MARTIN DRENTHEN - PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH (or German)
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This volume sketches the coming of age and development of environmental aesthetics as a field. In the first part Allen Carlson gives a clear survey of the development of the field. Next, Yuriko Saito discusses some important future directions for environmental aesthetics. She argues for the inclusion of everyday artifacts, human activities, and social relations and urges environmental aesthetics to go beyond the confines of Western tradition. Jonathan Maskit argues for a shift in attention from the overreaching universalism of the (analytic) majority strand of environmental aesthetics to the cultural-historicism of the (continental) minority strand.
The widening of scope, that characterized the coming of age of environmental aesthetics, involves a continual rethinking of relationships, which is the subject of the volume’s second part. This part opens with a chapter by Arnold Berleant, who attempts to reconcile the need for cooperative environmental action with the existence of cultural and historic difference. Next, in employing Kant’s aesthetics to develop an aesthetics of respect, Denis Dumas redefines the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Yrjö Sepänmaa discusses the relationship between the theory and practice of environmental aesthetics.
The third part is devoted to yet another relationship that needs rethinking, the relationship between nature and art. Jason Simus agues that environmental artworks might have the same democratic potential as restoration projects. David Wood show us that art can “save the earth” by allowing us to imaging alternative, less destructive, modes of living and dwelling than our current ones. Irene Klaver’s chapter sketches the rise of what she calls “environmental imagination”, with special attention to the work of two modern painters, Georgia O’Keeffe and Anselm Kiefer.
The final part of the volume is illustrative of the emergence of practical applications from theoretical studies, and the use of concrete examples and case studies. Tyson-Lord Gray juxtaposes Kant’s and Dewey’s aesthetic theory to defend the beauty of wind farms. Steven Vogel examines the history of a shopping mall, asking whether the same sorts of consideration that led Aldo Leopold to call for humans to “think like a mountain” might suggest that we should also learn to think like a mall. Finally, Emily Brady tries to make some headway towards understanding the grounds of aesthetic appreciation of wild animals, widely used in animal welfare campaigns and conservation.
Contemporary visions of nature have been deeply affected by the ongoing interaction and interpenetration of science, nature, and society. These new visions appear to be more complex than older visions of nature and at the same time they seem to challenge our notions of authenticity.
"New Visions of Nature" focuses on the emergence of these new visions of complex nature in three domains. The first selection of essays reflects public visions of nature, that is, nature as it is experienced, encountered, and instrumentalized by diverse publics. The second selection zooms in on micro nature and explores the world of contemporary genomics. The final section returns to the macro world and discusses the ethics of place in present-day landscape philosophy and environmental ethics.
The contributions to this volume explore perceptual and conceptual boundaries between the human and the natural, or between an ‘out there’ and ‘in here.’ They attempt to specify how nature has been publicly and genomically constructed, known and described through metaphors and re-envisioned in terms of landscape and place. By parsing out and rendering explicit these divergent views, the volume asks for a re-thinking of our relationship with nature.
Whether or not this is explicitly admitted, each normative position within the debate turns out to rely on a particular normative concept of nature. However, the use of any of these particular normative interpretations cannot be legitimized. The starting point of this inquiry is the assumption that today's environmental crisis is intrinsically related to this ambiguity with regard to the normative meaning of nature. This ambiguity has a foundational character, and the conflicts and dilemmas that stem from it cannot be solved easily. In order to clarify this relation between the environmental crisis and the crisis in morality, we analyze the relation between nature and morality in the work of the late 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and ask whether his philosophy can help us clarify the problematic relationship between nature and morality in contemporary environmental ethical debates. From Nietzsche's viewpoint, environmental ethics appears as a paradoxical undertaking, on the one hand, interested in nature in so far as it transcends human seizures of power (wildness as a critical concept), on the other hand restricted in its possibility to model this interest on anything else than yet another interpretative appropriation. That is to say, we can only articulate the moral significance of nature "itself" by interpreting it, but each interpretation inevitably implies a moment of appropriation. However, some environmental ethicists appear to do more justice to this profound problematic character of our relationship with nature by explicitly acknowledging the inaccessibility and radical otherness of wild nature. The newly developed perspective is tested on its fruitfulness for the Dutch case of "new nature development". In this debate on ecological reconstruction, the concept of wildness functions as a moral concept, albeit a paradoxical one. This idea of wildness is hermeneutically elaborated. In a time where "real" wildernesses no longer seem to exist, we are fascinated by the idea of wildness as something beyond our ability to control and appropriate. Wildness thus poses a (moral) limit to human appropriations of nature, it is a critical border concept that puts the human, moral order in perspective.
Published scientific journal papers & book chapters (peer reviewed)
In this paper, I seek to provide building blocks for a reconciliation of the ethical care for heritage protection and nature restoration ethics. It will do so, by introducing a hermeneutic landscape philosophy that takes landscape as a multi-layered “text” in need of interpretation, and place identities as build upon certain readings of the landscape. I will argue that from a hermeneutical perspective, both approaches appear to complement each other. Renaturing presents a valuable correction to the anthropocentrism of many European rural cultures. Yet, heritage protectionists rightly point to the value of narratives for Old World identities. I will conclude with a short reflection on how such a hermeneutical environmental ethic can be helpfull in dealing with environmental conflicts.
doi:
10.3197/096327113X13528328798156Even though artists and philosophers sometimes succeed in finding words for the meaning that places can have for us, we can never fully identify the meaning that places have for us. Nicole Note is right in arguing (using the work of Arnold Burms) that the ineffable plays a key role in the meaningful relations we have with the world, and that the experience of meaning can only emerge if there is a real risk that it fails to appear. Therefore, meaning cannot be ‘produced’. I have argued, however, that we can be confronted with a far more radical loss of meaning when most at first meaningful interpretations of place turn out to be consciously produced by marketeers and lobbyists. Yet, even this very feeling of estrangement can lead us to a sensitivity for the otherness of nature as a transcendental source of meaning.
In this text, I discuss the environmental education project "Legible Landscape", which aims to teach inhabitants to read their landscape and develop a closer, more engaged relationship to place. I show that the project's semiotic perspective on landscape legibility tends to hamper the understanding of the moral dimension of reading landscapes, and argue that a hermeneutical perspective is better suited to acknowledge the way that readers and texts are intimately connected.
In 'Respect for Everything', David Schmidt rightfully criticizes species egalitarianism, buts neglects an even more fundamental problem. Ecocentric egalitarianism is not only self defeating, but in fact ultimately entails a morally dubious radical anthropocentrism. Perhaps the morally most troubling aspect of anthropocentrism is not its assumption that humans are superior to non-humans, but that what matters to human beings is true in an absolute sense. Taylor's argument that there are no valid moral reasons to consider humans superior, assumes that it is in principle possible to compare the value of both humans and non-humans, and that it would make sense to use normative expressions such as ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ objectively, e.g. outside the particular context of a human ethical outlook. Yet, evaluative concepts only have meaning within that context. To suggest that ethical concepts have meaning in an absolute sense, implies that the human moral perspective has absolute validity, and thus entails a radical form of anthropocentrism..
A social scientific survey on visions of human/nature relationships in western Europe shows that the public clearly distinguishes not only between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, but also between two nonanthropocentric types of thought, which may be called “partnership with nature” and “participation in nature.” In addition, the respondents distinguish a form of human/nature relationship that is allied to traditional stewardship but has a more ecocentric content, labeled here as “guardianship of nature.” Further analysis shows that the general public does not subscribe to an ethic of “mastery over nature.” Instead, practically all respondents embrace the image of guardianship, while the more radical relationships of partnership and participation also received significant levels of adherence. The results imply that ethicists should no longer assume that the ethics of the public are merely anthropocentric. Finally, they call into question the idea of a single form of ecocentrism and favor a hermeneutic virtue ethics approach to the study of the interface between ethics and action.
In “Why Not NIMBY?” Derek Turner and Simon Feldman fail to address that many NIMBY protesters are not just concerned with concrete decision making, but also introduce a ‘metaphysical’ issue that liberal-democracy considers an inappropriate subject for the political debate. The type of rationality dominating political discourse requires one to reason in terms of 'common good' or personal preferences that can be weighted against other preferences. NIMBY’s do neither; rather they reframe the debate, starting from a radically different approach to the meaning of place that questions the very notion that particular places can be compared.
The concept of wildness not only plays a role in philosophical debates, but also in popular culture. Wild nature is often seen as a place outside the cultural sphere where one can still encounter instances of transcendence. Some writers and moviemakers contest the dominant romanticized view of wild nature by telling stories that somehow show a different harsher face of nature. In encounters with the wild and unruly, humans can sometimes experience the misfit between their well-ordered, human-centered, self-created world view and the otherness of nature, and in doing so face, what Plumwood calls, "the view from the outside." Three films —Gerry, Into the Wild and Grizzly Man — deal with contemporary encounters with wildness. What these works have in common is the central theme of modern humans who are fascinated by wild nature and seek experiences unknown to those limited to the overly cultivated life (psyche) of modern society. Another connecting theme, however, is that any idealization of wildness is in itself deeply problematic. All three films have fatal endings, which in turn fascinates the contemporary viewers. These films show, first, that wildness is conceived as a moral counterforce against the overly civilized world; and, second, that fascination with this wildness has itself become thoroughly reflexive, and refers to a moral meaning of wildness that is both deeply paradoxical and utterly dark.
Drenthen, M. (2009). Ecological Restoration and Place Attachment; Emplacing
nonplace?. Environmental
Values 18(3): 285-312
The creation of new wetlands along rivers as an instrument to mitigate flood risks in times of climate change seduces us to approach the landscape from a ‘managerial’ perspective and threatens a more place-oriented approach. How to provide ecological restoration with a broad cultural context that can help prevent these new landscapes from becoming non-places, devoid of meaning and with no real connection to our habitable world. In this paper, I discuss three possible alternative interpretations of the meaning of places and place attachment in these ‘new nature’ projects, and show how all three imply a different view on human identity and history.
Drenthen, M. (2009). Developing
Nature along Dutch Rivers: Place or Non-place? In: M.
Drenthen, J. Keulartz, & J. Proctor (eds): New
Visions of Nature: Complexity and Authenticity,
Dordrecht: Springer 2009, pp 205-228.
Drenthen, M. (2007). New Wilderness
Llandscapes as Moral Criticism; A Nietzschean Perspective on Our Fascination with Wildness. Ethical
Perspectives:Journal of the European Ethics Network, 14(4): 371-403
This paper is a elaborated version of the paper 'Wilderness as a critical border concept'. It appeared in a special issue of Ethical Perspectives (edited by Glenn Deliège) about 'Environmental Philosophy after the de(con)struction of nature', devoted to my work on wildernes ethics. The issue further contains reflections on my work by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, Richard Kover, Nathan Kowlaski, Kingsley Goodwin and Ulrich Melle. Abstracts and full-text versions can be found here.
How can environmental philosophy benefit from Friedrich Nietzsche's radical critique of morality? In this paper, it is argued that Nietzsche's account of nature provides us with a challenging diagnosis of the modern crisis in our relationship with nature. Moreover, his interpretation of wildness can elucidate our concern with the value of wilderness as a place of value beyond the sphere of human intervention. For Nietzsche, wild nature is a realm where moral valuations are out of order. In his work, however, we can discern a paradoxical moral concern with this wildness. Wildness is a critical moral concept that reminds us of the fact that our moral world of human meanings and goals ultimately rests on a much grander, all-encompassing natural world. Nietzsche's concept of wildness acknowledges the value of that which cannot be morally appropriated. Wild nature confronts us with the limits of human valuing. Wildness as a concept thus introduces the 'beyond' of culture into the cultural arena of values.
Drenthen, M. (2002). Nietzsche and the Paradox of Environmental Ethics:
Nietzsche’s view of nature and morality. New Nietzsche Studies, 5 (1/2): 12-25. DOI: 10.5840/newnietzsche200251/22
A slightly different version of 'The paradox of environmental ethics' in Environmental Ethics.
Drenthen, M. (1999). The Paradox
of Environmental Ethics; Nietzsche’s View on Nature and the Wild. Environmental Ethics
21(2):
163-175.
In this paper, I offer a systematic inquiry into the significance of Nietzsche's philosophy to environmental ethics. Nietzsche's philosophy of nature is, I believe, relevant today because it makes explicit a fundamental ambiguity that is also characteristic of our current understanding of nature. I show how the current debate between traditional environmental ethics and postmodern environmental philosophy can be interpreted as a symptom of this ambiguity. I argue that, in light of Nietzsche's critique of morality, environmental ethics is a highly paradoxical project. According to Nietzsche, each moral interpretation of nature implies a conceptual seizure of power over nature. On the other hand, Nietzsche argues, the concept of nature is indispensable in ethics because we have to interpret nature in order to have a meaningful relation with reality. I show that awareness of this paradox opens a way for a form of respect for nature as radical otherness.
Interviews in English or French
Published professional publications in English
Reports
For a full list of my publications in Dutch and English, see here.
