Ecological Politics Since The Death Of God
Karl Rogers

A central feature of mainstream environmental philosophy is the maintenance of the human/nature dualism, as well as failing to consider political problems. I intend to demonstrate that this distinction can be situated within a historical era, namely the sixteenth century, and that by situating this distinction we can recognise the role that language has played in preventing us from producing a constructive critique of our practices. Whilst we focus our critique upon our relationship with the environment, with nature, with society, with culture, and with language, we will maintain a position of separation and transcendentalism which will prevent us from properly situating ourselves within the environment, within nature, within society, within culture, and within language. To properly situate ourselves within the world we must emphasis ourselves as bodies in a worldly context and analyse our relationship with particulars within the environment, nature, society and culture of which we ourselves are integral particulars.
 
We live in a world of wonder, mystery and exquisite beauty of which human beings are an integral part. Any environmental philosophy which aims to preserve these aspects of the world cannot, in my view, lay the problem solely at the feet of human beings. We must criticise particular destructive practices with the aim of learning and developing better ways of being within the world. We are facing not only an ecological crisis, but, a political, economic, and social crisis as well. We are facing a crisis of being with each other, and, being within the world. This crisis of being must lead us to certain questions: what are we doing?, and, why are we doing it? This is a time for a re-evaluation of all our practices.
 
We must recognise the cultural diversity within this world and hence the impossibility, and undesirability, of constructing an environmental philosophy which could be universally applicable, useful or acceptable. The practices of oppression and domination enacted upon peoples throughout the world must be avoided and condemned if we are to pass through, without maintaining, this crisis. This is not to say that to criticise the practices of other cultures is an act of domination, it is the prevention of criticism which is the act of domination. Naive relativism must be avoided, as it is a disempowering philosophical position (in as much as it is a position at all); as, conversely, so should naive absolutism, with it's inability to recognise any truth but it's own.
If we are to articulate open criticisms of our present practices we must emphasise particular relations, situations, and contexts centred around the body and discourse. We should focus our critique and re-evaluation upon bodily practices, with particular emphasis on discursive practices which prevent us from making an open critique.
The value of open discourse to explore articulation of values as opposed to a definition of truth cannot be over-emphasised. We must open discourse to the project of saying everything that can be said in such a way as to avoid excluding any participant from the debate on environmental values and critiques on bodily practice. As well as needing clear voices, we need clear ears!
We must make a movement from a metaphysical grounding of the debate in terms of "external truth" to a political grounding in terms of practices, power struggles, and open articulation of values, if we are to avoid the dead-lock of absolutism and the laissez-faire of relativism. If we can do this we have to ground our discourse on speech and action - do our practices, speech or otherwise, enhance the value of living? and, not whether they conform to any notion of "external truth". We will never be able to achieve the degree of worldly engagement necessary for a proper orientation whilst we maintain that the world, reality, is "out there" rather than "right here".
An etymological presentation is presented below to demonstrate how the concept of "truth external to discourse" can be situated in a historical situation. This is not intended to commit a genealogical fallacy but is intended to demonstrate that enough freedom exists within language to move us from a position of detachment to one of engagement within the world.
This etymological deconstruction starts with being. The word being has its roots in Aryan, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. The Aryan root created the stems es-, wes-, and vas- meaning to remain. The Sanskrit created the rootbhu- meaning to arise. The Greek created the root on- meaning to endure. On is related to ousia as enduring presence. Ousia in Greek, meaning presence, was firmly bound up within lived situations. It has its relation with substance, that which is one's own, one's substance, property. Certainly property is bound up with ownership but in the sense of proper ties, which could only be established within a community. Ousia is related to the Latin esse, the infinitive of sum used substantively: that which is in actuality, as opposed to posse, in potentiality. The present participle of esse, essentia, retained it's connection with ousia as substantive, property, viewed as fact. Ousia for the Greeks was not related to uparzn which meant existence, but in the sense of existence in a subject, and certainly was not entirely centred around anthropos, human being. The subject in uparzn was a subject in the sense of discourse and not in the sense of mind, or ego. The Greeks had no concept of mind. These peoples had no doubt that the world existed, that they existed, and their concerns were wrapped around how they could best live within it. Even though they had myths and tales of other worlds, these poems and stories, were created to inspire. They did not orient their being around any other world. The prided themselves on their sensual bodies and their passions. One of the key concepts in Greek thinking is that of the logos, this is perhaps a very difficult concept to translate, without thinking through what it would be to be Greek but is analogous to being in tune with one's community, involving communication, in the sense of communion, requiring a responsive relationship between listening and speaking. Being, for the Greeks, was a political being, grounded in relation to logos, and hence a discursive event centred on being within the world.
The word thing has its roots in Nordic languages. The Thing was originally a large rock upon which the people of a Nordic community would meet, sit upon and around, and discuss community problems, interpretations of law and personal squabbles. When these issues had been discussed to the satisfaction of the community members, the thing would be settled. Archaeologists have found many examples of such boulders strewn all over northern Europe, Scandinavia, Iceland and the British Isles. The Thing-mount is an example of such a meeting place. Upon these rocks two runes were often carved.
The rune Ing and the rune Thorn .
The rune Ing is the symbol representing the nordic hero god, Inguz, that had the closest affinity with humans of all the Nordic gods, the rune represents being, in the sense of remaining, persisting, and becoming. It is taken to mean the people, referring to the importance of the community, and the "we" of a group. The rune Thorn is the symbol representing contemplation, considering what has happened, what is present, and directions and goals. Phonetically, Ing remains unchanged from the English pronunciation, whereas, Thorn is pronounced as a "th". The runes were written from right to left and hencethe two are pronounced as "thing". The thing began as a judicial and deliberative assembly.
In the Germanic languages, given the transition from small communities to princedoms, the thing became a matter brought before the court, a legal process, a charge brought, or a suit or case. Even today the Icelandic parliament is known as the Althing. In the Old English, the thing became any matter with which one was concerned, in action, speech, or thought. That which is done or to be done; a doing, act, deed, transaction; an event, occurrence, incident; a fact, circumstance or experience.
In the Middle English, the thing became that which is said, a saying, utterance or expression. Through all the changes in the use of this word one common thread remains: the thing was a discursive event.
Even though these peoples were different from the Greeks they did share an engagement with life. Theirs was also a worldly, bodily life focused on a community being, a social being and a creative being. The Nordic thing is analogous to the Greek polis.
Early Latin, inextricably bound up within Roman life, had it's usage centred on a political and worldly existence. In early Latin Existere, formed on ex sistere, meant to set, place and stand. Early Latin was still intrinsically bound up in a lived, bodily existence. It was only after the influence of the Church did Christian metaphysics play a major role in the constructions of Latin. This construction was designed to perform an exegesis upon the world. An exegesis which orientated itself on determining the divine schemata of God. With the introduction of guilt and contempt for worldly and bodily life, the Church focused on the supernatural and perfect realm of God. The soul became transcendental and unworldy, a link between this realm of ideal existence, and the means by which the human could escape the world and its suffering. From this contempt for the worldly and the bodily, came a contempt of all that was natural and a love of all that was supernatural. The world became a place imbued with meaning from God, in the form of signs and marks by which humans could orient themselves within the world. Truth came from outside the world, from above it, from the supernatural and the world was only a shadow upon which this veritas, light, was benificently cast. Furthermore, the Church was using the philosophical texts of the ancients to aid in this exegesis, and made the Platonic realm of Ideals synonymous with the realm of God. The human became separated from the world in the attempt to achieve the Ideal. The scholarly exegesis was conducted within Latin and changed the language as it wove all discourse around the logos of God, God's thing, for which the priesthood were necessary for a proper communion with this logos, this thing. Mediaeval scholasticism made this discourse within Latin and henceforth Latin its own.
For example, the old Latin essentia is related, to Middle English essence, as nature or character, whereas in the mediaeval philosophy, essentia, became the substance of which the heavenly bodies were composed, and actually latent in all entities; the most essential part of any substance; the purest or most perfect form, or manifestation, of any substance.
Entity, late Latin, entitatem, formed on ens, entis, meaning being, existence as opposed to non-existence; the existence, as distinct from qualities or relations. Ens, again late Latin, substantive formation on esse.
The mind, as distinct from the body, was created. The mind, that which was closest to the Ideal, became the focus, and diviner of the divine, allowing the formation of the object. Object, partly substantive use of the participle adjective objectum, which previously, from the old Latin, changed from, an interruption of debate to make an opposing point, to, an entity thrown before the mind. To mind, once the bodily activity of concern and care, became an entity in its own right, as the mind.
By the Sixteenth century, being, had changed from, existence in some relation, place or condition, to, objective, material or immaterial, existence. Here too, essence, changed from, its distinctly social usage to a metaphysical one, to, substance, the substratum of phenomena, to absolute being. Essentiality came to mean that which constitutes the being of an entity, either as conceptual or, as real; nominal or real. Essence became equality that by possession of which an entity is what it is. Discourse had changed its centre; from being centred around God, it changed, to being centred around "external reality" and "internal reality", with language to reveal these two poles "situated outside of language". Language was reduced to being "a representation of what was external to language". Ontology became separated from its constituting being, epistemology became subservient to ontology, and language became a project of nominalisation and ordering. Logos and discourse became invisible.
Descartes was then able, by his method of doubting-thinking-being, to create the cogito, cogito ergo sum, and the ego became that which thinks and by doings so was unable to doubt its own existence. Most importantly, this made two very important distinctions: the subject and object distinction, and, the mind and matter distinction. The body was held to be matter under the control of the mind. The subjective mind became detached from the objective world. The objective world was a creation of the sixteenth century; as was also the subjective mind. The world became an it. The subject became an I. Discourse was placed at the disposal of the subject to reveal, directly, the relationships between the objects within the external world.
This led to two innovations: epistemological egoism and scientific ordering. The former meant that, what was most prior, most certain, was impressions on the mind and led to subjective idealism. The latter meant that the world could now be described in terms of pre-discursive order, independently of the subject, and led to objective realism. The idealist/realist dualism was created at this time, henceforth any critique of objectivity has always been forced, by realists, into the idealist camp, and visa versa. In the sixteenth century, the thing became either an object or became situated outside of discourse. Discourse was no longer a creative constituent of being.
This ego transcended this world of matter, and used science as a tool for detached study, manipulation and control. The ego became surrounded by a world of material at it's disposal. The word environment was coined in the sixteenth century, meaning the action of environing; the state of being environed; that which environs. Environ was a Middle English adoption of the French verb environner, meaning to form a ring around.
This transcendental egoism, either as idealism or realism, universalised itself as individualism. The distinctions between individual/society, human/nature and thought/world became manifest, separating us from our culture, language, and world.
Kant, created a necessary invention in response to the philosophical tradition created as a result of the sixteenth century, the concept of the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. He rejected the notion that existence was a quality that a thing was imbued with, but that the existence of a thing was intuitively known as a consequence of its phenomenal existence. The proper mode of thought became that of transcendental reflection. Universalisable rationality placed us above the phenomenal world, grounded upon the noumenal self and the thing-in-itself. Still the ground was "external" and "unknowable". But still the illusion of universalisation, transcendence, and orientation toward the absolute presented us with the illusion of control, grounding and allowed language to remain invisible. This transcendence provides us with a reduction of the world, as the world, and prevents us from freeing the world from this constraint by fixing language within representation. We become alienated from creativity within language and ontology, and the illusion of transcendence prevents from formulating a critique of practice. The noumenon, the thing-in-itself, is an arbitrary construct.
However, we only need this construct if we adopt the distinctions introduced in the sixteenth century, if we track our thought back to earlier times we can see how intimately and inextricably our language, the world and thought were intertwined within a lived, bodily existence. The world is not external to us, and we do not transcend the world, except within the discourse of this particular era. But, now that the distinction between subject and object, mind and body, human and nature, the individual and it's environment have been made, how can we reconfigure our discourse in such a way as to remove them?
Nietzsche first uttered "God is dead." in aphorism 125, Gay Science (1882).
The madman.- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" - As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? - Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not small nothing yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early", he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves." It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
What are we to make of this? This is not a denial of God - a declaration of the absence of God, in truth, from reality, but a deliberate reorientation of the position of truth and meaning in such as way as that they are only meaningful and truthful in a lived, bodily, and human existence. It is the active and deliberate removal of God, external truth, the supernatural and the Ideal from our lives. It is a declaration of a murder and not an absence. There is no "external arbiter" of our truths, for every truth there is only a human arbiter, and as such there is no ground for truth, except in human terms, it is the end of the madman's search for a transcendental existence, and the search for inhuman, acultural, asocial and apolitical truth. There is no "external reality", nor is there an "internal reality", without discourse. Existence is within discourse, we are within discourse, and all differentiations and integrations are within discourse.
Furthermore, in making this step we have placed the external absolute, external truth, and objective reality within discourse. Essence can now also be placed within discourse; essence now becomes that which is essential, important, to our aims and being, within discourse. We now have the freedom and creativity to create our own essence and the flexibility to recognise a multiplicity of essences without the need to universalise them. There is a reclamation of matter, it is no longer a question of what is matter? but, what does matter? what is important? what is essential? what is valuable? These questions can be answered in relation to a particular project, goal, or practice. The answers to these questions become meaningful in terms of a lived , bodily, worldly existence and they can only be meaningfully answered in engagement and not detachment.
But what reference could we use to determine the truth of our discourse? It is not a question of whether any utterance within a discourse is true or false, but is a question of whether any utterance is valuable. Does our discourse enhance the value of our lives? Do our practices enhance our bodily existence? These questions are the important ones. It does not matter whether, this or that is true, except in context, as part of a larger project to enhance the value of our lives, within a discourse. We can now dissolve the distinctions, or keep them, as we deem proper to our practices, as they are no longer fixed in place. We can dissolve or invert the distinction between mind and body. It is much more conducive to critical and engaged bodily practices if we view ourselves as bodies rather than minds. We can still keep the word "mind", as we want to mind what we, as bodies, are doing, "mind the gap", "I mind", "we mind"; mind is what the body does and not what it has. As bodies we become situated within the world, within the environment, and we are of the world, and constituted by the environment. We cannot transcend the world, as we are part of the world, and can only develop practices with particulars of existence, with particulars of the world, but not with the world as a entirety. As an entirety, the world includes us, and as such the worldly is contained within the world. We have to look toward our relationships, situations, and practices within the world. Once the supernatural has been excommunicated then the world becomes natural, therefore we become natural.
Of course, as we have placed the supernatural within discourse, having denied its existence without, we can allow others to maintain their discourse centred around "God" - they have either inherited a living god or they have resurrected God. We can still ask them our questions of value, but, there is no need to exclude them from any discourse. There are many religions in the world and if we are to solve our ecological, political, social and economic problems the debate must be open to, what is after all, the largest number of people.
There is after all a place for metaphysics. We too can create our myths for the purpose of inspiration. An inspirational metaphysics, through metaphor and poetry, can provide an orientation of the human within mythology. Providing we question the value of such stories. Language is free to return to literature and poetry - escaping representation of the world, itself and us. Language becomes poetic utterances, metaphorical and descriptive, but always bound up in the orientation of the body within the world. Language, the world and the body become inextricably interwoven and connected. The infinitude of language can now reveal itself, free from the structures of the nominalist enlightenment, and offer itself in the celebration of existence through it's wonderful, beautiful and mysterious alchemy. We are its life and embodiment, for how could it exist without us?; but, it is our world and our being, for what would we be without it? Language cannot transcend the world, nor can it transcend us, but twists and entwines throughout the world creating our orientation, our being, and our world. Above all it is a living and embodied language. As Nietzsche wrote in the aphorism 124, of the Gay Science:
In the horizon of the infinite.- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is an ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realise that it is infinite and there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it offered more freedom - and there is no longer any "land".
The land is the voyage. A voyage through the superabundance of life; a life full of value, and demanding the enhancement and preservation of value. As Heidegger wrote in The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead,
If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above all its vitalising and upbuilding power, then nothing remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself..."Are we not straying through an infinite nothing?" The pronouncement "God is Dead" contains the confirmation that this Nothing is spreading out. "Nothing" means here: absence of a suprasensory, obligatory world. Nihilism, "the most uncanny of all guests," is standing at the door.
This nihilism demands of us a thinking through of nihilism, a re-evaluation of all values, a creative engagement within being, to pass through, without retreat, to a world of superabundant value; a world that is intimately ours and we intimately its.
We must also take care not to replace one obligatory Ideal with another. We must not replace "God" with "Man", the universal generalisation which ignores difference. As Foucault wrote in The Order Of Things,
In our day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning-point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of Man...it becomes apparent, then, that the death of God and the last man are engaged in a contest with more than one round: is it not the last man who announces that he has killed God, thus situating his language, his thought, his laughter in the space of that already dead God, yet positing himself also as he who has killed God and whose existence includes the freedom and the decision of that murder? Thus, the last man is at the same time older and yet younger than the death of God; since he has killed God, it is he himself who must answer for his own finitude; but since it is in the death of God that he speaks, thinks, and exists, his murder itself is doomed to die; new gods, the same gods, are already swelling the future Ocean; Man will disappear.
One of the main criticisms brought to bear against grounding the present debate on speech is the problem of suffering. The realist claims the suffering is an objective fact independently of possession of language; the fact that a being does not have a language does not prevent it from suffering. In order to deny the realist from any monopoly on the question of suffering we have to make a problematic but interesting move. Instead of denying the fact of others suffering, we can deny the fact that other beings do not have a language - if a being can differentiate then that being must have a language. We must resist the intellectualist account of language in favour of a bodily account of language - if a being utters and avoids suffering then it can, at least, differentiate between suffering and not suffering, it has a language - albeit an alien one to any language we are used to describing as language - we could easily hold that mammals have languages, grunts, calls, howls, snuffling, grooming, touching, hugging, song etc., and there is certainly a case for extending this human privilege to birds, reptiles, insects, etc., as well as possibly extending language, as communication, to plants too. If we insist on denying other beings a voice that is only because we wish to keep them silent within our discourse.
 
We can focus on an embodiment of values rather than a detached intellectualisation of values whilst remaining aware that we are born into an already established discourse. There is no pre-discursive reality, but discourse precedes any of us; the world is, and always has been a discursive event. Discourse extends beyond us, we cannot transcend it, but there is freedom within it. We cannot sit back and justify our practices in terms of a discourse which we describe as "externally true" except within discourse. We are now free to criticise any practices, and change our discourse to allow a change of practices. We can change the foundation of our practices and hence change our practices. We are not limited to relying on a particular set of discursive practices to define our orientation and goals, but we can weave our discourse around our orientation and goals. We can use rhetoric to support and enhance our values.
 
As our essence is defined within discourse we are free to create and change that as well, we are not necessarily individuals in competition; we could as freely move toward a communitarian discourse based on participation, and co-operation in our practices and speech. We can move from a truth centred debate to a value centred debate. Let's reconvene the thing as a discursive event and in doing so empower ourselves.
 
Even if you still want to centre your discourse on an "objective reality outside discourse", well that is your prerogative, but if we are to solve this crisis then we must begin within open discussion. As R.D.Laing wrote in Bird Of Paradise,
There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose that Alpha and Omega do you want to start to talk and to write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words. At best and most they are perhaps in memoriam, evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares in the sky of darkness, a just feasible tact, indiscretions, perhaps forgivable....
City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off.... If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

Karl Rogers
Copyright 1996

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