Nature and Intrinsic Value.

“Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!” - David Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

The idea that nature has intrinsic value is so controversial because the very idea of intrinsic value is controversial both politically and philosophically. This is one of the great chasms of philosophy into which green thinkers must throw themselves so as to assess the philosophical claim of intrinsic value if they want to employ it as a bridge on which to structure an ethics or ideology. If this controversy is not taken seriously greens will be in danger of acting in unethical ways or open to attack by groups sceptical about this notion. The notion of value is problematic in three different ways, whether value can be understood as a property (x has value), whether it is objective (or intrinsic) or subjective (or extrinsic) and how one can say what is valuable (evaluations). It is evident that intrinsic value cannot be measured as a property of nature. There is no empirical method to do this. To hold this notion, one must have some form of special awareness or explanation beyond the empirical. This problem is related to the issue as to whether value resides in the object (nature) or the subject (people) which is this essays main concern. With regards to what is valuable, things have value within the structure of people’s lives. This is not subjectivity because it could be an objective truth that something is valuable in a persons life. Philosophers have struggled with what the idea of intrinsic (or objective) value suggests, to avoid problems inherent in the subjective position (namely, relativism) and to provide a firm, moral foundation. Though I have the choice to describe the objectivist position as one side of the debate, I think it would be more interesting to elaborate the subjectivist position as a critique of the idea; but for reasons of space I cannot undertake both tasks.

Initially we must be clear as to why objectivity is problematic as the disagreement between the objectivist and subjectivist positions is the very basis of the controversy. These difficulties will necessitate a discussion of the self as part of the elucidation of the subjectivist position, followed by an understanding of anthropocentrism to complete this explanation and expose the deeper reasons for objectivism's influence on Western culture. Finally, some possible solutions are outlined in the light of what has been discussed.

The problem of objectivity

Many thinkers have posited a metaphysical realm (like Plato’s Forms or Emmanuel Kant‘s noumenon) on which a conditional value or values can be placed which will prove an irrefutable (or at least convincing) grounds for an ethics. Perhaps the most influential philosopher in recent centuries to theorise such a solution is Kant. It is necessary to understand an important thinker like Kant in relation to the intrinsic idea, so that the controversy might be elaborated by examining the criticism brought to bare against Kant and the idea. Of course the controversy might be examined by analysing the dialogue between other philosophers, and as a result understood rather differently, but Kant and a major critic like Friedrich Nietzsche provide not only a recent example but one who’s influence in still strongly felt today.

Very simply put, Kant based value in noumena (things that underlie our experience of the physical world and mental states known via pure reason as opposed to the senses). Though he admitted this noumenal realm cannot be reached or understood, it still constitutes an objective realm where ultimate reality and thus ultimate value resides. For Nietzsche the noumenal is incomprehensible, a philosophical nonsense, and as a result so is Kant’s explanation and ethics.(1) Nietzsche rejects all transcendentalising of values into any metaphysical realm likes Kant’s noumenon, because of this incomprehensibility. He does accept that these realms may exist, but because we cannot access them except uncertainly through philosophical speculations likes Kant’s, they are totally unreliable and thus do not matter. If all transcendental values are to be rejected, then all objective (that is: unconditional) values must be rejected because there is no ultimate foundation on which such values can be postulated. Intrinsic value is an unconditional value by definition, requiring a transcendental move to ground it.

This transcendental scepticism leaves all values conditional, but with this conditionality comes a problem; all conditionals must be dependant upon something prior to them, requiring an unconditional base at some point, otherwise an infinite regression (a philosophical absurdity) cannot be avoided. Does this mean that there are no values at all? Or can an unconditional value be posited by Nietzsche to avoid this problem (the problem Nietzsche identified as nihilism), but not resurrect the old Kantian one? Nietzsche’s answer could be that because values are not grounded in an unconditional absolute, they must come from elsewhere, or more accurately, from people. Nietzsche thinking is anti-realist in the sense that values arise from the historical exigencies, preferences and dictates of cultures and languages (whether they can arise from individuals is a totally different problem, but one Nietzsche thought to be possible). As value comes from different groups within a society, they can anchor each other according to a situation (which are real-life and not other-worldly), forming a dynamic hierarchy, or value system. In a value systems, values are unconditional within a system based on some notion of the intrinsic or transcendent, but the systems and their claims to objectivity are themselves conditional. So, for example, "Thou shalt not kill" is an unconditional value within the Judeo-Christian religion and within many of the societies that were (de)formed by this tradition. However, the system in which it is based (the system is a complex combination of, faith in God, who is the basic transcendent value grounding all values, biblical exegesis, historical force and tradition and certain social structures and institutions, for example) can be rejected in favour of a different system of (unconditional) values.

I will return to an analysis of the Judeo-Christian system later, but for now it is enough to say that interplay between systems is possible and is most probably the rule as people are typically involved in a variety of systems. Contradictions, where contrary unconditional values within or between systems conflict, are also possible as is the dissolution or transformation of the system all together. It is also necessary to note that changing systems (which is a symptom of their conditional status) is not always easy or possible. For example, it would be impossible to live as a fifteenth century Aztec in twenty first century England, though one can change from say, a modern theistic system to a modern atheistic system of value. The main point of Nietzsche’s scepticism is to show that there are no absolutes (like the noumenal or intrinsic values), only contexts. This is better known as perspectivism regarding value, where metaphysics is a debunked or irrelevant concern.

Two major problems regarding the idea with which greens should be concerned now present themselves. Where intrinsic value is affirmed there is the possibility of the idea coming to dominate any system of thought. For green theorists this danger can prove a problem if ideology becomes dogmatic and if theory becomes constrained by inflexibility. The other problem is how value arises from the self (or rather the societies in which selves are formed) if value is not objectively existent. Understanding how value arises subjectively will help elucidate the controversy of intrinsic value and perhaps provide answers as to how green thinkers might engage with it in relation to the environment.

The self

Michel Foucault is a Nietzschean thinker who was most concerned by these problems. He considered objective value problematic because it has often supported domination. Domination results when systems of power or thought become inaccessible, assuming the guise of imperatives, creating problems that arise in the form of stagnation and solidification of power relations. Domination is a system of constraint that becomes intolerable when individuals have no means of modifying it.(2) It is probable that domination always requires an objective justification and that objective values contain the possibility of domination because they impose rules (a deontology) which must be taken as absolute. Because of this danger Foucault demanded "a more accurate and up-to-date assessment of power formations, and we need to develop tactics that provide a more effective response to the world as it is."(3) This process of assessment must be an examination of the understanding of value today, which will go on to challenges the system of domination that forms us, represents us and perhaps even mutilates us. The main tool of this scrutiny is critique. In What is Critique, Foucault describes critique as a virtue. For Foucault, critique is an end unto itself and thus valuable in its own right.(4) If "everything is dangerous" as Foucault claims, then any way of questioning and uncovering these dangers are valuable, and could perhaps provide a foundation for an ethics.(5) Critique is that constant attention to today, the raising of subversive and uncomfortable questions, the genealogical analysis of the given, and the struggle to keep open new possibilities, new ways of thinking and living. It is an exit from domination.(6) The necessity of critique is highlighted by a remark made by Janna Thompson that "Ethical resolution... presupposes social critique: an attempt to show that present social relations and the goals and desires that spring from them, are unsatisfactory, and that new conceptions of self-fulfilment and happiness are desirable."(7) This then, is the critical move from a tyrannising objectivity to a free-thinking subjectivity. In this way critique is in practice the tool suggested by Foucault by which the self should chose its value.

To comprehend how value (and thus the value of nature) can be understood as subjective we must examine Foucault’s notion of the self. His notion of the self does not concern consciousness or individuality; his concern is with ethical and political practice. Foucault’s formulation of the self is non-essentialist, it is a complex of social influences, a notion that is shared by other philosophers. Bernard Williams is especially useful here, because both thinkers separately agree that a process of social and linguistic construction constitutes the self, which has and requires no metaphysical underpinning.(8) Williams clarifies this notion of self by urging us to understand it not as a Kantian suggestion to return to an apriori self, a characterless moral self who existed before our socialisation and enculturation.(9) The self simply does not exist before these processes.

The self Williams postulates can never be "properly understood and enacted" nor can we "realise a harmonious identity that involved no real loss" in the relations the self has with others in society; there can be no utopia. This self, as a complex of social influences, must except or reject value systems using critique as an aid, though initially the self is always formulated within a value system without critical understanding of it. Because the self is a complex of influences without any metaphysical unity, this is a conception of a non-unitary individual (or dividual), a challenge to the liberal notion of the unified self tied to intrinsic value, specifically intrinsic rights. As a result of this understanding, the self is the major site of constant political struggle: "…if the individual is plastic and can be shaped, then the productive and creative force that the individual represents will be contended for."(10) The dividual is formed of various identities from this struggle, some are formed by various disciplines and some are self-formed because "individuals are not unitary, single psychic structures."(11) A dividual maybe a clerk, a mother, a communist, a schizophrenic, and a daughter with different attitudes, clothes, actions and different social, political and personal responsibilities etc., in different situations at different times, who is at the same time and place all of these to some degree. This dividual is in this way an amalgam self, subject to change and to the different value systems s/he is involved in. However, there does seem to be some difficulty here as to how critique is possible without an individual to make effective judgements, and how the dividual is active in its separate roles. If a complex is active here, the concept of unity seems to be creeping back into Foucault’s account of selfhood. However, such difficulties can only be raised as a note of caution here.

It is important to emphasise that the value systems chosen are themselves culturally determined and do not spring forth from outside culture. Foucault’s and William’s understanding of the self as non-unitary, is articulated by Deleuze. Subjectivity is an interiorisation of value systems from the outside, but one that does not involve determinism or total dependence. "The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside."(12) Though the subject does not apply value to her/himself or the world ex nihilo, value can be synthesised, and so created, from the values that present themselves in various systems to the subject.(13) Again, the questions "who or what does the synthesising?" can be raised here, and the problem of a hidden unity or infinitely regressing self become a possibility. To avoid these issues, we have to be clear that Foucault’s concept of self allows for a historical development of the self over time from the first moments of socialisation (typically at birth). Tentatively, I would like to suggest that the younger a self is, the more subject s/he is to power and domination and the less likely s/he can criticise and synthesise value for her/himself. The more experienced and educated a dividual becomes, the more able s/he is able to utilise cultural value systems. Age however, would not be the key. The philosophical and political use of critique would determine this "moral maturity", that would allow a self to synthesise the outside as s/he learned and understood the difficulties Foucault and others have explored.(14)

Anthropocentrism

The concept of anthropocentrism is perhaps the key to understanding this controversy and the philosophy of subjectivity. Dobson identifies two types of anthropocentrism: a weak form which means "human-centred" and the strong form as "human- instrumental".(15) Dobson goes on to elucidate what many philosophers have been overlooking or ignoring for so long, that "weak anthropocentrism is a necessary feature of the human condition."(16) Our consciousness, language, actions, concepts, values and laws all spring from humanity based in a own socio-political situation, as described by Foucault, Williams and Derrida above. As a result, all human undertaking is necessarily anthropocentric, including the theorising of objective value. In this sense, everything matters not, if we as a species do not exist, simply because there is no-one to care and evaluate in the way we care and evaluate.

This human-centredness has been practiced for a long time as human-instrumentalism, which has had its basis in the notion of intrinsic value as expounded by Judeo-Christians. With the rise of this religion, intrinsic value was displaced from the environment when pantheism and panentheism were rejected as "pagan" religions. Intrinsic value was not been placed within the sphere of the environment as it was with these religions (where the god/s resided within or as part of the world), instead it has been assigned to God and to humanity. These valuations continue to cause problems for greens (and for everyone else!) for several reasons. First of all, assigning this kind of value to God is assigning it to a transcendent being removed from the world and thus placing intrinsic value beyond the world and (almost) beyond life. I add this caveat because humans are still considered intrinsically valuable after God as beings made in His image. This evaluation, supported by biblical exegesis, has resulted in our exploiting those life-forms deemed less valuable and placed here for our own use.(17) Though certain biblical passages stress our stewardship, Christian practice has been more in line with the former attitude. A good example is the building of Churches over pagan sacred ground, thus destroying this natural area and replacing it with the cold artificial domicile of the Lord. Furthermore, the understanding of ourselves as intrinsically valuable has lead to an over-valuation of human life. Like other theories that value life as an end in itself (biocentrism), the Christian system has over-valued human life to the point that it rejects abortion, euthanasia and suicide (though interestingly, not war) as unethical, even evil.

Though the Christian cosmology does not persist as strong as it has, the hierarchy of God, the angels, man, woman, other animals, plants and rocks remains in the instrumental attitude, where most people consider themselves above nature (either because we are better than it in some way, or because we posses a soul) as opposed to part of it. This belief serves to justify our actions and no doubt reinforces the kind of sexual taboos which express our disgust with and assumed superiority over other animals.(18) This has also provided the ideal conditions for sexism, where women are equated with an irrational, cyclical and dangerous nature, both of which must be controlled or destroyed, and for technology and science to emerge and dominate nature. This emergence may be seen as a result of the hegemony of rationality that Nietzsche identified. This began with the sublimation of rationality (associated with man and God or more accurately, Logos) over emotionality (associated with women, animals and nature) in Greek culture around the time of Socrates by conflating rationality with objectivity.(19)

The primary reason for today’s arrogance and cruelty is nihilism. Western ethics and laws still hold this Judeo-Chrisitian morality and its over-valuation of human life and under-valuation of non-human life to be true, yet most people are only nominalistic or apathetic in their belief in God, the foundation, reason and justification of this value system. But the system itself continues to persist like a stench after a corpse; this is the problem Nietzsche identified as "the death of God."(20) This problem has resulted in the continued instrumental attitude to the environment because the Christian system allows, even encourages exploitation, because of the lack of value it places in the non-human. The Christian-instrumental attitude is found throughout our culture; a good example is the concept of democracy. Here all men (and maybe eventually women) have a voice, but those animals without a voice have no part in democracy. Here the defenceless have absolutely no protection resulting in the kind of horrifying carnage, genocide even, which is presently taking place throughout the UK because of a disease spread by human instrumentalism, mistakes and carelessness. Because of these attitudes, there is strong resistance from our whole Christian based tradition to the notion that nature has intrinsic value. It is perhaps due to this canker in the Western tradition that we cannot formulate a satisfactory solution to the subjective-objective dichotomy because our conceptual and historical understanding is based on the instrumental prejudice.

Possible Solutions

Green thinkers may find these arguments problematic. Greens are left with no unconditional foundation on which to rest the valuing of nature and the concomitant ethical demand. Any appeals to intuition must be rejected because Foucault’s analysis exposes intuition, and any other cognitive ability which is usual referred to in these circumstance like reason or conscience, to be socially and historically constructed. However, these problems might be assuaged. With regards to subjectivity, the self must be recognised as integrally connected with other selves and nature. This connection is not objective or metaphysical, it is a matter of perspective as to how each individual interacts with each other and nature. This could be philosophically expressed through Ortega’s "I am I and my circum-stance" or Heidegger’s "Being-In-The-World". To deny this interaction with each other and nature is solipsism, a stance widely considered to be philosophical nonsense.(21)

So how can greens who are concerned with the value of nature find a way of defending their claims without resorting to philosophical objectivity? The kind of holism expressed by Ortega is the first step into a defensible direction which will support the notion of natural value by including the human self as a necessary and irreducible part of that picture. Because nature is necessary for us (in a human-centred way) we must value it or we devalue ourselves. To further this, Dobson has pointed out that our knowledge of nature is derived from examining the whole of the natural system through examining the interaction of parts; in doing so greens have drawn upon holistic modern physics.(22) People must be regarded in this light of being an interacting part. Though certain greens have attempted to impose total equality (biospherical egalitarianism) between natural parts (people, other animals, plants, rocks) this has proven to be objectionable on the grounds that clashes between parts exist and cannot always be resolved.(23) The issue then, is one of survival and of the accompanying conflict. However, the solution reintroduces hierarchy, with all of its potential for oppression and exploitation. Johnson basis his moral hierarchy on the possession of well-being interest and humans have a greater capacity for well-being than a disease, so humans are higher in hierarchy.(24) This is problematic not just for the reasons noted but because it could be argued, as Nietzsche has, that some people have a greater capacity for well-being than others.(25) This kind of hierarchy wipes away the deep-ecological biospherical egalitarianism and challenges social egalitarianism also. Yet, as Dobson notes, "a practical philosophy would have a strategy for social change built into it".(26) What might this be?

Foucault’s Nietzschean observation that values arise from conflict between subjects is an expression of the problem of survival. Without objectivity, subjective values flirt with the dangers of nihilism. There is no solution other than to win in a conflict of values. So the real battle for greens is between the multiplication of perspective and the sublimation of natural value (issuing forth from perspectivism and critique) and instrumentalism (caused by domination and compliance) as opposed to being between subjectivity and objectivity. The rapine Judeo-Christian tradition must be challenged and the disastrous end results of the human-instrumentalism it supports exposed and publicised.(27) One can use any number of tactics to win the struggle, from political action and pressure, oratory, violence or terrorism, protest, culture jamming, education, rhetoric, media manipulation or any other form of persuasion, alteration or coercion. What we can be fairly certain of is that nature certainly does not value us or itself. A comet might fall out of the sky tomorrow and smash the entire planet into oblivion. A longer look at history certainly demonstrates the uncaring annihilating power of nature and that entire species, planets and planetary systems are wiped out in a single flash without a tear shed by "nature" as a whole. Indeed the end result of the universe may be that finally all heat will be spent and everything will become cold, homogenous and dead. The universe will be reduced to solid lumps of undifferentiated cold, a uniform and lumpen mass of almost nothing, where nothing happens, there is no change, no reaction, no reversibility, no organisation and every biological thing is dead and dust. With this in mind our reasons for valuing nature must not be anthropomorphised nor even pantheistic and definitely not metaphysical, they must be practical. This is because the only thing that we can change which is threatening our survival is ourselves.

  • (1) Nietzsche - section, 12 essay 3 of The Genealogy of Morals.
  • (2) Foucault – Foucault Live, p32
  • (3) Ransom – Foucault’s Discipline – the politics of subjectivity, p9
  • (4) Ransom – ibid., p3
  • (5) Rabinow – The Foucault Reader, p343
  • (6) Ransom – op cit., p4-8 Foucault’s debt to Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant respectively can be seen here.
  • (7) Dobson - Green Political Thought p50
  • (8) Kroker offers a fascinating Freudian/Marcusian essence in which the self is based, though not in a transcendent realm. This essential self is the unsocialised young baby, universal and timeless in its similarity to all humans in that stage of life, in which all types of socialisation will take place. See Critical Assesments:2 p109-121
  • (9) Williams – Shame and Necessity p159
  • (10) Ransom – Foucault’s Discipline – the politics of subjectivity, p168
  • (11) Ransom – ibid. p49.
  • (12) Deleuze – Foucault p96
  • (13) Barker – Michel Foucault – An Introduction, p70-74. Here Barker discusses Foucault’s denial of personal creativity (along with a human nature) because it is disciplines that create possibilities and negate others according to a dividuals resistance to it. In this way, creativity comes from the outside. "There is no value or conceptualisation that is outside this non-subjective process of knowledge production."
  • (14) This notion of the self echoes Heidegger’s concept of "throwness", which in turn was elaborated by Merleau-Ponty. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tackles the Sartrean problem of original choice and foundationlessness, which Foucault had seemed in danger of here. "While ‘I can no longer pretend… to chose myself continually from… nothing at all,’ I do possess the power of ‘general refusal’ and the power to ‘begin something else.’ " (Cooper – Existentialism, p155, Blackwell 1996). Though we cannot simply choose a self and cast off the straitjacket of discipline, we can perform certain actions to break partially with present conditions that are exposed as intolerable and oppressive through the three modes of critique.
  • (15) Dobson - Green Political Thought, p51
  • (16) Dobson - ibid., p55
  • (17) Genesis (1:28) "Be fruitful & multiply & replenish the earth & subdue it & have dominion over it etc..."
  • (18) Leviticus 18:23 is the primary expression of the bestiality taboo and the instrumental reasoning that accompanies it. Andrea Dworkin is one of the few people that have dared to explore this taboo and its implications in her Women Hating.
  • (19) Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
  • (20) Nietzsche - The Gay Science
  • (21) Sartre’s notion of the Look (found in his Being and Nothingness) and Wittgenstein’s private language argument (found in his Philosophical Investigations) provide two excellent examples as to why solipsism is nonsensical.
  • (22) Dobson - Green Political Thought, p38
  • (23) Dobson - ibid,, p43
  • (24) Dobson - ibid., p44
  • (25) See Nietzsche’s aphorism "My Utopia" for example in his Human, All Too Human
  • (26) Dobson - op cit., p61
  • (27) Even though it has wide influence, the Judeo-Christian tradition is not the only exploitative tradition that runs through Western culture, but I single it out as a target in this essay for wont of more space.

 

Bibliography

Barker, P. – Michel Foucault – An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press 1998)

Deleuze, G – Foucault (Athlone 1999)

Dobson - Green Political Thought

Foucault, M. & Lotringer, S. (ed.) – Foucault Live (Semiotexte 1996)

Garner, R. - Environmental Politics (Macmillan Press Ltd 2000)

Nietzsche, F. - On The Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press 1994)

Rabinow, P. – The Foucault Reader (Penguin 1984)

Ransome, J. S. – Foucault’s Discipline – the politics of subjectivity (Duke University Press 1997)

Williams, B. – Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana Press 1993)

Williams, B. – Shame and Necessity (University of California Press 1993)

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