My PhD research project at the Center for Ethics of the University of Nijmegen (supervised by prof.dr. Paul van Tongeren and prof. dr. Hub Zwart) resulted in a dissertation (in Dutch), that has appeared in print at Damon publishers:
My PhD research project at the Center for Ethics of the University of Nijmegen (supervised
by prof.dr. Paul van Tongeren and prof. dr. Hub Zwart)
resulted in a dissertation (in Dutch), that
has appeared in print at Damon publishers:
Bordering Wildness.
On the Significance of Nietzsche's critique of Morality for Environmental Ethics
(In Dutch: Grenzen aan wildheid. Wildernisverlangen en de betekenis van Nietzsches moraalkritiek voor de actuele milieu-ethiek.)
Budel:
Damon, 2003, 320 pages, ISBN 90 5573 404 7,
Click here for an English summary or here
for the full-text version in pdf (Webdoc - University Library
Nijmegen).
Older project description:
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.
