Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, 2000. Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. |
Reviewed by Kenneth Maly
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic asks her questions of “sustainable development” within the context of the Brundtland Report, written by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 and published as Our Common Future. In developing the notion of “sustainable development,” the Brundtland Report defines it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Safeguarding Our Common Future asks of sustainability these crucial questions: Is the distinction between deep ecology and shallow ecology useful? How can we think sustainability that is not anthropocentric? What kind of ethics of sustainability can there be if one calls into question the dominant notions of ethics: objectivist ethical norms rationally conceived and subjectivistic valuing-willing (exemplified in two dominant paradigms of contemporary moral theory: utilitarianism and rights-based individual justice)? And how can phenomenology—specifically, Heideggerian phenomenology—offer a way to think the “ethics of sustainable development” that is more inclusive and “implaced” than the usual ethical theories?
This book is out to find answers, to clarify the philosophical issues, to see how phenomenology can inform an environmental ethic, and to demonstrate how a phenomenology-based ethic can be applied to specific projects for environment and sustainability.
Stefanovic is impatient with any theory that puts humans and the natural world into a hierarchical order—whether it is “earth first, humans second” or the subjectivistic, individualistic rights-obligation paradigm that takes little account of the natural world as such. She wants to explore the question of how to think sustainability in such a way that both our natural and built worlds are sustained.
Stefanovic’s book shows careful work in thinking. It is useful, provocative, and stimulating to any environmental thinking that recognizes the limits of merely quantitative research and analysis and conclusions and takes the qualitative into account. It undoes
and redoes notions of “sustainability” and “sustainable development.” Its major contribution is showing how the undoing and redoing of “originative thinking” informs specific projects in “sustainability.” In this context it is an admirable work, one of a kind.
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Using Heidegger’s way of phenomenological thinking, Stefanovic unravels a way of dealing with the natural world in its relation to human beings that is non-calculative, relational (not mechanistic), even non-subjectivistic. Her thinking moves away from calculative representation of entities as objects, away from the world (including the natural world) as parts of a machine, away from thinking what is in the world as “disposables” and “replaceable components” in a standing reserve, waiting for further disposal.
Her thinking moves toward thinking things in place, toward the context in which things are “gathered” for their full import, toward things’ belonging to earth, “grounded in their “origin,” an origin that does not itself manifest and a ground that includes and shares the space said by the “not."
With all of these thoughts in place, is there a way to rethink sustainability? A sustainability that is not humanistic, not rights-based and individualistic, and not primarily economic? She says: Yes, there is!
Stefanovic calls this possibility originative thinking, a phrase by which she tries to avoid the misconstruals that accompany the translation of Heidegger’s “meditative” thinking, namely, that if thinking is not calculative and scientific, it is passive and merely receptive. Originative thinking, on the other hand—in line, actually, with what Heidegger means by “meditative thinking” and with what Heidegger says about this thinking when he calls it: Besinnung, mindfulness, engaged mind—is active, uncovers the otherwise taken-for-granted origins, and suggests openness and creativity of thought (p. 51).
A useful place to start is in thinking originatively the non-reductionist experience of connectedness of the natural world and humans with it. If we pay attention phenomenologically, we will take in the natural world, not as merely quantifiable empirical data nor as a merely social construction, but rather simply there in the experience of connectedness—what Charlene Spretnak, in her book Resurgence of the Real, calls the “felt experience of the real.”
Stefanovic calls this thinking “holistic,” a thinking that sees the natural world in a way that is not separatist-- with the “things” in nature seen as isolatable and disconnected parts -- but rather organismic, expanding, and connecting. In this originative thinking of the whole, of eco-holism, she recognizes the danger of thinking the whole as a metaphysical unity with universality. Heeding this danger, she offers a useful summary of the arguments against holistic thinking, along with a phenomenologically grounded holism that does not fall prey to the “dangers” of holistic thinking that some see.
The various critiques of holism, or ecoholism, assume that this “whole” of nature in its connectedness (a) is a metaphysical substance, (b) comes from a thinking that is willful, (c) is stable and unchanging, and (d) crushes and undermines any individuality. But these critiques of eco-holism all take place within a thinking that dichotomizes: Holistic thinking or. The skeptics of ecoholism see it as a thinking that is either holistic or no connection whatsoever, holistic or mere parts or different wholes, holistic or ongoing change, holistic or individual. But never both! I find this chapter rich in implications, such that it leads one to think this holism beyond or underneath the usual dichotomizing: Seeing the natural world and the humans within it as holistic without being a universal, objective substance-whole, holistic without static stability, holistic without giving up the individual.
She thinks holism away from these pitfalls by thinking, phenomenologically, “a referential whole within which we are situated” (p. 63). Such a situatedness is a ecoholism away from a totalizing paradigm but within a context, away from an objective, observing standpoint but engaged with attention.
Having set the stage for this holistic, originative thinking within situatedness, Stefanovic turns to environmental thinking, stating that ecoholism and holistic thinking is less about “imposing a static, unified structure upon a diverse and variegated world” than about “illumining an implicit order and integrity of what Heidegger calls the functional contexture” of the world in which we are. (p. 66) This world is complex, contextual, dynamic, given, and one that withdraws --recognizing that “nature unfolds beyond my control” and involves the “mystery of self-concealment” (p. 76).
In a statement that gathers up these various moments in holism directly applied to the environment (eco-holism) she says:
To deny one’s beholdenness to nature through large-scale environmental destruction threatens to deny a relation between human beings and their world that should include care and respect for the mystery--understood not as something yet to be conquered through knowledge, but as the ever-more of the source of existence itself. To bear witness to the self-emergence of the natural world is to acknowledge that I belong to this world, not as conqueror but as protector and even servant (p. 77).
The respect, reverence, and reticence implied here turn thinking away from the ethics of “how one ought to act” toward an “illumination of the fundamental ontological relation” (ibid.) between humans and the natural world, or humans within the natural world, or the natural world of humans and nonhumans. But can “ethics” make this jump, or must “ethics” itself be left behind with this illumination?
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Having opened up the region for a more holistic, originative way of thinking—beyond reductionist and “objective” paradigms—Stefanovic (in Part III, “Phenomenological Guidelines for Sustainability”) outlines and describes a “place-based environmental ethics.” She does this by workingthrough the several key components of such an ethic.
First, she rethinks “development” unto a sense that is alternative to the dominant meaning of “economic development,” i.e., “understood simply in narrow terms of utility, resource distribution, and traditional paradigms of economic growth” (p. 138). In the alternative sense, “development” involves promotion of growth, actively engaged in “uncovering that which is essential to its unfolding” (p. 140), “authentic self-development” (p. 141). Given that this alternative sense of “development” says more than material growth, it can be heard as a radical re-saying of development in terms of unfolding in possibility.
Second, she rethinks the notion of “needs” unto a sense that is alternative to the usual “economic needs” of an individual, solipsistic human subject. As she rethinks this notion of needs to include environmental needs and constraints, she turns her attention to human finitude (our being limited within any given, human or otherwise), to human immersion-in-the-world (earth or natural world), and to the human being’s “concernful dealing” (her translation of Heidegger’s word Sorge) with things that are not human. With this understanding of how humans are in the world, what we call “need” is enlarged, to encompass the “needs that announce themselves from the context of the situation as a whole” (p. 144)—thus always including and involving needs of the earth community in its holistic inter-being.
Here Stefanovic enlarges and rethinks sustainability by drawing upon Heidegger’s notion of what “saving the earth” means. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger says that “saving/rescuing the earth means: to free something into its own, its ownmost [in sein eigenes Wesen].” And in “The Question concerning Technology” Heidegger writes:
What does “saving/rescuing” mean? Usually we take it to mean merely to grab hold… of something that is threatened, in order to secure it in his present continuance. But “saving/rescuing” means more. “Saving/Rescuing” is: bringing something into what is its ownmost, in order thus to bring what is its ownmost first of all to the shining/appearing that is proper to it.
This remarkable passage by Heidegger opens up a vast possibility for thinking sustainability of the earth community and human beings within it. The needs that announce themselves in the earth community as a whole (including humans as part therein) call for humans to engage with it in such a way that the earth community as a whole is “saved,” i.e., brought into what is its ownmost as earth community. This is a whole new way to think environmental ethics!
Third, she introduces the notion of “place” into environmental ethics. Saying that a place-based ethic “aims to guide us in our actions, not through the imposition of static principles and rules but, instead by teaching the meaning of attunement to a balanced, fitting relation between human beings and their world” (p. 117), she sees place as dwelling, as rootedness, as relatedness, as where we are “implaced.” The ethics of place, then, is about being attuned to being-in-place, about an awareness of prereflective being-in-the-world—or, in this case, being-in-the-earth-community.
A place-based ethic calls for “thoughtful deliberation about converging ethical images, contextual references, and common, human needs” (p. 135). Such a place-based ethic “respects the bonds that tie us to our dwelling places but one that allows for continuing dialogue as we collectively reflect on environmental questions of right and wrong” (pp. 135-136). Hidden in these words are two tensions: one, the issue of “right and wrong” and its relation to a code of ethics; two, the issue of human needs -- the primacy of socio-cultural values regarding these needs within the context of the natural world versus the essential needs of the earth community as such (which always includes humans).
At the end of her book Stefanovic gives examples of how phenomenology informs specific projects relating to sustainability. I call this “applied phenomenological environmental ethics.” She shows how phenomenology can play a role (a) in exposing pre-thematic, implicit judgments that underlie indicators/values of what sustainability is and what specific projects call for in terms of sustainability and (b) in actually generating qualitative indicators/values for specific projects (cf. p. 147). As she writes, “The special task for phenomenology becomes one of promoting awareness of ontological relations and grounds of shared meaning so that sustainable development is not pursued haphazardly, with a focus on arbitrary, ontic realities” (p. 175).
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Having enjoyed a careful reading of the whole text and having learned much, my questions back to Professor Stefanovic include the following.
QUESTION 1. Is Arne Naess—or deep ecology in its impetus—really some form of “Earth first, humankind second” (p. 42)? Whereas much popularizing of the “ecocentric” philosophy implies such a hierarchy, I would question whether this hierarchy is at the core of deep ecology in its essential possibilities.
Is deep ecology not about the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the co-emergent co-equality? Dare one really talk of human settlements as having “priority”? For what is a human settlement if it is not also the natural world? If we do not abstract from human places, do we necessarily give priority to human places? If not, then how not?
QUESTION 2. Can any sustainability be round enough unless it calls for humans to be measured by non-human “earth” or “land” awareness? As humans actively participate according to what is ownmost to them as humans, do they not necessarily take into account how the earth (in ecogenic thinking) manifests what is ownmost to humans?
How do we think “essential human needs” in relation to “essential needs of the earth community,” which include essential human needs? Stefanovic notes that, whereas what the Brundtland Report lists as “essential human needs” for food, employment, energy, housing, water supply, sanitation, and health care are “central,” they must be pursued within the broader context of the earth community and the needs that manifest from the “whole” situation of earth.
Does “central” here mean “having priority”? If so, how can human needs continue to have priority over the needs of other earth-community members? If human needs are “central,” is that not anthropocentric? If thinking attends to the “needs that announce themselves from the context” of the earth community “as a whole,” is it possible that “essential human needs” are no longer central or prior? How does one think the two together: “essential human needs” within “essential needs of the earth community”?
QUESTION 3. How can one avoid the dangers of thinking holism with images like “universal,” “immutable forms,” “universal principles”? (pp. 53-61) If one returns from “situated thinking” to the originative, holistic world, must one perhaps no longer use these words, ensconced as they are within the metaphysical, mechanical paradigm of separate parts belonging to a universal, “objective” unity? So how does one think the “what” of holistic thinking away from the universal, the objective, the immutable—and more as ongoingness, as creative unfolding, as ongoing energeia? If the “parts” of the holistic world are not stable, mechanical parts, then how shall we say this? Is holism perhaps a synergistic works—“parts” in the sense of nodes within a whole that is at-work and not really “there” at all? So that we would no longer talk of the ecosystem as a “substantive whole” (p. 60)?
QUESTION 4. Can Heidegger’s ontology, by which he critiques all “ethics of values” as a “blasphemy against being” ever open out upon any ethics? Are all ethics necessarily anthropocentric and subjectivistic? Rethinking “ethics” in terms of ethos, dwelling, humans in earth as “abode,” is more about comportment and being than it is about rights and obligations. Only in that sense can it be called “original ethics.” But then, if we really rethink ethics, away from objectivistic values or subjectivistic (individualist) valuing/willing, can it still be called “ethics”?
Can the word ethics ever say what ethos means and says? Indeed when we say something, we participate in the coming forth and granting of that “thing.” The same may be true here for the word ethics , so that the naming of the word may require that a different word be brought to bear here. If the issue here is paying attention to what is and responding appropriately -- can the word ethics still say that? If ethos names how humans are in the world, “their way of dwelling” (p. 151), does the English word ethics say that?
Regardless of how this question is resolved, it is clear that such words as “value judgments” (p. 149), “converging moral values” (p. 134); “moral order,” even if it is “implaced” within a society through its culture (p. 129); “articulation of moral guidelines” (p. 165); “code of ethics,” even if it is “evolving” (p. 168)—all of these words become suspect when recognizing that “ethical discernment is less a matter of intellectual construction than it is one of attunement to a particular way of being-in-place” and involves “ethical awareness” of “implacement” (p. 128). This “ethical discernment” and “ethical awareness” does not come from a code of ethics or a moral order or moral values. The “ethical” in these words is about ethos, not ethics as we normally take that word.
QUESTION 5. There is an implicit “given” that runs throughout this book and, as far as I can see, is never itself put into question: that humans will not or cannot surrender the “higher quality of life” through technology and economic development (including consumerism). It seems to me that, in any discussion of sustainability, this question needs at least to be addressed. Simplistically said: Is it possible that the “original ethics” of sustainability call for simplicity—and not economic development at all?
QUESTION 6. In understanding the role of phenomenology—and specifically Heideggerian phenomenology—is there a role for phenomenology that goes beyond awareness of what is, of values/indicators, beyond understanding the “realities”—beyond ... to the ownmost possibilities inherent in a phenomenological thinking of the earth community, thinking the earth community (and humans within that community) unto its ownmost possibilities? What, then, would be the role for phenomenology in “saving the earth”?
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