Fittingness and Environmental Ethics: Philosophical, Theological and Applied Perspectives [1 ed.] 9781003261391, 9781032145839, 9781032218533

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Fittingness and Environmental Ethics

This volume focuses on ‘fittingness’ as an ethical-aesthetical idea, and in particular examines how the concept is beneficial for environmental ethics. It brings together an innovative set of contributions to argue that fittingness is a significant but under-investigated facet of human ethical deliberation with both ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In widely diverse matters – from architecture to table manners – individuals and communities make decisions based on ‘fittingness’, also expressed in related terms, such as appropriateness, prudence, temperance, and mutuality. In the realm of environmental ethics, fittingness denotes a relation between conscious embodied persons and their habitats and is of relevance to judgements about how humans shape, and take up with, the non-human environment, and hence to ethical decisions about the development and use of the environment and non-human creatures. As such, fittingness can be of great benefit in reframing human relationships to the non-human, stimulating a way of living in the world that is fitting to the preservation of its fruitfulness, goodness, beauty, and truth. Michael S. Northcott is Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh and Guest Professor at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies at Universitas Gadjah Mada Graduate School in Yogyakarta (Indonesia). He is also Guest Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium). Steven C. van den Heuvel is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium).

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. The Fathers on the Bible Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu The Theological Imperative to Authenticity Christy M. Capper The Political Theology of Pope Francis Understanding the Latin American Pope Ole Jakob Løland Transhumanism, Ethics and the Therapeutic Revolution Agents of Change Stephen Goundrey-Smith Fittingness and Environmental Ethics Philosophical, Theological and Applied Perspectives Edited by Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel Misusing Scripture What are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible? Mark Elliott, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/religion/series/RCRITREL

Fittingness and Environmental Ethics Philosophical, Theological and Applied Perspectives Edited by Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-14583-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-21853-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-26139-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figure List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix xiii 1

M I C H A E L S . N O RT H C O T T A N D S T E V E N C . VA N D E N H E U V E L

PART I

Metaphysics and Aesthetics

15

1 Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes in Environmental Aesthetics

17

E M I LY B R A DY

2 Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth: John Moriarty and Deep Ecology

33

N O R A WA R D

3 On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness, Affordances and Providence

50

M I C H A Ë L B AU W E N S

4 Fittingness and Environmental Ethics: Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy J U N S O O PA R K

63

vi Contents PART II

Theological Perspectives on Fittingness

77

5 The Ontological Turn, Religious Tradition, and Human Cosmological Fittingness

79

M I C H A E L S . N O RT H C O T T

6 Fittingness and the Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism 100 J O H A N D E TAV E R N I E R

7 Fittingness as Attunement? Being Ecological with Timothy Morton and Hans Urs von Balthasar

116

Y V E S DE M A E SEN EER

8 Anselm on Fittingness: Varying Concepts of Fittingness in the Cur Deus homo

133

RO S T I S L AV T K AC H E N KO

PART III

Practical Applications

151

9 Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction: Implications for Embedding Ecological Concerns in Community Life and Practice

153

J AC K B A R E N T S E N

10 When ‘Fitting in’ means to ‘Care’: Proposing a Form-of-Life for Environmental Care

167

E M I L IO DI SOM M A

11 Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste

183

G R E G O RY J E N S E N

12 The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology for Understanding ‘Fittingness’: A Theological Engagement

199

S T E V E N C . VA N D E N H E U V E L

Index

217

Figure

7.1 The transformative dynamics in von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics

120

Contributors

Jack Barentsen (PhD)  is Professor of Practical Theology and Senior Researcher of the Institute of Leadership and Social Ethics at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium). He researches church leadership, in NT studies (Emerging Leadership in the Pauline Mission, 2011), and in practical theology (Zoektocht naar hoop voor de stad, 2019). In addition, he consults with churches on leadership development. He holds an appointment as Extraordinary Researcher in Practical Theology at the Faculty of Theology of North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Michaël Bauwens (PhD) obtained his PhD from the KU Leuven Institute of Philosophy and is currently Doctoral Assistant at the University of Antwerp, Centre for Ethics, and Affiliated Researcher at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium). His research is on the metaphysics of social and institutional reality, philosophical theology, and the intersection of both. Emily Brady (PhD)  is Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University (USA). Her research interests span aesthetics and environmental ethics. She has authored or co-edited several books, including, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (2003), The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (2013), and Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments (with Isis Brook and Jonathan Prior, 2018). Yves De Maeseneer (PhD/STD) is Associate Professor of Fundamental Theological Ethics and Coordinator of research group Anthropos at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven (Belgium). Among his many publications is also Relation, Vulnerability, Love: Theological Anthropology in the 21st Century, a special issue which he co-edited of Louvain Studies 41 (2018). Johan De Tavernier (PhD) is Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics and former Dean of the Faculty and Religious Studies at KU Leuven (Belgium). He is a member of the Research Unit of Theological and Comparative Ethics and Director of the Ethics@Arenberg. He researches personalist morals, Christian ethics, engineering ethics, and environmental ethics.

x Contributors Emilio Di Somma (PhD) is Affiliated Researcher at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium) and High School Teacher in History and Philosophy in Turin (Italy). Ethics is one of his research foci; he authored the monograph Fides and Secularity; Beyond Charles Taylor’s Open Faith (2018). Steven C. van den Heuvel (PhD) is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit (ETF), Leuven (Belgium). In addition, he is Director of the Institute of Leadership and Social Ethics, a research institute of the ETF. His research interests are continental theology, the study of ‘hope’, environmental ethics, economic ethics, and the ethics of technology. He published inter alia on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and ecological ethics. Specifically noteworthy in this regard is his published dissertation: Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Theology and Fundamental Debates in Environmental Ethics (2017). Gregory Jensen (MA) is Assistant Professor at Cairn University, USA, and a doctoral candidate in Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He teaches courses in biology and ethics. His current research focuses on environmental ethics, with a special emphasis on issues of waste and disposability. Michael S. Northcott (PhD) is Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh. He now teaches and supervises doctoral students at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies in the Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta (Indonesia), and he is Guest Professor of Systematic Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium). His research focuses on religions and the environment. Among his many publications on the topic are the books The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1996), A Political Theology of Climate Change (2014), and Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities (2015). JunSoo Park (PhD) serves as Associate Tutor in Christian Ethics at Westminster College, Cambridge, and Minister of North Herts group churches (Methodist/URC), following a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the Director of the Research Centre of the Presbyterian Church of Korea-UK. He is the author of Confucian Questions to Augustine (2020). Rostislav Tkachenko (PhD-equivalent)  is a doctoral student and Affiliated Researcher in Historical Theology at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven (Belgium). His research area is medieval theology and philosophy with a focus on Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas.

Contributors  xi Nora Ward (PhD)  is Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). She received her BA and MA from NUIG and completed her PhD from the University of North Texas. Her research is in the field of environmental ethics and philosophy, with a particular interest in the themes of attention, belonging, and storytelling.

Acknowledgements

This volume is one of the outcomes of the research project “Towards an Environmental Ethic of Fittingness,” which is carried out by the Institute of Leadership and Social Ethics (ILSE), a research institute of the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit (ETF), Leuven (Belgium). ILSE’s aim is to develop a Christian perspective on aspects of leadership and social ethics, specifically as they contribute to a just and sustainable society.1 This research project is funded by the Issachar Fund, a private operating foundation, which “… partners with scholars, leaders and organizations that seek religious and scientific truth, learning from and contributing to the ideals, values, knowledge and practices of our increasingly multicultural society.”2 The goal of this research project is to contribute to environmental ethics, particularly through a theological appropriation of the notion of ‘fittingness’. In the context of this project, ILSE organised an academic conference (in hybrid format) on October 2–3, 2020, at the ETF. We like to acknowledge the work done by PhD candidate Leslie Herrmann, in helping to organise the conference, as part of her research stay at the ETF, from November 2019-December 2020. During this conference, the concept of ‘fittingness’ was explored from various angles, by three keynote speakers and thirteen paper presenters of various nationalities and disciplines. This volume contains a selection of these contributions, which were subsequently peer-reviewed and revised. We would like to thank the experts who were involved in the review-phase. We also like to thank the staff at Routledge for their work in editing this volume for publication. Special thanks to Kay Caldwell, who provided the language editing for this volume with her usual skill and dedication, as well as to Cees Tulp, for his involvement in the formatting of the manuscript. Finally, we want to thank our sponsor, the Issachar Fund, for investing in the project of which this volume is one of the outcomes. Leuven, November 2022 Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel

xiv Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel

This volume focuses attention on the ancient and recently revived theological and philosophical concept of ‘fittingness’ and its significance for environmental ethics. Fittingness has a long genealogy in the history of religion and philosophy. Indo-European traditions have long shared a metaphysical conception of order – rta in Sanskrit, arta in ancient Persian – which carries with it the belief that humanity’s first and foremost calling – both moral and spiritual – is to fit the self and human society to the divinely given order of things (Chaturvedi 2016). The belief that the cosmos has a given order may be said to find modern form in the idea of evolution. But evolution is most often conceived of as a set of random processes which, although they happened to issue in the arrival of beings – Homos – capable of conscious thought, might have turned out quite differently. Stephen Jay Gould has notably argued that if the ‘tape of life’ were to run again it need not issue in the complex array of species, including homos, that it did before (Gould 1990). On this view, the history of life does not imply that the evolved order is intrinsically good. Those whom Bruno Latour imagines as the novel ‘tribe’ of ‘the moderns’ are trained by modern science and philosophy to view the present order as the outcome of random and chance processes which have no intrinsic logic or purpose and which therefore may be radically disrupted and re-ordered as the moderns so choose (Latour 2013a). The way that the environment, or nature, presents itself to the moderns does not carry with it the lessons on which the ancients used to draw, about how they might best fit themselves, and their life practices, to the natural order. This is not only a philosophical matter, for it means in practice that the way in which moderns organise their use of the nonhuman is no longer governed by the traditional belief that radically disrupting the appearance, and the resilience, of the prior order is not fitting. Modern philosophers promote quite a contrary tendency to fittingness. Reflecting on the discoveries and theories of modern science, Enlightenment philosophers proposed that what humans ought to value is not related to the order of things in which they find themselves but arises instead purely from human intuitions and sentiments. The claim that values are not connected with empirical facts was first articulated by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-1

2  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel is pretty much taken for granted by most subsequent philosophers including Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. Reasons, or values, are the ways in which modern philosophers describe how moderns justify and promote the kinds of behaviours that they believe are appropriate for moderns to engage in. But that such reasons or values are related to a prior order is generally dismissed as ‘metaphysics’ by modern philosophers, although something analogous to traditional metaphysics does make a comeback in the form of moral realism among philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre (1999) and Hilary Putnam (1999), and theologians such as Oliver O’Donovan (1986) and Michael Northcott (2003). As Latour argues, the tribe of the moderns is set apart from previous tribes and cultures in the extent to which they no longer believe that they are ‘earthbound’ and so do not need to fit their lives to honour and sustain a prior given, and providentially constructed, order (Latour 2013b). Hence moderns, in the form of industrial chemists, engineers, farmers, fishermen, miners, and urban designers do not find occasion in the order they find in nature to guide or limit the extent of their interventions in, and reshaping of, the ecosystems they instrumentalise for purposes of resource harvesting. In the last fifty years, industrial fishing has removed approximately 90 per cent in number of all the creatures that once lived in the oceans (Jackson et al., 2001; McClenachan, Ferretti, and Baum 2012). Industrial chemists and farmers have utilised full spectrum pesticides and herbicides so extensively that they have reduced insect numbers by up to 75%, not just on farmland, but in nature reserves as well (Hallmann et al. 2017). Since the industrial revolution, miners and drillers and burners of oil, coal and gas have extracted, marketed and burned so much buried carbon from underground that they have significantly raised the proportion of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere – one of the greenhouse gases which influence the temperature of the Earth (O’Connor 2020). Industrial farmers and foresters have adopted monocultural methods of food and timber growing that have significantly reduced the habitats of non-domesticated species, and, through excessive tilling and the use of artificial nitrogen, they have reduced the microbiota and nutrients in soils to the extent that soils in many agricultural areas are lifeless and merely used to hold up plants while no longer able to provide them with nutrients or to sustain the rich microbiota, worms, and other insects of preindustrial soils (Wang, Liu, and Bai 2018). Architects and urban planners have commissioned the pouring of so much concrete and black tarmacadam that they have created urban landscapes which are heat islands, requiring extensive artificial cooling in many regions. At the same time, these cities are prone to flooding as there are insufficient trees and tree roots in the ground to moderate the fall of rain, and the speed of rain runoff from roofs and pavements. Urban rivers have often been boxed in, thereby exacerbating the problem (Mohajerani, Bakaric, and Jeffrey-Bailey 2017).

Introduction  3 It is commonplace to blame the numbers of people on earth, or ‘consumers’, for the environmental crisis. But the real origins of the crisis are in the development of industrial forms of agriculture, building, energy and resource harvesting by large corporations and governments deploying technologies that emerged from the European scientific and industrial revolutions. Subsistence farmers were removed from the land under the scientific legitimation of ‘agricultural improvement’ and so prevented from pursuing traditional modes of life which conserved biodiversity. They were instead forced into industrial wage work, and modes of consumption became reliant upon industrial processes. Companies such as the East India Company spread this pattern across the Dutch, British, Spanish, and Portuguese Empires and, in the process, they destroyed forms of life and practices across much of the planet which were more fitted to maintaining biodiversity and resilient ecosystems than modern industrial practices. Despite the central role of corporate industrialism in displacing forms of life which were more fitting to conserving the natural environment, modern environmental thought has tended to focus on approaches to environmental repair that are concerned not so much with practices as with how humans think about, or value, the nonhuman. This reflects the mentality just discussed that emanates from the European Enlightenment and distinguishes, as first did David Hume, between natural ‘facts’ and human ‘values’. This has developed in the last two centuries into a schism between the sciences and the liberal arts, and between scientific knowledge and the knowledge of God, self, ethics and ‘values’. Building on and extending Hume’s fact-value distinction, Kant called the former ‘theoretical’ knowledge and the latter ‘practical’ knowledge; but the terminology is unhelpful as technology and industrialism are the means by which theoretical knowledge is turned into practices. When pursued independently of these practices, knowledge of God, the self, ethics, and values result in forms of philosophy which do not critique or resist industrial practices, except where these are said to impinge on a perceived transcendent value, such as, for example, the moral status of the human embryo. This problem of the gap between thought and practice in modern European philosophy reached a tragic zenith in the technological destruction at scale of both humans and nature in the two World Wars. During the second of these, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote a critique of the Enlightenment in which they observe: Thinking objectifies itself to become an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it. Enlightenment has put aside the classic requirement of thinking about thought—Fichte is its extreme manifestation—because it wants to avoid the precept of dictating practice that Fichte himself wished to obey. (Adorno and Horkheimer 2016, 147)

4  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel The split between scientific and philosophical knowledge which Enlightenment philosophers adopted resulted in a dialectic in which ultimately scientific knowledge colonises philosophy and thought itself. The root of this tendency is ‘experimental philosophy’ and modern science of which the father is Francis Bacon. Baconian nominalism decrees that nature is a realm of accidents and substances and that there are no hidden or transcendent animating powers. Mystery and metaphysics are disposed of, and modern human sovereignty is expressed in the domination of nature and its re-ordering by human intent and through new technologies. The result is alienation, not only from tradition, myth and mystery but from nature herself: Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned to his own ends. (Adorno and Horkheimer 2016, 82–3) Despite the implication of the Enlightenment divorce between facts and values, science and philosophy, nature and culture, in the contemporary alienation between humans and the environment, and the related lack of fit between modern practical ways of life and the maintenance of the beauty, biodiversity, and resilience of the natural environment, most proponents of ‘environmental ethics’ adopt forms of philosophy which originate in the Enlightenment. The two dominant approaches to environmental ethics both manifest this tendency. One approach ascribes ‘deontic’ value – most often via aesthetics – to landscapes and/or species in need of conservation. The other ascribes the consequentialist measure of utility to the nonhuman in such a way as to set it in a utility calculus which raises the ‘value’ of nonhuman lives, or ecosystem services, relative to the benefits humans derive from them. Both approaches are associated with important advances in environmental law and regulation. In the case of the deontic approach, its influence can be seen in the turning of particularly biodiverse ecosystems, and perceptibly ‘beautiful’ landscapes, into protected areas, a practice which originated in romantic protests at industrial encroachments on mountainous regions in England, the American West and parts of mainland Europe. A second instance of deontic approaches is the claim that species have intrinsic value, that this value arises from their evolved uniqueness, and that this value generates a human duty to conserve them. The influence of this idea can be seen in the United States’ Endangered Species Act and in analogous legislative and regulatory efforts to conserve species in other domains (Callicott 2015). While these approaches have had some success in reducing anthropogenic species extinction, and conserving protected areas such as National

Introduction  5 Parks, they have not prevented the larger threats to species and habitats represented by the scientific and industrial reshaping of all life through organic chemistry and the degrading of marine and forest habitats, soil chemistry, and the atmosphere. The discovery of a 75% decline in insect numbers in German National Parks in 2017 was a key moment in bringing this home (Hallmann et al. 2017). But the point was also made by Wendell Berry in the 1970s when he observed that the Sierra Club – begun by John Muir who is celebrated as the founding father of the US National Parks System – was investing its membership funds in industrial companies which were degrading the very environment the Sierra Club is supposed to be committed to conserving (Berry 1977, 26). Given the failures of environmental gradualism to halt the decline in species and intact ecosystems, scientists, conservation agencies, and international governmental agencies, through the global agency of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, propose setting aside and protecting one third of the land area of the earth from all human activities (Convention on Biodiversity 2020). NGO partners in this project include the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund. But the project, and these organisations, are sponsoring forcible evictions of indigenous peoples from ancestral forests, including large areas of the Congo in which indigenous peoples have dwelled fittingly for thousands of years while guarding the forests from degradation (Schmitt-Soltau n.d.). The modern history of such evictions amounts to genocide, and far from conserving the resident species of the forests, mountains, rivers, and ‘wilderness’ from which indigenous people are excluded, such exclusions often lead to declines in the species diversity and quality of the landscapes allegedly being ‘protected’, as, for example, in Borneo (Northcott 2019). In concert with the 30% project, US and European investors are utilising the idea of ‘natural capital’ to create a new asset class for banks and investors, and new forms of bio-mapping and surveillance (Webb 2021). This approach is also backed by the huge wealth of private ‘philanthropists’ and it utilises the ecological crisis to further advance contemporary human alienation from the Earth via the further spread of corporate ownership, monetisation, and control. Against this background, we propose an alternative approach to environmental ethics which draws on the ancient idea of ‘fittingness’, and its modern philosophical retrieval. The ancient view of fittingness, as already indicated, can be traced at least as far back as the Hindu Vedas and classical Greek philosophy. It is encapsulated in the Indo-European metaphysical view that behind the physical order of the cosmos as it is encountered and perceived by humans is a meta-verse of divine Being. The emanation of the divine in the cosmos, and to the inhabitants of the cosmos, is described as the life force or prana in the Hindu Vedas; as Spirit in the Hebrew Tanakh, the Gospels and the letters of Saint Paul; as logos in Heraclitus, the Gospel of John and most of the Christian fathers; as Sophia, or wisdom, in the

6  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel wisdom literature of the Old Testament and among modern Russian sophiologists; as energy or energeia in Eastern Orthodox Christian thought; and as light in the Gospel of John and in the Qur’an. This traditional metaphysics is found in Hinduism, in the Hebrew Tanakh, in classical Greek literature, in the Christian New Testament, and in Islam. We will primarily focus on Christianity, since that is the tradition we know best, but we agree with the perrenialists, including Mercea Eliade and Syyed Hossein Nasr, that what most modern Western philosophers dismiss as pre-scientific metaphysics represents an underlying and unitive truth in most ancient religious traditions in East and West. And we concur with Nasr that the loss of this metaphysical way of thinking is the philosophical origin of the modern ecological crisis (Nasr 1996). The belief that human desires and practices are good and right when they are directed towards preserving, or are fitted to, the given divine order of all things visible and invisible is a belief found in most pre-modern religious traditions and indigenous traditions. The loss of this belief is the consequence of the near universal influence in the modern world of Baconian scientific nominalism according to which humans encounter a world of appearances through the senses and these appearances are all univocal, and they do not mediate, are not underwritten by, an underlying or transcendental teleology, order, or metaverse. In Christianity the most authoritative text which expresses this transcendent metaphysics is the Gospel of John. The Gospel uses the metaphors of light, Logos and Spirit to describe the person of Jesus Christ as the fullest – and unique – realisation of the divine in human flesh. In the Gospel, Jesus as the human Incarnation of the divine Logos is said to combine the order of Being which links the metaverse, or Ouranos, with the Earthly order of being of flesh and blood, fire, rock, and water which is the Cosmos. This cosmology appears throughout the Gospel of John and it issues in the distinctive teaching of the Gospel according to which those who follow Christ, by shaping or fitting their thoughts and actions to his teaching, will know God: ‘I am the light of the cosmos; whoever follows me most surely will not walk in darkness, but rather will possess the light of life’ (John 8:12 in Hart 2017, 170). The Greek words for fit and fittingness do not occur in the Gospel of John, but the clear implication of this and other texts is that those who fit their lives to follow the life of Christ will know God, and they will be fitted to live in the world so as to express the divine intentions of the creator, and honour the divine order situated in the creation. The dialogue of Jesus on the metaphor of the Vine in chapter 15 comes closest to presenting a metaphorical connection with the idea of fittingness: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches; the one remaining in me and I in him, this one bears plentiful fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5 in Hart 2017, 182). And later in the same dialogue, ‘If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love….This is my commandment: that you love one another’ (John 15:10 and 12 in Hart 2017, 182). In essence

Introduction  7 according to this Johannine dialogue, the fruitful life, the life that bears good fruits, and above all the virtue of love, is a life which is fitted to receive and know divine Truth by following the example, and the commands, of the fullest revelation of divine Truth in history who is Jesus Christ. To describe the concept of fittingness in relation to a belief in a transcendental metaverse of divine Being which transcends or underlies the order of beings as humans encounter them physically in the cosmos, or in the ‘environment’, is to adopt a way of thinking which is rejected by modern philosophers, although this approach is taken up by a number of the authors in this volume. This approach is refused by mainstream philosophers because it is said to represent an appeal to divine revelation which, from Immanuel Kant on, is held to be an unnecessary and superstitious supplement to the human faculty of reason which is sufficient to know how to live. The approach is also said to be inconsistent with the findings of modern science that the cosmos, and beings, evolved randomly and not according to a natural teleology, whether this teleology is understood as divinely imbued, or mysteriously implicate in the nature of reality. Instead of reviving the metaphysical perspective in which the idea of fittingness originates in Indo-European thought, the modern retrieval of fittingness has principally focused the idea on the largely shared convention of Anglo-Saxon linguistic and German idealist philosophy. In this tradition, philosophy is primarily about the meanings of human words, and their correlation to human desires, reasons, thoughts and values, rather than a way of speaking about ultimate meaning or Being itself. For us, the appeal of the idea of fittingness is that it overcomes the fact-value, nature-culture, theoretical-practical knowledge dualisms of both Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophy and German idealism. But most modern philosophers read the idea of fittingness as a way of speaking about the appropriateness or fit of attitudes or emotions to reasons or values. A representative example of this approach is the essay ‘Fittingness First’ by Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way in which fittingness is said to be a ‘normative primitive’ not in itself, but as ‘fitting to the value of the object’ (McHugh and Way 2016, 596). However, the article is marred by the constant reference to the example of a demon who threatens to destroy the world unless everyone admires it. This hypothetical example is, to say the least, unhelpful, and it offers no purchase on thinking about fittingness in relation to environmental philosophy since to these philosophers their words and meanings must have the potential to be sensible in any imagined world and not only the real world. Against this philosophico-linguistic approach to fittingness, some contemporary philosophers have revived the idea of fittingness, and its root meaning fit, with Aristotelian virtue ethics. A fine example of this approach is Nancy Sherman’s The Fabric of Character in which she argues that, for Aristotle, choices concerning paths of action are determined by the fit of particular actions to how actors ‘compose the scene’, in which the scene is other people, and the nonhuman environment. From multiple

8  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel acts of ‘composing the scene’ and of reflection on such composition, Sherman argues that individuals develop an idea of the good life, and of how to fit their choices and their desires to what is truly good and hence truly desirable (Sherman 1989). This approach differs from standard Enlightenment accounts of ethics because it situates moral agency in a field of other actors, human and nonhuman, and allows that being in the field over time contributes to the development of the kind of moral character in persons which enables them to make choices which fit to the field, and which do not overly disrupt it. This approach includes, therefore, the possibility of self-limitation and community limitation, in relation to a given prior order which humans encounter collectively. This is a prior order which presents them with sets of things and beings having enduring substance independently of human perceptions, and which are therefore capable of shaping, or at least co-composing, the range of choices humans make, and the kinds of character humans develop if they are sufficiently sensitive, as well as sensible, to the things and beings among which they find themselves. This approach is a valuable corrective to linguistic analytic approaches to fittingness. But like them, it is an approach which does not require a metaphysical view that the order and arrangement of things and beings in relation to which humans compose their thoughts and shape their desires and ends is underwritten by a transcendent order that emanates as divine Ideas from a divine Creator. An ecological scientist who adopts a view analogous to Sherman is James Lovelock who argues that over time humans have become fitted to the conservation of ecosystems composed of varieties of beings because human beings are themselves composed of a range of organs and limbs and humans have evolved to recognise a well-proportioned body as beautiful. Bodies are also formed of cell co-operatives. Each nucleus-containing body cell is an association of lesser entities in symbiosis. If the product of all this co-operative effort, a human being, seems beautiful when correctly and expertly assembled, is it too much to suggest that we may recognize by the same instinct the beauty and fittingness of an environment created by an assembly of creatures, including man, and by other forms of life? Where every prospect pleases, and man, accepting his role as a partner in Gaia, need not be vile. (Lovelock 2000, 135) Having evolved to live among beautiful and complexly diverse compositions of species over millennia, humans, Lovelock suggests, have evolved a sensibility for beauty and for assemblies of creatures which fits them to conserve species when they find ways to honour beauty and other creatures in the choices they make about how to live in, and treat, the environment.

Introduction  9

Outline of the Volume In this volume, we set out to strengthen the focus on ‘fittingness’ in environmental ethics from the revival of metaphysics to engaging fittingness theory with practices. The volume is in three parts. In the first part, ‘Metaphysics and Aesthetics’, the focus is on reviving the concept of fittingness by engaging aesthetics and metaphysics. The second part of the volume is theological: from the perspective of the Christian faith, a number of perspectives on fittingness are developed. In the third part of the book, we turn to practical applications of the notion of fittingness. In Chapter 1, Emily Brady – who is well-known for her many contributions to ecological aesthetics – explores three kinds of experiences which de-centre the human subject and constitute other-regarding attitudes towards the environment: the sympathetic attention of aesthetic experience, the receptivity and curiosity of wonder, and the humbling effect of the sublime. She argues that, taken together, these experiences, as well as the values and meanings they generate, assist in grasping and giving content to the concept of ‘fittingness’ as it relates to environmental thinking and practice. Valuing these experiences helps us to foster meaningful, fitting relationships, both between humans and between humans and nature, to the benefit of mutual flourishing. In Chapter 2, Nora Ward analyses the work of Irish poet-philosopher John Moriarty in the context of environmental ethics. In particular, she draws parallels between Moriarty’s concept of commonage consciousness and deep ecologist Arne Naess’ understanding of self-realisation. Both Naess and Moriarty are invested in finding better modes of ‘fitting in’ with the earth, critiquing atomistic, anthropocentric relations to the nonhuman word. In comparing their perspectives, Ward argues that Moriarty’s use of story and myth provides a compelling addition to the ontological focus of deep ecology, as developed by Naess. She argues that Moriarty’s use of story provides an important tool in which to further ground normative frameworks in environmental praxis and to actualise new, more fitting ways of living in, and with, the more-than-human world. In Chapter 3, Michael Bauwens develops a metaphysical approach to the ethics of fittingness. In particular, he takes as his starting point the concept of ‘affordances’, as developed by Gibson in his well-known primer on ecological psychology. Bauwens expands on this concept, interpreting it in light of a Christian metaphysics. He argues that the concept of affordances has the advantage of overcoming the subject–object dichotomy. It emphasises ‘goodness’, not as something to be ‘brought to’ the natural world, but something that is already there; the task, then, is simply to discover and to attune ourselves to this goodness. In this way, Bauwens argues, we can learn to see and respect our environment as something with which we share goodness – then we behave fittingly.

10  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel Chapter 4 approaches the concept of ecological fittingness from the perspective of Chinese religion and philosophy; JunSoo Park investigates how in Daoism and Confucianism, ideas of fittingness are represented, such as in water, filial piety, and music; he also shows how these concepts have been translated in traditional Chinese architecture. This chapter shows that fittingness is not just a Western philosophical and religious concept, but rather describes a universal concept, that finds expression in non-Western cultures as well. In Chapter 5, Michael Northcott begins by observing that pre-modern society presupposed co-agency and mutual co-constitution between human and nonhuman beings. He notes, however, that the rise of a mechanistic cosmology, combined with Enlightenment rationalism, conferred on modern humans a sense of control and dominion over Earth in which moderns have progressively eradicated the agency, and diversity, of other Beings. He argues that the agency of humans and nonhumans may be rebalanced again through the recovery of the cultural influence of the original ontology and related practices of human ancestors – in particular, he points to music, in this regard. As Northcott points out, music was a key means for achieving fittingness between human life and cosmic and creaturely order in Chinese and classical Greek religion. Music also plays a central role in Christian worship. Northcott argues that it is the most theurgic of Christian practices in that in its regular performance, the musical frequencies and harmonies of hymn singing and chanting engage the harmonic frequencies with which the Earth and other creatures vibrate in. In this light, he argues that music is an important resource, providing a way for modern humans to reconnect, and better fit their lives to the ‘music of the spheres’ which is the original transcendent order of all things. In Chapter 6, Johan de Tavernier focuses on the value–action gap, in environmental ethics: while most people are aware of the crisis represented by anthropogenic global warming, this inspires comparatively little action. De Tavernier wants to help overcome this value-action gap. He draws attention to the importance of nature experiences, which often have a formative impact on environmental attitudes. He argues that also spiritual experiences of nature can have such an impact. He further observes that modern environmentalism harbours certain elements of religiosity. De Tavernier asserts that this by no means warrants labelling the environmentalist movement as a ‘religion’. But it does mean, according to him, that a conscious articulation and structuring of the religious-like aspects within environmentalist thoughts can contribute to a better understanding of its core motivating beliefs and attitudes, benefitting the coherence and consistency of its message. In Chapter 7, Yves de Maeseneer proposes the notion of ‘attunement’ for understanding fittingness in an ecological context. He starts by exploring how the contemporary ecological thinker Timothy Morton develops this notion, drawing upon Kant and the Romantic movement – the German term for attunement (‘Stimmung’) is related to ‘(Über)einstimmung’ (‘consensus/consent’) and the expression ‘es stimmt’ (‘that’s right’). Morton uses

Introduction  11 the aesthetic term ‘attunement’ to evoke an alternative relational ontology and critical epistemology, with fundamental eco-ethical implications. In a second step, De Maeseneer brings Morton’s approach in dialogue with the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), who recapitulated his ground-breaking theological aesthetics under the heading ‘attunement’. He notes a surprising parallel between these two very different thinkers; on this basis, he elaborates a theological-ecological approach, combining Morton’s ecological focus with the theological depth of Von Balthasar. Finally, he critically evaluates the potential of the notion ‘attunement’, pointing out its promises and its limits (in particular, concerning agency). In Chapter 8, Rostislav Tkachenko explores the theological reflection on fittingness developed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), who ascribed importance to such notions as ‘fittingness’ (convenientia) and ‘propriety’ (decentia). In his famous Cur Deus homo, he appeals to what is fitting or unfitting in a double sense: theological and methodological. Tkachenko describes how, for Anselm, there is a correspondence between God’s nature, the world-order, and human thinking – he suggests that this idea can benefit a contemporary environmental ethics of fittingness. At the end of his chapter, he offers a list of concrete recommendations for ecological ethics, based on Anselms’ thoughts on fittingness. In Chapter 9, Jack Barentsen examines social identity theory, as a major research paradigm in social psychology, which contains a complex notion of fit. Barentsen argues that the process which determines ‘fit’ in this context is largely intuitive and implicit; however, a number of observations can nevertheless be made. Outlining several of these, he argues that – on the basis of the social identity notion of fit – environmental values need to be embedded in particular social identities that encompass both religious/ industrial values and social belonging and behaviour. Barentsen argues that it is necessary for values and norms to have a place to ‘land’, and become embedded in salient social identities; otherwise, they will have little effect on human behaviour. In Chapter 10, Emilio di Somma starts out by analysing what he sees as the failure of our attempts to develop sustainable and functional environmental policies. He analyses two major proposed solutions to the ecological crisis, namely the ‘technological-progressivist’ narrative on the one hand – which argues that the crisis can be resolved via the development of more technology – and the narrative of ‘consume less’ on the other hand – which state that we simply must reduce our consumption. Di Somma argues that neither narrative is able to overcome the evils of consumerism; even the ‘consume less’ narrative is located within what he calls a ‘destruction’ paradigm. In order to find a new and better way for human beings to relate to the earth, without ‘consuming’ it, Di Somma proposes another paradigm, namely one that is based on the concept of ‘care’ – this, in turn, requires a deep-seated interest in both nature and human society; it also requires a ‘strong metaphysics’, he argues.

12  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel In Chapter 11, ‘The Unfittingness of Waste’, Gregory Jensen takes the increasing volume of waste as indicator of the commodification of nature. Building on the work of Guy Debord, he argues that the idea of ‘waste’ itself fuels a false understanding of modern modes of production and consumption based on the assumption that all persons, things, and places should be understood, first, as commodities. Jensen then draws on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric anthropology, making the point that any fitting response to waste necessarily involves attentiveness to the limits of creaturely life. According to Bonhoeffer, it is through obedience to Christ that humanity can reclaim the boundaries of its existence and its true creaturely status as imago Dei. Jensen argues that such a reclamation of creaturely limitedness can help strengthen an account of environmental fittingness. In the concluding Chapter 12, Steven C. van den Heuvel examines the role of fittingness in relation to queer ecology. This new school of ecological thinking argues that the queer experience is meaningful in the context of ecological ethics, as it affirms the fundamental interconnectedness of all living beings, celebrating its rich diversity. Van den Heuvel argues that queer ecology can contribute to the notion of environmental ‘fittingness’, as it helps to give voice and space to the justified desires and interests of all the stakeholders in a specific locale. In his chapter, Van den Heuvel engages queer ecology from a Christian theological perspective; specifically, he chooses Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a conversation partner. He identifies a number of ways in which queer ecology resonates with Bonhoeffer’s theology, while also highlighting points of contention. His aim in doing so is to broaden the theological notion of ‘fittingness’, making room for a recognition of the justified interests and added value of queer ecology which can dynamise the notion of ‘fittingness’ to include a more complex order. Together, the contributions in this volume develop the concept of ‘fittingness’ for environmental ethics in new ways. We believe that in doing so, we provide an important resource for living in the world in such ways as are fitting to the preservation of its fruitfulness, goodness, beauty, and truth.

References Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2016. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder. Berry, Wendell. 1977. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Callicott, John B. 2015. “The Intrinsic Value of Nature in Public Policy: The Case of the Endangered Species Act.” In Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman, 279–97. Oxford: Blackwell. Chaturvedi, Aditi. 2016. Harmonia and rta. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Convention on Biodiversity. 2020. “Recommendation Adopted by the Working Group on the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework.” Rome, February 2020 at

Introduction  13 https://www.cbd.int/conferences/post2020/wg2020-02/documents. Accessed November 21, 2021. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1990. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton. Hallmann, Caspar A., Martin Sorg, Eelke Jongejans, Henk Siepel, Nick Hofland, Heinz Schwan, Werner Stenmans et al. 2017. “More Than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas.” PLoS One 12: 1–12. Hart, David Bentley. 2017. The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jackson, Jeremy B. C., Michael X. Kirby, Wolfgang H. Berger, et al. 2001. “Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems.” Science 293: 629–38. Latour, Bruno. 2013a. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013b. “War of the Worlds: Humans against the Earthbound.” Fifth Gifford Lecture, University of Edinburgh, February 26, recording at https://www. ed.ac.uk/arts-humanities-soc-sci/news-events/lectures/gifford-lectures/archive/ series-2012-2013/bruno-latour/lecture-five. Accessed November 11, 2021. Lovelock, James. 2000. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1999) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth. McClenachan, Loren, Francesco Ferretti, and Julia K. Baum. 2012. “From Archives to Conservation: Why Historical Data are Needed to Set Baselines for Marine Animals and Ecosystems.” Conservation Letters 5: 349–59. McHugh, Conor, and Jonathan Way. 2016. “Fittingness First.” Ethics 126: 575–606. Mohajerani, Abbas, Jason Bakaric, and Tristan Jeffrey-Bailey. 2017. “The Urban Heat Island Effect, Its Causes, and Mitigation, with Reference to the Thermal Properties of Asphalt Concrete.” Journal of Environmental Management 197: 522–38. Nasr, Syyed Hossein. 1996. Religion and the Order of Nature: The 1994 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Northcott, Michael S. 2003. “Do Dolphins Carry the Cross? Biological Moral Realism and Theological Ethics.” New Blackfriars 84: 540–53. ———. 2019. “Biofuel Energy, Ancestral Time and the Destruction of Borneo: An Ethical Perspective.” In In Search of Good Energy Policy, edited by Marc Ozawa, Jonathan Chaplin, Michael Pollitt, David Reiner and Paul Warde, 237– 56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1999. The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press. O’Connor, John P. 2020. “Modelling of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Concentrations as a Function of Fossil-Fuel and Land-Use Change CO2 Emissions Coupled with Oceanic and Terrestrial Sequestration.” Climate 8: 1–13. O’Donovan, Oliver 1986. Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline of Evangelical Ethics. Leicester: IVP. Schmitt-Soltau, Karl. n.d. “Evictions from DRC’s Protected Areas.” https://www. fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/DRCongo/23.pdf. Accessed November 13, 2021.

14  Michael S. Northcott and Steven C. van den Heuvel Sherman, Nancy. 1989. The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wang, Chao, Dongwei Liu, and Edith Bai. 2018. “Decreasing Soil Microbial Diversity Is Associated with Decreasing Microbial Biomass under Nitrogen Addition.” Soil Biology and Biochemistry 120: 126–33. Webb, Whitney. 2021. “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class.” Wrong Kind of Green Blog, October 13. https://www. wrongkindofgreen.org/2021/10/13/wall-streets-takeover-of-nature-advanceswith-launch-of-new-asset-class/. Accessed November 28, 2021.

Part I

Metaphysics and Aesthetics

1

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes in Environmental Aesthetics Emily Brady

Introduction What does fittingness have to do with our aesthetic experiences of environment, and how does it relate to the discovery of aesthetic meaning and value in nature? Here, I explore three kinds of experiences which, I believe, decentre the human subject and constitute ‘other-regarding attitudes’ towards the environment: the sympathetic attention characteristic of aesthetic experience, the receptivity and curiosity of wonder and the humbling effect of the natural sublime. I shall argue that these experiences, and the values and meanings that they generate, help to give content to the concept of ‘fittingness’ as it relates to environmental thought and practice. To shape my thinking in this chapter, I draw mainly from environmental philosophy and aesthetics. Sympathetic attention is often theorised as central to aesthetic experience, and it involves directing attention to the particular qualities and meaningful features of things other than oneself. Such attention harmonises with the openness of wonder, a quasi-aesthetic experience marked by curious, receptive perception which is directed outwards at the extraordinary qualities of natural phenomena. By contrast, in the natural sublime, the aesthetic subject is not so much drawn into contemplative appreciation but rather shocked, overwhelmed, and in awe of powerful forces and processes. Through surprise, wonder brings with it a sense of the unknown, while the humbling impact of the sublime forces a reassessment of hubris and one’s place in relation to the more-than-human world.1

Fittingness and Human–Nature Relationships Before exploring these ideas, let me first provide an explanation of the concepts and framework that I adopt in this chapter. I take the concept of ‘fittingness’ to align with human–nature or society–nature interactions which are characterised by ‘meaningful relations’ (Holland 2012). 2 This value-space unites evolutionary, ecological, and cultural forms of life: ‘life cannot be sustained in isolation … meaningful relations are those that enable

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-3

18  Emily Brady life-forms to cluster in a way that is productive of further life’ (see also Firth 2008; Holland 2012, 11). Cultural or human relations will involve the aim of co-flourishing (an aim which, clearly, is not always achieved given the many ways that humans have harmed the environment). Fittingness, thus, has both a relational and ethical meaning in the environmental context. The fittingness aligned with meaningful relations is, on my approach, set within an ontological framework where humans are part of nature and belong to a web of relationships populated by ecological, earth, marine, and atmospheric systems, and all kinds of living and non-living things. Human and more-than-human worlds are interconnected, too. I favour this ontology of relationships over, say, deep ecology or other deep green holistic approaches because such accounts run the risk of erasing difference, particularity and individuality through assimilation or appropriation. Although I do not take the view that humans and nature belong to one unified whole, I do place emphasis on the holism inherent to ecological thinking and science. I share Val Plumwood’s views on this when she writes that: ‘Overcoming the dualistic dynamic requires recognition of both continuity and difference; this means acknowledging the other as neither alien to and discontinuous from self nor assimilated to or an extension of self’ (1993, 17). I also want to affirm the agency of organisms and recognise the mutual interdependence of humans and nonhumans. There are many different ontologies and cosmologies that will be relevant for conceptualising, describing, or prescribing relationships between humans and the more-than-human world (Kelbessa 2011). For example, there are indigenous and pantheistic cosmologies which inform and structure particular communities and their situations. Also, learning from worldviews grounded in the interconnectedness of beings, community, kinship, and living in harmony with the natural world can help to counter the dominance of western European and Anglo-American perspectives which continue to be framed by the pernicious belief that humans have and should have dominion on earth. One advantage of the meaningful relational approach is that it does not require a radical ontological shift and can develop from those relationships which already support flourishing relationships between humans and nonhumans. Another advantage is that it is more open and pluralistic with respect to how environmental responsibility is envisaged. In the field of environmental ethics, there has been a shift towards pluralistic and practice-based thinking, with more attention to everyday and sustained nature–society interactions (Light and Katz 1996; Marris 2013). ‘Environmental pragmatism,’ in particular, responds to the concern that environmental ethics, while making philosophical progress, seems to have made little impact on policy and creating positive environmental change. John O’Neill, Andrew Light, and Alan Holland (2007) provide a rich alternative to theories focused on intrinsic values by emphasising narrative, history, place, and identity as relevant for shaping ethical attitudes.

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes  19 Motivating ideas for this approach are drawn from American pragmatism, Aldo Leopold’s notion of ‘land as a community’ (1989), as well as ideas of flourishing from virtue ethics. Within meaningful and fitting relationships, ‘other-regarding attitudes’ will play an important role. Within the narrower domain of understanding human–nature relationships, other-regarding attitudes refer to interest directed outwards, and ways in which the human is decentred consistently through forms of non-anthropocentrism. Such attitudes may be captured by emotions, virtues, actions, and principles of love, humility, care, respect, duty, and justice and how they feature in relations with humans, nonhumans, place, and environment. Cultivating these attitudes can foster meaningful relationships which support the inherent worth of all living things and also help to lessen tendencies to humanise, sentimentalise, trivialise, uncritically anthropomorphise, and appropriate or manipulate others, all of which prevent flourishing. To summarise, on my account, fittingness refers to meaningful relationships which support flourishing and are part of a web of interconnected relationships which may involve other-regarding attitudes. The field of aesthetics provides rich territory for articulating some types of other-regarding attitudes and, in the rest of the chapter, I discuss three of these.

Sympathetic Attention and Environmental Aesthetics Environmental aesthetics is largely concerned with the environmental character of natural things as opposed to the object-centred approach typical of art, where artworks are conceived as fairly static and bounded, for example, a painting or a sculpture. The environmental conception has also served as a critical response to the so-called scenic model of aesthetic appreciation of nature, where a focus on natural scenes has been held to be ocular centric and narrow, failing to capture the variety of multisensory and changing qualities of natural phenomena (Carlson 2000). It is often claimed that the scenic approach is rooted in the Picturesque Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where landscapes were judged as aesthetically pleasing according to standards of human design, mainly gardens and landscape paintings. Such an approach suggests a distanced and mediated rather than relational and more intimate aesthetic encounter with the natural world. The environmental approach recognises the potential of multisensory attention to particular, individual living and non-living things, and a more holistic experience of settings and atmospheres shape appreciation. Many ‘objects’ of aesthetic attention are better described as phenomena and processes, like changing patterns of clouds in the sky, or the drama of a sudden thunderstorm. Living things move, grow, and decay at different rates: ecological change occurs across time and space in the long and short term; geological processes at the greater scale of deep time. These changes will

20  Emily Brady be apparent in terms of aesthetic qualities that emerge with changes in weather, seasons, and over much longer stretches of time. Sympathetic attention is not a new idea in the field of aesthetics, and it is often regarded as a central feature of aesthetic responses and judgements (both conceptually speaking and in practice). In aesthetic appreciation, sympathetic attention occurs when perception and the senses are strongly focused on the qualities and meanings of some everyday happening, landscape, garden, natural area, entity, process, sight, sound, texture, smell, taste, phenomenon, work of art, and so on. Such attention can involve imagination, knowledge and affect, and be sustained or more fleeting, depending on just what it is that captures one’s attention. The main point is that sympathetic attention is directed away from the experiencing subject and towards the features and meanings of things lying beyond the self. 3 Attention may be directed towards the sweeping view of a distant desert landscape or can be closer, focused on the sound of a bird singing nearby. It begins in perception and sensory engagement but may become layered with imaginings of that desert coming alive with colour after rain, then layered yet again with knowledge of which plants are more likely to flower under these specific weather conditions. Why is sympathetic attention significant when considering other-regarding attitudes? To begin with, it describes the multisensory and environed situation of the aesthetic subject. Here, environmental aesthetics captures an important mode of how humans relate to the more-than-human. The subject’s attention is shifted from general or vague ideas and thoughts to concrete and particular qualities, meanings, things, lives, and places; attention is defined not through casual glances; rather, it is direct and paid to things. Of course, things also capture our attention, draw our attention and hold our attention. While brief sensory attention can be rich – a whiff of pine on the breeze – much attention has duration, is drawn out. Lingering attention is also something we do, as in lingering on the rich scent of jasmine. Sustained forms of attention, often articulated in terms of aesthetic contemplation and perceptual absorption, are a familiar feature of theories of aesthetic experience and judgement. Importantly, these theories do not characterise an inactive state of mind or passive taking in. Elsewhere, I have emphasised how aesthetic experience involves immediate attention focused on something for its own sake (Brady 2003). I view this attention as not merely passive or reactive: the subject is not detached, but rather engaged, active and absorbed, with the body sometimes playing a role, too. Drawing on the pragmatic tradition in philosophy, John Dewey contends that the aesthetic arises through an almost primal, active engagement between self and environment, and through ordinary activities, including both practical and intellectual pursuits. The aesthetic emerges in ‘an experience’ when the elements of ordinary experience come together in a meaningful and vital way, creating a unified experience that is complete and whole in itself. It is not disengaged or distant, but full of meaning and expression,

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes  21 involving both ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’ and engaging the ‘entire live creature’. Like other aesthetic theories, Dewey’s recognises the centrality of perceptual absorption, emotional response and an active imagination. Dewey’s theory is notable for embedding aesthetics within everyday life, and eschewing an elitist notion of aesthetic experience as occurring only within the institutions of high art. His ideas open up forms of aesthetic engagement that are not reserved for the privileged, as well as types of aesthetic interactions which cut across global cultures. Dewey is interested in how artistic experience can enhance and invigorate human life, but he is also aware of engagement with the natural world and the aesthetic dimension therein. As Paul C. Taylor puts it, for Dewey, experience that has an aesthetic quality denote[s] the felt sense of connection and wholeness that registers the fashioning of a proper experience out of the fugitive elements of our encounters with the world. Through pragmatic and interpretive processes of inquiry, agents assign meanings to the phenomena they encounter, and these interpretations order the world in a way that renders it intelligible and navigable. (2016, 25) Aesthetics plays a fundamental role within human experience and enables us to navigate the world and to discover meaning and value. Pragmatism in its non-environmental form is somewhat humanistic, so we should ask how it squares with the cosmology of interconnectedness. In Dewey’s approach, interconnectedness plays out in the ways that his philosophy seeks to dissolve a number of dualisms such as human/nature, nature/culture, mind/ body, and so on (Shusterman 2013, 99). Dewey’s ideas can enrich our understanding of fittingness by providing ideas through the lens of aesthetics. The pragmatic tradition in aesthetics is concerned with how such experience can enable the enrichment of human life and (to some extent) the mutual flourishing of humans within nature. This meliorative approach, therefore, works well with the idea of developing intergenerational meaningful relationships. Furthermore, Dewey’s ideas concerning the continuity of aesthetics in everyday life fits nicely with the fact that today, more than ever before, human beings are living in urban places. It is within these more everyday spaces of human and more-thanhuman interactions that such relationships can develop (without forgetting the majestic, wilder places which are less populated). In sympathetic attention, perception is drawn outwards by something that we are drawn toward. It is the particular qualities, moods, atmosphere, actions, behaviours, and so on that draw the aesthetic subject out and toward. All of this plays an active part in any aesthetic relationship, regardless of the make-up of what we’re relating to: another human, a work of art, a preening bird, the smell of dirt, a marine system, or the texture

22  Emily Brady of stone. The active role of attention can be reflexive, too. The Scottish philosopher, Ronald Hepburn, describes the subject as: ‘… involved in the natural aesthetic situation itself … [as] both actor and spectator, ingredient in the landscape … playing actively with nature, and letting nature, as it were, play with me and my sense of myself.’ One is experiencing oneself in … an unusual and vivid way; and this difference is not merely noted, but dwelt upon aesthetically … [We] are in nature and a part of nature; we do not stand over against it as over against a painting on a wall. As such, through forms of sympathetic attention, a relationship may be formed in which ‘Nature and ourselves are indissolubly co-authors, for instance, of our aesthetic experience … [but] the task is to avoid self-diminishing without lurching to the opposite error of exaggerating our creative role’ (Hepburn 1984, 12–3). I interpret Hepburn’s ideas as attempting to capture the mutual interaction, perhaps agency, of each member of human–nature relationships. Overall, his ideas suggest how the human subject creates meaningful, fitting relations through aesthetic experience. There is a second reason that I favour understanding aesthetic experience and judgement as relational. Sympathetic attention makes possible the judgements that constitute aesthetic valuing. But not all such judgements will be positive because not all aesthetic experiences are of the beautiful, the marvellous, or the pretty. The fascinating, terrible, ugly, disgusting … all can play a meaningful part in aesthetic encounters. In intrinsic value-based theories of environmental ethics, if something is less than beautiful or attractive, it may be harder to prevent it from harm. And when aesthetic experiences are only associated with positive values, it can become a barrier to ethical treatment and lead to various injustices. Consider tidy lawns kept green and free of ‘weeds’ by using fertilisers which harm insects and other organisms. Avoiding messiness, most often seen as a negative aesthetic value, can do more harm than good. Learning to appreciate unkempt nature is, in many cases, essential to ecological flourishing. What is needed is an account of aesthetic experience which also captures more than positive values. This can be achieved in aesthetic theory and practice by recognising the range of values, disvalues, and relationships that exist through human– nature interactions. Some less-than-positive values and relationships are meaningful and part of a flourishing life (at least in so far as we can know this to be the case for humans): cheerful ascription of value does little to register the part played by the natural world in some of the grief, disappointment, sorrow and failure that are among the basic ingredients of a fully engaged, fully committed and fully vulnerable human life. (Holland 2012, 4–5)

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes  23 Sympathetic attention can aid in the discovery of disvalues in nature, but also values and meanings in things that might otherwise go unnoticed. Rachel Carson’s thoughts suggest the ethical significance of this, For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’. (Quoted in Dean Moore 2008, 271) Attending to the natural world through our senses and, more broadly, aesthetic experiences, can play an essential role in underpinning efforts to prevent further losses to habitats, species, and all kinds of things affected by global climate change and other environmental emergencies.

Expansive Naturalism I would like to transition into my discussion of wonder and the sublime by considering the metaphysical framework which runs through this essay. Why is this framework important? Within environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics in the analytic philosophical tradition, metaphysics is something that is too often dismissed out of hand. In environmental aesthetics, some philosophers have argued that we ought to move beyond eighteenth and nineteenth-century romantic conceptions of the natural world and the transcendental metaphysics which shaped these conceptions, for example, as seen in the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, German Idealism (Diffey 1993). For example, one of the most influential theories in environmental aesthetics proposes a model called ‘scientific cognitivism’, which argues that scientific knowledge is needed to ground appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature (Carlson 2000). Knowledge of ecology and other sciences is, of course, important to environmental thought and action, but this model tends towards a reduction to scientific realism or a purely empiricist epistemology. This model runs the risk of leaving out metaphysical, speculative and transcendental experiences in aesthetic situations and other ways in which humans relate to the more-than-human world. In light of my concerns, I adopt a metaphysical framework inspired by what the English philosopher, Fiona Ellis (2014), calls ‘expansive naturalism’. On her view ‘nature is not limited to whatever is the object of scientific inquiry’, even while science remains an important tool of knowledge (2014, 2). Ellis builds her expansive naturalism from the philosophies of John McDowell and David Wiggins and then takes it further, in a theological direction. I do not take Ellis’ extra step towards theistic naturalism, rather I use this framework to make room in environmental aesthetics – in theory and

24  Emily Brady in practice – for ideas, concepts, perspectives, philosophies, cosmologies, epistemologies, and varieties of aesthetic experience which cannot be fully explained or conceived of through the sciences. My own theory of environmental aesthetics, ‘the integrated aesthetic’ (Brady 2003), aims to capture the role of the senses, imagination, emotion and feeling, thought, and knowledge that may all play a part in environmental aesthetic experiences. As I see it, a critical pluralist approach is needed in order not to exclude the broadest range of experiences. I agree with Hepburn’s reasoning with respect to positions which undervalue metaphysics: Why should metaphysical imagination be under-acknowledged today? I suspect that some of the undervaluers may wish to keep their own account of aesthetic engagement with nature well free of the embarrassment of what they see as the paradigm case of metaphysics in landscape. I mean Wordsworthian romanticism … Embarrassment, because this is taken to express a religious experience whose object is very indeterminate, whose description virtually fails of distinct reference, and which may lack adequate rational support … But my response to that is not to urge an aesthetic experience of nature free of metaphysics, for that would be grossly self-impoverishing, but rather, to encourage its endless variety. What comes to replace a theistic or pantheist vision of nature may well itself have the status of metaphysics – naturalistic, materialistic, or whatever: and may have its own metaphysical imaginative correlatives. (1996, 193–4) Hepburn’s interest in metaphysics is not of the systematic kind and, in his writings, he describes himself as agnostic. Given the influence of British and German romanticism on his philosophy, his own metaphysical interest is, perhaps, best described as a type of ‘nature-mysticism’ (Cooper 2020, 92). Let me clarify that since the context of my discussion is aesthetics, it would be apt to underscore that the empirically known world remains vital to the aesthetic data of sympathetic attention, even if not reduced to this. My hope is that the ideas in this chapter provide a distinct counterweight to contemporary views in environmental aesthetics such as scientific cognitivism. Expansive naturalism is also more generally important in environmental philosophy by countering theories which express epistemological arrogance. Contemplating that there are things beyond the human and beyond that which is known through scientific knowledge opens up space for decentring the human and their ways of knowing and for being open to alternative modes of being and agency. Expansive naturalism opens up space for epistemic humility and provides an appropriate opening for wonder and the sublime, since both illustrate other-directed ways of relating which move beyond a realist environmental aesthetics.

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Wonder Sympathetic attention harmonises with the openness of wonder, a quasiaesthetic experience which is curious and deeply receptive. Through surprise and suddenness, wonder directs interest outwards at the extraordinary qualities of natural phenomena. It is commonly said to involve being receptive to other-being, sensitive to the world, and open to its diversity and majesty. This kind of stance has also been linked to epistemic finitude, that is, becoming aware of what one does not know, perhaps discovering not answers, but that which lies at the outermost edges of knowledge. In place of the attending-to of sympathetic attention, wonder more often draws us in, with our attention being grabbed or caught. Of course, the two work together as well: ‘Wow! Look at how intricate that snowflake is, and it looks so different up close, and that’s just one snowflake among all the tiny snowflakes in the snow flurry around me!’ Wonder is characterised by exploring the how and the why; in the moment of marvelling at the incredible patterns of the clouds above, we are at the same time struck by questions: ‘What’s going on up there in the atmosphere that makes the clouds those incredible shapes?’ The extraordinary is also found within everyday settings: There is a spider in the bathroom with whom I keep a sort of company. Her little outfit always reminds me of a certain moth I helped to kill. The spider herself is of uncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of a web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed. The web itself is in the corner behind the toilet, connecting tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corpses she has tossed to the floor. (Dillard 1994, 427) In these lines from Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard captures a fitting and meaningful relationship in her own home, shared as it is with other creatures. She develops a relationship of peaceful cohabitation with the spider, learning about her home, existence, and ways of flourishing. Within such daily routines, wonder and fascination can emerge to draw us beyond ourselves in an attempt to grasp other-being. Intellectual curiosity and a desire to know are often cited as distinctive to the attitude of wonder, and this feature shows its relevance to meaningful relations. Sometimes there will be an unconscious comparison – a contrast made – between ourselves and that which is astonishing or mysterious. Wonder is, thus, also characterised by an attempt to grasp what is different from or beyond human selves. It is interesting that wonder is at once related to both science and to that which lies beyond any kind of scientific understanding. The persistence of wonder, and questions about things that

26  Emily Brady cannot be explained by science alone, would seem to demand that we adopt a metaphysical stance of expansive naturalism. Rachel Carson captures this well, ‘Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of the meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden’ (Carson 1955, 250). Hepburn’s ideas show that wonder has a life-enhancing character which is ‘appreciative and open, opposed to the self-protective and consolatory’ and ‘notably and essentially other-acknowledging;’ turning us away from self-interest, wonder has the effect of grasping other-being and ‘the possibility of action purely and simply on another’s behalf’ (1984, 144–5). These reflections open a rich dialogue between wonder and fittingness. Recall that I conceive of fittingness as referring to meaningful human–nature relationships which aim at mutual flourishing. I would suggest that it is a short step from wonder to compassion, humility, and what Hepburn describes as ‘gentleness – concern not to blunder into a damaging manipulation of another’ (1984, 145–6; see also Attfield 2017). Respect for others is implicit across Hepburn’s philosophy of both wonder and environmental aesthetics. Quite rightly, he is wary of humanising, trivialising, or sentimentalising nature in forms of aesthetic appreciation and wonder (which he takes to be a neighbouring category to the aesthetic). Wonder can draw us into more intimate experiences, deepening appreciation, while at the same time maintaining a degree of distance that avoids appropriation. Above, I have discussed environmental pragmatism and meaningful relations approaches to environmental ethics as offering alternatives to intrinsic value-based theories. Another fruitful alternative is environmental virtue ethics, which draws on virtue theory in moral philosophy. Along these lines, Ronald Sandler (2009, 50) has argued for the place of aesthetic responses and wonder as ‘virtues of communion with nature.’ Wonder is given special attention: ‘The natural environment provides the opportunity for intellectual challenge and reward, but those benefits come only to those who are disposed first to wonder and then to try to understand’ (2009, 50). A range of major environmental thinkers, Muir, Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard, and Carson, for example, have connected wonder to environmental responsibility. Carson has been given special attention as a scientist (a marine biologist) who argued that the ‘sense of wonder,’ as a way of feeling, responding to, and seeing nature, can encourage environmental protection (Dean Moore 2008; Carson 2017). Recall that the idea of meaningful relationships is also meant to capture the range of ways we relate to the natural world, sometimes in ways that are unpleasant or involve negative values. On Holland’s view and my own, such relationships can still be meaningful, nonetheless. I mention this because, like aesthetic experience, wonder is often presented only in terms of positive values and pleasant experiences. In their magisterial study of the history of wonder, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (2001) describe

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes  27 the supernatural phenomena, monsters, and natural organisms perceived to be odd or deformed, which were a primary focus of cultural imagination and science. Considering contemporary societies across the globe, there are many wondrous phenomena that can be harmful to humans and nonhumans alike, such as the bite of a stunning but venomous snake. For the snake, biting is a means to food or defence and, thus, enables flourishing. Yet, at the same time, this action undermines the flourishing of the creature who has been bitten. Here, we might say that there is a meaningful relationship within a holistic, ecological, or evolutionary context, where the snake’s ways of being are essential to flourishing and support the development of a range of more particular capabilities related to self-protection. Here is a relationship which involves conflict and predation, and yet the relationship also involves fittingness on an ecological level. Before concluding this section, I would like to note that wonder has also played a part in motivating harmful human-to-nature and human-tohuman interactions, where the object of wonder is harmed, appropriated, or manipulated for instrumental ends (Van Wensveen 2017). The field of natural history involves collecting in the name of scientific study, and colonial practices have included collecting artefacts, human and nonhuman alike, while the museums housing such collections continue to create experiences of wonder and fascination for spectators but, in many cases, do not promote an ethic of flourishing.4 In these cases, wonder is unfitting, an inappropriate response which can be understood as such when full knowledge and context is presented.

The Sublime The third kind of other-regarding attitude that I would like to explore is the concept and aesthetic experience of the natural sublime. In this case, the subject is not so much drawn in to contemplation of other-being but rather overwhelmed, shocked or in awe of powerful forces, phenomena, or processes. While wonder introduces a sense of the unknown, the sublime brings with it a different kind of metaphysical shift and forces the subject to rethink their place in the cosmos. The noun, ‘sublime’, originates in the Greek noun hupsos, or height, while its Latin meaning is sublimis, or elevated, uplifted, aloft. Its etymology stems from (probably) sub, ‘up to’ and limen, ‘lintel’.5 Various theories follow this etymology, arguing that the thing described as high or lofty also indicates a response to such qualities where the subject – or self – feels elevated or uplifted. This lofty feeling is often linked to a mental expansion of imagination or the mind, more generally. I understand the sublime to articulate a relation between material or nonextended overwhelming qualities and a mixed positive and negative emotional-imaginative response in the subject. Elsewhere, I have discussed how various theories of the natural sublime emphasise a feeling of insignificance in the subject, a feeling of

28  Emily Brady being humbled by the natural phenomena of soaring mountains, stormy seas, vast deserts, and the night sky (Brady 2013, 2019). The sublime aesthetic response is often conceptualised as both self- and other-directed, in so far as the power or great scale of natural phenomena enable one to grasp both how small the self is, but also how humanity fits into the natural world (decidedly not all-powerful). Our existential ponderings in relation to the sublime often move beyond the human condition. Let me explain. In the sublime response, the self is often in a comparative relationship with something that is greater, larger, and overwhelming in some way. This can have the effect of evoking a feeling of insignificance. In sublime theories, this feeling is often linked to being humiliated – the sensible, physical self in Kant’s theory of the sublime – but also to humility, showing a strong contrast with the exalted mind. Humility originates in the Latin, humilis, which means ‘low’, and the concept has, as we know, many resonances, not least the ethical, as in showing a willingness to bow to others. The sublime humbles the self and opens out an awareness that there are other things in the world and universe that are greater than ourselves. We find the idea of the insignificant self-expressed in many theories of the sublime. For example, Schiller, who was strongly influenced by Kant’s aesthetic theory, writes, ‘for the feeling of the sublime it is absolutely requisite that we see ourselves with absolutely no physical means of resistance and look to our nonphysical self for help’ (1993, 28; author’s emphasis). Schopenhauer describes the sublime as ‘an exaltation beyond our own individuality’ (1969, I, 206). In the context of this remark, Schopenhauer cites the Uphanishads, ‘I am all this creation collectively, and besides me there exists no other being.’6 The self is reduced by sublime other-than-human phenomena of space and time: [I]f we lose ourselves in contemplation of the infinite greatness of the universe in space and time, meditate on the past millennia and on those to come; or if the heavens at night actually bring innumerable worlds before our eyes, and so impress on our consciousness the immensity of the universe, we feel ourselves reduced to nothing. (1969, I, 205) More recently, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory, which focuses on avantgarde art, the self is decentred through encounters with the ‘inexpressible’ and ‘indeterminate’. Lyotard interprets the Kantian sublime to show a transcendent movement where the subject ‘feels in the object the presence of something that transcends the object. The mountain peak is a phenomenon that indicates that it is also more than a phenomenon’ (Lyotard 2006, 260). This encounter with other-being creates a kind of ontological dislocation. All of these philosophical ideas articulate a displacement of the self from its stance over and above the natural world and introduce into aesthetic experience an element of being humbled.

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes  29 Recent work in both philosophy and psychology has examined the concept of awe, a concept similar to the sublime but with a broader range of subject matter. Experiences of awesome vastness seem to shrink the self, reduce focus on the self and its desires, and increase human-to-human ‘prosocial behavior’ (Piff et al. 2015, 885). Katie McShane draws on such studies in her exploration of awe in environmental ethics, yet she notes a significant concern with respect to the small self (which, for my purposes here, also applies to the insignificant self of the sublime): ‘while it might be the case that those with the most social power do make bad environmental decisions out of arrogance, those who suffer the effects of bad environmental decisions might well need less humility rather than more’ (2018, 480). The sublime and awe create a stance of humility, yet this attitude does not fit every situation. It is fitting to honour the sublimity of a very old redwood tree, but when it comes to communities fighting environmental injustice, different emotions, virtues, actions, and principles will be required, instead, to support empowerment. Another area of concern about the sublime and the insignificant self relates to the new geological age of the Anthropocene. How can the sublime and the insignificant self possibly get a foothold in the face of the pervasive effects of humans on the earth? Such effects show themselves in massive industries, deforestation, global climate change, the extinction of species on a scale not seen before, and other awful consequences of human habitation on earth. Some hope lies in the very forces, adaptive capacities and flourishing of the more-than-human. Landscapes in Iceland and in other parts of the world, today, provide compelling examples of just how insignificant the human can be. Many of Iceland’s volcanoes are still active, with huge eruptions occurring in recent times. The results of this activity are calderas, vast lava fields, and black sand deserts. Through an aesthetic experience, the subject encounters extraordinarily massive, powerful, and old phenomena, as well as the early formation of new geologies. Such experiences are meaningful, metaphysically speaking, in so far as they enable us to grasp how humanity is situated in relation to such processes, and how humanity may or may not feel at home with them. Environmental thinkers recognise deep time as significant across aesthetic and other kinds of values. Time depth is expressed in many of Aldo Leopold’s writings, but especially in his essay, ‘Marshland Elegy’, a lament about the loss of sandhill cranes and wetlands from agricultural development: A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has wakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the ice sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge

30  Emily Brady into the future, this habitat where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die. (Leopold 1989, 214) Leopold’s reflections are instructive about the limits of humankind and the richness and diversity of deep time expressed through an ecocentric rather than anthropocentric lens. He reminds us of the true limits of the human with respect to other kinds of life on earth. Experiences of the temporal sublime push against uncritical renderings of the Anthropocene and help to shape thinking and awareness that span generations. The sublimity of deep time, we might say, brings about awareness of a fitting intergenerational relationships. We have seen that wonder and the sublime both serve as ‘limit experiences’ which decentre the human perspective and invite modes of non-anthropocentric relations. Marvelling at and with wondrous things or being humbled by the awesomeness of nature instil, respectively, a sense of epistemic humility and epistemic finitude. The metaphysical resonances of wonder and the sublime also show that environmental aesthetics demands a framework of expansive naturalism, which is richer and more pluralistic than scientific realism. Sympathetic attention brings us down to earth and draws our senses, feelings, and imagination to the particular and concrete aesthetic qualities, atmospheres, and situations which inhabit aesthetic engagement. Finally, these other-regarding attitudes offer different kinds of meaningful and fitting relationships with nature, ecologies, place, and environment.

Notes 1 This chapter builds upon ideas discussed in Brady 2018. 2 In this chapter, I shall use ‘nature’ to refer to the earth’s systems, ecologies, and organic and inorganic entities which lie beyond human agency, artefacts, technology, and the built environment. I acknowledge that ‘nature’ is a contested concept and, also, that there are many kinds of hybrid and modified environments which combine human and more-than-human agency (see Brady, Brook and Prior 2018). 3 The notion of sympathy differs historically from empathy. The latter term is introduced into the English language in the early twentieth century as a translation of the German concept, Einfühlung (feeling into). Sympathy is more appropriate to aesthetic responses, which are less concerned with the attempts to empathise that we find in moral situations. Sympathy is also better suited to the relational approach I outline here, and my interest in maintaining respect for difference. 4 The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has recently changed and removed many displays in an effort to decolonise the museum’s collections. https://www.prm. ox.ac.uk/critical-changes. Accessed December 18, 2020. 5 ‘Sublime, adj. and n.’. OED Online. Third edition. June 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/192766. Accessed December 18, 2020. 6 This is the translator’s translation from Schopenhauer’s Latin rendering of a saying from the Uphanishads (1969, 206).

Fittingness and Other-Regarding Attitudes  31

References Attfield, Robin. 2017. Wonder, Value, and God. London: Routledge. Brady, Emily. 2003. Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2013. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. “L’esthétique, l’humilité et l’étonnement: d’autres modes de relation à l’environnement.” La Pensée écologique 2 (1): n.p. ———. 2019. “Kant and Greatness of Mind.” In The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity, edited by Sophia Vasalou, 197–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brady, Emily, Isis Brook, and Jonathan Prior. 2018. Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Carlson, Allen. 2000. Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture. New York: Routledge. Carson, Rachel. 1955. The Edge of the Sea. New York: Vintage. ———. 2017. A Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper Perennial. Cooper, David. 2020. “Aesthetic Experience, Metaphysics and Subjectivity: Ronald W. Hepburn and ‘Nature-Mysticism.’” In Aesthetics, Nature and Religion: Ronald W. Hepburn and His Legacy, edited by Endre Szécsényi, 90–101. Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press. Dean Moore, Kathleen. 2008. “The Truth of the Barnacles: Rachel Carson and the Moral Significance of Wonder.” In Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, edited by Lisa H. Sederis and Kathleen Dean Moore, 267–80. Albany: State University of New York Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. 2001. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books. Diffey, Terry. 1993. “Natural Beauty without Metaphysics.” In Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 43–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dillard, Annie, ed. 1994. The Annie Dillard Reader. New York: Harper Perennial. Ellis, Fiona. 2014. God, Value, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hepburn, Ronald W. 1984. Wonder and Other Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1996. “Landscape and Metaphysical Imagination.” Environmental Values 5: 191–204. Holland, Alan. 2012. “The Value Space of Meaningful Relations.” In HumanEnvironment Relations: Transformative Values in Theory and Practice, edited by Emily Brady and Pauline Phemister, 3–15. Dordrecht: Springer. Firth, Dan. 2008. “The Role of Aesthetic Considerations in a Narrative-Based Approach to Nature Conservation.” Ethics and the Environment 13 (2): 77–100. Kelbessa, Workineh. 2011. “Indigenous Environmental Philosophy.” In The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, edited by William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield, 574–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leopold, Aldo. 1989. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Light, Andrew, and Eric Katz, eds. 1996. Environmental Pragmatism. New York: Routledge.

32  Emily Brady Lyotard, Jean-François. 2006. “The Communication of Sublime Feeling.” In Lyotard Reader and Guide, edited by Keith Crome and James Williams, 254–65. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marris, Emma. 2013. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York: Bloomsbury. McShane, Katie. 2018. “The Role of Awe in Environmental Ethics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76 (4) (Winter): 473–84. O’Neill, John, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light. 2007. Environmental Values. London: Routledge. Piff, Paul, Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato, and Dacher Keltner. 2015. “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior.” The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108 (6): 883–99. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Sandler, Ronald L. 2009. Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press. Schiller, Friedrich. 1993. “On the Sublime.” In Essays, translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 22–44. New York: Continuum. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation, volume I. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover. Shusterman, Richard. 2013. “Pragmatism: Dewey.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, third edition, edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 96– 105. Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Van Wensveen, Louke. 2017. “Revival of the Fitting: Virtue and Relational Experiences of Value.” In Theological Ethics and Moral Value Phenomena: The Experience of Values, edited by Steven C. van den Heuvel, Patrick Nullens, and Angela Roothaan, 185–203. London: Routledge.

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Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth John Moriarty and Deep Ecology Nora Ward So wretched are we, we need the most radical of remedies, we need to be sun-speared and death-rattled and bone-fired into world-worthiness. (Moriarty 2007a, 266)

Introduction The Irish poet-philosopher John Moriarty (1938–2007) is not a household name in environmental philosophy, yet his contributions to the fields of both environmental ethics and environmental theology are substantial and deserving of further recognition. While his ten books oscillate between the genres of poetry, myth, prose and story, a unifying centre is his call to peacefully coexist with the natural world, in Moriarty’s words, to ‘learn to walk again on the Earth’ (Moriarty 2007b, 5). In a basic sense, his goal was like that of cultural shaman, attempting to heal the soul of what he deems a broken culture, driven also by the recognition that his own soul also needs saving. Theoretically, Moriarty’s influence is as eclectic as his style, and he draws upon a wide variety of conceptual frameworks, most notably, Christianity, the Romantics, Indigenous and First Nation philosophies, and Ancient Irish mythology. Although Moriarty eschewed formal academic style in his writings, there remains much to analyse and give attention to. My goal is not to project a formal philosophical ethic onto his work, but rather to draw out elements of normative interest in his writings, particularly those aspects that contribute to and advance themes in environmental ethics and theology. Thematically, the main focus in this chapter is Moriarty’s concept of “commonage consciousness,” a driving force throughout both his work and his life. For Moriarty, commonage consciousness is a congenial way of coexisting with the natural world that recognises a kindred relation between all living beings. Similar to the concept of self-realisation in deep ecology, the transition to commonage consciousness involves a departure from an atomistic and ego-centred subjectivity to a holistic conception. Uniquely, Moriarty’s path to commonage consciousness carves out a productive space for the role of stories and narrative in this reorientation of selfhood from alterity towards

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-4

34  Nora Ward relation. For Moriarty, stories constitute the “forms of [our] sensibility and the categories of [our] understanding” (Moriarty 2007a, 86). In line with this view, Moriarty engaged in the recounting of stories and myth in order to cultivate new forms of environmental subjectivity, and to elicit attitudes of openness and belonging in relation to one’s experiences with and in the natural world. I suggest that this narrative focus contributes to the process of self-realisation in deep ecology and offers an engaging complement to the concept of direct, spontaneous experience as developed by Næss. In the following chapter, I begin with an overview of Moriarty’s environmental philosophy, focusing closely on the concept of commonage consciousness. In the second section, I draw parallels between Moriarty’s concept of commonage consciousness and Næss’s framework of self-realisation. I argue that both concepts point to an attempt to fit in with the natural world, constructing a conception and experience of subjectivity that understands the human as a co-inhabitant of a larger natural community, and thus departing from narratives of atomism, mastery and anthropocentrism. Put simply, Næss and Moriarty want to find a home in the world, and both concepts represent this drive. Finally, I examine Moriarty’s use of story and myth, exploring how this particular emphasis in his work serves to direct the praxis of environmental philosophy away from the domain of knowledge in an objectivist sense towards one of imagination. Thus, it is through story that a deep relation with the non-human world is evoked and experienced.

The Environmental Philosophy of John Moriarty When John Moriarty1 returned to Ireland after years abroad, he found himself homeless in his own homeland. This feeling was not due to the lack of a physical home, rather it pointed to a sense of psychological alienation and estrangement from the land. Moriarty maintained that the intellectual habits and conceptual frameworks he acquired from both his European education and the dominant culture in a wider sense disallowed his engagement in a collegial manner with the natural world. Indeed, it demanded a destructive relation to it. In particular, he noted the tendency of Western philosophy and religion to glorify the rational, the transcendent and the distinctly human; a tendency which results in, he argued, the emergence of a dualistic metaphysics which sees humanity as essentially ontologically and normatively distinct from the natural world, thus serving to sever the human–nature relationship and legitimise practices of exploitation and domination. As a particular feature of this process, Moriarty pointed to the overt rationalism represented in Platonic thinking which defines the usefulness of humans in relation to their capacity to transcend the sensory world and ascend to the world of the intellect, represented by Plato’s metaphor of the cave. Modern philosophers, such as Descartes, continued and fulfilled the

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  35 rationalist tradition by demoting the natural world to that of machine, accessible to both exploit and understand fully through the distinctly human capacity for reason, but devoid of agency in- and of-itself. On many occasions throughout his book, Moriarty drew on Melville’s Moby Dick as representative of such a mentality. Captain Ahab, in his quest to kill the white whale, plays out a large-scale defence of the notion of human transcendence with the whale embodying a wilful nature that must be subdued. Referring to this attitude and behaviour as “Pequod culture,”2 Moriarty maintained that the violence of conquest is represented through physical violence, such as intensive extraction and habitat destruction, as well as a colonising, scientific attitude which seeks to intellectually possess the entirety of existing natural processes. Of this tendency, he wrote: “surely the impulse that has plagued us throughout history is our impulse to rule over and subdue things” (Moriarty 2007a, 362). For Moriarty, the glorification of the intellect over sensory experience widens and cements the ontological divide between human and broader reality, inaugurating a hierarchal relationship between humans and the rest of the living world. This separation is also represented psychologically and philosophically through the subject–object divide, in that a disjoint is constructed between the inquiring subject and the object of the inquiry. Among many modern philosophers, humans were considered the sole agents with subjectivity, due to the possession of reason, and the scientific method represents the culmination of a framework in which its function is the analysis of an objectified nature. Indeed, even within this methodology, the prioritisation of the rational faculties serves to reduce the features of the natural world to that which can be comprehended in strictly rational terms. Early scientists and philosophers understood primary properties, for example, such as size, shape and volume, as belonging to the object itself while secondary properties, such as colour, smell and taste, belong to the perceiver. In such a view, a flower’s beauty and fragrance do not exist “out there” in the noumenal world, but rather are a subjective translation of the object within the consciousness of the observing subject. As Christian Diehm outlines, however, this view “takes as most real that which is not only farthest from experience, but in some ways even antithetical to it” (Diehm 2006, 24). It leads to, as Neil Evernden puts it, “a non-experienced reality” (Evernden 1992, 63). Thus, sensory experience was understood as a contaminant to a pure reality that consists of abstract principles that can be explained by physics. For Moriarty, such a dualistic epistemology, which both separates subject from object and considers the most real to be that which is most remote from experience, serves to further heighten a sense of human estrangement from the world. As such, Moriarty contended that the subject– object divide is “the mechanism of our alienation,” forcing one to become a spectator rather than participant in reality (Moriarty 2007a, 297). In line with this understanding, Moriarty’s aim is to bridge the subject– object divide by not just analysing and observing the natural world, but

36  Nora Ward inhabiting and engaging with it. Such a shift can be achieved, for Moriarty, through the development of a type of perception which emphasises a direct and immediate sensory experience of the world unburdened by prior cultural concepts, the intellect or by the habits of education and culture. Many times in his writings and talks, he recounted a particular occasion in which he sunk his head deep inside a hare’s den, experiencing a baptism of sorts. Upon lifting his head out from the soil, he observed that all acquainted conception sucked out of it, as if by a poultice. I came to my feet and starting with individual sensations in hearing, seeing, touch, taste, and smell, I set about laying down and building a new mind for myself. (Moriarty 2007a, 34) This new mind that Moriarty referred to is not only free from cognitive concepts but also, and more radically, one that separates and removes the individual ego doing the perceiving from the act of perceiving. He explained: “liberated from conception and self, what remained was pure sensation” (Moriarty 2007a, 73). As Moriarty further depicts, this is a perception which involves realising “the naked eye,” described as “an eye not made myopic by opinion or purpose. Seeing not darkened by someone doing the seeing … Seeing only” (Moriarty 2007a, 73). Recognising that the “kenosis”3 involved in such a task is no small feat, he nonetheless noted its necessity for inaugurating a transition towards commonage consciousness, an understanding of self as relationally tied to all other living beings and natural processes, and the conceptual focal point in his work. Moriarty depicted commonage consciousness simply as “sinking down into a depth within myself where I is we” (Moriarty 2007a, 133). With this concept, Moriarty envisioned the antimony to Pequod culture such that it emphasises a sense of interrelation of all being, and subsequently denounces the view of humanity as transcendent, superior and ontologically distinct. Although his influences for this concept are wide-ranging and include Christian mystics such as Eckhart and Marguerite Porete, as well as Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, it is Indigenous philosophies and myth that provide seminal examples of commonage consciousness. One particular story he recounted is a Blackfoot Indian myth which tells of a young woman in a starving tribe who marries a buffalo bull in exchange for the buffalo permitting the tribe to use them as food. For Moriarty, this act, which saved the people from starvation and set both buffalo and human on a shared path of co-evolution, represented the capacity of humans “[to] stand in the difficult chasm that exists between humans and animals” (quoted in O’Donoghue 2013, 11). By enduring that precarious gulf, the girl represented the “reversal of humanity’s declension into us-and-them awareness back into a state of ‘we-awareness’ (quoted in O’Donoghue 2013, 11).”

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  37 What the experience of commonage consciousness achieves, then, is the development of what Moriarty referred to as the sympathetic nervous system, a capacity to radically empathise and identify with the other. He outlined that “beneath all surface antagonisms is the sumpatheia ton holon, the sympathy than runs through all things” (Moriarty 2007a, 354). The development of the sympathetic nervous system flows alongside the capacity to reduce the potency of the individual ego and to subsequently enter into a “kind of seeing and knowing that doesn’t seek to apprehend or lay hold of reality” (Moriarty 2007a, 373). Likening this process to the concept of wu wei in Taoist thought, usually translated as “effortless action,” this state is conceived by Moriarty as a satisfaction with a state of immanence rather than transcendence, and the adoption of an attitude that emulates the “way of the lily in the field” (Moriarty 2007a, 39). Recounting personal experiences of such a state, he observed that: There were times when my whole mind was as low as the mind of badger to the floor of the wood. It was as if my arrogant and divisive nervous system had become a sympathetic nervous system and sympathy in the literal sense of experiencing with, suffering with, enjoying with, dying with, that above all else was who and what I was. (Moriarty 2007a, 37–8) In so far as the experience of commonage conscious entails the identification of oneself in another, the subject–object divide is overcome, or at least, reduced. For Moriarty, however, this process does not necessarily result in the eradication of alterity. Thus, to enter into the awareness of relationality is to simultaneously perceive wholeness and individuality: to experience the world in both unity and difference. His attention to difference is most apparent when he referred to viewing the world as mirabilia, a type of perception in which “the smallest speck of dust is tremendous” (Moriarty 2007a, 216). This insight is depicted most robustly in Moriarty’s retelling of the ancient Irish story of Bran mac Feabhail, which features the concept of silver-branch perception. In the story, a beautiful woman presents a singing silver branch from Manannán4 to Bran, an act that symbolises his journey and subsequent entry into a utopian world. For Moriarty, however, the branch represented not so much an opening into another world, but rather an invitation into an alternative way of seeing and existing in this one. As such, it embodied a manner of engaging with the world as mirabilia, a reverent view.5 As he put it, Bran and his men knew that Manannán has gifted them with this way of seeing things, he has gifted them with silver-branch perception, with original perception, with a kind of perception that has been native to them all along but that over time has been curtailed by custom and familiarity. (Moriarty 2007a, 112)

38  Nora Ward Approaching reality with reverence in this manner may be likened to a sense of the Kantian sublime, or to Buber’s I-and-Thou relationship. Indeed, both relationships involve a state of awe and a sense of mystery in the face of the other. Yet, for Moriarty, an important component of perceiving the world and its constituents as mirabilia is the mutual process of identifying oneself as mirabilia, also. He wrote, for example, that “I see things as mirabilia and so it is in turn that I experience myself as Miranda in nature and name” (Moriarty 2007a, 374). Commonage consciousness involves both sympathy with and reverence for the other in the recognition of the simultaneous affinity and sublimity of reality, and as such, a sense of sympathy and reverence in relation to oneself is cultivated. On the back of this understanding, Moriarty contended that upon transitioning to a state of we-awareness, ethical action will necessarily follow, stating “how we perceive things influences and in many cases wholly determines our behaviour towards things. Indeed we might say that perception is already behaviour” (Moriarty 2007a, 114). In living from a depth of identification with the living world, the Promethean tendency to overcome and subdue is overcome. Questioning rhetorically, he asks: “If I am willing to hear the ontological singing of the silver branch … here in this wood … how can I wilfully damage an ordinary branch of ash or oak?” (Moriarty 2007a, 114).

Arne Næss, Deep Ecology and Self-Realisation Like Moriarty, Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1912–2009) also understood the root of ecological issues to be primarily ontological. He pointed to an instrumental and anthropocentric relation to the non-human world, propped up by an atomistic conception of self. For Næss, the conceptualisation of oneself as ontologically and wholly distinct from the natural world in which you reside is both metaphysically inaccurate and ecologically damaging. In response, he put forth an understanding of subjectivity centred around what Freya Matthews calls the “interconnectedness thesis,” the idea that “all things are constituted by their relation to other things” (Mathews 1998, 349). Influenced by the ecological sciences, as well as Hinduism and the Buddhist concept of Anatmavada,6 Næss identified the framework of the ecological self, an understanding of identity as a “product of relationships to, among other things, the non-human environment” (Diehm 2007, 3) and which involves the embracing of a “total-field image,” in which all organisms are conceived of as “knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations” (Næss 1973, 95). The development of the ecological self occurs in a process of self-realisation, which points to a movement away from the atomistic ego self—what Næss refers as small self—and towards an extended, deep and comprehensive Self. Næss outlined the process in the following way: “Traditionally, the maturity of the self has been considered to develop through three stages: from ego to social self (including the ego), and from social self to a metaphysical self (including

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  39 the social self). […] I tentatively introduce […] the concept of ecological self” (Næss 2005a, 516). The expanded and mature subjectivity that is at the heart of the concept of self-realisation links with an understanding of gestalt, influenced by Spinoza’s philosophy. For Næss, everything that exists has a gestalt character, in that all individuals exist as part of a larger whole and are related to one another within that whole. Næss used music as an example of a gestalt. He observed that when one hears an isolated part of a song, there is a tendency to associate it with other parts of that same song, as well as relating it to other things, such as personal memories attached to the song (a relationship break-up or a sister’s birthday party, for example), or even the mood one happens to be in at the moment of listening. Thus, Næss contended that a “cloud of perceptions surround the perception (hearing) of the part itself” and that “there is no experience of the part as just a part” (1989, 135). Relatedly, he maintained that the experience of reality is similar, in that it constitutes a “manifold of gestalts” with experiences forming the “‘concrete contents” of our reality (1989, 135). Such a view doesn’t imply, however, that one’s experience of reality is subjective and relative to individuals. Rather, it adopts a perception of reality as being full of qualities, all of which are accessible to varying degrees under different conditions. Christian Diehm provided an example of water temperature to illustrate this process, observing that while in traditional dualistic metaphysics, the experience of one person holding a glass of water and perceiving it as cold and another person thinking the same glass felt warm was evidence that the glass was neither, and that its true reality is its biochemical components that do not include warm, cold or other features of temperature. In gestalt ontology, however, the experience demonstrates that the water is both warm and cold, and varying circumstances will elicit different qualities. As Diehm put it, “Næss presumes the world to be so full of [secondary and tertiary qualities] that they cannot be experienced all at once, thus requiring multiple methods of approach or relation to encounter them” (Diehm 2006, 26). For Næss, a recognition of the gestalt character of the natural world is coeval with a process of identification with other individuals, and reality to a broader extent. There is, therefore, a synchronicity in a metaphysical posture of holism and an ethical stance towards identification and compassion, with Næss writing that the “ecological self is a person’s process of identification” (Næss 2005a, 517). In one personal account, Næss provided an example of personal experience with a flea to portray this process: My standard example involves a nonhuman being I met forty years ago. I was looking through an old-fashioned microscope at the dramatic meeting of two drops of different chemicals. At that moment, a flea jumped from a lemming that was strolling along the table and landed in the middle of the acid chemicals. To save it was impossible.

40  Nora Ward It took many minutes for the flea to die. Its movements were dreadfully expressive. Naturally, what I felt was a painful sense of compassion and empathy, but the empathy was not basic; rather, it was a process of identification: that “I saw myself in the flea.” If I had been alienated from the flea, not seeing intuitively anything even resembling myself, the death struggle would have left me feeling indifferent. So there must be identification in order for there to be compassion. (Næss 2005a, 518) As evidenced by this example, the development of the ecological self results in a compassionate relation to all other living beings founded on the recognition of mutuality, thus strengthening Næss’s claim pertaining to the primacy of the ontological question in environmental philosophy. Næss maintained, for example, that once the self is realised, “we find that the destruction of nature threatens us in our innermost self,” and when acting in defence of the natural world, we are “defending our vital interest […] we are engaged in self-defence” (Næss 2005a, 520). It is in this sense, then, that moral egoism is an appropriate ethical response to ecological destruction, but it is not the egoism of the individual self, rather the selfishness of a mature and comprehensive Self. When the self is expanded to include the flea and indeed all living beings, ethical behaviours towards the natural environment will flow naturally. Drawing upon the Kantian distinction between beautiful acts (actions undertaken on the basis of inclination) and moral acts (those motivated by duty), Næss contended that beautiful acts, cultivated organically through the development of the ecological self, are a more powerful and effective basis in an ecological crisis because they are more compelling that moral duties, and thus more likely to form a consistent habit. He wrote, “everything that can be achieved by altruism—the dutiful, moral consideration of others—can be achieved, and much more, by the process of widening and deepening ourselves” (2005a, 516). Despite this brief analysis, there appear to be elements of congruity in the concepts of self-realisation and commonage consciousness. Both concepts prioritise the importance of a realigned subjectivity as a response to global ecological degradation, and both call for an overcoming of the subject– object divide through processes of mutual identification with the natural world. Further, like Moriarty, Næss argued that self-realisation rejects the view, characteristic of Galilean ontology, that direct, sensory experience cannot provide access to reality itself. In contrast, Næss maintained that secondary and tertiary qualities, such as aesthetic experiences of a landscape (as beautiful, ugly, pristine, etc.), as well as the value placed on the landscape or environment, serve to constitute the concrete contents of one’s environment and consequently ought to be primary subjects of ethical analysis. It is in line with this latter view that Næss pointed to direct, spontaneous experience with, and in, free nature7 as a means to develop and cultivate the

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  41 maturation required in the transition towards the ecological self. Næss understood spontaneous experience as not necessarily sensory, but “bodily” depicting it as an experience with nature which precedes cognition (Diehm and Næss 2004, 12). A central aspect is the depletion of the individual ego in the act of perception, with Næss claiming that “one must abandon the sentiment that there always must be an ego involved in experience” (Næss 2005b, 337). It is precisely in this unburdening from the ego that true identification can occur, in the sense that only then can the relations which constitute one’s identity be felt and experienced. Næss experienced examples of this identification process in relation to the mountain that he lived on and identified as a father figure, Hallingskarvet. He also pointed to such experiences as represented in poetry, and cites So-to-ba’s poem, “in which the sound of the mountain revealed reality, and the poet had satori in listening to it” (Næss 2005b, 337).8 Stephen Harding presented Aldo Leopold’s encounter with the wolf in A Sand County Almanac as another example, in which Leopold’s experience with the wolf enacted a deep philosophical and personal change. It was the dying of the light in the eyes of the old wolf that led Leopold to recognise the comprehensive and intrinsic relatedness of the biotic community.9 In Næss’s view, Leopold’s recognition was the recognition of more complex, higher order gestalts. It is in this sense that, for Næss, spontaneous experience “acquaints us with the real” (Næss 1989, 136). Here, too, similarities can be gleaned in Næss’s concept of spontaneous experience and Moriarty’s philosophy of commonage consciousness. Highlighted in both concepts are those experiences with the natural world that are liberated from the confines of narrow subjectivity, and in which the boundaries between the self and the place one is in, or the living beings one is in proximity with, are blurred. In one poignant depiction, for example, Moriarty recounted an evening cycling home along the banks of the Owenmore river10 adjacent to a flying heron, both moving into a heavy wind. Moriarty described that, for a brief moment, he exchanged identity with the heron. He experienced the labour of the “slow, arched wingbeats along the river,” while the heron was “the one pushing mechanically along the road” (Moriarty 2007a, 136). Such an encounter transformed his sense of himself forever, such that he observed “never again would I be so fixed in my human identity” (Moriarty 2007a, 136). While Næss calls such experiences spontaneous and direct, Moriarty refers to this epistemological posture as “inapprehensive perception,” a kind of perception that doesn’t seek to “apprehend or grasp or lay hold of reality” (2007a, 373). In so far as this involves a subtraction of ego and intellect, this perception overcomes a strict subject–object dualism in that essentialist divides between oneself and one’s surroundings are obscured, or reduced altogether. Thus, a feeling and experience of “we-awareness” emerges in these exchanges. For Næss, for example, Hallingskarvet is a fundamental and inseparable part of his own identity, pointing to the

42  Nora Ward broader acknowledgment that to be a human being is to be in relationship with one’s environment, the precise meaning of Næss’s concepts of the ecological self. As Luca Valera wrote, “we can no longer say that the environment starts where the boundary of our skin ends, because we ‘live an environment’ much more than we ‘live in it’” (Valera 2018, 3). At times, Moriarty referred to such an acknowledgement and experience of belonging as “inhabitation,” saying further that a posture of inhabitation means that one must “become the fox they are looking at and so, instead of talking objectively about him, they speak subjectively, meaning experientially from within him” (Moriarty 2007a, 136). Put simply, both Næss and Moriarty acknowledge the path to self-realisation as intrinsically linked to a resistance of transcendence narratives, and an epistemologically pious manner of co-existence which recognises mutuality and belonging as the fundamental mode of existence. Questions remain, however, as to how to evoke these experiences with the natural world. It certainly appears that for both thinkers, direct experience with free nature, which includes sensory immersion and precise attention to the details of one’s place, is one way. Indeed, it is probably not coincidental that both men lived primarily outdoor lives, with Næss an avid mountaineer and outdoorsman, and Moriarty a gardener and walker. I contend here, however, that Moriarty’s work offers another path that tends to be less observed in the work of deep ecology, but nonetheless may be an important complement to the concept of self-realisation. In particular, for Moriarty, it is story and myth that constitute fundamental tools with which to approach the epistemologically pious manner of co-existence that both thinkers called for and see as essential to the development of the ecological self. Story, as it functions in Moriarty’s work, results in what Diehm understands to be central to the process of self-realisation, an “[expansion] of the possibilities for new forms of encounter with nature for a deep understanding of the values it holds” (Diehm 2006, 33). By attesting to the “insurgent strangeness of the world” (Moriarty 2007b, 40), stories have the potential to cause a rift in perceptual and behavioural habits and subjectivities, and open up new pathways for the experience of nature’s value.

Story and the Expanded Self For Moriarty, to be housed is not primarily to be housed in brick and mortar, but rather to live in and with stories (Moriarty 2001, 2007a, b, 2009). As mentioned above, upon returning to Ireland, Moriarty lamented that he had fallen out of his story, resulting in a sense of estrangement from both his country and himself. In time, however, he found other stories that allowed him to inhabit and co-exist with the land. He explained “it wasn’t Descartes, it wasn’t even Shakespeare […] it was some old Aboriginal stories, it was some old Native American stories that took me by the hand and took me back to Earth” (Moriarty 2007b, 10). For Moriarty, stories

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  43 function as a type of home, a place to reside and live from and within. In congruence with the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and Alisdair McIntyre, stories and narratives are the means by which we constitute ourselves and our lives. Ricoeur wrote, for example, that “our existence cannot be separated from the stories that we tell ourselves” (Ricoeur 1991, 156). Likewise, Moriarty referred to the stories he assembled as the “forms of my own sensibility and the categories of my understanding” (Moriarty 2007a, 86). In the following, I look to two ways in which story and narrative are utilised in Moriarty’s work in a manner that fosters the development of commonage consciousness. The first is his use of story to challenge habits and norms relating to subjectivity and one’s experience in the world, and the second is the function of narrative to bring about an animation of the land, such that a sense of agency, and synergetic potential, is revealed. For Moriarty, stories challenge subjectivities precisely because stories have a central function in the formation of identities and identifications, both personally and culturally. He wrote: A story [can] create, individually and as people. A story whose images and metaphors are the rods and cones of our retinas. A story whose images and metaphors are the forms of our sensibility and the categories of our understanding. A story whose seeing subsumes biological sight. Our third eye isn’t a separate eye. It is a way of seeing things that informs the eyes we already have. Eyes informed by great myths. (Moriarty 1997, quoted in O’Donoghue 2013, 170) In line with this thinking, Moriarty engages in the rewriting of origin myths to foster new imaginaries in relation to both self and other. One, in particular, stands out, a retelling of Noah’s Ark in his book Turtle Gone a Long Time, Vol II. In Moriarty’s version of the myth, Noah is depicted as unable to land back on shore after the flood due to the conceptual constraints of his cosmology. In particular, it was the dominating mandate in Genesis to subdue the earth that disallowed him from walking upon it, so that even if he could land back on soil, he would remain alienated from it. For Moriarty, what Noah was in need of, therefore, is the medicine of a great story of origins to replace his biblical one. To achieve this, Noah sends numerous animals, including otters, cormorants, owls, to collect origin stories. Each animal returned with a different story. Eventually, upon hearing and collecting enough stories from enough animals, Noah was again able to land again on the soil. As Moriarty explained, “every story [told by the animals] opens its door to the Earth” (Moriarty 1997, quoted in O’Donoghue 2013, 168). In this retelling, Moriarty emphasised both the connection between story and self, and the centrality of myth in the constitution of oneself. He commented that “when a great story of origins originates great seeing in you, originates great dreaming and great walking in you, that the Earth, itself

44  Nora Ward so great, will come co-creatively close” (Moriarty 1997, quoted in O’Donoghue 2013, 165). For Noah, what was needed was not only a new myth, but rather a myth that originates deinanthropos thinking. Pointing to a recognition of our animal natures, deinanthropos here refers to an acknowledgment of a mutuality with the rest of the natural world. Thus, while the biblical narratives of domination and the modern ontologies of Occidental philosophers emphasise human exclusiveness, Moriarty’s myths focus on those parts of human identity that share commonalities with the land and its inhabitants. In Moriarty’s words, it is the recognition that “the hands with which we play the Kreutzer Sonata are still structurally analogous to the fins they have evolved from” (2009, 236). Inspiring deinthropus thinking was not only achieved through the rewriting of great myths, but also in the recounting of personal anecdotes. In What the Curlew Said, for example, Moriarty depicted one particular exchange between his young neighbour, Sara, and a horse. He recounted that while feeding a neighbour’s horse buttered bread slices over the halfdoor to his house one evening, Sara waddled up to the scene with her teddy bear in hand. Finding the usual entrance to her neighbour’s house blocked by a large horse, yet unphased, Sara simply pushed the tail of the horse to one side, ducked in between the hind legs and under the belly, and grabbing a foreleg, hauled herself up on the door of the house. There they all sat, drinking tea and eating bread together. Providing significant symbolic meaning to Moriarty, he stated that this encounter, and little Sara’s journey that evening, “had enacted an immense cultural mutation” (Moriarty 2007a, 107). He observed that instead of taking a hatchet to the horse in my door, she eased her tail aside, she walked between her hind legs, and she brought all that is bearish in us into good com-panis, into good company, and, marvellous though this was in outer enactment, inwardly it was equally marvellous, a marvel of integration. (Moriarty 2007a, 107) This small and ostensibly insignificant act provided such meaning for Moriarty because—even in its smallness—it revealed the possibility of dissenting from the primary psychic and cultural modes of atomisation and differentiation. An act of revolt, like a small child gently easing the tail of a horse aside to join a gathering, is powerful in its capacity to symbolise alternative kinds of co-habitation. Ending the story with optimism, Moriarty reflected that “thinking of Sara coming through as I did the washing up that night, seeing her coming through, the horse looking down at her, I knew that we could be a significant species” (Moriarty 2007a, 107). By communicating commonage consciousness in story in these ways, Moriarty welcomed the reader into alternative subjective frameworks experientially. Commonage consciousness is accessed using the imagination,

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  45 rather than an objectivist mode of knowledge acquisition. In this way, stories provide a pathway in which alternative forms of co-existence can be recreated, experienced and felt. These stories also serve to frame experiences with the natural world. To refer again to Moriarty’s experience with the heron, it can be understood as an interaction that was made possible only when Moriarty rid himself of the stories of atomism and mastery that he had inherited from his upbringing. Thus, stories of commonage consciousness, such as Blackfoot tribe’s tale of the buffalo girl, cultivated the grounds for an expansion of meaning and possibility in a simple and insignificant interaction. In addition to providing pathways towards subjectivities of relation, stories also serve to conjure a sense of the uncanny. For Moriarty, while scientific knowledge offers detail and conviction regarding the operations of the physical world, a hegemonic scientific worldview results in an attitude of hubris and arrogance, in which the capacity of the human intellect is considered as corresponding directly to what can be known about the world. Stories, on the other hand, affirm those aspects of reality that remain unknown, and perhaps can never be known, and thus serve as a counter to the reductionism of many bluntly scientific accounts. Referring to the call of the curlew, the title of which his final book is based on, he stated “we might never know what the curlew said […] better that way” (Moriarty 2007a, 74). In expressing this sense of strangeness, Moriarty recounted an old folktale of a hunter who lived by himself in a remote cottage. One evening upon returning home, the hunter noticed smoke rising from his chimney. Entering his house, he sees a fire blazing in the hearth and a hot meal at the table. While he ate the food and sat at the cozy fire, he was dismayed at the oddity of it all: “the strangeness and danger and wonder of the world was in his house, blazing from his hearth, steaming from his table” (Moriarty 2007a, 86). The next day, he lay waiting outside in order to spot the intruder and was astonished to see a fox trotting towards the door and pushing it open. After a few moments, once again, smoke began to seep from the chimney and the smells of cooking wafted from the windows. Sneaking closer to the house and peering in the window, the hunter saw a woman cooking over the open fire with a fox pelt hanging beside her. When the hunter entered, the woman informed him that she had come to live with him, and from that day on, the hunter and the woman lived together. Every morning, the hunter had fresh clothes laid out for him, and a fire and hot meal waiting for him every evening. Despite the pleasantries, the hunter remained distraught at his new situation, constantly fearful and fretting about this strange woman who could turn into a fox at any minute. Indeed, the hunter considered that it might be better to live alone than suffer with such uncertainty and queerness. As the years went on, his worries continued, until one day, he couldn’t take it anymore and complained about the smell of fox in the house. The following day, he made another complaint, and this

46  Nora Ward time sat as far away from the woman as he could. The next morning, the woman removed the fox pelt from the door, draped it over her shoulders, and trotted off into the distance, never to return. From then on, “the only human footprints the hunter ever saw were his own” (Moriarty 2007a, 87). What this story reveals, for Moriarty, is the sense in which postures towards reality can hinder an engagement with the multiplicity of meanings intrinsic to relations of coexistence. Acknowledging agency external to the human domain, and simultaneously accepting a sense of oneself as a part of a greater and vaster whole, requires the related understanding that reality “is queerer than we can suppose” (Moriarty 2007a, 88). Put simply, it involves an admission that there is a plurality in meaning in the experience of nature that goes beyond the parameters of human sciences, and even the limits of human intellect. For Moriarty, it is with story that such a picture can be most accurately represented, in that it is though the poetic imagination that a sense of openness to the unbidden can be most robustly fostered. He explained “I would want the path to also be folktales, attesting in a way that science very often doesn’t, to the unpredictable strangeness of the world” (2007a, 40). Such a sentiment of openness is central also to Næss’s understanding of spontaneous, direct experience, in that such experiences are essentially pluralistic in that they recognise an “expansion of the possibilities for new forms of encounter with nature.” Valera reiterates the importance of the process of opening, commenting that the “ecological self essentially recalls the human being’s constitutive opening to something other than itself, or more importantly, the need for a non-closure to the relationship with the other” (Valera 2018, 669). Yet, in Moriarty’s philosophy, this function of story to communicate a sense of uncanniness and openness in the relationship with the natural world might at first appear contradictory to the other purpose illuminated in the first two examples, that stories serve to inspire relation and critique subjectivities of difference and foreignness. To understand this dichotomy, we can again return to both the conceptual orientation of self-realisation and commonage consciousness. In both accounts, the individual is internally related to the whole, but not in the manner in which the individual is indiscernible. Identification, or the process of developing a sense of we-awareness, are not processes in which the individual is subsumed, but rather one in which the individual is widened and expanded, reflected in Næss’s use of the term, “the expansive self.” The process does not involve, therefore, an annihilation of the boundaries of the self, rather an opening into different aspects of self-understanding and identity. As Næss recalled: “the identification process leads deeper into Nature as a whole, but also deeper into unique features of particular beings. It does not lead away from the singular and finite” (Næss 1977, 51). Similarly, Moriarty stated that “instead of threatening them, the unity I lived from sustains things in their particularity, in their diversity. At no point, however, are things in their particularity extravagant to that unity” (Moriarty 2007a, 45). The dance

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  47 between relation and difference that is characteristic of both concepts carves out a space for both an empathetic relation with the other, as well as an awareness of the inherent spontaneity, subjectivity and strangeness of the external world outside oneself. Put simply, it involves the recognition that the human is a part of the environment, but never exceeds it, and cannot master or grasp the whole in its totality.

Conclusion: Finding a Home in the World I have suggested that there are interesting parallels between Moriarty’s concept of commonage consciousness and Næss’s framework of self-realisation. Both concepts call for a relational mode of existence, that acknowledges that humans don’t merely live in environments, but are part of them; that the human person is “internally related to nature” (Diehm and Næss 2004, 14). Crucial to both processes, and represented by Næss’s view of spontaneous, direct experience, is the sense to which a posture of openness and unboundedness is a central feature of this process of identification and in the widening of the self. In Moriarty’s work, stories are used as another way to achieve this openness. Stories connect the human to something bigger and stranger than ourselves, eliciting a sense of mystery and wonder, and providing an antidote to bluntly materialist and reductive epistemologies. Using imagination as the primary epistemic tool, commonage consciousness is felt and experienced, and reality opens to a broader array of potentiality, carving a space for a plurality of meaningful interactions and forms of co-existence between the self and the natural world. Ultimately, both Moriarty and Næss are interested in finding a home in the world. As Valera wrote, “Næss’s ecological self is nothing but an echo of the theme of the home and of belonging to a place” (Valera 2018, 661). Moriarty, too, in finding himself estranged from his homeland, used stories as tools to capture and create a sense of belonging, to finding a home again. I contend that Moriarty’s use of narrative and myth is an important complement to the concept of self-realisation and the ecological self in deep ecology. In broader terms, it also may represent a significant contribution to the pressing need to develop stronger ethical and emotional ties to the natural world and foster habits and behaviour of accommodation and adaption in relation to it, connecting to Freya Mathews observation that “in societies in which desire is reconfigured truly to ‘fit into nature’, the ultimate frames of reference may need to be poetic ones” (Mathews 2010, 5).

Notes 1 Moriarty was born in 1938 in County Kerry, Ireland. He worked as a lecturer in English Studies in the University of Manitoba and later as a gardener in the Carmelite Monastery in Oxford, as well as in Connemara, in the west of Ireland. He is the author of ten books, including Dreamtime (1988), Invoking

48  Nora Ward

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Ireland (2005), Night Journey to Buddh Gaia (2006) and What the Curlew Said (2007). He died in Kerry in 2007. Pequod is the name of the whaling ship that appears in the novel, Moby Dick, written by Herman Melville. From the Greek κενόω (kenóō) “to empty out,” kenosis is a term used in Christian theology that refers to an act of self-emptying, usually for the purpose of accommodating divine will. Manannán, also known as Manannán mac Lir (son of the sea) is interpreted as a sea-god and warrior of the Otherworld in Irish mythology. Usually referring to something that inspires wonder. In Buddhism, the doctrine that that “I” or Atman does not exist. Deep ecologists, including Næss, usually refer to free nature as natural areas without intensive human intervention or interference. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, Satori refers to enlightenment and translates to “seeing into one’s true nature.” For Harding’s analysis, see Stephen Harding, “What Is Deep Ecology?”, https:// www.schumachercollege.org.uk/learning-resources/what-is-deep-ecology. Accessed April 20th, 2021. A river in Connemara, in the west of Ireland.

References Diehm, Christian. 2006. “Arne Næss and the Task of Gestalt Ontology.” Environmental Ethics 28 (1): 21–35. Diehm, Christian. 2007. “Identification with Nature: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Ethics and the Environment 12 (2): 1–22. Diehm, Christian, and Arne Næss. 2004. “Here I Stand: An Interview with Arne Næss.” Environmental Philosophy 1 (2): 6–19. Evernden, Neil. 1992. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Mathews, Freya. 1988. “Conservation and Self-Realization: A Deep Ecology Perspective.” Environmental Ethics 10 (4): 347–55. ———. 2010. “On Desiring Nature.” Indian Journal of Ecocriticism 3: 1–9. Moriarty, John. 1997. Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume Two: Horsehead Nebula Neighing. Dublin: Lilliput Press. ———. 2001. Nostos: An Autobiography. Dublin: Lilliput Press. ———. 2007a. What the Curlew Said. Dublin: Lilliput Press. ———. 2007b. One Evening in Eden. Kerry: Slí na Fírinne Productions. ———. 2009 [1994]. Dreamtime. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1994; expanded version, Dublin Lilliput Press, 2009. Næss, Arne. 1973. “The Shallow and the Deep-Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary.” Inquiry 16: 95–100. ———. 1977. “Spinoza and Ecology.” Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel 7 (1): 45–54. ———. 1989. “Ecosophy and Gestalt Ontology.” Trumpeter 6 (4): 134–7. ———. 2005a. “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being-in-the-World.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, vol. 10, edited by H. Glasser and A. Drengson, 515–30. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2005b. “Gestalt Thinking and Buddhism.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, vol. 10, edited by H. Glasser and A. Drengson, 337–42. Dordrecht: Springer.

Commonage Consciousness and Fitting in with the Earth  49 O’Donoghue, Brendan. 2013. A Moriarty Reader. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From Text to Action Essays in Hermeneutics II. Translated by K. Blamey and J. B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Valera, Luca. 2018. “Home, Ecological Self and Self-Realization: Understanding Asymmetrical Relationships through Arne Næss’s Ecosophy.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (2): 661–75.

3

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness, Affordances and Providence Michaël Bauwens

Introduction: Metaphysics, Ethics, Goodness A theological enquiry concerning an environmental ethic of fittingness invites by its very nature an interdisciplinary approach, where a tentative search for a common ground is probably the most fitting intellectual attitude. What follows is a philosophical contribution to this search, employing metaphysics as the traditional place to find a common ground for all that is. This need not imply a univocal concept of being, but metaphysics can offer a common meeting place where theologians, philosophers and others can meet each other and discuss topics of common concern, as a point at which these different disciplines can at least interface with each other. More specifically, this chapter starts from William Desmond’s observation that our ethical thinking needs to rethink ‘the relation between being and being good’ (Desmond 2001, 1). Desmond has long since been an advocate of metaphysics as a live option, also and especially in relation to our thinking about God. An environmental ethics would then need to rethink the relation between the being and the being good of the environment, beyond immediate anthropocentric concerns. That is not a plea for more meta-ethical theorising, but a call to pay attention to a question about ethics and the good that is deeply metaphysical. The locus classicus for thinking about the relation between being and being good is the convertibility of being and goodness. This standard theme in ancient and medieval metaphysics has deep roots in Platonism, and thereby even opens avenues towards mysticism. In The Republic, Plato used the sun as an analogy for the good, whereby the good not only gives the light of understanding but also gives life and growth to all that is. Moreover, in the reported words of Socrates: ‘the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power’ (Plato 1908, VI 509b). The famous allegory of the cave is presented shortly after this passage, visualising the point just made. The convertibility of being and goodness is here ultimately grounded in the primordiality of goodness vis-à-vis being and was later developed into the distinction between the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-5

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness  51 primordial goodness of the Creator vis-à-vis the participating goodness of creation. Coupled with an Aristotelian teleology, it provided for a stable and theologically grounded moral order. The convertibility of being and goodness received a heavy blow at the hands of modernity, famously illustrated by Hume’s dichotomy between fact and value, but the roots of the problem arguably go back to late medieval voluntarism and the Euthyphro dilemma it at least implicitly poses. If the created order – including its moral laws – is ultimately grounded in a contingent act of the divine will, why would it necessarily reflect, or participate in, a primordial goodness that ultimately communicates God Himself? Hume’s famous claim in On the standard of Taste that beauty – or goodness, on the convertibility of all the transcendentals – ‘is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them’ (§7) can then be seen as a secularised version of one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma. Environmental ethics can be done after that subjective turn, starting from an anthropocentric concern – e.g., the survival and flourishing of mankind. But the question is whether there is an inherent, ethically relevant notion of ‘fittingness’ to be found in our relation to the environment as such, or whether it is we who project our anthropocentric concerns like survival onto a neutral environment which subsequently only gains an ethical relevance to the extent that it ‘fits in’ with our projects. For in that case, fittingness would merely exist in the mind which contemplates these projects, as an externally imposed teleology. But if the environment is nothing but a set of resources for a multitude of human projects, it can quickly lead to its economic instrumentalisation, exhaustion and subsequent crisis – an instrumentalisation by an exalted or secularised understanding of man as made in the image of a voluntaristic God. Man’s heart was made for God, and its restlessness will fuel an impossible thirst for economic growth at the cost of the environment because it is impossible to fill our hearts with the economic goodies we can extract from it – worshipping the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1: 25). Perhaps Weber’s ‘spirit of capitalism’ is a sign of the growing restlessness of man’s heart? Alternatively, a metaphysical approach to an environmental ethics of fittingness could seek to understand the being good of our environment in a way that precedes anthropocentric projects and concerns. This could lead to a static or monolithic understanding of a pre-given metaphysical and hence ethical order to which human conformity is demanded, as a teleological approach or a Platonist metaphysics of participation might imply. It could lead to a kind of environmentalism that re-introduces the convertibility of being and goodness by making the environment the highest good over and against a voluntaristic humanity, whereby man’s modifications of the environment (and ultimately man himself) are bad relative to a pristine and ultimately deified ‘natural’ order of things – ‘mother nature’ surreptitiously replacing God the Father.

52  Michaël Bauwens But a goodness preceding anthropocentric concerns and projects need not neglect the dynamic and interactive nature of the relationship between man and his environment. There is an important grain of truth in the subjective turn of modern ethical thought, in line with man’s innermost metaphysical reality as an imago Dei who is thereby also a co-creator of reality – an imago Dei creatoris. A careful balance between the exalted status of a co-creator and the humble status of a co-creator can make that subjective turn fruitful, namely by extending the original goodness of creation with the goodness that initially merely exists in the human mind which contemplates it, but which can subsequently realise and materialise it in the created order, in a dynamic interplay with the providence of the Creator.

A Metaphysics of Affordances and Mutual Manifestations To the extent that these two tendencies (a secularised voluntarism vs. an absolutised environmental order) start from the opposing side of a subject– object dichotomy, the sought-for dynamic balance seeks to overcome this typically modern dichotomy by turning to a concept borrowed from ecological psychology – namely James Gibson’s concept of affordances. It will here be used in a metaphysical and theological environment far beyond what was ‘dreamt of’ in ecological psychology, trusting that metaphysics will be a reliable interface for such an interdisciplinary endeavour.1 The term ‘affordance’ was coined by Gibson himself: The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, for good or ill. The verb to afford is in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. (Gibson 1986, 127, original emphasis) A fragile bridge affords crossing to a child, but not to an adult person. The water surface of a lake affords walking to a water bug, but not to humans. Affordances are therefore neither an objective property of the environment because it is always relative to an actor, nor a subjective one that ‘exists merely in the mind which contemplates it’, because an affordance depends on the specific properties of both. Affordances thereby enable a kind of fittingness of an actor relative to its environment that is inherently dynamic and relational. Gibson is quite aware of the unique perspective this offers: An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness  53 dichotomy of subjective–objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (Gibson 1986, 129) In order to rethink the relation between being and being good, the first question is what affordances are metaphysically – the question about affordances and goodness will be treated in the next section. The proposal is to understand affordances in terms of a metaphysics of powers or dispositions. In the recent literature, both terms are mostly used interchangeably, as will be done here. A metaphysics of powers is a project that has been steadily growing in the last decades and years in analytic metaphysics. Its unifying concern is mostly anti-Humean – rejecting Hume’s rejection of powers, dispositions or potentialities as real metaphysical features of our world, even when they are not presently manifest or actual. 2 The following brief presentation of such a metaphysics starts from a seminal article by early proponents of a metaphysics of powers (Martin and Heil 1998), and relies crucially on the notion of a mutual manifestation of reciprocal disposition partners. Powers or dispositions are not made manifest by a trigger, their manifestation is a mutual manifestation, together with another power or disposition as a reciprocal disposition partner. For example, the solubility of salt in water is a real, irreducible feature of both salt and water, which are reciprocal disposition partners that mutually manifest salty water. That salty solution is a manifestation of the pre-existing but hitherto unmanifested powers or dispositions of water and salt. The reciprocity of powers for a mutual manifestation on the one hand, and the relationality of affordances as action possibilities on the other hand, are a good fit for each other, and the connection between affordances and dispositions has been made before (Turvey 1992; Vetter 2018). Next, salty water as a mutual manifestation has itself further, new powers, that is, iterated powers or dispositions (like conducting electricity) which only arise upon the earlier mutual manifestation of the powers of salt and water. When you add salt to a water basin in an electric circuit with a lamp, the lamp will start to glow and gradually glow more intensely the more the salt is dissolving. The power of salty water to conduct electricity was always already there as an iterated disposition. Likewise, the shining lamp was always already there, it was just waiting for the salty solution (and its electricity-conducting power) to become manifest upon the meeting of the salt and water. The glowing lamp is now lighting up the room, which gives, in turn, new powers to the room – which are not really new, since they were likewise always already there. Moving on to our theological domain, the lit room now gives a reader the power to read a book in the evening and ‘enlighten’ him or herself by gaining insight into the truths of, say, philosophy or theology. That

54  Michaël Bauwens enlightenment would be a mutual manifestation of the reader’s contingent intellectual background, with the contents of the book as a reciprocal disposition partner – enabled by the lamp and the salt and the water, etc. Similarly, then, the truth that has at that point become manifest was always already there, even though it was not yet manifest, but was eternally waiting to become manifest in the mind and the soul of that reader, it just needed a little bit of salt – if the salt has not lost its flavour, that is. The fact that truth can only become manifest in a ‘mind which contemplates it’, and depends for its manifestation on (e.g., historical) contingent reciprocal disposition partners, need therefore not imply that it merely exists in that mind – pace Hume. This eternal aspect of truth also contains the mustard seed for the final section on providence, which also employs the intertwinement of the (historical) contingencies of specific reciprocal disposition partners, with the eternity of providence. A further aspect is that dispositions have disposition partners for very different, often incompatible, mutual manifestations. The salt cannot be used at the same time to lighten up the room and bake bread – and it will be nearly impossible to use the salt to lighten up the room once it has been used to make bread. Hence, powers or dispositions far outstrip their manifestations and many manifestations that could (have) happen(ed) will never happen. There is an inexhaustible abundance that will only contingently become manifest in certain ways, at certain times and places, with further, sometimes hitherto unmanifested, powers or dispositions. When, how and where these manifestations occur will irrevocably alter the total state of affairs. Time and history are fully real, certain opportunities can be gone forever, or need a long chain of iterated dispositions before they can become manifest (again) – a time during which other opportunities for certain manifestations can be gone forever. All of this, however, does not alter the aspect of eternity that the previous paragraph pointed out. All these points – pre-existence, reciprocity, iterations and abundance – result in the image of a holistic web of powers or dispositions: ‘a disposition should be conceived of as occupying a region of a holistic web of possible mutual manifestations with reciprocal partners’ (Martin and Heil 1998, 295). We do not live in a world of discrete entities, but in a net of abundant and reciprocal powers and thus far unseen manifestations at the end of long chains of iterations. This power-net or power-web can be understood to be spread out synchronically, across the different alternative possibilities we face at any single instant of time, as well as diachronically, across the historically evolving state of the universe. Such a metaphysics can undergird the reality of affordances, as mutual manifestation of reciprocal disposition partners. Given the purpose of rethinking the relation between being and being good, how does this metaphysics relate to the convertibility of being and goodness? Answering that question is the goal of the next section.

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness  55

Goodness and Dispositions In the same way that affordances cut across the subject–object dichotomy, they imply that there is no dualist distinction between a natural environment on the one hand, and an artificial or cultural environment on the other hand: Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment? To change what it affords him. He has made more available what benefits him and less pressing what injures him. […] This is not a new environment—an artificial environment distinct from the natural environment—but the same old environment modified by man. (Gibson 1986, 130) We make the environment more beneficial and less injuring – more fitting – for ourselves and our projects and concerns. But considering the previous section, all of these benefits were always already there, waiting to become manifest. Man’s modification of nature need not imply a deviation from a pristine state but can be a way of bringing out or uncovering the more hospitable features of what was always already there. In ecological psychology, Gibson links this modification to the process of niche construction, whereby a niche is a set of affordances – affording nutrition, shelter, etc. – that brings out these beneficial or hospitable features of our environment. Constructing a niche does not introduce a nature– culture distinction, but is a way to make certain affordances more readily available. Birds gather twigs and leaves to build a nest, humans dig up clay to make bricks and build a house, clear the land to enable a richer harvest, etc. – although Gibson is careful to point out that a niche is not limited to a certain place (a habitat) but refers more broadly to a way of life. Metaphysically, the nest and the house and the harvest were always already there, waiting to become manifest upon a certain combination of reciprocal disposition partners. In that sense, the alteration of our natural environment by way of niche construction is a gradual uncovering or manifestation of a goodness that was always already there. Gibson also adds that the richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are provided by other animals and, for us, other people. […] Behavior affords behavior, and the whole subject matter of psychology and of the social sciences can be thought of as an elaboration of this basic fact. (Gibson 1986, 135) Hence, the development of culture can likewise be a kind of niche construction among people, making more readily available what people positively

56  Michaël Bauwens afford each other – marriage for what men and women afford each other, a market for what buyers and sellers afford each other, etc. A culture is a set of rules and habits by which people live, act and think, thereby enabling certain behaviour, and avoiding other behaviour. Rules, habits and institutions in general can likewise be captured via a metaphysics of powers (Bauwens 2018). They are then likewise not an alteration of a natural or pristine state of affairs, but a way of uncovering or making manifest the best of what was always already there, in a dynamic interaction with whatever historically contingent situation we find ourselves in. Recent work on the connection between dispositions and ethics has described value in general as a mutual manifestation between reciprocal disposition partners: ‘value would be described as a mutual manifestation between perceivers and objects. The value does not belong to either the perceiver or the object exclusively but is produced by them jointly as a result of them coming together’ (Anjum, Lie, and Mumford 2013, 245). Assuming knowledge or understanding to be values, what was described earlier as the process whereby a lit room, a book and the reader’s mind jointly manifest understanding, would be an example of this. But given that powers precede their manifestation, value as a mutual manifestation precedes its manifestation as well. As an unmanifested power or disposition, it was always already there, like the unmanifested light of the lamp, even though its manifestation is an irreducibly contingent and historical event. The valuable insights gained from reading the book were likewise always already there, even though its manifestation was an irreducibly contingent and historical event, e.g., dependent on the interpretation of the reader as a reciprocal disposition partner for the mutual manifestation, together with the book, of the valuable insight. Beauty would be a mutual manifestation between a painting or piece of music and an observer or listener, existing neither in the object nor merely in the mind of the subject, but as a mutual manifestation between the two. The metaphysical position of pandispositionalism whereby there are powers ‘all the way down’, and the axiological position that everything that is valuable is valuable in virtue of something that is the same in all of these different cases, is assumed. What is nutritious for one organism might be poisonous for another organism, since they are different disposition partners, but that does not affect the universality of nutrition as valuable. Similarly, knowledge is valuable, and nutrition is valuable, and one or the other might be more valuable for different persons or different times, but that does not affect the universality of that which makes either one of these values good in these different cases. Taken together, this opens up an avenue to think about an ultimate or original goodness underlying all that is valuable. When you eat bread, the mutual manifestation of your body and the bread as reciprocal disposition partners results in an event of nutrition, which in turn sustains your life. Bread affords nutrition, and hence life, so bread is a reciprocal disposition partner for the manifestation of life.

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness  57 Assuming life to be valuable, even from a naturalistic point of view, this value was always already there as an unmanifested power or disposition, awaiting its contingent manifestation. The ‘nutritiousness’ was always already there as an iterated disposition, although it really required all the contingent work of the farmer and the baker to bring it to someone’s table as a long series of mutual manifestations of reciprocal disposition partners. Moreover, if one does not properly conserve the bread, mould could turn the bread into something poisonous. Nutritiousness, and value in general, is often a very transient property. A prepared meal on a plate rather quickly loses whatever taste and nutrition it affords. Whether the bread actually manifests its valuable nutritiousness remains highly contingent on someone eating it. Again, history is real and irrevocable. But when the bread is eaten, it finally manifests something that was always already there as an iterated power, from the very beginning – at least from the beginning of time. Arguably, it existed even before the beginning of time if we consider the creative power of God before the act of creation, although that would stretch to its very limits the metaphysical notion of ‘real existence’ of the nutritiousness as an iterated power and stand in need of a theological reconsideration. Nevertheless, it would be an interesting avenue to explore, given that God is the fullness of being, and God’s creative power becomes manifest in creation. It is a creation which evidently does not exhaust or fully reveal God Himself, lest we end up in pantheism, but that manifestations do not exhaust powers was already mentioned above. Whether and how God can become manifest in His creation given such a metaphysics could then be explored in relation to the incarnation. Hence, value as a mutual manifestation unearths the value that was always already there, pointing back to an ultimate origin of what is valuable, a primordial goodness that becomes manifest in myriad ways. Instead of, or in complement to, a metaphysics of participation and transcendence, what offers itself here is a metaphysics whereby goodness is unearthed, uncovered, revealed or made manifest in the concrete and contingent historical actions of actors. Given the plenitude of powers that characterises our environment as such – albeit hidden in chains of iterated powers – one can almost perceive the values lying hidden there, like a farmer seeing the rich crop in a bag of seeds. Value permeates the environment in virtue of this very plenitude of powers. Unearthing this value invites an interaction with the environment that is both engaging and dynamic while being respectful and even awe-struck in relation to the ultimate origin of that value. That latter point depends on a certain receptivity on the part of the subject for such an ultimate origin, or for the pure form of goodness which impels the search for such an origin. That is precisely the point at which a theological approach is called for, and the next section will attempt to bring the preceding insights into a theological context.

58  Michaël Bauwens

Goodness and Providence Since man does not live by bread alone, the nutritiousness of bread and the value of life can awaken the quest towards the origin of those values, as well as – due to the restlessness of our hearts – their ultimate or most pure and eternal form. Given that what all these valuable things have in common is goodness itself, where do we find goodness itself? The restlessness of our heart can be turned away from an economic frenzy to fill it with benefits extracted from our environment, towards a consideration of and search for the highest good of which all these earthly goods are but a partial foretaste. Acquiring a taste for pure goodness itself requires an iterated disposition. Humans are born with a power to use language, or play an instrument, but it requires a long and sustained effort and exposure to develop that power. Likewise, we might all be born with an innate capacity (capax Dei) to recognise pure goodness – but Plato himself (or rather: Diotima) warns us in the Symposium that it requires a sustained effort that ideally starts at a relatively young age to eventually perceive what is there described as pure beauty. The highest beauty can only be perceived by the mind which has been properly trained for it. Assuming that pure goodness precedes and hence surpasses this created order, it is here taken to refer to grace as the supernatural form of goodness. We can recognise the power or capacity of every person to receive or recognise that grace, even though that power requires a chain of iterations, e.g., because of the epistemic consequences of original sin having darkened our minds. Put differently, the influx of grace needs an ‘unclogging’ of our ‘porosity’ towards the divine (cf. Desmond 2008) – or more famously in Augustine’s Confessions: ‘Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness’ (X, 27, 38). Both the radical primacy and gratuitousness of grace, as well as the efficaciousness of natural means (e.g., natural theology), can thereby be recognised. In our toy example, the salt was really needed to enlighten the room so that the arguments in the book could enlighten the reader. What happened in the physical order (in the water basin) enabled something to happen in the mental realm (in the mind of the reader). Similarly, what happens in the natural order (reading a philosophical argument) can enable the influx of supernatural grace, and Augustine repeatedly acknowledged the importance of Platonism (VII, 9, 13; VII, 20, 26; VIII, 2, 3). This does not mean that philosophical arguments can in any way ‘cause’ faith, but philosophical arguments can enable the influx of grace. During a couple of crucial nights in October 1914, the German offensive in the far west of Flanders fields was halted because Karel Cogge and Hendrik Geeraert aided Belgian soldiers to inundate the Yser. They didn’t stop the German offensive, the water (which was always already there, ready to inundate) did, yet they were widely honoured for their role in keeping this outskirt of Belgian territory free. In a similar way, it is grace that ultimately

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness  59 enlightens a soul by inundating it, yet arguments in philosophy, acts of moral uprightness and even good works can all contribute to unclog our porosity for grace – opening the locked sluices of this fallen world to let the water in. Whether Geeraert or the water of the Yser stopped the German offensive is a false dilemma. The water stopped the Germans through the actions of Geeraert, Geeraert stopped the Germans through the power of the water. Although the causal power came from the water, the inundation was a mutual manifestation of both the water and the contingent, historical actions of Cogge and Geeraert. This model works both for the case of enlivening and sharpening our receptivity or porosity of pure goodness, as well as for our efforts to modify our environment to make it a niche for the receptivity of grace. As soon as we have acquired this taste for the pure and highest good, we will modify our environment in such a way that it affords us this highest good. Instead of constructing niches so that they afford us natural goods, we will construct niches so that they afford us supernatural goods. Mining our environment to extract precious metals and other economic goodies is often destructive of the environment, but it is a good visual example of the general metaphysical process of making iterated dispositions (from mines to batteries, from wheat to bread) eventually become manifest. When making the shift from natural goodies to the supernatural good, we will start ‘mining’ our environment differently. We will still need our daily bread (and countless other contingent reciprocal disposition partners) for the influx of grace. But since the radical transcendence of this highest good escapes human (or any other creaturely) control, we can only make our environment more hospitable for the reception of grace by aligning it with truth, beauty, justice, unity, etc. – in brief, by aligning it with the will of the Creator of our environment. Since this radical transcendence also works orthogonally to economic distinctions, it pulls the rug from under a frenzy capitalism which hopes to eventually mine from creation what only the Creator can give. This is not a plea to combat that frenzy with other immanent societal concerns that are making the same basic error, but to direct its quest for goodies to the level where pure goodness is to be found. The concept of niche construction also implies that we can, even structurally, increase the receptivity of creation for grace. But, looking at the environment with the question of how to structurally transform it in order to afford more grace will likely yield a different answer from the question of how to transform it to afford more profit. Again, this is not an indictment against economic or even capitalistic modes of thinking or acting, as long as one is storing up treasures in heaven (Mt. 6: 20) instead of on earth. Given that people provide the richest set of affordances for other people, there is a similar permanent task of shaping our common culture to make it more hospitable to the reception of grace, by unclogging the countless ways in which it is blocked.

60  Michaël Bauwens The fittingness of our actions towards, and modifications of, our (cultural) environment, will then ultimately be judged from the point of view of that pure goodness. That is a transcendent, but not an external point of view because it is standing at the origin of all that is, including our environment and our neighbours. It does not require conformity to a static framework, but an active cooperation as irreducibly historical and contingent reciprocal disposition partners in the permanent process of salvation. Precisely because that goodness is standing at the origin of all that is, our role as reciprocal disposition partners is a role as co-creators and stewards of creation. When that grace has enkindled a personal relationship with the Creator, all the natural and supernatural goodness we encounter can finally be recognised as something more than a neutral goodness, but as providential gifts which were always already there for us, prepared by a loving God, should we happen to make this particular historically contingent path manifest. Given that He wants our eternal happiness, every single event arguably affords a step towards that end, if we are continually and increasingly receptive to the grace to see and understand how it can be a providential step towards that end, along our earthly path to eternal life. Predestination is a domain where angels fear to tread, but according to this picture, there is an array of paths (a series of iterated dispositions) available for every person that affords him or her eternal life – and at least as many leading to damnation. Although the manifestation of either one of these paths is contingent, they were always already there, providentially, from the very beginning. Ultimately, it might not be primarily a matter of us having to make our environment more fitting for our projects, but a matter of making ourselves more fitting for the reception of grace, whatever situation we happen to find ourself in. If our environment is seen to be a rich landscape of affordances, providentially leading us step by step towards an increasingly pure goodness, it will be valued accordingly – not instrumentalised by a theological anthropocentrism that has replaced an economic instrumentalisation, but as a thin veil between us and our Creator, enabling and celebrating our creaturely status. To the extent that we thereby can and should modify our environment, it will be done in order to make grace more readily available, with the full realisation that every single thing we see around us was created from eternity by God as something that affords us a glimpse of his goodness, and a providential drop, or an inundation, of grace. This does not imply denigrating or instrumentalising all the created goods that are less than that pure goodness, but to rightly celebrate and engage with them qua created goods. To what extent can this help to resurrect the convertibility of the being and goodness of our environment? Qua manifestation of God’s creative power, creation is good as such. Moreover, the abundance of powers relative to their possible manifestations gives a real and irreducible power to us, imagines Dei creatoris, to extend His creation one way or the other in

On the Ethics and Metaphysics of Fittingness  61 light of what we find good and valuable. Our ultimate calling is thereby to see all of created goodness, including our own actions and modifications of the environment, as reciprocal disposition partners in the dynamic interaction with the divine grace that is providentially awaiting us every step along the way.

Conclusion This chapter started from the consideration that the path towards an environmental ethics stands in need of a reconsideration of the relation between being and being good, avoiding the Scylla of a secularised voluntarism as well as the Charybdis of a static environmentalism. The concept of affordances, fleshed out by a metaphysics of powers and mutual manifestations, served to cross the subject–object dichotomy and unearth a notion of goodness that was always already there yet allowing for the irreducible contingency of its historical manifestations. In this way, we find ourselves in a rich landscape of affordances, gradually attuning ourselves (and modifying our environment accordingly) to the supreme good for our restless hearts. Instead of a frenzied economic search for the supreme good within our created environment, we can learn to see and respect our environment as something with which we share the goodness of a creature qua creature, and which enables our lives as co-creating children of a loving Father. Moreover, precisely as imagines Dei creatoris, our modifications will be fitting when they are made through Him and towards Him, because without Him we can make nothing of what we can make (cf. John 1: 3). It is key to see how our creaturely co-creativity is perfectly in line with, and enabled by, the divine creativity – and our creaturely ‘it is good’ of the subjectivist turn is in line with and enabled by the divine ‘it is good’ in Genesis. Our care for the environment can thereby be a genuine part of Paul’s call to restore all things in Christ (Eph. 1: 10). Given the birth pangs of creation (Rom. 8: 22), this restoration is about giving birth to a new creation in Christ (Gal. 4: 19) by co-creating together with our own Creator.

Notes 1 The application of affordances could also be extended to an overcoming of the nature–culture dichotomy (Heras-Escribano and De Pinedo-García 2017), also relevant for our present concern. 2 Although there are some neo-Aristotelian trends in it (Groff and Greco 2013), the basic proposal can also be understood along Platonist lines (Tugby 2013).

References Anjum, Rani Lill, Svein Anders Noer Lie, and Stephen Mumford. 2013. “Dispositions and Ethics.” In Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, edited by Ruth Groff and John Greco, 231–47. New York: Routledge.

62  Michaël Bauwens Bauwens, Michaël. 2018. “Institutions as Dispositions: Searle, Smith and the Metaphysics of Blind Chess.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 48 (3): 254–72. Desmond, William. 2001. Ethics and the Between. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2008. God and the Between. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Gibson, James J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press. Groff, Ruth, and John Greco, eds. 2013. Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism. New York: Routledge. Heras-Escribano, Manuel, and Manuel De Pinedo-García. 2017. “Affordances and Landscapes: Overcoming the Nature-Culture Dichotomy through Niche Construction Theory.” Frontiers in Psychology 8: 2294. Martin, Charles B., and John Heil. 1998. “Rules and Powers.” Nous 32 (S12): 283–312. Plato. 1908. The Republic of Plato, vol. II, translation by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tugby, Matthew. 2013. “Platonic Dispositionalism.” Mind; a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 122 (486): 451–80. Turvey, Michael. T. 1992. “Affordances and Prospective Control: An Outline of the Ontology.” Ecological Psychology: A Publication of the International Society for Ecological Psychology 4 (3): 173–87. Vetter, Barbara. 2018. “Perceiving Potentiality: A Metaphysics for Affordances.” Topoi. An International Review of Philosophy, December. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11245-018-9618-5.

4

Fittingness and Environmental Ethics Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy JunSoo Park

In terms of environmental crisis, Judeo-Christian tradition is primarily criticised in the aspect of cosmological, metaphysical, and moral implications. Its main points are under attack: Man created in the image of God is segregated from the rest of nature, so man is given dominion by God over nature. This notion is compounded in the later Judeo-Christian tradition by Aristotelian-Thomistic teleology-rational life is the telos of nature and hence all the rest of nature exists as a means – a support system – for rational man (Callicott 1987, 117). Considering environmental problems are rooted in the Western worldview and value premises, it is necessary to adopt a different metaphysic and a different axiology. Eastern traditions could be considered such an alternative metaphysic and axiology, readymade to establish harmony between man and nature. Important principles in fittingness can be derived from the Confucian and Daoist metaphysics in the Chinese perspective to address this aspect. Daoism and Confucianism can supply meaning and the motivation to take positive steps to correct the environmental imbalances of our day. In fact, the idea that Eastern religious traditions could help in healing antagonistic relationships between humans and nature, as Snyder argues, is hardly new (Snyder 2006, 100). In 1956, Alan Watts showed the inseparability of humans from nature by drawing upon Eastern traditions in Nature, Man and Woman. Lynn White also showed Eastern religious traditions as antidotes to the environmentally destructive trajectories of Judaism and Christianity in ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ (1967). Huston Smith regarded Chinese traditional attitudes toward nature as tools for expanding the West’s environmental awareness in ‘Tao Now: An Ecological Testament’ (1972). Since the 1970s, interconnections between world religions and ecological thought have been widely examined. For many, turning to Daoism, or any other unfamiliar tradition for that matter, offers fresh perspectives from which to view the world and the human place in it. In his essay ‘On Seeking a Change of Environment’ (1989), David Hall argues that by turning to alternative cultures such as Daoism, one can attain fresh perspectives on one’s own environment. In ‘Ecological Themes in Taoism and Confucianism’ (Tucker 1994, 154). Mary Evelyn Tucker states

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-6

64  JunSoo Park that Daoism and Confucianism share a worldview that might be described as organic, vitalistic, and holistic in spite of the difference in their specific teachings. A series of conferences on religion and ecology at Harvard University during the mid-1990s led to the formation of the Forum on Religion and Ecology; these conferences, and the Forum, gave birth to a series of books on World Religions and Ecology (1997–2004). Contrary to dichotomous Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to reality with abstract universal and univocal concepts, the Asian way of thinking is, as C. S. Song and R. Panikkar argue, holistic and integrated with symbols and narratives (Amaladoss 2014, 106–15). For such Asian theologies, the Bible is full of natural symbols such as water and symbolic stories. Arts such as music, dance, painting, architecture, and drama lead to deeper understanding and spiritual experience. As the New Testament itself gives Jesus different names such as Messiah, Son of Man, Light, Water, Door, and Shepherd, the Chinese have regarded him as the dao, the Sage, and the Ancestor in their religious traditions (Amaladoss 2014, 110). In Daoism and Confucianism, there is not much discussion about fittingness, but both are full of symbols and symbolic stories that illustrate the idea. It shows that fittingness can be approached by analogy. In this chapter, I examine how the idea of fittingness is manifested in traditional Chinese architecture and in the concepts of the dao, water, chi, sage, virtue, heaven, filial piety and music that belong to Daoism and Confucianism. Daoist ideas have been recommended as a conceptual resource for the articulation of an ecological metaphysics. Daoism is an ancient tradition of philosophy and religious belief that is deeply rooted in Chinese customs and worldview. The most fundamental concept of Daoist environmental ethos is the dao (道). This is usually translated as the Way. The dao is not God and is not worshipped. It is a religion of unity and opposites; yin and yang. By classical Daoism, we understand the thought that was first founded by Lao Tzu (sixth century B.C.) and further developed by Zhuangzi (c. 375–300 B.C.) in pre-Qin China. They had a common interest in the ultimate reality, the dao – its natural unfolding in cosmic processes and in human life. The dao in Lao Tzu’s and Zhuangzi’s thought is equally unfathomable and unnamable. For Lao Tzu, the dao was an undifferentiated whole, inaudible, invisible, independent of all beings, self-subsisting, boundless, great, far off but turning back in a circular cosmic process as the ultimate reality (Daodejing ch. 1). For Zhuangzi, the dao was invisible, inaudible, without action, without form and incapable of being appropriated. Positively speaking, the dao was real, credible, self-dependent, prior in existence, the ultimate cause of all things, infinite in space and time, pervading all existent things. In this regard, the most important difference between them had to do with infinity. For Lao Tzu, the dao, the future, was infinite but the past was somehow finite – there must be some beginning in time. For Zhuangzi, the dao was infinite in both space and time, so that it could unfold infinitely rich possibilities (Shen 2003, 210).

Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy  65 Originally, Lao Tzu’s concept of dao was proposed as a solution to a sociopolitical crisis, but its implication also shows a solution to the environmental crisis. His writing on the dao and the de (virtue), the Daodejing (道德經), reveals to us, when we give it a careful hermeneutic reading, an image of a society undergoing radical change. The Daodejing shows how the dao is the very beginning of the beginning of heaven, earth, and the things of the world. Lao Tzu uses the word ‘void’ (無) to describe the transcending, but this does not mean that dao is nothingness. Rather, it is better conceived as suggesting infinite creativity. The Daodejing shows how things originate from dao, thrive in dao, and then return to dao. Here, the Daoist principles of non-action and receptivity and return are not only made explicit but also applied to individual persons and states, for a better conducting of human life and a better governing of communities. In relation to fittingness, it is necessary to explore the relationship between the dao and water in the Daodejing as follows: The highest goodness is like water: Water benefits the myriad things and rests in the places everybody detests. Therefore, it is close to the Way. Dwelling aims to be earth-bound; Thinking aims to be profound; Giving aims to be like heaven; Speaking aims to be trustworthy; Governing aims to be correct; Accomplishing aims to be capable; Undertaking aims to be timely. Only through not competing will there be no disaster. (Daodejing, ch. 8) Why does Lao Tzu say that the highest goodness is like water? This question shows something about how to live. Although there is no transcendent divinity, the seasons and agricultural cycles reveal a profound continuity in nature’s dynamic movements. Daoism gives the primary place in its cosmology to water, one of five basic elements along with metal, wood, fire, and earth. For Lao Tzu water is the Dao and the dao is water. Water is an element that makes life possible, so it is inseparable from life. The highest good is like saving lives. Water is beneficial to all things, but it does not fight anything for higher or lower status. Water can be found in places that people hate. Most people who want to do good wish to be visible. Such people hope to be evaluated well and receive wide recognition for what they have done. Humans do not want things not to be revealed because they want to be seen to be superior to others or to receive special treatment. But water goes to invisible places. Many people do not like to be in unseemly places, or dirty places, as well as not wanting to be in hidden places. Water exists regardless of its status. It goes where it needs to go and needs to be. That is why water is close to dao. In this context, Lao Tzu describes the lifestyle of the sage: Only by bending can you be whole; Only by twisting can you be straight. Only by hollowing out can you be full; Only by being used

66  JunSoo Park up can you be new. Only by reducing can you obtain; Only by having excess can you be tempted. For this reason, The Sage embraces the One so as to be the pointer of all under heaven’ (Daodejing, ch. 22) It reminds that growth and loss are aspects of the Way, since everything only lasts for a certain period of time. Water gives life to all things and sustains them, but the method is harmony, not struggle. It shows the fittingness of harmony. The dao itself was originally primal chaos. It seethed and churned until in its centre was formed a ‘drop’ of primordial breath (氣 chi): ‘The Way generates the Unique; The Unique generates the Double; The Double generates the Triplet; The Triplet generates the myriad things. The myriad things recline on yin and embrace yang while vacuous chi holds them in harmony’ (Daodejing, ch. 42). Since all things, including humans, are rooted in chi (material force), the goal of personal cultivation in Daoism is to be in harmony with the natural and human while attentive to the dao (Chamberlain 2009, 13). Lao Tzu’s water is a powerful analogy of fittingness – water always fits itself to the surfaces on which it sits and flows. And the more water flows, the better it is for the human body. So flowing water is an excellent analogy for the idea of fittingness as denoting humanity’s relationship to nature and environmental ethics. It can be linked to Martin Heidegger’s seminal contribution to environmental ethics. Heidegger argues that the hydroelectric dam is somehow contrary to dasein, or being, of water because it turns flowing water into a ‘standing reserve’. For Heidegger, transforming the Rhine into an energy source by means of the technology of the hydroelectric dam is a severe, unlikely form of acting upon things (Poster 2002, 25). This is somehow not fitting – it contradicts the ‘Way’ of water, to put it in Daoist terms. Lao Tzu states that To know harmony is called “what is ever thus”; To know what is ever thus is called “insight”; To block life is called “inauspicious”; The mind controlling chi is called “strengthening”. When things are at their peak they grow old. This is called “Lacking the Way”’. (Daodejing, ch. 55) For him, a person who has mastered the dao, in possessing many virtues is like a pure child. It does not sting or bite venomous insects. It does not attack ferocious animals, and it does not snatch away ferocious birds. It is said that attaining enlightenment that adapts to any situation without overdoing it is called the unchanging dao, and to know and to examine the unchanging dao is to be wise. The dao is not God and is not worshipped. It is a religion of unity and opposites; yin and yang. The principle of yin yang sees the world as filled with

Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy  67 complementary forces. Yang signifies heaven; male; sun and heat, mountains; while yin signifies earth; female; water and nourishing, rivers. The light yang chi moves up to the heavens while the heavy yin chi sinks down to form earth. They are two poles but always complementing one another through constant interplay. There is no dualism of opposing forces, but constant interplay, bringing changes in harmony. Daoist traditions provide a dynamic view of the universe which integrates heaven, earth, and the human. Heaven, earth, and the human are part of a triadic through which chi as ‘material energy’ flows in the universe (Chamberlain 2009, 13). For Lao Tzu, heaven (天 tian) is interpreted as nature. He saw all these as derivative manifestations of the dao, which alone was the ultimate reality. Human beings, together with all other things in heaven and earth, were but manifestations of the dao and had to return to the dao. The relation between the dao and man replaced the traditional anthropocentric, humanistic relation between tian and man. For Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi, the discussion of virtue and heaven and the sage is a perfect place to situate the idea of fittingness since the sage in pursuit of true knowledge and virtue gradually ‘fits’ himself toward heaven as he grows older – by following the Way. Both Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi set up the idea of a perfect man. For them, this is the sage (聖人 shengren). For both of them, the perfect man was the incarnation of the dao. For Lao Tzu, the sage was someone who attained the highest virtue as achieving a total union with the dao and sharing its spontaneous creativity. He characterised this virtue as all-embracing, innocent, simple, original, generous, and self-forgetful. Lao Tzu held that the dao incarnated itself and was concretely manifested in the person of a sage. The sage knew how to gain a world of love and reverence by giving himself generously for the sake of the world. Lao Tzu said, ‘The sage has no fancy to accumulate’ (Daodejing, ch. 81). Also: ‘The sage has no fixed mind of his own; he immerses his own mind in the mind of all people’ (Daodejing, ch. 49). The sage had transcended all human weaknesses and selfishness, becoming one with the dao and thus realising the highest virtue in spontaneous freedom and undefiled infinitude. To Zhuangzi, the perfect man, the ideal or best human being, was more diverse. Such a being could be called, for instance, zhiren (supreme person), shenren (marvelous person), shengren (sagely person), and zhenren (authentic person). Three of these terms are defined negatively: zhiren with respect to self, shenren with respect to particular achievements, shengren with respect to name (Shen 2003, 211). Along with Daoism, Confucianism also places an emphasis on the dao. Daoism tends to emphasise more what human beings cannot and should not do in order not to violate the natural way of nature, whereas Confucianism stresses what human beings can and should do in accordance with the principle of benevolence (仁 ren) that is manifested in nature. Daoism understands ultimate harmony a natural harmony, whereas Confucianism considers it a cultural harmony, which is an ideal to be achieved gradually

68  JunSoo Park through human endeavour (Lai 2011, 16). From this simple comparison, one can foresee that a dialogue with Confucians on environmental ethics could be quite different from a dialogue with Daoists. In terms of self-cultivation, Daoism advocates the authentic self that is freed from legal, social, or political restrictions by healing and emancipating individuals from the ethical bounds of human society. For Confucius, a specific method of self-cultivation is practice (習) in relation to human nature (性). Confucius did not, as Zi Gong said, clearly express an opinion on human nature and the way of heaven (Analects, 5.13). Seen in the light of later discussions by Mencius, Xunzi, and others about whether human nature is originally good or bad, Confucius seems not to be specific about what human nature is. However, Confucius, in part, shows some evidence that human nature is good. At first, he explains the possibility of virtue in human nature in relation to heaven; ‘Heaven produced the virtue that is in me’ (Analects, 7.23). What is heaven for Confucius? He states that he began studying at fifteen and then he eventually understood the decrees of heaven as follows: At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right. (Analects, 2.4) This indicates for Confucius that heaven is an essential object of study because studying heaven is inextricably linked to being the man of virtue; If one does not understand fate, one has no means of becoming the man of virtue. Without an acquaintance with the rules of ritual propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established. Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know people. (Analects, 20.3) For example, Confucius praises Yao because by imitating heaven he could institute elegant regulations (Analects, 8.19). Confucius regards the man of virtue as the one who is in awe of the decree of heaven, as well as of great men and the words of sages (Analects, 16.8). What is heaven? This is a significantly controversial issue. According to Fung, in ancient Confucianism, heaven can be classified under five different aspects: ‘physical’, ‘anthropomorphic’, ‘fatalistic’, ‘naturalistic’, and ‘ethical’ heaven. For Confucius, heaven is ‘anthropomorphic’ whereas for Mencius, heaven is ‘fatalistic’, and for Xunzi, heaven is ‘naturalistic’ (Fung 1937, 31). Confucius indicates his sincere respect for heaven which remained for him a responsive over-all authority (Fu 1984, 133). Following Confucius, Mencius elaborates a theory which affirms benevolence as the

Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy  69 universal nature of man, tracing its ultimate source to heaven (Fu 1984, 151). Thus, man’s heart is a microcosm of heaven through which a union with heaven is made not only possible, but also necessary. Unlike Mencius, Xunzi treats human nature as evil and highlights ritual propriety as the way of maintaining an orderly society. For Xunzi, heaven, in combination with earth, indicates the natural world (Fu 1984, 167). Confucius’ understanding of heaven as an anthropomorphic Shang Ti (上帝) is similar to the religious belief of a large part of the common people of China, and had probably existed since early times. For example, in the Shih Ching, Shu Ching, Tso Chuan, and Kuo Yü, heaven (天) and God (帝) are frequently mentioned. Among them, many indicate an anthropomorphic Shang Ti, ‘a name which literally translated means Supreme Emperor, seems to have been the highest and supreme authority, who presided over an elaborate hierarchy of spirits (神), who were secondary to him and paid him allegiance’ (Fung 1937, 31). Confucius emphasises that ritual propriety (禮) can be possible in support of benevolence. This indicates that ritual propriety can be conducted when human nature is good, as follows: Zi Xia asked, saying, What is the meaning of the passage – The pretty dimples of her artful smile! The well-defined black and white of her eye! The plain ground for the colours? The Master said, The business of laying on the colours follows (the preparation of) the plain ground. Ceremonies then are a subsequent thing? The Master said, It is Shang who can bring out my meaning. Now I can begin to talk about the odes with him. (Analects, 3.8) From the perspective of Fung, for Confucius, heaven may have a right to bestow virtue on humans. Like Fung, Guo Moruo and H. G. Creel claim that Shang Di was originally the high god of the Shang people. Such a hypothesis has been widely accepted and is often repeated (Allan 2007, 1). However, Graham claims that for Confucius, heaven seems to take part in functions of fate and nature as well as those of deity. According to him, Confucius focuses on its alignment with moral goodness, its dependence on human agents to actualise its will, and the variable, unpredictable nature of its associations with mortal actors (Graham 1989). Furthermore, the matter of heaven is, as Allen argues, related to the discussion of Sang Di (上帝) which, in the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1050 B.C.), is called the most powerful spirit and is variously translated in English as ‘high lord, lord on high, high god, supreme thearchy, and even God’ (Allan 2007, 1). Allan pays attention to the fact that Shang Di is closely connected to heaven and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in the transmitted textual tradition from the Western Zhou (ca. 1050–771 B.C.) on. She raises a question as to why Shang Di should be translated into

70  JunSoo Park God, given that Tian literally means ‘sky’ even though Tian is conventionally translated as ‘heaven’ when it is associated with spiritual power. She points out that the matter of translations of God and heaven derives from reconceptualisation of this relationship into a familiar Judeo-Christian one (Allan 2007, 1). Contrary to Fung, Allan suggests that Shang Di was originally the spirit of the pole star. As such, it was the one celestial body which was higher than the ten suns, with whom the Shang ancestors were identified. Tian-the sky-was the location of the Shang Di and the other ancestral spirits. Thus, it was a wider term that came to serve as a euphemism for Shang Di or, more broadly, for Shang Di and all the celestial phenomena and spirits who were under his aegis. (Allan 2007, 2; cf. Analects, 2.1) In particular, it is noticeable that Confucius links study (學) with practice (習); ‘to learn something and at times to practise it – surely that is a pleasure?’ (Analects, 1.1) This shows that practice must be linked to learning in the context of self-cultivation. For him, the purpose of moral learning is not for obtaining reputation but for cultivating self; ‘In ancient times, men learned with a view to their own improvement. Nowadays, men learn with a view to the approbation of others’ (Analects, 14.24). For Confucius, study is the essential part of self-cultivation for fittingness. He believed that study, and the cultivation of virtue, were aspects of the same process since, as one grows older, the Confucian virtues gradually fit one for heaven – by following the Way. Hence, he states that if one loves humaneness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is folly; if one loves understanding but does not love learning, the consequence of this is unorthodoxy; if one loves good faith but does not love learning, the consequence of this is damaging behaviour; if one loves straightforwardness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is rudeness; if one loves courage but does not love learning, the consequence of this is rebelliousness; if one loves strength but does not love learning, the consequence of this is violence. (Analects, 17.7) Confucius insists on the importance of order in study. He places emphasis on practising ‘filial piety’ (孝) and ‘fraternal submission’ (弟) as the roots of humaneness prior to studying literature, since, if the roots are firmly planted, the Way grows (Analects, 1.2). It shows that filial piety has positive implications for fittingness. In Confucian culture, filial piety can be understood in the relationship between elder and younger. The presumption that elders have wisdom about the right way to live and honouring them is an obvious feature of fittingness. He submits that

Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy  71 a youth, when at home, should be filial, and, abroad, respectful to his elders. He should be earnest and truthful. He should overflow in love to all, and cultivate the friendship of the good. When he has time and opportunity, after the performance of these things, he should employ them in polite studies (文). (Analects, 1.6) For him, the man of virtue is the one who concerns himself with the root (本). After studying literature, he shows how to preserve what he has studied; If the scholar is not grave (重), he will not call forth any veneration, and his learning will not be solid. Hold faithfulness (忠) and sincerity (信) as first principles. Have no friends who are not up to his own standard. When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them. (Analects, 1.8) For Mencius, filial piety is dealt with in human unity and moral education. In time of war, for Mencius, human unity by benevolent government is the most powerful weapon rather than earth’s advantageous terrain and heaven’s favourable weather (Mencius, 2B1). For Mencius, the major source of power to overcome war is not military but human unity, formed by benevolent government. Mencius explained to King Hui of Liang why a benevolent government can overcome powerful countries in the military dimension, such as Qin and Chu, by recourse to the moral education of filial piety and self-cultivation (Mencius, 1A5). According to him, if the king delivers benevolent government to the people, is sparing in the use of punishments and fines, and sets light taxes and levies, in so doing he will cause the fields to be ploughed deeply, weeded carefully and attended to. Then the ­strong-bodied, during their days of leisure, will cultivate filial piety, fraternal respectfulness, sincerity, and truthfulness, thereby serving their fathers and elder brothers at home, and their elders and superiors abroad. As a result, the king will have a people who can be employed, with sticks which they have prepared themselves, to attack the strong armour and sharp weapons of the troops of Qin and Chu. It is because the rulers of those states rob their people of their time that they cannot plough and weed their fields to support their parents. Their parents suffer cold and hunger. Brothers, wives, and children are separated and scattered abroad. Mencius points out that type of ruler drives his people into pitfalls or drowns them. According to him, ‘a man can have no greater crimes than to disown his parents and relatives, and the relations of sovereign and minister, superiors and inferiors’ (Mencius, 7A34). As he considers the richest fruit of benevolence to be the service of one’s parents, the essence of benevolence is filial piety (Mencius, 4A27). Hence, he argues that if only everyone loved their parents and treated their elders with deference, the Empire would be at peace (Mencius, 4A11). For him, the Way lies at hand. It is because filial

72  JunSoo Park affection for parents as the work of benevolence, and respect for elders as the work of righteousness, are intuitive abilities, and constitute knowledge possessed by men that is not acquired by learning nor involves the exercise of thought (Mencius, 7A15). For him, those feelings are universal under heaven. Yet, those feelings do not guarantee the automatic practice of filial piety. Mencius shows that filial piety as the service of parents can be properly practised in support of self-cultivation since it is the root of all others: Of services, which is the greatest? The service of parents is the greatest. Of charges, which is the greatest? The charge of one’s self is the greatest. That those who do not fail to keep themselves are able to serve their parents is what I have heard. But I have never heard of any, who, having failed to keep themselves, were able notwithstanding to serve their parents. There are many services, but the service of parents is the root of all others. There are many charges, but the charge of one’s self is the root of all others. (Mencius, 4A19) This could be applied to Mencius’ fittingness between father and son. Mencius states that ‘the trouble with people is that they are too eager to assume the role of teacher’ (Mencius, 4A23). This indicates the danger of moral teaching without self-cultivation. Mencius points out even the man of virtue might lose his temper in teaching his children, so the ancients exchanged sons, and one taught the son of another to avoid offence between father and son (Mencius, 4A18). This shows how important filial piety is in his idea of the formation of the moral self. Mencius strongly asserts, therefore, that reform of economic, social and educational systems should be undertaken from the perspective of filial piety (Mencius, 1A3). For him, the first step along the kingly way is to make the people support their parents when alive, or mourn them when dead, and ensure that the filial and fraternal duties are taught in schools. According to Mencius, taxation can be levied in cloth, in grain, and in labour. The man of virtue employs one to the full while relaxing the other two, since, if two were to be employed to the full, there would be death from starvation amongst the people, and if all three were to be employed, father would be separated from son (Mencius, 7B27). Continuing the theme of taxation, Mencius stresses the importance of establishing educational institutions in order to enhance human relationships in pursuit of fittingness, since good government does not lay hold of the people as much as good moral education (Mencius, 3A3). Mencius claims that good government is feared by the people and the people’s wealth, while good moral education is loved by them and takes hold of their hearts (Mencius, 7A14). So, when a prince seeks by his goodness to nourish men, he will be able to subdue the whole kingdom, for if they are well fed, warmly clad and comfortably lodged but without being taught at the same time, they become almost like the beasts (Mencius, 4B16). Hence, the sage Shun

Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy  73 appointed Xie to be the Minister of Education, to teach about the relationships of humanity: how, between father and son, there should be affection; between sovereign and minister, righteousness; between husband and wife, attention to their separate functions; between old and young, a proper order; and between friends, fidelity (Mencius, 3A4). For Confucius and Mencius, music was of paramount relevance to fittingness since it is a key tool for realising harmony between heaven and human life and creaturely order. Musical offerings were played as a part of state sacrificial ceremonies to ensure the continued goodwill of the ancestral spirits. Musical instruments, such as bronze bell-sets with their harmonious sounds, were thought to have the power to communicate directly with such spirits. The order inherent within the structure of music itself reflected the structure of the cosmos as a whole, with its twelve-month cycles and alternating five phases. By helping to establish the ritual calendar in such a way that ensured sacrificial music was performed in the proper keys and modes for the different times of the year, the music masters were assisting their rulers in tapping and harnessing the very strength of heaven and earth (Cook 1995, v). From the standpoint of the performer, music was for some the perfect metaphor for the process of self-cultivation and the maturation of the completely virtuous individual. Recognising the overwhelming influential power of music, the nobility used public performance in front of an audience as a means by which to instil in the masses a sense of social harmony that would both allay any tendency to unrest and at the same time direct them as a unified body toward certain desired ends. Mencius makes mention of music in relation to filial piety. He shows a vision of ebullient happiness resulting from the balanced practice of the great virtues such as benevolence, righteousness, and wisdom in relation to music. He states that The content of benevolence is the serving of one’s parents. The content of righteousness is obedience to one’s elder brothers. The content of wisdom is to understand those two things, and not depart from them. The content of ritual propriety is the ordering and adorning of those two things. The content of music is the happiness that comes of delighting in them. When happiness arises, how can one stop it? And when one cannot stop it, then one unconsciously begins to dance with one’s feet and wave one’s arms. (Mencius, 4A27) For Mencius, the nature of music is happiness in that the sense of happiness catalyses the growth of the virtues, and leads to ecstatic experiences, such as dance, by delighting the contents of benevolence and righteousness. Given that such virtues are inextricably related to filial piety in the context of family life, the essence of music should be understood from the perspective of fittingness.

74  JunSoo Park The ideas of fittingness in Daoism and Confucianism are manifested in traditional Chinese architecture. In relation to the fittingness of water flow in Daoism, Mount Qingcheng and the Dujiangyan (都江堰) irrigation system must be considered together as a single religious-economic-environmental complex (Huadong 2013, 198). Mount Qingcheng, dominating the Chengdu plains to the south of the Dujiangyan irrigation system, is a mountain famous in Chinese history as the birthplace of Daoism. The Dujiangyan irrigation system, which has helped make the Chengdu Plain rich in agriculture, is significant because of its evolution and sustainability over the past 2000 years. It shows the classical Daoist ideal of the role of humans as the harmonisers of heaven and earth. Construction of the Dujiangyan irrigation system began in the third century B.C. and the system still controls the waters of the Minjiang River, distributing them to the fertile farmland of the Chengdu plains. Mount Qingcheng is not simply a religious site but is also implicated in the regional environment. Equally, the Dujiangyan is not simply an environmental project. It is a religious relic, since the irrigation project provides context for understanding the environmental precepts that were adopted by the celestial masters (Miller 2004, 12). The concern for water, wetlands, and the earth was not simply a theoretical or metaphysical concern of the celestial masters but was an economic and ecological concern. As part of a single religious-environmental complex, Mount Qingcheng and the Dujiangyan irrigation system show that the celestial masters were attuned to the complexity of the symbolic and environmental value of water. Fittingness in Confucianism is manifested through architectural design to reveal a harmonious social system. A hierarchical social system is the core of Confucian thought and was taught in Confucian temples. Unlike Daoist or Buddhist temples, Confucian temples do not normally contain images, since Confucius is not an object of worship. But his hierarchical code influenced, in particular, the residential design of courtyards (The Confucian Weekly Bulletin 2015). In courtyard residences, the centre of the courtyard was thought to be most significant while the sides were less so. The north end of the courtyard was highly desirable as it faced south and received the most sunlight. This choice location would be occupied by family elders, showing the value of superior/subordinate relationships, for example, the relationship of parent/child. According to Confucian family order, the east and west ends were used by the younger generation. The courtyard was a self-enclosed world that represented safety and harmony. Within it, relationships were defined by Confucian values and space was allocated accordingly. This is an obvious feature of fittingness in Confucianism, in that respect for elders who have wisdom about the right way to live is made manifest in the residential design of courtyards.

Perspectives from Chinese Religion and Philosophy  75

References Allan, Sarah. 2007. “On the Identity of Shang Di 上帝 and the Origin of the Concept of a Celestial mandate (Tian Ming 天命).” Early China 31: 1–46. Amaladoss, Michael. 2014. “Asian Theological Trends.” In The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia, edited by Felix Wilfred, 104–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callicott, J. Baird. 1987. “Conceptual Resources for Environmental Ethics in Asian Traditions of Thought: A Propaedeutic.” Philosophy East and West 37 (2): 115–30. Chamberlain, Gary. 2009. “The Waters of Tao.” Spirituality and Water Management 11 (6): 13–4. Cook, Scott B. 1995. “Unity and Diversity in the Musical Thought of Warring States China.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Fu, Pei-Jung. 1984 “The Concept of ‘T’ien’ in Ancient China: With Special Emphasis on Confucianism.” PhD diss., Yale University. Fung, Yu-lan. 1937. A History of Chinese Philosophy: The Period of the Philosophers. Translated by Derk Bodde. Peiping: H. Vetch. Graham, Angus Charles. 1989. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle: Open Court. Huadong, Guo, ed. 2013. Atlas of Remote Sensing for World Heritage: China. London: Springer. Lai, Pan-Chiu. 2011. “Interreligious Dialogue and Environmental Ethics.” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 21 (1): 5–19. Miller, James. 2004. “The Symbolic and Environmental Value of Water in Daoism.” https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/handle/1974/7262/The%20 Symbolic%20and%20Environmental%20Value%20of%20Water%20in%20 Daoism.pdf?sequence=1. Poster, Mark. 2002. “High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc.” In The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, edited by Joanna Zylinska, 15–32. London: Continuum. Shen, Vicent. 2003. “Daoism.” In Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, edited by Antonio S. Cua, 206–13. London: Routledge. Snyder, Samuel. 2006. “Chinese Traditions and Ecology: Survey Article.” Worldviews 10 (1): 100–34. The Confucian Weekly Bulletin. 2015. “Confucian Architecture.” https://confucianweeklybulletin.wordpress.com/tag/confucian-architecture/. Tucker, Mary E. 1994. “Ecological Themes in Taoism and Confucianism.” In Worldviews and Ecology: Religion and the Environment, edited by Mary E. Tucker and John Grim, 150–62. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Part II

Theological Perspectives on Fittingness

5

The Ontological Turn, Religious Tradition, and Human Cosmological Fittingness Michael S. Northcott

Homo sapiens evolved approximately 250,000 years Before Present (BP) with capacities unknown in their ancestors to create symbols and languages to represent reality. These capacities evolved into what moderns call art, myth, ritual and religion. The earliest indications we have of these capacities are cave paintings, the oldest of which yet discovered are in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia and depict other animals in symbolic forms as participant agents, alongside early humans, in the realm of Being (Aubert et al. 2019). Some identify early human capacities to create and depict symbols with the emergence of capacities to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (Achrati 2013). But this is an unduly modern and Western-centric reading which introduces a conception of ‘selfhood’ as distinct from other beings and other selves which is unlikely to have been influential among hominids living many thousands of years BP. Against this reading is a more contextually attuned reading of Sulawesi, and other Indonesian, rock art in relation to Southeast Asian cosmologies. In these cosmologies rocks and stones, as well as sentient beings and plants, are ‘sources of power and life’ in a material world which ‘is made up of a constant flow of cosmic power, closely identified with life itself’, and which ‘does not separate mind and matter’ and sees stones as ‘alive’ (Janowski 2020, 105). It is not surprising that many Indonesians to this day see stones as alive since they live on the Asia-Pacific Ring of Fire and the more than 4,000 inhabited islands which constitute the Archipelago Republic are the most lively volcanic and hence geomorphic region on Earth. Contemporary interpretation of cave art has taken an ‘ontological turn’ under the influence of Bruno Latour (Alberti and Bray 2009). Latour argues that moderns have adopted an overly mental conception of the ‘real’ under the influence of the modern cultural and philosophical translation of ontological questions – ‘what really is apart from “me”’ – into epistemological questions – ‘how do I know what is’ – primarily under the influence of Descartes (Latour 1993; Alberti 2016). Against this tendency, Latour argues that beings and things acquire ontological presence and significance for persons to the extent that persons are in relationship with beings and things in networks of engagement that Latour, after Michael Calon, calls

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-8

80  Michael S. Northcott ‘actor-networks’. In this approach ‘reality’, what things and beings ‘are’, is constituted by relations at least as much as by interior reflection or consciousness. Hence the indigenous ancestors of contemporary moderns, with their problematic ‘turn to the self’, believed in an external order of relationships and Being in which human individuals and communities were cosmically situated.1 This sense of a prior cosmic order was said to arise outside the self and human society and gave to premodern humans a mythic and transcendent sense of their place in the world. Hence the cultural, ethical, and religious practices of premoderns were primarily concerned with fitting the desires and practices of humans to this prior objective cosmic order. Meaning came, first and foremost, from fitting the self towards an objective transcendent order, and not from within. The loss of a sense of a prior objective cosmic order to which humans are called to find a ‘fit’ in their lives originates in the modern epistemological break between human perceptions and the external world opened up by Copernican science, and the discovery that the universe is not geocentric but heliocentric. This discovery led British empiricists, and especially John Locke and David Hume, to claim that human knowledge comes principally from sensory perceptions and not from the external world or from the divine. But, since Copernicus’ astronomical discoveries, it is well known that sensory perceptions do not always accord with reality since, although humans experience by sensory perception that the sun rises in the East and sinks in the West, this does not accord with reality since the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. This epistemological problem of ‘non-correspondence’, combined with the empiricist turn to sensory perception as the foundation of knowledge, renders modern knowledge of reality more uncertain than it was for their predecessors. 2 Immanuel Kant, in many ways the most influential of European Enlightenment philosophers, attempted to resist the British empiricists when he argued that human minds are structurally formed to understand cause-effect relations as underlying sensory perceptions. But Kant nonetheless promoted a bifurcation between scientific and theoretical knowledges with his influential division between theoretical and practical reason, which, in significant ways underwrote Hume’s epistemological chasm between the external world and human sense perceptions.3 Against Hume and Kant, the American pragmatists Pierce and Dewey promulgated an alternative theory of truth to the Europeans. But their pragmatic resolution did not resolve the chasm between the given structure of reality and human apprehensions of it that Hume had opened up.4 Latour’s answer to the problem of non-correspondence is a rejection of a false polarity between (German) idealism and (American) pragmatism. It is reminiscent of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead who, against the idealists and the pragmatists argued that life is a process in which individual entities participate, and that at any one moment in time, while they may apprehend themselves as distinct and fixed entities, the

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  81 ontological reality is that they exist in a flow of being and event that constantly shifts their affects, concepts, engagements and practices, and their bodily constitution, in the world (Whitehead 1948). The ‘ontological turn’ which is to be found in Latour’s work, and earlier in the work of anthropologists Viveiros de Castro and Marilyn Strathern, involves a recovery of elements of indigenous epistemologies in which things – including rocks, plants, and animals – have the cultural status of agential beings, or actors (Strathern 1987, 1999; De Castro 1992; Latour 1993; see also Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). The philosophical recognition of the ‘beingness’ of nonhuman objects and living organisms has the important corollary that human life is best fitted to maintaining the given order of beingness when it recognises and honours the other ‘actor-networks’ of beings among which human agents are situated. The ontological turn is perhaps most easily illustrated from a near universal human experience in the mother–infant relationship. In the first months of life, an infant does not have a sense of separation between their own and their mother’s body or identity. The awareness of a separate identity typically comes sometime after six months (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975). Before then there is no awareness of separation between the external world and the internal world and this correlates in significant ways to the infant’s experience of having nine months been carried within the body of the mother and then subsequently being constantly fed and tended to by the mother without whom the infant could not sustain their own life, since humans are the longest of all primates in the time it takes them to acquire the skills necessary to feed and take care of themselves. The significance of the inter-connected and inter-dependent nature of Being in the formation of the self, and even of consciousness, is not confined to human-human relations. It is also the case that the infant, and indeed adult humans, are creatures composed of what is customarily but misleadingly call their ‘environment’, for the cells of their bodies are constantly being remade from the molecules of the air, water, and food they receive into themselves. And just as this is true of humans, so it is true of all other Beings or ‘things’ in the world. For Latour, living in the world in a state of ontological awareness, or ‘after’ the ontological turn, therefore involves ‘learning to be affected’ in body as well as mind by the networks of Being that give humans life (Latour 2004). This is a way of being and perceiving which some call ‘fittingness’ or ‘ecological attunement’ (Smith 2001; Duvernoy 2020). This way of being and perceiving is one which modern humans’ ancestors, and those indigenous people who still live in forests or deserts, have in much greater abundance than moderns. Moderns have mostly lost this instinctive capacity because of the extent to which they are now surrounded by energetic, harvesting, residential, and technological control systems that distance them from nonhumans, and from such essential processes as photosynthesis, without which they would not have life. Hence, what Latour and others critique as the ‘nature-culture’ divide is not

82  Michael S. Northcott only a philosophical problem emanating from the thought of Hume and others: it is also a feature of the modern, principally urban, and increasingly technologically mediated, way of life which mystifies and obscures from people in developed industrialised societies the ways in which their lives are sustained by, and fitted towards, other Beings. In the light of Latour’s ontological turn, the earliest cave art of Sulawesi is a visual window onto an indigenous or ‘primitive’ ontology which is pre-Cartesian, premodern, in which beings – animate and inanimate – are represented as agents which relationally interact with and co-constitute the reality of the painters and the subjects they symbolised. For those who painted them, ‘beings’ and ‘things’ mutually constituted habitats and things/beings through processes of communication, gaseous and other material exchanges, relationality, and vibration. The paintings, and other indigenous rock art that has been discovered on every continent, point to modes of representation of reality which reveal how primitives evolved habits, practices, beliefs and rituals which ‘fitted’ them to live in ways so as not to destabilise the communities of beings they dwelled amongst, or risk the endurance and resilience of their own habitats. The paintings are also evidence of the early evolution of the sense of connection between earthly humans and heavenly or transcendent Beings. They evoke early indigenous religious cosmologies in which humans developed a cultural state of awareness of, and evolved ritual celebrations of, harmonic resonance and energetic exchange between earthly life and the ‘heavenly’ life of the gods. The gods confer life on humans and other beings and, as the ancients believed, continue to harmonically resonate through the realm of earthly beings, and sustain them in spirit as well as in flesh. The glimpses of indigenous or ‘primitive’ cosmologies that are available to modern humans in rock art, and in the lives and practices of still surviving indigenous peoples, indicate an ‘original ontology’ in which art, ritual, and tradition ‘fit’ humans to dwell harmoniously in their cosmic and terrestrial environments by celebrating and performing theurgic connections between human and other Earthly and Heavenly beings. This original ontology was taken up into ‘world religious’ traditions first in the Indian subcontinent’s Vedic traditions. The Vedas are among the oldest texts of modern world religious traditions. They represent humanity as an ontological microcosm of the macrocosm of the universe. The essence of ethical and religious life is to ‘cultivate’ body and soul by Indian classical techniques such as yoga, so as to fit each human person into the universal order of things. By such means the Bhagavad Gita teaches that humans may learn detachment and ‘attain the highest good’ so that their actions are performed ‘with the very maintenance of the world in view’ (Bhagavad Gita [Smith 2009, 356]). Aditi Chaturvedi argues that the concept of ‘order’ or rta, in Sanskrit is central to Indo-European thought, and is variously represented as harmonia in Greek, and arta in Persian, ‘all of which descend from the same PIE

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  83 root – H2er- (to become adjusted, to fit)’ (Chaturvedi 2016). Hence both Indian and Greek thought see the core performative, or theurgic, purpose of philosophy and religion as to create and sustain harmony with the original order of being both in the human as microcosm and in the universe as macrocosm: ‘The fitting together takes place in nature, the macrocosm, and in human life, the microcosm; furthermore, it also involves adaptations between microcosm and macrocosm’ (Chaturvedi 2016, 54). 5 In the Vedas, ‘beings’ plural, and not only persons, express agency and participation in the physical and spiritual realms into which souls are incarnated at birth. Embodied human souls are also said to pre- and post-inhabit a larger encompassing invisible and transcendent world of being in the karmic cycle of life, death, and rebirth which connects material, organic, personal, and spiritual beings in the Vedic ontology of all beings.6 Later in the Upanishads, the ontological connection between all beings, all things, which is spoken of enigmatically in the Vedas is described more explicitly: ‘All this is guided by intelligence, is established in intelligence. The world is guided by intelligence. The support is intelligence. Brahma is intelligence’ (Aitereya Upanishad III. 3 [Radhakrishnan 1953, 523]). This Vedic ontological sensibility for a shared realm of agency between visible and invisible beings guided by and underwritten by a universal intelligence, which joins heavenly bodies and earthly beings, human and nonhuman, finds many echoes in the language and narratives of Jewish and Christian texts. While the Abrahamic faiths are often said to be post-animistic and monotheistic, it is the case, as I have shown more fully elsewhere, that ancient Israelite creation stories, and subsequent Israelite legal, ritual and prophetic texts, and the Christian New Testament, retained much of the ‘primitive’ ontology of the predecessor religious cultures of indigenous traditions, and of the Vedas whose influence spread through the Middle East via international maritime and land trade routes.7 From the opening verses of Genesis, in which the spiritual animator of all life on Earth is said to ‘brood upon the waters’, a metaphor referring to child birth, to the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion and death of Jesus in which the sky is said to have darkened and an Earthquake shaken Jerusalem and torn the veil of the Temple in two, it is evident that the Biblical writers did not abandon the beliefs of their ancestral predecessors in the animating spiritual powers which connect all of life through unseen as well as physical forces. Jesus also teaches quite explicitly, as recorded in the Gospels, that thought constitutes reality and that thoughts and intentions are more powerful even than geomorphic forces that push mountains above the plains: Because of your little faith; for, amen, I tell you, if you possess as much as a mustard seed of faith, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move, and nothing will be impossible to you (Matthew 17:20 in Hart 2017, 53)

84  Michael S. Northcott But neither the bible, nor what come to be known as ‘world religious’ traditions more broadly, are any more viewed by most Western scholars as performative and theurgic in the ‘maintenance of the world’, and in creating harmony between heavenly and earthly beings in the senses just discussed.8 Against the beliefs of religious adherents that their religious activities influence invisible and supra-material beings, the modern scientific study of religion assumes that religions only have empirical and measurable effects on human phenomena, and principally on human thoughts, behaviours and practices. But nonetheless in the interdisciplinary field of religion and ecology there is a generally shared view that different ‘sets’ of thoughts and practices are fostered by diverse religious cultures, and that this explains differences between how Western Europeans, and their colonial settler descendants, treat of ‘nature’ or the nonhuman, and how ‘animists’, ‘indigenous peoples’, Buddhists and Hindus, treat the nonhuman.9 Analogously, the contemporary ‘ontological turn’ suggests that humans’ thoughts and intentions are – uniquely among all other Beings or Earthly agents – capable of influencing the Earth, and assemblies of Beings, and individual Beings, in particular places, habitats, and ecosystems. And of course, that humans may influence other Beings by their thoughts and intentions, and vice versa, is intrinsic to the cosmologies of most religious traditions before modernity (see, for example, Valladolid and Apffel-Marglin 2001). But this way of understanding human–nature relations declined under the influence of the scientific method first articulated by Francis Bacon which gradually displaced predecessor religious and traditional cosmologies in the West and which is the key modern ideology in disenchanting the world or ‘nature’ (see further Russell 1953; Merchant 1980). Modern scientific culture produced what Alan Watts insightfully calls a ‘ceramic model’ of nonhuman life according to which cosmic or spiritual forces set up the Earth and nonhuman beings as hard machinelike objects which are impermeable to spirit or to human thought once set in motion (Watts 2017, 16). Conventionally, this cosmology is known as deism and was in the ascendant in Europe when Darwin studied theology under William Paley at Cambridge. Watts’ metaphor highlights the impermeability of material and organic reality in this view to both divine action – other than the distant hand of ‘providence’ unfolding like clockwork from the dawn of space and time – and to consciousness. Under the influence of Bacon, Newton, Paley, and Darwin, the ‘ceramic’ worldview was gradually replaced by a more explicitly atheist successor cosmology according to which the cosmos, life itself – other than conscious humans – and the universe are autonomous machines governed by cause and effect and natural laws intrinsic to all matter, invariant in time and space and across human history and human cultures, and which autonomously generated life itself by the random coming together of atoms and gases on Earth around 500 million years BP (Watts 2017, 16). This well-established ‘automatic’ and materialist worldview informs engineering

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  85 projects concerning animals, atoms, chemicals, forests, genes, rivers, and oceans to this day. And yet, this strong materialist view was at least partially displaced in twentieth-century physics by the insights of quantum mechanics, and in particular, the work of Niels Bohr and Walter Heisenberg who discovered that the laws of motion are not invariant in time or space, and that ‘reality’, the material atomic structure of all things, is permeable to thought, to consciousness, to the extent that when atoms are scrutinised in an electron microscope, the act of observation changes the behaviour of what is being observed, a discovery that became known as the ‘Heisenberg principle’ or the ‘uncertainty principle’ (see further Ganzalo 2015). In line with Quantum mechanics, the teachings of the Upanishads and the Christian Gospels, the permeability of living things to human thought is, increasingly, a subject of scientific investigation in and of itself.10 While the precise mechanisms of such permeability remain largely hidden and mysterious even to modern science, moderns have begun to measure mental communication as electrical signals that occur in plants, animals, and humans, while ancients conceived of such communication in more ‘spiritual’ or transcendent terms, which cave art displays in its range of stylised forms.11 The idea that ‘intelligence’ or ‘mentalité’ is not confined to human brains in modernity is often called panpsychism, and panpsychism persisted as a minority tradition in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy even after the rise of mechanistic and materialist philosophy in the Scientific Revolution (Skrbina 2017; see also Goff 2019). Among the foremost advocates of panpsychism in the West in the last four centuries are Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Denis Diderot, Johan Herder, Friedrich von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, and Henri Bergson. With this impressive assembly, though a minority tradition, it is evident this view attracted many Western adherents in the pre- and post-Enlightenment eras (Sheldrake 2012, 369–77). Against the view that plants and matter autonomously evolved, and yet lack capacities for self-organising such as those manifest in the human mind and in higher mammals, panpsychists hold that mind in some senses is present in all naturally evolved beings or things including microbes, plants, animals, and inorganic matter (Skrbina 2017, 11). But Galen Strawson, Rupert Sheldrake, and other contemporary panpsychists make a valuable distinction between inorganic matter such as engines and rocks, and ‘self-organising systems like atoms, cells and animals’ (Strawson 2006). They argue that the higher the level of complexity in an organism, the higher the level of consciousness. Hence rocks and gases, though they are critical component parts of the Earth System, or Gaia, do not have the qualities of mentality associated with higher mammals. That the Earth herself is alive as a composite of things and beings, as the ancients also believed, is a perspective that is also gaining ground among contemporary environmentalists, and some scientists, under the influence of the remarkable claim of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis that the

86  Michael S. Northcott Earth is alive, and represents a ‘superorganism’ which has gradually shaped the habitat of the Earth in multiple ways over deep time to make the Earth more habitable for multiple life forms including, ultimately, conscious humans. As Lovelock puts it, Such a large creature, even if only hypothetical, with a powerful capacity to homeostat the planetary environment needs a name: I am indebted to Mr William Golding for suggesting the use of the Greek personification of Mother Earth, ‘Gaia’. (Lovelock 1972) While Lovelock later resiled from his initial strong version of the Gaia hypothesis, under sustained assault from mechanistic evolutionary biologists, the co-author of an early paper on Gaia, microbiologist Lynn Margulis never abandoned the view that the Earth is a ‘super-organism’, and restated and developed it in subsequent work with Dorion Sagan (Margulis and Sagan 1997, 265). Against materialism and physicalism – the view that life emerged autonomously from the coming together and splitting of atoms alone – panpsychists hold that mind is an emergent property of living organisms. In the Gaia hypothesis, this philosophical theory finds scientific form which suggests that the Earth converged or directed life towards the evolution of more highly conscious beings, and the highly biodiverse and complex Earth System that humans experience today. Henri Bergson added an important qualification to panpsychism which is that mentality involves experience, including what humans call memory. Bergson argued that experience and memories are shared across time and space by unseen processes (Bergson 1911a). Hence for Rupert Sheldrake, the capacity of biological organisms to arrive at settled forms of life, even when a seed or an embryo is damaged, indicates something beyond material development and something more analogous to memory or learned experience, which is not confined to individuals, which is shared among individuals of each species, which may also cross species barriers, and which Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’ (Sheldrake 2009).12 This idea suggests that it is not only species that have morphic resonance but the Earth herself, and it explains a possible mechanism by which the Earth, or Gaia, gradually evolved conditions and elements which not only gave rise to ‘life’ but gradually produced a ‘homeostatic state’ of balance in the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, land and oceans – a scientific analogy to the Sanskrit rta or Greek harmony – which was friendly to the emergence of more complex and increasingly conscious organisms including humans. The idea that ‘things’ are influenceable by consciousness, and especially higher forms of consciousness, disappeared in the Christian West under the influence of scientific disenchantment and the cosmology of mechanism as discussed above. But that this cosmology is to be found in the Western Christian canon is not in doubt. As already indicated, the collections of

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  87 sayings and stories about the life of Jesus Christ known as the Christian Gospels, and the stories about him, indicate that he was witnessed as influencing all the Beings around him – humans, animals, plants, and invisible spirits both good and evil – in ways that no other religious teacher did. However, from the second millennium, Catholic theologians increasingly spoke of such divine powers in Jesus as ‘miraculous’ or ‘supernatural’ and in the practices of the Catholic church this ‘supernatural’ character was increasingly confined to the priest-controlled sacraments.13 The distinction ‘nature-supernature’ also paved the way for the Thomist philosophical idea of ‘pure nature’ in the thirteenth century, and was subjected to insightful critique in the twentieth century in the ‘nouvelle theologi’ of Henri de Lubac (1998). The Roman Catholic medieval distinction between the natural and the supernatural, nature and grace, is the philosophical root for the ontological separation of ‘persons’ from ‘nature’ in early modern philosophy and which underwrote the Scientific Revolution, the rise of the modern mechanistic cosmology, and the evacuation of ‘being’, in the senses used in this chapter, from nonhuman agencies. After the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment divide between science and philosophy, nature and culture, the influential Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, attempted to resituate the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as a historical figure and spiritual teacher in the context of the Scientific Revolution and the related Enlightenment rationalist dismissal of Christian revelation. In an attempted repair of the breach between science and religion, Schleiermacher argued that the historical Jesus was the most ‘God-dependent’ person who ever lived (Schleiermacher 1986; see also Bentley 2019). In so doing, Schleiermacher attempts to redescribe the premodern and traditional belief that Jesus Christ was the divine logos or the order by which the world was made, in the realm of human experience, which, for panpsychists is the crucial missing dimension in modern scientific materialism (Strawson 2006). In this approach, Jesus was more open to God, more God-conscious, and so more able to channel God-consciousness towards other Beings, human, nonhuman, and spiritual, than any other person who ever lived. In speaking of Jesus Christ as uniquely God-conscious, and in arguing that his principal aim in life was to lead other humans towards God-consciousness, and away from the errors and idols of corrupt institutional religion, Schleiermacher intended to open up ways for those he called ‘the cultured despisers of religion’ to embrace the idea that Jesus Christ came closer than any other human being to manifesting the cosmic order of life in his life and teachings (Schleiermacher 1958). Nonetheless Schleiermacher, along with most modern scholars, dismissed the miracles of Christ in the Four Gospels as mythological descriptions of secular historical events in the lives of those who claimed to know him. This reflects the ‘ceramic’ cosmology already discussed, according to which material reality is impermeable even to the higher divine consciousness of Jesus Christ. But the Gospel stories of Christ are not only a unique

88  Michael S. Northcott compendium of ethical and spiritual teachings: they also offer a unique way into understanding the complex range of phenomena – variously called consciousness, experience, memory, mentality, morphology, spirituality – which taken together pose a powerful alternative ontology and cosmology to mechanistic materialism, physicalism, and scientism. Hence, they offer a powerful heuristic for reading and understanding the unique moment in history in which humans now find themselves in which they have acquired powers to materially re-engineer other kind, from genes and microbes to the Earth’s climate and even outer space, which no previous groups of humans ever had. Moderns have, however, become accustomed to living in a world over which modern science and technology are thought to have ‘control’ and in which ‘miracles’ do not happen. Since Bacon, modern science first revealed the supposedly repetitive nature of the cause-effect nexus of the ‘ceramic’ or ‘autonomous’ cosmological worldview. It then opened up access to technologies which grant humans the capacity to control the networks of beings in which humans are situated by the power of anticipation of what will happen next in the cause-effect nexus, a power which is greater in more humanly engineered and governed systems and spaces. Predictability, control, the absence of surprises, is intrinsic to the modern eschewal of magic, for want of a better word. It was predictability of the rate of return on trees as lumber which produced the turn to ‘scientific’ forest monocultures in eighteenth-century Germany, although it is now evident that evolved biodiverse forests produce more lumber along with multiple other ‘ecosystem services’ to human and nonhuman life. But a forest of one species, often grown in rows, is more visible and ‘countable’ to the accounting instruments of double entry book-keeping (Scott 1998). So, monoculture forests are still preferred as devices for creating wealth from forests, and even for sequestering carbon in United Nations’ dubious ‘carbon market’ mechanisms. This preference for predictability remains the driver of destruction of old growth forests, despite this being the principal cause of biodiversity decline on land globally, as well as the third largest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. James C. Scott calls this approach ‘high modernism’, according to which nature works best for humans when it is controlled so as to conform to scientific accounts of predictable and unchanging laws (Scott 1998, chap. 3). For panpsychists, however, nonhuman beings do not always behave predictably; often seem to have a ‘will of their own’; and that will not only reflects aspects of mentality but is permeable, influenceable, by human thoughts and intentions though not in the ‘certain’ and scientifically predictable ways envisaged by modern science and delivered up to moderns by technologies. The first place on Earth in which Francis Bacon’s ideas and influence were felt in any great degree was the island of Britain after the Reformation. Under Bacon’s influence ‘nature’ – including the commons of forests, rivers, marshes, and coastlines as well as common or open fields – was

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  89 systematically stolen from commoners and peasant farmers and turned into the landed estates of the wealthy who used the cover of scientific ‘agricultural improvement’ to justify the theft. Forests were then cut down, uplands turned into grazing land for sheep and deer, and latterly for the sport of hunting artificially reared birds while wetlands were drained and turned into cattle grazing and cereal farms. The result 500 years later is that Britain is the most nature-depleted humanly inhabited island in the world and its people are increasingly suffering from various kinds of addictions including addiction to toxic industrial foods, alcohol, and opiates which has generated a rising tide of mental ill health, obesity, and cancers. There is now good evidence that such addictions are connected with the growing disconnect between modern mechanistic and technologically dependent urban-industrial lifestyles and the natural environment, and that conversely spending more time outside, interacting with nonhuman creatures and non-built environment, is highly therapeutic, a matter discussed more fully elsewhere (Northcott 2015). Essentially the loss of constant contact with an order of being that is external to the self, and which provides a source of ontological orientation and energetic exchange, results in the modern pathologies of consumerism, drug addiction, narcissism, and so on. The modern ecological crisis is therefore, at root, a psycho-spiritual crisis resulting from the loss of a sense of a transcendent order which gives purpose and meaning to human life, and from the disconnect between urban life and the natural habitat where that transcendent order was encountered by our premodern ancestors. This disconnect is principally a consequence of the ever-increasing scale at which industrial organisations – public and private – deploy an array of scientifically-informed technological powers over earthly Beings, visible and invisible, and so impose their intentions and will on other than human life.14 As on the island of Britain, the result of the spread of these technologies – and especially of industrial agriculture, forestry, and fishing – across the land area and oceans of the Earth is a systematic decline in the numbers and kinds of species that live on Earth alongside humans. Ninety per cent of the numbers of all living species which were in the oceans until 1945 have been harvested by modern industrial trawlers. There has been a similar decline in the numbers and range of microbiota, and hence of minerals, in agricultural soils, while the world’s forests are increasingly being turned from the principal terrestrial pools of biodiversity into monocultural plantations where only a small fraction of the millions of species which once lived in forests now survive. In the history of the Earth, species evolved through five cataclysmic despeciation and re-speciation events to an ever-increasing array of species diversity. The result is that Homo sapiens evolved in an Earth state which has greater species diversity than at any point in Earth’s 3.5-billion-year history. This tendency in the history of life towards ever-greater species diversity is remarkable, and inexplicable by modern science. As I have already explained, industrial agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry prefer

90  Michael S. Northcott monocultures because they are more predictable and controllable. But, this means that industrial humans are not fitted to live on a planet whose prior order – before humans presumed to re-engineer it – tended towards ever greater species diversity. What I am calling humanity’s ‘original ontology of being’ embraced species diversity and honoured it by representing particularly significant plants and animals in the environment as quasi-divine beings; in cave art, and in more recent times in religious iconography and, latterly, landscape paintings and botanical and zoological drawings and most recently photography. The difficulty, however, is that the large-scale mechanical reproduction of images of the nonhuman lack the cultural and symbolic power of predecessor cultural images to fit modern human beliefs, practices and rituals towards honouring and sustaining species diversity. Here it seems to me that we may see a role for religious theurgy of the kind that was practised by the ancients who believed that their rituals and traditions fitted them to live in harmony with the cosmic order of being, and so not to unduly disrupt it in the course of deriving livelihood and dwelling places from it. However, the modern scientific study of religion, as already discussed, typically assumes that religious beliefs are not directed in their influence to other-than-human beings. But a minority school of thought among anthropologists of religion from the 1960s began to push back against conventional scientific theories of religion. They argue that these theories upheld what Latour and others call the ‘nature-culture divide’ by suppressing the ecological situatedness, and ecological functions of religions in fitting human life and practices towards the larger ontic environment of earthly and heavenly beings.15 It is in one way remarkable that the erasure of such mediation from the theorisation of the study of religion occurred in the Christian West, since the Christian Gospels are filled with stories about the interaction between Jesus of Nazareth and the world of spirits, living and dead. There is hardly a chapter in the Gospels where demons and spirits, wild and domesticated animals, and the Earth herself, do not appear as actors alongside Jesus and the Apostles in the stories recorded there. But, most modern exegetes dismiss these interactions as instances of mythical and magical worldviews while attempting to preserve the purely ‘ethical’ aspects of Christ’s teachings. In this way, the ‘scientific’ study of religion has a reductive effect on the reading of religious texts as well as on the description and analysis of religious rituals, communities, and belief systems. The ecological push back against the nature-culture divide in the study of religion began not with theologians but with anthropologists, and it can be seen first in field studies in the 1960s by Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, and Roy Rappaport (Geertz 1964; Rappaport 1986; Douglas 2003). These three independently pioneered field studies of religion in which customary traditions concerning relations with nonhuman beings – including dietary laws, rules governing the uses of rivers, soils and trees, and the hunting and slaughter of animals and fish, lunar and solar observances, sacrificial

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  91 practices, and ancestral rites - were theorised anew as engaging potential ecological, ethical, hygienic, health-giving, political and societal powers. Douglas looked at pollution and the sacred with new eyes by drawing on the structuralism of Evans Pritchard. She discerned from pollution taboos, which she first studied in the Congo, and then in the texts and practices of ancient and modern Hebrews, that what a people believes about dirt and pollution can reveal the totality of their cosmological beliefs about organic and transcendent beings and social order, and hence that ‘rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience’ because they engage both material and transcendent beings (Douglas 2003, 2–4). She proposed that in dividing rituals concerning pollution and conceptions of ethics and the human good, anthropology and religious studies were shaped by evolutionary theory, and in particular, the claim of William Robertson Smith that Christianity – as the first religion to displace material and environmental concepts of taboo with purely ethical concepts – is the most ‘advanced’ form of religion. Primitive or ‘under-developed’ religions are therefore defined by the extent to which they mix up beliefs and practices concerning hygiene, pollution, and taboo with ethics, holiness, and the sacred. Douglas developed a series of readings of Hebrew rules and texts, culminating in her Edinburgh Gifford Lectures on the Book of Leviticus, in which she argued that Hebrew dietary and sacrificial rules concerning blood, forbidden animals such as pigs, the confining of slaughter to the Jerusalem Temple, and the isolation in a separate settlement of Levites involved in the slaughter of animals, would have conferred health advantages on the Hebrews given the role of blood in spreading infection, and the role of pigs as vectors of avian diseases to humans who keep pigs (Douglas 2000). In effect, the Hebrew ‘confusion’ of hygiene and holiness carried with it what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘unconscious knowledge’ and Michael Polanyi ‘tacit knowledge’: and it had health benefits that are now underwritten by modern science. This also helps to explain why modern epidemiological studies show that Orthodox Jews are more resistant to modern infectious diseases (Martini et al. 2019). Douglas’ theoretical analysis of ‘primitive’ and premodern dietary and hygiene rules drew on Evans Pritchard’s structuralist critique of the Enlightenment’s reductionist focus on the State as the core social structure around which all traditions were said to be encyclopaedically ordered and placed. Once the State and the Comtean cult of positivism are decentred in structuralism, traditions can be reinvestigated, retrieved, and reconstructed in opposition to the positivist and differentiated edifice of civil society, economy, law, natural science, ‘nature’, and the State. While Douglas’s work focused principally on the human and societal potential of traditions in managing risk and danger, and in promoting bodily and social wellbeing, Clifford Geertz made a related move, also in the 1960s, and embraced what he called ecological anthropology in which the core focus is on the ‘maintenance of system equilibrium’ or homeostasis. In this approach, cultural traditions are approached with a question about

92  Michael S. Northcott how the ‘patterned interchange of energy among the various components of the ecosystem as living things take in material as food from their surroundings and discharge material back into those surroundings as waste products’: this process Ernst Haeckel, the founder of ‘ecology’, called ‘external physiology’ (Geertz 1964, 3–4). Geertz called his engagement of ecological science in the study of cultures and traditions ‘cultural ecology’, in which the anthropologist focuses thick description on subsistence relations as the key to understanding economic, social, and religious practices and beliefs. Taking up this approach in relation to the impacts of modern industrial agriculture on Javanese traditions, Geertz argued that although the introduction of chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds in the ‘Green Revolution’ increased economic dependence on external chemical inputs, the 1000year- old tradition of rice growing in Java, and its deep interconnection with Javanese religion, enabled the Javanese to maintain a predominantly smallholder and peasant based rice growing, in a process he called ‘agricultural involution’ (Geertz 1964; see also Vatikiosis 1993). The third pioneer in the anthropological study of religion and ecology was Roy Rappaport whose field work on the Tsembaga people of Papua New Guinea demonstrated that their religious practices of sacrifice played an ecological role in controlling the number of domesticated pigs in relation to the carrying capacity of their habitat (Rappaport 1986). Rappaport went on to develop a more systematic account of the relationship between religion, ecology and meaning, and in a final magnum opus he argued that indigenous and world religious traditions in different ways are all ordered around sustaining what Heraclitus first called Logos – an intelligible, recognisable, and divinely originated cosmic order or law which binds all living things together: and that the establishment and maintenance of logos is the core theurgic function of liturgical rituals. Rappaport argues that while the spread of the culture of secular modernism enhanced scientific knowledge and control of particular beings and habitats – such as farmed animals or aquaculture ponds – it fragments knowledge and ‘the result is the loss of the sense of the world’s wholeness’ and the ‘dissolution’ of logos (Rappaport 1999, 347–68). Hence in modernised societies religious traditions and associated rituals and beliefs are increasingly detached from, and fail to perform, their evolved function of fitting humanity to the realm of being and the habitats human share with other kind. As we have seen, from the 1980s, anthropologists of indigenous cultures began to publish on indigenous ontologies, and this ontological turn was taken up influentially by Bruno Latour in the 1990s, and led to new theorisations of nature-culture ontologies in which the Western categories of ‘personhood’ and ‘being’ were decentred in the interpretation of indigenous religious traditions. A key French anthropologist who took up this approach, and directly influenced Latour, is Philippe Descola who argues, like de Veiros and Strathern, that indigenous cultures are situated in networks of beings which are as ‘alive’ as humans in indigenous cultures, and in relation

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  93 with whom human mentality and human productive practices are developed and sustained (Descola 2013). Latour took up a similar strategy through the medium of science and technology studies (STS) in which he treats of the culture of modern science as a novel tradition, analogous to premodern tradition, with its own fetishes, priesthood, and taboos, though with a characteristically ‘modern’ refusal that scientific tradition is situated in ‘nature’, or that science participates in ‘nature’ and reshapes it by reducing the nonhuman to controlled assemblies of inanimate objects or ‘factishes’ in laboratories, agential networks, and computer models (Latour 1993, 2017). A similar move was made by the perennialist philosophers including the Iranian Sufi scholar, and pioneer of the field of religion and ecology, Syed Hossein Nasr (1996). Like Douglas, Nasr provides a bridge between the ecological anthropology of indigenous traditions, and ‘world’ religious traditions in their relations with ‘nature’ and nonhuman beings. For Nasr, world religious traditions including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are rooted in the Vedic worldview. Nasr acknowledges that the Vedas were studied by Greek philosophers who travelled to India to learn from them and brought back copies to the libraries of classical Greece. Through Greek philosophy, the Vedas influenced Christianity East and West, though the Vedic heritage is better preserved in the culture of Byzantium and Eastern Orthodoxy than in the Latin West. It is often argued that despite the rich ontological pre-history of the Western Christian tradition, it is hard to see in the contemporary practices of Western Christians an equivalent set of beliefs and rituals to those reflected in the Vedas concerning fittingness, harmony, and ‘world maintenance’ and which therefore have the potential to fit modern humans to their species-rich planet. Reflecting at length on this problem in the preparation of this chapter, it occurs to me that in Christianity as a tradition, music is the most widely practised form of theurgic performance. Despite the attempts of Reformers to banish music, and especially collective singing, from churches, it was only a temporary aberration and music has been central to most forms of Christian ritual from the earliest centuries (Dowley 2018). And it is notable that the most influential theologian in Western Christendom – Augustine of Hippo – wrote an extensive treatise entitled De Musica.16 Music is equally central to the Eastern Orthodox tradition though they believe that only the divinely created human voice is an appropriate instrument for divine worship (Engelhardt 2015). In ancient China and classical Greece, and especially the Pythagorean tradition, philosophers taught that music was an essential means of humans in worship connecting themselves, fitting themselves, to the transcendent order of things.17 Music was a key practice by which the Indo-European idea of order, harmony, or rta, connected the human microcosm to the macrocosm. And hence until today chanting, horn blowing, and other traditional instruments, such as traditional Chinese orchestras and opera and the Gamelan orchestras of Bali, remain central to many Asian religious

94  Michael S. Northcott traditions. What we now know from the contemporary field of ethnomusicology is that the generation of harmonious and vibrating frequencies of voice and instrument picked up by the human ear creates frequencies of the kind which are analogous to the electrical frequencies which connect the different organs and senses in human and animal bodies, and the analogous electrical frequencies with which trees, fungi, ocean-going mammals, migrating birds and all living creatures communicate with each other, and orient themselves to the magnetic-electrical fields of the Earth (Kunst 1969). It is, then, no coincidence that in the Old Testament a frequent image of the redemption of nature mobilised by the Biblical writers is of creatures such as trees, and of wild places, dancing, singing, and clapping hands in praise of the Creator who redeems them from the over-extractive behaviours of greedy humans (see further Bauckham 2011, 147–62). The idea of nature ‘praising’ God for the beauty and harmony of God’s creative acts, while humans act more often as slayers or wreckers, is arguably an early instance of environmentalist misanthropy. But this would be to read into the Old Testament a note that is not there. Instead, the Old Testament writers, like the Vedic writers who preceded them, believed that humans were uniquely privileged among the birds of the air, the fish in the sea, and the beasts on land because they combined more fully than other animals a combination of flesh, mind, and spirit which makes them closer to the gods. But along with this unique quasi-divine status goes greater responsibility for humans, both in the Vedas and in the Old Testament for ‘world maintenance’. In both sets of texts, humans are said to be priest-like in their guardianship of the realm of Being in which they are situated; and their most important priestly duty is to coordinate and even raise the energetic and vibrational level of the hymnic praise which all creatures are invited to offer to the pantheon of gods (and the God of gods, for both the Vedas and the Old Testament assume that there is one God, Brahma or Yahweh, behind the pantheon of gods) who give them life. In most religious traditions the key theurgic practice which performs this service to all Being is sacrifice, and hence it is interesting that in Christianity, while blood sacrifice was given up after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls the ‘sacrifice of praise’, and the sacrificial life of prayer and fasting, become central components of Christian theurgic activities. If praise in music is the most widely practised of theurgic arts in the Christian tradition, it may be asked why more Christians are not living lives which are ecologically attuned, fitted, to the conservation of the beauty and biodiversity of the evolved and divinely originated and sustained biosphere in which they dwell. There is evidence that those who regularly participate in Christian worship are more inclined than the general population to support conservation initiatives and social and lifestyle changes that are ‘pro-environmental’. There is also a documented movement towards greening the campuses and buildings of conservative evangelical and charismatic churches in the United States where collective singing can take up to half of

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  95 the total time devoted to public worship (Bratton 2016). But, of course, a big part of the answer to the question is that Western Christians inhabit regions of the Earth which have been most strongly reshaped by the Baconian mechanistic cosmology. Accordingly, there is nothing transcendently beautiful or meaningful in the order of nature which humans encounter before it is modified by agricultural and other kinds of engineers, and hence many Christians find themselves caught up in the same deep disconnection from nature, and the species-reducing nature-homogenising harvesting and supply chains to meet their daily needs. Ritual, in its root meaning, means repetitive act. Too many of the rituals of urban industrial humans train them to dissociate their own inner lives, and their bodily needs, from what baroque musicians, such as the genius J. S. Bach, celebrated as the ‘music of the spheres’.18 But that music in all its forms is a way to fit human lives better towards created and cosmic order, and that music is uniquely widely available to modern humans even on their electronic devices, at least opens up the possibility that as more moderns awake to the energetic vibrational frequencies with which all creatures and the whole creation vibrate, and which form the harmonic range from which all kinds of human music are made, they may begin to more successfully resist the industrial homogenisation of creaturely life; and they may find pathways to reconnect their own nutritional, energetic and spiritual needs by more sensitive ecologically attuned modes of gathering and harvesting from the nonhuman order than those proffered by industrialism.

Notes 1 On the turn to the self and its roots, see Taylor (1992). 2 For a fine summary of Humean non-correspondence theory, see Hampshire (2009). 3 For a fuller discussion of Kant on this, see Northcott (2014). 4 For an overview of the American pragmatists, see Hammer (2003). 5 On the recent philosophical revival of the Indo-European concept of ‘fit’, as ‘fittingness’, see Chappell (2012). 6 For a fuller discussion of Vedic cosmology along these lines, see Panikkar (2013). 7 For an engagement of deep ecology and indigenous traditions with readings of the Books of Genesis and Jeremiah, and the New Testament Gospels, see Northcott (1996), Chapters 4–5; on the maritime diffusion of Indian philosophy to the Mediterranean, and classical Greece, see Tathagatananda (2005). 8 For an overview of the disenchanting and de-animating character of the modern scientific study of religion, and the post-modern emergence of alternative perspectives, see Josephson-Storm (2017). 9 For earlier pioneers of this field, and claims along these lines, see Nasr (1996) and Rappaport (1979). 10 For data from empirical experiments demonstrating the permeability of things to thought, see Sheldrake (1995). 11 Rudolf Steiner argued at the time of the capture and theorization of electricity by modern scientists that there is significant overlap between what moderns call electricity and what the ancients called Spirit: Steiner (2001).

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The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  97 ———. 1911b. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin. Bhagavad Gita. 2009. In The Mahabharata. Abridged and translated by John D. Smith. London: Penguin Books. Bratton, Susan P. 2016. ChurchScape: Megachurches and the Iconography of Environment. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Chappell, Richard Y. 2012. “Fittingness: The Sole Normative Primitive.” The Philosophical Quarterly 62: 684–704. Chaturvedi, Aditi. 2016. “Harmonia and rta.” In Universe and Inner Self in Ancient Indian and Greek Thought, edited by Richard Seaford, 40–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Castro, Viveiros. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Translated by Catherine V. Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Chardin, Pierre T. n.d. [1965] “La Nostalgie du Front.” Introduced and translated by Lanayre di Ligerra. http://vlib.us/wwi/resources/teilharddechardin. html. De Lubac, Henri. 1998. The Mystery of the Supernatural. Translated by R. Sheed. New York: Crossroads Publishers. Descola, Phillipe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 2000. Leviticus as Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. Dowley, Tim. 2018. Christian Music: A Global History. London: SPCK. Duvernoy, Russell J. 2020. Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead: Ecological Attunement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Engelhardt, Jeffers. 2015. Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ganzalo, Julio A. 2015. On the Cosmological Implications of the Heisenberg Principle. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company. Geertz, Clifford. 1964. Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Godwin, Joscelyn, ed. 1993. The Harmony of the Spheres: A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International. Goff, Philip. 2019. Galileo’s Error. New York: Pantheon. Hammer, M. Gail. 2003. American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hampshire, Stuart. 2009. “Scepticism and Meaning.” Philosophy 25: 235–46. Hart, David Bentley. 2017. The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten A. Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janowski, Monica. 2020. “An Exploration of the Relationship between Humans and Stone in Southeast Asia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 176: 105–46. Josephson-Storm, Jason A. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kunst, Jaap. 1969. Ethnomusicology: A Study of Its Nature, Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities to Which Is Added a Bibliography. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

98  Michael S. Northcott Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. “How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.” Body and Society 10: 205–29. ———. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lewis, Clive S. 1943. The Abolition of Man. London: Geoffrey Bless. Lovelock, James E. 1972. “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere.” Atmospheric Environment 6: 579–80. Mahler, Margaret S., Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman. 1975. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 1997. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors. Berkeley: University of California Press. Martini, Mariano, Naim Mahroum, Nicola, L. Bragazzi, and Alessandra Parodi. 2019. “The Intriguing Story of Jews’ Resistance to Tuberculosis, 1850–1920.” Israel Medical Association Journal 21: 222–8. Merchant, Caroline. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins. Nasr, Syed H. 1996. Religion and the Order of Nature. New York: Oxford ­University Press. Northcott, Michael S. 1996. The Environment and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. A Political Theology of Climate Change. London: SPCK. ———. 2015. Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities. London: Bloomsbury. Panikkar, Raimon. 2013. The Rhythm of Being: The Gifford Lectures. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Park, JunSoo. 2020. Confucian Questions to Augustine: Is My Cultivation of Self Your Care of Soul? Portland, ON: Wipf and Stock. Rappaport, Roy. 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books. ———. 1986. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. Second edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1999. Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1953. The Impact of Science on Society, chapter 2, 1–17. London: Simon and Schuster. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1958. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Translated by John Oman. New York: Harper Torchbooks. ———. 1986. The Christian Faith. Second edition. Translated and edited by H. R. MacKintosh and J. Steward. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sheldrake, Rupert. 1995. Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. ———. 2009. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.

The Ontological Turn and Religious Tradition  99 ———. 2012. The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry. E-book edition. London: Coronet. Skrbina, David. 2017. Panpsychism in the West. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, Barry. 2001. “Objects and Their Environments: From Aristotle to Ecological Ontology.” In Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units, edited by Andrew Frank, Jonathan Raper, and Jean-Paul Cheylan, 69–87. London: Taylor and Francis. Steiner, Rudolf. 2001. The Light Course: First Courses in Natural Science: Light, Colour, Sound-Mass, Electricity, Magnetism. Translated by Raoul Cansino. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1987. Dealing with Inequality: Analyzing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: The Athlone Press. Strawson, Galen. 2006. “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13: 3–31. Tathagatananda, Swami. 2005. Journey of the Upanishads to the West. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valladolid, Julio, and Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. 2001. “Andean Cosmovision and the Nurturing of Biodiversity.” In Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, edited by John A. Grim, 639–70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vatikiosis, Michael R. J. 1993. Indonesian Politics Under Suharto: The Rise and Fall of the New Order. London: Routledge. Wang, Yuhwen. 2004. “The Ethical Power of Music: Ancient Greek and Chinese Thoughts.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 38: 89–104. Watts, Alan. 2017. “Cosmological Models of the World.” In Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence and the Cosmic Game of Hide-and-Seek, chapter 1, 1–14. E-book edition. Boulder, CO: Sounds True. Whitehead, Alfred N. 1948. Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925. New York: Pelican Mentor Books.

6

Fittingness and the Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism Johan De Tavernier

We have never been more knowledgeable about environmental challenges, in particular about climate change, its causes and potential effects. We are aware of what happens. But our deep concerns do not often translate into appropriate behaviour. Despite ample evidence that anthropogenic impacts are destabilising the Earth’s ecosystems which support the possibility of life, not much progress has been made in working out enduring solutions, let alone taking adequate action. There is a huge gap between what we believe should be done and what we actually do. Theoretically, we know what we ought to do but we fail to bring it into practice. The anthropogenic global warming continues. We are still waiting for the needed social changes to reduce drastically negative human impacts. Such gap is, for Lisa Kretz, not only ‘blatantly irrational but also blatantly immoral’, even from an anthropocentric perspective (Kretz 2012, 2020). This apparent disparity between intention and behaviour is known in the ethics literature as the ‘value-action gap’ or the ‘theory-action gap’. It refers to the age-old problem of akrasia (weakness of the will or failing to do the right thing which one knows to be right). What could explain this immoral inaction, unwillingness to do what is best, even if one knows it and is able to do it? Why do we fail to give an adequate response to global climate change?

Downsizing the Value-Action Gap For Socrates, in Plato’s Protagoras, the explanation for the failure to act in accordance with knowing the right thing to do is caused by a lack of adequate knowledge of the long-term benefits of the right action. Ignorance about the greater balance of the overarching benefits in the long term is thus for Plato the causative factor. Aristotle saw it differently. Contrary to Socrates’ opinion that nobody willingly opposes what is thought to be good, Aristotle wrote in Book VII of the Ethica Nicomachea that knowingly doing the wrong thing is caused by a failure of the will because our passions are stronger than our rational mind.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-9

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  101 In order to bridge the theory-action gap, one must reflect on what motivates people to act in a more consistent way. Increasing knowledge and awareness about nature is one thing, caring for nature seems to be something different. Goralnik and Nelson are of the opinion that people ‘will neither care about nor retain the knowledge they gain unless they are first emotionally and ethically engaged by place, community, and context’ (Goralnik and Nelson 2011, 184). They developed their arguments in line with David Thoreau who is convinced of wild nature’s intrinsic value but therefore is very much in favour of developing a personal connection to nature as constituent of human flourishing, self-development and moral character, combining it with restraint in an overall life-affirming ethic. In his essay, ‘Walking’, devoted to the spiritual importance of walking in wild nature and published in The Atlantic Monthly in June 1862, a month after his death, Thoreau describes walking as the best way of connecting with nature, away from urban civilisation and the world of business.1 Goralnik and Nelson believe that knowing more about nature does not necessarily lead to a favourable attitude toward nature. More knowledge does not motivate behavioural changes, only emotions can do that. They also recommend Aldo Leopold’s approach in his Land Ethic, in which he focuses on relationships with nature that inspire care and empathy. For Kretz, the ability to reason regarding an ethical dilemma does not by itself have an impact on ethical action. In her Ethics, Emotion, Education, and Empowerment (2020), she argues for empowered action requiring intentional emotional engagement. In sum, a combination of reason and emotion, in casu full awareness and recognition of the valuable epistemic roles of emotions into moral life, is a condition sine qua non for ethical engagement (see also Goralnik and Nelson 2011). In a similar way, Carol Booth recommends focusing on a better understanding of motivation in relation to conservation policies: ‘… to foster motivation across multiple domains, by supporting motivational capabilities and countering vulnerabilities’ (Booth 2009, 66). Conservation policies are plagued by a chasm that exists between values rhetoric and actual behaviour. In a theory of environmental action, more attention should be paid to the motivation to care for virgin forests and biodiversity. What actually motivates people to conserve biodiversity? Booth refers to Elizabeth Anscombe’s plea that an adequate moral psychology be introduced into the broader ethical framework. What we need, is a motivational turn so that we become capable of reducing our ecological footprint. Motivation, for her, is an amalgam of psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious (Booth 2009, 53, 57). 2 Motivation is a combination of beliefs, emotions, perceptions and identities converging into genuine commitment. Neither ethical ideals nor the will can direct behaviour. Among naturalistic accounts of moral motivation are aesthetics (desire to protect the beauty of the landscape), eudaimonia (visions of the good life, including a green

102  Johan De Tavernier environment) or a religious sense of duty, inspiring the spiritual perspective of nature as creation.

Morality: Between Reason and Sensibility Although current neuroscientific research cannot specify at what point in the moral process emotions intervene, scientific studies state that emotions do play an important role in motivating action. For a couple of decades, evolutionary biologists, for example, E. O. Wilson, have instructed us that morality is rooted in dispositions which are programmed into our human nature by evolution (Wilson 1975, 562). Christian ethics can certainly live with the idea that evolutionary biology teaches us that morality is a mix of culture and nature, unlike the many common cultural-determinist views on Christian ethics. Knowledge of evolution is even capable of deepening Christian understanding of the biological factors that influence virtues and sin (Pope 2007, 4). Either way, this was not a strange idea to classical authors. Aristotle and Aquinas were convinced that animals and humans have emotions and passions in common, for example, love, hate, anger, joy, hope, fear, desire, sadness and aggression (Summa 1a2ae, Q. 40, art. 3). However, both say that human beings are able to control themselves using reason. Modernity gradually developed a dualist perspective on human/culture/reason and animal/nature/body and depreciated the latter, a position which has been embraced for a long time in Christian ethics. Personalist morals installed a nature-culture dichotomy in combination with a particular theological anthropology. However, with regard to the classics it would be a mistake to think that behaviour is either exclusively biological or cultural, because nature and culture are intimately intertwined. For Aquinas, animals are sensitive and possess decision-making power, although not comparable with human free will (Baranzke 2002, 171, 191). We share with them numerous natural inclinations among which are our desire for knowledge, for companionship and for food and sex. Understanding the biology of our nature will enable us to deepen our knowledge of Christian ethics. It will make us more alert to our innate urge to lie, even for the better, or for the tendency to be blind to our weaknesses, to cover vices and to justify prejudices. Alisdair MacIntyre concludes his Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999) as follows: In After Virtue I had attempted to give an account of the place of the virtues, understood as Aristotle has understood them, within social practices, the lives of individuals and the lives of communities, while making that account independent of what I called Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’. Although there is indeed good reason to repudiate important elements in Aristotle’s biology, I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible … (MacIntyre 1999, x, italics original)

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  103 In fact, he no longer accepts a radical dualism between humans and animals. The human reflexive capacity does not make us very different from other animals because we share with them purposeful action, social needs and beliefs. Although our capacity for reflection gives us a ‘second nature’ beyond our physical nature, there is also a lot of continuity that helps us better grasp human needs. The moral endeavour should not focus on discussing and arguing value conflicts but on becoming virtuous while having a better understanding of our emotions and passions. As human beings are a mix of rationality and emotions, Damasio points out how moments wherein a well-practised unconscious mind is trained under the supervision of conscious reflection are interspersed with moments where we let ourselves be guided by unconscious, deeply rooted, ancient biological inclinations, passions and desires (cf. Damasio 2010). We often play in both registers. As far as the natural sciences explain the basic conditions for human action, and in as far as they do not justify moral behaviour, they are not a threat to Christian ethics, on the contrary. A neurobiological and psychological clarification of the emotions that are relevant to the capacity for moral action (be it by way of hindrance or promotion) contributes to a better understanding of the moral commitment. Human beings always act from certain motives and desires that are biologically rooted (Joyce 2007, 9–10). What concerns the relative role of neurosciences in explaining (im/a) moral behaviour, Damasio refers mainly to the contribution of positive and negative feelings as a basis for moral behaviour, for example, the sense of outrage which the late Stéphane Hessel, as the father of the indignados, has made his trade mark (cf. Damasio 2003; Hessel 2010). A sense of fairness, empathy, sympathy, attachment behaviour, etc. have a form of premoral competence. Long before we develop intelligent constructions (e.g., theories of justice) to shape normative social behaviour, these intuitional feelings play a role in the development of cooperation strategies among non-human species that use social emotions. Christian ethics, in its traditional form, paid great attention to biological mechanisms that block or promote ethical behaviour. Traditionally, moral education was practising and ritualising moral skills and asceticism, and needed to get a grip on partly unconscious natural processes that always threaten to drive behaviour in an arbitrary way. In the introduction to Morality and the Emotions, Carla Bagnoli mentions authors who conclude that ‘emotion always precedes cognition’, stating that emotions substantially intervene in the mechanics of action (Bagnoli 2011, 17). The pervasive interconnection between emotions and reasoning opens interesting questions, such as what is the purpose of norms and decisions if we are mainly driven by emotions? And if emotions are taken to be a kind of neurological affect framework, what about choice and responsibility? Are they no longer appropriate?3 Of course, neurosciences (neurophysiology, neuropsychology) could teach us a lot about the relationship of emotions to morality. In the same line, based on research on autism,

104  Johan De Tavernier Lisa Damm concludes ‘… emotion does appear to be critical in bridging a gap in understanding in order to provide a motivational basis for why a person should show a distinctly moral concern for engaging in behaviours that exemplify moral norms’ (Damm 2010, 288). In a well-functioning person, cognitive and affective capacities are integrated. But Bagnoli mentions that the problem of how to think of this integration is not yet settled: Are the emotions relevant for the theory of value and normativity? Current debates are often structured as though there were only two theoretical options to approach these questions, a sentimentalist theory of some sort, which emphasizes the role of emotions in forming ethical behavior and practical thought, and intellectualist rationalism, which denies that emotions can help at all in generating normativity and contributing to moral value, hence also denying that they may have any role to play in moral agency and moral thinking. (Bagnoli 2020, 141) Focusing on compassion by way of illustration, Bagnoli is of the opinion that Kant’s account of practical reason would include such emotion as compassion as playing an important epistemic function because ‘compassion targets suffering and sensitizes to the wrong inflicted to others, thereby showing the way towards remedy and redress’ (Bagnoli 2020, 147). Compassion, as a spontaneous emotional answer to vulnerability and fragility, disturbs reasoning. Practical reasoning precisely requires both reason and sensibility. This is not to say that morality is resting on emotions or that only emotions are driving action. The fact that emotions like compassion play a role with regard to moral motivation could also be defended on empirical findings.

Environmental Self-identity A major study by Palmer et al. (1999), describing significant lifetime experiences and formative influences affecting pro-environmental behaviour among adults, singled out what people have experienced of nature during childhood as being the strongest determining factor (Palmer et al. 1999, 181–200). Time spent with ‘wild nature’, by preference in a participative way, for instance, by walking, playing and camping, has a significant positive correlation with adult environmental attitudes and behaviour. Such time spent in a wild environment permits an ‘apprehension of that quality of self-arising in things’, which is beyond human authorship. Direct experiences of nature as the truly other, beyond my control, are significant in motivating care for the natural world and developing a receptive and responsive sensitivity to nature (Chawla and Gould 2020, 636–7). On the other hand, the less experiential and the more individualistic the sense of

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  105 connectedness to the environment is (e.g., in urban areas), the more brittle the commitment to display appropriate behaviour. Participative child experiences of nature could not only be considered as an experiential learning process but also an ‘emotionally engaged learning’. In later life, although not impossible, such learning seems less evident because of the acquisition of scientific thought frames through education which objectify nature. Bonnett speaks about ‘knowledge by acquaintance’: ‘a direct, intimate, tacit knowledge that affects’ (Bonnett 2019, 253vv). He also describes this as Emplaced Transcendence: ‘… refers to ecstatic grounding, standing-out while residing attentively (…). A key feature of such experiences is that they are emplaced and immediate rather than abstract and discursive, and that they are bodily as much as cerebral’ (Stickney and Bonnett 2020, 1089). Attuning to the native presence of nature, different ways of seeing and relating occur, opposed to instrumental views, more in line with art. This more receptive way of looking and seeing ‘can allow things to reach out to us and perhaps to initiate intimations of the mystery of being in their “world”’ (Stickney and Bonnett 2020, 1093). Bonnett refers to Van Gogh’s painting of the Plane Trees at St Remy (1889) and his Tree Trunks in the Grass (1890). There seems to be a kind of dialectics at work. The greater level of commitment to the environment, the greater the psychological experience of (inter)dependence, the more pro-environmental behaviour is reported. The inclusion of the non-human nature as a part of the concept of self-identity stimulates a willingness to act on its behalf. Closeness increases empathy and the willingness to help and to support. Being present in natural environments has been shown to be restorative, causing a physiological and emotional winding down and/or the recovery of the capacity to focus attention. The marked restorative potential of natural environments creates a kind of place identity and attachment and a feeling of being ‘nested’. Considering nature as part of one’s conception of identity, presumes a change in personal worldview, removing oneself as the sole centre of things. Balundé Jovarauskaité and Poskus (2019) define an environmental self-identity as ‘the extent to which one sees oneself as a type of person whose actions are environmentally-friendly’ (Balundé, Jovarauskaité and Poskus 2019, 3). Environmental self-identities refer to relevant outcomes of one’s identity, for example, one can identify oneself as a cycler, a recycler, a re-user, thus in effect identifying with a group of likeminded souls. In that sense, environmental self-identity comes strongly into expression in specific pro-environmental actions. Verplanken and Holland are convinced that once we perceive a particular situation as ‘being relevant for a value that is central to our self-concept, we have the cognitive and motivational architecture to act on that value spontaneously’ (Verplanken and Holland 2002, 436). In the same vein, a promising view is the one that looks into the contribution of contact with nature in addressing a range of health issues. Frumkin et al. (2017) refer to considerable promises with

106  Johan De Tavernier regard to public health priorities, such as mental health, depression and anxiety. Jogging in a natural context helps beat obesity and cardiovascular diseases. Contact with nature fits into a prevention strategy as well as part of a low-cost treatment. According to the best available evidence, contact with nature offers opportunities which few medications can boast. With regard to a better understanding of the process of experiential learning and self-renewal, Kovan and Dirkx report that the lives of committed environmental activists are ‘characterized by struggles that represent a profound form of learning, involving recognition and understanding of one’s work as a calling or vocation as well as exemplifying the kind of transformative learning reflected in Jung’s concept of individuation’ (Kovan and Dirkx 2003, 99). The kind of experience they have in mind is well described in the testimony of Peter (a citizen of Michigan, USA): I think most of the people that I know, whether it’s in environmental groups or environmental agencies of government, are attracted to the field because they really care. (…) It’s something that has to do with almost their spirituality. (…) It is my life commitment. I’m committed to the earth. It’s committed to me, after all. The least I can do is give back. For most environmentalists that I know, including me, there is a spiritual element to what we do. I hopefully use my rational mind in my work, but it really all stems from a love of, in my case, I guess, Michigan and wanting to see Michigan remain beautiful for other people. That’s a powerful fuel. (…) It’s not like I light candles to pagan gods. I just believe that we have a duty to the earth and that there is a right and a wrong in relation to the earth. Our task as a species is to learn to live more doing what’s right for the earth and right for us too. I don’t know how to articulate this without sounding like a bad mystic or a sexist. I don’t think of nature as a “she,” but I do feel an emotional attachment to it, and when you get angry, you feel like you’re defending it. It’s almost like you’re defending a friend or a loved one. You know, for your husband or your children, you would do anything. (Kovan and Dirkx 2003, 105–6) Peter’s commitment reflects a deep longing to improve the world, attention to fostering connections between humanity and nature, and an authentic openness for continual learning about his self-identity. These processes are grounded in a strong ‘willingness to invest head, heart, and spirit’ into voluntary work, developing and strengthening strong emotional and spiritual ties between himself, nature and humanity. It represents a deeply personal journey. For Kovan and Dirkx, a ‘process of juggling hope and despair, an unconscious interplay of emotions that seems to propel them onward in their work and further fuels their passion’ is central (Kovan and Dirkx 2003, 113). Although there is sometimes doubt about the engagement, people feel sustained through a kind of trustworthy faith in the deep meaning

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  107 of their commitment. Such emotions play an important role in the process of transformative learning.

Transformative Learning Through this process of transformative learning, a more genuine sense of who I am as an individual person, enabling me to have more authentic relationships with others, is created. Transformative learning represents a fundamental change or shift in one’s understanding of oneself and of the relationship with the world in which one lives. Historical examples could be helpful in order to grasp the power of transformative learning. An examination of the biographies of figureheads of environmental engagement and commitment (e.g., Aldo Leopold, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson, David Suzuki) reveals that they all had significant experiences that brought them to a life-long commitment to nature preservation (e.g., for Leopold the experience of a dying wolf; for Carson, a letter describing the effects of DDT; for Suzuki, a clear-cut forest and for Schweitzer, the overwhelming natural beauty of an African tropical forest). Such transformational moments are consistently described as strongly emotional experiences. Analysing life stories, a kind of emotional consternation about nature during childhood and being in nature during, for instance, informal outdoor activities are found to be essential driving forces for the implementation of a sustainable lifestyle. Grund and Brock state that an important implication of their research findings – which should be considered as an ‘update’ for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) – is greater emphasis on the emotional dimension of education: For the field of SD, this need for dealing skilfully with emotions appears even more pronounced given the immediate existential dimension these issues touch upon since they concern how habitable the world will be and the quality of live for humans and other species. Since this renders SD and therefore ESD especially emotionally charged, the role of this existential dimension in ESD settings and its implications on the level of both content and methods appear to be a promising future research field. (Grund and Brock 2020, 14–5) Often, naturalists explain their commitment in terms that relate the inner and the outer. Weinberg et al. add to this the dimension of the future. They stress that sustainability education plays a crucial role not only in changing the present but also in shaping the global future (Weinberg et al. 2020). In their recommendations for improving the transformative potential of education, they present a particular form of education that encourages scientific literacy and advise looking at transformation from a more activist stance, resulting in deliberate and goal-directed actions. Sustainability literacy will

108  Johan De Tavernier include more appreciation of an intergenerational stance, systems thinking and respect for distributive justice and for limits. Evaluating Lynn White’s thesis about the religious roots of our ecological crisis (1967), Bron Taylor, Van Wieren and Zaleha conclude: ‘On balance, we found the thrust of Lynn White’s thesis is supported, whereas the greening-of-religion hypothesis is not’ (Taylor, Van Wieren, and Zaleha 2016, 1000). Indigenous traditions are more likely to foster pro-environmental attitudes than other religious systems because of their nature-based cosmologies and parallel value systems. When the sea is experienced as powerful in the way that, for example, a surfer sees it, a transformative understanding of the sea as worthy of reverent care is fostered. With regard to the link between the spiritual dimension of nature experience and environmental responsibility, Hedlund-de Witt found that those who experience nature in a spiritual way, feel ‘related’ and ‘connected’ to their surroundings, suggesting a different stance from Bron Taylor (Hedlund-de Witt 2013, 174vv). In their opinion, the stronger the feeling of being part of nature/creation, the stronger one identifies with the well-being of nature (Hedlund-de Witt 2019, 177). In the same line, Ives and Kidwell (2019) came to the conclusion that up until recently, the discourse on environmental and sustainability values was only conducted in secular terms, but ‘with a renewed emphasis on culture as defining and shaping links between people and nature, there has been an increasing level of scholarly attention to the role of religion and spirituality in defining and understanding social values’ (Ives and Kidwell 2019, 1355). Particular narratives, characteristic histories and practices with regard to sustainability may contribute to the required systemic change for sustainability.

Legere-ligare as a Lens to Link ‘Creation’ with ‘Nature’, Resulting in ‘Ordo’ Authors such as Bron Taylor (2009), Bronislaw Szerszynski (2005) and Thomas R. Dunlap (2006) indicate that environmentalism ports particular characteristics of religiosity. Making use of the etymological understanding of religio, rooted both in legere and ligare, a hermeneutical key is presented to frame life experiences meaningfully while associating them with notions of relationality, contemplation and even transcendence and calling. Elements of relationality are mentioned, such as the dialogical aspect of understanding, horizontal variants of transcendence, nature’s alterity enabling encounter and the desire for commitment. For example, while focusing on the ligare dimension, environmentalist writers often mention the importance of belonging and (re)connecting to the earth and to nature. The origins of the word religio connect with two main hermeneutical components. One refers to ‘legere’ (relegere; religere) which incorporates notions of interpretation, vision, view and meaning, rereading and

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  109 contemplation (relegere) but also notions of care, attention, renewed choice and recovery (religere).4 These are considered as ‘interior’ dispositions, focusing on the felt need to surpass reductionist, atomistic, merely empirical views on reality and nature in order to gain a deeper insight into the whole. This experience is often coined in phrasings like ‘a renewed sense of wonder’ and touches upon forms of transcendence. It aims at a more intuitive knowledge, the fruit of a more direct experience of nature without prior recourse to rationality. And it is considered as a transformative experience because it changes both the reader and that which is being read. The reader does not merely perceive, but what is read changes his or her life and practices. The second dimension, taking its origin in ‘religare’, moves outward by focusing on the exterior aspects of (re)connection and relationship, but also on (re-)unification and associated processes of transformation. Aquinas bundles all these meanings into the word ‘ordo’ (‘religio proprie importat ordinem ad Deum’) (Summa II.II, Q. 81, art. 1), signifying ‘a basic orientation that affects, directs and “orders” everything that it touches’, animating and directing the whole of human life according to the end or principle it is directed at (Bretzke 2003, 98). Aquinas is inspired by the notion of ‘rectus ordo’ in Gregory the Great’s thinking on fittingness (convenire). It means that moving from action to contemplation and vice versa perfects both action and contemplation. The themes of both ‘order’ and a ‘duality of inward and outward’, contemplation and action, resemble the premodern idea of a primordial objective cosmic order, providing a secure world view which gave humans a rather mythic understanding of their role in the world (Evans 1986, 117). We have to remember that theology for Aquinas was in the first place a question of recognising the fittingness or logic of God’s activities through reason. His theological search for fittingness, underlying God’s activities, has slowly been replaced by Enlightenment’s rationalistic and anthropocentric approaches which introduced the Anthropocene, characterised by a kind of asymmetry and even dualism between humans and the natural world.

Becoming Receptive Again to the Alterity of Nature: An Experiential Hermeneutical Impetus Transformative learning processes prove to be fundamentally hermeneutical in character, demonstrating a strong outer-inner dynamic of attributing meaning, whereby one’s connection with nature changes the concept of self, in turn, affectively influencing our attitudes toward the natural world. According to Van Tongeren and Snellen, hermeneutics does not try to provide a rational foundation for norms, but take as its point of departure actual human (moral) experiences (Van Tongeren and Snellen 2014, 312). Hermeneutics should be considered as the interplay of emotional, cognitive and spiritual elements resulting in a transformative experiential process. Hermeneutics simply begins by letting oneself be addressed; things have

110  Johan De Tavernier something to say to us, in casu, the receptivity to the alterity of nature. These experiences call for interpretation, withdrawing one from preconceived opinions. Meaning is thereby ‘received’, on the presumption that there is an experiential openness to meaning (Van den Noortgaete and De Tavernier 2014b, 586). Hans-Georg Gadamer made it clear in Truth and Method that this ‘involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so’ (Gadamer 2013 [1960], 369). Van Tongeren and Snellen, using Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, argue that traditional moral theories often begin from outside of experience and therefore easily fail to fully incorporate our factual engagements with the world. This is the reason they suggest that we should develop, instead, a hermeneutic ethics of experience. Such an ethics should take into consideration the interpretive character of our interactions with nature and others as fundamental, leading to a reinterpretation of our self-identity and ultimately to moral activities that are built on experience while maintaining a critical stance.

Fittingness and the Iconicity of Nature The theme of the ‘iconicity of nature’ has been, for the last two decades, an emerging theme in Orthodox eco-theology. The notion ‘iconicity’ (re) introduces an in-depth-perspective vis-à-vis nature. It is an interesting concept because nature is not seen as sacred in itself but sacred in its being a dynamic reference to the transcendent/divine. The iconic experience presupposes an appropriate, ‘contemplative’ attitude in the one approaching the icon. There is, however, a clear primacy of initiative on the part of the icon. Through its iconic perspective, nature is reconnecting humans to the divine, re-establishing a more balanced relation between God, nature and man, a balance that has weakened and/or skewed throughout history. The earth is thereby considered as a place of ‘sacramental’ encounter (cf. Hart 2006). In the Summa, Aquinas did not present the sacrum as the opposite of the profane. All material reality could refer to something more. He is presenting a new concept of the sacred which is able to transcend its natural sense and asks to become sensitive to a multilayered reading of the reality of nature. He distinguished two types of sacred, in the proper sense when it comes to a holy man, that is a holy subject, and in a secondary sense with regard to things, places, times, events that are sacred through relationships, by reference to holiness, by possessing the power of sanctification because what exists is an evocation of the wisdom and the goodness of the Creator (Roszak 2021, 3). Sanctification means that something rests in God. God as the final cause is not replacing the natural action of creatures but His role ‘consists in ordering’ (Roszak 2021, 5). Again, the essence of theology for Aquinas is to discover fittingness in creation, depicting God’s

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  111 action as wise. His broad understanding of sacramentality, relating and not opposing the spiritual with the material, allows for a new language of sacredness, not based on the contrastive asymmetry between God and creation, but perceiving God as present in creation and revealing Himself through what is created. Beauty and harmony (ordo) seem to be a promising way for recognizing his presence. (Roszak 2021, 11) The iconic cannot be separated from a liturgical view of the cosmos, nature as a whole being considered part of a ‘cosmic liturgy’. Through this liturgy the reconciliation of God, nature and man is brought about and celebrated. This reconciliation leads to a transformation, which could be linked to the Orthodox concepts of theosis and deification of man and nature, already taking place in the present but always also to be seen in an eschatological perspective. This ordering through liturgy does not abandon profane reality but means sanctifying everyday life. The aim of discipleship is not escaping the world but transforming it. All this is conducive to a more ascetic attitude, not seen as physical renouncement, but as a positive, liberating choice to leave behind addictive attitudes, detrimental to the relation between man, nature and the divine. The iconic, therefore, inextricably leads to a strongly associated ethics, encompassing attitudes of gratitude (eucharistein) and restraint (askèsis) (Chryssavgis and Foltz 2013). The Eastern Christian view on the iconicity of nature, seen as cosmic liturgy, calls on humans to fulfil a ‘priestly’ role, quite different from the stewardly role advocated by Latin Christianity. In such a cosmic liturgy, natural entities are seen as participating in worshipping, being living references to the divine (Creator), all of which brings about a wholly different perspective on nature as a ‘concelebrating multitude’.

Conclusion In order to address present-day environmental challenges, a radical shift in human behaviour is needed. Until recently, a strong techno-optimism has often prevailed, but we now know that any increase in technological efficiency is often countered by ‘rebound-effects,’ whereby the (cost) efficiency of new technologies encourages increased consumption, even exceeding possible environmental gains. Thus, even with a strong confidence in technological improvements, human behaviour remains a crucial factor for environmental change. In this regard, we can hardly downplay the importance of the ‘value-action’ gap. How to address this gap, knowing that moral reasoning as such is apparently not sufficient to produce more consistent moral action? From a substantive literature overview of research in behavioural and educational psychology, Joe Heimlich and Nicole Ardoin have come to the conclusion that research consistently shows that pro-environmental

112  Johan De Tavernier attitudes alone rarely lead to behavioural changes (Heimlich and Ardoin 2008). Reviewing available research, Susan Clayton and Gene Myers came to the same conclusion: the link between cognitive convictions and behaviour is ‘typically weak’ (Clayton and Myers 2009). Often, models used in environmental education and policy are rooted in a rationalistic model. The key determinant of action is thereby assumed to be reasoned moral agency. These approaches presume a linear progression: more environmental knowledge will lead to environmental awareness and concern, which in turn is thought to lead to pro-environmental behaviour. This model has – and continues to be – influential in environmental education. But if it is not part of a wider approach, research has shown that it cannot lead to the changes aspired for. Elizabeth Shove poignantly puts the over-optimistic assumptions into perspective by saying that these so-called information-deficit approaches only have a limited impact on actual behaviour and often fail to durably engage people around urgent ecological issues (Shove 2010). A shift in focus is required. According to Carol Booth, environmental ethicists need a ‘more naturalistic understanding of motivation’ (Booth 2009, 73). Is there a better way to engage the challenge posed by the value-action gap than by studying the life of nature preservationists (e.g., Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and David Suzuki)? Studying their genuine commitment makes clear that a kind of transformative learning process is at the core of their sustained engagement. Walter sees their transformative learning as an integrative process, intermingling rational, emotional and spiritual elements (Walter 2013, 29–36). The result is an integration of the self with the commitment, a strong identity. These pioneers have adopted ecological lifestyles significantly beyond the average. Analysing their life histories, he found that emotionally powerful experiences with nature during childhood and early teenage years are crucially important in their biography. Such an interaction of the interior and the exterior and such transformation can restore a kind of authenticity through the retrieval of a form of ‘inner ethics.’ All of these appear to become a life-orienting dynamics, motivating a long-lasting commitment and pro-environmental behaviour. The field of meaning, opened by the legere-ligare lens, supports the unravelling of things. This by no means warrants labelling the ecological movement as a religion. But a conscious articulation and structuring of the religious-like aspects within environmentalist thoughts could contribute to a better understanding of its core motivating beliefs and attitudes, benefitting the coherence and consistency of its message. According to Gottlieb, even environmentalists unconnected to religious organisations are often inspired by at least a moral sensibility that has powerful religious overtones. Through its iconic perspective, nature – understood as a place of sacramental encounter – is capable of reconnecting humans to the divine. In sum, we are touching the original sense of the word ‘ordo’ which for Aquinas is the essence of any religion: animating, structuring and directing the self and human society to its ultimate end. Is this not the essence of fittingness?

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  113 At the core of environmentalism lies a view of nature as a place of singular importance, an ultimate reality considered as a sort of ‘sacred’ space. These spaces need to be experienced. One has to move beyond scientific or rational discourse and enshrine nature’s value in forms of reverence, calling for the recognition of its sacrality. This spiritual-religious undercurrent, however, is usually not articulated. In his A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold writes: ‘We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in’ (Leopold 1989 [1949], xxvi and 214).

Notes 1 ‘I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society’ (Thoreau 2019, 1). 2 See also Anscombe 1958. 3 For more details, see De Tavernier (2014). 4 For more details, see Van den Noortgaete and De Tavernier (2014a).

References Anscombe, Elizabeth. 1958. “Modern Moral Psychology.” Philosophy 23: 1–19. Bagnoli, Carla. 2011. “Introduction.” In Morality and the Emotions, edited by Calra Bagnoli, 1–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. “Normativity and Emotional Vulnerability.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 46 (2): 141–51. Balundé, Audra, Lina Jovarauskaité, and Mykolas Simas Poskus. 2019. “Exploring the Relationship between Connectedness with Nature, Environmental Identity, and Environmental Self-Identity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Sage Open 9 (2): 1–12. Baranzke, Heike. 2002. Würde der Kreatur? Die Idee der Würde im Horizont der Bioethik. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann Verlag. Bonnett, Michael. 2019. “Towards an Ecologization of Education.” The Journal of Environmental Education 50: 251–8. Booth, Carol. 2009. “A Motivational Turn for Environmental Ethics.” Ethics and Environment 14 (1): 53–78. Bretzke, James T. 2003. Consecrated Phrases: A Latin Theological Dictionary. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. Chawla, Louise, and Rachelle Gould. 2020. “Childhood Nature Connection and Constructive Hope: A Review of Research on Connecting with Nature and Coping with Environmental Loss.” People and Nature 2: 619–42. Chryssavgis, John, and Bruce V. Foltz, eds. 2013. Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation. Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought. Oxford: Fordham University Press. Clayton, Susan, and Gene Myers. 2009. Conservation Psychology: Understanding and Promoting Human Care for Nature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Damasio, Antonio. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. London: Mariner Books.

114  Johan De Tavernier ———. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage. Damm, Lisa. 2010. “Emotions and Moral Agency.” Philosophical Explorations 13 (3): 275–92. De Tavernier, Johan. 2014. “Evolutionary Challenges to Christian Ethics.” Zygon 49 (1): 171–89. Dunlap, Thomas R. 2006. “Environmentalism, a Secular Faith.” Environmental Values 15: 321–30. Evans, Gillian Rosemary. 1986. The Thought of Gregory the Great. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frumkin, Howard, Gregory N. Bratman, Sara J. Breslow, Bobby Cochran, Peter H. Kahn Jr., Joshua J. Lawler, Philips S. Levin et al. 2017. “Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda.” Environmental Health Perspectives 125 (7): Article ID 075001. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2013 [1960]. Truth and Method. Translated and revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Goralnik, Lissy, and Michael Nelson. 2011. “Forming a Philosophy of Environmental Action: Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and the Importance of Community.” The Journal of Environmental Education 42 (3): 181–92. Grund, Julius, and Antje Brock. 2020. “Education for Sustainable Development in Germany: Not Just Desired but also Effective for Transformative Action.” Sustainability 12 (7): 1–20. Hart, John. 2006. Sacramental Commons: Christian Ecological Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hedlund-de Witt, Annick. 2013. “Pathways to Environmental Responsibility: A Qualitative Exploration of the Spiritual Dimension of Nature Experience.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 7 (2): 154–86. Heimlich, Joe E., and Nicole M. Ardoin. 2008. “Understanding Behavior to Understand Behavior Change: A Literature Review.” Environmental Education Research 14: 215–37. Hessel, Stéphane. 2010. Indignez-vous! Montpellier: Scribe Publications. Ives, Christopher D., and Jeremy Kidwell. 2019. “Religion and Social Values for Sustainability.” Sustainability Science 14 (5): 1355–62. Joyce, Richard. 2007. The Evolution of Morality, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kovan, Jessica T., and John M. Dirkx. 2003. “‘Being Called Awake’: The Role of Transformative Learning in the Lives of Environmental Activists.” Adult Education Quarterly 53 (2): 99–118. Kretz, Lisa. 2012. “Climate Change: Bridging the Theory-Action Gap.” Ethics and the Environment 17 (2): 9–27. ———. 2020. Ethics, Emotions, Education, and Empowerment. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Leopold, Aldo. 1989 [1949]. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, Alisdair. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court. Palmer, Joy A., Jennifer Suggate, Ian Robottom, and Paul Hart. 1999. “Significant Life Experiences and Formative Influences on the Development of Adults. Environmental Awareness in the UK, Australia and Canada.” Environmental Education Research 5: 181–200.

Fittingness and Spiritual-Religious Nature of Environmentalism  115 Pope, Stephen. 2007. Human Evolution and Christian Ethics. New Studies in Christian Ethics 28. Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press. Roszak, Piotr. 2021. “The Sacramental Approach to the Sacred in Thomistic Perspective.” Religions 12 (46): 1–15. Shove, Elizabeth. 2010. “Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social Change.” Environment and Planning 42: 1273–85. Stickney, Jeff, and Michael Bonnett. 2020. “‘Emplaced Transcendence’ as Ecologising Education in Michael Bonnett’s Environmental Philosophy.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (4): 1087–96. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2005. Nature, Technology and the Sacred. Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Taylor, Bron. 2009. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Bron, Gretel Van Wieren, and Bernard Daley Zaleha. 2016. “Lynn White Jr. and the Greening-of-religion Hypothesis.” Conservation Biology 30 (5): 1000–9. Thoreau, Henry D. 2019. Walking. New York: Dover Publications. Van den Noortgaete, Francis, and Johan De Tavernier. 2014a. “Legere – Ligare: An Interpretive Key to the Environmentalist Experience of Nature.” Louvain Studies 38: 55–75. ———. 2014b. “Affected by Nature: A Hermeneutical Transformation of Environmental Ethics.” Zygon 49 (3): 572–92. Van Tongeren, Paul, and Paulien Snellen. 2014. “How Hermeneutics Might Save the Life of (Environmental) Ethics?” In Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, edited by Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen, and David Utsler, 297–312. New York: Fordham University Press. Verplanken, Bas, and Rob W. Holland. 2002. “Motivated Decision-Making: Effects of Activation and Self-Centrality of Values on Choices and Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82: 434–47. Walter, Pierre. 2013. “Dead Wolves, Dead Birds, and Dead Trees: Catalysts for Transformative Learning in the Making of Scientist-Environmentalists.” Adult Education Quarterly 63: 24–42. Weinberg, Andrea E., Carlie D. Trott, Wendy Wakefield, Eileen G. Merritt, and Leanna Archambault. 2020. “Looking Inward, Outward, and Forward: Exploring the Process of Transformative Learning in Teacher Education for a Sustainable Future.” Sustainability Science 15: 1767–87. White Jr., Lynn. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–7. Wilson, Edward O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

7

Fittingness as Attunement? Being Ecological with Timothy Morton and Hans Urs von Balthasar Yves de Maeseneer

Introduction Fittingness implies a given order within which what we do is either fitting or not. Classically this order has been imagined in musical terms as world harmony (harmonia mundi), to which ‘consonance’, ‘concordance’ and ‘well-temperedness’ were associated. (cf. Spitzer 1944, 1945) This vision got lost in Modern cosmology but survived in aesthetics through the German term ‘Stimmung’, which is related to ‘(Über)Einstimmung’ (‘consensus/consent’) and the expression ‘es stimmt’ (‘it’s right’). In English ‘Stimmung’ is rendered as ‘attunement’; the expression ‘to be in tune’ evokes a similar semantic field. This chapter will explore the potential of ‘attunement’ as a root metaphor for understanding ‘fittingness’, bringing to the fore an intrinsic link between the aesthetic and the ethical. I consider root metaphor as a fundamental image that shapes how we perceive, interpret and relate to reality (cf. McFague 1988). In my investigation I shall bring together Timothy Morton, a trendy contemporary eco-philosopher, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the greatest Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century – and close friend of Karl Barth. At first sight, Morton’s thinking might seem completely incompatible with von Balthasar’s Christian perspective. Leaning towards a kind of postmodern eco-Buddhism, Morton is open to spirituality and meditation, but if he refers to ‘religion’ at all, it is in a negative sense. In particular, monotheist religions are cast as ideological systems legitimating anthropocentric domination and violence. Morton suggests a close link between those religions and the development of agriculture, which gave rise to a destructive anthropocentrist ‘agrologistics’. This notwithstanding, there is some unexpected common ground. Both Morton and von Balthasar did their doctorate in (English and respectively German) Literature, with a keen interest in the Romantic period. In their later writings which are more philosophical /theological in nature, they remain more gifted in literary style than their peers who received a formal training in the disciplines of philosophy and theology. More importantly, both of them explicitly draw attention to the issue of style (cf. von Balthasar 1962a, 9–28; Morton 2018, 191–215). Each of them is highly influenced by Martin Heidegger’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-10

Fittingness as Attunement  117 thinking. And there is a striking parallel in both of them taking the aesthetic experience as the point of departure for breaking through what they perceive as the modern anthropocentric impasse. In this chapter, I shall focus upon the metaphor1 of attunement which both of them elaborate upon extensively in order to re-envision the field they are working in, respectively theology and ecology. In order to facilitate the encounter between both authors, I have attempted to structure their styles of essay writing into a more systematic presentation. 2 After having presented in parallel the views of both authors, I shall conclude with a critical evaluation of the eco-ethical relevance of their use of attunement in the light of this volume’s theme of fittingness. As a theological ethicist, my point of departure with a Christian thinker was showing how his notion of attunement can be further developed ethically in dialogue with a contemporary ecological author. This first section has an initial theological relevance. Readers who do not share this Christian framework will probably find the second and the third sections more accessible since they develop and discuss attunement in a philosophical-ethical way.

Attunement in von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics Von Balthasar develops his notion of attunement (Stimmung) in the first volume of his famous theological aesthetics, Herrlichkeit (1961; translated as: The Glory of the Lord), where the Christian faith experience is articulated in analogy with the aesthetic experience of beauty. My analysis will first distinguish three aspects within von Balthasar’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience: a transformative dynamics, a particular disposition and a participatory ontology/epistemology. 3 Second von Balthasar’s parallel with the experience of being Christian will be drawn. The Aesthetic Experience a) The aesthetic experience concerns an event in which I am confronted with what is not me and cannot be reduced to myself.4 In the encounter with a work of art, the person as a whole is moved. This dynamic of the aesthetic experience is described by means of sophisticated spatial metaphors. The human subject is decentred through a process of reciprocal dislocation. Beauty is said to be ‘literally ‘‘trans-porting’’’ (GL I, 221; H I, 213): Before the beautiful – no, not really before but within the beautiful – the whole person quivers [vibriert]. He not only ‘finds’ the beautiful moving; he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it. […] Such a person has been taken up wholesale into the reality of the beautiful and is now fully subordinate to it, determined [bestimmt] by it, animated by it. (GL I, 247; H I, 238)

118  Yves de Maeseneer The process goes in both directions: I am drawn (in)to the work of art, and the work of art enters into me; all our senses are engaged when the interior space of a beautiful musical composition or painting opens itself to us and captivates us: the whole person then enters into a state of vibration and becomes responsive space, the ‘sounding box’ [Resonanzkasten] of the event of beauty occurring within the person. (GL I, 221; H I, 212) Notice that in both citations the metaphor of attunement is deployed to evoke the intimate interrelationship and transformative dynamics at stake. A vibration – in the case of music literally – moves, interconnects and transforms us. b) A second aspect concerns a disposition of receptivity – ‘a mysterious obedience’ (GL 1, 251; H I). In the aesthetic experience, I give up my absolute autonomy in order to not obstruct the appearance of Beauty. I make room in myself in order to correspond to the beautiful form. In the enrapturing experience of beauty, a self-surrender takes place in service of the beautiful. c) This aesthetic experience opens up the realm of a participatory metaphysics/epistemology, in which the human subject is attuned to reality as a whole and is open to experience – to love and to know – by affinity. Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas’ notion of connaturality (cf. Carpenter 2015, 129–31), von Balthasar makes mention of an ontological attunement (GL I, 234; H I, 235: Eingestimmtsein auf das Sein im ganzen). As experiencing subject, I find myself in an intimate kinship with the being I encounter and with Being as a whole. The attuned person empathically ‘feels with’ what it encounters. Referring to the etymological roots of con-sensus, which comes from the Latin cum-sentire (literally: ‘to feel with’), von Balthasar further unfolds his point that epistemology involves a fundamental affective layer: ‘the feeler is by his nature attuned to what is felt and, therefore, as-sents and con-sents to it [zu- und bei-stimmt]’ (GL I, 234; H I, 235). Through this fundamental concordance, the human subject is given a share in a primal joy in Being, which precedes any more specific affection (fear, sorrow, delight …). Earlier in his book, von Balthasar had referred to the Swiss Romantic theologian Alois Gügler (1782–1827), who understood attunement as a way of becoming cosmoform – and Christoform (GL I, 99–100; cf. Coolman 2009, 786–7; Moser 2016, 250–1). von Balthasar’s metaphysics is not to be misunderstood as a form of cosmic monism or pantheism. He emphasises that there is a multilayered differentiation among beings whose appearance can never be identified with Being as such, and that God remains transcendent as the ungraspable Fount of Being (GL I, 244–5; H I, 235–6; cf. von Balthasar 1965, 943–83). In a world impoverished by Modern positivism,

Fittingness as Attunement  119 von Balthasar claims Christians are called to be shepherds of Being, to retrieve a differentiated ontological depth and ‘experience the cosmos as the revelation of an infinity of grace and love’ (von Balthasar 1989, 109). ‘Only one whose heart is attuned to the art of God can be expected to establish order and due proportion in the confusion and chaos of the present’ (von Balthasar 1989, 126). Being Christian This view of aesthetic experience as attunement serves as analogy of the faith experience wherein the whole person – including their affective and bodily dimension – encounters Christ and is attuned to Him. In the following words, von Balthasar recapitulates the key section entitled ‘Christian Attunement’ (GL 1, 241–57; H I, 233–47), comparing the existence of the Christian with a harp tuned by the Triune God: The concept of attunement (Stimmung) embraces both the aesthetic and the theological elements. An existence is envisaged which is like an instrument tuned [gestimmtes Instrument] by the Spirit: at the breath of the Spirit, the instrument like the Aeolian harp rings out in tune. This is an attunement (Gestimmtsein) which is a concordance (Übereinstimmung) with the rhythm of God himself, and therefore an assent (Zustimmung) not only to God’s Being, but to his free act of willing which is always being breathed by God upon man. And finally in virtue of this pliancy it is the order (das Stimmen) within man himself – his Augustinian rectitudo – which make him to be himself the work of the divine Artist. But the instrument has no need to bother himself about this. (GL I, 251; H I, 241–2) The rectitudo (‘fittingness’) subsists in an ontological and ethical attunement to God’s Being and Will, in which the three aspects I distinguished in the aesthetic attunement can be retrieved in an analogical way: a) As the German words between brackets in the fragment illustrate, it is hard to translate how von Balthasar plays here and elsewhere in his text with different forms based upon the root ‘-stimm-’ (‘-tune-’). In order to visualise the transformative dynamics he suggests, I produced following diagram: By means of prepositions and prefixes, which von Balthasar often hyphenates in order to draw attention to the fact that the different words are composed with the same root ‘-stimm-’, he expresses a dynamics of ‘tuning towards/unto/into’ (rendering in English the words linked to the bottom arrow in the diagram) and ‘being tuned by/from’ (see upper arrow). 5 The resonance to and for God involves a perichoretic dynamics of decentring in which the human person is radically receptive, vibrating in the tune of Christ and His Church.

120  Yves de Maeseneer von Gott her Bestimmung

Stimmung Christi

Gestimmtheit

Echo sich einstimmen in/auf

Zustimmung zu Beistimmung eingestimmt werden auf/in

Figure 7.1  The transformative dynamics in von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics.

b) Analogous to the second aspect in the aesthetic experience, the required human disposition subsists in a fundamental receptivity. This ability to receive is bestowed by the Spirit, but this does not take away the fact that the human person has to actively attune themself to it (cf. GL I, 247; H I, 237). The aim is ‘to make the whole man a space that responds to the divine content. Faith attunes man to this sound […] preparing him to be a violin that receives just this touch of the [divine] bow’ (GL I, 220; H I, 212). c) In the process of attunement, grace works within our ontological structure by indwelling it and transforming it into a renewed connaturality. The Spirit ‘awakens and inclines our own deepest love to the absolute Love that comes to meet us from the depths of Being itself, a Love that addresses each of us personally’ (GL I, 250; H I, 241). As such, the whole person is transposed to the sphere of Christ. Through a loving obedience, the human person grows in consonance with God according to a Christological measure. The hymn of Philippians 2 expresses the required inner movement in which a joyful and trusting ascent of the Risen paradoxically coincides with a kenotic descent into the suffering of the Crucified. Attunement involves expropriation for God and for the world (cf. GL I, 253–4; H I, 244–5). ‘The tune of Christ is the tune of one who has become expropriated for God and humankind’ (H I, 244).6 Von Balthasar does not articulate the ecological dimension of ­attunement – apart from an aside about animals (cf. GL 1, 243). Nor is there any ethical elaboration in his theological-aesthetic approach.7 The only, very general, criterion von Balthasar proposes is related to ontological attunement. Inspired by the Ignatian spiritual exercises which aim at discerning God’s will by experiencing which act brings consolation or desolation – joy or sadness –, he

Fittingness as Attunement  121 formulates the following question for the ‘discernment of spirits’: ‘Does the joy of an act (or the sadness of an act) positively point to the joy of Being? Or, no matter how seductively an act may strongly and obviously be experienced as an act of joy, could it not in reality be an act that veils and clouds the joy of Being?’ (GL I, 246; H I, 237).

Attunement in Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thinking Inspiration for an ecological-ethical development of attunement could be found in an intriguing parallel in contemporary eco-philosophy. In Veer Ecology, a collection of essays in which major ecological thinkers were asked which verb they considered key for our current age, Timothy Morton proposed the verb ‘attune’, which he further elaborated upon in his book Being Ecological (Morton 2017, 2018). Morton explains what attunement is about by referring to evolutionary adaptation and entanglement in quantum theory, but most prominently to the experience of art. Alluding to both the Romantics and Immanuel Kant, who used the word ‘Stimmung’ (attunement) to evoke the harmony between imagination and understanding within the aesthetic experience, Morton gives the notion his own twist. The aesthetic experience becomes the model for a less hierarchical, less violent coexistence between humans and nonhumans, which he considers the basis for ecological ethics and politics (Morton 2018, 41, 108, 122, 177 e.a.). The Aesthetic Experience A careful analysis of Morton’s phenomenology of the aesthetic experience leads to structural similarities with the one I found in von Balthasar’s. a) First of all, there is the dynamics of what Morton calls ‘uncanny dislocation’ (Morton 2018, 102).8 In the experience of art, something strange happens which is not initiated nor controlled by the human subject. ‘Attunement is the feeling of an object’s power over me – I am being dragged by its tractor beam into its orbit’ (167). When I enter, for instance, the non-confessional Rothko Chapel in Houston, I am confronted with a non-human being (the painted walls), which has its own timbre (colours), which cannot be seized by my cognitive capacities, but with which I find myself involuntarily resonating. The different verbs which Morton uses to describe the aesthetic experience could be represented in a similar diagram as the one we had in von Balthasar. As Morton himself indicates, the dynamics corresponds to a Möbius strip (159–60). b) A second parallel with von Balthasar is the required disposition of receptivity and openness. Several of Morton’s expressions suggest an overpowering of the human subject, but the relationship is not characterised by mere passivity. Rather there is a mutual veering. If I do allow art to affect me, a complex dynamics can take place, ‘some kind of mind-meld-like thing that takes place, where I can’t tell it’s me or the artwork that is causing the

122  Yves de Maeseneer beauty experience’ (122). Whenever I encounter another object or subject, ‘I am playing a tune called myself to which you are attuning, but which is itself attuned to you, so that we have an asymmetrical chiasmus between myself and me, between me and you’ (163). c) Third, the experience of art gives access to a different ontology and epistemology. While the ruling anthropocentrist system is based upon a metaphysics of presence, with its clear and distinct ideas neatly separating the human subject from the different objects, the aesthetic experience of being tuned implies allowing and appreciating ambiguity (cf. Morton 2018, 177–9). Through art, the boundaries maintained by the agrologistic system, which serve the objective of power and control, are dismantled to lay bare a repressed interconnectedness. The alternative to the current dualism is not a simple holism: on the contrary, art reveals the ‘rift between being and appearing’ (131, 137). What Morton is seeking for is ‘uncanny affinity’ (162), which respects ‘a different kind of difference’ (153, 159, 162), with which we find ourselves intertwined. ‘Finding something in me that is not me’ (178), I retrieve a feeling of solidarity with non-humans – in this case, with works of art. As irrevocably different, the work of art can appear as an ‘infinity portal’ (134, 165), in which the unexpected future can appear. Morton ends his essay ‘Attune’ with an enigmatic imperative: ‘The not-me beckons, making me hesitate. Come.’ (Morton 2017, 166; cf. Morton 2018, 134, 172). Being Ecological Morton proposes this account of the aesthetic experience in terms of attunement as a model for ecological awareness. Being ecological involves acknowledging the existence of things which are not human and with whom we coexist (Morton 2018, 128). Attunement opens an open-ended transformative space within ourselves and between human and other life forms – life forms ranging from the symbionts in our own body, over rocks and animals, up to the level of ecosystems and the biosphere. Attunement implies a dynamics and a disposition which have epistemological, ontological, systemic/political and ethical implications. a) The challenge of ecological thinking is not just what to think or know about ecology, but rather how to think differently. The metaphor of attunement helps to break away from the Modern representational logics of the technocratic paradigm which prefers visual metaphors (insight, overview, supervision …) and to turn towards a logic of resonance. It is significant that Morton’s acoustic metaphor does not refer to the hearing of words, but to the vibration of sound, for instance, as in the attuning of a string instrument (141). As a non-verbal relation to reality, attunement involves a pre-cognitive awareness which is deeply embodied and integrates the affections, for example, as in the profound empathy provoked by listening to the sound of whales (156). Epistemologically, attunement implies giving up

Fittingness as Attunement  123 the idea of the human subject being situated above reality – like the soul above the body, or the transcendental subject above its object. We are always entangled in the middle of it. This intimacy makes a ‘one-way human conversation’ (120) impossible. The self-certain disposition of the Modern subject makes way for hesitation, thoughtfulness, contemplative openness and the appreciation of ambiguity.9 Ecological epistemology means taking into account different scales from the ones which only reckon with human temporality and proportions. In this regard, Morton critically remarks that the mainstream sustainability discourse remains ‘anthropocentrically scaled’ (127) as it reduces the question to solving a situation which has become dysfunctional for us humans. b) In line with the epistemological aspects, Morton holds that attunement also implies a different ontology. The static metaphysics of presence, which assumed the human as centre of power and meaning, is dismantled by the awareness of the force of the non-human. In Morton’s ‘object oriented ontology’ (147–9), we find ourselves in a world in which objects have power over us, enchanting or repelling us. Versus human intentionality and mechanical causality which imagines the human being as conductor of the world, attunement corresponds to a multidirectional dynamics. Morton’s relational ontology brings to the fore interconnectedness and kinship. However, it is not to be confused with a harmony understood as static order: especially in the current context, being ecological is being intermingled in torn, weird relationships. c) This ontology leads to a critical perspective at the political/systemic level. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are always already attuning and being attuned. Morton introduces the notion ‘attunement space’ (139, 144–6, 154, 162) in order to thematise the often unnoticed framework within which we vibrate. The critical question is to which tone we resonate. The current capitalist system has a certain reference tone to which we are pushed to resonate. As such it perfects what agrologistics (backed up by monotheism) did: flattening out the multilayered complex space of attunement, tempering the world with its manifold and spectral harmonics to a merely anthropocentric tone. In that process, the space of interconnectedness underwent a neat separation into binary schemes and got ordered to a human teleology. Over against this tendency, being ecological is about retrieving ways of attuning to a wilder region in which we rediscover the love and desire of a kinship among non-human beings (cf. Morton 2018, 151–2, 168). d) Thinking in terms of attunement helps to switch to a different attitude in ecological ethics. Morton presents his approach as an alternative to the prevailing styles (Morton, 191–215). On the one hand, there is the style which attempts to raise moral concern by overwhelming people with data about the state of our planet. More information has often a paralysing effect, while what we need is transformation. On the other hand, there is the strategy to blame people and make them feel guilty in the hope

124  Yves de Maeseneer they will convert (4). According to Morton, this approach is misdirected: individuals do not have a significant impact on, for instance, global warming – which does not mean that there is no responsibility to address the issue (35). Moreover, people will sooner or later suffer from ecological action fatigue or even allergy against this style’s patronizing tone. Equally counter-productive in the latter style is the assumption underlying the call for conversion that we would need a completely different kind of human being (‘saints’ or ‘heroes’) in order to become ecological (106–7). Ecological attunement, on the contrary, implies a transformation which is not a complete make-over, but a more subtle change in awareness. Morton let himself be inspired by a Buddhist calligraphy which read ‘CARE/LESS’ (32–5, 179, 183ff, 188): a call to become care free, and through this relief grow towards a playful care. In a certain way, Morton suggests, the widespread indifference towards the ecological crisis might be a better point of departure than an overstrained concern. The disposition we need subsists in a certain surrender. This kind of spiritual contemplation could be found in Buddhist meditation, in which the point is entering into a paradoxical state of ‘relaxed alertness’ (141–2). For Morton, the first step is allowing humans and nonhumans to exist (188). Being ecological is developing hospitality, a welcoming openness to the unpredictable (cf. 182–3).

Fittingness as Attunement? A Critical Eco-Ethical Evaluation Morton’s ecologically sensitive perspective, which has some intriguing parallels with von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, allows us to see how the metaphor of attunement can help to make sense of ecological fittingness.10 For both authors, attunement involves a transformative dynamics, a receptive disposition and the ontological-epistemological participation in an interconnected and multilayered space to which human beings can open themselves. Let us briefly look at the promises and limits of such an approach. A Radically Interrelational and Complex Ontology A common understanding relates fittingness to how a part fits within a larger whole – or, applied to ecological ethics, how a life-form fits within its environment. ‘Environment’, which etymologically refers to ‘that which surrounds’, suggests the non-human as a backdrop to the human – as circumstances which do not intrinsically belong to the subject. The metaphor of attunement helps to imagine a relationship which is less static and more interrelational: vibrations penetrate deeply into the different parts involved and interconnect them in an intimate way – perichoretic like a Möbius strip. Conceiving of fittingness as attunement affects a ‘shift in orientation

Fittingness as Attunement  125 from being within an environment to being inseparably part of ecological processes’ (Jensen 2019). Notice in this regard that both authors distance themselves from a holistic worldview which would reduce relational ontology to a fake harmony. Morton and von Balthasar emphasise that there is beauty ánd distortion – in theological terms: glory ánd cross. Indeed, Morton’s worldview is marked by a refusal to dream our ecological world as a harmonious order – as such avoiding more Classical or Romanticising visions of ecological fittingness. Attunement is about constantly seeking how to live in a messy reality. Morton’s approach resonates with other major ecological voices such as Donna Haraway, who also invokes the notion of attunement in order to imagine practices of making kin with the wounded earth and the other-than-human. Her goal is not restoring harmony, but rather ‘staying with the trouble’, while at the same time seeking to share in the joyful process of ‘sym-poiesis’ (‘making-with’) (Haraway 2016). Nearer to von Balthasar’s take on attunement as ‘feeling with’ is the stance taken by Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato si‘ where the point is both ‘to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it’ (Laudato si’, nr. 19; cf. Christie 2017) and to contemplate with joy and awe the beauty of creation (Laudato si’, nr. 12). A More Fundamental Level than Action: Attunement as Disposition Those looking for concrete ethical advice will be left disappointed after reading both authors’ accounts of attunement. Resonating with von Balthasar’s contemplative orientation (von Balthasar 1989), Morton is deliberately unpractical (cf. Morton 2018, 14–7): the objective is to open space for thoughtfulness and a different way of being. Ecological ethics is not primarily about what to do, but the question how to relate to – how to be in the middle of – what is going on. Indeed, there are good reasons to take this direction. The well-known problem of the value-action gap points at a kind of foundational blockade which the mere imperative to work harder cannot overcome. (cf. Van Den Noortgaete and De Tavernier 2014; De Carvalho et al. 2011) The perplexity is not practical but situated at a deeper level. Understanding what moves us can help to overcome the gap. Attunement promises a more integral strategy which includes the affective dimension. Moreover, both von Balthasar and Morton prioritise the affection of joy in contrast to ecological ethics’ usual tendency towards fear or guilt. In line with Morton’s analysis, I would point to another problem with a pragmatist critique of attunement. Ecological calls to action might be blind to the vicious circle of action and reaction. By lack of a deeper connection, action might actually end up as reaction, buying into the very system which

126  Yves de Maeseneer is causing the impasse. The vector of the current destructive dynamics is not transformed, but merely inverted in a sterile back and forth – involuntarily sustaining the anthropocentric attunement space. Ecological attunement is a different way of responding to what is going on. It is receptively seeking to plug into sources of life-giving creativity – von Balthasar would say: joyfully participating in the primal goodness of Being. Attunement reminds us that contemplation precedes and shapes action. Just like fittingness, attunement offers a helpful metaphor to articulate the more fundamental layer in our moral life to which ecological virtue ethics has drawn attention. In this regard, Morton claims several times that free will is overrated (Morton 2018, 168, 171–2). Epistemologically, an attunement perspective implies that there is no position outside the world from which we would be able to deliberate which choice we should freely make. Moreover‚ ‘ecological awareness is awareness of unintended consequences’ (50). That is why the way forward is not a kind of perfect ‘ecological attunement’ in which humanity through efficient measures will take back control over nature and the planetary system. This is, in Morton’s eyes, both impossible and undesirable as it would merely continue the anthropocentric mind-set which brought us into trouble in the first place. A genuinely ecological attunement is not the result of our human master plan, but of a shift in orientation, where the focus is no longer on human intentionality, but on what Tim Ingold calls ‘attentionality’ (Ingold 2017, 18–20). The notion of ‘attunement’ indicates an awareness of being enmeshed in a world in turmoil, which nevertheless is living on creatively and with which we resonate and cooperate. Attunement, which addresses our human disposition and affections to retrieve the power of love and desire, is situated at a different level from action, although it is crucial to maintain the connection (cf. Coolman 2009). In musical terms, attunement serves as a bourdon tone, a drone tone, which is always there in the bottom throughout the song, as a background bearing and enabling the melodic variations. The merit of Morton’s thinking is to be found in his thorough-going deconstruction, which is a liberating move insofar as the assumption holds that our major problem is being stuck within a closed system. More practical issues are beyond his scope. Once attuned ecologically, alternatives can emerge. This said, attunement could and should become more concrete than what both our authors have on offer. I think here, for instance, of the special issue of the geographers journal Geohumanities where attunement is explored as a path of inventing new ways of collaborating with, listening to, and granting authority to new kinds of voices, including more-than-human life and forms of material agency … What happens when we attempt to attune ourselves to forms of agency that do not possess a conventionally recognized voice to be amplified? (Brigstocke and Noorani 2016, 2)11

Fittingness as Attunement  127 Aeolian Dynamics: A Complication about Agency Related to the preceding issue, a moral ambiguity emerges concerning the fate of human agency in an attunement model. In line with his relativisation of free will, Morton states that attunement happens in a penumbra beyond active and passive (Morton 2018, 180). The non-human is said to be ‘affecting you, but in a non violent way’ (180), but if Morton calls attunement a ‘mind-meld’ (129), he is not very outspoken about the way in which this is distinct from a meltdown. Other passages hint at a certain objectification of the subject, a loss of conventional personhood (Morton 2018, 162–3). A similar concern arises with von Balthasar’s view: in a text which contains an overflow of words based on the root ‘-stimm-’, the word ‘Stimme’ (‘voice’) is suspiciously absent. Reflecting upon artistic inspiration, von Balthasar advises the human subject to shut up: ‘Externally the artist may choose to appear haughty, but interiorly he must be a humble receptive womb for the “conception”. Only if he knows how to be quite will the anima [the inspiring instance] sing in him’. (GL I, 251; H I, 241) Elsewhere in his book, he presents the Christian ideal as becoming an ‘echo of Christ’ (GL I, 218, 329, 366; H I, 210, 317, 353; cf. De Maeseneer 2004, 243).12 In this regard, there is a further striking parallel between von Balthasar and Morton: both compare the attuned person to an Aeolian harp, a string instrument not played by human hands, but only by the wind. In the fragment already quoted above, an ‘existence is envisaged which is like an instrument tuned by the Spirit: at the breath of the Spirit, the instrument like the Aeolian harp rings out in tune’ (von Balthasar GL I, 251). While Victoria Harrison praises attunement as an ‘arresting metaphor’ (Harrison 2000, 15), I felt rather unpleasantly captivated by the uncanniness of this image, which too eagerly seems to eliminate human agency. On several occasions, Morton also comes back to this image (Morton 2007, 129, 134, 191, 2008, 2018, 142–3). The ‘Aeolian’ is even a key term in his ecological aesthetics (Morton 2007, 4, 34, 41–3, 47, 58, 66, 82, 129–30). ‘All voices are Aeolian,’ he states (Morton 2008, 327), but he also admits that an Aeolian perspective ‘inevitably ignores the [human] subject (Morton 2007, 4). In an article devoted to the Romantic poet Coleridge, Morton offers a rich reflection on the way in which the Aeolian harp provides a form for ecological thought, which he defines as ‘the profoundest possible meditation on how everything is connected’ (Morton 2008, 311). The wind harp – today, we more commonly have wind chimes – is marked by a refined receptivity analogous to a sensor or seismograph and organises sound without human intervention. Its music is played with ‘un-intention’ (313), ‘de-individuated’ (314). The dualist distinctions between subject and object, active and passive, inside and outside, spiritual and material, are blurred. The Aeolian harp ‘makes us aware of the environment as music’ (319) and, intimately interwoven with the atmospheric conditions, something contingent, i.e., both fragile and unique, happens. In unpredictable encounters, different voices

128  Yves de Maeseneer resonate with and through each other. The instrument evokes an ecological mode of radical openness and attentiveness to strangeness and otherness, but also lays bare new realms of pleasure and a form of ‘contemplative materialism’ (316). It is interesting for the issue of agency that Morton interprets what is going on as a kind of ‘machinic automated process’ (320), which produces paradoxically the fairy tale sound of a utopian ‘world in which people are not treated like machines’ (330). The image of the Aeolian harp illustrates much of the appeal of attunement for ecological ethics, but also its ambiguity. One might object that my suspicion about depersonalisation is based upon a false dilemma. Ingold rightly questions a binary vision of agency: ‘Is there any way to imagine not being the masters of our acts “without falling prey to the idea that if we are not master, someone or something else must be?”’ (Ingold 2017, 17). Nevertheless, the ambiguity entertained by Morton in his article when he embraces the harp’s potential as ‘dehumanizing technology’ (Morton 2008, 327) and considers human beings as harps, rendered ‘sequacious’ (320) to the ambient wind, resonates with an ethically problematic feature of Morton’s more recent approach to attunement. In the 2018 book I have analysed above, both aesthetic experience and ecological attunement are qualified by adjectives with a rather negative connotation – dark, hidden, obscure, uncanny, weird, messy, demonic, fuzzy, haunting, spooky, abject, disgusting, perverse … (see, e.g., Morton 2018, 62, 113, 128, 134, 136, 138, 157, 159), Morton uses these terms as a playful shock therapy to reverse the dominant anthropocentric discourse which imposes an illusionary order based upon exclusion of the non-human – that is why in the article ‘dehumanizing’ could be appreciated as liberative. Against systemic discrimination, Morton wants to acknowledge and embrace the ambiguity of all life. My problem is that this argumentative strategy seems to situate his ontology beyond good and evil. Attunement seems to leave us without moral compass. Morton is clear that certain ‘attunement spaces’ are detrimental. But why would we trust his call to attune differently? The question is: who is setting the tune to which Morton recommends us to surrender? Attuning to an impersonal universe risks ending up in depersonalisation. Here, von Balthasar’s perspective has more potential. Von Balthasar’s sometimes equally radical words on the decentring or expropriation of the human subject are explicitly grounded in an ontology which is not morally neutral. It is significant that Morton explicitly dismisses Coleridge’s attempt to ground all tunes in a mystical unity, when the latter invokes in a late revision of his poem Eolian harp ‘the one Life within us and abroad’ as the animating principle of the organic harps which we and all life-forms are (Morton 2008, 320; cf. Trower 2009). At this point von Balthasar would side with Coleridge in his metaphysical affirmation of originary Goodness. One might draw upon different sources and traditions to further qualify this goodness to which to attune: Morton could have turned to a Buddhist view; others might refer to a Jewish one (Fishbane 2010). Von Balthasar

Fittingness as Attunement  129 grounds his ontological affirmation within a Christian framework: for him it is Christ who gives us the pitch to which we attune.13 When His Spirit breathes in us as in an Aeolian harp, this is experienced as unselfing, but ‘[i] t is not the personal existence of the individual that the Spirit undoes, but the sinful creature’s tendency to draw the world to himself, to grasp, objectify, and consume’ (Vogel 2007, 28). Attunement is about awakening ‘“our attention for the particular intention God had when he called us into existence” with that new name which he bestowed on us in His Son’ (GL I, 404; H I, 390). The decentring is oriented towards the creature’s retrieving that it has its personal center in its response to God’s creating voice. As such, von Balthasar suggests, fittingness as attunement can only hold ethically if we can trust that our own deepest love resonates with ‘an absolute Love that comes to meet us from the depths of Being itself, a Love that addresses each of us personally’ (GL I, 250; H I, 241).

Notes 1 I do not use metaphor as a technical term. Von Balthasar would rather use the term ‘analogy’, while Morton, as a literature scholar, might also have his own reluctance with ‘metaphor’. I use the term ‘metaphor’ in a broad sense, in line with what I have stated above about ‘root metaphor’ as a fundamental frame. Root metaphor is pointing at what Charles Taylor indicates as ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor 2004) – or in this case, ‘ecological imaginary’ (Buckles 2018). 2 I will use a significant number of quotes to make sure that my analysis does not drift away too far from the authors’. The disadvantage of this strategy is that – in particular, in the case of Morton – the quotes might raise new issues which I cannot resolve in the limited space of a book chapter. 3 For the sake of the argument, I present von Balthasar’s meandering writing into a schema which first describes the worldly aesthetic experience, distinct from the experience of faith. Von Balthasar’s method itself takes its starting point immediately from within the perspective of faith for which he finds analogies in aesthetics. For a more detailed discussion of von Balthasar’s theological-aesthetical notion of experience, see De Maeseneer (2004). 4 In order to evoke the aesthetic experience, I will use phrases in the first person. The third person is used to give a more distanced theoretical account. 5 See, e.g., also: ‘not only an objectless and intentionless disposition (Stimmung), but rather a deliberate attunement of self (sich-Einstimmen) to the accord (Stimmen) existing between Christ and his mandate from the Father, in the context of salvation-history’s assent (Zu-stimmung), which the Holy Spirit is in Christ and effects in him’ (GL I, 253; H I, 243). 6 My literal translation of the German original which reads: ‘Die Stimmung Christi aber ist die Stimmung des zu Gott und zu den Menschen hin Expropriierten’ (H I, 244). 7 In his development of a Balthasarian theological ethics, Christopher Steck puts forward the notion of attunement, but in his actual interpretation of it, more common metaphors (vision, call-response) take over and reframe the image of attunement. E.g.: ‘an attunement whereby the entire person comes to be the type of person who “sees” a world in which these calls of the good can be “heard”’ (Steck 2001, 127). 8 Unless indicated otherwise, all pages references in this section are to Morton 2018.

130  Yves de Maeseneer

Fittingness as Attunement  131 Gregersen, Niels Henrik, ed. 2015. Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harrison, Victoria S. 2000. The Apologetic Value of Human Holiness: von Balthasar’s Christocentric Philosophical Anthropology. Studies in Philosophy and Religion 21. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ingold, Tim. 2017. “On Human Correspondence.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23: 9–27. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.12541 Jensen, Tim. 2019. Ecologies of Guilt in Environmental Rhetorics. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, UK/Medford, MA: Polity. McFague, Sallie. 1988. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age. London: SCM. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2008. “Of Matter and Meter: Environmental Form in Coleridge’s ‘Effusion 35’ and ‘The Eolian Harp’.” Literature Compass 5 (2): 310–35. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741–4113.2007.00520.x. ———. 2017. “Attune.” In Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, 151–67. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2018. Being Ecological. London: Pelican Books. Moser, Matthew A. Rothaus. 2016. Love Itself Is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Pope Francis. 2015. Laudato si‘. Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home. http://www.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/ papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf. Spitzer, Leo. 1944. “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’ (Part I).” Traditio 2: 409–64. ———. 1945. “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’ (Part II).” Traditio 3: 307–64. Steck, Christopher W. 2001. The Ethical Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. New York: Crossroad. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trower, Shelley. 2009. “Nerves, Vibration and the Aeolian Harp.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net no. 54. DOI: 10.7202/038761ar. Van Den Noortgaete, Francis, and Johan De Tavernier. 2014. “Affected by Nature. A Hermeneutical Transformation of Environmental Ethics.” Zygon 49 (3): 572–92. Vander Lugt, Wesley. 2014. Living Theodrama: Reimagining Theological Ethics. Farnham: Ashgate. Vogel, Jeffrey A. 2007. “The Unselfing Activity of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Logos 10 (4): 16–34. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. 1961. Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik I. Schau der Gestalt. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag [Abbreviated as H I].

132  Yves de Maeseneer ———. 1962a. Herrlichkeit: Eine Theologische Ästhetik II. Fächer der Stile 1. Klerikale Stile. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag. ———. 1962b. Herrlichkeit: Eine Theologische Ästhetik II. Fächer der Stile 2. Laikale Stile. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag. ———. 1965. Herrlichkeit: Eine Theologische Ästhetik III. Im Raum der Metaphysik 1. Neuzeit. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag. ———. 1982. The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics. I. Seeing the Form. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982. [Translation of H I; abbr. GL I]. ———. 1989. Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made Flesh. Translated by A. V. Littledale and Alexander Dru. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.

8 Anselm on Fittingness Varying Concepts of Fittingness in the Cur Deus homo Rostislav Tkachenko

Introduction A medieval thinker such as Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) seems to be extremely remote from our contemporary concerns and challenges because his philosophy was formulated more than nine hundred years ago for a very different world. However, he does have something to offer for a discussion about fittingness in this world. In fact, he is one of the classic Christian theologians who ascribed importance to such notions as ‘fittingness’ and ‘appropriateness’. They are regularly mentioned in his Cur Deus homo (‘Why God [Became] Man’, hereafter CDH).1 This treatise has been traditionally associated with the doctrine of the Incarnation of God’s Son and the satisfaction theory, but it also discusses what is appropriate for God and the world he created. Therefore, it is worthwhile to explore the depths of Anselmian thoughts about fittingness. To a certain extent, the concept of fittingness in the corpus anselmianum has received due scholarly attention in the recent past. It has found its way into several significant publications and has been analysed from different angles (Hopkins 1972, 48–51; 2007, 239–40, 250–2; Evans 1978, 143–9; 1989, 45–7; Root 1987; McCord Adams 1999, 375–80; Brown 2004, 284– 5; Visser and Williams 2009, 166–9, 172–6, 196–201, 214–23; Sweeney 2012, 281–2, 292). For example, Evans saw it correctly that fittingness was important and ‘powerful in his frame of reference’, denoting ‘a rightness [of] things, a rectitudo, a divine harmony, which is divinely ordained and cannot ultimately fail’ (Evans 2004, 21), while Visser and Williams admitted that Anselm founded many of his arguments on the notion of ‘the fitting order that God has established in the universe as a whole’ (Visser and Williams 2009, 196). Still, the topic has not been exhausted yet, because, to my knowledge, only D. Hogg has offered a systematic treatment of ‘the aesthetic dimension’ of Anselm’s theology and the notion of fittingness in particular, although his approach is very broad, trying to integrate all works and explore ‘the pervasiveness of an aesthetic ideal in Anselm’s thinking’ as a whole (Hogg 2004).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-11

134  Rostislav Tkachenko My primary focus is to turn to CDH, concentrate on the multifaceted set of concepts of fittingness there, and try to systematise them in a form of partly exegetical and partly analytical study. I suggest that, when reading CDH, one may legitimately talk of proper theological fittingness which at times turns into more of methodological fittingness as well as ontological fittingness. The latter has to do precisely with structures of the world of created beings, leading one to think also about some sort of moral or ethical fittingness. In what follows, I introduce the key terms, interpret crucial concepts, and try to offer a few ethical considerations based on the Anselmian understanding of harmony and aptness that he sees in the world.

Terminological Observations First of all, one needs to answer the question: how does Anselm speak of fittingness? My starting point is to explicate the spectrum of key terms and grammatical constructions. In CDH, Anselm of Canterbury employs a number of predominantly impersonal formulations which one might associate with ‘fittingness’. He regularly uses an adjectival construction necesse est (‘it is necessary’, ‘it is useful’)2 and verbs like decet (‘it befits’, ‘it is appropriate’, ‘it is fitting), 3 oportet (‘it is proper’, ‘it is right’, ‘it is obligatory to’),4 and convenit (‘it is fitting’, ‘it is appropriate’). 5 The latter verb also provides a root for a group of cognate words that are scattered throughout the text: a pair of active present participles like conveniens (‘fitting’, ‘appropriate’) and inconveniens (‘unfitting’, ‘inappropriate’),6 a pair of adverbs like convenienter (‘fittingly’, ‘appropriately’) and inconvenienter (‘unfittingly’,’ ‘inappropriately’),7 and twosome abstract nouns like convenientia and inconvenientia which denote ‘fittingness’ and ‘unfittingness’, respectively.8 Overall, there is both some overlap and some differences in how these terms are used and what they mean. As Hopkins notes, both convenit and decet stand for ‘it is fitting’, necesse est for ‘it is necessary’, and oportet ‘appears to be used sometimes as a substitute for necesse est and sometimes as a substitute for convenit and decet’ (Hopkins 1972, 50n28). Hogg, in turn, draws a clear line between these terms and decidedly identifies oportet with ‘fittingness, propriety or acting in accord with one’s character’, convenit with something’s being ‘in accord with right order’, and decet with ‘that which is in [one’s] character’ (Hogg 2004, 97, 168–9), but he probably overstates both the difference in lexical meaning and the regularity of its observance in Anselm’s texts. All of the mentioned terms signify certain appropriateness – of God’s decisions, the world-order, and the God-man’s actions. The constructions necesse est and oportet generally highlight an aspect of moral obligation, need or objective appropriateness of someone or something acting in a certain way. The latter is, for example, the meaning of a passage from CDH I, 3: ‘For it was fitting (oportebat) that as death had entered into the human

Anselm on Fittingness  135 race by the disobedience of man, so life would be restored by the obedience of man’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 51.5–7; 2000c, 303). As for decet and convenit with its cognates, they straightforwardly signify the notion of suitability and appropriateness of an action or a course of events.9 This aspect is present, for example, in two phrases from CDH I, 12: ‘But it is not fitting that God (Deum vero non decet) should forgive something that is disordered within His kingdom’ and ‘God would be dealing with the sinner and the non-sinner in the same way—something which is unsuitable for Him [to do] (deo non convenit)’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 69.15, 19–20; 2000c, 319, 320). Here, as Hogg correctly observes, fittingness implies that an act should be performed ‘in accord with right order [as] integrally related to the character of God’ (Hogg 2004, 169). Thus, there are obviously some terminological variations as well as variations in emphasis, but the general idea is clear. Both the number of terms used, and their overlapping meanings, leave no doubt that Anselm does think in terms of ‘fittingness’ and ‘propriety’ as related to God’s actions and a certain order of things. The frequency of references to what is befitting (decet, convenit, conveniens)10 and its opposites, and the presence of unambiguous ‘fittingness’ and ‘unfittingness’ (convenientia, inconvenientia), allow one to suggest that CDH is not only a treatise about Christology but also a book about fittingness.

Theological and Methodological Fittingness First of all, Anselm places his ‘fittingness discourse’ in the context of theology proper. He refers to what is appropriate for God and employs rational arguments based on fittingness (rationes convenientes), in addition to his well-known rationally necessary arguments (rationes necessariae). It is what I call theological and/or methodological fittingness. Essentially, it is the same thing, but with two functions: first, as an element of the doctrine of God and, second, as a form of argumentation used therein. An explanation is in order. In CDH, Anselm formulates and systematically observes a theological rule: a portrait of God must be drawn with the help of a regular ‘fittingness check’ – whatever faith and reason show to be inappropriate for the most perfect being should be regarded false and whatever looks appropriate of the Godhead is likely to be true. Anselm explains: I would like for us to agree to accept, in the case of God, nothing that is in even the least degree unfitting and to reject nothing that is in even the slightest degree reasonable unless something more reasonable opposes it (nullum vel minimum inconveniens in deo a nobis accipiatur, et nulla vel minima ratio, si maior non repugnat, reiciatur). For in the case of God, just as an impossibility results from any unfittingness, however slight, so necessity accompanies any degree of reasonableness,

136  Rostislav Tkachenko however small, provided it is not overridden by some other more weighty reason (in deo quamlibet parvum inconveniens sequitur impossibilitas, ita quamlibet parvam rationem, si maiori non vincitur, comitatur necessitas). (CDH I, 10; Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 67.2–6; 2000c, 317) In other words, if one ascribes to God a property or an action that is in any sense unfitting, it cannot be a true predication, while the attribution of something fitting and reasonable should be true – or even may be necessarily true – unless proven otherwise. It seems, the reasonable here must be roughly identical with the fitting because ‘unreasonable’ is parallel to ‘unfitting.’ A passage from CDH I, 18 has a similar synonymity: the argument begins with the statement that ‘it is altogether unreasonable [to suppose] that …’ (omni caret ratione) and concludes with ‘a consequence which is unfitting’ (non convenit) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 81.4–10; 2000c, 331–2). In Anselm’s view, rationally fitting or reasonable theological arguments help to detect what is impossible in deo or what should be necessary in deo. Thus, he imposes ‘the necessity of avoiding unfittingness’ (necessitate vitandi indecentiam) on all speaking about God’s nature (CDH II, 5; Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 99.18; 2000c, 351), which Sweeney aptly and succinctly calls ‘the principle that God cannot act in unfitting ways’ (Sweeney 2012, 285). But reasonableness and fittingness are governed by a particular vision of God’s nature. The Anselmian principle naturally follows from his ‘perfect being theology’, that is, the perception of deity, according to which God is ‘the one necessary [Being], which is every good, complete good, and the only good’ (unum necessarium, quod est omne et totum et solum bonum) (Prosl. 23; Anselm of Canterbury 1938b, 117.5; 2000b, 107). That is, God must be understood as ‘the supreme good’ (Hogg) and an entity in whose case the ‘sum of those [divine] attributes, or any single of those attributes, by definition must constitute perfection’ (Evans) (Hogg 2004, 93; Evans 1978, 51; cf. Leftow 2004, 139; Morris 1991, 35). In practice, Anselm’s approach requires one to accept that it is theologically necessary to predict of the supremely good God only what is appropriate to and fitting for him. Likewise, it is theologically necessary to deny this God any inappropriate property or action. This is the theological necessity, and here is an example of how it works. In CDH I, 12 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 69.6–71.3; 2000c, 319–21), Anselm asks, ‘Whether it is fitting (deceat) for God to forgive sin out of mercy alone, apart from any payment of debt’. His response is in the negative because forgiving out of mercy alone entails too many unfitting consequences that would go contrary to both other divine attributes and to God’s intentions about creation. On the one hand, God is not only kind

Anselm on Fittingness  137 but also just, and the two attributes must balance each other. Therefore, divine mercy should not be considered apart from divine justice. This is a requirement of Anselm’s perfect being theology. On the other hand, the just God created the world which is – or should be – justly and appropriately ordered, and God’s rule is that any sin or crime is a breach of justice that must be paid off. Punishment or satisfaction would be, then, what God requires, while the absence of punishment or satisfaction would amount to injustice (iniustitia) and, hence, result in disorder (inordinatum). Consequently, forgiving without any punishment or satisfaction for the crime committed contradicts God’s justice and the God-imposed order of things, and therefore is ‘unbefitting’ (inconveniens). This is the way Anselm thinks about what is appropriate or inappropriate for God. Basically, it is, as McCord Adams calls it, the ‘weighing up and balancing off proprieties’ in theology proper, which is the backbone of CDH’s argumentation (McCord Adams 1999, 376). Our theories of God must be double-checked against the fittingness grid within the framework of a perfect being theology. Such is the Anselmian understanding which can be regarded as both a theological statement about God and a methodological principle of doing theology. The latter aspect allows the translation of this theological fittingness check into a formal procedure. Anselm wants to draw his conclusions from necessity or necessary presuppositions (CDH I, 4; I, 13; II, 8) but he also appeals to considerations of fittingness and unfittingness (CDH I, 4, 12, 15, 18; II, 9). How exactly does he weave it all together in his argumentation? The ‘symmetrical reading’ of Anselm’s principle suggests that ‘what is “fitting” for God is necessary’ for God (Kienzler 1981, 359) so that Anselm’s God ‘cannot sin, nor can He do less than the best’ and, therefore, God necessarily does the best’ (Rogers 2008, 185, 196, 85). In other words, fittingness is convertible into necessity and unfittingness into impossibility. But this view has been proved wrong (Hopkins 1972, 50–1; 2007, 250–2; McCord Adams 1999, 375–80; Root 1987, 211–27). In fact, as CDH’s text demonstrates, Anselm systematically maintains the distinction between rational fittingness and strict logical necessity throughout and ‘never argues from fittingness to necessity in CDH. The argument always takes the form of an argument from unfittingness to necessity’ (Root 1987, 215). Such texts as CDH I, 4, 15, 18, 25, and II, 5, 16 confirm the observation and point out the asymmetry of Anselm’s modal thesis: inferences from unfittingness to necessary falsity qua impossibility and, supposedly, from necessity to fittingness are unconditional and always formally valid, while inferences from fittingness to necessary truth are conditional and sometimes formally valid. The Anselmian argumentation often follows these steps: 1 A hypothesis regarding God’s property or action is formulated: hypothetically, God is/does X.

138  Rostislav Tkachenko

Anselm on Fittingness  139 (properly theological fittingness) and the level of the form of arguments (methodological fittingness). But why should this kind of thinking in terms of fittingness work at all? The answer is that, for Anselm, such arguments are valid because they reflect the reality: good reasoning reflects the harmony, which exists in the God-created world, and this harmony in its turn reflects the most appropriate intention of God. The Anselmian theological framework, as Hogg shows in his study, is pervaded by aesthetical categories, and fittingness/ appropriateness is one of them. As a result, he writes, ‘Anselm imbibed a model of reality which informs the very structure of his thought such that the aesthetic dimension is a fully integrated part of creator and creation’ (Hogg 2004, 5). Theological fittingness is related to the world-order because for Anselm fittingness is also an ontological notion. It is time to unpack it.

Ontological Fittingness Soteriological and Creational Framework The overall framework of CDH is soteriological. But the sin-and-­redemption leitmotif has arguably a counterpart in the secondary focus on the being(s) of the world. Already in the authorial introduction (CDH I, 1), Anselm has stated that the question he addresses is this: ‘For what reason and on the basis of what necessity did God become a man [i.e., a human being] and by His death restore life to the world (mundo vitam reddiderit) …?’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 48.2–4; 2000c, 300). A few lines below, the issue is reframed somewhat more narrowly with the help of an imaginary interlocutor, Boso: now, it has to do with ‘our redemption’ (nostrae redemptionis, emphasis mine), and Anselm is expected to say ‘for what reason and on the basis of what necessity did God – although He is omnipotent – assume the lowliness and the weakness of human nature in order to restore it?’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 48.22–4; 2000c, 301). Both quotations unanimously affirm that the hero of CDH and the subject of the divine rescue operation is the deus homo factus, God incarnate, but their views on its object are different. The former text speaks about the whole mundus and its life needing a saviour, while the latter assumes that it is not the world but only humanity’s destiny that interests Anselm. This alternation of foci seems at first glance problematic but should be explained by the double focus of Anselmian thinking. Throughout the text of CDH, Anselm speaks alternatively and almost interchangeably about the created world and humanity as the object of the God-man’s salvific activity. On the one hand, the archbishop of Canterbury speaks about the redemption of man (I, 5), the salvation of men (I, 8, 9, 10, 20), reconciliation of man with God (I, 22–23), restoration of man (II, 3, 17) and men’s sins (I, 6, 10; II, 14, 18) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 52.13,

140  Rostislav Tkachenko 60.14, 64.8, 88.6, 90.4–5, 17–8, 28, 98.15, 124.20–1, 54.7, 127.9, 67.18, 115.3). On the other hand, he writes about the reconciliation of the world (I, 9), the salvation of the world (I, 10), restoration and renewal of the world (I, 18) and sins of the whole world (II, 14, 18) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 64.1, 64.15, 66.2, 4, 81.5, 10, 11, 114.30, 127.8). These are overtly parallel statements about humanity and the world. Hence, one cannot avoid the conclusion that CDH is intended to address the issue of a needed restoration of both the universe as a whole and its crucial part, the human being. This is so because, for Anselm, humanity has to play a significant part in the perfection of the created world and is created to fit in for the better. God designed the world with its inhabitants and elements to be perfect, and human nature is appointed to ‘complement’ this perfection (ad complementum eiusdem perfectionis esse) (CDH I, 18; Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 77.20–78.3; 2000c, 328). As a result of this complementary position that humanity has and the connection that exists between it and the rest of the world, man’s behaviour influences the life of the world. Man’s sin damages and impairs the perfection of the world so that both are tainted by sin and corruption. Looked at the other way around, man’s restoration and redemption lead to a restored – in part now but completely in the future – harmony and flawlessness of the created world. Thus, the soteriological narrative is combined with the creational narrative and the latter hints at certain ideas about the structure and nature of the universe from a theological vantage point. The Anselmian world metaphysics remains sketchy, as neither CDH nor his other treatments build a complete ontology, but it allows one to draw a few conclusions. First, CDH does speak about the world, highlights its intended ontic perfection, and is interested in its – not only human nature’s – restoration and salvation. Second, for Anselm, humanity’s existence and behaviour are intimately and fundamentally related to the whole world’s being. Humans are a crucial part of the universe, they are expected to fill in a certain gap and, thus, fit in appropriately. The structure of the world as designed by God implies ontic fittingness of various building blocks. Even now, when the world is marred by sin and destruction, there are some perfections in it – it is fallen, but still fitting’ (Hogg 2004, 170). Where is this fittingness to be found exactly? Beauty and Order Anselm believes that the world, even in this flawed condition, has beauty to it, and this beauty is expressed in order. Every single element of the universe is positioned at a certain place so that everything fits together and is expected to act accordingly. CDH I, 15 contains probably the clearest exposition of this view. In the beginning, Anselm highlights the idea of things’ and creatures’ proper placement: ‘when each single creature keeps, either by nature or

Anselm on Fittingness  141 by reason, its proper place [in the order of things] – a place prescribed for it, so to speak – it is said to obey God and to honor Him’ (quando unaquaeque creatura suum et quasi sibi praeceptum ordinem sive naturaliter sive rationabiliter servat, deo oboedire et eum honorare dicitur) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 72.31–73.2; 2000c, 323). Here, Anselm refers to the notion of a hierarchy of beings wherein God is at the top of the hierarchy (or above it), then there are rational creatures who should keep their proper place consciously, as a result of their rational decisions, and the lower positions belong to those who hold their place naturally, that is, animals and inanimate things. The issue at stake is God’s honour because the chapter is entitled ‘Whether God lets His honor be violated even slightly.’ But, as Southern observes, God’s honour here is ‘the complex of service and worship which the whole Creation, animate and inanimate … owes to the Creator, and which preserves everything in its due place’, it ‘is simply another word for the ordering of the universe in its due relationship to God’ (Southern 1990, 226). One’s position is to be kept within this ontic hierarchy and suggested net of relationships because the order of the universe is its beauty. In the following paragraphs, Anselm unambiguously ties beauty and order together, identifying the one with the other. Three times he mentions them in the form of hendiadys as ‘the order and the beauty of the universe’ (rerum universitate ordinem suum et eiusdem universitatis pulchritudinem, universitatis ordinem et pulchritudinem) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 73.5, 8, 18–9; 2000c, 324); twice he speaks of ‘the beauty of [its] order’ (ordinis pulchritudinem); a few times he underlines God’s act of preserving and restoring this order when it gets violated (rectum ordinem perturbare … deus debet ordinare) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 73.22–4). Thus, the Canterbury theologian associates beauty with order and through these concepts explains his understanding of how everything in the universe fits together. In Hogg’s words, ‘Anselm’s model of reality’ is defined by ‘order and harmony, symmetry and proportion, unity and beauty, fittingness and propriety’ (Hogg 2004, 14). The connection between fittingness and order is further highlighted by statements such as this: ‘it is not fitting (non decet) that God should forgive something that is disordered (aliquid inordinatum) within His kingdom’ (CDH I, 12). The ‘order of things’ (rerum ordine) should be maintained (CDH I, 13), and the disorder amended (I, 20). When a sin is committed or damage is done, ‘that which [creatures] perversely will or do is redirected by Supreme Wisdom towards the order and beauty of the aforementioned universe (universitatis praefatae ordinem et pulchritudinem)’ (CDH I, 15) (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 69.15, 71.7, 86.21–2, 73.17–9; 2000c, 319, 322, 338, 324). Anselm’s words reveal an underlying and consistently held ontological conviction: there is an aesthetic dimension to the world, and it has to do with order, hierarchy and propriety. Such an emphasis naturally follows

142  Rostislav Tkachenko from the hierarchy of being, and of good, presented earlier in Monologion, which, in itself, comes initially from Augustine’s De Trinitate (Van Fleteren 1999; Evans 2004, 11–2; Matthews 2004, 61). The general scheme can be explained as a quasi-Platonic vision of the universe, but while scrutinising Anselmian fittingness one should neither exclusively identify it with ‘the Augustinian Neoplatonic tradition’ (Rogers 1997), nor downplay the idea of the ontic hierarchy (Hogg 2004, cf. 76–7 and 112–3, where the hierarchy of beings is mentioned, with 157–81, where CDH is analysed). Rather, we see here an obvious indebtedness to the Augustinian version of the Platonic ‘degrees-of-reality principle’ or, better, the degrees-of-being principle (Hopkins 1972, 16–20, 30–2, 174–5; Matthews 2004, 80–1). But the strong emphasis on order and beauty is a rather peculiar Anselmian addition. It is he who makes the notion of right order so fundamental and adds aesthetic overtones to the orderly picture of the universe. The right order of things (rectus ordo) is a beautiful order wherein everything fits everything else. But this ‘fittingness’, contrary to twenty-first-century sensitivities, is hierarchically structured and partially anthropocentric. God and angels apart, it is a human being that is on the top of the ontological ladder. The earth exists for him and is under his control. A text from CDH II, 16 says that ‘this present world with the creatures [was] created for men’s use (ad usus hominum)’ (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 119.4; 2000c, 372). The hierarchical ontology entails dominion ethics: the inferior nature is created to be used and ruled by the superior one. Nevertheless, this point is mitigated by two considerations. First, Anselm’s belief in human dominion is theological and not technological in nature: instead of stressing the power and high position of humans vis-à-vis inferior creatures and discussing the ways in which they should use nature, he constantly ‘humiliates’ them by comparing them to even higher beings, angels and highlighting the problematic character of humans’ relations with God. He has no interest whatsoever in discussing the ‘technology of domination’ or subjugation of nature, for priority belongs to the theological and soteriological discourse. Second, and more importantly, Anselm’s understanding of human dominion over inferior nature is not consumerist. Vice versa, his accent on order and beauty of the universe shows his respect for nature as it is because it has been created as such and is still governed by God. Nature cannot be simply used. It can only be used within the framework of divinely set rules and moral standards. Human domination and use of other creatures have to be subject to a higher goal of worshipping and obeying God because the world-order functions in the terms of a grand purpose. Perfection and Interconnectedness The universe with its chain of beings was created to be perfect (primae creationis perfectioni, CDH I, 17) (CDH I, 17; Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 75.18–9), and human nature had to contribute to this perfection (CDH I, 18).

Anselm on Fittingness  143 A particular expression of ‘the perfection of the created world’ (perfectio mundanae creaturae) was to be a perfect number of rational creatures elected to fill the eschatological heavenly city. Anselm introduces this idea because he sees fittingness in the perfect number (perfecti numeri convenientia): God, by definition, should have created and predestined for eternal beatitude a perfect world with a perfect number of blessed rational creatures. This number may refer to individuals or natures (in numero individuorum… in numero naturarum), but both options are equally plausible (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 76.8–78.9; 2000c, 327–8). In any case, despite the current corruption of the world, the divine goal remains the same, but its fulfilment, facilitated by the God-man’s work, is postponed until the eschaton. The order, beauty and fittingness that exist in the universe now are real but incomplete. Therefore, God’s involvement is needed again, and this is how Anselm describes this dramatic event: We believe that the physical mass of the world is to be transformed for the better and that this will not occur until the number of elect men is filled up and the Blessed City completed. Moreover, upon completion of this city, the transformation will no longer be delayed. Hence, we can infer that from the beginning God planned to perfect both [this world’s physical nature and that city of rational natures] at the same time. Thus, the inferior nature, which did not sense God, would not be perfected before the superior nature, which ought to enjoy God. And in its own way the inferior nature, having been changed for the better, would ‘rejoice’ in the perfecting of the superior nature. Indeed, every creature – each in its own way rejoicing eternally in its creator, itself, and its fellow-creatures – would rejoice over its own so glorious and so marvelous perfectedness. Thus, that which the will freely causes in rational nature, this the unsensing creature would also naturally display as a result of the governance of God. (CDH I, 18; Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 79.28–80.8; 2000c, 330–1) The passage contains three important statements about the universe and conforms with other texts.14 The first point is that the world is indeed hierarchically structured. Created beings are unambiguously divided into two large categories: the ‘major’ or superior nature, that is, humans and angels as rational beings (maior natura), and the ‘minor’ or inferior nature, that is, animals and non-animated beings (minor natura). Second, the world is to be understood teleologically: God set goals for the whole of the universe with its components. He planned from the beginning (ab initio proposuisse) that the entire world, with both its superior and inferior elements, would once reach perfection (perficeret). This perfection includes the physical transformation of matter (molem corpoream in melius renovandam), some kind of transformation of all genera of non-rational

144  Rostislav Tkachenko beings for the better (mutata in melius suo quodam modo) and salvation and consummation for humans and angels who will enjoy the presence of God (impleatur numerus electorum hominum; deo frui deberet). This idea of integral – both material and immaterial – transformation of the universe clearly reflects eschatological visions of the Bible (especially, Revelation 21– 22 and 1 Corinthians 15) and testifies to the Anselmian emphasis on the theology of creation and the idea of order. Since God created the world of spirit and matter with ‘harmony and fittingness’ in it (Evans 1989, 46), all originally placed elements should neither perish nor remain marred forever after the fall. Rather, everything is to be renewed, transformed and glorified, but within the divinely established hierarchical order. Indeed, humanity is not ‘restored to [its] original condition, but rather, to some prospective prestige that he lacked even in Eden’, that is, to the status equal to that of angels (O’Neill 2016, 12, 14, on the basis of CDH I, 18–9), and similar dynamic of the ultimate transformation for the better pertains to other creatures as well. Still, the initial order and apt placement of elements in the (meta)physical scheme remain intact: rational creatures will be at the top of the hierarchy, inanimate matter at the bottom and miscellaneous animate but non-rational creatures somewhere in between. Such is the Anselmian eschatological vision. Finally, the quoted text highlights the interconnectedness and mutual influence of various creatures in this perfectly ordered world: they participate in each other and influence each other. Anselm expects that every single creature in its own way will be ‘rejoicing eternally in its creator, itself, and its fellow-creatures’. Here, we see a Platonic motif of participation that has to do with ‘the ontological dependence of things in the world on spiritual/ intellectual realities, and ultimately on God’ (Schindler 2005; also de Vogel 1986, 161–71), although the notion of enjoyment of God is Augustinian and comes from his On Christian Teaching I.3–5 (Kitanov 2014, 1–27). Augustine thought that only the Triune God himself deserves to be enjoyed, and rational creatures are the ones who should enjoy him, but Anselm supplements this position with his own twist: now, inferior nature is allowed to ‘rejoice’ in the perfection of the superior and every creature is expected to rejoice ‘in its creator, itself, and its fellow-creatures’. Here, Anselm does not use the term for enjoyment (frui) but speaks of shared rejoicing, delighting and bliss (congratulari, congaudere, jucundare).15 The ultimate restoration and optimisation of the world-order entails the full realisation of mutual connection between creatures and has a positive quasi-emotional element to it – even for non-rational beings. When different creatures with their features truly fit each other and fulfil their purposes, then the perfection of the universe has come, indeed. It still remains an eschatological hope, but the order envisaged should be always in view, for this is God’s design. Summarising Remarks From what has been presented, it becomes clear that Anselm does have a powerful concept of what might be called ontological fittingness. He sees

Anselm on Fittingness  145 the universe as well-ordered, hierarchically structured, beautiful and intended to exist happily in the harmonious interaction of various creatures. When we read CDH and his other treatises, as Evans notes, we ‘consistently find reflections on “right order”’ and something’s suitability or appropriateness. This idea ‘seemed to Anselm cardinal to any understanding … of the “natural” order’ (Evans 1989, 46). Hogg adds that this is an ontology that incorporates ‘the aesthetic value of proportion, unity and fittingness’ (Hogg 2004, 138). This vision of the universe has it that every single creature is placed at a certain ‘location’ in the metaphysical ladder in order to be what it should be and act appropriately (for its nature) – to honour God. This idea, modestly articulated in CDH, is more fully presented in Anselm’s De veritate. There, he suggests that all things possess truth (veritas) as rightness (rectitudo), and this rightness amounts to a thing’s true nature. There is, or should be, truth in statements, thoughts and opinions, will, senses, things’ essences and actions (Anselm of Canterbury 1938a, 2000a).16 This ‘Grand Unified Theory of Truth’ highlights the idea of things ‘doing [their] proper job’ as Visser and Williams aptly expound it. All ‘sorts of things can therefore be said to be right or correct or true if they do the job assigned them by God’ (Visser and Williams 2009, 56). Even ‘fire does what is true and what is right when it does what it ought (debet)’ (DV 5; Anselm of Canterbury 1938a, 182.4–5; 2000a, 170). Hence, Anselm’s theory of ever-present truth clarifies his conception of world-order by underscoring the point that every single thing or entity can be true or untrue to itself and God’s design of the world. The ‘is’ of things is connected with their ‘rightness’ and ‘oughtness’, that is, duty. In other words, the universe’s beauty-in-order and truth-as-rightness are possible only in conjunction with all its components doing what they ought. If a thing functions properly and remains true to its nature, it keeps its rightness and, thus, fits well in the chain of beings. If it malfunctions or consciously rejects what is right and appropriate, it destroys the order of things and goes away from its own ‘truth’. In brief, true ontological fittingness of the world entails the ‘ethical fittingness’ of its elements, although morality sensu stricto concerns rational beings only.

Ethical Fittingness? Overall, Anselm’s view of morality can be identified in modern terms as predominantly deontological or duty-based ethics with a huge emphasis on a moral agent’s proper motivation and the limited presence of eudaimonism. This is the conclusion many scholars support (Brower 2004; Tracey 2011; Visser and Williams 2009, 193–211; Wilks 2019, 32–4). Every creature must be true to its God-given nature and divinely set purpose and do what it ought to do according to God’s standards. Inanimate or non-rational beings should do this naturally while rational creatures, including humans, consciously and willingly, with their motivation fixed on justice (rightness) of their undertakings. These principles unmistakenly emerge from Anselm’s

146  Rostislav Tkachenko ‘minor’ treatises: De veritate, De libero arbitrio, De casu diaboli, and De concordia.17 What is important for our discussion of fittingness is the foundation of deontology in the ontology: one’s assigned place in the hierarchically structured world defines one’s function, and one’s true nature imposes a (moral) duty. This is Anselm’s general vision, and it may be criticised for being underdeveloped and for placing too much emphasis on ‘vertical relationships of subordination and submission, rather than the horizontal relationships’ (Visser and Williams 2009, 211). But, probably, critics underestimate the positive side of his ethics, provided that one highlights the fittingness aspect in it. It is true that Anselm rarely mentions fittingness or appropriateness in his ‘ethical’ teachings, but the concept is still there, and ‘vertical relationships’ are part and parcel of his understanding of the world’s harmony. On the one hand, for Anselm, a harmoniously ordered but not hierarchical world is unthinkable. Granted his Augustinian-Platonic leanings and medieval social context with its complex seignorial patterns, the universe of beautiful order must be hierarchically structured, and all horizontal relationships can make sense only within the vertical scheme. Morality exists within the hierarchy of beings because anyone is good or just only insofar as they participate in goodness as such and justice as such, but these semi-Platonic ‘forms’ or properties belong to and come from the Supreme Being which is par excellence higher in the ladder of being. There is no other source of goodness and justice in the world, nor can a rational moral agent be moral without paying to God what is due, that is, honour (Brower 2004, 224–33). Hence, there can be only a vertically structured created world according to the Anselmian outlook. On the other hand, the ‘ethical fittingness’ is expressed precisely in and through this vertical ontological scheme. The Anselmian God, by definition, does only what is most appropriate for him, and the world he creates is ordered appropriately and for the most appropriate goal – perfection. Therefore, for the rational moral agent, this fittingness has to do with being aware of one’s place in the universe, celebrating it, discerning truth and rightness of things and actions, willingly doing what one ought, honouring God, and pursuing truth and justice for justice’s sake in all relationships (CDH I, 13; I, 23–4; II, 1). In sum, Anselm’s ethics prescribes doing what one ought to, but this ‘ought’ is rooted in the universe’s and man’s ultimate goal and corresponds to the ‘truth’ of other things. Being just in the world requires doing justice to the orderliness and particularity that exists in it. Therefore, on the one hand, the existing world-order in which elements are supposed to fit well and do their job should be discovered and appreciated. On the other hand, one should act morally in view of God’s parameters of justice and the future consummation within the narrative of creation, redemption and future transformation for the better, that pervades CDH.

Anselm on Fittingness  147 This ontological and moral vision is the starting point of ethically appropriate behaviour according to Anselm. Of course, his ideas cannot be simply ‘transported’ to the twenty-first environmentalist discussions, but, I believe, their meaning may be translated into some practical advice or principles implicit in the Anselmian theology. If one asks, ‘How should a Christian look at the universe and relate to their environment within the Anselmian framework?’ then, probably, the answer could go along these lines: • • • •

•

Remember aesthetics: appreciate the beauty of existing things, their nature, and their original arrangement in the universe. Retain curiosity: discover the truth in other things and perceive their nature, functions, and ways. Respect the universe: celebrate every person, being and thing doing their job and being what they are; do not destroy but maintain the order. Practise restricted dominion and consumerism: use inferior creatures and things but for right purposes, in the right measure, in a right way – that is, striving for justice in everything. In other words, make an effort to do what looks most right and appropriate coram Deo. Use theological imagination: hypothesise about what action(s) would be most morally fitting and corresponding to the theologically understood world-order within the narrative of creation, redemption and consummation, and act appropriately.

Notes 1 For the Latin text of CDH, I use the standard edition of F. S. Schmitt: (Anselm of Canterbury 1940). For the English translation, I prefer J. Hopkins’ version: (Anselm of Canterbury 2000c). 2 E.g., CDH, Praef.; I, 6; I, 13; II, 6 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 42.16–43.1; 55.1; 71.24; 101.7, 16, 18). Hereafter, I cite CDH by indicating a book in Roman and a chapter in Arabic numerals. In addition, I refer to the Latin text (when quoted) by page and line(s) and to the English translation by page only. 3 E.g., CDH I, 10; I, 12; II, 8 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 66.16; 69.15, 17, 33; 70.13, 28; 104.23). 4 E.g., CDH I, 3; I, 19; II, 3; II, 16 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 51.5; 84.9, 14; 98.19, 21; 118.2, 5). 5 E.g., CDH I, 12; II, 1; II, 7; II, 11 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 69.20; 97.13; 102.19, 20; 111.6, 8, 26). 6 E.g., CDH I, 4; I, 12; I, 18 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 51.21; 52.5–6; 69.29; 77.5; 79.21). 7 E.g., CDH I, 3; I, 10 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 51.3; 65.5). 8 E.g., CDH I, 8; I, 10; II, 16 (Anselm of Canterbury 1940, 60.7–8; 66.22–23; 67.3–5, 17; 119.6, 14). 9 For meanings of the terms cited in medieval Latin, see (Ashdowne, Howlett, and Latham 2018, s.v. ‘necesse’, ‘decēre’, ‘oportere’, ‘convenire’, ‘convenientia’, ‘inconvenientia’).

148  Rostislav Tkachenko

Anselm on Fittingness  149 Hogg, David S. 2004. Anselm of Canterbury: The Beauty of Theology. Great Theologians Series. Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hopkins, Jasper. 1972. A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. “God’s Sacrifice of Himself as a Man: Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo.” In Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition, edited by Karin Finsterbusch, Armin Lange, and K. F. Diethard Rornheld, 237–57. Numen Book Series 112. Leiden: Brill. Kienzler, Klaus. 1981. Glauben und Denken bei Anselm von Canterbury. Freiburg; Basel; Wien: Herder. Kitanov, Severin. 2014. Beatific Enjoyment in Medieval Scholastic Debates: The Complex Legacy of Saint Augustine and Peter Lombard. New York: Lexington Books. Leftow, Brian. 2004. “Anselm’s Perfect-Being Theology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, 132–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthews, Gareth B. 2004. “Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, 61–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCord Adams, Marilyn. 1999. “Elegant Necessity, Prayerful Disputation: Method in Cur Deus Homo.” In Cur Deus Homo: Atti del Congresso Anselmiano Internazionale Roma, 21–23 Maggio 1998, edited by Paul Gilbert, Helmut Kohlenberger, and Elmar Salmann, 367–96. Studia Anselmiana 128. Roma: Centro studi S. Anselmo. Morris, Thomas V. 1991. Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology. Contours of Christian Philosophy. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. O’Neill, Seamus J. 2016. “Aequales angelis sunt: Angelology, Demonology, and the Resurrection of the Body in Augustine and Anselm.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12 (1): 1–18. Rogers, Katherin A. 1997. The Neoplatonic Metaphysics and Epistemology of Anselm of Canterbury. Studies in History of Philosophy 45. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. ———. 2008. Anselm on Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Root, Michael. 1987. “Necessity and Unfittingness in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.” Scottish Journal of Theology 40 (2): 211–30. Schindler, David C. 2005. “What’s the Difference? On the Metaphysics of Participation in a Christian Context.” The Saint Anselm Journal 3 (1): 1–27. Southern, Richard W. 1990. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweeney, Eileen C. 2012. Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Tracey, Martin. 2011. “De Casu Diaboli and the Deontological Character of Anselm’s Moral Thought.” In Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109): Philosophical Theology and Ethics. Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Medieval Philosophy, Held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, 02–04 September 2009, edited by Roberto Hofmeister Pich, 153–68. Textes et Études du Moyen Âge 60. Turnhout: Brepols.

150  Rostislav Tkachenko Van Fleteren, Frederick. 1999. “Traces of Augustine’s De Trinitate XIII in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.” In Cur Deus Homo: Atti del Congresso Anselmiano Internazionale Roma, 21–23 Maggio 1998, edited by Paul Gilbert, Helmut Kohlenberger, and Elmar Salmann, 165–78. Studia Anselmiana 128. Roma: Centro studi S. Anselmo. Visser, Sandra, and Thomas Williams. 2004. “Anselm on Truth.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, 204– 21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Anselm. Great Medieval Thinkers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vogel, Cornelia J. de. 1986. Rethinking Plato and Platonism. Mnemosyne, Supplements 92. Leiden: Brill. Wilks, Ian. 2019. “From Anselm to Albert the Great.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics, edited by Thomas Williams, 32–54. Cambridge Companions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part III

Practical Applications

9

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction Implications for Embedding Ecological Concerns in Community Life and Practice Jack Barentsen

Introduction It is increasingly recognised that aesthetics and ecology, as indeed the whole area of moral agency, have significant social and psychological dimensions. For instance, Berleant argues that aesthetics, as in the concern for beauty, is not only or even primarily a property of the world in itself but involves human perception, indicating that people find certain constellations of things harmonious, evidencing good order and in other ways pleasing to behold. Indeed, the word ‘aesthetics’ derives from Greek cognates that mean perception by the senses (Berleant 2018, 6–7, 150). That is, beauty has both a natural and a social component. Similarly, although fittingness can be conceived as a property of nature or creation, the notion of fittingness presupposes that there is an observer who notes this fittingness, or who more likely constructs ‘fittingness’ in engaging with material and social realities in dialogue with others. Interestingly, MacIntyre argues that moral philosophy always presupposes a sociology, since moral philosophy – and I would argue, also aesthetics – presupposes that these claims can be embodied in the social world (MacIntyre 2007, 23). Fittingness, then, is a notion that is, at least in part, grounded socially in human interaction, tradition and culture, as well as in physical or natural aspects that match or fit to a certain degree in the eyes of the observer. This chapter contributes a social psychological perspective on the notion of fittingness in relation to environmental concerns, with special reference to a social and group context. My approach has some similarities to the contribution elsewhere in this book by Johan de Tavernier1 who is sceptical of the role of the individual rational moral agent in changing behaviour sufficiently to contribute to a healthy environmental ethic. He discussed the value-action or intention-behaviour gap (Blake 1999), and suggested that this gap points to the role of moral emotions that are perhaps more significant in moral agency than moral reasoning. This resonates with Moral Foundations Theory that points to other factors that govern moral reasoning, in addition to a moral, rational calculus that is often presupposed

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-13

154  Jack Barentsen to govern moral action (Graham et al. 2012). Where De Tavernier highlighted the role of moral emotions in regulating moral behaviour, this chapter highlights the role of social and group context in regulating ecological behaviour. De Tavernier also discussed development of the self and the importance of transformational learning in behavioural change that would explain the gap. I would like to suggest a related aspect that explains the gap, namely the role of personal and social identity. Personal and social identities are significant social constructs that incorporate values and norms into individual and group behaviours. Personal identity relates to the development of the self; unless certain values and attitudes are identified with, they do not become part of the self, and consequently don’t lead to new environmental action. Social identity relates, among other things, to how social learning is embedded in a group or community (Illeris 2004). Transformational learning is not a purely individual process but takes place within a community that welcomes or resists such transformational learning, which, in turn, will facilitate or hinder further development of the self. In other words, this chapter highlights how mechanisms of identification play a vital role in moderating the desired change in environmental action that we seek to address. This chapter draws specifically on social identity theory to show how beliefs, values and norms come to be embedded within a group and its social identity. It also draws on the social identity notions of fit or fittingness to describe how change in these beliefs, values and norms becomes possible, inevitable or necessary as groups respond to contextual changes and pressures. This has important ramifications for ecological concerns, because a social identity theory of social action (Reicher and Haslam 2013) indicates that moral concerns will impact and change moral action only if they become part of the values and norms of a group, organisation, institution and community. Simply identifying particular ethical principles or aesthetic concerns may point in the right direction, but without socially embedding these principles and concerns in the life and activities of various groups, no substantial change will take place. The questions, then, that I will address are: how can the social identity notion of fit elucidate the way in which ecological concerns may become a vital part of the values and norms of many constituencies in today’s complex societies, and how can leaders of these constituencies benefit from these insights to make progress towards ecological goals? After explaining aspects of social identity theory, I will exemplify these notions with reference to religious leadership, that is of leaders and pastors of faith communities, because this is my area of expertise. I will further analyse a case study from industrial leadership to show how at least one company attempts to build a consumer identity that weds ecological concerns to the desirability of their product. Finally, I will suggest how leaders in various societal segments can use the notion of social fit or fittingness

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction  155 in the context of social and group interaction to develop social identities within which ecological concerns become part of their beliefs, values and norms, and thus part of their repertoire of behaviours.

Social Identity and Notions of Fit Social identities represent social categories (gender, age, ethnicity, education, etc.) and social groups (family, neighbourhood, communities, organisations, institutions, etc.) with which people identify (Jenkins 1996; Haslam 2004). In terms of social categories, an individual may perceive herself as female, middle age, Asian and highly educated. Many such social categories are biological and cultural givens, which define one’s social identity with little personal choice, even if one may not wish to identify with a particular category. Other social categories, like education or sector of employment, have a greater element of personal choice. Which of these social categories is particularly relevant in any given situation is determined in the course of social interaction. The context determines whether one’s educational level is more relevant than, say, one’s gender or one’s work in a particular company. For instance, in applying for a job, one’s educational level is significant and is expected to more or less fit the job vacancy, while gender is often not considered relevant, even if only because of anti-discrimination legislation. Yet, once the job has been attained, gender might be relevant if, for particular work teams, more women or men would be needed. Thus, although category membership (I am female, I am vocationally trained, I am an immigrant, etc.) is for the most part stable, the relevance of any one of these categories in a particular situation depends on the context at hand. The term ‘salience’ indicates this phenomenon. Thus, the salience of a particular social identity in a particular context influences individuals in identifying with that particular category. When the situation changes, for instance, in leaving work and going to the fitness club, one intuitively, readily and effortlessly switches to the relevant social identity that fits the new context. The same applies to membership of various social groups. Identification with family or neighbourhood is also, in one sense, a given, but they are not always as publicly visible outside of family or neighbourhood circles. Yet other social groups, such as the business or organisation where one works, the church or other religious organisation of which one is a member, one’s fitness or hobby club, a volunteer organisation, etc. represent personal or lifestyle choices that usually change over time. Here, too, the principle of salience is applicable. When meeting business associates on a business trip, it matters to know for which company the other works, so businesses and companies function as salient social identities in this setting. However, when various people within the same company meet to discuss vision or company policy, it is less relevant for which company one works (all those present work for the same company), but it may be highly relevant for

156  Jack Barentsen which department within the company one works. In this context, the department becomes a salient social identity; no one would think of referring to one’s membership of a fitness club or volunteer organisation as relevant information in this setting. Membership of a social category does not always entail specific behavioural expectations, especially since these categories do not represent voluntary identification, but membership of social groups usually does entail such behavioural expectations. Working in a particular department in a particular company involves particular behaviours and norms. However, these behaviours will only be manifested in certain contexts, for instance, when one is at work, or representing the company elsewhere – i.e., when this particular social identity is salient. Evidently, one’s fitness membership, one’s family associations or being a soccer fan usually does not influence behaviour at the office or the factory. Individuals usually adjust their behaviour intuitively to the group or social identity that is salient at any particular moment, and seamlessly change their behaviour when the social identification changes from work to sport or family, all without needing constant instruction (Spears 2011; Charness and Chen 2020). Even this short explanation already indicates that a sense of fittingness influences the dynamic of social identification to match the salient social identity of a particular situation. It is an intuition that a particular social identity fits a particular social situation. Social identity research indicates that this fittingness, as highlighted by the concept of salience, is influenced by several factors (Haslam and Ellemers 2005). First, social identities are always comparative. Someone who teaches psychology at a university might identify as a scholar in psychology at an academic conference, as a university staff member when representing her university for accreditation or funding or as psychology instructor when meeting with instructors from other departments for didactical training. The social context determines which comparative dimension is relevant (e.g., scholar, staff member or department), and thus which social identity is salient. In this example, the social identities are all related to work at a university, but, of course, there are many other social identities, such as partner, mother, sister, neighbour, volunteer, church/club member, etc. Each time, the social context determines how this person identifies with a particular social category or group. This is the principle of comparative fit. More formally expressed, the differences between ingroup members are perceived to be smaller than the differences with members of other groups. Here, the notion of fit or fittingness features explicitly in the research literature. The social context determines which dimensions of comparison are fitting in that particular situation, which, in turn, influences how individuals evaluate their own fittingness in a particular group (Stets and Burke 2000, 230; Haslam 2004). Second, groups must behave more or less as individuals expect them to behave in order for individuals to identify with the group. That is, the

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction  157 content (beliefs, values, norms) of a particular social identity must match individual expectations about the salient categories. Sports club members are expected to behave more or less according to the rules of a particular sport as well as according to the specific habits and agreements of their local sports club. Members of a church or political party are often expected to hold to roughly the same beliefs and values. This may also apply to social categories like gender or ethnicity, when people have certain expectations about what counts as typically male or female or have expectations about the behaviour of people from a certain cultural background. When a particular social group or category matches one’s prior expectations, often in the forms of group stereotypes, it is easier for people to identify with that group or category. This is the principle of normative fit (Stets and Burke 2000, 230). Finally, an important condition for social identification is perceiver readiness or accessibility. Individuals have a social history with various experiences of social categories and groups that create ready-made mental maps or stereotypes of various groups, along with positive or negative personal experiences. This social history conditions an individual to identify with some identities more than with others. Changes in social identification can and will take place, but always in connection with (or perhaps resistance against) one’s past history to make sense of and to maintain continuity in one’s life narrative (Gerkin 1984, 84, 109). Hence, one’s ability to identify with various groups or to experience helpful change is highly influenced by the readiness of the perceiver to recognise certain identity dynamics and/or by the accessibility of earlier social identities that can become model for the future behaviour and actualisation. In summary, the salience of any particular social identity in a particular social context is influenced by comparative fit, normative fit and perceiver readiness. These factors enable individuals to identify more or less with particular social identities based on their own evaluation of fittingness. These processes are largely intuitive and implicit; however, it generally becomes conscious when social identification becomes complex and difficult so that previous experience offers little help in navigating that particular social context. Such a conceptualisation of social identity is largely constructivist: in social discourse, identities are constructed, maintained and adapted. Identity is not conceived in an essentialist manner, as if identity is an objective, identifiable core of the person or an organisation (Gingrich 2005). Hence, fittingness, when described along the lines of social identity theory, is also a matter of social construction, not an objective given. Yet, it is also clear that identities are not just ‘mere social construction’, as if anything goes. Identities are constructed as individuals and groups interact with their material and social reality in an effort to order the social world and give meaning to it (Barentsen 2019). In what follows, I will describe a case study in two domains of leadership (religious and industrial leadership) to analyse how leaders coped with

158  Jack Barentsen social (and religious) fit in climate of rapid social change, and to investigate how ecological values have begun to play a role in (re)shaping processes of social identification.

‘Green Church’: A Case of Religious Leadership Religious communities and their leaders have been subject to significant and even disruptive change over the last decades. This is clearly visible in cities, where dozens of initiatives at various levels contribute to Christian presence in the city. The city cathedral takes centre place with its ministries; district churches with historical roots serve their city district or neighbourhood; many other churches of various denominations reach selected individuals; pioneer places develop new ways of connecting within various neighbourhoods; and Christian organisations connect volunteers with locals to serve the common good (Eiffler 2019). Few are arguing today for one particular mode of church or Christian presence. The boundary markers between various Christian traditions have become less relevant than one’s position vis-à-vis one’s context, as shaped by a particular society and its culture. The growing diversity at many levels (Barentsen, Kessler, and Van den Heuvel 2018) thus leads many to the perception that a diversity of churches and Christian presence is fitting for today’s larger cities. These changes in religious communities and their leadership are largely motivated, if not driven, by perceptions of social and religious fit. The processes of social and religious identification in postmodern secular societies have become more challenging, since institutional Christianity is generally losing members rapidly (Bernts and Berghuijs 2016). Churches and faith communities suffer from a loss of social relevance and plausibility, so their usual dimensions of inter-church comparison (such as beliefs, rituals and habits) no longer have the same relevance. In this setting, emerging religious leadership is experimenting with new forms of social engagement and/or new patterns of music and worship – redefining both comparative and normative fit. The literature speaks of entrepreneurial leadership or missional leadership (Goodhew, Roberts, and Volland 2012; Volland 2015; Niemandt 2019), which, in turn, creates awareness of these new developments. The language of ‘emerging church’ and ‘fresh expressions’ still dominates this discourse, signalling that these faith communities represented nonstereotypical forms. By now, these new patterns are fast becoming the new stereotype of religious leadership as part of innovative faith communities, which improves accessibility or perceiver readiness. Clearly, such religious leaders, functioning as entrepreneurs of religious identity in particular social settings, work implicitly and sometimes explicitly with notions of social and religious fit (Barentsen 2015, 2016). The flipside of this development is that, increasingly, people lack any frame of reference for church or religion. Among unchurched people, perceiver readiness for religious identification has greatly decreased, since the

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction  159 social and religious relevance of churches has become strongly marginalised in secularised western societies. As part of a search for revitalisation and relevance, numerous churches are now considering climate change, ecological issues and environmental practices as an important dimension of identity for their communities. Numerous websites promote ‘Green Church’ at the popular level, 2 and several scholars document the increased attention to environmental concerns among Christians of various traditions over the last three decades. Sometimes this increased attention has turned political (Danielsen 2013), but there is a ‘remarkable upsurge of religiously inspired ecological concern’ resulting in church declarations and efforts to mobilise believers for environmental concerns (Chaplin 2016). This phenomenon has become known as ‘the greening of religion’ hypothesis, in response to claims by Lynn White in 1967 that religions, especially Christianity, have promoted environmentally destructive behaviour (White 1967). A review of 700 pertinent articles shows that there are indeed a number of ‘themes and dynamics’ that hinder ecological care, thus offering some support for White’s claim, and further research is needed to study how religious groups can be more effectively mobilised to engage with today’s environmental challenges (Taylor, Van Wieren, and Zaleha 2016). Yet, the Green Church movement is proving to be a key factor for many of today’s church identities. In the Netherlands, Montfoort, whose book Groene Theologie (ET: Green Theology) received the ‘best theological book of 2019’ award, also signals a host of ‘green’ initiatives in Dutch churches: Eco-church, Green Faith, a Green Bible and increasing engagement with ecological issues in the diaconal ministries of the church. However, environmental concerns are still mostly limited to general beliefs about creation care, and to a church management focus on fair trade coffee, paper instead of plastic cups and recycling garbage. According to Montfoort, ecological concerns have not yet penetrated to the heart of Christian theology, where the concern is not only with people and their salvation, but with the redemption of the whole earth (Montfoort 2019). A study of the Church of England’s policies on environmental issues similarly shows that ‘little awareness of the institutional Church’s ethos is found in the local church context’ (DeLashmutt 2011). However, several studies of the Church of Scotland show how a particular group of churches is less issue-driven in their concern for the environment, and that instead a combination of values, practices and notions of citizenship seems to be effective in generating pro-environmental behaviours (Kidwell et al. 2018). In addition, this research points to the potential of spiritual resources, underreported in other research, in mobilising green behaviour (Bomberg and Hague 2018). When analysed in terms of social and religious fit, the following can be observed. The principle of comparative fit can be recognised in the shift from comparison between Christian traditions as an important dimension of comparison, to comparison of ecological concerns as a new

160  Jack Barentsen and important dimension of identity in society at large. Socially speaking, one’s identification with one particular Christian tradition (as compared to dozens of other such traditions) is no longer relevant for most people, while one’s level of engagement with environmental concerns has become an important marker of a value- and belief-driven lifestyle (as compared to a mainly consumerist lifestyle). Thus, comparative fit is less shaped by comparing with other Christian groups and more heavily influenced by how general societal values concerning climate and environment influence the identities of political parties, business, schools and more. Since Christians and churches also participate in these societal developments, it is to be expected that churches shift towards or at least include environmental concerns in their view of religious identity, in order to maintain the salience of their socio-religious identity and hence a sense of social relevance. The principle of normative fit is operative in both resisting and embracing environmental practices. It is relatively easy to assent to ecological principles on the level of institutional policy or preaching, and then to practise it by using fair-trade products. This matches general societal awareness, where political discourse at the international level, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2016, is coupled with personal habits of fairtrade coffee and recycling. Many organisations protest that not enough is happening to actually implement the Paris Agreement, while many individuals wrestle with how to continue a consumerist lifestyle, but now with products that are a bit more environmentally responsible. Hence, believers may also come to expect some theological attention to the environment by their church and some minimal practices at the local level, but few expect to be challenged in developing a thorough-going ecology-friendly lifestyle. Thus, the level at which ‘Green Church’ and other such initiatives operates, frequently matches the normative fit for ecological concerns on the broader, societal level. Note that gradually the comparative and normative fits shift to include environmental concerns, from no awareness to little awareness and broad claims, to inclusion of more central ecological values and practices. Change towards more responsible ecological behaviour is not an overnight event, whereby some ethical or ecological principle is preached and change occurs, but a gradually growing awareness of and adaptation to the need to be better stewards of creation, and even to include creation care as a vital aspect of the Missio Dei today. To use another aspect of social identity theory, at the cognitive level environmental concerns are beginning to play a significant role; at the affective level, the emotional involvement is just beginning to grow; at the evaluative level, the value of ecological practices is still fairly low so that little deep change in practices occurs (Belanche, Casaló, and Flavián 2017). It is only when ecological concerns become part of a social identity in these three dimensions that practices will change, or new ones develop that incorporate these ecological concerns.

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction  161 My point is, then, that it takes such changes in social and religious fit, and thus in socio-religious identification, for change to eventually come. The debate about good and useful ecological principles and environmental practices is necessary and often intense. These can move people to actual change in behaviour, once at least some of these values and practices are incorporated into a new sense of social (and religious) identity. Without embedding them in a sense of identity, these principles will be enacted haphazardly, often with some resistance. However, with strong social identification, these principles will be advocated and practised consistently. Religious resources such as beliefs, values and spirituality need to be aligned with environmental concerns for such strong practices to develop with conviction. This is a first case study from the domain of religious leadership which analysed social and religious fit in a context of rapid social change. The adaptation to increasingly important ecological concerns is moving slowly, with, as yet, only small impact on actual ecological behaviours. A second case study comes from the domain of industrial leadership, which also demonstrates the link between identity formation and ecological behaviour.

Environmentally-Minded SUV Drivers: A Case of Industrial Leadership Various industries are going through similar adaptations of their social fit and, one might say, ‘consumer fit’. Industrial leaders have long realised that selling their products means creating consumer identities that align with treasured social values. Business schools and university marketing departments conduct research that demonstrates the value of identity. For instance, the identity salience principle, already discussed above, influences motives and (luxury) consumption, sometimes mobilising particular moral identities (Wilcox 2019; Graso, Aquino, and Ok 2019). Consumption of some goods creates desirable associations of identity, while others verify a particular valued identity (Reed II and Forehand 2019). 3 In many ways, companies are marketing identities more than simply their line of products (Morel 2010). A particular case of identity marketing is expressed in a flyer distributed in some US car dealerships in 2019. After facing the push for more economical engines and smaller cars, which not all car manufacturers seemed to ‘get’, and facing various scandals relating to emissions, this major car manufacturer launched a campaign in 2019 to connect their new line of SUVs with an environmentally conscious lifestyle. This seemed a contradiction in terms, since SUVs have a higher gasoline usage than small economy cars. The theme of the campaign, labelled ‘Drive Big’, also seemed counterintuitive to ecological concerns: it connected the desire to drive a bigger car with concerns like caring for the big picture rather than catering to self-interest, moving from ‘me versus them’ to a focus on the ‘we’ of today and the next

162  Jack Barentsen generation, seeing safety as protecting people inside and outside the vehicle, and providing room for more people to travel together. An internet search showed that this campaign is actually broader, creating a social and environmental identity to make owners of any size car proud to drive their product. In addition, the company solicits donations from its customers to furnish classrooms across America, while sponsoring U.S. Soccer to help increase the number of female coaches at all levels of play.4 The dynamics of this campaign are driven to a large extent by social (and economic) fit. The principle of normative fit is recognised in how the auto industry now has to reckon with the increased social value of environmental principles and behaviour. Although several car manufacturers have been proactive in this area, others have been slower, perhaps until a sufficient number of potential customers adopt such environmental values to make it economically profitable to take them on board. Slowly, more ecological expectations become part of our culture, so that the normative fit shifts to include them as general and growing consumer expectations of their valued products. In terms of comparative fit, the more car manufacturers engage with this, the more relevant it becomes to do so, since in any industry, products and services are compared with similar products and services from competitors. These developments move environmental concerns and behaviour from marginal to increasingly mainstream for large groups of consumers, thus increasing the accessibility of these categories, improving perceiver readiness. Whether such a new ecological identity fits with actual ecological performance, at least for the SUVs, remains doubtful. Notoriously, SUVs are formally qualified as light trucks for business usage, which allowed car manufacturers to market SUVs as consumer vehicles while evading California and later US Federal controls (Perl and Dunn 2007) for this category. Here, a social identity appears to promote values and behaviours that do not match the material reality with which it is said to engage. Sooner or later, this social identity will be adapted to a shape that reflects its material and social reality more plausibly and faithfully, whether this comes from better and stricter policies or from greater societal awareness. Yet, the construction of a consumerist but ecological identity is an interesting case study in social identification and ecological behaviour. This case study points out the potential as well as the pitfalls of connecting ecological values to social identity. On the one hand, such strategies of social identification can motivate the development of ecological behaviours and practices in smaller and larger social groupings. On the other hand, these strategies can be manipulated to generate behaviours that are not truly ecological. One could cynically argue that carmakers are primarily interested in creating a sense of identity that sells cars, perhaps less so in creating durable identities that last beyond the purchase. However, social identities need to engage not only with ideals and values, but also with material and social realities, in order to maintain vitality and relevance. These realities include the ecological effects of emission, the need for profit and the need for jobs that provide a good

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction  163 income while offering a meaningful contribution to society. As MacIntyre would say, moral choices and social identification cannot solely be driven by emotivism that encounters the other as a means of self-expression; rather, moral reasoning should encounter the other as an end in itself, approaching others with respect for their autonomy (MacIntyre 2007, 24–5). In summary, environmental concerns can be credibly linked with lifestyle choices and values to create not only new brands and product lines, but to create social and ecological identities that are increasingly environmentally minded – even if they are not always very consistent in terms of thoroughgoing environmental ethics. Also, incorporating particular products with particular social and ecological values in a new vision of consumer identity may increase brand loyalty while also promoting environment-friendly lifestyles. Yet, such processes are not without their shadow side, so that good moral reasoning remains necessary. This analysis is therefore offered not in the hope that industry will ‘save the planet,’ but to describe how processes of social and ecological identification may gradually enable and increase particular lifestyle choices, which are also economically sustainable (Fielding and Hornsey 2016; Fritsche et al. 2018). Questions regarding identity and environment are, indeed, an important part of the study of conservation psychology (Clayton and Myers 2015, 163–89).

Leaders as Social-Ecological Identity Entrepreneurs The main argument of this chapter is that, for environmental concerns to be converted into practice, supported by lifestyle choices, it is imperative that they will be integrated into forms of social identity that relate environmental concerns to other areas in the web of life, such as religion and consumption. This generates the kinds of regular practices that can move societies towards greater ecological awareness, concern and action. It remains necessary to engage in debate about various ethical and ecological considerations, but by crafting a sense of identity that stretches a bit more towards ecological concerns at every opportunity, these debates will gradually gain more traction and make a measurable ecological difference. In this process, one cannot simply invent entirely new social identities, since the principles of comparative and normative fit indicate that links with previous consumer identities cannot be simply severed or replaced in one move. Some beliefs and behaviours need to be unlearned as other beliefs and behaviours are learned, which is what happens when social identities are shaped and adapted according to the principles of comparative and normative fit and perceiver accessibility.

Notes 1 See Chapter 6. 2 See www.groenekerken.nl; deepgreenchurch.org, greenchurches.ca, greenchristian.org.uk, www.egliseverte.org, oeko.ekir.de, oeku.ch/de, and many more.

164  Jack Barentsen

Fittingness as a Dynamic of Social Interaction  165 Environment.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5 (1): 61– 81. https://journals.equinoxpub.com/JSRNC/article/view/8496. Eiffler, Felix. 2019. “Kirche für die Stadt. Pluriforme Gemeindeentwicklung unter den Bedingungen sozialer Segregation.” PhD diss., Greifswald: Greifswald Universität. Fielding, Kelly S., and Matthew J. Hornsey. 2016. “A Social Identity Analysis of Climate Change and Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors: Insights and Opportunities.” Frontiers in Psychology 7: Article 121. Fritsche, Immo, Markus Barth, Philipp Jugert, Torsten Masson, and Gerhard Reese. 2018. “A Social Identity Model of Pro-Environmental Action (SIMPEA).” Psychological Review 125 (2): 245–69. Gerkin, Charles V. 1984. The Living Human Document: Re-Visioning Pastoral Counseling in a Hermeneutical Mode. Knoxville, TN: Abingdon. Gingrich, André. 2005. “Conceptualising Identities: Anthropological Alternatives to Essentialising Difference and Moralizing about Othering.” In Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach, edited by Gerd Baumann and André Gingrich, 3–17. New York: Berghahn. Goodhew, David, Andrew Roberts, and Michael Volland. 2012. Fresh! An Introduction to Fresh Expressions of Church and Pioneer Ministry. London: SCM Press. Graham, Jesse, Jonathan Haidt, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl, Ravi Iyer, Sean P. Wojcik, and Peter H. Ditto. 2012. “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47: 55–130. Graso, Maja, Karl Aquino, and Ekin Ok. 2019. “Branding Virtuous Victimhood: How Activating the Salience of a Consumer’s Moral Identity Motivates Resource Transfers to Victim Groups.” In Handbook of Research on Identity Theory in Marketing, edited by Americus Reed II and Mark Forehand, 97–110. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Haslam, S. Alexander. 2004. Psychology in Organizations: The Social Identity Approach. Second edition. London: Sage. https://books.google.nl/books?id= XPCdpv2nwmYC&hl=nl&source=gbs_navlinks_s. Haslam, S. Alexander, and Naomi Ellemers. 2005. “Social Identity in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Concepts, Controversies and Contributions.” In International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, edited by Gerald P. Hodgkinson and J. Kevin Ford, 20: 39–118. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Illeris, Knud. 2004. “Transformative Learning in the Perspective of a Comprehensive Learning Theory.” Journal of Transformative Education 2 (2): 79–89. Jenkins, Richard. 1996. Social Identity. Key Ideas. London: Routledge. Kidwell, Jeremy, Franklin Ginn, Michael Northcott, Elizabeth Bomberg, and Alice Hague. 2018. “Christian Climate Care: Slow Change, Modesty and Eco-Theo-Citizenship.” Geo: Geography and Environment 5 (2): e00059. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.59. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 2007. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Second edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Montfoort, Trees van. 2019. Groene theologie. Middelburg: Skandalon. Morel, Kaj. 2010. Identiteitsmarketing: Waarom wij bestaan. Schiedam: Scriptum. Niemandt, Cornelius. 2019. Missional Leadership. HTS Religion & Society Series 7. Cape Town: AOSIS. doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2019.BK108.

166  Jack Barentsen Perl, Anthony, and James A. Dunn Jr. 2007. “Reframing Automobile Fuel E conomy Policy in North America: The Politics of Punctuating a Policy Equilibrium.” Transport Reviews 27 (1): 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441640600821308. Reicher, Stephen, and S. Alexander Haslam. 2013. “Towards a ‘Science of Movement’: Identity, Authority and Influence in the Production of Social Stability and Social Change.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 1 (1): 112–31. Spears, Russell. 2011. “Group Identities: The Social Identity Perspective.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth J. Schwartz, Koen Luyckx, and Vivian L. Vignoles, 201–24. New York: Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_9. Stets, Jan E., and Peter J. Burke. 2000. “Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory.” Social Psychology Quarterly 63 (3): 224–37. Taylor, Bron, Gretel Van Wieren, and Bernard Daley Zaleha. 2016. “Lynn White Jr. and the Greening-of-Religion Hypothesis.” Conservation Biology 30 (5): 1000–9. Volland, Michael. 2015. The Minister as Entrepreneur: Leading and Growing the Church in an Age of Rapid Change. London: SPCK Publishing. White, Lynn. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–7. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203. Wilcox, Keith. 2019. “How Signaling Motives and Identity Salience Influence Luxury Consumption.” In Handbook of Research on Identity Theory in Marketing, edited by Americus Reed II and Mark Forehand, 72–84. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

10 When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’ Proposing a Form-of-Life for Environmental Care Emilio di Somma Introduction: A Global Anthropological Crisis ‘Nothing in this world is indifferent to us’ (Pope Francis 2015, nr. 2) is the strong message that Pope Francis aimed to convey in his encyclical letter Laudato si’. The letter focuses on how the current human model of development is highly destructive for the environment and for the planet; it also discusses how the relationship between humanity and the earth they should preserve has been broken by the economic models of the last century. Quoting patriarch Bartholomew, Pope Francis affirms that the solution to ecological concerns cannot be purely technological, it cannot be found within the current cultural framework; it involves a change in humanity, in our cultural and spiritual interpretation of human life, as we are all ‘united by the same concern’ (Pope Francis 2015, nr. 2). A mere technical solution to the environmental crisis would simply solve the ‘symptom’ of the problem, without addressing its root: the highly dis-functional relationship that modern human beings have established with their own environment (both in a natural and social sense). However, five years after the encyclical letter, the increase in pollution and the inability of world governments (and societies) to cooperate and contribute to the development of new models of society and economy confirms that this change is yet to be obtained, and that we are still blocked at the starting point of this path. The Covid-19 crisis, still happening at the time of writing, is further exacerbating social division and has swept attention to the environment behind much more immediate concerns – like the long string of failures of economic activities, the increase in mass unemployment and the social divide between people that can afford immediate and effective health care and those who cannot. The pandemic society is not a ‘greener’ society or an environmentally friendly one. While, on the one hand, the forced lockdown may have reduced, for example, the use of means of transportation or reduced the consumption of some kind of goods, on the other hand, it has increased the production of waste (particularly plastic) and the consumption of energy for living purposes (and work,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-14

168  Emilio di Somma in the ‘smart-work’ era). A society of ‘enforced cloistering’, then, seems in no way any less disruptive of the environment than the previous one. The purpose of this volume is to discuss the concept of ‘fittingness’ as a resource to develop a theoretical framework in which human beings can live and flourish while preserving the integrity of the environment. The idea of ‘fitting’ into a context implies attention to one’s neighbours, and the willingness to limit oneself. Rightly, this volume assumes that the concept of ‘fittingness’ has received little attention from those involved with environmental ethics. In this sense, to ‘fit in’ with our environment would imply the capacity to keep in our sight the existence and the limitations constituted by the ‘other than us’ human or non-human, and to develop and flourish according not only to our wishes and necessities, but also to those of this ‘other’. The environmental crisis represents not just the failure of an economic model of development, but of the model of society created by modern human beings. The inability to ‘fit in’ with our own natural environment is just the symptom of a more general incapacity to live fairly and justly with our own neighbours and fellow human beings. If we are unable to develop a society that is respectful and protects the dignity of the members of our own species, how can we expect to create a model of development that is respectful of those creatures that are other than us? It would be more productive as a theoretical endeavour, in the present stage of our crisis, to analyse the reasons for the failure of our attempts to develop sustainable and functional environmental policies. And, before discussing what this ‘ecological sustainability’ should look like, to try to understand what is currently wrong in our own understanding of human life on earth and our relationship, not only with our environment, but also with our fellow human beings. To develop this line of thought, the argument of the present essay will be developed by offering a preliminary overview on the current narratives on environmental sustainability. It will then propose a connection between environmental exploitation and the lack of ‘care’ for what is other than us (be it the environment or our struggling neighbour) that seems to be encouraged in the current social/cultural landscape and will propose, as a conclusion, a possible re-interpretation of Agamben’s analyses on monastic orders and rules as a starting point to re-elaborate a concept of ‘caring’ as a foundation on which we could build a better understanding of our role as a human being, both toward the environment and our neighbours.

Current Narratives on Environmental Sustainability Scientists and activists have been warning civil society and political elites about the environmental risks of the modern model of development for years. It was in 1972 that Dennis Meadows and his team of researchers,

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  169 sponsored by the Club of Rome, published their report on The Limits to Growth, in which the following conclusions were made: 1 If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. 2 It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential. 3 If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success (Meadows et al. 1972, 23–4). This report was then followed by updated new editions, that grew more concerned the more time passed, arriving at the 2005 edition, in which the authors affirmed that ‘it is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but half-hearted, responses to the global ecological challenge’ (Meadows, Meadows and Randers 2005, XVI). We are now in the 2020s, amidst the Covid crisis, and I believe we can affirm that the ecological concerns of the last years, even in the form of mass protests and movements,1 have utterly failed in helping humanity, and especially the political/economical elites, in conceiving an alternative model of development. At this point in time, given the current state of failure of environmental movements and policies, without any serious future effort at modifying our current model of development in sight, I believe that the concerns and public claims about environment should be briefly put aside and free-up space for analytical efforts. We need to understand the reasons behind the failures of the last 30 years, before we can even attempt to find new solutions, otherwise we may very well end up following that definition that describes insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. To be able to trace a new road for our environmental concerns and develop a society that seriously tries to address them, we must develop an understanding of what has gone wrong so far, the reasons for our failures and how can we correct them. This chapter starts from the assumption that the failures in addressing environmental concerns are born out of the configuration of our society, and its anthropological assumptions. While we can assume that ecological and environmental concerns have been taken very

170  Emilio di Somma seriously by scientists, political elites and even large part of the citizenry, the cultural assumptions at the foundation of our current social structure, at least in western societies, have made us unable to take the proper necessary action to act upon these worries. At the present moment, many of the sacrifices and changes required to address these concerns properly are being forced on the weakest parts of these societies, the poorest sectors or the politically weak and vulnerable citizens; while strengthening the political weight of the more affluent citizens (causing, in turn, the worsening of environmental problems). The reason ecological concerns have been so far unable to develop a strong societal impact is to be found in the way that proposed solutions to the destruction and despoliation of the planet have been developed within two fundamental, cultural frameworks of reference that are structurally unable to alter the existing power-relations within our societies, and are unable to address the deep-root cause of environmental problems. Yet, these same two frameworks seem to exercise the strongest influence on how such concerns are expressed and communicated in society, through media and political discourses. The first framework is the technological-progressivist interpretation, according to which the ecological crisis will be resolved through the development of more complex and efficient technology, which will either resolve our need for energy and material goods or allow us to reduce the impact that humanity has on nature. This framework can be found as a by-product of trans-humanist narratives, like Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus or in Raymond Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. Harari imagines that the free flow of data and the development of science will allow us to rationalise the use of resources in the future (Harari 2017, 339–41). This new ‘religion of data’, or Dataism, postulates that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing, and that through this un-ending process of data, brought by more and more complex networks of information, machines and more precise scientific paradigms, it would be possible to rationalise, make efficient and put a stop to the excessive consumption of earth, reduce the waste of resources and preserve our environment. 2 Kurzweil, instead, believes that a planet that is reaching its computational pivotal growth may have more chance than ever to make it through every crisis and overcome its problems (Kurzweil 1999, 193). If technology, and its increasing implementation within the spheres of human life, will improve our lives and solve our problems, then, by logical consequence, it will also help in tackling pollution and the destruction of our environment. However, we may not necessarily need a trans-humanist theoretical framework to find belief in the capacity of technology and science to solve environmental problems. Technology and science can, then, stand by themselves as faith in the power of human creativity, intelligence and capacity to tackle problems. An example of such a narrative can be found in Mark Lynas’ works (Lynas 2011, 2020) in which he advises the

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  171 fast development of new technologies to abandon fossil fuels completely (Lynas 2011, epilogue). While Lynas openly expresses his rejection of an extensive manipulation of earth – stating that he finds the prospect of a geo-engineered planet morally repellent – he affirms that technology and science can give us the means to reduce the human impact on nature, move our economy and way of life away from fossil fuels and, more generally, allow us the development of a more environment-friendly way of life (Lynas 2020, ch. 7). Lynas’ mediation between technology and preservation of earth, discarding the possibility of extensive manipulation of nature, is a good opener with which to introduce the second main framework of contemporary environmentalist narratives. This second framework focuses on the reduction and differentiation of our activity of consumption of natural resources, either by not using determinate products or by eating determinate kinds of food. This framework focuses on responsible consumption of resources, the capacity of humanity to reduce its own impact on earth. Initiatives that can be interpreted as belonging to this framework are the various ‘taxes’ on pollution and CO2 production, that, in practice, should ‘discourage’ actions that are seen as less effective, or disruptive of the environment, within the contemporary system of production. The attempt to fund ‘green’ economies and financial initiatives within the market system can be interpreted in the same way. On an organisational level, this interpretation can be found in movements such as WWF, which promote political and financial initiatives that try to reduce environmental destruction or preserve some areas from human disruption. Theoretical contributions to the issue, such as William Nitze’s economic analysis on green investments, may advocate for the implementation of more sound methods of economic production and financial investment that would allow for the reduction of resource depletion and human impact on our environment while still guaranteeing solid economic returns (Nitze 1993, 30). The barrier to sustainable development, he affirms, is not lack of funds or technology, but lack of information, training and incentives to exploit existing resources and methods of production. In this way, Nitze affirms, it would be possible to still bring developing countries to the level of already industrialised, rich countries, while avoiding the destructive processes that allowed first world countries to achieve their wealth in the first place. In this sense, according to his analysis, to adopt environment-friendly policies would allow developing countries to incrementally increase the savings of their own natural and financial resources, allowing them to achieve solid economic status (Nitze 1993, 32). However, as Robert Fri later criticised, while to adopt environmentfriendly policies may, surely, represent a sound investment and preserve natural resources and reduce human impact in the short term, it would still not avoid the problem in the long term: sustainable development can cost real money, and poor people, when faced with a trade-off, would continue

172  Emilio di Somma to prefer economic wellbeing to environmental quality (Fri 1993, 7). In the end, he affirms, the problem pertains to a more general framework than the economic one. This generation, even with all its carefulness, will still consume part of the natural resources of the planet, and so one cannot expect to resolve long-term problems with ‘smart’ investments in the short term, we need to leave behind the technology and knowledge needed to satisfy future wants (Fri 1993, 8). According to Robert Fri, then, it is both a matter of ‘present’ economic justice and inter-generational justice. For all the long-term problems that environmental concerns present, smart, environment-friendly investments are considered a good ‘short-term’ option for the present generation, and one that surely can guarantee economic returns together with care for the planet (Fri 1993, 8). However, in my opinion, this argument sits still within the paradigm of ‘responsible’ consumption of resources and still considers valid the possibility of a ‘responsible consumerism’. Of course, the schematisation I just presented cannot be considered a full overview of the existing interpretations on environmental problems or an exhaustive summary of all existing possibilities; the purpose of this introduction is just to schematise what I believe are the main features of the theoretical paths that have been traced so far by academia, activism and public discourse. The main interest in operating such a schematisation is to allow for a clearer presentation of what I believe are the main reasons for the failure of environmental concerns in developing and fostering a consistent social and political approach that could allow humanity to live on this earth without exhausting all its resources and endangering its own (and other species’) life. I believe the main reason that these two frameworks have failed, so far, is because they are still tied, fundamentally, to the inherently destructive path tied to consumption and, more in general, to the contemporary oscillation between neo-liberalism and positivism. 3 The technological paradigm or the paradigm of responsible consumption is still imbued within the ‘destruction’ paradigm, merely trying to do it differently. The problem is that both these paradigms are unable to escape (or even actively embrace) the divinisation of the individual and of their desires. The paradigm of responsible consumption (which we could also call a kind of preservation/conservation paradigm) merely aims to educate humans to ‘consume’ in a better way, without questioning the fundamental desire and divinisation of selfishness tied to consumerism; instead, covering it with a layer of moral propaganda. The technological paradigm, instead, actively fosters human hubris, by giving humanity the impression of being an almighty factor on earth, capable of spelling its doom or its salvation. The problem, then, is that both paradigms are still strongly within the post-modern paradigm, which, ultimately, nourishes individualism and celebrates the destruction of any kind of limitation imposed on human action.

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  173

Environmental Issues as Symptom of a ‘Crisis of Caring’ While I do not question that, on a local, specific, dimension, environmentalists and activists belonging to both these paradigms can achieve important results, they remain, ultimately, unable to change the nature of the system itself. Some voices, like Chico Mendes, understood that a serious environmental thought should lie within a radical re-discussion of the system itself and to search for a different model of society. Most of the time, the process of destruction and depletion of natural resources is a by-product of economic exploitation whose aim is to increase wealth for a restricted number of people, who also gain the power to impose their will on the weaker majority of society. It is then the result of speculation, more than the intended result of a willed act of destruction. It is an act of a will fixed on the control and domination of its own community that also translates into the domination and destruction of natural resources. For example, as Chico Mendes affirmed in his own writings, most of the time, the landowners that destroyed the amazon forest were not doing it to ‘develop it’, but just to let it re-grow wildly and speculate on the terrain (Mendes and Gross 1989, 66–7). We need, then, a radical re-discussion of the fundamental assumptions on which we have founded our societies. This radical step is necessary because, whenever we adhere to a social structure, we buy into and adhere to its unspoken assumptions. A society is not merely a social contract or a legally organised community, it comes with strings attached: cultural presuppositions, a given ontology of the world and of the human (although there are social theories that mistakenly delude themselves to have none), an in-built idea of what is good. In this sense, a model of society brings with it a specific understanding of the world, which is never neutral and that operates in all the successive levels of decision and/or comprehension. Nature, then, is never neutral, it is always ‘culturally conditioned’ – in the sense that some processes within nature are seen only when we buy into determinate pre-assumptions and our sphere of action within nature is wider or restricted according to those same pre-assumptions (De Martino 2007, 219–22). The post-modern paradigm, even more than the modern one, has developed a radical encouragement of the activity of consumption, while consistently restricting the dimension of ‘caring’ within our society. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, which I will discuss in detail in the following pages, to ‘consume’ something means to use that something for our own satisfaction, an action that usually ends up with the destruction of the thing used (Agamben 2011, 160–1). This action of ‘consumption/destruction’ is radically opposed to an attitude of ‘caring’ that, instead, gives importance to something and asks for its preservation. Another argument that can support this interpretation has been provided by Margaret Jane Radin who proposes an interpretation of the contemporary social landscape as one of

174  Emilio di Somma ‘commodification as worldview’, in which everything is given value only according to its ‘use’ and possibility of ‘being used’, usually quantified within the sphere of the market (Radin 1996, 2–3). Such an understanding of our world, and our life within it, clashes with the necessity of preserving it, giving it importance and being able to give up the contingent satisfaction of our superfluous desires to ensure its preservation. An example of this ‘crisis of caring’, that looks at its consequences on our social landscape, can be found in O’Ferrall’s analysis on the crisis of the Irish NHS, linking the crisis to a more general incapacity of our society to develop the foundational values required to actually ‘care’ for patients as fellow human beings. This crisis, is localised by O’Farrell in the imposition, at a social level, of a ‘managerial model’, which transformed even the act of caring into a transactional procedure, transformed the intimate care processes of health services into ‘industrial production schemata’ (O’Ferrall 2013, 333) and which, ultimately, led to the scandals and failures presented in the essay, as the ‘system’ was no longer able to conceive of the patients as human beings, just merely a part of the procedure. In the example presented by O’Farrell, healthcare itself is something that, devoid of any relational perspective, becomes something that is ‘consumed’ by the patients, while the patients themselves (or at least their wallets) are seen as something that has to be ‘consumed’ to guarantee economic efficiency and productivity. This would lead to the whole process of healthcare being devoid of any humane ethical dimension, transforming it only into a marketable exchange of commodities (the commodity of health versus the commodity of money). An even more worrying interpretation of the ‘crisis of care’ has been offered by Hamington, in his The Will to Care, in which he interprets the act of caring as dependent upon the imaginative power of the expectations about one’s effective ability to care. In this sense, the capacity of someone to ‘care’ is linked to their perception/expectation of the effective capacity of their action to develop such an act of ‘caring’. Where we can’t link the performative action, logically, with our expectation, then our capacity to care is sensibly reduced (Hamington 2010, 681). While Hamington’s essay focuses on our capacity to care for the ‘distant other’, I believe that his interpretation of the act of caring becomes even more applicable (with worrying consequences) to the crisis of caring within our own communities and towards the environment. If we link the act of caring to the rational expectation of the success of our performative actions, then, the disengagement of the individuals from their own communities, 4 perceived merely in an instrumentalist sense, can only generate ‘lack of care’ for the wellbeing of our neighbours and of the environment. We stop having ‘expectations’ of our community and of our own selves. Thus, we simply ‘stop caring’ about how our own actions and attitudes can influence the immediate community and environment around us. This connection is not random. In the same way as we ‘care’ for our loved ones and our wider community, we can develop a sense of ‘care’ for

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  175 the environment in which we live, which is considered in continuity with our community. However, a lack of care for our wider community can only impact directly in our capacity to care for our own environment. In this sense, contemporary environmentalism has been able to advertise ‘global crises’, ‘emergencies’ and ‘initiatives’ while, at the same time, been unable to help in fostering a wide enough interest and sense of care for the close, near, environment of the communities. The environmental crisis can be interpreted, in this sense, as a by-product of the social crisis. The crisis of our global environment is tied up, in fact, with the forgetfulness and lack of interest that we show towards our own communities. And it will end tragically, if we keep on this track.

Fittingness as Caring The concept of ‘fittingness’ indicates the quality of being suitable or fitting to a context. To apply it to environmental issues would mean to establish the thought that humanity should try to meet the requirements presented by the context that is the delicate balance of life on earth, instead of believing itself the master and shaper of creation, free to transform and change it according to its fleeting desires. However, while there is much reason within this approach, we have to be careful when we wish to develop social, ethical and normative changes through it. Within this concept is a hidden risk: who decides the features of the ‘context’ in which we should try to ‘fit’? Who decides the correct way to ‘fit in’ the environmental context? The fact that different interpretations of the environmental crisis and its solution are possible, as suggested in the earlier part of this essay, already presents a challenge to the application of this concept. A multiplicity of interpretations means a multiplicity of social structures, and therefore a multiplicity of types of power that could be applied, enforced and created through laws, social practices and customs. Given the fallen, sinful, nature of humanity, and given the fact that every society, in every time and every place, has developed structures of power, we are at risk, when we discuss ‘fittingness’, of spreading the idea that individuals should simply adhere to the code of conduct given by people of authority, so that the largest part of society should simply be ‘instructed’ by the ‘experts’ and passively accept the social transformations prescribed to make our living standards more sustainable. In this sense, then, if ‘fittingness’ has to become a foundation for a more environment-friendly society, it has also to become the foundation for a more just society. It needs, then, to be tempered with a fundamental understanding of ‘fitting in’ as ‘caring’, for our social context as well as the environmental one. Otherwise, we risk of transforming ecological measures into an instrument of power and abuse. The complexity, and the possibility of abuse of concepts like ‘green economy’ or ‘sustainable development’ was already clear in the conference of

176  Emilio di Somma Rio+20, where the countries of the world met to converge on mutual agreements and common rules to develop environment-friendly economies. This conference, while it did achieve some measure of success, was still unable to develop a consistent theoretical framework for a ‘green economy’. The countries involved managed to agree only on a mild, broad, rule of action that did not manage to result in consistent economic transformations (Khor 2012, 13–4; Schreurs 2012, 22–3). The fact that, in recent years, economic and social inequality has also risen sharply (Partington 2019) is proof that the recent rise in ‘green’ finance and the invitations to change the social landscape to make it more ‘sustainable’ did not necessarily imply a transformation of the balance of wealth and power in societies. Ecology and environmental discourse, in this way, can easily become a hammer used against the poorest and weakest part of society. Of the weak and poor, we require them to pay the full price of the ‘sustainability’ without changing the balance of power and the distribution of wealth within society itself. It can, instead, crystallise the existing structures of power, while throwing into abject desperation those who were already desperate. This issue can only be tackled in a meaningful way if we decide to address the elephant in the room: that is, for as long humanity exists on earth, it will consume resources. The consumption of resources is a process of nature. Every living being takes something from nature, uses it to further develop its own life, and then returns in another form the consumed resources. The problem, with capitalist/consumeristic economy, is that we currently lack meaningful ways to return, even in other forms, the resources we take from nature, while at the same time consuming them to a rhythm so fast that earth itself cannot regenerate what has been taken. The problem that we should address, then, through the concept of ‘fittingness’, becomes: How can we ‘consume’ resources without giving in to ‘consumeristic’ urges? Can we make ‘caring’ the foundation on which we could build a new sensibility, in which ‘fitting in’ means ‘to care for’ the delicate balance of our natural environment? This question may seem to re-propose the already presented paradigm of ‘responsible consumption’. I am confident, however, that through the interpretation of fittingness as ‘caring’, we can develop a whole new framework of discourse, that would escape the consumeristic paradigm. ‘To care’ means, in fact, to feel concern or interest; attach importance to something. A good definition of ‘caring’ has been provided by Tronto as ‘a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Tronto 1993, 103). Other care theorists have similarly defined caring as ‘a social practice that is essential to the maintenance and reproduction of society’ (Baier 1994; Streuning 2002, 87; Fineman 2004 use similar language). The act of caring,

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  177 from a social and moral point of view, is directly opposed to the ‘productive labour’ on which we base consumerism. 5 While productive labour aims to transform material objects to satisfy needs and desires, and contributes to the sustenance of human life and relationships only as a by-product of such satisfaction, caring requires the direct facing of someone else’s, or something else’s, needs and necessities. A true act of caring, then, is based on the self-limitation of the caring subject and the acceptance and recognition of a significant ‘other’. The contemporary paradigm, unfortunately, attaches importance primarily to the unlimited and unending desires of individuals, which are the real engine of our society. Any attempt to put limits to such desires, both in politics, society or economics, is seen as an unacceptable act of violence and is, therefore, shunned. Within this system, other causes and problems that are external to individual desires only get, in the best case scenario, either spare energy left over from the continuous race for more production, or else the morally cleansing donation of some pocket change. In this sense, then, caring can represent a reversal of this failing paradigm. It is one thing to propose ‘responsibility on consumption’ while preserving the existing social, political and economic structures, based on individualism and egotism, and another to pose the same question while also looking for a new ‘form-of-life’, a new way through which humanity can establish a covenant with itself, with earth and, ultimately, with God, in the acceptance and recognition of the other and through a radical act of self-limitation.

Caring as Form-of-Life The problem of how we ‘consume’ our resources is not new. While environmental concerns are, historically speaking, relatively new to human civilisations, the problem of how we ‘consume’ our own property has already been addressed in history, although from a legal/juridical point of view. A notable case of this problem has been analysed by Giorgio Agamben, in The Highest Poverty. The problem of the ‘use’ and the consequent ‘consummation’ of resources was the centre of the theological debate between the Catholic church and the Franciscan order (Agamben 2011, 135–6). The rule of St. Francis aimed to develop a form-of-life in which the single monk would give up any concept or right of ‘property’ – to the point that the early Franciscan monks claimed that they would ‘use’ the basic items needed for life (the cloth for their vests, the food for their survival), but that even this use could not be considered as ‘property’. It was a usus facti, a simple use, without property, of the things of the world, much like a horse eats its own oats, or a bird creates its own nest with splinters of wood, they use what they find in the world, but have no ‘property’ in such resources (Agamben 2011, 136–7). It was not only a legal argument, but also a theological statement developed from the doctrine of the age of innocence, the state of

178  Emilio di Somma blessedness in which humans would have been before their fall. According to this doctrine, in which Adam and Eve used the resources in the garden of Eden, without claiming any property in it, the Franciscan order aimed to create a community in which iure naturali sunt omnia omnibus; by natural right all things belonged to everyone (Agamben 2011, 139). It was an attempt to develop an abdicatio iuris, an act of abandonment of any kind of secular ‘law’ or ‘right’ in order to take upon themselves the life of Christ. In this way, through the radical abandonment of any relation of possession, and therefore of power, with the things of the world, the rule of St. Francis aimed to develop a form-of-life of radical abandonment of one’s own selfishness, culminating in a total trust in God’s will. The theological struggle of the order against the central authority of the church went on for about one hundred years, until Pope John XXII, in the year 1322, wrote the Decretal letter ad conditorem canonum. In this letter, the Pope affirmed an argument that was both legal and theological: while there could be an argument about the abandonment of property and the ‘right to property’ of stable and durable things, how could there be any argument about the simple ‘use’ of things that were, inevitably, destroyed in their own use? For example, food and clothes, that were inevitably ‘abused’ (destroyed) in their use (the food is consumed and digested, the cloth is worn and, consequently, ruined gradually) could not be considered simply as ‘used’ by the monk. In the moment itself that the monk was eating his food, or wearing his vest, he was already ‘owning’ it (Agamben 2011, 158–60). Curiously enough, the Franciscan monks did not try to oppose the argument in this letter or that about the age of innocence, probably recognising its inherent weakness (while it was certainly a source of inspiration, fallen humanity was not in the age of innocence). The Pope rightly observed that the act of consumption, the use, requires necessarily the ‘destruction’ of the item used (the food is eaten, the vest is used until it’s damaged and destroyed). How can, then, someone pretend to use something without claiming property in it? The hierarchies of the Franciscan order tried for a further twenty years to oppose this reasoning until the death of Michele da Cesena, the last of the ‘spirituals’ of the Franciscan order, whereupon they signed the complete submission of the order to the laws of the church. This theological conflict is interesting for the argument about fittingness for two main reasons: 1) The legal-theological argument developed by Pope John XXII can be interpreted, as Agamben interprets it (Agamben 2011, 160–1), as a pre-figuration of consumerism. The ideology of mass consumption, in fact, rests on the assumption that the ‘consumer’ has any right to ‘consume’ and ‘abuse’ the resources they own as property and cannot simply ‘use’ something that they cannot ‘own’. For this reason, too, contemporary laws establish that ‘common goods’, that is, resources like water, are either owned by a private owner or are owned collectively

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  179 through the figure of the state. In this sense, Pope John XXII developed an unconscious prophecy of the rules on which modernity developed consumerism. 2 The polemic is interesting in itself because of its theological and philosophical value. While the church authorities were indeed worried about the political weight of the Franciscan claims, those claims also posed a theological problem. If one can freely use something, without having any property in it, how can one be held accountable for the use? How can we meaningfully discuss the responsibility of a ‘free use’? If the use is free, then one using cannot be held accountable for the misuse. After all, there is no legal or moral boundary that would restrict the action and impose responsibility for the consequences of the use. While, obviously, Saint Francis had no ill intention in his theological claim, and wanted to propose a form-of-life of poverty, the church had to face the problem when, from its beginning as a small covenant of monks, the Franciscan order became a powerful order, spread throughout Europe.6 Re-interpreting the possible answer that the Franciscan order could have given to the central authorities, Agamben notices an important fact. So worried were the Franciscan monks about the ‘legal’ possibility of an usus facti that they entered a defensive position and forgot the possibility given by the monastic life itself as form-of-life (Agamben 2011, 170–3). Poverty, in fact, for Francis, was not just a ‘legal problem’ but a part of the form-oflife of the monk. I believe we can interpret his monastic rule, beyond Agamben’s interpretation, as an attempt to propose not simply a legal concept, but a way for human beings to be in the world, through a radical act of self-limitation (of their own desires, power, and, ultimately, existence) that culminated in a radical attitude of ‘caring’ in relation to everything in existence. This fundamental caring for everything in existence is also testified to by Francis’ Laudes Creaturarum, in which he thanks God for everything in existence, to the point that the sun is ‘brother’ and death is ‘sister’ to humankind. The radical self-limitation of Francis’ form-of-life culminated in a radical love and caring for the created world, a world in which humanity had to ‘fit in’ through love, equality and compassion. It could also be interpreted as the negation of a ‘duality’ between human beings and nature. We human beings exist because we breath, eat and drink of the things created in the world, we are ‘part’ of this world and are, in our bodily existence, extremely similar to the other creatures of this world. This is why everything can be ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ to us, because we are integrated in a common existence, from which we cannot prescind. What is, then a form-of-life? Taking inspiration from the monastic orders, we can describe it as a ‘rule’ that becomes ‘life’. In the life of the monk, every act was part of the liturgy. The rule of Saint Benedict, with its ora et labora transformed all the activities of the monk, work included, into

180  Emilio di Somma acts of liturgy aimed at blessing the name of God and acts of prayer toward him. The rule of St. Francis aimed to make the ‘life of Christ’ the model of life for the monks, so that the life of Jesus itself was considered as ‘the rule’ in a new understanding that transformed the meaning of ‘life’ and ‘rule’ themselves (Agamben 2011, 123–4).7 In this way, every act of the monk would be lived as a prayer, a blessing, an act of liturgy aimed at God, and every prayer would be a lived experience. In this way, the life of the single monk was inscribed – fitting in with – in a solid order of the whole universe. The liturgy was not a simple parenthesis in the individuality of the monk, life and liturgy became indifferent to each other; every act of liturgy was an act of life, and every act of life was a liturgy. My interpretation is that, in this way, the monk was compelled to exercise constantly the act of ‘caring’. He had to care constantly for God, for his fellow monks and for his fellow neighbours. The peak of this form-of-life remained, and remains, the rule of St. Francis, in which the poverty was also paired with a constant caring for the brothers and sisters, humans and non-humans, for the weak and the unfortunate, a perfect imitation of the ultimate ‘rule’: the life of Jesus. Regretfully, I believe that the contemporary social/cultural milieu has done its best precisely to destroy the cultural humus that allows us to ‘care’ for other than our own selves.

Conclusion: How to Care Again? The essay started its argument by affirming that the concept of ‘fittingness’, while useful as a foundation on which we could build a new environmental sensibility, needed to be detailed and integrated with a notion of ‘caring’ for our own environment. In this way, the concept of ‘fittingness’ becomes accessible to the wider public and does not become just a technical tool that a few could use to impose their own vision on the majority. The argument also addressed the possible interpretation about the root causes of our inability to ‘fit in’ within the environmental balance, and our continuous act of destruction upon natural resources and beauties, hinting that such unrestrained destruction is only one symptom of a more general cultural crisis. I have developed the argument that the root cause of this crisis is tied to our necessity to ‘use’ natural resources to develop and continue our own life. This ‘use’, exaggerated by contemporary consumerism and commodification of everything regarding human life, has resulted in our inability to ‘care’ for things outside of our own selves. In an unrestrained attempt to satisfy every one of our individual desires, we develop a society that is not only highly destructive of the natural resources of the planet but is also unsustainable in the environmental (as well as in the social/moral) sense. This attempt is born out of the acknowledgment that there is not a ‘duality’ between human beings and the environment. We live on this planet, from which we have not been able to ‘escape’,8 and are fully integrated in a very subtle crust of biosphere. We live because of this subtle, fragile crust

When ‘Fitting in’ Means to ‘Care’  181 and we cannot survive without it. However, this simple fact seems to have been unable, so far, to inspire us toward more sustainable social models. In addition, the cost of both the destruction of nature and our attempts to preserve it, seems to fall always on the heads of the weaker members of our society. Thus, I have proposed finding inspiration in Francis’ rule, and in its description in Agamben’s work, interpreting it as a radical act of self-limitation and as an attempt to see all things in creation as ‘equal’ to us, as brothers and sisters in the world created by God. In this way, we may be able to preserve, together, the balance of creation while, at the same time, striving to improve not only our own relation with nature, but also with our human neighbours.

Notes 1 We can think about the movement ‘Fridays for Future’, inspired by the young activist Greta Thunberg, as the most recent effort at a global attempt to foster and develop environmental concerns. 2 Paradoxically Harari concludes in the last pages of his book (340–2) that it may also be possible that, once we have given all power to algorithms, the algorithms themselves believe the humans to be imperfect, obsolete processors, that should be updated or eliminated. 3 For this definition, I refer to John Milbank’s, Theology and Social Theory (Milbank 2006, XIII–XIV), which describes contemporary political/cultural landscape as one imbued both with a positivist and neo-liberal overtone. 4 I am using this term in a wider sense, implying not only the people we live with, but also the surrounding environment in which we live with them. 5 In the sense that consumerism takes the notion of productive labour to its extremes, where everything and anything is “produced” to be consumed. 6 And also causing an enormous amount of unrest, like the rebellion of Fra Dolcino, which ended with the assault of church and nobility properties and the massacre of their owners and custodians. 7 According to Agamben, this was another one of the reasons for the theological conflict against the church authorities. 8 I also would not see a reason to do so.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. Altissima Povertà. Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore. English edition, 2013, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baier, Annette, 1994. Moral Prejudice: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. De Martino, Ernesto, 2007. Il Mondo Magico. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Fineman, Martha Albertson, 2004. The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency. New York: The New Press. Fri, Robert W. 1993. “Sustainable Development.” Issues in Science and Technology 10 (1): 7–8. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/43311343. Hamington, Maurice. 2010. “The Will to Care: Performance, Expectation, and Imagination.” Hypatia 25 (3): 675–95. www.jstor.org/stable/40928645.

182  Emilio di Somma Harari, Yuval Noah, 2017. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Toronto: Signal Books/McClelland & Stewart Ltd./Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Khor, Martin. 2012. “An Assessment of the Rio Summit on Sustainable Development.” Economic and Political Weekly 47 (28): 10–14. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/ stable/23251705. Kurzweil, Raymond. 1999. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Viking/ Penguin Book. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lynas, Mark. 2011. The God Species. Washington: The National Geographic Society, Kindle. ———. 2020. Our Final Warning. London: 4th Estate/HarperCollins Publishers, Kindle. Meadows, Donella H., Meadows Dennis L., Randers Jørgen, and Behrens William W. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Meadows, Donella H., Meadows Dennis L., and Randers Jørgen. 2005. The Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update. London: Earthscan. Mendes, Chico, Gross Tony. 1989. Fight for the Forest. London: Latin America Bureau. Nitze, William A. 1993. “The Economic Case for Sustainable Development.” Issues in Science and Technology 9 (4): 29–32. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/43311327. O’Ferrall, Fergus. 2013. “The Crisis in Caring: An Evidence-Based Response.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 102 (407): 324–35. www.jstor.org/ stable/23631183. Partington, Richard. 2019. “Inequality: Is It Rising, and Can We Reverse It?” The Guardian, 9 September 2019. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/ news/2019/sep/09/inequality-is-it-rising-and-can-we-reverse-it. Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home. The Holy See, May 24, 2015. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica­ laudato-si.html. Radin, Margaret Jane. 1996. Contested Commodities: The Trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts and Other Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schreurs, Miranda A. 2012. “Rio 20: Assessing Progress to Date and Future Challenges.” The Journal of Environment & Development 21 (1): 19–23. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/26199400. Streuning, Karen. 2002. New Family Values: Liberty, Equality and Diversity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

11 Representation as Isolation The Unfittingness of Waste Gregory Jensen

Society of the Spectacle We are encouraged to forget about our waste (trash) while producing ever greater quantities of it. Solutions to the waste crisis are increasingly mediated through various environmental images. Product marketers tap into eco-conscious citizens’ desire for a more sustainable society by deploying such environmental images to narrate a more fitting zero waste future made possible by the consumption of various ‘environmentally friendly’ consumer goods. This is, however, nothing more than a cleverly implemented strategy designed to maintain the status quo of a production society premised on limitless extraction and utilisation of resources. In the meantime, landfills keep getting bigger, greenhouse gases continue their steady rise and a growing segment of the population is forced to deal with the harmful effects of production society’s wasteful living. Environmental images such as the recycling logo shape the modern environmental imaginary. Guy Debord’s (2005) account of the spectacle explicates the role of images in shaping modern accounts of reality; thus, the spectacle serves as a robust category for interrogating the interconnectivity between the application of various environmental images and perceptions of environmental responsibility. Debord employs the term ‘spectacle’ to denote ‘a social relation between people that is mediated by images’. These images shape public perception through their continual re-presentation across time and space (7). The spectacle’s successful colonisation of the visual field draws on a ‘weakness of the Western philosophical project, which attempted to understand activity by means of the category of vision’ (11). For Debord, the spectacle amounts to a pseudo-reality made visible, the appropriation of which relies on passivity and fragmentation enabling ‘all that was directly lived [to recede] into representation’ (7). Thus, the (un) reality of the spectacle results from the conflation of ‘all human social life with appearances’ (9). The inseparability of image and reality also marks the overcoming of critical thought, dialogue and physical interaction as necessary factors in the formation of individuals and of social relations, since these can only be inimical to the spectacle’s refashioning of social relations through appearances.1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-15

184  Gregory Jensen The spectacle exhibits a totalising influence on human beings, but this is only possible because ‘the economy has already totally subjected them’ (Debord 2005, 10). Accordingly, the spectacle’s disintegration and refashioning of all natural and social relations originates from an economic rationality that seeks ever-greater control over the means of production and consumption. Spectacular images normalise modern modes of production in commodity society around a Nature/Society binary that evaluates the natural world as source and sink for an ever-increasing stream of commodities and that organises social life around a view of human beings as source and sink of production and consumption respectively. 2 As a result of the totalising impact of production society, human beings no longer live fully in the world, rather they manufacture an increasingly abstract pseudo-world. The spectacle, then, perpetually reifies this pseudo-reality, and it does so ‘by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed, and believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness’ (Debord 1998, 19). Thus, the pseudo-world of spectacularly mediated production society subjects human beings to alienation in order to actualise total commodification. Spectacular orientation of nature and society around total commodification thrives on fragmentation and hyperindividualism, for as Debord (2005) notes, ‘separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle’ (13). Because the nuanced and varied composition of the social body more easily recognises the falsity of appearances than isolated individuals, dialogue and social unification are inimical to spectacular existence. The spectacle, however, immunises individuals from the disorientating side-effects of fragmentary narrations of the world by offering a sense of ‘social unification through consumption’, which simply ‘postpones the consumer’s awareness of the actual divisions until his next disillusionment with some particular commodity’ (34). Furthermore, the spectacle normalises and justifies societal disintegration through the mediating effect of images, leading to what Debord describes as the sole message of the spectacle: ‘what appears is good; what is good appears’ (9–10). Various forms of separation result from social existence no longer dependent on the dialogue and physical interaction of diverse individuals, including the separation of worker and product. Importantly, this pertains to an intentional ordering of nature and society that validates total commodification through colonisation of the visual field (14). In sum, the spectacle perpetually reifies the pseudo-reality of production society, undergirded by an economic rationality that absorbs all natural and social relations within a world of total commodification.

Spectacular Green Images Spectacular images mediate the perceptual framing of fitting and unfitting environmental actions and attitudes, and thus serve as a helpful lens

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  185 through which to view the formation of environmental narratives. With Debord’s account of the spectacle in the foreground, we will now analyse two iconic environmental images that bolster contemporary descriptive accounts of waste’s unfittingness and the proposed solutions organised around such accounts. Finis Dunaway (2015) examines popular media images associated with the environmental movement and their role in developing an environmental imaginary. According to Dunaway, while drawing awareness to various forms of environmental degradation, images developed and employed during the formation of the environmental movement ‘masked systemic causes and ignored structural inequalities’ associated with environmental crises (2). Environmental images have become more numerous and varied, but the overarching message Dunaway describes has not changed. Indeed, the deflection of blame from systemic and structural causes has only increased, in part because the proliferation of novel technological forms and the increasing amount of time devoted to such technologies integrates individuals even further into the aforementioned passivity and fragmentation of spectacular existence (Kalaidjian 2017, 20). Since modern forms of production (i.e., the proliferation of single use plastics) are the chief source of material waste, blame must be shifted elsewhere for production to remain unhindered. For this reason, rather than ignoring the problems for which they are chiefly responsible, various industries coopt environmental messaging through extensive utilisation of visual media in order to shape environmental narratives. For Dunaway (2015), environmental images craft public perception of environmental citizenship around the notions of universal vulnerability and universal responsibility (3). By universalising vulnerability and responsibility, ‘environmental citizenship focuses on the private sphere of home and consumption’. Consequently, these narratives suggest that the best practice for preservation of the global home involves no more than getting one’s own home in order. Accordingly, the message of universalisability brought about by spectacular environmental iconography maintains the status quo of production society by reframing potentially subversive messages of environmentalism around hyper-individualised environmental citizenship.3 Dunaway analyses two images especially relevant to our consideration of the spectacularisation of waste: the Crying Indian advertisement and the recycling logo. Both images reveal waste’s perceived unfittingness as misordered and misplaced matter accumulating in the environments of irresponsible and neglectful individuals. Fitting responses, therefore, require individuals to become more conscientious environmental citizens. The result of carefully coordinated public relations manoeuvres, these images reveal industry efforts to coopt trending environmental narratives to deflect blame away from production practices and externalise disposal costs. The iconic Crying Indian public service announcement was first launched on Earth Day 1971. The advertisement featured the Indian known as Iron Eyes Cody (played by an Italian-American actor) paddling a canoe down a

186  Gregory Jensen litter-laden river amid an industrial landscape. Cody exits his canoe on the banks of the river and is shown walking alongside a busy street. A driver throws a pile of garbage out his window that lands at the feet of Iron Eyes Cody. The camera then zooms in on Cody’s face, revealing a tear, shed on behalf of the polluted landscape. The narrator’s low, booming and judgmental voice concludes the advertisement by stating ‘People start pollution. People can stop it.’ This advertisement, more than any other, roused the guilty conscience of an irresponsibly citizenry, particularly those individuals a prior Keep America Beautiful (KAB) advertisement labelled ‘litterbugs’ (Dunaway 2015, 83). The Crying Indian advertisement involved a joint effort between the Ad Council and KAB, a nonprofit established in 1953 to ‘help people end littering, improve recycling, and beautify America’s communities’ (Keep America Beautiful n.d.). The KAB campaign is sponsored by numerous individuals with a sincere desire to better their local environments, but the advertisement’s central message was the direct result of the public relations firm of one particular KAB sponsor, the American Can Company. In the years leading up to the Crying Indian advertisement, some states were considering bans on no-return bottles, legislation that would ultimately hinder beverage industry profits (Dunaway 2015, 86). As Ginger Strand (2008) notes, the American Can Corporation countered such legislation ‘with an increasing vilification of the individual.’ The task became one of developing a message that caused individuals to view litter as a mirror into their own recklessness, and Iron Eyes Cody’s tear accomplished just that through the individualisation of a guilty environmental conscience. Interestingly, the advertisement also tapped into another aspect of America’s guilty conscience, for as Jennifer Ladino (2012) explains, it held out the promise of reconciliation for the past sins of colonialism. In addition to beautifying the natural environment to a state of pristinity as in the time of the Native Americans, the advertisement implies that litter cleanup crusades ‘might mysteriously dry the tears of this nation’s native residents’. Furthermore, the advertisement’s representation of Native Americans as nature diminishes Native American’s humanity and masks the ongoing difficulties they currently experience; thus ‘the appeal to protect the environment is achieved by concealing the ongoing marginalisation of indigenous people’ (122). The Crying Indian ad profoundly influenced the American environmental psyche. As Dunaway (2015) notes, The conceptual brilliance of the ad stemmed from its ability to incorporate elements of the countercultural and environmentalist critique of progress into its overall vision in order to offer the public a resistant narrative that simultaneously deflected attention from industry practices. (87)

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  187 The ad tapped into trending environmental narratives and rather than denying the increasing production of single use disposables, successfully placed the problem for proliferation of such disposables in the laps of individuals.4 By ‘situating private feelings within public spaces’, industries granted themselves an aura of value-neutrality (Dunaway 2015, 84). After all, industries are not the ones throwing trash on the streets, they merely manufacture the products essential to America’s strong economy. People, not corporations, start pollution. People can stop it. Strand helpfully summarises the pseudo-reality propagated by the ad: It was an elegantly closed circle. The titans of packaging pushed throwaways into production. The Ad Council preached the creed of consumption, assuring Americans that the road to prosperity was paved with trash. The people bought; the people threw away. Then, the same industries and advertisers turned around and called them pigs. The people shamefacedly cleaned up the trash. And the packagers, pointing to the cleaned-up landscape, just went on making more of it (Strand 2008). The components that make up this closed circle rationalise, or to use the increasingly broad and almost meaningless environmental phrase, make ‘sustainable’, an image of social and ecological well-being alongside limitless production and consumption, the key ingredient being individuals who dispose responsibly. But, upon obeying the Ad Council’s demand and cleaning up all that misplaced trash, a responsible environmental citizen might be led to question what happens to all the responsibly disposed of trash. The Crying Indian ad’s protological message with its appeal to nature’s original aesthetic goodness paralleled an eschatologically oriented logo that addressed such concerns by promising endless material futurity and utility. In 1970, one year before the release of the Crying Indian ad, the Container Corporation of America sponsored a contest to develop a recycling symbol. Gary Anderson, a student at the University of Southern California, won the contest for his recycling logo, to this day the most proliferate and recognisable environmental icon. Anderson’s design was modelled after the artist M.C. Escher’s Mobius strip and its reflection on ‘tensions between the finite and the infinite’ (Dunaway 2015, 99). The Mobius strip had become a popular environmental symbol for its conveyance of ‘ecological harmony and the wonders of nature’ (101). Anderson’s recycling logo tapped into the notion of ecological harmony by giving finite material products the appearance of infinite utility. Like the Crying Indian Ad, the recycling logo ‘popularised the discourse of individual responsibility and deflected attention from industry practices’, but it expanded the narrative of responsible disposability to include the

188  Gregory Jensen promise of material renewal for properly sorted refuse (104). For product manufacturers, this means they need not worry about the life of a product once it leaves store shelves; messages of individual responsibility allow product manufacturers to offload the cost of disposal, thereby situating considerations of waste squarely in the lap of consumers. In 1955, fifteen years prior to the advent of the recycling logo, numerous Americans adopted ‘throwaway living’, made possible by the increasing number of disposable products in circulation that promised to ‘cut down household chores’ (Throwaway Living 1955, 43–4). The recycling logo offered hope that society’s increasingly disposable lifestyle need not be considered wasteful. This hope blossomed and developed into what Ted Steinberg (2010) calls a ‘recycling ethic’, by which recycling acts as ‘the surest sign today of virtuous environmental behavior’ (13). Recycling as environmental panacea is good news for eco-conscious individuals and industries. Individuals know they are the problem, but now, through curbside recycling, they are also the solution; and for industries ‘curbside recycling works as a corporate subsidy: the makers of the product do not bear the cost of dealing with packaging waste’ (15). The linking of recycling with environmental responsibility demonstrates the power of the spectacle to translate appearances into ideology, in this case, the placement of all environmental discussions within an economic rationality. The recycling logo masks the ultimate unreality of a totalising economic rationality by situating the limitless exponential growth economic model, a core feature of production society, within recycling’s closed loop. Numerous industries brand their packaging with the recycling logo, recognising its positive impact on corporate reputation and product sales stemming from consumer demands for more environmentally friendly practices and less waste. They recognise the recycling logo’s ability to mollify fears of waste attributed to limitless consumption. Additionally, industries summon the logo to assist the fight against environmental regulation by taking advantage of the logo’s association with environmental responsibility. In essence, the logo allows companies to say ‘we are conservationists too’ while ridding themselves of disposal costs for the products they manufacture. The complex classification system that surrounds today’s recycling logos, such as the seven categories of plastics, prevents consumers from any real engagement with recycling beyond their sorting efforts, making it an even more powerful spectacular force. A more recent iteration of recycling’s inner logic of limitless economic value alongside endless material utility can be seen with the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s push for a circular economy vision. The foundation seeks to build an ‘economy that is restorative and regenerative by design’ (Ellen Macarthur Foundation). The circular economy model expands the nexus of responsibility to businesses and governments as well as individuals, and correctly emphasises waste as an intentional feature of the design

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  189 phase (the linear economy’s production, use and disposal model); nevertheless, the circular economy’s goal of an economy in which limitless growth is decoupled from resource constraints amounts to nothing more than a reorientation within the same economic rationality. The commodification of the globe continues and market forces reign, albeit in a seemingly more sustainable fashion. 5 Additionally, the circular economy’s aim at endless material utility demands a market for all products in circulation; therefore, even within a circular economy, shrinking market demand inevitably results in the tangentalisation of various materials out of the reuse cycle. China’s recent ban on plastic imports (dubbed ‘National Sword’) is a prime example of this concept. China imported most of the world’s plastic, so the ban left waste management companies scrambling to locate new markets, none of which compared with the scope and scale of the Chinese market. In addition to pollution concerns, Chinese officials cited not wanting to be viewed as the world’s dumping ground as part of the reason for the ban (Hook and Reed 2018).

The Ordering of Waste The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2004) sheds light on China’s concerns by revealing the interconnectivity between material and social ordering. For Bauman, modernity’s view of progress entails a social ordering that classifies particular human lives as waste, namely those redundant individuals out of place in production society. For Bauman, ‘to be “redundant” means to be supernumerary, unneeded, of no use – whatever the needs and uses are that set the standard of usefulness and indispensability’. The characterisation of particular individuals as redundant references those whose skills no longer count as productive and those with little or nothing to offer as consumers.6 The standard methods for assessing a human life as useful include productive individuals whose labour encourages economic progress, and individuals with the power to translate choices and desires into purchases. Persons requiring attention and physical assistance ‘are talked about as mainly a financial problem’, a burden offending societal ordering and hindering economic progress (12). The ordering of human waste is an intentional and ‘inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts some parts of the extant population as “out of place”, “unfit” or “undesirable”) and of economic progress’ (5). Drawing on Mary Douglas’ (2002) description of pollution behaviour as ‘the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications’ (45), Bauman (2004) indicates the designation of people or things as product or waste, fitting or unfitting, to be the result of an intentional and creative process. Such categorisations do not merely result from a particular system; rather they are central to the operational effectiveness of the system itself.

190  Gregory Jensen Left to its own devices, unlit by the spotlight of the story … the world is neither orderly or chaotic, neither clean nor dirty. It is human design that conjures up disorder together with the vision of order, dirt together with the project of purity. (19) The economic rationality undergirding production society regulates the valuation of material and social utility, shining a light on all that is useful (productive) and leaving everything and everyone else in the dark. Bauman’s appeal, then, calls individuals to attend to the social reality at the heart of disposability practices and to production society’s conceptualisation of fitting and unfitting, reinforced as it is by the spectacularisation of green images. Bauman exposes the shallowness of proposed waste management solutions organised around proper material sorting; and as China’s plastic import ban reveals, economic rationality’s market-based strategies externalise all ecological and social considerations (Alvater 2016, 148). Despite the material and social degradation at the heart of spectacular society’s environmental order-building, the palliatives to pollution, existing as they do within economic rationality, involve nothing more than more responsible environmental citizenship at the individual level and ‘new specializations, ministries, jobs for the boys and promotions within the bureaucracy at the corporate level’ (Debord 2008, 90). This is because the ‘essential function of the developed economy of today is the production of employment’ (85). China’s plastic ban revealed the often hidden ecological and social externalities of waste management strategies. Recycling services were suspended in many communities and responsible environmental citizens, no longer able to sort paper and plastic, felt especially guilty.7 Additionally, local governments were left scrambling for places to send the increasing volume of ‘recyclables’. The Philadelphia region sent these materials to a large incineration facility in Chester, a community already disproportionately suffering from the pollution emitted from the incinerator.8 As Diane Sicotte (2016) notes, the drawback associated with the incineration facility ‘fueled the suspicions to residents that their community had been chosen because it was seen as a place that lacked the capacity to successfully resist unwanted and unhealthy waste disposal technologies’ (113). This example aptly illustrates the interdependence of material and social ordering, which capitalist commodity production cannot account for without undermining itself.9 Waste, both material and human, must remain externalised. Consequently, ‘wasted lives’ are left to deal with the externalities of wasteful commodity production (Bauman 2004, 59).

Christologically Mediated World-Ecology: Toward a Descriptive Account of Fittingness I have suggested that the spectacular mediation of environmental ideology within production society coincides with natural and social order-building

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  191 that both justify and reify the pseudo-reality of production society. Insofar as it mediates a social unreality, the dominance of the spectacle in modern society renders problematic any normative account of environmental fittingness, but our analysis of spectacular green images suggests un/fittingness as a helpful descriptive category. In the final section of this paper, I offer an alternative descriptive account of environmental fittingness based on a renewed relationality between humanity and nature. I propose a Christologically mediated world-ecology that links Jason Moore’s critique of capitalism’s ordering of nature with Bonhoeffer’s account of human freedom-from-nature. Jason Moore’s (2015) concept of ‘world-ecology’ disrupts the Nature/Society binary at the heart of contemporary environmental discourse, seeking instead an account of their inter-relationality where they ‘co-produce manifold configurations of humanity-in nature, organisms and environments, life and land, water and air. “History,” in this sense, is the history of a “double internality”: humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity’ (5). In other words, Moore suggests that humans do not merely exist as independent agents acting on external environments, rather human and extra-human natures form environments and are formed by environments. Destruction of the Nature/Society binary provides leverage for critiques of commodification and its devaluation of work, labour and social relations. For instance, one of Moore’s (2016) chief concerns with the Nature/Society binary especially relevant to our discussion of order-building involves its capacity for dehumanisation, namely the exclusion of certain individuals from the realm of Humanity through their attribution with uncivilised, external Nature (91).10 The valuation of human labour takes place ‘within a porous sphere of commodity production and exchange’.11 Thus, the nomenclature operating within a Nature/Society binary justifies and reinforces capitalist rationality by qualifying claims to societal membership. Moreover, world-ecology offers critical purchase on the natural and social relations central to the formation and sustenance of capitalist production society. Moore (2015) insists that capitalism be understood as a world-ecology, by which it develops within a set of relations that ‘join the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity’ (3). Thus, capitalism is not an economic system acting on abstract Nature, but rather a project resulting from a series of socio-historical relations that order and value production, power and nature in specific ways. It develops through nature, not merely on nature.12 This view ‘moves us from the commonplace view of nature as object to nature as matrix’ (Moore 2015, 44). Accordingly, capitalism organised nature around ‘a singular civilizational project: the law of value as a law of Cheap Nature’ (298). The expansion of commodity production relied on a continual supply of cheap sources to maintain and expand profitability, and this was accomplished through nature’s organisation around the ‘four cheaps’ of labour, food, energy and raw materials (Moore 2016, 97–102).

192  Gregory Jensen Capitalism, then, is constituted by a web of socio-historical relations that prioritise commodity production through the valuation of human and extra-human nature as sources of cheap inputs for capital accumulation. World-ecology rightly situates humanity within a web of mutually influential natural and social relations, but it fails to adequately account for the human distinctive. For Moore (2015), humanity’s development takes place within the web of life’s ‘distinctive and interpenetrating evolutionary trajectories’, thereby excluding any possibility of a given distinctive (11). Thus, Moore rightly demonstrates the double internality (humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity) that regards human beings as environment makers. Furthermore, the concept of world-ecology confronts the passivity of spectacular existence that leaves the Nature/Society binary unquestioned. Nevertheless, we need a fuller account of the human distinctive to account for the ends of human environment making. For this, we turn to Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric anthropology and his rendering of human freedom from nature. Far from a licence for domination and limitless control over nature, Bonhoeffer’s notion of freedom from nature provides an adequate, albeit underdeveloped, account of environmental responsibility that moves beyond the harmful Nature/Society binary whilst correctly emphasising the human distinctive. Alongside Moore’s world-ecology, Bonhoeffer’s account of the human distinctive provides a helpful framework for developing a descriptive account of environmental fittingness, described here as a Christologically mediated world-ecology. Suggestion of a Christocentric anthropology as the basis of a fitting environmental ethic rests on an axiomatic claim rooted in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. While this claim entails a confessional commitment exclusive to Christianity, it applies to and is relevant for Christians and non-Christians alike. In this way, I am following Michael Northcott’s (2007) claim regarding Christ as the foundation and source of redemption for the ‘interconnections in which life is sustained’ (267). All accounts of fitting environmental actions and attitudes require a prior commitment to some account of the unity to which fitting environmental responses or actions are ordered. Such commitments orient environmental perception and qualify those attitudes and actions deemed unfitting. To confront the aforementioned spectacular mediation of the environmental imaginary requires some account of reality. For Bonhoeffer, this reality is Jesus Christ. As such, Bonhoeffer’s Christological methodology serves as a guide for how Christians perceive the environment whilst also providing a basis for identifying misperceptions and distortions inherent in their own tradition. How, then, is Bonhoeffer’s claim that ‘humankind’s freedom over against the rest of the created world is to be free from it’ compatible with a fitting environmental ethic? Furthermore, how exactly does freedom from nature provide a counter-narrative to spectacular society’s mediation of environmental responsibility? To answer these questions, we will explore three aspects of Bonhoeffer’s (2004) explication of freedom. First, freedom from

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  193 nature is a created freedom and therefore not something a human being possesses (63). For Bonhoeffer, ‘freedom comes from God’, so humanity’s freedom exists as the creative expression of God’s ultimate freedom. The specifically human quality of freedom from nature results from its being created in the image and likeness of God; therefore, human beings only remain truly free from nature insofar as they live into this freedom ‘as having been commissioned and empowered by God to rule’ (66). In this way, the passivity of spectacular existence can be interpreted as failure to rule, amounting instead to humanity’s being ruled by nature through the economic rationality of production society, because global commodification entails a forgetful and untethered freedom that seeks to appropriate Godgiven gifts as possessions.13 Second, freedom from nature is a relational freedom. The crucial point here is that ‘there is no “being-free-from” without a “being-free-for”’ (67). As with Moore’s world-ecology, Bonhoeffer posits a fluidity between nature and sociality.14 For Bonhoeffer, though, Jesus Christ is the centre and mediator of nature and sociality. The correlate of humanity’s freedom-from nature is their being-free-for one another. Additionally, the priority of this relational ontology extends beyond human freedom to the very core of what it means to be human. We can summarise this as follows: human beings are only free from nature insofar as they are free for one another, and human beings can only be for one another because Christ is free for humanity. Therefore, in no way does freedom from nature imply mastery as domination and control, but rather mastery as freedom to rule in Christ on behalf of other human beings.15 ‘God, the brother and the sister, and the earth belong together’ (Bonhoeffer 2004, 67). Lastly, freedom from nature is an embodied freedom. The Incarnation informs embodied freedom, for just as God in Christ bound Himself to creation, humanity’s God-given ‘freedom to rule includes being bound to the creatures who are ruled’ (66). To subdue and master the earth is precisely not to stand over and above it, but rather to be fully embedded in it. Human beings are only free from nature within nature.16 Moreover, freedom from nature as embodied freedom prevents any conceptualisation of dominion around nature/culture or spiritual/natural divides; to be free from nature is to exist within God-given creaturely limits. Humanity’s pressing in on planetary limits originates from a prior desire to overcome creaturely limits, or what Bonhoeffer (2004) refers to as the desire to be like God (sicut deus) ‘in knowing out of its own self about good and evil, in having no limit and acting out of its own resources, in its aseity, in its being alone’ (113). Insofar as they desire to be like God, human beings do not image God. Thus, embodied relationality in and through Christ is the way back to true creatureliness in the image of God, for as Brian Brock (2016) notes, It is the bodiliness of the offer of true freedom to human beings through the incarnation and cross, through the sacraments and through the

194  Gregory Jensen neighbor, that we come to understand the mechanisms of the divine work of freeing humans so that they can image God. (450) Human beings are free to bear the image of God for one another and for all of creation because Christ, the One who is free for His creation, liberates humanity from limitless self-referential existence to limited creaturely existence (Bonhoeffer 2004, 116). Since environments are always shaped by the double internality of humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity, freedom to rule over nature requires some account of environmental ordering. To what end are we to rule nature? What does a ‘good’ environment look like? Crucially, any account of environmental ordering begins by recognising that the realm of nature is no longer discernible as creation because of the fall into sin; for postlapsarian creatures, nature can only be understood as creation through Christ.17 The fall into sin causes a blindness problematising any static account of ‘the natural’, such as those accounts of environmental fittingness – as we saw with the Crying Indian ad – that seek to restore the environment to its ‘natural state’. How, then, do we differentiate between natural and unnatural environments? Bonhoeffer (1996) makes the following distinction that helps us formulate a response: ‘The natural is that which, after the fall, is directed toward the coming of Jesus Christ. The unnatural is that which, after the fall, closes itself off from the coming of Jesus Christ’ (173). To be clear, the natural understood as welcoming the coming of Christ does not justify any complacency with environmental degradation so as to bring about Christ’s second coming; rather, it asks human beings to employ the distinctly human, God-given capacity to rule over nature so as to reveal Christ, the origin, centre and end of nature. Consequently, natural or fitting environmental ordering welcomes life in all its manifold relationality by revealing nature as creation (176). On the contrary, unnatural or unfitting environmental ordering involves a misuse of freedom that hinders relationality and cements the Nature/Society binary, resulting in the objectification of human and extra-human nature.18 As the issue of waste demonstrates, any robust description of environmental fittingness must be considered alongside the reciprocal category of unfittingness. I have suggested that the spectacular mediation of environmental un/fittingness by green images masks production society’s unnatural material and social relations. The descriptive category un/fittingness acts as a helpful referent for analysing environmental ideology, but crucially, such accounts must be carefully analysed alongside spectacular narration strategies at the core of production society that valuate human and extra-human nature as commodity. The spectacle ‘aims at nothing other than itself’ (Debord 2005, 10), so we will not find our solution without an alternative narration strategy. Accordingly, I have offered a Christologically mediated world-ecology as an alternative narration strategy based on

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  195 a renewed relationality between humans and nature that confronts production society’s idolatrous valuation of human and extra-human nature as commodity.

Notes 1 ‘The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to an existence which is concretely submissive to the spectacle’s rules, ever more removed from the possibility of authentic experience and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, permanent self-denial is the price the individual pays for the tiniest bit of social status. Such an existence demands a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products’ (Debord 1998, 32). 2 ‘Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else … alienated consumption has become as much a duty for the masses as alienated production’ (21). 3 Appropriating Debord’s concept of the spectacle, Ryan Gunderson describes these messages as ‘spectacular reassurance strategies,’ according to which ‘the spectacle is often relatively forthcoming and open about environmental harms and risks, yet masks their structural origins and eases environmental concern and risk perception’ (Gunderson 2020, 260). 4 Ellul’s (1973) comments on propaganda clarify the fact that successful messaging utilises pre-existent narratives in order to reframe those narratives: ‘Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material, it does not create it … All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, peace, security, work) or a psychological need’ (36–7). In our example, the message portrayed by the Crying Indian ad satisfies the growing countercultural critique of progress and therefore enables the contradictory belief that wastefree existence coincides with mechanisms of production in a limitless growth economic model. 5 Companies are also quick to incorporate the circular economy vision in order to give the appearances of environmental responsibility. Take, for instance, the following quote from Callum Falconer, the head of Dundeecom, a decommissioning company located in Dundee, Scotland: ‘We are looking to offer decommissioning safely, with due care of the environment at best value for our customers while also embracing our circular economy vision.’ It is interesting to note that Dundeecom’s first decommissioning project had to be halted due to excess toxic waste: ‘Augean NSS was told that initially there was 100 tonnes of hazardous waste to be removed from the vessel,’ Mr Falconer said. ‘Last month when it was announced that work was to stop, the firm had removed more than 1,000 tonnes while expending over 200,000 man-hours on the project.’ No mention is given as to how that toxic waste will be recirculated into the global economy in order to meet the circular economy vision (McLaren 2020). 6 ‘“Redundancy” shares its semantic space with “rejects”, “wastrels”, “garbage”, “refuse” – with waste’ (12). 7 ‘Victoria Aslan, a West Philadelphia resident surprised at the turn in recycling, said, “It’s inflammatory on so many levels. It’s just very distressing’” (Kummer 2019). 8 ‘Some experts worry that burning plastic recycling will create a new fog of dioxins that will worsen an already alarming health situation in Chester. Nearly four in 10 children in the city have asthma, while the rate of ovarian cancer is 64% higher than the rest of Pennsylvania and lung cancer rates are 24% higher’ (Milman 2019).

196  Gregory Jensen

References Alvater, Elmar. 2016. “The Capitalocene, or, Geoengineering against Capitalism’s Planetary Boundaries.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 138–53. Oakland: PM Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1996. Ethics. Edited by Isle Todt, Heinz Todt, Ernst Feil, and Clifford Green. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Representation as Isolation: The Unfittingness of Waste  197 ———. 2004. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3. Edited by Martin Ruter, Ilse Tödt, and John W. De Gruchy. Translated by Douglas Stephen Bax. Paperback edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Brock, Brian. 2016. “On Becoming Creatures: Being Called to Presence in a Distracted World.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 18 (4) (October): 432–52. Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso. ———. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press. ———. 2008. A Sick Planet. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Seagull. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Dunaway, Finis. 2015. Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ellen Macarthur Foundation. n.d. https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/. Accessed May 10, 2020. Ellul, Jacques. 1973. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Vintage Books. Gunderson, Ryan. 2020. “Spectacular Reassurance Strategies: How to Reduce Environmental Concern While Accelerating Environmental Harm.” Environmental Politics 29 (2) (March): 257–77. Hook, Leslie, and John Reed. 2018. “Why the World’s Recycling System Stopped Working.” The Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/360e2524-d71a11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8. Accessed April 2, 2020. Kalaidjian, Andrew. 2017. “The Spectacular Anthropocene.” Angelaki 22 (4) (December): 19–34. Keep America Beautiful. n.d. Accessed April 12, 2020. https://kab.org/about/. Kummer, Frank. 2019. “At Least Half of Philly’s Recycling Goes Straight to an Incinerator.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. https://www.inquirer.com/science/climate/recycling-costs-philadelphia-incinerator-waste-to-energy-plant-20190125. html. Accessed March 26, 2020. Ladino, Jennifer K. 2012. Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. McLaren, Rob. 2020. “Plan to Turn Dundee into the UK’s Top Decom Hub.” The Courier. https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/business/business-news/1238500/ plan-to-turn-dundee-into-the-uks-top-decom-hub/. Accessed April 12, 2020. Milman, Oliver. 2019. “‘Moment of Reckoning’: US Cities Burn Recyclables after China Bans Imports.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/ feb/21/philadelphia-covanta-incinerator-recyclables-china-ban-imports. Accessed March 26, 2020. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Moore, Jason W. 2016. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78–115. Oakland: PM Press. Northcott, Michael S. 2007. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

198  Gregory Jensen Scott, Peter. 2000. “Christ, Nature, Sociality: Dietrich Bonhoeffer for an Ecological Age.” Scottish Journal of Theology 53 (4): 413–30. Sicotte, Diane. 2016. From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Steinberg, Ted. 2010. “Can Capitalism Save the Planet? On the Origins of Green Liberalism.” Radical History Review 2010 (107): 7–24. Strand, Ginger. 2008. “The Crying Indian.” Orion Magazine. Last modified November 20, 2008. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-crying-indian/. Accessed May 6, 2020. “Throwaway Living.” 1955. Time Magazine, August 1, 1955, 43–4. Van den Heuvel, Steven C. 2017. Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Theology and Fundamental Debates in Environmental Ethics. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.

12 The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology for Understanding ‘Fittingness’ A Theological Engagement Steven C. van den Heuvel Introduction: Queer Ecology and Fittingness In this chapter, I focus on a relatively new subfield of environmental ethics, namely queer ecology. This novel discipline provides an additional angle from which to recognise, appreciate and celebrate nature’s rich diversity; it also provides additional insight into the fundamental interconnectedness of all of nature. The queer perspective is an invitation to not stand apart from, or out of, nature – in the attempt to dominate it – but rather to live in recognition of and gratitude for the manifold connections we share with it. This is brought out by Daniel T. Spencer, in his primer on queer ecology, Gay and Gaia (Spencer 1996). There he writes, autobiographically: Gay and Gaia, two parts of who I am, two ways through which I know and am known. Gay – the erotic life force welling up within me, seeking connection and intimacy with others. Gaia – the ecological life force surrounding me and flowing through me, showing me the connection of all things with each other … Gay and Gaia tell me about where and how I am located within the human and earth ecology … (Spencer 1996, 4, italics original) A concrete locus in which queer ecology can be seen at work occurs in an unlikely place, namely the world of cowboys and rodeos, mainly based in the US. In this world, known to be homophobic and conservative, the queer experience does not necessarily have a positive connotation. Yet within that world of homophobic machismo is located a remarkable niche, namely the subculture of queer cowboys and queer rodeos. This subculture has been pictured by Luke Gilford, in his book National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo (Gilford 2020). For Gilford, who is gay himself but who grew up as the son of a father who was a rodeo champion and judge in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, this seemed an impossibility. But, when in his professional role as a filmmaker and photographer he started to explore this subculture through the lens of his camera, he became fascinated on discovering the International Gay Rodeo Association, which

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261391-16

200  Steven C. van den Heuvel has fifteen member groups across the US and one in Canada. He narrates that, due to the homophobia rampant in rural communities, many queer people move to cities, away from the land; queer culture is, as a result, often a very urban culture (Sawa 2020). Luke Gilford comments: ‘I’ve never totally identified with urban queer culture, which is about celebrating this escape, perhaps, from rural places. It’s about partying, consumerism, capitalism’ (Sawa 2020). He longs to reconnect to the land, to rural culture, and he finds a positive way of doing so in the queer rodeo world. There, he says, ‘[i]t is so much more about a connection to the land, to animals, to community’ (Sawa 2020). This ecological openness notably translates to the social. Queer cowboys are different, also in their rejection of racism; they are also not exclusively queer to the extent of rejecting non-queers. Rather: ‘If you are black or brown or Asian and you do not feel safe in the mainstream rodeo spaces, you’re welcome at the queer rodeo, even if you’re not queer’ (Sawa 2020). This fascinating example of queer subculture shows important hallmarks of what queer ecology is about. Gilford again: What I think is really beautiful, and so inspiring, about the queer rodeo community is that it brings back [an] aura of promise. It embraces both ends of the American cultural spectrum: people living on the land, but who are also queer. (Sawa 2020) Put this way, queer ecology has a positive function: it emphasises that the queer experience – an often-overlooked, rich and creative dimension of human life – can be deeply meaningful in the context of ecological ethics, as it provides additional insights into the interconnectedness of all being, while also helping queer people and their allies to (re)connect with nature, finding in that connection a powerful motive for being involved in ecological ethics.1 Connected with this, queer ecology has another, more critical, function as well: building on biological findings (see, for example, Roughgarden 2009; Barad 2011), it challenges accounts of human and non-human ecologies that are closed off to alternative ways of looking at romantic relationships. One concrete example of how this critical function works is offered by Alex Johnson. Narrating autobiographically his reading experience of David Quammen’s essay ‘The Miracle of the Geese’ (Quammen 1998), in which it is argued that it is the male–female relationship that is constitutive of geese society, Johnson comments: Quammen assumed that geese are straight because it was easy to do. It was easy to assume I was straight, too; I did so for the first eighteen years of my life. But generalizing about the habits of both humans and the more-than-human living world not only denies that certain

The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  201 behavior already exists, it limits the potential for that behavior to become more common, and more commonly accepted. (Alex Johnson, n.d.) These positive and negative functions of queer ecology come together in a definition of the field as offered by Sandilands: The term ‘queer ecology’ refers to a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory … (Sandilands 2016, 169)2 For a fuller understanding of queer ecology, it is important to note the foundations of this school of thought in the work of Judith Butler, in particular her book Gender Trouble (Butler 1990) and Bodies that Matter (Butler 2011) as well as the work of Michel Foucault (1976).

Queer Ecology as a Promise and Challenge to ‘Fittingness’ My thesis in this chapter is that queer ecology entails both a challenge and a promise for the notion of fittingness. It challenges conceptions of fittingness that do not recognise or validate the queer experience. Historically, and today still in many places and in many ways, the queer experience is a contested experience; queer people were – and often still are – deemed to be ‘not fitting’, non-natural.3 Such an outright rejection often functions as a social identity marker (Hamner 1992) and is regularly done for political reasons (as has been pointed out by, for example, Maietta 2019). The contested fittingness of queer experiences puts great pressure on individuals who identify as queer; often, they respond by internalising heteronormativity and homophobia. As Hartmut Rosa points out: ‘… the clash between a culturally established heterosexual self-image and homosexual physical tendencies frequently leads to an all but irrevocable tension between the reflexive self and an obstinate body that obstructs resonant relationships and almost by definition implies alienation’ (Rosa 2019, 106). Of course, there now is – at least in most Western countries – a visible queer culture, which is mostly, if not always, tolerated, and also increasingly celebrated. But this culture is often expressed in a metropolitan context and has a cosmopolitan outlook (for one account to this effect, see Chauncey 1994). As a result, there is often quite a discrepancy between urban queer culture and rural life – as we saw, Gilford also points this out. It is difficult to bridge this gap, not least because homophobia is often more rampant in rural communities. A focus on the particularity of place is often made, by ecological ethicists of different stripes (for examples, see Scruton

202  Steven C. van den Heuvel 2013 and Northcott 2015), and clearly has merit. Yet it can be coupled with darker, exclusivist agendas, both in relation to queer people, as well as to other groups, such as racial minorities. This was the case in Nazi Germany, which issued some of the first environmental legislation in the world, while simultaneously pushing a xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic agenda (Ferry 1995). There are also current-day examples of this dynamic, such as the world of cowboys, which is the same world in which Matthew Shepard, a gay youth, was murdered, in 1998. All this is to say that the notion of fittingness can be very repressing. The queer experience, which does not fit in the ‘natural order’ that mainstream society has in mind, puts the established order under pressure, but can also dynamise it towards recognising a more complex ordering, one that includes the wildness and the quirkiness of nature. Furthermore, recognising the relation between homophobia and ecocide provides an additional, helpful perspective from which to analyse critically the unfittingness of environmental destruction, in addition to other perspectives, such as ecofeminism.4 As such, queer ecology can, on the one hand, function as a criticism of ideologically hijacked conceptions of fittingness and, on the other hand, contribute to a fuller, more nuanced expression of it. 5 This is the mission to which I want to contribute in this chapter. In doing so, I will take what may seem to be a bit of a detour, namely by offering a positive-critical evaluation of queer ecology from the perspective of Protestant theology. Elsewhere in this volume, other authors have made the case that notions of ‘fittingness’ are strongly shaped by religious influences. Therefore, in order to dynamise the concept of fittingness, it is important – as a pragmatic strategy – that religious traditions engage with queer ecology. Such an engagement is my endeavour in this chapter.

Theology and Queer Ecology: The State of the Art Queer ecology finds enthusiastic endorsement by several Christian theologians; it resonates especially with those who are involved in the nexus of liberation theology, gender theology, and eco-theology. Apart from the important work of Spencer (1996), which I have already mentioned, there are noteworthy contributions by other theologians (cf. Jay Emerson Johnson 2014). In contributing theologically to the formulation of queer ecology, theologians draw on biblical scholarship (Tipton 2020), and Church history (Burrus 2019), among others (for an overview, see Page 2011). Simultaneously, however, queer ecology’s critical alternative to more traditional views on the order of nature forms a challenge to theological traditions that are more order focused. Jeffrey Bilbro, for example, in responding to the queer ecology proposed by Timothy Morton (2010), remarks: Morton’s “dark” or “queer” ecology has no standard of health by which to judge our interactions … Morton’s approach takes ecology

The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  203 more seriously than most ecocritics, yet by theorizing from a radical materialism, he must pose an ethic of promiscuous, open-ended desire, an ethic that can offer no restraint to individuals prone to satisfy their desires by exploiting their environment. (Bilbro 2015, 19)

A Bonhoefferian Way Forward In this chapter, I want to move beyond the dichotomy outlined above between those theologians that primarily value order (and are thus inclined to be negative about queer ecology), versus those that primarily value the liberationist impulse present in queer ecology (and are thus inclined to be positive about it). Instead of choosing either one of these alternatives, I propose to do justice to both these emphases together, holding them in a creative paradox. For this endeavour, I have selected Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a conversation partner, for two reasons. First, Bonhoeffer continues to have a wide appeal to Christians of different stripes and colours. That has the pragmatic advantage that a ‘Bonhoefferian’ theological approach to queer ecology potentially has relevance for believers from many different Christian traditions. Second, while Bonhoeffer never wrote in the context of either ecology or queer studies – because these disciplines weren’t yet around at that time – his theology has the potential to contribute fruitfully to the theological evaluation of queer ecology. There is a burgeoning stream of publications that investigate the contribution that Bonhoeffer’s theology can make to the development of Christian eco-theology.6 With regard to queer theology, there is a ‘battle for Bonhoeffer’, between those who claim him as spokesperson on the side of those who resist the acceptance of homosexual love (Champion 2012), and those who draw on his theology precisely as a resource for the development of queer theology (for an overview, see Lindsay 2013). Adding to the complexity is the fact that Bonhoeffer never explicitly addressed the issue of homosexuality in his work, though he did often reflect on aspects of his own sexuality.7 In this light, it is important to explain the methodological steps in which we draw on Bonhoeffer, based on the understanding that we are ‘working with’ his theology, but applying it in ways that he could not envision. In what follows, I will draw on theological concepts in Bonhoeffer that I consider relevant for the theological appropriation of queer ecology, in particular, (1) his emphasis on the theological importance of experiences ‘from below’, (2) his emphasis on bodiliness, the goodness of sex and the celebration of living in nature, (3) his focus on relationality, in understanding the imago Dei, and 4) the creative tension in his theology between order and freedom, as is evidenced in his wrestling with the concept of the divine mandates. In what follows, I will expound each of these concepts in more

204  Steven C. van den Heuvel detail, indicating what role they can play in the positive-critical engagement of Christian theology with queer ecology. In the course of doing so, I hope to indicate various ways in which queer ecology advances or informs a phenomenological understanding of ‘fittingness’ as an environmental ethical conceptualisation which facilitates practices and ways of living which are more fitting to the conservation of species-rich and resilient ecosystems, habitats and planet.

Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Experiences ‘From Below’ First, a strong mutuality can be established between queer ecology and Bonhoeffer’s theology, by pointing to the emphasis both place on the importance of viewing the world ‘from below’, from the perspective of the disadvantaged and downtrodden. I have already mentioned in the introduction that, in his important contribution to the field of queer ecology, Spencer draws on liberationist theology. As he puts it: ‘It [a liberationist ecological ethic] shifts the primary location to the margins of society as sites of resistance and creativity in order to overcome center/periphery dynamics that maintain and reproduce hierarchical social relations’ (Spencer 1996, 74). This emphasis on the margins of society resonates well with Bonhoeffer’s thinking. It is well known what he wrote in the essay ‘Nach Zehn Jahre’ (ET: After Ten Years), written for a small group of fellow-conspirators at the turn of the year 1942–1943, in which he looks back on ten years of resistance against the Nazi regime. In the section entitled ‘The View from Below’, he writes: It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering. (Bonhoeffer 2010, 38) In these sentences, Bonhoeffer sums up the learnings from a road that he has been travelling throughout his life. He has had formative encounters with the poor and downtrodden, for example, when he did youth work in Berlin (on this theme, see Root 2014). Another formative moment occurred during his stay in New York City, in 1930, as a postdoctoral student at Union Theological Seminary. There, while working as a student chaplain in Harlem, he became intimately acquainted with the inequalities experienced by the African-American community. Throughout the 1930s, Bonhoeffer, himself, increasingly became part of the minority, first as one of the leaders in the Confessing Church, and later as a co-conspirator, plotting the downfall of the Nazi regime itself.

The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  205 Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on experiences from below connects well with the liberation theologies that arose later in the twentieth century. In fact, Bonhoeffer has a direct influence on Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the fathers of Latin American liberation theology (this is attested to by Gutiérrez himself (Gutiérrez 1983)). Gutiérrez developed the ‘preferential option for the poor’ as a theological concept (Gutiérrez 1973), stressing the importance of joining the poor in their struggle.8 Liberation theology has gone through various evolutions since its inception; a focus on the poor has been combined with a focus on feminist thinking, as well as ecological ethics. Including the perspective of queer ecology within this biotope of liberationist theological ethics enriches it in yet another way. As Spencer put it: ‘Grounding a liberationist ecological ethics in lesbian and gay insights facilitates the integration of ecological and social justice concerns by understanding them both as manifestations of right relation’ (Spencer 1996, 324). This starting point, of recognising theologically the value of queer ecology as offering a perspective ‘from below’, is meaningful. Too often, theological engagement with queer theory has focused on the limited question whether sexual acts between members of the same sex are allowed, or not; this continues to be a matter of fierce debate. While important, this question also limits the encounter between theology and the queer experience. It is important for Christian theology to value the queer perspective, distinct from the limited question about the validity of the queer sexual acts. When Christian theology develops a deeper understanding of the queer experience, as a perspective of the downtrodden that is to be listened to, firm ground for a dialogue is established. Translated in terms of fittingness, the contribution that the queer ecological emphasis on the importance of experience ‘from below’ makes is to critically challenge accounts of ‘fittingness’, warning that a certain order should not be taken at face value, but that critical questions, in particular the question cui bono? (ET: ‘who benefits?’) should be asked. Asking this question can help uncover hidden social structures that benefit those in power, as well as help in discovering muted voices – among them, queer voices. This is an important question to ask; accounts of fittingness are often related to a sacramental understanding of the world. While valuable, these perspectives have a potential blind spot for existing unequal relationships. As Rasmussen puts it: ‘… metaphors of organisms and symphonies don’t expose the unequal and corrupted power relations of life among human beings, nor between humans and other creatures. They mask the fact that struggle and conflict so often are the status quo’ (Rasmussen 1996, 240, italics original). Queer ecology can help expose such abuses of power, and thus can make a valuable contribution to the understanding of fittingness. The consequences will not just contribute to the flourishing of interhuman relationships, but also positively impact the flourishing of other-than-human species, that have been unjustly muted in our power-hungry, technocratic societies.

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The Importance of Bodiliness, the Goodness of Sex and the Celebration of Living in Nature Apart from offering a theological framework for valuing the queer experience as an experience ‘from below’ as such, Bonhoeffer’s theology also resonates with key emphases of queer ecology, as it offers a strong appreciation of materiality/bodiliness, asserts the goodness of sex and celebrates living in nature – these three themes are linked to each other and occur frequently in the corpus of Bonhoeffer’s work. In his early work Creation and Fall, for example, in which he offers a theological commentary on Genesis 1–3, Bonhoeffer strongly asserts the importance of human bodiliness. Just one example of this is found in his comments on Gen. 2:7; there, he asserts: ‘Humankind is derived from a piece of earth. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. The “earth is its mother”; it comes out of her womb’ (Bonhoeffer 2004, 76). And further on, strongly resisting any gnostic interpretation of the creation-story, he states: The body is not the prison, the shell, the exterior, of a human being; instead, a human being is a human body. A human being does not “have” a body or “have” a soul; instead, a human being “is” body and soul. (Bonhoeffer 2004, 76–7) This emphasis on human bodiliness runs through all of Bonhoeffer’s writings and finds its most elaborate treatment in his Ethics. In the manuscript ‘Natural Life’ he asserts: ‘The human body has an intrinsic right to inviolability’ (Bonhoeffer 2005, 209). It is interesting to note – as Larry Rasmussen does – that in stating this, Bonhoeffer became the first German Protestant theologian to speak of natural rights (Rasmussen 1996, 308). Connected to this emphasis on bodiliness is Bonhoeffer’s assertion of the goodness of sex, not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. He says: Sexuality is not only a means of procreation, but, independent of this purpose, embodies joy within marriage in the love of two people for each other. As all this indicates, the meaning of bodily life never revolves around being a means to an end but is fulfilled only by its intrinsic claim to joy. (Bonhoeffer 2005, 188)9 Asserting the importance of bodiliness and the goodness of sex were not just theoretical matters for Bonhoeffer; instead, they resonated deeply with his own experiences. In his letters, he expresses a deep ‘love for the earth’, a love of music and food, of the sensation of lying in the sun, and of sports; his celebration of earthly life has justly been described as his ‘song of songs’

The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  207 (Rasmussen 2002). As he puts it in a letter from prison to his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer: ‘Our marriage must be a “yes” to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth’ (Bonhoeffer and von Wedemeyer 1995, 64). The manifold connections, both between human bodies, as well as between our bodies and the non-human world, which are celebrated in queer ecology, thus find a deep resonance with the theological anthropology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This is an important point; it indicates that main tenets of queer ecology are not opposed to Christian theology but are confirmed as constitutive of our living in this world. This does not mean that Bonhoeffer’s theology allows for all and every expression of human sexuality; but he strongly asserts that there is not only nothing wrong with bodiliness and ‘earthliness’, but that it is entirely proper for people to enjoy bodily life, living it to the fullest. This theologically appropriated emphasis on bodiliness can assist in keeping accounts of fittingness grounded in earthly reality; in the same way that fittingness can obfuscate unequal power relationships, so too the concept of fittingness can become divorced from reality. Fittingness is about a cosmic resonance, but for this resonance to mean something, it needs to find concrete expression in practices aimed at social and ecological well-being.

Focus on Relationality versus Ontology in the Imago Dei As mentioned above, another defining characteristic of queer ecology is its emphasis on the manifold possibilities of human erotic relationships, in harmony and resonance with the natural world. This perspective is strongly influenced by the resistance against essentialism in gender studies, and the subsequent plea for non-essentialism. The aim is to deconstruct the power structures that stealthily but powerfully determine the range of choices of romantic expression that is accepted. There is a burgeoning theological engagement with the deconstructionism of Foucault and others (see for an overview Michener 2007). Bonhoeffer’s theology can be a fruitful conversation partner in this endeavour, particularly because of his theological appropriation of personalist philosophy. Personalism, which arose in the 1920s and 1930s, was characterised by resistance to the neo-Kantian approach, which was considered too formal and sterile to do justice to life in its fullness. A good example in this regard is the work of Max Scheler (Scheler 1973). Bonhoeffer was an early adaptor of personalist philosophy (see Barth 2011); his first major interaction with it took place in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio (Bonhoeffer 1998), where it informs his sociology of the Church. The influence of personalism is particularly visible in Bonhoeffer’s theological anthropology, which he develops in Creation and Fall. There, in commenting on Gen. 1:26–27, he proposes a new interpretation of the imago Dei; the way that people image God. There, he turns himself strongly against

208  Steven C. van den Heuvel an ‘essentialist’ interpretation, which he characterises as an ‘analogia entis’. He declares: ‘There can be no such analogy between God and humankind’ (Bonhoeffer 2004, 65). Instead, according to him, The likeness, the analogia, of humankind to God is not analogia entis but analogia relationis. What this means, however, is, firstly, that the relatio, too, is not a human potential or possibility or a structure of human existence; instead, it is a given relation, a relation in which human beings are set …” (Bonhoeffer 2004, 65, italics original) This Bonhoefferian focus on relationality not only connects well with the non-essentialism of queer ecology, but it can also provide a key by which to come to a different evaluation of non-heterosexual relationships, whereby the criterion of an ethically good romantic relationship is not primarily whether the partners involved are of different sexes, but rather if the relationship is a mutual, affectionate, safe and empowering one – in other words: whether it allows for human flourishing or not. Such a reinterpretation holds in check harmful sexual behaviour but is at the same time able to recognise the validity of same-sex love relationships.10 Such a theological undergirding of the emphasis queer ecology places on valuing the diversity of (romantic) relationship can help enrich the notion of ecological ‘fittingness’, explicating that this concept is not necessarily bound up with an essentialist understanding of relationships.

Order and Desire as Paradoxical Tension between Cantus Firmus and Kontrapunkt An important aspect of queer ecology is that it criticises attempts at order that foreclose possibilities of understanding and appreciating alternatives to (erotic) relationality. While liberation theologians – who stand in a more critical relation to established orders and hierarchies – respond positively to this aspect of queer ecology, others find it more difficult to do so, and voice concerns. I have already referred above to Bibro (2015) in this regard. Bonhoeffer’s theology can make an important contribution to dealing with this key issue; in his work, we find a paradoxical unity between an emphasis on ‘order’ with an equally strong emphasis on ‘freedom’. First, a defining characteristic of Bonhoeffer’s ethics is his insistence on the value of order, and on discipline in maintaining that order. It is particularly important in the context of this chapter to note Bonhoeffer’s insistence that order – and, subsequently, the need for discipline – is not juxtaposed to freedom but is, in fact, a form of freedom. He makes this point explicitly in Creation and Fall. Commenting on Gen. 1:3, he says: ‘That God creates by the word means that creation is God’s order or command, and that this command is free’ (Bonhoeffer 2004, 41). And also: ‘As the formless night

The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  209 takes form in the light of morning, as the light unveils and creates form, so that primeval light had to order the chaos and unveil and create form’ (Bonhoeffer 2004, 43). Throughout his subsequent theology, this emphasis on order remains – it comes particularly clearly to the fore in the Ethics, where Bonhoeffer not only speaks about the freedom of bodily life, but also recognises it as the basis of ethical responsibility. As he succinctly puts it: ‘Responsibility is human freedom that exists only by being bound to God and neighbour’ (Bonhoeffer 2005, 283). ‘Freedom’ is also the constitutive element for Bonhoeffer’s concept of the divine mandates: the mandates of Church, government, family life and work that together form a matrix, in his thinking. Yet, there is also a tension between freedom and the divine mandates in Bonhoeffer. In a letter to Renate and Eberhard Bethge, he asks: ‘Marriage, work, state and church each have their concrete divine mandates, but what about culture and education?’ (Bonhoeffer 2010, 290–1). And, further on: ‘They [meaning “culture” and “education”, SCvdH] belong not in the sphere of obedience but rather in the sphere of freedom [Spielraum], which encompasses all three spheres of the divine mandates’ (Bonhoeffer 2010, 291). Later, in a letter to Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer introduces the musical metaphors of cantus firmus and ‘Kontrapunkt’, to illustrate what he calls the ‘polyphony of life’. He explains: ‘What I mean is that God, the Eternal, wants to be loved with our whole heart, not to the detriment of earthly love or to diminish it, but as a sort of cantus firmus to which the other voices of life resound in counterpoint’ (Bonhoeffer 2010, 440–1). And further on: ‘Where the cantus firmus is clear and distinct, a counterpoint can develop as mightily as it wants’ (Bonhoeffer 2010, 441). As these quotations indicate, the point that Bonhoeffer was making referred to the perceived dichotomy between ‘earthly love’ and love for God and all things spiritual. His point was that this is a false dichotomy; both can flourish simultaneously. I propose using the concept of cantus firmus versus Kontrapunkt also for the evaluation of queer ecology. As ‘cantus firmus’, heterosexual relationships receive their full value, while simultaneously also the value of non-heterosexual relationships can be recognised, as ‘Kontrapunkt’. One step in this direction has already been taken, by Peter Scott (2007). He argues that each mandate has a counterpart: [F]or work, it is non-work and non-paid work, including care of children, the elderly and the infirm; for marriage, it is alternative parenting and sexual arrangements (…); for government, it is self-government, as suggested by anarchism; for church, it is other religions. (Scott 2007, 127) He specifically mentions homosexual relationships, which are a counterpart to Bonhoeffer’s mandate of ‘family’, which – paradoxically – normalises,

210  Steven C. van den Heuvel rather than ostracises these, creating an equilibrium, a balance. As he puts it: The mandate normalizes and thereby does not exclude this “broken middle”; instead, through such normalizing, the mandates stabilise activities of the “broken middle”, granting dignity to them. Through such a conferral what is excluded are injustices in the counterparts and what is permitted is ordination of the good. (Scott 2007, 128) Scott argues that, concretely, this may mean that dignified homosexual relationships can call into question ‘mandated’ heterosexual relationships that are not lived in freedom. This creative development of Bonhoeffer’s twin-concepts of ‘cantus firmus’ and ‘Kontrapunkt’ is very meaningful in the context of the theological evaluation of queer ecology; it makes it possible to give full due to the importance of heterosexual love, and its important role in family formation, while at the same time giving the queer experience its full due as well. The positive valuation of such creative paradoxes is one of the abiding contributions of dialectic theology. This positive appreciation of two seemingly juxtaposed positions is not just important in the theological valuation of queer ecology, but also indicates an important contribution that queer ecology can make in understanding ecological fittingness. It means that asking for attention to be paid to queer perspectives does not necessarily imply the rejection of order, or the denial of the value of heterosexual relationships, in human and non-human societies. Forcing an either-or decision between a perceived order on the one hand, and a creative chaos on the other hand is too simplistic an understanding of the way things are. In nature, ‘chaos’ is not the enemy of ‘order’, nor vice versa; rather, they are necessary co-existents (Worster 1990). Recognising and positively valuing queer behaviour in nature is not equal to rejecting the importance of heterosexual relationships – both can co-exist. The same is true for human societies. An often-heard argument against valuing homosexual relationships is that validating these will lead to a bleak future for humanity. Pope Benedict, for example, declared in 2012 that gay marriage was a threat to the traditional family, even to humanity itself (Pullella 2012). But it is difficult to see how the sheer existence of gay relationships can undo heterosexual relationships. The insight that both types of relationships can strike various tones or chords, forming a harmonious duet, is one of the insights that queer ecology can contribute to the concept of ecological fittingness.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have focused attention on queer ecology; this new subfield of ecological ethics constitutes both a criticism of – as well as an alternative

The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  211 to – a too rigid, limited understanding of ‘fittingness’. My particular focus has been on the theological evaluation of queer ecology, which up until now has been relatively limited. In doing so, I have engaged the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While recognising the historical gap and the subsequent danger of anachronism, I believe that his work can nevertheless make significant contributions to the theological evaluation of queer ecology. I have pointed to four such contributions. First, Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on the importance of the ‘view from below’ can help to appropriate queer ecology theologically as a liberation movement. Second, his strong emphasis on ‘bodiliness’, combined with his assertions about the goodness of sex and his celebration of nature, connects to queer ecology’s emphasis on materiality. Third, Bonhoeffer shares the non-essentialist approach to anthropology that also characterises queer ecology – his interpretation of the imago Dei as an analogia relationis, rather than an analogia entis, has been a significant development in theological anthropology, and opens up a new way of valuing non-heterosexual romantic relationships. Fourth and finally, Bonhoeffer’s distinction between ‘cantus firmus’ and ‘Kontrapunkt’ can be used to emphasise the importance of both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, without contradiction – this paradoxical unity can be very fruitful for the contemporary debate on the theological status of same-sex relationships, as it transcends the ‘either-or’ which often characterises this debate. Taken together, we can conclude that there is a surprising amount of common ground between queer ecology and Christian theology, specifically as developed by Bonhoeffer. That does not mean that there are no important differences; but it does mean that a dialogue is possible. This dialogue has the potential of enriching the concept of ‘fittingness’ theologically, dynamising it towards justice. The ‘view from below’ offered by queer ecology is an important critical function, which can help correct accounts of fittingness that – wittingly or unwittingly – serve the interests of the powerful, oppressing minority voices. Second, queer ecology’s emphasis on the importance of bodiliness can help guard accounts of fittingness against losing their link to concrete bodily realities. Third, queer ecology can open a discussion about essentialism, in accounts of fittingness. Finally, I have argued that queer ecology’s focus on the value of other-than-straight relationships does not imply a rejection of these relationships; queer and straight relationships are not locked in a zero-sum game, but rather can co-exist in an enriching paradox. While the discussion in this chapter has necessarily been theoretical, it is worth recalling where we started, with the account of the queer cowboys; men and women, united in their desire to meaningfully connect to the land and to each other, refusing to let social barriers keep them from accomplishing this. Valuing such practices is important; they open our eyes to a wide diversity in ways of living that are more fitting to the conservation of our planet.

212  Steven C. van den Heuvel

Notes 1 This focus on materiality, on physical location in the world, is a feature of queer theory as such (as is evident in the work of Ahmed 2006). 2 This is put another way by Nicole Seymour. She writes: ‘Perhaps then this is the most important definition of queer environmental affect: all of the messy, contradictory, utterly sad, and deeply joyous dimensions of human life lived in connection to the nonhuman, in a social, political, and material context deeply hostile to both’ (Seymour 2018, 251). 3 One measure of this is the lack of philosophers addressing the issue. As Bryan Magee has pointed out, ‘It was a topic … which no other philosopher had dealt with since the Greeks, and which readers would not expect to be discussed in a philosophical work’ (Magee 1983, 346). 4 As Seymour puts it, queer ecology ‘… cannot take “the natural” at face value, because of how it has frequently been used against the queer, but nor can they reject “the natural” because of how it encompasses the threatened non-human world’ (Seymour 2013, 180, italics original). 5 For an analogous argument regarding the idea that adoption can ‘queer’ the family, by normalizing ‘unnatural ties’, see Ganzevoort and Derks (2018). 6 Among the scholars who work on this nexus are Dianne Rayson (2021), Larry Rasmussen (2002 and 2014), Benjamin Burkholder (2013), Peter Scott (2000 and 2010) and Steven C. van den Heuvel (2017). 7 Several recent publications are exploring the possibilities of Bonhoeffer having same-sex attractions himself, doing so either implicitly (Marsh 2014) or explicitly (Reynolds 2016). Interestingly, his father, Karl Bonhoeffer, – a renowned psychiatrist – did write on homosexuality, in decidedly negative terms. As Vendrell says: ‘He supported the view that homosexuality was certainly caused by an inborn physiological or psychiatric degenerative condition’ (Vendrell 2020, 109). 8 There has been quite a lot of attention on the influence of Bonhoeffer’s theology on liberation theologies (see De Santa Ana 1976; Richards 1987; Altmann 2016). Bonhoeffer continues to be drawn upon in the context of liberation theologies (for an example, see Smith 2019). 9 For a fuller account of Bonhoeffer’s view on sexuality, see Brain (2018). 10 It should be clearly noted that in doing so, we move beyond Bonhoeffer himself, and are working with his theology.

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The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  213 Krauss and Nancy Lukens. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 1. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. ———. 2004. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3. Edited by Martin Rüter, Ilse Tödt, en John W. de Gruchy. Translated by Douglas Stephen Bax. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 3. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. ———. 2005. Ethics. Edited by Clifford J. Green. Translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 6. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. ———. 2010. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by John W. de Gruchy. Translated by Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, and Nancy Lukens. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 8. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Bonhoeffer, Dietich, and Maria von Wedemeyer. 1995. Love Letters from Cell 92. Edited by Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz. Translated by John Brownjohn. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Brain, Michael. 2018. “Sexuality and Community in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” Scottish Journal of Theology 71 (1): 67–84. Burkholder, Benjamin J. 2013. “Christological Foundations for an Ecological Ethic: Learning from Bonhoeffer.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66 (3): 338–56. Burrus, Virginia. 2019. Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. Champion, Max. 2012. “Nihilism and Nature: ‘Theology of the Body’ and the Homosexuality Debate.” In Bonhoeffer Down Under: Australian and South African Essays Celebrating the Centenary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Birth, edited by Gordon Preece and Ian Packer, 105–26. Adelaide: ATF Theology. Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books. De Santa Ana, Julio. 1976. “The Influence of Bonhoeffer on the Theology of Liberation.” The Ecumenical Review 28 (2) (April): 188–97. Ferry, Luc. 1995. The New Ecological Order. Translated by Carol Volk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1976. La Volonté de Savoir. Histoire de la Sexualité 1. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Ganzevoort, R. Ruard, and Marco Derks. 2018. “Unnatural Ties: How Adoption Queers the Family.” In A Graceful Embrace: Theological Reflections on Adopting Children, edited by John Swinton and Brian Brock, 183–94. Theology in Practice 4. Leiden: Brill. Gilford, Luke. 2020. National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo. Bologna, Italy: Damiani. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1973. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Translated by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. ———. 1983. The Power of the Poor in History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Hamner, Karl M. 1992. “Gay-Bashing: A Social Identity Analysis of Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men.” In Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against

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The Challenge and Promise of Queer Ecology  215 Richards, Glyn. 1987. “Faith and Praxis in Liberation Theology: Bonhoeffer and Ghandi.” Modern Theology 3 (4): 359–73. Root, Andrew. 2014. Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker: A Theological Vision for Discipleship and Life Together. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Rosa, Hartmut. 2019. Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner. Cambridge: Polity Press. Roughgarden, Joan. 2009. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sandilands, Catriona. 2016. “Queer Ecology.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow, 169–71. New York and London: New York University Press. Sawa, Dale Berning. 2020. “Kissing Cowboys: The Queer Rodeo Stars Bucking a Macho American Tradition.” The Guardian, September 23. https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/23/kissing-cowboys-queer-rodeo-stars-bucking-macho-american-tradition-luke-gilford-national-anthem. Accessed September 4, 2021. Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Translated by Manfred S. Frings and Robert L. Funk. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scott, Peter Manley. 2000. “Christ, Nature, Sociality: Dietrich Bonhoeffer for an Ecological Age.” Scottish Journal of Theology 53 (4): 413–30. ———. 2007. “Postnatural Humanity? Bonhoeffer, Creaturely Freedom, and the Mystery of Reconciliation in Creation.” In Mysteries in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Copenhagen Bonhoeffer Symposium, edited by Kirsten Busch Nielsen, Ulrik Nissen, and Christiane Tietz, 111–34. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 2010. Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology and the Postnatural. Revisioning Ethics. London: SCM. Scruton, Roger. 2013. Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet. London: Atlantic. Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2018. “The Queerness of Environmental Affect.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, 235–56. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Smith, Robert O. 2019. “Bonhoeffer Moment(s)? Learning to See ‘From Below’ in Indian Country.” Theology Today 76 (2): 145–57. Spencer, Daniel T. 1996. Gay and Gaia: Ethics, Ecology, and the Erotic. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press. Tipton, Brian James. 2020. “A Backward Glance for a Queer Utopian Future: Genesis, Climate Change, and Hope as a Hermeneutic.” Biblical Interpretation 28 (4): 466–94. Vendrell, Javier Samper. 2020. The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Worster, Donald. 1990. “The Ecology of Order and Chaos.” Environmental History Review 14 (1–2): 1–18.

Index

aesthetics 4, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19–21, 23–4, 26, 30–2, 101, 116–17, 120, 124, 127, 129–32, 147, 153, 164; aesthetic appreciation 19–20, 23, 26; aesthetic experience 9, 17, 20–2, 24–9, 31, 117–22, 128–9; environmental aesthetics 17, 19–20, 23–4, 26, 30, 131 Agamben, Giorgio 168, 173, 177–81 agency 5, 8, 10–11, 18, 22, 24, 30, 35, 43, 46, 83, 104, 112, 114, 126–8, 153 alienation 4–5, 34–5, 184, 196, 201 alterity 33, 37, 108–10, 165 Anselm of Canterbury 11, 133–50 anthropocentric 9, 30, 38, 50–2, 67, 100, 109, 116–17, 123, 126, 128, 130, 142 anthropogenic 4, 10, 88, 100 anthropology 12–13, 91, 93, 96, 102, 131, 192, 207, 211; anthropological crisis 167; theological anthropology 102, 207, 211 appropriateness 2, 7, 19, 23–4, 30, 40, 93, 100, 103, 105, 110, 133–9, 145–7, 193, 211 Aquinas, Thomas 102, 109–10, 112, 118 architecture 10, 31, 64, 74–5, 105 Aristotle 7, 14, 99–100, 102 attitude 25, 27, 29, 35, 37, 45, 50, 101, 110–11, 123, 173, 179 attunement 10–11, 81, 97, 116–31 Augustine of Hippo 58, 93, 96, 98, 142, 144, 149–50 awe 17, 27, 29, 32, 38, 57, 68, 125 Bacon, Francis 4, 84, 88 Bauman, Zygmunt 189–90, 196, 214 beauty 4, 8, 12, 23, 26, 31, 35, 51, 56, 58–9, 94, 101, 107, 111, 117–18, 122, 125, 140–3, 145, 147, 149, 153

Bentley, Wessell 13, 87, 96–7 biodiversity 3–5, 12, 88–9, 94, 99, 101 biology 13–14, 43, 86, 102–3, 115, 155, 166, 196, 200 bodiliness 193, 203, 206–7, 211 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 12, 191–4, 196, 198, 203–15 Bonnett, Michael 105, 113, 115 Brock, Brian 193, 196–7, 213 Brown, David 133, 148, 200 Callicott, John B. 4, 12, 63, 75 care 11, 19, 61, 81, 98, 101, 104, 106, 108–9, 113, 124, 131, 159–61, 164–5, 167–9, 171–7, 179–82, 195, 209 Carlson, Allen 19, 23, 31 Carson, Rachel 23, 26, 31, 107, 112 Chaplin, Jonathan 13, 159, 164 Chaturvedi, Aditi 1, 12, 82–3, 97 Clayton, Susan 112–13, 163–4 commitment 101, 103, 105–8, 112, 192 commodity 12, 174, 182, 184, 190–2, 194–5 community 8, 18–19, 34, 41, 99, 101, 114, 153–4, 173–5, 178, 190, 196, 200, 204, 213–14 Confucius 68–70, 73–4 consummation 144, 146–7, 177 contemplation 20, 27–8, 108–9, 124, 126 Coolman, Boyd Taylor 118, 126, 130 cosmology 6, 10, 18, 21, 24, 43, 65, 79, 82, 84, 86–8, 95, 99, 108, 116, 213 dao 64–7 Dean Moore, Kathleen 23, 26, 31 Debord, Guy 12, 183–5, 190, 194–5, 197 deontology 145–6, 149 Descartes, René 34, 42, 79

218 Index desire 25, 47, 101–2, 108, 123, 126, 149, 161, 172, 183, 186, 193, 203, 208, 211 Desmond, William 50, 58, 62 Dewey, John 20–1, 32, 80 Diehm, Christian 35, 38–9, 41–2, 47–8 dignity 50, 138, 168, 210 discipleship 111, 215 disposition 53–61, 117–18, 120–6, 129 diversity 5, 10, 12, 14, 25, 30, 46, 75, 89–90, 158, 164, 182, 199, 208, 211, 215 Douglas, Mary 90–1, 93, 96–7, 130, 189, 196–7, 213 ecology 5–6, 8–12, 17–19, 22, 27, 38–42, 46–9, 52, 55, 62–4, 74–5, 81, 89–93, 97, 99, 101, 108, 112, 114, 116–17, 120–31, 153–5, 158–63, 167–70, 175, 187, 190, 198–201, 204–5, 207–8, 210, 212–13, 215; deep ecology 9, 18, 33–4, 38, 42, 47–8, 95; ecological attunement 81, 97, 124, 126, 128; ecological awareness 122, 126, 163; ecological crisis 5–6, 11, 40, 89, 108, 124, 170; ecological psychology 9, 52, 55, 62; ecological self 38–42, 46–7, 49; queer ecology 12, 199–211 emotions 7, 19, 29, 101–4, 106–7, 113–14, 153–4 Enlightenment 1, 3–4, 8, 10, 12, 48, 54, 66, 80, 85, 87, 91, 109 environment 1, 3–5, 7–9, 17–20, 26, 30–2, 38, 40, 42, 47–8, 50–3, 55, 57–61, 63, 74–5, 81, 86, 89–90, 97–8, 102, 104–5, 113–15, 124–5, 127, 147, 159–60, 163–5, 167–72, 174–6, 180–2, 186, 192, 194–6, 203, 215; environmental crisis 3, 63, 65, 167–8, 175; environmental philosophy 7, 17, 24, 31, 33–4, 40, 48, 115; environmental responsibility 18, 26, 108, 114, 183, 188, 192, 195; environmentalism 10, 51, 61, 94, 100–1, 103, 105, 107–9, 111–15, 147, 171, 175, 185–6 epistemology 11, 23, 35, 117–18, 122–3, 149 eschatological 111, 143–4 Evans, Gillian R. 114, 133, 136, 142, 144–5, 148 evolution 1, 36, 74, 82, 86, 96, 98, 102, 114–15, 215

experiences 9–10, 17, 22–4, 26–7, 29–30, 32, 34, 37, 39–42, 45–6, 73, 104–5, 107–10, 112, 114, 117, 157, 201, 203–6 flourishing 9, 18–19, 21–2, 25–7, 29, 51, 101, 205, 208; human flourishing 101, 208 Foucault, Michel 201, 207, 213 Francis of Assisi 177–81 freedom 67, 113, 149, 191–4, 196, 203, 208–10, 215 Geertz, Clifford 90–2, 96–7 gestalt 39, 48, 131 Gibson, James J. 9, 52–3, 55, 62 Gilford, Luke 199–201, 213, 215 goodness 9, 12, 50–61, 65, 69, 72, 110, 126, 128, 146, 187, 203, 206, 211 Hague, Alice 97, 159, 164–5 Hallmann, Caspar A. 2, 5, 13 Hammer, M. Gail 95, 97, 176 harmony 18, 63, 66–7, 73–4, 83–4, 86, 90, 93–4, 97, 111, 116, 121, 123, 125, 131, 133–4, 139–41, 144, 146, 187, 207 Hart, David B. 6, 13, 83, 97 Heidegger, Martin 66, 75, 116 Hepburn, Ronald W. 22, 24, 26, 31 Herder, Johan 12, 85, 149 hermeneutics 49, 109, 115 Hogg, David S. 133–6, 139–42, 145, 148–9 Holland, Alan 17–18, 22, 26, 31–2 hope 29, 102, 105, 144, 188 Hopkins, Jasper 48, 133–4, 137, 142, 147–9 hubris 17, 45, 172 Hume, David 1, 3, 51, 53–4, 80, 82 humility 19, 24, 26, 28–30 identity 11, 18, 38, 41, 44, 46, 75, 81, 96, 99, 104–6, 110, 112–13, 154–66, 201, 213; self-identity 104–6, 110, 113 imago Dei 12, 52, 203, 207, 211 indigenous 5–6, 18, 31, 33, 36, 80–4, 92–3, 95, 99, 108, 186 interconnectedness 12, 18, 21, 38, 122–3, 142, 144, 199–200 isolation 17, 91, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197

Index  219 Jensen, Tim 12, 125, 131, 183–4, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 7, 10, 28, 31, 80, 95, 104, 121 Kidwell, Jeremy 108, 114, 159, 165 Ladino, Jennifer K. 186, 197, 215 Latour, Bruno 1–2, 13, 79–82, 90, 92–3, 98, 130–1 Leopold, Aldo 19, 26, 29–31, 41, 101, 107, 112–14 Light, Andrew 6, 9–10, 18, 23, 31–2, 41, 50, 56, 61, 64, 67–8, 71, 82, 99, 106, 117, 162, 189–90, 201, 203, 209 Lovelock, James E. 8, 13, 85–6, 98 MacIntyre, Alasdair 2, 13, 102, 114, 153, 163, 165 metaphysics 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 15, 23–4, 31, 34, 39, 50–7, 59, 61–4, 118, 122–3, 140, 149 Miller, James 74–5, 130 Moore, Jason W. 23, 26, 31, 191–3, 196–7 morality 102–4, 113–14, 145–6; moral action 103, 111, 154; moral agency 8, 104, 112, 114, 153; moral behaviour 103, 154; moral character 8, 101; moral emotions 153–4; moral philosophy 26, 153; moral reasoning 111, 153, 163 Moriarty, John 9, 33–8, 40–9 Morton, Timothy 10–11, 116, 121–31, 202, 214 motivation 63, 101, 104, 112, 145 Muir, John 5, 26, 114 Myers, Gene 112–13, 163–4 mystery 4, 38, 47, 97, 105, 215 myth 4, 9, 33–4, 36, 42–4, 47, 79, 97, 181 Nasr, Syyed H. 6, 13, 93, 95, 98 necessity 36, 135–7, 139, 149, 174, 180 Næss, Arne 34, 38–42, 46–9 O’Donoghue, Brendan 36, 43–4, 49 ontology 9–11, 18, 28, 35, 38–40, 48, 62, 79, 81–5, 87–93, 95–7, 99, 117–20, 122–5, 128–9, 134, 139–42, 144–7, 173, 193, 207; ontological turn 79, 81–5, 87, 89, 91–3, 95, 97, 99

openness 17, 25, 34, 46–7, 106, 110, 121, 123–4, 128, 200 ordering 4, 73, 110–11, 141, 184, 189–91, 194, 202 Palmer, Joy A. 97, 104, 114 Panikkar, Raimon 64, 95, 98 panpsychism 85–6, 99 participation 51, 57, 83, 124, 144, 149 particularity 18, 46, 146, 201 passions 100, 102–3 perfection 136, 140, 142–4, 146 personalism 102, 207, 215 Pine, Fred 20, 81, 98 Plato 34, 50, 58, 62, 96, 100, 150 Pope Francis 167, 182 Pope John XXII 178–9 positivism 91, 118, 172 pragmatism 18–19, 21, 26, 31–2, 80, 97 pro-environmental behaviour 104–5, 112 providence 50, 52, 54, 58, 84 psychology 9, 11, 29, 32, 52, 55, 62, 101, 111, 113, 115, 130, 156, 163–6 Rappaport, Roy 90, 92, 95–6, 98 Rasmussen, Larry L. 205–7, 212, 214 rationalism 10, 34, 104 rationality 103, 109, 184, 188–91, 193, 196 receptivity 9, 17, 57, 59, 65, 110, 118, 120–1, 127 reconciliation 111, 139–40, 186, 215 redemption 94, 139–40, 146–7, 159, 192 Reed, John 161, 165–6, 189, 197 relationality 37, 53, 82, 108, 191, 193–5, 203, 207–8 relationships 9, 17–19, 21–2, 26, 30, 38, 49, 63, 72–4, 80, 101, 107, 110, 123, 141, 146, 177, 200–1, 205, 207–11 religious leadership 154, 158, 161, 164 representation 32, 82, 96, 183, 185–7, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197 resilience 1, 4, 82 responsibility 18, 26, 94, 103, 108, 114, 124, 177, 179, 183, 185, 187–8, 192, 195, 209 restoration 61, 139–40, 144 Ricoeur, Paul 43, 49, 130 Rogers, Katherin A. 137, 142, 149 Root, Michael 133, 137, 149 Russell, Bertrand 84, 97–8, 166

220 Index salvation 60, 129, 139–40, 144, 159, 172, 213 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 87, 96, 98 Schopenhauer, Arthur 28, 30, 32, 214 Scott, Peter 196, 198, 209–10, 212, 215 self-limitation 8, 177, 179, 181 self-realisation 9, 33–4, 38–40, 42, 46–7 sensibility 8, 34, 43, 83, 102, 104, 112, 176, 180 Sheldrake, Rupert 85–6, 95–6, 98 sin 58, 102, 136–7, 139–41, 194 social identity 11, 154–7, 160, 162–6, 201, 213; social identity theory 11, 154, 157, 160, 166 social interaction 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165 sociology 153, 207, 212, 215 Socrates 50, 100 Song, C.S. 39, 64, 126, 206, 214 soteriology 139–40, 142 Southern, Richard W. 141, 149, 187 Spencer, Daniel T. 199, 202, 204–5, 215 Spinoza, Baruch 39, 48, 85, 113 Steiner, Rudolf 85, 95, 99 story 9, 33–4, 36–7, 42–4, 46, 98, 190, 206 strangeness 42, 45–7, 128 Strathern, Marilyn 81, 92, 99 Strawson, Galen 85, 87, 99 sublime 9, 17, 23–4, 27–32, 38 sustainability 74, 107–8, 114–15, 123, 130, 164, 168, 176; sustainable development 107, 114, 171, 175, 181–2 Sweeney, Eileen C. 133, 136, 148–9 sympathetic attention 9, 17, 19–25, 30 Taylor, Bron 108, 115, 159, 166 Taylor, Charles 95, 99, 129, 131 technology 3, 11, 30, 66, 88, 93, 115, 128, 142, 170–2, 181–2, 215 teleology 6–7, 51, 63, 123 Thoreau, Henry D. 26, 113, 115 tradition 4, 6–7, 20–1, 23, 35, 48, 63–4, 69, 79, 81–3, 85, 87, 89, 91–5, 97,

99, 142, 149, 153, 160, 192, 215; religious tradition 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99 transformation 107, 109, 111–12, 115, 123–4, 131, 143–4, 146, 176 transformative 31, 106–9, 112, 114–15, 117–20, 122, 124, 165; transformative learning 106–7, 109, 112, 114–15, 165 truth 6–7, 12, 31, 52, 54, 59, 68, 80, 110, 114, 137, 145–8, 150 Valera, Luca 42, 46–7, 49 value-action gap 10, 100, 112, 125 values 1–4, 7, 9, 11, 17–18, 22–3, 26, 29, 31–2, 42, 52, 56–8, 74, 101, 108, 114–15, 154–5, 157–63, 174, 182, 215 Van den Noortgaete, Francis 110, 113, 115, 125, 131 Vedas 5, 82–3, 93–4 virtue ethics 7, 19, 26, 126 virtues 13, 19, 26, 29, 66, 70, 73, 102, 114 Visser, Sandra 133, 145–6, 148, 150 voluntarism 51–2, 61 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 11, 116–21, 124–31 Walter, Pierre 85, 112, 115, 212 waste 12, 92, 167, 170, 183, 185, 187–91, 193–5, 197–8 Watts, Alan 63, 84, 99 White, Lynn 63, 108, 115, 159, 166 Whitehead, Alfred N. 80–1, 97, 99 Wieren, Gretel van 108, 115, 159, 166 Williams, Thomas 32, 110, 133, 145–6, 148, 150 wonder 9, 17, 23–7, 30–1, 45, 47–8, 109 world harmony 116, 131 world order 11, 134, 139, 142, 144–7 Zaleha, Bernard D. 108, 115, 159, 166