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old debate between the philosophers fighting for the inherent value of
nature and those who insist on the subjectivity of value judgments is
losing its meaning. Value is neither objective, nor subjective, since direct
experience shows that the object to which a particular value is attributed
forms a unity with the act of evaluation itself.
But on what basis do we evaluate? In his study The Real and the Good,
Charles Brown claims to have discovered the possibility within
Husserlian phenomenology of providing a rational foundation for a
nature-based value theory. The difference between good and bad is just
as real from a phenomenological perspective as any other quality that
we experience. In contrast, the concepts of the valueless object and of
value in itself are revealed to be pure abstractions. As for the intentions
behind our values, they are proved not to be subjective and by no means
incidental either, but rather intersubjectively grounded, since their
motivation comes from the living world, which, according to Brown,
means that their biological expedience vouches for their validity: “...
good and evil does have an ontological justification: some things sustain
life, others destroy it (...) ...life is a value for itself... (...) and death,
too, is a part of the order of good life,” as he quotes Kohak.** Brown
sees the role of ecophenomenology as discovering how nature determines
the structure of phenomenological experience. It would be hard to deny
that this approach confuses the Husserlian conception of lifeworld with
a suspiciously biological understanding of the living world and that it
therefore, via a complicated phenomenological detour, arrives exactly at
the starting point of deep ecology: that the order of the good life mirrors
the order of nature.
5. Corporal contact. The Voice of the Earth.
However, “Today we no longer believe nature to be a continuous system
of this kind; a fortiori we are far removed from thinking that the islets
of “psychism” that here and there float over it are secretly connected to
one another through the continuous ground of nature. We have then
imposed upon us the task of understanding whether, and in what sense,
what is not nature forms a “world,” and first what a “world” is, and
finally, if world there is, what can be the relations between the visible
8 Charles Brown: The Real and the Good: Phenomenology and the Possibility of an
Axiological Ratonality. In: Charles Brown — Ted Toadvine eds.: Eco-Phenomenology. SUNY
Press, New York, 2003. p.13.