Abstract
This paper provides a brief critique of anthropocentrism and introduces the papers of the special theme issue on “non-anthropocentric conceptions of nature.”
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Notes
The Economist, “Robochop: An automated jellyfish exterminator takes to sea.” October 19, 2013.
The word “subhuman” has been applied to both animals (especially primates) and indigenous people. Throughout this Introduction, we use it with purposeful ambiguity as a catch-all derogatory concept that has, in different contexts, targeted nonhumans and human beings. See Williams (2012).
Rodman (1980). The focus on Western anthropocentrism is warranted by the present-day world dominance of Western culture and by the fact that this culture has a long historical legacy of anthropocentric orientation toward the natural world. Two qualifications are in order: One, anthropocentrism is not a monopoly of Western societies; and two, there have been intellectual currents and subcultures within the Western world that have opposed it.
“Worldviews lay down the framework of fundamental concepts within which we interpret everything that appears in the world in a specific way as something.” Further down, citing anthropologist Robin Horton, Habermas describes worldviews as “regulat[ing] our dealings with external reality, with what can be perceived or handled in the objective world, in such a way as to exclude alternatives” (Habermas 1984). Given the immense breadth of actions toward and uses of the natural world that anthropocentrism can legitimate and guide, its characterization as a worldview seems amply justified.
Heidegger (1977). For Heidegger the era of modern techno-science inaugurated the age of the world picture. He writes that “world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth” (129–130, emphases added). From an ecological perspective what Heidegger’s words point toward is that the post-Enlightenment colonization of the biosphere is simultaneously representational and physical. As the natural world’s ontology is remade, the remaking as such is reified within the collective’s experience.
Debord (2006).
Horkheimer and Adorno (1972).
It must be added, however, that obliviousness to ecological mayhem is still epidemic. As British environmental journalist George Monbiot wryly notes, people continue to “live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic [of the destruction of Earth’s living systems] that demands our attention” (Monbiot 2014).
Never mind that the explosion of jellyfish numbers is a consequence of the ecological havoc civilized humanity has wreaked in the oceans.
Turner (2014).
Berardi (2009).
References
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Theory of communicative action, vol. 1, 58–63. Boston: Beacon Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The age of world picture.” In The question concerning technology and other essays, ed. William Lovitt, 115–154. New York: Harper & Row.
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Jack Turner. 2014. “Not on any map,” Interviewed by Leath Tonino, 4–14. The Sun.
Monbiot, George. 2014. The impossibility of growth. Kings Place: The Guardian.
Rodman, John. 1980. Paradigm change in political science: An ecological perspective. American Behavioral Scientist 24(1): 49–78.
Williams, Robert. 2012. Savages Anxieties: The invention of Western Civilization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Crist, E., Kopnina, H. Unsettling anthropocentrism. Dialect Anthropol 38, 387–396 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9362-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9362-1