A debate has been brewing over the last few weeks between myself and a colleague of mine on the nature of ‘truth’ and reality and its extension to environmental advocacy strategies. This debate has been especially interesting, picking up from my post on Manuel DeLanda earlier this month and leading most recently to a comment, which I highly recommend reading, available here. The following is a response to that posting, along with a summary reiteration of my earlier position.

I appreciate the simplification of my point - which I wouldn’t call ‘postmodernist’ as much as a position within ‘Critical Theory’ - but I think what I was trying to get at was missed in the process. Fundamentally, the two positions you are describing involve truth claims about the world, and it is precisely this that I want to think critically about. First, I’ll explain my ‘philosophical’ (or methodological) position on this, then my ‘political’, and finally, bring the two together.

The points that Manuel DeLanda uses to justify his realism, and the ones you bring up in your posting, are inevitably anthropocentric, as is my own position. But they are also anthropomorphic, something I want to explicitly argue against. Let me ask a simple question - ‘What is Art?’ Is it art when it appears on a tableau? When it involves patterns? When it is ‘consciously’ or ‘deliberately’ created? These are extremely biased questions about what is essentially an anthropocentric concept to begin with. We, socially subjectively, define the limits of what “art” is and determine what qualifies and what does not. DeLanda imputes a thoroughly human (and likely culturally specific) understanding of ‘art’ onto the birds in his example to make a point about the realm of humans - a blatant display of anthropomorphism. In contrast, I argue that any definitive claims about realms outside the human experience are necessarily anthropomorphic, and thus we should readily disclose that position, instead of making and hiding human concepts, values and beliefs in the secure sphere of a higher authority (’nature’). This is ultimately a question of power: to what extent are aspects of humanity immutable - that is, ‘natural’? To what extent do our social institutions, practices and norms, beliefs and values have objectively independent manifestations outside of humanity?

This has important implications for the various politics that we are constantly engaged in, especially the current struggle over human ecology. But I look to history to determine how we might frame and shape it. Marxists and Anarchists have long sought to reorient the terms of their debates with their political opponents by freeing it from the realm of humans, thereby gaining legitimacy and authority to carry out their various projects. In these cases, it was partly idealism, stemming from a higher religious authority, that spurred them to embrace the kind of realism that Mao and Lenin were thinking of when they argued that the dialectic contradiction was an essential characteristic of every unit of matter in the universe. Kropotkin tirelessly appealed to the natural world to shore up support for the ideas that mutual aid institutions are a natural part of humanity, against the realism of disfigured Darwinists.

This is an appealing strategy for political action, since it appears to be the ‘easy way out’. By establishing a truth claim that supports your political values, you only need to extend that truth claim to dominate all others, and defend it vigorously against future competing truth claims. Conversely, by orienting human questions around human values, you condition yourself to an endless and grueling battle to assert the “hegemony” (used loosely) of certain values - a constant flux of power-laden ideas, unanchorable within our social vortex. We know the story of the former strategy - realism was coopted (and significantly placed on a pedestal) by those who used it to hide a different set of values within the absolute truths of our time. Pertaining to ecology, realism proved to be highly amenable to the transformation that ‘the Great Chain of Being’ was to undergo with the loss of its Christian foundations. Carried on in the tradition of Western science, and aided and abetted by scientific Marxism at every turn, what many environmentalists struggle so hard against today has its genesis in the tradition of realism.

Concerning environmental advocacy, the reorientation of debates away from instrumental rationality, though an extremely difficult task, is both necessary and desirable. But how this is done is perhaps my political point of contention. Using realism to achieve this goal - by exclaiming that, objectively, every aspect of non-human nature is “good, in and of itself” - does nothing to challenge the power structure of the human belief system, and is almost certainly to lead to the eventual resurgence of instrumental rationality. In political terms, what is needed is not a change in the government of the governance of the ecological debate, but a regime change that transforms the foundational elements of the way truths are constructed in society.

Thus, I see the philosophical component of environmental advocacy as inextricably intertwined with the political projects that make it up. However, my point was fundamentally missed by equating anthropocentrism with cost-benefit instrumental rationality and with postmodernism (it is not through discourse that we can only understand the world, but as humans, only in human terms, terms which may be fundamentally experiential and non-discursive). What Weber meant by instrumental rationality, and as Habermas has subsequently developed, is not that the the act of valuation is free of ‘ends’. I value a tree because it fulfills a psychological and emotional function of my humanity, not because it will become a chair I will sit on. Rather, it is the kind of thought (and really valuation, but a critique of Weber will have to wait), now commonly associated with ‘cost-benefit analyses’ that need to be rejected. This is inescapably anthropocentric, just as all human action must be - after all, Weber’s typology aimed to describe ’social’ action. But claiming that this is something that must be ‘avoided’ only furthers the false dichotomy that ‘humans’ and ‘nature’ are separate entities. Rather, it is the combination of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism with instrumental rationality that needs to be rethought.

All variants of realism seek to covertly extend human values onto nature, thereby claiming an objectively independent basis for their values, which mask the power that they wield. In seeking to circumvent anthropocentrism, we will only further entrench it in the structure of our knowledge systems, something that has been done for far too long in the academy and in ‘Western’ society. Rather we should embrace our anthropocentrism, and recognize that the range of values and possible actions that we can engage in are endless. This may be a gruelling and thankless task - defeatists might say impossible - but if we are to challenge the Enlightenment project that threatens the world, our world, we must attack it at its roots. Usurpation ultimately never cuts the head off the king. It only holds the place until another usurper, preaching a different message, comes along.

0 Recommend this Post
      view other notable posts

Matthew Lymburner is an MA student at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University. He is interested in Brazilian history and political economy, and progressive politics worldwide.
Email this author | Profile and posts by Matthew Lymburner

Email this Post
Citation Styles
Print this Post
Save as PDF
Share & Bookmark