Abstract
Laura Ephraim asks “Who Speaks for Nature?” and in one respect her posing of the question is rhetorical. She grants that we humans speak for nature and, foremost, the scientists among us know nature authoritatively. How could we answer otherwise, with climate change deniers abounding and earthly life hanging in the balance?
What makes Ephraim’s book important, though, is a generative conflict the book enacts and the inquiry about our idea of nature it prompts. Today, we should ask “Whose nature? Which science?” and Ephraim makes a significant contribution to our possibly acknowledging this need. 1
Ephraim effectively avoids subservience to scientific authority. Since she theorizes “the politics of science in worldly terms, as constructive, creative activity of reconfiguring material reality” (21), Ephraim is unwilling to follow those political theorists who “look to natural scientists to lend authority to their redescriptions of nature” because “they too often leave unquestioned how natural scientists attained the authority to which they defer” (23). Her introductory chapter is as refreshing as it is informative about the history of natural science as both foil and fulcrum for political theory. Inspired by Giambattista Vico, Ephraim redefines the politics of science as that which “creates a tissue of affinities, habits, rhetorics, and affects that hold disparate human and nonhuman bodies together in a common world and enable some of them to speak for others.” This is indeed a politics because the “phenomena for which scientists speak are rendered perceptible, speakable, and intelligible through multigenerational popular struggles to establish a common world from the disparate materials encountered on the earth’s surface” (142).
Ephraim’s reading of Hannah Arendt is more generative still, recovering an Arendt who imagines the intelligibility of nature in ways different from Vico. I will stress their difference more than Ephraim does. The well-being of the world depends upon common sense, in this Vico and Arendt concur. They apparently diverge, though, when it comes to their understanding of the conditions of common sense, as exemplified by Arendt’s conviction that all sentient creatures have two purposes—to live and to perceive (41). Arrestingly, Ephraim leads us back to Arendt’s sobering view that modern sciences—in tandem with modern economics, Arendt stresses—have literally destroyed human common sense about earthly givens. Is it any wonder that we seem unable to stop ourselves from destroying the conditions of our own lives and all else?
Both Vico and Arendt “warn that sciences that estrange us from our material surroundings and thus from one another endanger the web of relationships that holds the world together,” however, “Vico has a different understanding than Arendt of what it means to be alienated from nature” (88). Vico maintains that enactments of common sense are the point of origin of earthly sciences and political realities (78), and so it is possible for modern sciences to restore by revivifying the web of relationships upon which all—including our sciences—depends. Rather than repetitively insisting on the apolitical validity of the findings of climate sciences, for instance, we need realize that the “people who would be united by a shared desire to hear what climate scientists have to say does not yet exist. If the scientific consensus on climate science is to become the way of the world, this people must be founded” (146). At its best, Ephraim’s Vichian politics of science envisions citizens acting together to reorganize “the worldly conditions governing who may—and may not—speak for the quality of the air, water, and soil” (148).
Vico’s imagination of nature is notably modern. For Vico the “stuff of nature becomes available for human observation and experimentation as human language users weave things that God made ex nihilo into a meaningful web of rhetorical relationships. Without these man-made relationships to hold it together, nature would be an illegible cacophony of radical diversity, particularity, and flux” (77). While we may pass over this representation of nature as obvious, it is an implausible account of any animal’s placement in nature. Animals perceive as they live, as Arendt acknowledges, because they must be attentive to the effects of what they are doing as they work to shape a particular landscape to their own ends. Vico could judge the forest to be the oblivion of nature, but in reality the forest is the earth’s most generative landscape for building a high-quality humus that fosters the flora that convert the sun’s energy into forms that fauna and humans can use to live. 2 Apparently it is possible for the preponderance of a civilization to misjudge such earthly givens, just as it is possible for prominent tropes of evolutionary sciences to obscure that possibility by presuming that any predominant choice is adaptive. 3
Vico is hardly alone in uncritically inheriting the modern ideology of progressive improvement upon a valueless nature. Indeed, one can nearly see the rise of the Anthropocene as John Locke reworks the Abrahamic understanding of land as property. The earth is granted exclusively to humanity, not only as ours alone to use but also as without any ordering value of its own. Human labor, mediated by the commodity form, is to take the measure of nature’s value. But when use is oriented solely by the question “how can we best make the monetary value of this land grow?” then inquiry about what a patch of land can bear or give simply does not arise. This practical upshot follows upon the notion that nature has nothing of its own to say about its use. We can use nature without heeding any of its expressive limits when we imagine that “nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials, as in themselves” 4 , or follow René Descartes’s aspiration to create a world that is easy to see by imagining a view of nothing from nowhere, or follow Thomas Hobbes’s certainty that given nature is no match for human artifice. In time, questions of good and just use cannot be received or addressed in the absence of a world of understanding and terms of art by which nature as a whole and in each of its parts are communicating to us perceptible good use as distinct from misuse. All of which is to say that I am less impressed than others are sure to be by Ephraim’s fine readings of Hobbes and Descartes to recover the politics of their science. Ephraim has such a subtle feel for the realities of earthly life evoked by Vico and Arendt that I was jarred by how unaffected she was by the ways Descartes’s aesthetic of abstraction cultivates methodical alienation from the realities of earthly life and sets in motion disorders of experience and knowledge of nature among modern idealists and materialists alike, new and old.
With the benefit of greater hindsight, Arendt diverges from Vico when it comes to the valuation of nature. For Arendt, modern science and modern economics join in abstracting us from earthly life, and both thereby contribute to unleashing processes that destroy lives and land in the name of improving them. For Arendt, modern economies would not be organized around production processes that continually expropriate people and land without the aid of modern sciences that alienate us from earthly givens since “the process of wealth accumulation . . . is possible only if the world and the very worldliness of man are sacrificed.” 5 We have found a way, says Arendt, “to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from the outside . . . even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature’s household.” 6 As Ephraim rightly stresses, it seems we have misconstrued Arendt’s distinction between earth and world (34–35), for Arendt clearly believes that worldliness is dependent on “nature’s household” and both are doomed if that connectedness is forsaken. Arendt finds her place in a tradition of modern thinkers like Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu and of modern scientists like Sir Albert Howard and Aldo Leopold, who surmise that what is bad for the land comes in lock step with what is bad for the people who have the misfortune to be settled in a place in need of “improvement” so as to increase the “common stock of humanity.” 7
Unlike Ephraim’s Vico, then, Arendt cannot imagine a “more productive relationship between natural science and world building,” because Arendt finds that neither modern science nor modern economics acknowledge that “the earth gives the law to the world” (40). More specifically, we find in Arendt a sense that the aesthetic diversity of the earth instructs us as to what the earth is like, and thereby also directs us as to how it must be used if it is to be sustained. Ephraim rather brilliantly dubs this dimension of Arendt’s understanding her account of “the natural growth of the natural” (41).
Rather than follow Arendt, Ephraim opts for the dominant modern scientific sense that “the phenomena of nature, thus defined, cannot be ventriloquized when spoken for: there is nothing recognizable as an organ of speech to put words into, nothing recognizable as an inner life to give voice to” (7). Ephraim’s forthrightness clarifies the dead edge of the most common accounting of our receptive capacities toward nature, and yet, simultaneously, she mitigates the loss by recovering Arendt’s naturalism. Arendt’s insistence that every creature perceives as it lives is a rejection of the extraction of the reality of “mind” from animal nature. 8 Methodically extracting the attentional–perceptual–intentional evaluative dimensions of animal activity is integral to the power of modern science, economics, and technology. 9 It is also constitutive of the common-sense delusions of our ways of life. Arendt’s remarkable reflections in the first chapter of The Life of the Mind fill out a new naturalism intimated in both The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. In those works, the loss of a place in the world from which nature’s givens are regularly, sensually accessible is the beginning of every modern catastrophe. As Ephraim shows us, in The Life of The Mind, Arendt makes earlier ontological convictions explicit when she announces that all earth’s creatures are “responsible for securing the very reality of the natural and artificial things they perceive” (40). According to the sciences of this understanding of nature, each species, indeed each singular animal, confronts options of cooperatively competing in a degree of “mutual toleration to mutual benefit” that sustains a landscape in some equilibrium of health or takes part in succumbing to pathological collapse when too many animals forsake common sense. 10 As Aldo Leopold’s sketch of the doomed passenger pigeon as a “biological storm”—so evocative of Arendt’s sense of the “unnatural growth of the natural”—makes clear, human beings are not the only animals who can prove bereft of common sense, though we are currently the most notorious. 11
I have suggested that Ephraim’s book manifests an elemental division, and in this respect she’s made more progress than most of us. She knows that “the reality of climate change must be not merely believed but lived, breathed, and acutely felt by the people in their everyday and extraordinary acts of perceiving, desiring, dismantling, assembling, and otherwise creating a world” (143). Yet she is understandably reluctant to relinquish our habitual preoccupation with the problem of how we are going to get climate change–denying citizens to listen to climate scientists, as if the orchestration and quotidian execution of the destruction of earthly life were unfolding predominantly from Kentucky and West Virginia and not New York, Chicago, and California. It would be lovely if the rule of so-called sound science and progressive social policy is all we needed to get ourselves right with nature. A great virtue of Ephraim’s book is to open a space where we might confront deeper disorders of modern experience and knowledge.