Paul Matthews - The Revelation of Nature

The greatest question faced by humanity in the present epoch is how to dwell on earth? The physical reactions of the planet to the way we have come to exist are complex and our understanding of them nascent. But the overall message is clear: we must transform the way we have come to live on planet earth. The earth can no longer be viewed as a cornucopia; it is a rare and precious source of life in the void of space. It is our home and we must care for it.

In response, a broad environmental movement has developed and ecological issues are now debated at an international level. For the most part, international and national green policies are reformist rather than radical. In other words, reformists seek to reduce pollution and conserve natural resources. However, this approach does not go far enough for radical ecologists, who insist that the depth and breadth of our ecological problems cannot be solved simply by tinkering with the attitudes and practices that created these problems.1 Instead, radical ecologists call for a fundamental transformation of the human world. They want to see a world premised on and inspired by earth-based wisdom. To date, radical ecology remains a movement on the margins of history. For the most part we live in a world premised on an increasing exploitation of nature. The demand for more resources to produce more food and things for a growing human population seems insatiable. From a long-term ecological perspective the prospects seem bleak. But, one may ask, will we not develop new technologies and commensurate strategies that not only overcome our contemporary environmental problems but also enable all humanity to flourish? This may happen, but would it help us to dwell on earth in sympathy with nature, or merely provide more sophisticated ways of dominating and exploiting natural resources?

The way we have come to exist on this planet estranges us from our earthly home. In an everyday sense many of us are strangers to the earth because our normative experience is a conditioned response to a framework of meaning and practice which predominantly reveals things as mere resources for the production of the human world. Yet, we know the world is contingent upon the earth, that all our technology and culture- our whole history- could not exist without a natural environment where such things could exist. The true premise of our world is the earth, but the everyday premise of our world is the exploitation and domination of nature and, indeed, ourselves.

The dominant form of contemporary human existence is one that seeks to enframe everything as a stockpile of resources. Nature is largely seen as a mere array of objects more or less useful for the production of the human world. Even the beauty of nature has become a commodity to be used. Any potential transformation of our present world must therefore come to terms with the dominant mode of human existence abroad in the world today. To understand the way we exist is vitally important if we are to transform our world and learn to dwell in sympathy with our natural home.

In Heideggers Being and Time the word existence (Dasein) is used exclusively for the Being of the human being. Existence is a way of being essentially founded upon concern. We are all concerned about our existence. We are beings whose mortality is always an issue. Everything we do refers to our ownmost existential predicament. For us, existence is an issue that matters. As mortals our lives are essentially defined by existential finitude. We were born and we will die. Human consciousness is the way we represent existence. None of us, whether as individuals or groups, represent our existence from scratch, since we are born and acculturated to specific place and time; we dwell historically. So, the particular way we express our existence is contextual. Because we are raised within a particular world of meaning already defined historically by our culture, our individually unique expressions of existence are more or less predefined by the everyday world in which we dwell. Everyday existence precedes our individuated existence.

Human beings are the beings who are capable of asking the question of Being. As such we are unique with respect to all other beings. By conceiving our existence as primarily being-in-the-world, Heidegger made the ancient problem concerning the relationship between subject and object secondary. Approached in this way, the basic structures of existence are a primordial state of mind (Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen), and logos (Rede). These structures are, in turn, grounded upon the temporalisation of Dasein, from which future, having-been (past), and present originate.

In Being and Time the two basic possibilities of existing are those in which a human being either individuates authentically or loses itself inauthentically. Each of us is inauthentic, for example, when we let the possible choices for our own existence be prescribed by others instead of deciding for ourselves. Heideggers concept of concern should not be identified with distress. Rather it should be understood as a basic existential disposition that embraces the unity of the articulated moments of a persons being-in-the-world. Concern is considered to be the fundamental aspect of the relationship between a human being and other entities, insofar as each of us is concerned to obtain the things that are necessary for us and even to transform them with our work as well as to exchange them so as to make them more suitable for our needs. Concern demonstrates that each of us is thrown into the world, into the midst of other beings. For each human being, being thrown means being abandoned to the whirling flow of things in the world and to their determinism. In becoming a person, each of us has been accustomed to a world of meaning. Each human being therefore finds him or herself as an issue within a world of meaning already defined by others.