Against what?

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumAgainst what? Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Philippe DescolaPhilippe DescolaCollège de France Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBecause of its vagueness, the idea of nature has been the main prop in a series of dichotomies which constitute the building blocks of the history of Western thought: nature/culture, nature/artifice, nature/art, nature/history, nature/mind, natural/supernatural, etc. However, as Heidegger remarked, nature has been much more than the basic term of a series of antithetical notions: in all those distinctions it functions as an encompassing totality defining the very characteristics of each of the notions it opposes (Heidegger 1968). What is distinguished from nature receives its determination from it, so that most metaphysical themes appear to draw their existence from an endeavor to transcend a notion which, in itself, has very little meaning. With her distinctive elegance of style and clarity of expression, Lorraine Daston explores one of these couplings, the one whereby moral norms receive their determination from an appeal to nature. According to Daston, this “naturalistic fallacy”—which consists in ascribing moral values to natural phenomena so as to claim nature’s authority when it comes to sustain the superiority, even the infallibility, of these values—prevails “in many different cultures and epochs” (p. 3), and it does so because the need for a normativity of social life is efficiently buttressed by various forms of order encountered in the observation of nature.Daston identifies three main modalities of this phenomenal orderliness—specific, local, and universal—which she describes in as many chapters. Specific natures refer to the ontological identity card of natural species, the fact that they appear to persist in their being and reproduce their identity at each generation, an idea which corresponds to the original sense of the word phusis in Greek, later translated as “nature,” the first occurrence of which, in the Odyssey, designates the properties of a plant, that which makes it what it is (Homer 1919: 381). The orderliness of local natures is more subjective and rests on the experience of places: it lies in the sense of adequacy one feels between a specific milieu and its specific inhabitants; and it translates into various scholarly traditions, whether Hippocratic medicine, Montesquieu’s theory of the influence of climate on institutions, or Haeckel’s Ökologie. Universal nature, finally, is a construct of the European scientific revolution and it comes about when celestial mechanics becomes the reigning science and imposes the philosophical idea that the world is subjected to uniform and inviolable laws, a form of universal legality with strong roots in theology and obvious moral consequences, politically enforced in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America (1776) and in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French revolutionary assembly of 1789.Thanks to its conciseness and to the forcefulness with which the main argument is pursued, Against nature is the best antidote I have read against the natural fallacy in general. Daston’s book even goes beyond this necessary critical function by providing the clearest summary available of the conceptual entanglements of the multiple senses of the idea of nature and of their applications in various domains. Having taught philosophy for a brief period in the French school system (where this topic is part of the last year of secondary education), I would have welcomed such a book to help me and my pupils navigate along the polysemous channels of the notion of nature, one of the themes on the program, and the political, and polemical, uses it can lend itself to. But I am a philosopher no more, at least technically, and it is as an anthropologist that I will make a few comments on Against nature.Anthropology has a strange status in the book. To begin, the book claims to be an exercise in philosophical anthropology, which the author contrasts with the cultural anthropology, or history, of a particular time and place. This dissociation between a comparative endeavor, qualified as a “philosophical” form of anthropology, and the ethnography of a particular culture, dubbed as “cultural anthropology,” does not render justice to the fact that, from the start, that is, for scholars such as Morgan, Tylor, or Frazer, social and cultural anthropology was a comparative science fueled by ethnography (and ancient history). Perhaps Daston’s claim to practice philosophical anthropology rather than cultural anthropology is an effect of another division still very common in German universities between, on the one hand, Philosophische Anthropologie, a branch of philosophy concerned with the variety of human experience and illustrated by such prominent figures as Helmuth Plessner or Arnold Gehlen, and, on the other hand, Volkskunde, or ethnology proper (with an origin in the study of European folklore), focused on the ethnographic knowledge acquired through fieldwork and practiced nowadays under the name Kulturanthropologie in departments and institutes bearing that appellation. Contrary to what happened in Great Britain, France, and the United States, where eminent field ethnologists did not waver in propounding philosophical generalizations, in German universities the two domains of expertise remained split for a long time between different trainings, departments, and careers.Whether this epistemological divide has influenced Daston or not, her anthropological approach is avowedly restricted to European conceptualizations of nature, from ancient Greece onwards, in spite of her initial claim that the naturalistic fallacy is common to “many different cultures and epochs.” There is only one reference in the whole book to a non-European concept that might serve as an equivalent to the Greek phusis, that of dharma in Sanskrit texts where it stands for the causal essence of each kind of being, prompting it to act “according to its nature.” And it is true that concepts that bear some resemblance to phusis taken in that sense of the innate property of a class of being—Daston’s “specific natures”—may be encountered in Far Eastern religious and scholarly traditions (see Chinese and Japanese examples in the respective contributions by Geoffrey Lloyd, Anne Cheng, and Jean-Noël Robert in Descola 2018). However, the European concept of nature, as it was progressively constructed through the centuries with its multilayered senses, is a cultural singularity, strictly untranslatable in non-European languages and systems of ideas. And the cosmology which endows nature with a crucial role in the ontological distribution of beings is even more exotic, as it is the only one which neatly distinguishes humans from nonhumans, physical regularities from social conventions, cosmic destiny from political affairs. It thus lends itself to the kinds of correspondence between two discrete domains that Daston so skillfully explores.True, the peculiarity of this “naturalist” ontology, as I have come to call it, is acknowledged in passing by Daston when she refers to my claim that non-Western traditions freely interweave elements of the natural and moral orders without conceptualizing them as separate domains (Descola 2013). But that admission surely warrants that the naturalist fallacy should be seen as a parochial episode within a truly cosmopolitan history of ideas (yet to be written), an episode worthy of scholarly investigation, no doubt, but hardly a general tendency detectable in “many different cultures and epochs.” Anyhow, the concession to ontological pluralism made by Daston is quickly dismissed on the next page when she writes, without providing a shred of evidence, “Even cultures that do not categorically distinguish the natural from the human … use aspects of the natural order to figure the moral order” (p. 59). But for this to be feasible, there must exist a perceptible “natural order” hypostasized as an independent domain of legality, opposed to a “moral order” which would foreground the legality of custom, an opposition which, as Daston knows better than anyone, has a specific history beginning in Greece in the fifth century BC with the polemical use of the contrast between phusis and nomos to determine what is a proper behavior. Hardly a universal, then.In fact, a sort of counterfactual history of the naturalistic fallacy could be written in which, instead of positing an imaginary cause to sustain a hypothetical conclusion, one would substitute the facts which Daston adduces by other facts taken from the ethnographic record, so as to support totally different consequences. I will take only one example, the idea that nature would universally provide the evidence of order. If we call “nature” a series of observable physical regularities in domains which appear to lack an anthropic imprint, then it can be shown that most human collectives will adopt toward the elements of this construct very different attitudes than those that Daston pinpoints in her analysis of the naturalist fallacy where nature is an obvious representation of order.In many parts of the world, particularly in Africa, a breach of prescribed behavior is said to cause climatic catastrophes: an incest, a perjury, a neglect of the ancestors, will bring about droughts, floods, or torrential rains. This is not because a moral order is predicated on meteorological cycles, but, on the contrary, because human conduct is paired with the behavior of a variety of nonhuman entities, whether animals, deities, celestial bodies, malevolent spirits, or meteors, within a sociocosmic whole where every event in one sector reverberates in another sector. These kinds of correspondence provide the basis of Hippocratic medicine, and of the theory of signatures, of astrology, of all kinds of divinatory systems, and of many forms of analogical linkages between macrocosm and microcosm as well as between colors, sites, periods of the year, or social functions; but they do not imply the existence of a transcendent natural order observable under different guises that would provide a template for an equally transcendent moral order.It is even doubtful that, as Daston claims, natural and moral orders should be universal preconditions of the social life of humans. When evoking the role of “specific natures”—the like generating the like—in the stabilization of our experience, she asserts that we can barely imagine a world without them; a world “in which everything would constantly be morphing into everything else,” a world where “what a thing is would be no guide to what it was and will be” (p. 14). But such worlds do exist, right now. They are the worlds of animist ontologies (in Amazonia, in northern North America, in Siberia, in some parts of Southeast Asia) where the appearance of a being tells little about its real identity because souls move freely between corporeal clothing, and metamorphosis becomes precisely the experimentum crucis of intersubjective exchanges between human and nonhuman persons. Seen from Kant’s point of view, no doubt that these worlds look disquieting, though obviously lots of peoples have gotten used to them.They have gotten used also to the lack of a social order as we understand it: that is, implicitly, the order enforced by a state apparatus, whatever the form of the said state, in particular through the exercise of legitimate violence to maintain civil peace. Hobbes’s Leviathan lurks in the background when Daston writes “endless civil war is a greater calamity than the most oppressive dictatorship” (p. 45). Perhaps it is, for those among us who believe in the existence of Nature, but for those who don’t, in Amazonia for instance, it is not. Although we may see constant feuding as a nightmare, I can testify out of personal observation that some peoples who live in that state do not experience it as such. In such societies some kind of order does exist in pockets of normativity—you must marry your cross-cousin, you must repay a gift, you must avenge an offence; but these norms, sometimes disregarded, do not present themselves as part of an overarching pattern that could be derived from the observation of regularities in the surroundings.I am sufficiently acquainted with Lorraine Daston, both her work and her person, to know that she is not only one of the major figures in a brand of the history of sciences that is broadly anthropological, but also that she is the exact opposite of a Eurocentric bigot (and I have crossed swords with a few of them). So where does the problem lie? Perhaps it is a question of vocabulary. Some might counter the argument that nature is hardly a cross-cultural concept with a claim that the lack of a term does not imply the lack of a conception of what the term denotes. Some anthropologists do confuse, for instance, the lack of a word for “time” with the lack of an experience of duration. But such an argument does not work with “nature,” which is a local cosmological concept the relevance of which is no more universal than, say, mana or hau. The problem is rather that “nature,” along with other basic concepts we use in the social sciences, such as “society,” “history,” “culture,” or “art,” carry so much historical weight with them that they automatically transform the non-Western local phenomena that they designate by making them look like Western ones. It is not only a question of decolonizing our concepts, it is also a question of survival for an anthropology, whether “philosophical” or “cultural and social,” which has yet to reckon with ontological pluralism.ReferencesDescola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———, ed. 2018. Les natures en question. Paris: Collège de France & Odile Jacob.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHeidegger, Martin. 1968. “Ce qu’est et comment se détermine la physis.” In Questions II. Translated by Kostas Axelos, et al. Paris: Gallimard.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHomer. 1919. Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPhilippe Descola is emeritus professor at the Collège de France. He initially specialized in the ethnology of Amazonia, focusing on the relations of native societies with their environment. Besides his field research with Achuar people of Ecuador, he has published extensively on cross-cultural comparisons of the relations between humans and nonhumans. Among his books in English are In the society of nature (Cambridge University Press, 1994), The spears of twilight (Flamingo, 1996), Beyond nature and culture (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and The ecology of others (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013). He is a foreign member of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Philippe Descola[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716594 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.