Naturalizing Heidegger

It seems strange, on first thought, that anyone might look to Nietzsche to found an environmental ethic. In GS, he claims that “Whatever has value in the current world, has it not in itself, from nature—nature is always valueless” (GS 301), and he generally lauds the natural strength and nobility manifested in the will to power's domination and exploitation of resources (BGE 259; KSA 12:7[25]; KSA 12:9[139]). Yet in Naturalizing Heidegger, David E. Storey crafts an educative and compelling argument geared toward environmental philosophers who have yet to consider the relevance of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies of life for environmental ethics. In particular, Storey argues that a non-mechanistic and non-anthropocentric naturalism inspired both by Heidegger's early attempts at an ontology of life and by Nietzsche's sense of the world as will to power serves as the best philosophical foundation available for an environmental ethic, since it shows how nature possesses value independent of human valuation and projection.Storey's text can be roughly divided into four sections: an introduction to Heidegger's influence on environmental philosophy; an extended discussion of life and nature in Heidegger's thought; an interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power and its usefulness for supplementing Heidegger's early philosophy; and a section in which Storey (very) briefly outlines Nietzsche's “hierarchical biocentrism” and its promise for environmental ethics.Storey dedicates his first chapter to early criticisms of the potential use of Heidegger's thought for environmental ethics made by Karl Löwith and Hans Jonas and to the appropriation of Heidegger's later thought by deep ecology and eco-phenomenology. According to Storey, Löwith and Jonas rightly criticize the anthropocentrism of Heidegger's late view of nature, an anthropocentrism that prevents it from serving as a resource for deep ecological or eco-phenomenological frameworks.In chapters 2 through 7, Storey provides an extended chronological exegesis of Heidegger's thoughts on nature, life, and nihilism. In the second chapter, he discusses the twin influences of Aristotle and Jakob von Uexküll on Heidegger's early ontology of life. Here Storey draws on Heidegger's lectures and writings on Aristotle from the 1920s to show that he employs various Aristotelian concepts—in particular, anima and dynamis—to construct a philosophy of life that recognizes the continuity of human and nonhuman life. Regarding the immense influence of Uexküll, Storey shows how Heidegger's interpretation of anima as “the power or potential for comportment toward a world [and] a kind of intentionality” (42) draws on Uexküll's understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between an organism and its environment.The third chapter traces the development of Heidegger's thoughts on nature in his 1929 text, Being and Time. Although nature shows up in human engagement primarily as a resource to be studied and drawn upon for human use, it also appears as an “incomprehensible kind of being that can only be described metaphorically, aesthetically, and poetically” (78). According to Storey, these two different ways of understanding nature lead to two diverging paths in Heidegger's thinking: one that sees human beings and the natural world as continuous, and one that leads to a view of nature and nonhuman life as radically other to human life.In the fourth chapter, Storey demonstrates that Heidegger temporarily takes the former path in his 1929–30 lecture course, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where he attempts to conceive of “humans as ontologically continuous with nature and natural processes such as evolution” (79). In the fifth and sixth chapters, Storey then describes how Heidegger later abandons this avenue of thought in favor of a view that sees nature as something fundamentally unknowable, unintelligible, and radically other. Ultimately, Storey claims, Heidegger's mature view unwittingly reinscribes the Kantian divide between objective and sublime nature, divorcing human beings from nature, life, and animality. This ontological separation of human and nonhuman life, coupled with Heidegger's disinclination to derive “any ethical norms from the nature of things” (138), severely limits the usefulness of Heidegger's late work for developing an environmental ethic.Storey thus offers a comprehensive account of life and nature in Heidegger. He employs Heidegger's cryptic terminology as he must, but still offers a remarkably instructive and lucid account of the development of these concepts in Heidegger's work. Heidegger saw his later work as less anthropocentric than his earlier work; while other environmental philosophers seem to take him at his word, Storey delves into Heidegger's late work to demonstrate that he actually retains a “residual anthropocentrism” that undermines much of his attempt to think beyond the Cartesian divide.The sixth chapter ends with Storey's claim that Nietzsche's philosophy of life succeeds precisely where Heidegger's thought failed: Nietzsche's account of the will to power incorporates elements of evolutionary theory, acknowledges a hierarchical continuity between nonhuman life and human life, and returns value to nature. In the seventh chapter, Storey introduces the reader to Nietzsche's non-reductive naturalism, which Storey claims has the potential to found an environmental ethic and overcome nihilism. For Storey, Nietzsche's naturalism is non-reductive insofar as it attempts to free biology from mechanism, and it is non-nihilistic insofar as it naturalizes values in the will to power and drive psychology.Storey offers a biological reading of the will to power heavily influenced by John Richardson's interpretation of Nietzsche's drive psychology, Hans Jonas's assignment of inwardness, value, and purpose to all life, and Evan Thompson's understanding of the organism. According to Storey, Nietzsche's claim that the world is will to power is equivalent to his claim that all organisms are composed of drives. The former claim thus results not in a fundamentally anthropocentric worldview, as Heidegger insists, but instead in a biocentric worldview of the sort hinted at by Heidegger in his early studies of Aristotle. According to this biocentric worldview, the world has value independent of human projection. There is always an evaluative component to the will to power's interpretation, and since all living organisms are composed of drives, this interpretation and evaluation are endeavors that all life participates in. Plants, animals, and human beings alike manifest a kind of intentionality; such intentionality serves as an evaluative component of all organisms. And since all of life is valuing, Storey claims, life for Nietzsche must be valuable in itself. Nietzsche's account of the world as will to power is thus understood as a non-nihilistic account of a value-laden world.Furthermore, Storey insists, Nietzsche offers a comprehensive philosophical biology. Nietzsche incorporates Darwinian principles into his notion of the will to power by offering an evolutionary account of the drives according to principles of selection, and his insistence upon an inward autonomy of the organism itself prefigures the movement of contemporary theoretical biology away from mechanism and neo-Darwinism (200). Insofar as this naturalist account fails to reduce the operations of organisms to mere mechanism, it is non-reductive.Storey's biological interpretation of Nietzsche treats lower and higher forms of life as participating in a symbiotic relationship: lower forms of life play a “supportive function” for higher forms of life, while higher forms of life “open [lower forms of life] up for possibilities [they] could not realize on [their] own” (230). This “hierarchical biocentrism” (228), which Storey describes in his final chapter, establishes a continuity between nonhuman and human life and acknowledges the value of both. It is therefore able to serve as a metaphysical foundation for an environmental ethic in a way that Heidegger's anthropocentric later thought—which divorces human being from all other forms of life—is unable to do.Storey's thought-provoking and frequently convincing interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power is not entirely new or unique—his most obvious influences are Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Graham Parkes's Composing the Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)—but his attempt to read the will to power as a metaphysical foundation for an environmental ethic is, and it offers much food for thought.There are, however, a few interpretive worries. Storey claims that Nietzsche's dominant “value scheme is a hierarchy in which the higher, more developed, more evolved, more powerful viewpoint is less dominating [and] less oppressive” (215) and that such a value scheme makes plain Nietzsche's belief in an obligation of human to nonhuman life plain. While plausible, this claim is by no means obvious, and one might expect more primary textual evidence for it than Storey provides. Moreover, his interpretation of Nietzsche's perspectivism holds that the higher the form of life, the more values that form of life is able incorporate into its value scheme (214). What remains at issue is the nature of this incorporation. Storey claims that higher, human life must incorporate the values of lower, nonhuman life into its own value scheme in order to flourish. Yet Nietzsche does not obviously rule out domination or oppression of the lower by the higher in the process. In GM, for instance, he writes that an individual's affirmation of his own existence may go hand in hand with a complete disregard for the continued existence of the rest of the world (GM III:3), and in an unpublished note, he describes great individuals as those “strong enough” to subjugate and domesticate their animal appetites (KSA 13:[16]7).More textual evidence from Nietzsche's corpus, rather than secondary sources, might also be expected in places. While Storey tempers Richardson's account of Nietzsche's alleged Darwinism by presenting Lamarckian themes from Nietzsche's work, his account of Darwinian strains in Nietzsche's thought rarely utilizes primary texts. Storey also claims that his interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy of life commits Nietzsche to progressivism (215). Given Nietzsche's declaration that progress is an “illusion” (KSA 13: 5[8]), readers ought to be suspicious of this take. Regarding secondary sources, it is also notable that he does not engage with Dirk Johnson's Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).Furthermore, although Storey explicitly acknowledges that “it is one thing to claim that ‘x values’; it is another thing to claim that ‘x is valuable’” (233), he consistently jumps from the first to the second without justification; indeed, this is what enables him to interpret Nietzsche's world of will to power as value-laden. We see an example of this in his account of the amoeba: since an amoeba is a “driven being,” it must value in some minimal sense (229). And that which values, on Storey's account, is valuable; therefore, the amoeba is valuable. Storey nicely argues that the various evaluative perspectives of nonhuman life forms make them valuable for human life, but it is not clear that he may be granted the broader conclusion he intends: nonhuman life is valuable in general. This stands out as the most likely point of contention in the text. Nonetheless, this work introduces a new significance for Nietzsche's thought in environmental ethics, and Storey's fresh interpretation is sure to interest scholars in environmental philosophy, Heidegger studies, and Nietzsche studies alike

Epistemology · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

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