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    Against Nature
    Against Nature
    Against Nature
    Ebook79 pages57 minutes

    Against Nature

    By Lorraine Daston

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    A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders.

    Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders.

    In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder.

    Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe MIT Press
    Release dateMay 28, 2019
    ISBN9780262353816
    Against Nature
    Author

    Lorraine Daston

    Lorraine Daston is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of several books, including Objectivity, How Reason Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, and Against Nature. She lives in Berlin.

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      Book preview

      Against Nature - Lorraine Daston

      Against Nature

      Untimely Meditations

      1. The Agony of Eros

      Byung-Chul Han

      2. On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism

      Albrecht Koschorke

      3. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects

      Byung-Chul Han

      4. The Terror of Evidence

      Marcus Steinweg

      5. All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse

      Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Höfer

      6. Positive Nihilism: My Confrontation with Heidegger

      Hartmut Lange

      7. Inconsistencies

      Marcus Steinweg

      8. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese

      Byung-Chul Han

      9. Topology of Violence

      Byung-Chul Han

      10. The Radical Fool of Capitalism: On Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon, and the Auto-Icon

      Christian Welzbacher

      11. German Philosophy: A Dialogue

      Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy

      12. Portrait of the Manager as a Young Author: On Storytelling, Business, and Literature

      Philipp Schönthaler

      13. Waste: A New Media Primer

      Roberto Simanowski

      14. The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas

      Roberto Simanowski

      15. Law as Refuge of Anarchy: Societies without Hegemony or State

      Hermann Amborn

      16. Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene

      Andreas Weber

      17. Against Nature

      Lorraine Daston

      Against Nature

      Lorraine Daston

      The MIT Press

      Cambridge, Massachusetts

      London, England

      © 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

      First published in the series De Natura (edited by Frank Fehrenbach), which is part of Fröhliche Wissenschaft at Matthes & Seitz Berlin: © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2018. All rights reserved.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

      This book was set in PF DinText Pro by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Daston, Lorraine, 1951– author.

      Title: Against nature / Lorraine Daston.

      Other titles: Gegen die Natur. English

      Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2019. | Series: Untimely meditations ; 17 | Includes bibliographical references.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018049313 | ISBN 9780262537339 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Philosophy of nature. | Ethics.

      Classification: LCC BD450 .D32513 2019 | DDC 113—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049313

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      d_r0

      Contents

      1 The Problem: How Does Is Become Ought?

      2 Specific Natures

      3 Local Natures

      4 Universal Natural Laws

      5 The Passions of the Unnatural

      6 The Very Idea of Order

      7 The Plenitude of Orders

      8 Conclusion: Saving the Phenomena

      Notes

      Against Nature

      1 The Problem: How Does Is Become Ought?

      In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Immanuel Kant remarked: It is noteworthy that we can think of no other suitable form for a rational being than that of a human being. Every other form would represent, at most, a symbol of a certain quality of the human being—as the serpent, for example, is an image of evil cunning—but not the rational being himself. Therefore we populate all other planets in our imagination with nothing but human forms, although it is probable that they may be formed very differently, given the diversity of the soil that supports and nourishes them, and the different elements of which they are composed.¹ The many depictions of the serpent with a human head who corrupted Adam and Eve implicitly make Kant’s point: a serpent who could speak and reason so beguilingly was as much person as reptile (fig. 1). Although Kant was firmly convinced of the existence and physical diversity of nonhuman rational beings, he assumed that this diversity made no difference to their character as rational beings: whether they were rational Martians or rational angels, reason was reason everywhere in the universe.² I would like to offer an alternative to this brand of Kantian philosophical anthropology: it matters to reason—not just to sensibility and psychology—what kind of species we are. The kind of philosophical anthropology I am proposing is an inquiry into human reason, rather than universal Reason tout court.

      Figure 1

      Anonymous Master, Adam and Eve in Paradise (ca. 1370), Doberan Cathedral, Bad Doberan, Germany.

      This project makes sense only when anchored in a genuine problem, one of sufficient historical and cultural generality to be a plausible candidate for a philosophical anthropology (as opposed to a cultural anthropology or a history of a particular time and place). The question I would like to address can be simply posed: Why do human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, pervasively and persistently, look to nature as a source of norms for human conduct? Why should nature be made to serve as a gigantic echo chamber for the moral orders that humans make? It seems superfluous to duplicate one order with another, and highly dubious to derive the legitimacy of the human order

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