Ted Toadvine

Biodiversity at Twenty-Five Years: Revolution Or Red Herring?

A quarter of a century ago, a group of scientists and conservationists introduced ‘biodiversity’ as a media buzzword with the explicit intent of galvanizing public and political support for environmental causes. AsDavid Takacs summarizes this on the basis of his interviews with many of those involved, ‘Scientists who love the natural world forged the term biodiversity as a weapon to be wielded’ in battles over biological resources (Takacs, 1996, p. 3; cf. p. 37). The resulting conception of biodiversity, and the image of nature that it suggests, has subsequently dominated public perceptions, political discourse, and empirical research in the fields of ecology and resource management. For instance, David Tilman refers to the last several decades of ecological research as the ‘biodiversity revolution’ (Tilman, 2012, p. 109), and the goal of Conservation Biology as an interdisciplinary research program has been understood since its inception in terms of biodiversity conservation and restoration.Within the policy arena, the concept’s influence is international, from the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, signed as a legally binding treaty in 1992, which specifies the ‘conservation of biological diversity’ as one of its main goals, to the UN’s declaration of 2011–2020 as the Decade on Biodiversity, with a strategic plan that aims to integrate the values of biodiversity into government decision-making at all levels and to ‘mainstream’ biodiversity across government, society, and the economy. In short, since gaining broad attention quickly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, biodiversity has remained a focal point for scientific research and environmental policy, with consequences for how significant research and management resources have been distributed and invested over this period. Notably, environmental ethicists have also eagerly embraced biodiversity as a natural value, and whereas they have debated whether this value is intrinsic or merely instrumental, they have rarely questioned either its descriptive basis or its prescriptive import. Critical scrutiny of the concept of biodiversity is nevertheless long overdue, and we argue that there are good reasons to doubt whether it provides any guidance for environmental decision-makers or has any clearly established relationship with those

Life beyond Biologism

In a move that has puzzled commentators, Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am rejects claims for continuity between the human and the animal, aligning such claims with the ideology of “biologistic continuism.” This problematization of the logic of the human-animal limit holds implications for how we are to understand life in relation to auto-affection, immanence in relation to transcendence, and naturalism in relation to phenomenology. Derrida’s abyssal logic parallels the “strange kinship” described by Merleau-Ponty, though only if this strangeness is intensified as “hetero-affection” by incorporating death into life. Following Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, we locate the creative moment of this abyssal intimacy in the transformative productions of sexual difference. This positive account of the excess of hetero-affection reconciles phenomenology with evolution and offers a figure for thinking the thickening and multiplying of the differences between human and non-human, living and nonliving, corporeal and cosmic.

The Elemental Past

In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity. Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future.

Leaving Husserl’s Cave? The Philosopher’s Shadow Revisited

Despite the claim by contemporary commentators that Merleau-Ponty ignores the transcendental perspective of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s final essay on Husserl, “Le Philosophe et son ombre,” is engaged in reformulating the relation between the transcendental and the mundane. The necessity for this reformulation lies in his reconsideration of the Cartesianism underlying his earlier appropriation of the phenomenological method. Merleau-Ponty ‘s later formulation of the reduction, I contend, is a historical retrieval of Platonic dialectic by way of a re-reading of the myth of the cave.

Ecophenomenology and the Resistance of Nature

In his justly famous essay “Walking,” published after his death in 1862, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau penned these words at a time when Americans were enacting their vision of “manifest destiny,” displacing the indigenous peoples from the western half of the continent and hacking down its ancient forests to make way for orchards, cattle pastures, and industrial progress. A century later, Thoreau’s remark became a clarion call for the modern American environmental movement in its effort to preserve our remaining “pristine” forests and natural areas. “Wildness” had become, in the minds of many, equivalent to “wilderness,” defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Our Monstrous Futures: Global Sustainability and Eco-Eschatology

Apocalyptic ictions abound in contemporary culture, multiplying end-of-the-world fantasies of environmental collapse. Meanwhile, efforts toward global sustainability extrapolate from deep-past trends to predict and manage deep-future scenarios. These narratives converge in “eco-eschatologies,” which work as phantasms that construct our identities, our understanding of the world, and our sense of responsibility in the present. I critique ecoeschatology’s reliance on an interpretation of deep time that treats every temporal moment as interchangeable and projects the future as a chronological extension of the past. This enacts what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “catastrophe of equivalence” by domesticating the future and obscuring the incommensurability of what resists substitution, conversion, or exchange. By contrast, the renewal of our responsibility toward the future, without apocalypse or apotheosis, requires an intuition of deep time that respects the singular anachronicity of the present and refuses the framing of existence against a background of annihilation.

Naturalism, Estrangement, and Resistance: On the Lived Senses of Nature

The tension within environmental theory between the view that humans are “part of” nature and the view that humans are alienated from nature cannot be resolved by endorsing either position, since both perspectives are motivated by structures of human experience: “unrestricted” nature, which incorporates everything that exists, including humans and their technology, and “pure” nature, which contrasts with the artifactual. This distinction resolves quandaries that emerge in environmental debates over, for example, restoration and wilderness preservation. Yet this resolution of our paradoxical relationship with nature raises the deeper problem of whether the correlation of experience with nature is fundamentally anthropocentric and consequently eliminates any descriptive access to nature “as such.” Phenomenology is uniquely poised to address this concern, since our experience of nature also reveals to us, albeit indirectly, the manner in which nature withdraws from that very experience. As descriptions from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty suggest, and as developed more recently by Amanda Boetzkes, certain works of art prove especially valuable for revealing a fundamental duplicity of nature by which it retains an uncompromised autonomy.

Apocalyptic Imagination and the Silence of the Elements

Contemporary cosmic imagination takes an apocalyptic turn away from the harmonious cosmic reverie described by Bachelard, instead envisioning the imperceptible toxification and elemental dissolution of the world. In parallel, phenomenology’s confrontation with the annihilation of the world leads it to recognize a moment of death that haunts every lived experience as its immemorial past. Tracing the moment of the world’s withdrawal through Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne, Deleuze, Levinas, and Sallis, we see that this immemorial past is associated with a prehuman level of sensation that opens onto the silent materiality of the elements. Investigating sensation at the limits of perception, elements at the limit of the world, and art at the limits of representation allows us to reconfigure Bachelard’s cosmic imagination in the wake of the apocalyptic turn. This reveals that apocalyptic imagination is not merely a contemporary response to our technological and environmental context but rather an intensification of nature’s own fundamental duplicity.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Lifeworldly Naturalism

Merleau-Ponty’s account of our inherence in nature, inspired by Husserl’s Ideen II, breaks with naturalism by taking seriously the problem of thinking nature from within. Whereas the naturalistic definition of nature fails to encompass we who are reflecting on it, Merleau-Ponty’s “lifeworldly naturalism” treats philosophical reflection as emergent from the nature on which it reflects, as an intensification or redoubling, an iterative fold, of nature’s own sense-making. In The Structure of Behavior, this iterative fold of nature is presented as the “structure of structures,” an all-encompassing gestalt by which human subjectivity escapes the interest-bound environments of other organisms. In Phenomenology of Perception, nature’s intensification takes the form of a “reflection on the unreflective,” a radical or second-order reflection that takes into account its relation, as reflection, with the situation that precedes and conditions it. And in his final working notes, Merleau-Ponty characterizes philosophy as a “chiasm of chiasms,” a doubled reversal by which the self-interrogation of Being, as the encroachment of the sensible and the intelligible, becomes explicit as a question. At stake in this series of recursive figures is the effort to think philosophy immanently. Yet insofar as philosophy is incapable of thematizing its own emergence, since it remains conditioned by a nature that escapes its reflective recuperation, its recursive twisting forms around a remainder that it cannot elucidate. This remainder, the immemorial silence of nature, is both the condition for philosophical reflection and the resistance that marks its limits.