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What must I do (and why me)? | 85
quotes Heidegger from the Essence of Truth, which he explains thus: “...
To be free in Heidegger’s sense of the term means to free that which is
other, to disclose the world in a way that preserves and safeguards its
difference. (...) Use and predation in themselves are neither unwarranted
nor illegitimate as long as we understand the origin of human freedom
and dignity to lie not in the mastery and possession of beings, but in
the witnessing of their Being.” Not for nothing did the moral obligation
inherent in man’s essential determination to be “the shepherd of being”
attract those aiming to establish eco-ethics. Yet most of them still
shrank from assuming intellectual kinship with the German philosopher
tainted by Nazism, who, moreover, stood as far as possible from the
views of the bioegalitarians who treat man as a natural being. (Deep
Ecology has already been descried by its opponents as anti-human and
anti-progress and Murray Bookchin, the father of social ecology,
condemns Naess himself for what he sees as views tending towards
confused nature-mysticism.)
Heidegger was not the only classic of phenomenology, however, who
had a serious impact on ecophilosophy. The authors in conflict with the
dominant scientific worldview were inspired primarily by Husserl’s
program: the “return to things” (which, of course, they gladly interpreted
as “return to nature”). The examination of direct experience free from
metaphysical prejudices promised for them the demolition of the iron
curtain between the two worlds of real but value-free facts and
respectworthy but only subjectively valid values — and this without
having to fall into the naturalistic fallacy often described by Anglo¬
Saxon philosophers. This phenomenological examination does not aim
to conclude to value-preferences from experience. Rather, it sees the
latter as one of the necessary preconditions of the former. Its starting
point is that to even perceive objects, we necessarily have to perceive
them as some kind of things. They become things in the context of a
world already full of meaning and laden with values. No object exists
without thought directed towards it, identifying the object and making
distinctions, just as there is no thought not directed towards something.
It is our direct and real experience that the two belong together. It is
this that is hidden by the naive objectivism of the scientific worldview:
“Rather than risk contaminating the vaunted objectivity of its
judgements with the alleged objectivity of value, Western thought
6 Leslie Paul Thiele did. pp.133-34. Thiele op.ibid. pp.182, 184.
8 On this see e.g., Zimmermann: Rethinking the Heidegger — Deep Ecology Relationship.
Environmental Ethics 15.2. 1983.