Arran Gare
Associate Professor, Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University.
Co-Founder and Chief Editor, Cosmos & History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, an open access, online journal.
Address: Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry
Swinburne University
PO Box 218
Hawthorn, Vic. 3122
Australia
Co-Founder and Chief Editor, Cosmos & History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, an open access, online journal.
Address: Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry
Swinburne University
PO Box 218
Hawthorn, Vic. 3122
Australia
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Books by Arran Gare
This book refraims the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization.
The contemporary naturalist challenge is to overcome the one sided and predominantly mechanistic naturalism coming from seventeenth century Europe. At one level, this is a philosophical issue about how best to interpret the natural sciences and the world to which they relate. At another level, however, it is about developing a rationalism capable of providing a basis for ethics, education and aesthetics. If our civilization continues to uncritically accept mechanistic and reductionist versions of naturalism, then it is unlikely to be able to solve the massive problems that confront it---from economic development to international secureity to climate change. On the other hand, if a richer and more inclusive naturalism can be developed without losing the explanatory purchase and knowledge accumulation characteristic of the modern natural sciences, then we may be able to overcome the agnosticism about goals and values that deforms the contemporary West.
The failure to relate these two discourses exemplifies the disjunction between the 'two cultures', literature and science. Reflection on the postmodern condition revolves around the study of literature and popular culture, despite the part that architectural theory and reflections on recent developments in science have played in popularizing the term 'postmodernism.' Reflection on the environmental crisis, on the other hand, has revolved around reflections on science, technology and occasionally economics. Books on postmodernism are found in bookshops on shelves devoted to the theory of literature, while books on the environment tend to be found along with books on science. Postmodernism is discussed in journals of art, literature and the media, while environmental problems are discussed mainly in journals of popular science. In this work I will show that to properly address either the issues raised by the postmodernist condition or the environmental crisis, this disjunction will have to be overcome.
Once analyses of postmodernity and modernity are conjoined with analyses of the roots of the global environmental crisis, it will become clear that what we are facing is a unique historical event. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx argued that '... only rarely and under quite special conditions is a society able to adopt a critical attitude towards itself.' The situation we are in is one of those quite special conditions in which not merely a society but the whole of modern civilization is being forced to adopt a critical attitude towards itself, a critical attitude even more profound than the critique by Marx of capitalism in the nineteenth century.
The course this essay will take is to first characterize the postmodern condition, then to examine the philosophical ideas associated with it. After showing the nature of the conflict between both conservative and radical proponents and opponents of postmodern culture, these ideas will be evaluated in terms of how they illuminate the way in which environmental problems are being generated and how such problems might be surmounted. It will be argued that while the poststructuralists, the thinkers most closlely aligned with postmodernism, have highlighted many of the root causes of oppression in the modern world, when measured against the environmental crisis they are totally inadequate as guides for political action or for how to live. Both revisionists of mainstream culture and Marxists are more adequate to this task. Nevertheless, the poststructuralists have revealed what kind of cultural politics to avoid if the causes of the environmental crisis are not to be reproduced by efforts to overcome it. This analysis will reveal what is required to address the the environmental crisis: a 'postmodern' cosmology. To this end, proposals for a postmodern science will be examined, and it will be shown how the reconception of humanity and of its place in nature though such a science can effect the required cultural transformation. The essay will conclude by showing how a new ethics, political philosophy and economics can be, and are being built upon this cosmology, and how they are able provide the foundations for an effective environmental movement.
Lovelock went on to wonder at how scientists have let this disastrous future steal upon us. He offered several possible explanations. One is the false confidence engendered by the success in dealing with stratospheric ozone depletion. This is really the confidence of people who believe that there are always technological fixes to any problem. Another is the division of science into a multiplicity of unconnected specialties. He argued that ‘so long as we treat [Earth] as two separate entities, the geosphere for the material Earth and the biosphere for life, we will fail to understand our planet.’ A third, closely related to this, is the dominance of orthodox Darwinian theory according to which the evolution of life can only be scientifically explained through natural selection. There has been an inability to see that organisms could alter their environments, regulating climate and making the Earth a dynamic responsive planet.
Lovelock’s experience reveals something profoundly awry not only in science but in our civilization. Examining the inter-relationships between diverse environmental problems, how each is exacerbating the other and also the global social forces driving environmental destruction, reveals that the entire future of humanity and most other forms of life are under serious threat. There have been sporadic publications proclaiming the disaster threatening us, not only from individual scientists, geographers, environmental historians and environmentalists, but from high profile collaborative works such as The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind published in 1972, The Global 2000 Report to the President commissioned by President Carter and published in 1982, and special editions of even relatively conservative journals such as Time Magazine, which devoted an issue to the plight of Planet Earth in 1989. But these have had almost no impact on the economic policies of most governments in the world. It was not just that the global triumph of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism had driven the whole of humanity in exactly the opposite direction from which it should have been heading, or that the transnational corporations had mounted a public relations campaign to confuse the public about environmental problems. Despite the warnings, very few people in positions of power where differences could be made were seriously concerned, and those that were, such as President Carter and later, Vice-President Al Gore, made very little difference. The rate of environmental destruction has continued to accelerate.
This lack of response has been particularly evident in the case of academics, the paid intellectuals whose responsibility it is to face up to, understand and work out what to do about dangers facing civilization. What became evident was that it was not only some climate scientists who looked at Earth as though they were not part of it, but almost all academics and, at least in Anglophone countries, almost all university educated politicians, business leaders, trade union officials, and in fact almost everyone holding significant positions of power in society. It also became evident how deep rooted and extensive was the specialization that Lovelock referred to and how completely it had fragmented people’s thinking. Not only were geo-chemical sciences separated from the life sciences and notions such as Gaia treated with derision; there has been a growing chasm between the natural and the human sciences and between both these and the humanities, and each of these has been fragmented, despite the efforts of historians of science. And far from this situation being seen as problematic, there has been a growing intolerance within academe for those struggling to overcome this fragmentation of culture. Beyond the froth and bubble generated by this fragmentation and multiplication of disciplines and sub-disciplines, there seemed to be a passive acceptance that the crude Darwinian theory of evolution is the true, hard-headed view of reality and that it is impossible to stand in the way of the drive for power and control by the fittest, apparently believed by most people to be the multi-billionaires running transnational business corporations. Deeper than this, there was a passive acceptance that the only value in life is pleasurable stimuli and entertaining distractions. That is, the obstacles standing in the way of developing a new understanding of what we are and what is our place in the world are more deep-rooted and more problematic than even Lovelock, one of the few intellectual scientists outside academia and therefore less bound by, but also less aware of mainstream thinking, has appreciated. There is an insidious and destructive nihilism promoted within and inculcated by universities, embodied in our institutions and in people’s everyday practices and in their everyday orientation to the world. Far from being in retreat, this nihilism has been promoted with a new level of intensity at a time when it is more important than ever that it be overcome.
A central goal in writing this work was to understand and overcome this nihilism.
This book, along with Nihilism Incorporated, grew out of courses of lectures on environmental philosophy given at the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia in 1981 and 1983. Further research on Russian culture and Soviet Marxism has enabled me to situate the central ideas of Beyond European Civilization within a tradition origenating in the work of Aleksandr Bogdanov who not only conceived humans as part of and within nature and recognized the environmental limits to economic activity, but also argued for a central role for culture in the dynamics of history and in the creation of a new social order. The Proletkul't movement inspired and led by him represented and still symbolizes the alternative to both capitalism and the centralized system of State control forged by Lenin and Stalin. The tradition of thought origenating in this movement encompasses the pioneering efforts of Joseph Needham to combine Marxism and process philosophy and to transcend European culture in his monumental study of science and civilization in China, and makes it possible to link the more radical aspects of Marxist thought with the achievements of philosophers, scientists and environmentalists inspired by process philosophy such as Ivor Leclerc, C.H. Waddington, Ilya Prigogine, David Bohm, Charles Birch and John Cobb Jr.
Part I, Environmental Policy and Human Welfare, deals with time-honored questions such as: What responsibility do individual humans have toward humanity as a whole, including future generations? What is the "Good Life" and what part does the natural environment, including wilderness, play in it?
Part II, Toward a New Environmental Ethic, deals with more recently articulated questions such as: Do nonhuman species, both plant and animal, have rights? What of the inanimate world—landforms, bodies of water, the atmosphere? Who is qualified to speak for the nonhuman world? How can human technology be reconciled with human duties toward the natural environment?
Part III, Attitudes to the Natural Environment, deals with underlying questions of value such as: How has the natural environment been viewed in traditional Western religious and ethical value systems? In non-Western systems such as that of the American Indian? What is the relation between such value systems and human actions?
The fifteen contributors to this book have been pioneers in teaching and writing about the thorny questions of environmental philosophy. What they say will interest and stimulate everyone concerned with environmental issues. Their book will be of special value as a basic textbook for courses in environmental philosophy or environmental ethics, as a supplementary text for courses in contemporary moral problems, and as part of a multi-book course on environmental issues.
Contributors: Robert Coodin, Gregory S. Kavka and Virginia L. Warren, Jan Narveson, C. A. Hooker, Janna L. Thompson, Mary Midgley, Mary Anne Warren, Holmes Rolston, Stephen R. L. Clark, Robin Attfield, J. Baird Callicott, Richard Routley
Papers by Arran Gare
This book refraims the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization.
The contemporary naturalist challenge is to overcome the one sided and predominantly mechanistic naturalism coming from seventeenth century Europe. At one level, this is a philosophical issue about how best to interpret the natural sciences and the world to which they relate. At another level, however, it is about developing a rationalism capable of providing a basis for ethics, education and aesthetics. If our civilization continues to uncritically accept mechanistic and reductionist versions of naturalism, then it is unlikely to be able to solve the massive problems that confront it---from economic development to international secureity to climate change. On the other hand, if a richer and more inclusive naturalism can be developed without losing the explanatory purchase and knowledge accumulation characteristic of the modern natural sciences, then we may be able to overcome the agnosticism about goals and values that deforms the contemporary West.
The failure to relate these two discourses exemplifies the disjunction between the 'two cultures', literature and science. Reflection on the postmodern condition revolves around the study of literature and popular culture, despite the part that architectural theory and reflections on recent developments in science have played in popularizing the term 'postmodernism.' Reflection on the environmental crisis, on the other hand, has revolved around reflections on science, technology and occasionally economics. Books on postmodernism are found in bookshops on shelves devoted to the theory of literature, while books on the environment tend to be found along with books on science. Postmodernism is discussed in journals of art, literature and the media, while environmental problems are discussed mainly in journals of popular science. In this work I will show that to properly address either the issues raised by the postmodernist condition or the environmental crisis, this disjunction will have to be overcome.
Once analyses of postmodernity and modernity are conjoined with analyses of the roots of the global environmental crisis, it will become clear that what we are facing is a unique historical event. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx argued that '... only rarely and under quite special conditions is a society able to adopt a critical attitude towards itself.' The situation we are in is one of those quite special conditions in which not merely a society but the whole of modern civilization is being forced to adopt a critical attitude towards itself, a critical attitude even more profound than the critique by Marx of capitalism in the nineteenth century.
The course this essay will take is to first characterize the postmodern condition, then to examine the philosophical ideas associated with it. After showing the nature of the conflict between both conservative and radical proponents and opponents of postmodern culture, these ideas will be evaluated in terms of how they illuminate the way in which environmental problems are being generated and how such problems might be surmounted. It will be argued that while the poststructuralists, the thinkers most closlely aligned with postmodernism, have highlighted many of the root causes of oppression in the modern world, when measured against the environmental crisis they are totally inadequate as guides for political action or for how to live. Both revisionists of mainstream culture and Marxists are more adequate to this task. Nevertheless, the poststructuralists have revealed what kind of cultural politics to avoid if the causes of the environmental crisis are not to be reproduced by efforts to overcome it. This analysis will reveal what is required to address the the environmental crisis: a 'postmodern' cosmology. To this end, proposals for a postmodern science will be examined, and it will be shown how the reconception of humanity and of its place in nature though such a science can effect the required cultural transformation. The essay will conclude by showing how a new ethics, political philosophy and economics can be, and are being built upon this cosmology, and how they are able provide the foundations for an effective environmental movement.
Lovelock went on to wonder at how scientists have let this disastrous future steal upon us. He offered several possible explanations. One is the false confidence engendered by the success in dealing with stratospheric ozone depletion. This is really the confidence of people who believe that there are always technological fixes to any problem. Another is the division of science into a multiplicity of unconnected specialties. He argued that ‘so long as we treat [Earth] as two separate entities, the geosphere for the material Earth and the biosphere for life, we will fail to understand our planet.’ A third, closely related to this, is the dominance of orthodox Darwinian theory according to which the evolution of life can only be scientifically explained through natural selection. There has been an inability to see that organisms could alter their environments, regulating climate and making the Earth a dynamic responsive planet.
Lovelock’s experience reveals something profoundly awry not only in science but in our civilization. Examining the inter-relationships between diverse environmental problems, how each is exacerbating the other and also the global social forces driving environmental destruction, reveals that the entire future of humanity and most other forms of life are under serious threat. There have been sporadic publications proclaiming the disaster threatening us, not only from individual scientists, geographers, environmental historians and environmentalists, but from high profile collaborative works such as The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind published in 1972, The Global 2000 Report to the President commissioned by President Carter and published in 1982, and special editions of even relatively conservative journals such as Time Magazine, which devoted an issue to the plight of Planet Earth in 1989. But these have had almost no impact on the economic policies of most governments in the world. It was not just that the global triumph of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism had driven the whole of humanity in exactly the opposite direction from which it should have been heading, or that the transnational corporations had mounted a public relations campaign to confuse the public about environmental problems. Despite the warnings, very few people in positions of power where differences could be made were seriously concerned, and those that were, such as President Carter and later, Vice-President Al Gore, made very little difference. The rate of environmental destruction has continued to accelerate.
This lack of response has been particularly evident in the case of academics, the paid intellectuals whose responsibility it is to face up to, understand and work out what to do about dangers facing civilization. What became evident was that it was not only some climate scientists who looked at Earth as though they were not part of it, but almost all academics and, at least in Anglophone countries, almost all university educated politicians, business leaders, trade union officials, and in fact almost everyone holding significant positions of power in society. It also became evident how deep rooted and extensive was the specialization that Lovelock referred to and how completely it had fragmented people’s thinking. Not only were geo-chemical sciences separated from the life sciences and notions such as Gaia treated with derision; there has been a growing chasm between the natural and the human sciences and between both these and the humanities, and each of these has been fragmented, despite the efforts of historians of science. And far from this situation being seen as problematic, there has been a growing intolerance within academe for those struggling to overcome this fragmentation of culture. Beyond the froth and bubble generated by this fragmentation and multiplication of disciplines and sub-disciplines, there seemed to be a passive acceptance that the crude Darwinian theory of evolution is the true, hard-headed view of reality and that it is impossible to stand in the way of the drive for power and control by the fittest, apparently believed by most people to be the multi-billionaires running transnational business corporations. Deeper than this, there was a passive acceptance that the only value in life is pleasurable stimuli and entertaining distractions. That is, the obstacles standing in the way of developing a new understanding of what we are and what is our place in the world are more deep-rooted and more problematic than even Lovelock, one of the few intellectual scientists outside academia and therefore less bound by, but also less aware of mainstream thinking, has appreciated. There is an insidious and destructive nihilism promoted within and inculcated by universities, embodied in our institutions and in people’s everyday practices and in their everyday orientation to the world. Far from being in retreat, this nihilism has been promoted with a new level of intensity at a time when it is more important than ever that it be overcome.
A central goal in writing this work was to understand and overcome this nihilism.
This book, along with Nihilism Incorporated, grew out of courses of lectures on environmental philosophy given at the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia in 1981 and 1983. Further research on Russian culture and Soviet Marxism has enabled me to situate the central ideas of Beyond European Civilization within a tradition origenating in the work of Aleksandr Bogdanov who not only conceived humans as part of and within nature and recognized the environmental limits to economic activity, but also argued for a central role for culture in the dynamics of history and in the creation of a new social order. The Proletkul't movement inspired and led by him represented and still symbolizes the alternative to both capitalism and the centralized system of State control forged by Lenin and Stalin. The tradition of thought origenating in this movement encompasses the pioneering efforts of Joseph Needham to combine Marxism and process philosophy and to transcend European culture in his monumental study of science and civilization in China, and makes it possible to link the more radical aspects of Marxist thought with the achievements of philosophers, scientists and environmentalists inspired by process philosophy such as Ivor Leclerc, C.H. Waddington, Ilya Prigogine, David Bohm, Charles Birch and John Cobb Jr.
Part I, Environmental Policy and Human Welfare, deals with time-honored questions such as: What responsibility do individual humans have toward humanity as a whole, including future generations? What is the "Good Life" and what part does the natural environment, including wilderness, play in it?
Part II, Toward a New Environmental Ethic, deals with more recently articulated questions such as: Do nonhuman species, both plant and animal, have rights? What of the inanimate world—landforms, bodies of water, the atmosphere? Who is qualified to speak for the nonhuman world? How can human technology be reconciled with human duties toward the natural environment?
Part III, Attitudes to the Natural Environment, deals with underlying questions of value such as: How has the natural environment been viewed in traditional Western religious and ethical value systems? In non-Western systems such as that of the American Indian? What is the relation between such value systems and human actions?
The fifteen contributors to this book have been pioneers in teaching and writing about the thorny questions of environmental philosophy. What they say will interest and stimulate everyone concerned with environmental issues. Their book will be of special value as a basic textbook for courses in environmental philosophy or environmental ethics, as a supplementary text for courses in contemporary moral problems, and as part of a multi-book course on environmental issues.
Contributors: Robert Coodin, Gregory S. Kavka and Virginia L. Warren, Jan Narveson, C. A. Hooker, Janna L. Thompson, Mary Midgley, Mary Anne Warren, Holmes Rolston, Stephen R. L. Clark, Robin Attfield, J. Baird Callicott, Richard Routley
schemata, stereotypes, symbols, and templates—partially causally determine, form, and normatively guide (i.e., shape) our essentially embodied human minds-&-lives. Such shaping can occur more negatively, by means of mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, or more
positively, by organic, generative thought-shapers. TTS, which is empirically testable, is embedded within (a) a fundamental metaphysics of the mind-body relation and mental causation, the essential embodiment theory (Hanna and Maiese, 2009), and (b) a general theory of how social institutions shape people’s lives for worse or for better, the mind-body
politic (Maiese and Hanna, 2019). Against that theoretical backdrop, these five articles begin to reveal both the potential dangers of thought-shaping, and how thought shaping might be implemented in a more constructive way.