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What must I do (and why me)? | 87 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.
