6 Does Kant have anything to teach us about environmental ethics?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Marc Lucht

Heidegger claims that in the modern age, the "earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault." (11) Nature is represented as nothing but raw material available for human use and consumption, and this representation holds "complete dominion over all phenomena that distinguish the age." (12) Even objective properties recede behind function, and nature comes to appear even to ordinary perception as merely "the constant reserve by which man makes secure for himself material, bodily, psychic and spiritual resources." (13) Heidegger thinks that instrumental rationality reaches its apotheosis in the triumph of the market, where all worth is reduced to economic value: with the "technological dominion" that "spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely ... the humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market ... [that] subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers." (14)

If Heidegger is correct that instrumental attitudes are so entrenched in modern Western culture that they even affect perception and regulate common sense, then it can only follow that the idea that nature could consist in anything but raw material for human use will seem alien and dangerous. Those thinkers arguing that nature is more than just a "gigantic gasoline station" (15) stand in need of a way to combat such attitudes by encouraging alternate modes of experiencing the world. If people can be prompted to encounter the natural world in a way other than as an array of resources merely awaiting subordination to their material, recreational, and intellectual interests, and if people can be presented with experiential evidence that nature is more than instrumentality, then ideas about its intrinsic worth may well be rendered more plausible.

Kant offers a clue that could help to surmount this practical difficulty. For him, the ability to appreciate nature as beautiful is important, not only insofar as it makes possible sophisticated kinds of pleasure, but also because our aesthetic sensibilities have substantial moral import. In what follows, I attempt to excavate the resources that Kant's account of the pure, disinterested judgment of taste contains for reflection about our attitude toward nature. A broader analysis of the implications of sensibility for morality in general would deal also with Kant's account of intellectual aesthetic judgments, which are tied to particular moral interests. Following Rudolf Makkreel and Henry Allison. I shall assume that the purity of the aesthetic consciousness does not entail that it lacks moral import, and I shall argue that its import bears especially upon our attunement within the natural world. (16) Kant says: "Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of representing it, by means of a liking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautiful." (17) Our judgment about something's beauty (or lack thereof) is not determined by the possibility of personal gain or sensuous pleasure, nor is it determined by theoretical or even moral interests. In taste, it is the mere representation of an object that prompts a feeling of like or dislike, and that feeling lies at the basis of our judgment that something is beautiful. Thus Kant thinks that when appreciating beauty, my natural attitude in which my own well-being is of paramount concern shifts to an attitude receptive to pure aesthetic considerations. Pure aesthetic judgment requires the suspension of my more typical preoccupation with matters of self-interest and physical pleasure. In the aesthetic consciousness, "we must be able to view the ocean as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye." (18) The representation's pleasure does not relate to the ocean's bearing upon any of my practical endeavors, but is merely contemplative. Aesthetic contemplation is indifferent to the manner in which the judged object's existence might contribute to one's well-being, and we find ourselves enraptured by something independent of its capacity to contribute to the satisfaction of our selfish interests.