inconveniences were eradicated. Not only does technology allow us to react to pollution nowadays, but it also enables to enjoy the necessary means to ensure that the more developed our societies become, the less pollution is produced.
‘Today, man has the technological means to guarantee both his own well-being and that of his descendants, without wasting his “nature-capital”. It is a question of discipline, regulation, organisation and financing’, writes Mr Edouard Bonnefous.544
As for Mr Jean Dorst,545 he specifies that ‘it is urgent to put a stop to the old antagonism between “the protectors of nature” and those that plan our progress. The former must understand that man’s survival on this planet requires an intensive sort of agriculture and the profound and lasting transformation of certain environments. Technocrats must, on the other hand, acknowledge that man can never free himself from certain biological laws and that the reasonable exploitation of natural resources is in no way synonymous with their dilapidation or the automatic and complete transformation of habitats’.
The purpose is thus not that of putting an end to man’s domination of nature, but to remind people that every domination must have its own compensation, namely protection. Being at the top means being responsible for those that are under you. And one may also wonder whether the questioning of man’s domination of nature does not, in part, stem from our contemporary inability to conceive of authority in a non-caricatural manner, which gives rise to a false choice: either anarchy or dictatorship.
Whether Left-oriented or Right-oriented, radical ‘naturalism’ raises some bizarre and long-lasting paradoxes. It is strange to see Leftists espouse the ‘good nature’ myth while claiming, elsewhere, that one can modify man at will by impacting his environment, thus releasing him from his ‘biological pseudo-fatalism’. It is just as bizarre to see the Rightist supporters of a ‘return to nature’ forget that social order is, above all else, an order that has been established through institutional and customary action, one that is specifically synonymous with our breaking with ‘nature’.
Environmentalism bears within itself some very pronounced ambiguities. As stated previously, the main one relates to the fact that, while evoking the connection that exists between man and nature, what ecologists establish is, in fact, a radical severance between an ‘imaginary’ nature and a human species that is allegedly incapable of evolving. This severance is envisioned in a regressive and reductionistic manner and is highly similar to all dualistic caesuras, including that between matter and spirit (Marx), the creator and the created, the subject and the object, and so on.
This dualism has been denounced by Mrs Sigrid Hunke,546 especially in Das Ende des Zwiespalts. Zur Diagnose und Therapie einer kranken Gesellschaft (Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach, 1971).
The Subject of History
It is an undeniable fact that, as with all living beings, there exists a privileged relationship between man and his specific environment (Umwelt); a relationship that happens to be of the dialectical kind. It is equally a fact that there is an interdependence between man and his surroundings (just as there is one between the creator and the created, matter and spirit, etc.). Compared to the ecologists, however, one could, or indeed must, draw the opposite conclusion from this interdependence; a conclusion according to which man, when confronted with the intense transformation whose object is embodied by his own surroundings, must never seek to regress to a stage that precedes this transformation, but, on the contrary, strive to achieve a symmetrical self-transformation that will allow him to remain in control of the relationship that has emerged in his coupling with the environment.
Man’s concern for ‘nature’ is resurfacing all the more intensely nowadays because he has reached the end of a certain stage in the development of his own condition. One could say that man, inhabiting a well-defined environment that has now been explored and is entirely known and subservient to him, finds himself in the ‘natural’ conditions of all species at their very beginning, in the ‘Eden’ that precedes every stage of his own condition. By departing this Eden and venturing into the unknown again, by taking up the challenges that, once more, lie ahead of him, man can continue to embrace (and thus reconquer) his own genuinely human dimension (which is now under threat), his originality (in both meanings of the word), and his tragic historicity. He could, however, refuse to resume his march upon a path where every stage involves a clash between the closely related past, present and future (the end, the peak and the [re]commencement), thus falling into the depths of infra- or pre-humanity.
We have reached a turning point where the word ‘progress’ loses all meaning, because every movement forward only serves to reinstate, once the threshold has been crossed, what already was at the beginning, but within a framework that has been enriched with a new dimension of man’s self-awareness and consciousness of the world in which his actions are conducted. (It is in this respect that every genuine revolution is, in its purest manifestation, also synonymous with conservation or, to be more specific, regeneration.)
The issue faced by man today as a result of the transformation of his own surroundings is highly similar to the one that humanity had to contend with at the time of the Neolithic revolution. In the face of that ‘revolution’, one that was to give birth to a ‘second man’ (compared to the ‘first’ one, as part of the previous phase), Indo-European peoples responded by overcoming their former condition, an undertaking whose numerous manifestations included, among other aspects, the organising of social tripartition and which allowed them to embrace the transformations that they were witnessing while still remaining the subjects of history. Today, we must, likewise, find out whether the ‘third man’ will see the light of day, whether man shall, yet again, bestow upon himself a super-nature or be precipitated below the requirements of his own age by a movement of regression.
The ‘naturalistic’ illusion consists in believing that man must cease his transformation of the world. The ‘super-humanistic’ response lies in stating that man must undergo self-transformation so as to reclaim his mastery of the world he has transformed.
Human history is not a continuous phenomenon, but a discontinuous one. It is enamelled with ‘
sudden qualitative leaps’. And it is such a moment that we now face. The challenge that we must rise up to does not consist in finding ways to preserve an old nature, but in acquiring the means to establish a novel culture. It is not a matter of salvaging a ‘natural environment’ (which, as such, has never actually existed), but of striving, over and over again, to re-establish a balance that would allow mankind to retain the position through which it initially came to be.
***
L’homme ou la nature?,547 an essay by Edouard Bonnefous. Hachette, 380 pages.
La nature dé-naturée, an essay by Jean Dorst. Seuil, 190 pages.
The Doomsday Book, and essay by Gordon Rattray Taylor. Calmann-Lévy, 294 pages.
Déclaration des droits de la nature,548 an essay by Claude-Marie Vadrot. Stock, 350 pages.
Der Tanz mit dem Teufel, an essay by Günther Schwab. Le Courrier du livre, 285 pages.
Making Peace with the Planet, an essay by Barry Commoner. Seuil, 220 pages.
L’utopie ou la mort!,549 an essay by René Dumont. Seuil, 184 pages.
The Eco-Spasm Report, an essay by Alvin Toffler. Denoël, 208 pages.
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The End of the World?
In How to Be a Survivor (Ballantine Books, New York, 1971), Paul R. Ehrlich and Richard L. Harriman suggest ‘reorganising the economic regression of developed countries’ so as to resolve the under-development issue faced by the Third-World.
The Zero Population Growth (ZPG) ideal, i.e. the ceasing of demographic increase, goes hand in hand with this proposal. The authors, Paul R. Ehrlich and Thomas Eisner, set an example by undergoing sterilisation themselves. In The Population Bomb, Mr Ehrlich, a professor at Stanford University, writes the following: ‘The model mother should henceforth be a sterilised woman, with two adopted children’.
Systems and Debates Page 28
