Neil Evernden strikes again

For whatever reason, I enjoyed Neil Evernden's book "The Natural Alien". At the time, I had more or less exactly the opposite views. Evernden's neo-Romantic and Existentialist form of Deep Ecology left me slightly bemused, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the eclectic, omnivorous quality of his work. "The Social Creation of Nature" is just as eclectic, but ultimately seems to take a somewhat different approach than the first book.

Evernden tracks the meaning of the term "Nature" throughout the centuries. Or at least the Western meaning of that term. During the Middle Ages, Nature was seen as meaningful and significant. Humans were part of this meaningful world, in which every natural object or animal had a didactic message to mankind, a message ultimately rooted in the Divine. This God-centred view of the world was decisively challenged during the Renaissance in favour of a man-centred view, in which the world was seen as an expression of abstract geometrical laws graspable (and in a certain sense, created by) human reason. Somehow, this abstraction was seen as more "real" than the actual nature "out there". The estrangement from Nature continued with Francis Bacon and the British empiricists, who considered Nature to be something that should be conquered by Man.

Or so Evernden believes.

For a long time, the modern world operated on the basis of a tacit dualism being Man and Nature, where Man was somehow exempt from the material mechanisms of Nature with which science was dealing. However, this dualism could not be uphold forever, and eventually the method of materialist science was applied to the human subject as well, in effect dissolving it in the maze of behaviourism, sociobiology, etc. Even humans were thus emptied of meaning, and that's more or less where we stand today. Here, our author obviously has a certain point!

Evernden has some nostalgic longing for the totalizing, divine-centred and intrinsically meaningful Weltanschauung of the Middle Ages. However, he eventually reaches the conclusion that this worldview is unworkable, since the meaning medieval man found in Nature was really an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric projection of his own subjectivity. I also get the impression that Evernden is somewhat uneasy about the purported ability of the medievals to decode the meaning of pretty much everything in Nature. (The scholastics decoded the will of God as well, in some detail.) Naturally, Evernden also rejects the human-centred "abstractions" of the Renaissance and present-day reductionism. At times, he comes close to suggesting that these world conceptions are downright clinical, making creative use of Jungian typology to that effect.

To Evernden, the world may indeed be meaningful, but not necessarily in the medieval or "animist" sense of that term. Rather, he sees Nature and the universe as mysterious and wild. It carries its own meaning, which may to a large extent be ungraspable to human beings. Rather than attempting to bring everything under our control, conceptually or literally, we should accept that a large part of our reality is fundamentally Other. Only by accepting "wildness" can we begin to realize that Nature exists for its own sake, which would then lead to a dramatic re-orientation in our attitude towards it. The last chapter of the book is entitled "The Liberation of Nature".

Unsurprisingly, Evernden is somewhat pessimistic about the prospects of actually bringing this state of affairs about...

As already indicated, Professor Evernden's sources of inspiration are diffuse. In this book, he references C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Carl Gustav Jung, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas and Ernst Cassirer, among others. He also has a soft spot for William Blake, John Muir, Charles Bergman and Annie Dillard. (Who on earth are Bergman and Dillard?) The bad guys in our story are Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon. Evernden is often hard to understand, but I got the feeling that there's a certain discrepancy between his two books. In "The Natural Alien", the author seems to be suggesting that humans are naturally alienated from Nature, but that this alienation can be reduced by creating worldviews which see Nature as meaningful. Of course, such worldviews would in practice be "anthropocentric" and perhaps anthropomorphic, as well. In "The Social Creation of Nature", Evernden takes a more pessimistic approach, essentially arguing that humans should remain alienated from nature, seen as a wild frontier out there. It seems Evernden has become more Existentialist than neo-Romantic.

I'm not sure if that counts for progress.