Indeed, the existentialists make it clear that political values can never be universalized. There are no fixed and timeless truths that ground our moral commitments. Values are ambiguous and finite human constructs that emerge against the background of specific sociohistorical contexts. (It was the European Enlightenment, after all, which made it possible for philosophers to universalize the modern liberal values of ‘rights,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality’ in the first place. Such an egalitarian view would have been inconceivable in the hierarchical social arrangements of the Greco-Roman or Medieval worlds.) To this end, the political aims of existentialism may look modest. The primary goal is to remind us that our political projects are fragile and historically contingent and that these imperfections cannot be eradicated because they are constitutive of human existence itself. This is why Beauvoir calls for political philosophers to let go of the “dream of purity” (2004, 189; cited in Kruks 2012, 42). The best we can do is to create a discursive space so that the suffering individual can speak, be heard, and be recognized as such and to act, in the limited and incomplete way that we can, to free them from this situation. But when it comes to universal prescriptions for how all humans ‘ought’ to act when confronting oppression, the existentialist often remains silent.
By exploding the myth of the modern subject and forwarding an interpretation of the self as finite, vulnerable, and already bound up in potentially oppressive relations, existentialism has deeply influenced the way contemporary theorists conceptualize our relationship to the polis. But it has also broken new ground in how philosophers think about our relationship to the natural world, laying the conceptual groundwork for a ‘radical’ or ‘deep’ ecology that challenges the metaphysical assumptions of modern philosophy, assumptions that have proven to be so destructive in the technological age. In the next section, we turn to existentialism's contribution to recent developments in environmental philosophy.
Self and nature
As we saw in chapter 3, one of the great legacies of existentialism is its dismantling of the subject/object metaphysics that has been largely axiomatic to the Western worldview since the time of Descartes. On this account, there is an explicit separation between the ‘inner’ perceptions of my mind and what exists ‘out there’ in the real world, creating a situation of skepticism about whether anything in the world can be known with certainty. This position results in an epistemological gap or barrier between self (as encapsulated mind) and world (as objects), creating the impression that the world is somehow apart from us rather than part of us. Nature, from this perspective, is seen as being elsewhere; at best, it is the place we drive to on vacation or weekends, the National Parks, the beaches, the conservation areas or nature preserves. But more problematically, the scientific view tends to reduce the natural world to an aggregate of material objects. This is because, in order to gain genuine knowledge of things, the scientist focuses only on the objective ‘facts’ by following a method or procedure that abstracts out the ‘values’ that we bring to our experience of nature such as beauty, meaning, and purpose. The subject/object dualism, then, creates a more insidious fact/value dualism, one that interprets the natural world as a calculable domain of valueless matter that can be measured in terms of weight, mass, and volume. On this view, nature becomes in Heidegger's words a “resource” (Bestand) waiting to be “set upon” and mastered by technology. “The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district. … Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, uranium to yield atomic energy [etc.]” (1977b, 15).
But existentialists show that in my everyday life I do not experience myself as a detached mind or subject, nor do I encounter the world from a disinterested perspective as the sum total of objects that are separate and distinct from me. Rather, in my ordinary acts and practices I am ‘being-in-the-world,’ already bound up and involved with things that have meaning, that matter to me in particular ways based on my own embodied and situated perspective. For instance, unless I'm a hydrologist doing research, the river that runs through town does not reveal itself to me as a measurable mass of waterpower. It is, rather, the place that invites me for a swim on a hot day or the bittersweet memory of fishing with an old friend or the area that threatens to flood during rainy season. Camus's meditations in ‘Summer in Algiers’ illuminate how our own experience reveals a natural world vivid and rich with meanings and how these meanings are disclosed not through detached cognition but through penetrating emotions or moods. He writes of “the carob trees covering all of Algeria with a scent of love,” of the bay “opening to the sky like a mouth or a wound,” of the “flight of the black birds rising against the green horizon.” Struck by what he calls the “paralyzing excess of nature's bounty,” he asks:
How can one fail to participate in that dialogue of stone and flesh in tune with the sun and season? … In the evening or after the rain, the whole earth, its womb moist with a seed of bitter almond, rests after having given herself to the sun all summer long. And again the scent hallows the union of man and earth and awakens in us the only really virile love in this world: ephemeral and noble. (1955, 141, 144, 153–154)
Camus's description of the sensual ‘union of earth and man’ undermines the dualisms that are foundational to the modern worldview by showing how they uncritically assume a standpoint of theoretical detachment, a standpoint that is betrayed by our own experience.
Heidegger's work is especially helpful here because he makes it clear that the primary relationship we have with the world is based not on ‘knowing’ about it but on ‘caring’ about it and our place in it. Before we can know anything about present-at-hand objects, we already embody a felt sense of care or concern with things that arises from our situated frame of reference. This is why Heidegger says, “Care is ontologically earlier” than any detached reflection (1962, 194, my emphasis). This means that the objectifying view of modern science is not only parasitic on our everyday being-in-the-world; it also covers over and hides the layers of experiential meaning that allow the natural world to emotionally affect us. Environmental philosophers have recently taken up this point, highlighting the significance of Heidegger's alteration of the famous Cartesian dictum from “I think, therefore I am” to “I care, therefore, I am” (Evernden 1985, 70). On this view, we are not disinterested minds looking down on the natural world as a calculable grid of resources. We are already situated and involved in such a way that forests, animals, rivers, and mountains light up for us in meaningful ways.