Eccy de
Jonge’s book is a strident critique of deep ecology, but it is sometimes
difficult to assess the validity of his charges, and given that, despite its
title, issues specific to ecology seem marginal in the book, it is difficult to
see de Jonge as sincere when he seeks to forge a new environmental philosophy. 

De
Jonge’s central point is that only a subject with a positive, robust sense of
self can be an effective agent of care for other living beings. While such a
subject is a precondition for any political activism, de Jonge intends here a
critique of deep ecology’s doctrine of non-anthropocentrism. But this argument
is at bottom a straw man, and an old one at that, conflating non-anthropocentrism with misanthropy.

This
charge is fundamentally unfair. The first principle in the Deep Ecology
Platform states that "The well-being and flourishing of human and
non-human life on Earth have a value in themselves. These values are
independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes,"
(Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep
Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith,
1985), 70). And deep ecologists are far from failing to honor the human qua human: "The richness of reality
is becoming even richer through our specific human endowments; we are the first
kind of living beings we know of which have the potentialities of living in
community with all other living beings," (Arne Naess, in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, ed.
George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), 239).  

Whatever
de Jonge’s shortcomings, though, deep ecologists come off in this book as poor
philosophers. Three points, in particular, emerge as requiring immediate
rethinking if there is to be any philosophy of deep ecology worthy either of
being called philosophy, or of claiming to express the principles of the
Platform.

First,
any effort to supplant environmental ethics with the blunt instrument of an
ecological metaphysics is misguided. There is no reason why a metaphysics of
ecology and an environmental ethics should not be allied doctrines under the
umbrella of ‘ecosophy’ rather than competitors. It is unclear, however, from de
Jonge’s account, whether deep ecologists actually oppose their philosophy to
environmental ethics in this way or whether they are merely guilty of getting
tangled up in the concepts they have appropriated. De Jonge’s proffered
solution, which substitutes for ecosophy a broad "philosophy of
care", is faithful to Spinoza as far as it goes but only peripherally
ecological.

Another
problem de Jonge identifies is an insufficient commitment in deep ecology to
the structures of civil society. There is an air of bad faith to this critique,
which would tar deep ecologists as supporters of anarchy or ‘ecoterrorism’. To
the degree, however, that a misdirected radicalism has led any deep ecologists
to undervalue political and juridical structures vital both to the well-being
and flourishing of human life, as well as to any accomplishments the
environmental movement has made up to now and might yet make in the foreseeable
future, then this must also be counted among the incoherencies of the
philosophers of deep ecology – incoherencies with respect to their own core principles.

Finally,
and perhaps most fundamental of all, is the contradiction between the basic
deep ecology thesis of the intrinsic
value of living beings as individuals and deep ecologists’ naïve attraction
to philosophical or spiritual positions which would dissolve individual living
beings into an unmediated unity with Nature conceived as a totalizing super
individual. At its worst, this amounts to a regrettable marriage of bad Spinoza
and bad Vedanta. The contrast is instructive in this respect between the deep
ecologists’ Spinoza and Deleuze’s. For Deleuze, what matters in Spinoza’s
thought "is no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but rather
the laying out of a common plane of
immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are
situated," (Gilles Deleuze, "Spinoza and Us," in Spinoza: Practical Philosopy, trans.
Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 122). Deep ecologists have
erred in grasping at a global, totalizing ‘non-dualism’ instead of working out
a complex, pluralistic picture of the
human in nature.

A
nagging question is why deep ecological philosophy should be Spinozist at all. The authors of the
Deep Ecology Platform, Arne Naess and George Sessions, were fond of Spinoza,
and a Spinozist orientation has become somewhat traditional in deep ecology
circles, but a review of the Platform’s eight principles finds in them nothing
particularly Spinozist; hence there is no reason to suppose a priori that a metaphysics of deep
ecology ought to be Spinozist, or that any number of other metaphysical systems
might not, with the right interpretation, serve just as well or rather better.
Indeed, Arne Naess has consistently indicated that multiple ‘ecosophies’ can be
accomodated under the rubric of deep ecology. De Jonge’s book cannot be taken
as dooming the project of an ecological metaphysics, but should be taken as an
indication that this project is in its infancy.

© 2005 Edward Butler

Edward
Butler holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a M.S.Sc. in Psychoanalytic Studies from
the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Categories: Philosophical