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Toward an Eco-ontology: A Response to Greg Garrard's Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism

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Published in the Spring 2010 issue of ISLE, Greg Garrard's provocative and polemical attack on German philosopher Martin Heidegger's alleged contributions to ecocriticism is as sweeping as it is problematic. In this response to Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism, I will argue that Garrard's dismissal is misguided because the problem is not so much Heidegger, but how he has been translated into an ecocriticaland mainly deep ecologyidiom. Rather, I claim that the young Heidegger's ontological and phenomenological concerns in Being and Time (1927) speak to what can be called an eco-ontology. The Heidegger debate is important because, since the 1980s, ecocritics have recognized afnities between Heidegger's critique of technological Enframing and deep ecologists critique of the Western domination of nature. For Heidegger, this Enframing is a setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature as a standing-reserve of resources to be exploited (Question 15). This, then, constitutes the only possible way Being can be disclosed to Da-sein (17). In turn, Da-sein itself becomes caught up in this Enframing, the implications of which Derrida would later take up in his work on animals. The antidote Heidegger prescribes for this Enframing is poetry, a stance that lets beings be themselves, free from the grip of human violence and domination. Much of Garrard's boldly-titled Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism concerns Heidegger's later (post-Being and Time) thought, with its
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.2 (Spring 2012) Advance Access publication October 6, 2011 doi:10.1093/isle/isr087 The Author(s) 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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mystifying roundabouts that frequently divert into self-helpisms more memorably encapsulated by Paul McCartney, let beings be. This leads Garrard to conclude with a hyperbolic denunciation of Heidegger's thought and its worthlessness for ecocriticism: [I]f my argument can spare even a single ecocritic the disproportionate and unrewarding effort of reading Heidegger, I will consider it vindicated (269). With the exception of reading Heidegger's lectures on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (where he takes up the question of the animal, later explored by Agamben in The Open) and his close readings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kant, among others, I agree with this conclusion. But what if Heidegger cannot be extricated from ecocritical thought? As ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment editor Scott Slovic queries in his introduction to the Spring 2010 issue, this problem drills to the core of ecocriticism's contested meanings and origins: What is ecocriticism? What are its traditions? Who are its ancestors? (245). Discussed in Garrard's article for their debt to Heidegger, such works as Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth (2000) and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: Shadows of Civilization (1992) are central to the ecocritical eld. If Heidegger does so inuence the eld, then perhaps the question becomes one of not of eliminating Heidegger, but of guring out how his thinking about ontology can be recuperated for the future of ecocriticism. Garrard, in fact, seems to be making two overlapping arguments. First, he proposes that Heidegger's thought has no value for ecocritics; indeed, it skirts the edges of fascism. The second, more nuanced argument is that only Heidegger's later thought has no value for ecocritics. Garrard acknowledges this point, though he downplays it by relegating it to a footnote: It is unfortunate, and perhaps symptomatic, that Heidegger's early philosophy of temporality, everyday at-handness, and mortality, which presents some intriguing ideas to a pragmatic ecocriticism, has been more or less wholly eclipsed by his later, far more involuted homey murmurings, as Adorno called them (269). It is telling that Garrard leverages Wittgenstein to critique Heidegger's later thought, here represented by the essay Enframing and Poetry Language Thought. In Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reication of Language, American pragmatist Richard Rorty argues that the paths of the two philosophers moved in opposite directions: the young Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, like the later Heidegger, fell prey to a Schopenhaurian urge that resulted in the reication of language (338). Wittengenstein attempted a project of transcendental semanticsof nding nonempirical conditions for the possibility of

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linguistic description (344). In short, he thought of language as a self-contained universe, positing words as things wherein the limits of our perception are the limits of language itself. The later Heidegger, of course, would also come to see Being as purely linguistic, leading to what Garrard calls his etymo-poetic style of philosophizing, in which language speaks man (263). The secrets of Being are to be found in ever more primordial meditations on the history of the word itself. As Rorty argues, the later Wittgenstein (who Garrard draws on) of Philosophical Investigations was far closer to the pragmatical young Heidegger of Being and Time (339), who formulated a Dewey-like social-practice pragmatism (348). Indeed, Being and Time, with its focus on the ready-to-hand over the present-to-hand, has been described variously as philosophical anthropology and a study of situated practical activity (Schroeder 158). For the purposes of this short response, I will only focus on some passages in the Introduction to Being and Time, where Heidegger rst poses the question of Being, and their value for ecocriticism. The whole eld of ecocriticism is fraught with ontological anxiety, for to ask what is nature is, in essence, to ask what is is? From the romantic sublime to the nave realism of nature writers like John Burroughs and Mabel Osgood Wright; from Thoreau's notion of a radically other wilderness to Marx's historical materialism; from the Nietzschean becoming of will to power to Clementsian climax ecology; from Derrida's radical questioning of all ontology and the self-presencing of entities through the mechanism of diffrance to Timothy Morton's call for a queer ecology, ontology is at the heart of all these perspectives. Heidegger's lifelong deferral of the question of Being, his often obfuscating refusal to answer it, teaches a rigorous skepticism in the face of the ontological assumptions posited in all philosophical propositions, including ecological ones. The long introduction to Being and Time elaborates the question of Being. As Aristotle stated in his Metaphysics, metaphysics (or ontology) form an inescapable horizon for all philosophical and scientic inquiry, since every proposition carries with it a metaphysical presupposition about the nature of beings and/or Being. For Heidegger, like Aristotle, there is no escaping an interpretation of Being, for whenever one cognizes anything or makes an assertion, whenever one comports oneself towards entities, even towards oneself, some use is made of Being (Being and Time 23). Being is the farthest away from our understanding precisely because it is the closest of all. But the question of Being itself envelops the questioner as an entity with a comportment towards Being, and therefore

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always already presupposes an interpretation of Being in a hermeneutic circle (2425). Heidegger cuts through this circularity with a highly self-reexive, relatedness backward or forward mode of inquiryone that repeatedly boomerangs back to the questioner and the formal structure of the question itself (28). As Heidegger argues, the implications of ontology for science are profound: the real movement of the sciences takes place when their basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision which is transparent to itself. The level which a science has reached is determined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In such immanent crises the very relationship between positively investigative inquiry and those things themselves that are under interrogation comes to a point where it begins to totter. Among the various disciplines everywhere today there are freshly awakened tendencies to put research on new foundations (29). He goes on to cite mathematics, physics, biology (the shift from mechanism to vitalism), history, literature, and theology (3031). Here, Heidegger's question of Being and its application to the sciences is akin to notions of paradigm shift and epistemic break. To use an example from ecology, botanist Frederick Clements's climax ecology owes its ontology to late-nineteenth-century notions of holism and organicism. For Clements, each organism in a plant formation functions like an organ within a super-organism the totality of the formation itself. Through the metaphysical presupposition of the super-organism, Clementsian ecology ascribes a false agency and stability to the formationclosely related to temporalityin which the super-organism, in a sense, grows up and reaches a climax stage of development. In another example, British botanist A. G. Tansley's 1935 elaboration of the ecosystem concept substituted the idea of nature as a stable formation or super-organism for a rigorously materialist ontology that, at the same time, argued that natural processes are systemic and coherent. Drawing on thermodynamics and systems theory, he brought together biotic and abiotic, organic and inorganic elements of a formation in accounting for the energy ow within a system. Donald Worster explains: all relations among organisms can be described in terms of the purely material exchange of energy and of such chemical substances as water, phosphorous, nitrogen, and other nutrients (302). As a result, this materialist ontology allows ecologists to think of systems as systemici.e. having some kind of orderwithout arbitrarily closing them off and positing a nonmaterialist, transcendent entity (i.e. the totality of the Clementsian super-organism).

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In a similar spirit to this response, ecocritic Timothy Morton returns, indirectly, to ontological questions in his recent call for a queer ecology. In his guest column in the March 2010 PMLA, Morton begins with the ontological task of building up ecocriticism from the foundations (or unfoundations) (273). Combining insights drawn from Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva with Darwinian and molecular biology, he shows that if anything, life is catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative. Queering ecological criticism will involve engaging with these qualities (275). Likewise, grappling with Heidegger could, I think, aid a more self-reexive, much-needed ontological skepticism on the part of ecocritics and push us towards a historically grounded elaboration of eco-ontologies. In the end, Garrard's polemic raises key questions about ecocritical traditions and their attempt to make Heidegger disappear, but ecocriticism can still benet from the young Heidegger of Being and Time, who asked the ontological question so forcefully.

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WORKS CITED
Garrard, Greg. Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (2010): 25171. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Print. . The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Print. Morton, Timothy. Guest Column: Queer Ecology. PMLA 125.2 (2010): 27382. Print. Rorty, Richard. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reication of Language. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles B. Guignon. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print. Schroeder, William R. Continental Philosophy: A Critical Approach. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Slovic, Scott. Editor's Note. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (2010): 24548. Print. Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: The Roots of Ecology. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977. Print.