Jim Cheney
Truth, Knowledge,
and the Wild World
One ought not to put too much stock in the word
‘philosophy’. . . . [T]here are
alternative ways of intelligently engaging the world. To construe one’s
thinking in terms of belief is characteristic of a particular kind of world
view and it remains to be seen whether those who share an indigenous world view
conceive of experience in such an overtly intellectualized manner.
—Leroy N. Meyer and
Tony Ramirez
Wilderness treats me like a human being.
—Tom
Birch
As Holmes Rolston, III has said, “A
principal characteristic of human life is that it develops into biography. In
that sense, humans do not want their values in nature, any more than they want
other goods in life, to come seriatim, like beads on a string. . . . Humans
want a storied residence in nature where the passage of time integrates past,
present, and future in a meaningful career.”
This is what I had hoped for: a narrative of storied residence in Midwest
prairie, lake, and river country, and in the mountains and deserts of Idaho,
with the history of the development of an environmental ethic (or ethos) left
largely implicit within that larger narrative, leaving readers to reflect as
they may on the philosophical dimensions of the journey. To leave traditional
philosophical modes of expression completely behind proved impossible (for
now), but it has been for me a worthwhile exercise to locate my reflections on
“truth, knowledge, and the wild world” in something of a narrative form. It is
the lakes and rivers, prairies, mountains, and deserts that have remained
implicit. They have cast their spell, however, on any attempt to impose
cultural order on the relationship between truth, knowledge, and the wild
world.
I
Looking back on it, it seems that my entire
philosophical career has been implicated—in one way or another, directly and
indirectly—in these two questions: “How important is truth to knowledge and
epistemology?” and “What is the role of natural environments in the production
of knowledge?” Furthest back, at the very origin of my philosophical life,
reflections on philosophical knowledge were inevitably posed and thought about
in natural environments, particularly in my meditations as I drifted in the
early morning mist on the St. Croix River and several Minnesota lakes,
especially Cedar Lake. Even now, when I am trying to make my way to a new
understanding of some philosophical issue, I walk along the shores of Lake
Michigan and the Milwaukee River, or sit by rivers and lakes in Idaho, a place
that became my second home after meeting my partner, Fran. Northern White
Cedars stand in our yard, front and back; Western Red Cedar holds our house in its
embrace.
There is no question in my mind that natural
environments are the deepest sources of whatever philosophical understandings I
may have come to. In terms of formal studies, however, the question of the role
of natural environments in the production of knowledge did not emerge for me
until, well into my teaching career, I discovered the newly-emerging field of environmental
ethics. It was at that point that the deepest wellspring of my philosophy and
my life came together with my professional philosophical interests—in an uneasy
balance. Until that time, as I think of it now, my philosophical track through
the curious environment of the academy, however well it prepared me to think
about central issues in environmental ethics, was mostly marked by a
fascination with glittering baubles and gemstones and did not truly touch the
soil, water, and atmosphere of my life.
Questions of truth, knowledge, and epistemology took
center stage from the beginning of my formal philosophical studies. As an
undergraduate at Berkeley, Thompson Clarke introduced me (in three courses) to
the sceptical implications of Ordinary Language Philosophy that had escaped the
attention of J. L. Austin and others. This baptism into the rigors of sceptical
philosophy left me pretty much convinced, as my partner and I packed our bags
and headed for the University of Wisconsin—Madison for graduate school, that
the quest for truth about the world was a nonstarter. Convinced—for a time,
until other riches of the philosophical life revealed themselves—that the study
of philosophy could be no more than a study of the history of ideas, getting
acquainted with grand ideas and world views, I resolved to begin with the great
religions of the Orient—Hinduism and Buddhism in particular—studying them
through the heart and mind of the great M_dhyamika scholar, Richard Robinson,
then teaching in the East Asian Studies department in Madison. These studies
were cut short by Robinson’s untimely death, but not before I had encountered
the remarkable analyses of the Buddhist dialectician N_g_rjuna, who had argued
with much force that all statements (his own included) lacked svabh_va
(“self-existent reality”—in this case, loosely translated, “truth”), and Edward
Conze’s observation that
the metaphysical statements of Buddhism—e.g., an_tman (no self) and prat_tya
samutp_da (“dependent co-origination”)—were not to be understood as
expressing true beliefs about the world, but rather were to be taken as edifying
views, views which, if accepted within the context of Buddhist practice, would
be conducive to achieving liberation from the wheel of birth and death.
At the same time, I introduced myself to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
(with its notion of “forms of life” and its linking of meaning and use) and
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution (which delinked the
concepts of “truth” and “scientific progress”). These early encounters, East
and West, certainly served to convince me to set aside any simple answers to
questions of the relationship between truth, knowledge, and epistemology.
Later, at the beginning of my teaching career, these thoughts concerning truth,
knowledge, and epistemology were pulled together for me as I listened with a
sense of liberation to Nelson Goodman argue that “defeat and confusion are
built into the notions of truth and certainty and knowledge.” Rather than
attempt to pry these concepts away from their historic Western uses, Goodman
shifted his focus from truth to rightness, from certainty to adoption,
and from knowledge to understanding.
Only very much later did I begin to follow a different
path leading off from J. L. Austin’s work as I began to comprehend—while
canoeing on Lottit Lake, nestled in the deep embrace of three billion year old
Canadian Shield granite in northwestern Ontario—the force of Austin’s emphasis
on performative uses of language. I had long since found my way to the
newly-emerging field of environmental ethics and a philosophical understanding
of my childhood intuitions concerning the connection between land and
knowledge. Luck
introduced me, during this time on the Canadian Shield (1996-7), to some of the
very-much-alive Indian philosophy of Native North America, an introduction
that—through acquaintance with day-to-day practices and oral teachings at many
long lunches—confirmed me in some of my philosophical headings and subtly and
powerfully changed such understanding of American Indians as I had picked up through the written word.
This confluence of a performative understanding of language and acquaintance
with a living Indian philosophy braided together, for me, questions of truth,
knowledge, and epistemology with questions of the role of natural environments
in the genesis of knowledge.
Though the philosophical journey I recount in the
following sections both begins, and continues to concern itself throughout,
with ethics, the reader will note that the two kinds of epistemological
questions I have cited as central to my philosophical life are at the heart of
the ethical concerns I now explore. Indeed, some link between
epistemology and value theory (as well as narrative) is inevitable, given the
now commonplace understanding that so-called facts are theory laden, theory is
value laden, and values, as Donna Haraway has put it, are “story laden.”
II
During the time I was bringing my first paper in
environmental philosophy to a close, I took a bus to Bowling Green, Ohio to
listen to Holmes Rolston, III deliver a remarkable paper subtitled “Storied
Fitness in the Moral Observer.”
Following Carol Gilligan’s understanding that in an ethic of care that tends
closely to the nurturing of what I call “defining relations” between people—a
defining relationship is a relationship with something or someone that is at
least partly definitive of one’s understanding of who one is—the resolution of
a moral dilemma follows its “compelling representation” in highly
contextualized narrative form,
I had written:
Just as an answer to the question of what one’s
responsibilities are to one’s friend is a highly contextual matter involving a
detailed understanding of the precise threads of connectedness and intimacy
involved, so an answer to what might be our moral relationship to the nonhuman
environment depends upon (1) a complex understanding of what it is to be a
human being, what it is to respond to another human being as a human
being . . . , and (2) an understanding of how those complex webs of
relationships that constitute the human moral community might expand to include
the nonhuman. This sort of expansion of the moral community is . . . a matter
of trying to come to an understanding of what it might mean to care, to respond
to something in the nonhuman environment as a member of one’s moral community.
I know that defining relations to the land are the deepest sources of
knowledge for the indigenous inhabitants of North America, and this connection
between land and knowledge, mediated by defining relations to the land, became,
with this first paper, a recurring thread in my thoughts about environmental
philosophy and ethics. Rolston’s comments in Bowling Green, however, took me in
another direction, beginning a second recurring thread of thought concerned
with the relation between truth, knowledge and epistemology. These two threads
became more and more intertwined as my thoughts about environmental philosophy
became more deeply influenced by indigenous philosophy.
I had concluded my paper by saying: “To contextualize
ethical deliberation is . . . to provide a narrative, or story, from which the
solution to the ethical dilemma emerges as [a] fitting conclusion.”
It was with this notion of narratively contextualized ethical deliberation that
Rolston’s words resonated. (In appreciation of Rolston’s words, which both
confirmed and extended my thoughts, I then decided to end my paper with words
from his paper.) I received two gifts from Rolston on that occasion, each an
aspect of what he calls “storied residence,” extensions of Gilligan’s thought
to environmental ethics: (1) The notion of the idiographic dimension of
an environmental ethic:
An ethics should be rational, but rationality inhabits
a historical system. The place that is to be counted morally has a history; the
ethics that befits such a place will take on historical form; the ethics will
itself have a history. . . . Under [this] idiographic focus, ethical concern
will be directed toward historical particulars, with minimal appeal to types or
universals.
and (2) The notion of a narrative track through the world that is at once
epistemological, evaluative, and descriptive:
The rationality of the ethic, as well as the area to
be mapped, will be historical. . . . The move from is to ought .
. . is transformed into movement along a story line.
If an idiographic focus is central to both environmental knowledge and
to an environmental ethic, then defining relations to place are surely central
elements in the production of this environmental/ethical
knowledge. The narrative move from is to ought certainly thickens
one’s conception of truth in relation to knowledge (and has implications for
epistemology as well). I think of it this way. Ecosystem descriptions have
normative force within the context of human love of, and care and respect for,
the land community and the sense of healthy community functioning which it
exemplifies. Indeed, this love, care, and respect is implicit in the so-called
descriptions themselves. The land community, under certain ecological
“descriptions,” is a moral community. This way of putting the matter is
somewhat misleading, however. It suggests that values come first and dictate
the ways in which we describe the world. Might we not turn this around and say
that ecological descriptions of the land community exert a pull on values
insofar as they locate human life within the life of the land community? That
ecological descriptions, as they change, force us to rewrite accounts of human
existence, value, and moral community? Better, perhaps, if we think instead of
the co-evolution (and ultimate inseparability) of values and description.
Gilligan’s articulation of the narrative dimension of
an ethic of care and Rolston’s notion of “storied residence” certainly cooled
my interest in the focus on ethical and ontological abstractions in much of
environmental philosophy.
(It is a curious fact that my first thoughts
concerning the idiographic importance of place in environmental ethics should
have come to a focus in what for me was a nonplace, what Wendell
Berry would call an “abstract” place: My short stay in Bowling Green consisted
in walking a few blocks back and forth along an edge-of-town tourist business
strip between motel and conference site. Unreal. Far from home, in a place that
was for me no place at all, the notion of storied residence came
vibrantly alive. —Perhaps not so
unusual, however strange: Much of environmental philosophy, it seems to me, expresses
a kind of yearning for home.)
Thinking about the narrative and idiographic
dimensions of ethical deliberation suggested that those ethicists who find it
appealing to first construct a “metaphysic of morals” that is consonant with
contemporary ecological thought (as well as with contemporary high-energy
physics) and, secondly and derivatively, construct an environmental ethic
consonant with this “metaphysics of morals” had erroneously privileged
metaphysics over epistemology. That is to say, it began to seem that one’s
idiographic and narrative track through the world is structured in part by what
might be called an ur-epistemology which is at the same time an ur-ethic. The
“world” one lives within, if this is so, is given shape and texture by this
ur-epistemology/ur-ethic. This ethic/epistemology, in dynamic reciprocity with
experience, gives rise to the “world” within which one lives.
Karen Warren and I worked on one aspect of this issue
in an exploration of methodological issues raised by hierarchy theory in
contemporary biology:
As a methodological stance, hierarchy theory rejects
the view that there is only one way to describe ecological phenomena. Which
description is appropriate will depend upon the observation set and on what it
is one is attempting to describe, explain, or predict. In this respect,
hierarchy theory privileges methodological and epistemological considerations
over ontology, the attempt to specify what is “really” in the world. The
ontology embedded in both explanation and phenomena being explained is always a
function of the appropriate observation set. Any grand attempt to provide one
metaphysics of morals seems doomed because misguided: it puts the metaphysical/
ontological cart before the epistemological/methodological horse.
The strategy of constructing an environmental ethic on the basis of a
prior delineation of a metaphysics of morals also puts the ontological cart
before at lease one critically important ethical horse—which I elaborate
on presently, but first a word about words and world .
In my early “Postmodern Environmental Ethics” I
suggested that “The truth of ‘It’s language all the way down’ must be
understood in light of the equal truth of ‘It’s world all the way up’.”
Ten years later Anthony Weston and I found better words:
Contrary to the
emphasis some place on the constructed nature of the worlds we live in,
reflected in the catch phrase “It’s words all the way down,” we suggest a very
different emphasis: “It’s world all the way up”. . . .
The
poet Robert Bringhurst speaks of poetry as “knowing freed from the agenda of
possession and control.” He understands poetry as “knowing in the sense of
stepping in tune with being, hearing and echoing the music and heartbeat of
being.”
A friend [Irene Klaver] says of Indian Paintbrush—a plant we know well from the
American West—that it “speaks the soil.” Similarly, language is most
fundamentally an expression of the world—it “speaks the world.” Language is
rooted in being, rooted in the world as are we who speak forth that world in
our language. Our language is a mode of interaction with, and hence a mode of
knowing, that world. Knowing can take shape as a form of domination and
control. It can also take shape as a way of “stepping in tune with being.”
Though the
epistemologies of modernism detached themselves from the world—treating the
nonhuman world and even the human world as objects of domination and
control—and though the postmodern view of language and self (the self as
solipsistic maker of worlds) to a large extent reflects this detachment, we and
our languages are fundamentally of the world. Before they convey
information, before they are assertions with “truth values,” our words are a welling
up of the world. The more-than-human world bursts forth in multiple songs of
the world—human songs in a more-than-human world, songs rooted in, and
expressive of, that world. They carry the power and energy of that world.
Multiple accounts of the world suggest the constructed
and physically- as well as culturally-situated nature of knowledge at the
intersection of self and nonhuman world, self and human culture, and the
necessity of taking responsibility for positioned knowledge (precisely because
it is positioned rather than abstract knowledge that is simply and
universally true).
Multiple accounts suggest as well that multiple epistemologies are at work in
the construction of knowledge, as I have indicated above in connection with
hierarchy theory in the biological sciences. Physical and cultural contexts
leave their mark on epistemologies. The locatability of knowledge and the
accountability associated with this locatability further suggests that an ethic
(or “ur”-ethic) is at least implicit in our epistemic encounters with the
world. Thus, for example, an ethic of control is embedded in the
epistemological model of the controlled experiment, whereas an ethic of
nonmanipulative attentiveness is embodied in the epistemological model
suggested by the science of phenology.
Knowledge as expression of the world at the
intersection of the human and the nonhuman also suggests the necessity and
importance of acknowledging nature’s participation in the construction of
knowledge. The idea is basically Bateson’s:
[A]ny ongoing ensemble of events and
objects which has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the
appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics. It will compare,
that is, be responsive to difference. . . . It will “process
information” and will inevitably be self-corrective either toward homeostatic
optima or toward the maximization of certain variables. . . . [N]o part of such
an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder
or over any other part. The mental characteristics are inherent or immanent in
the ensemble as a whole. . . . The network is not bounded by the skin
but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. It also
includes those effective differences which are immanent in the “objects” of
such information. It includes the pathways of sound and light along which
travel transforms of differences originally immanent in things and other
people—and especially in our own actions.
Mind inheres in nature. I like the way the Zen Buddhist philosopher D_gen and the poet Gary
Snyder put it:
“Whoever told people
that ‘Mind’ means thoughts, opinions, ideas, and concepts? Mind means trees,
fence posts, tiles, and grasses,” says D_gen . . . in his funny cryptic way.
In one of his talks
D_gen said: “To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is
delusion. But myriad things coming forth and experiencing themselves is
awakening.” Applying this to language theory, I think it suggests that when
occidental logos-oriented philosophers uncritically advance language as a
unique human gift which serves as the organizer of the chaotic universe—it is a
delusion. The subtle and many-layered cosms of the universe have found their
own way into symbolic structure and have given us thousands of tawny
human-language grammars.
To say “It’s world all the way up” rather than “It’s words all the way
down” is liberating. It frees us to listen rather than merely impose our
will on nature. To stress listening is not to suggest a passive epistemological
relationship to the world. To listen to the world is an active process, a way
of engaging the world every bit as active and reciprocal as listening to a
friend in order to know her better.
One of the central themes of my “Postmodern
Environmental Ethics” is the thought that the central role of natural
environments in the production of knowledge is to reduce the parochial element
of human knowledge. Relying heavily on the work of Paul Shepard in Nature
and Madness, I argued that only by enlarging the scope of our
conversational partners to include the natural environment in which we live can
we envision the possibility of reaching the “transcendental limits” of our
necessarily parochial knowledge. I have in mind, here, Sabina Lovibond's
distinction between “transcendental parochialism” and “empirical parochialism.”
She recommends an “anti-ascetic philosophy . . . compelling our
recognition of the bodily aspect of knowledge” in which our beliefs and
concerns “will necessarily be the beliefs [and concerns] of creatures with a
certain physical constitution and a certain ecological location.” Acceptance of
this view, in turn,
amounts to an acquiescence in what we might describe
as a ‘transcendental parochialism’: a
renunciation of the (ascetically-motivated) impulse to escape from the
conceptual scheme to which, as creatures with a certain kind of body and
environment, we are transcendentally related. . . . [However,] as long as we
can form the concrete conception of a less arbitrary description of the
world—as long as we can find other rational persons or communities, by
reference to whose world-view new symptoms of (empirical) parochialism in our
own world-view can be identified—there will still be ground to cover in order
to emancipate ourselves from such parochialism.
What Shepard adds to Lovibond’s argument is the idea
that if we test our world-views only against those of other human
communities, we are far from emancipating ourselves from “empirical
parochialism.” Indeed, the brunt of his argument is that we, in our very nature
as homo sapiens sapiens, are so deeply embedded in the natural world
around us that only by renewing sustained communication with the geo- and
biological world which made us the beings we are through long stretches of
evolutionary time can we escape an ever-increasing descent into what we might
call “species autism.” Again: What we become in our modern isolation from the
world which gave us birth as the species we are, in our insistence that we
are the knowers and the nonhuman world is merely the object of our
knowing, is an autistic version of what we are when we engage in active and
reciprocal communication with the world around us. What the natural world provides
(and what we can come to understand and emulate only through sustained
communication with that world) is the fullest, most complete model of health
and well-being available to us as the ecologically embodied creatures we are.
If we draw a circle around our existence as humans and draw our models of
health and well-being only from within this human circle, we effectively cut
ourselves off from the source of our own species existence, a source that not
only brought us into existence, but one that continually nourishes us.
The Lovibond-Shepard argument is powerful. As
“creatures with a certain physical constitution and a certain ecological
location” our knowledge is necessarily parochial (transcendentally
parochial), but we need not accept the myriad forms of empirical
parochialism in which we are currently mired. Active and reciprocal
communication with the source of our species existence alone—the natural
world—can enable us to reach the transcendental limits of this parochialism.
When we become the creatures we are in this way, we will then once again become
what Aldo Leopold hoped for us: plain members and citizens of the land
community.
Once we have acknowledged the ethical dimension of the
epistemologies we bring to the world, the physically and culturally situated
nature of knowledge and the ethical and political responsibility that goes
along with this, and nature’s participation in the construction of knowledge—as
Henry Sharp puts it: “symbols, ideas, and language . . . are not passive ways
of perceiving a determined positivist reality but a mode of interaction shared
between [people] and their environment”—it
is but a short step to Goodman and Elgin’s conclusion that “defeat and confusion are built into the
notions of truth and certainty and knowledge.” Perhaps we should, as do Goodman
and Elgin, relegate these notions to the periphery of philosophical concern and
centralize concepts of “rightness,” “adoption,” and “understanding” instead.
One alternative to such a shift in terminology would be to radically rethink
our notions of knowledge and truth.
All these issues and conclusions have come to a focus
in my work on the linked notions of “ceremonial worlds” and narrative, which I
began to think about listening to indigenous people in Whitehorse, Yukon
Territory in 1995 and in Thunder Bay, Ontario while working with the Native
Philosophy Project during 1996-7.
Ceremonial worlds are the worlds—or stories—within which we live, the
worlds—myths, if you like—that have the power to orient us in life. They define
for us the nature of the sacred (that in which meaning is located, the
more-than-human dimensions of our worlds), the natural, and the human—and the
relationships between them. A starting place for me in developing the notion of
a ceremonial world was Louise Profeit-LeBlanc’s explication of the Northern
Tutchone term t_i an¢ oh in response to a question posed to her concerning whether the
stories she used in her work with at risk children were “true.”
In response, she used the term t_i an¢ oh (usually
glossed as “what they say, it’s true”) and defined it as meaning “correctly
true,” “responsibly true” (a “responsible truth”), “true to what you believe
in,” “what is good for you and the community,” and “rings true for everybody’s
well-being.” Aside
from the question of whether there is a concept of truth simpliciter in
Northern Tutchone or only the concept of a responsible truth (and,
presumably, its correlate: the concept of an irresponsible truth), t_i
an¢ oh does at least suggest
an alternative to (or, perhaps, a variant of) Goodman and Elgin’s way around
the “defeat and confusion . . . built into the notions of truth and . . .
knowledge.”
Making use of Austin’s notion of the performative
function of language, a ceremonial world (in the fullest sense of the term) is
an actively constructed portrait of the world intended to be responsibly true,
one which rings true for everybody’s well-being. It is a world built on the
basis of an ethical-epistemological orientation of attentiveness rather than an
epistemology of control. Such ceremonial worlds, built, as they are, around the
notion of responsible truth, are not developed piecemeal, but are synthetic
creations, adjusted holistically to all the concerns that arise from a focus on
responsible truth: they must tie down to the world of everyday practice
and experience in a way that makes it possible to survive; they must orient the
community and its individuals on roads of life that allow for the flourishing
of all members of the community as far as that is possible. The metaphysics or
ontology of such a world will not be understood as true in the modernist
sense of the term. The issue is always (if implicitly) whether it is responsibly,
or correctly, true; is it action guiding in the full sense just
delineated?
In this full sense of the term, ceremonial worlds
exist, so far as I know, only in indigenous cultures. All of us live within
ceremonial worlds in some sense, however, though nonindigenous ceremonial
worlds tend to be diminished worlds. The ceremonial worlds of the West, for
example, are diminished in the sense that they are not intended to be
responsibly true worlds, ones that ring true for everybody’s well-being. Nor
are they worlds built on the basis of an ethical-epistemological orientation of
attentiveness. Rather, these worlds pretend to be value-neutral true
accounts of how the world really is. The so-called value-neutral project of
building a true account of the way the world is is severed from the
project of creating a world in which humans can and do flourish. Moreover,
these ceremonial worlds tend to be built in accordance with epistemologies of
domination and control. Such worlds are mired in the defeat and confusion of
which Goodman and Elgin speak: Epistemologies of domination are used to build
portraits of the world within which we propose ethical projects to defeat
domination and control. This odd and unfortunate situation arises because we do
not see that our world-building projects are themselves founded (though
implicitly) on ethical (or “ur”-ethical) epistemological foundations that all
but guarantee that the explicitly ethical projects we set ourselves within
these worlds will fail.
What one would no doubt expect in a world (1) that is
rich in bio- and geo-diversity and (2) in which the development of ceremonial
worlds in the full sense is the norm would be a world marked not merely by
cultural pluralism but by the acceptance and embracing of
cultural pluralism. Radical relativism is not an inevitable or even likely
result since grounds for rational criticism of existing ceremonial worlds and
the practices called forth by those worlds are built into the very notion of
responsible truth as spelled out above and, indeed, built into the integrity of
the geo/biological worlds within which these cultures exist. Since in such a
world there would be no search for the one truth of Enlightenment
epistemology, one would also expect modes of examining ceremonial worlds that
take account both of the purpose of constructing such worlds and the likelihood
(inevitability, really, given the bio- and geo-diversity of the natural homes
of these worlds) of many worlds satisfying that requirement. Given my particular
idiographic track through the world, two such methods come to mind: Goodman and
Elgin’s “reconception of philosophy” and Indian storytelling.
Goodman and Elgin shift their focus from truth,
certainty, and knowledge to rightness, adoption,
and understanding (respectively). “Rightness is a matter of fitting and
working. . . . [,] fitting into a context or discourse or standing
complex of other symbols. . . . The fitting is tested by the working, by the
forwarding of work in hand or in prospect.” Goodman and Elgin are not offering
a coherence or pragmatic theory of truth; they are recommending that we
switch our focus from truth to rightness, “a concept with greater reach
than truth.” As a replacement for certainty Goodman and Elgin propose,
not “alternatives such as probability, belief, and assent,” but adoption.
“Adoption is a matter of putting to work, of making or trying to make a fit. .
. . Adoption does not imply any degree of confidence. . . . [T]he
overall effort is toward achieving a relatively durable but flexible and
productive network of adoptions.” “Finally, knowledge . . . gives way . . . to understanding.
. . . ‘Understanding’ is a versatile term for a skill, a process, an
accomplishment. First, the
understanding is what might be called the cognitive ‘faculty’ in an inclusive
sense: the collection of abilities to inquire and invent, discriminate and
discover, connect and clarify, order and organize, adopt, test, reject. Second, understanding is the process
of using such skills for the cognitive making and remaking of a world, worlds,
or a world of worlds.”
Lee Hester, an indigenous philosopher and colleague,
weighs the virtues of Indian storytelling against the claim that the
self-critical method of Western science rightly privileges its method over
other methods of establishing knowledge claims:
The claim that Western science is self-critical and
therefore privileged . . . seems to imply that other traditions, since they
aren’t privileged in this way, are not self-critical (or not as
self-critical). This is a dubious conclusion at best. Arguably, indigenous
peoples are far more self-critical than Euro-Americans. They engage in
self-criticism communally, over the long haul, and expect that there will
always be dissension because there really are different stories. We might call
this “unself-conscious examined interaction.” It comes quite naturally, isn’t
forced, isn’t artificial, and doesn’t have a rigid protocol—all to the good: it
gives a flexibility of mind that Western science doesn’t have. The way
indigenous peoples engage in self-criticism, along with the results of that
criticism, just appears uncritical to the outside observer. Indigenous people
swap stories and come to understand each other better and understand the
various ways of examining the subject matter of the stories better. They aren’t
uncritical. It is just another form of criticism and arguably should stand
indigenous people in better epistemic stead than any form of privilege-assuming
self-conscious self-criticism, if only because it doesn’t and never would claim
primacy and privilege. Indigenous peoples know that their stories differ from
those of most Western science. The stories of Western science are good for some
things and indigenous stories are good too. But to suggest that indigenous
people are not self-critical in the way that supposedly stands Western science
in such good stead is arrogant and misguided.
Indian storytelling sits nicely with Goodman and Elgin’s reconception.
Indian storytelling techniques do seem to forego conceptions of truth,
certainty, and knowledge (as knowledge is understood when linked to the notion
of truth) in favor of rightness, adoption, and understanding. If knowledge is
understood in terms of the empowerment that comes with understanding, then we
have a notion of knowledge that does not require truth. The notion of responsible
truth, in turn, is easily explicated in terms of rightness, adoption, and
understanding.
When thinking back over my use of other voices through
the years—Gilligan, Rolston, Haraway, N_g_rjuna, Bringhurst etc.—my sense is
that these voices play through my papers as stories, or fragments of stories. I
have understood them to be voicing responsible understandings, or elements of a
larger story that might provide a responsible understanding of the world. These
voices are “true to” my experience in the world, they center me, connect me,
orient me; they do some of the things responsible truths are intended to do. I
don’t so much argue on their behalf in my writing as simply let them speak and build a collage that is plausible in
relationship to my experience, one which opens up the possibility of
communication with, and invites reciprocity with, human and more-than-human
worlds. Given the narrative source of my philosophy, and its narrative (as
opposed to argumentative) complexity, it should be understood as a story for
contemplation rather than as asserting truth claims.
While returning from a bush walk in an old growth
Tingle-Karri forest in southwestern Australia to Murdoch University with
members of the Ecophilosophy and Earth Education class I was in Western
Australia to help teach, Cathy Fussell helped me understand philosophy
narratively. Philosophers need not actually write stories, she said (although
that would be an excellent alternative to much of what goes on in academia, I
think); we just need to rethink what it is we philosophers are doing now.
We need to think of our present work narratively, as stories that are being
told within larger narratives, and that in that sense we are participating in
the narrative reconstruction of our understandings of the world, understandings
that might be responsible or irresponsible. This could be transforming. We
might come to prize responsible understandings over some illusory search for
the way the world “really is.”
III
At a campfire in the Lemhi Range of east central Idaho
with Tom Birch and Anthony Weston, Anthony asked, “Why do we go into the
wilderness?” After a thoughtful pause, Tom replied, “Wilderness treats me like
a human being.” Tom’s response has been with me for a long time. It is a Zen
koan with endless depth, and I keep coming back to it from different angles.
One thought about it, with which I begin, comes from Paul Shepard: The earth
matrix is our caretaker in the broadest sense.
That humans have survived as a species for a long time means that we have a
place in the scheme of things—a niche, adaptive fit. We live in a world of
gifts: air, food, shelter, a rich, complex, and diverse world as stimulus to
the development of our complex minds and the variety of human cultures.
Evolution has shaped us to fit these gifts—else they would not be gifts.
Erik Erikson says that basic trust is a fundamental condition of well-being,
“it is the first and basic wholeness, for it seems to imply that the inside and
the outside can be experienced as an interrelated goodness.”
Basic trust in the world of gifts that shaped us and sustains us, a basic sense
of belonging to the world, a living sense that knowledge, understanding, and
wisdom emerge from deep and sustained conversation and communion with the earth
matrix and the creatures and land forms embedded in it, is the most
fundamental, the most essential of all. Achieving full maturity depends upon
it.
Basic trust is not blind trust, thoughtless and
passive. Basic trust is a condition within which we are enabled to develop (and
receive!) the skills and the maturity that make us both deserving of the
world’s gifts and able to use them (and pass them on) with appropriate thanks
given. Having equipped us well for life, the more-than-human world then becomes
our consummate teacher, according us true and unqualified respect. It does not
jerk us around, it does not manipulate us; it treats us like human beings. It
is not a paradox that basic trust is a condition that enables us to develop the
skills needed to face life’s dangers and gifts with clarity and some measure of
success (maybe, most of the time; there are no guarantees). Nor is it a paradox
that the condition of basic trust urges us to thank the world, not
ourselves, for the skills and maturity basic trust has enabled us to acquire.
Basic trust has different epistemological implications than does lack of trust.
With basic trust, one studies the world differently, builds ceremonial worlds
with a different epistemological orientation—attentive openness to the world’s
processes and possibilities rather than a guarded and fearful wariness and need
to control life’s processes.
Western attitudes toward nature are by and large
shaped from within culture—to the exclusion of the nonhuman environment as
conversational partner in the shaping of these attitudes—by an epistemology of
domination. Environmental philosophy is an attempt to step beyond this
parochialism, but it, also, is by-and-large a gesture made from within culture,
on cultures terms.
We can take paths that lead to less parochial results.
Joseph Meeker suggests a promising path that fits nicely with the thoughts I
have been developing in this section. He builds upon a surprising thesis,
namely, that biological life (with the exception of certain human forms of
behavior such as “tragedy and related disasters”)—and,
I would add, geological life—is essentially comedic. For example, basing
his analysis on a classical understanding of comedy,
Meeker says that
Evolution proceeds as an unscrupulous, opportunistic
comedy, the object of which appears to be the proliferation and preservation of
as many life forms as possible. Successful participants in it are those who
live and reproduce even when times are hard or dangerous, not those who are
best able to destroy enemies or competitors. Its ground rules for participants,
including people, are those that govern literary comedy: Organisms must adapt
themselves to their circumstances in every possible way, must studiously avoid
all-or-nothing choices, must seek alternatives to death, must accept and revel
in maximum diversity, must accommodate themselves to the accidental limitations
of birth and environment, and must prefer cooperation to competition, yet
compete successfully when necessary. . . . The comic way is to be found in
evolutionary history, in the processes of ecology, and in comic literature,
which may represent the closest we have come to describing humans as adaptive
animals. Comedy illustrates that survival depends upon our ability to change
ourselves rather than our environment. . . . Comedy is a strategy for living
that contains ecological wisdom, and it may be one of our best guides as we try
to retain a place for ourselves among the other animals that live according to
the comic way.
Comedic existence for humans demands knowledge of a
particular kind: that which results from clear-eyed attentiveness to wild
systems— and to human systems understood as wild systems—with
an eye to both survival and an answer to the question of what constitutes the
good life for homo sapiens sapiens, understood as a member of a wider
land community, using an epistemology appropriate to the comic/evolutionary
goal of adaptive fit. It seems to me that indigenous knowledge fits this model
as forms of knowledge privileged in the West do not.
An epistemology of clear-eyed attentiveness with an
eye to adaptive fit rather than control of one’s environment is precisely what
many indigenous people in North America are referring to when they use the
English word respect. In a discussion of the Ojibwa conception of
respect with my Ojibwa colleague Dennis McPherson, he insisted strongly that
respect is about survival, not ethics (understood as moral law). Dennis’s
remarks fit nicely with those made by Carol Geddes in response to a
question posed to her concerning the meaning of the indigenous notion of
respect. She replied: “I asked a similar
question of someone who knows the Tlingit language very well [Geddes is herself
Tlingit]. Apparently it does not have a very precise definition in
translation—the way it is used in English. It is more like awareness. It is
more like knowledge and that is a very important distinction, because it is not
like a moral law, it is more like something that is just a part of your whole
awareness.” It
should be noted that survival and adaptive fit are understood more broadly in
an Indian context than they are in non-Indian contexts. For example, Indian
sacred ways and practices are understood as “practical systems of
knowledge” for survival, “survival” being understood not merely as “continuing
to exist” but more broadly as “seeking life,” seeking the proper road of life
on which to walk.
I am using “adaptive fit” in this broader sense, linking human well-being with
adaptive fit, as does Meeker. The comic way as a strategy for living on the earth’s
terms rather than ours makes eminently good sense. Adaptive fit as the key to
well-being implies that we cannot understand what the good life is for homo
sapiens sapiens without listening to what the natural environments we live
in have to say to us about this. This is so since we are the animals we are
because of the generative earth matrix that produced us and now sustains us. We
are deeply embedded in this matrix. Communication within this matrix produced
us and continued communication between humans and the earth matrix is necessary
for survival and well-being.
Should the comic way also be a strategy for our
relationship to other human beings—earth beings, surely, but earth beings who
all-too-often resist living on earth’s terms but, rather, seek domination and
control of earth’s processes? What would it be like for one with basic trust in
the world of gifts that shaped us to face humans as one (usually) faces
the weather: realistically, without moral outrage, without moral complaint,
with neither idealism nor romantic sentiment; that is, with the same respect
nature accords us?
Meeker’s study of picaresque comedy can (without too much of a stretch) be
understood as a thought experiment in envisioning human comedic existence in
relationship to human culture for one who stands outside that culture.
The picaresque world is a natural system in which
humans are one of the animal species. The picaro . . . sees society [in
relationship to which he is an outcast] as one of the many forms of natural
order. He objects to the society into which he is born no more than wolves or
ants or whales object to theirs, and like these animals, he tries merely to
adapt himself to his circumstances in the interest of his own survival. . . .
Picaresque nature is not a garden, but a wilderness.
But should this picaresque model of adaptive fit be a
model for those of us who are not outsiders but who would critique and
oppose human individuals and cultures that do not live on earth’s terms? To
envision a picaresque-like life within culture and its mode of response
(or resistance) to humans who do not live on earth’s terms, we must, first of
all, envision responses, or forms of resistance, developed around a central
defining feature of Indian cultures: the notion of “responsible truth.”
Secondly, these responses must be consistent with the notion of adaptive fit
central to the comedy of survival. They must face problems in some way
homologous to the way in which one faces the weather: realistically, without
moral outrage or complaint, with neither idealism nor romantic sentiment.
The basic ingredient of such strategies is that they
would not so much attempt to meet and defeat moral error as such
as they would seek to return the world to biological normalcy by means of the
strategies of comedy—biological normalcy and the strategies of comedy as
defined above in Meeker’s depiction of the comedy of evolution. Another way to
put this is to say that comedy resists fighting on terms set by the forces of
domination and control. Comedy would prefer to “count coup” on these forces in
ways that return them to their senses (and away from their ideologies), return
them to the comedy of survival and away from the tragedy of
ideologies that float free of the earth (or try to). Note that such strategies
would exemplify the biological condition—the comedy of survival—they
promote and attempt to establish, as strategies of hierarchical control (i.e.,
the judicial system) do not. (To live outside the law you must be comic.)
A charming example of comedic strategy was brought to
my attention in a discussion of Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival in the
Ecophilosophy and Earth Education class. In an action attempting to halt old
growth clearcutting, forest activists threaded yarn through the area to be
logged. The loggers brought the mighty force of their chainsaws to bear on
these spidery webs of yarn only to find them hopelessly jammed and rendered useless.
One would hope that the absurdity, irony, and pointed social and political
(including, obviously, sexual political) commentary provided by such actions
would bring any sane person back to earth. It would be a humorless person
indeed who could respond to such a commentary with a straight face. —Well, of
course, there are such humorless people, and so we can only speculate at
this point about whether, and to what extent, comedy has the power to bring us
to our senses, back to earth. If it cannot, this is a sad commentary on human
alienation from the natural world.
Indian knowledge of the natural world, as I have said,
is based on an epistemology of respect requiring attentive listening to, and
reciprocal communication with, that world, and is woven together within
ceremonial worlds designed to accommodate human culture within (and as)
a wild world. This knowledge is, essentially, a comedic way of being in
the natural world rather than a tragic separation and alienation from
that world. Western knowledge, on the other hand, is often designed to bend or
assimilate wild systems to cultural order and purpose. It therefore employs
epistemologies of domination and control of both the nonhuman world and other
humans and human cultures. In this difference we find very different
understandings of the relevance of natural environments to the production of
knowledge.
From the perspective of indigenous cultures one could
read the motto of the picaresque hero of Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of
Felix Krull, Confidence Man—“He who really loves the world shapes himself
to please it”—as the idea that nature’s integrity becomes the model of
individual and social integrity. As an example, consider the following: The
Choctaws, when they moved to a new area, looked around and saw that deer grazed
in the lush meadows, the meadows which would be perfect for raising corn,
beans, and squash. But the deer were using this land, so the Choctaws chose
land not nearly as good for agricultural purposes. Why? Because, presumably,
though deer did not have the ability to make this hardscrabble land speak
meadow, the Choctaws had the ability to make it speak corn, squash, and beans.
IV
Vine Deloria, Jr. has given us a portrait of the
epistemological relationship to the physical world of the “old Indians, people
who had known the life of freedom before they were confined to the reservations
and subjected to Western religious and educational systems” that resonates
remarkably with the ideas I have been developing and takes them a significant step
further. I use
elements of Deloria’s portrait here as a case study of the viability of these
ideas. “The old Indians,” Deloria says,
were interested in finding the proper moral and
ethical road upon which human beings should walk. All knowledge, if it is to be
useful, was directed toward that goal. Absent in this approach was the idea
that knowledge existed apart from human beings and their communities, and could
stand alone for “its own sake.” In the Indian conception, it was impossible
that there could be abstract propositions that could be used to explore the
structure of the physical world. Knowledge was derived from individual and
communal experiences in daily life, in keen observation of the environment and
in interpretive messages that they received from spirits in ceremonies,
visions, and dreams. In formulating their understanding of the world, Indians
did not discard any experience. Everything had to be included in the spectrum
of knowledge and related to what was already known.
To use a phrase of Deloria’s, we might call the idea
that “in formulating their understanding of the world, Indians did not
discard any experience” a “principle of epistemological method.” Another
principle of epistemological method appears, Deloria says, at the end of Black
Elk’s telling of how the Sioux received the sacred pipe from White Buffalo Calf
Woman and how she taught the people to communicate with the higher powers
through the use of the pipe in ceremonies: “This they tell,” Black Elk
said, “and whether it happened so or not, I do not know; but if you think
about it, you can see that it is true.” Deloria explicitly calls this
statement “a principle of epistemological method.”
The idea here is more complex than the first principle. As I read it, this
second principle points to two ideas: (1) that the account of Buffalo Calf
Woman is not necessarily to be understood in literalist, historical terms; the
account is to be understood as a depiction of one element of the ceremonial
world within which the Oglala Sioux live
and (2) that we must always consider (over the course of one’s entire life) the
ways (often multiple) that a particular story or experience might instruct us;
stories and experience are to be understood as having often inexhaustible depth.
A third principle of epistemological principle (not explicitly stated as such)
is that “everything that humans experience has value and instructs us in
some aspect of life.”
These three, closely-related principles might be
contrasted with a more critical epistemological method which focusses on
refutation and critical objection as the way to truth. In this epistemological
style, for example, one might object that the second principle would certainly
lead one astray and that the third principle is simply false (or, at least, has
not been shown to be true). It should be noted, however, that to shift the
burden of proof in this way does not so much advance the cause of truth
as it shuts down modes of reflecting on experience and stories that may
very well lead to insight and knowledge and to “responsible truth.” The point
is similar to one Anthony Weston makes concerning Tom Birch’s notion of
universal considerability. Birch says that his principle demands that all
things “be taken as valuable, even though we may not yet know how or why, until
they are proved otherwise.”
Weston comments: “Actually, even more deeply, universal consideration requires
us not merely to extend this kind of benefit of the doubt but actively to take
up the case, so to speak, for beings so far excluded or devalued.” Weston then
adds, precisely in line with the Indian view that at the heart of one’s
epistemological relation to the world there must be moral purpose, that “ethics
[a basic etiquette] is primary: ethics opens the way to knowledge, epistemology
is value-driven, not vice versa.”
This epistemological style of openness contrasts with
the focus on extracting very specific pieces of information, understood within
an equally specific set of concepts, that characterizes the controlled
experiment of modern science. Deloria in fact contrasts Indian epistemology
with Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of science as proceeding within paradigms and
as being therefore highly selective both in its attention to data and the
problems on which it choose to focus.
Indian epistemological style, as depicted by Deloria,
is even more radical than I have so far indicated. The principles of
epistemological method so far mentioned are at least straightforwardly epistemological.
But Deloria goes further. Many statements coming from Indian worlds which
non-Indians would understand to be statements of belief concerning
Indian world views are best understood as principles of epistemological
method of a rather different sort than those so far mentioned. Consider, for
example, Deloria’s portrait of the universe as a moral universe:
The real interest of the old Indians was not to
discover the abstract structure of physical reality but rather to find the
proper road along which, for the duration of a person’s life, individuals were
supposed to walk. This colorful image of the road suggests that the universe is
a moral universe. That is to say, there is a proper way to live in the
universe: There is a content to every action, behavior, and belief. The sum
total of our life experiences has a reality. There is a direction to the
universe, empirically exemplified in the physical growth cycles of childhood,
youth, and old age, with the corresponding responsibility of every entity to
enjoy life, fulfill itself, and increase in wisdom and the spiritual
development of personality. Nothing has incidental meaning and there are no
coincidences. . . . In the moral universe all activities, events, and entities
are related, and consequently it does not matter what kind of existence an
entity enjoys, for the responsibility is always there for it to participate in
the continuing creation of reality.
These attributes of the moral universe have the same
status as the three epistemological principles discussed above. That is, in
relationship to the goal of finding the proper road upon which to walk, Indians
paint a portrait of a moral universe that invites its own fulfillment,
they create a ceremonial world that gives direction to the quest
for moral understanding and support for living in accordance with that moral
understanding. The characteristics of the moral life are not deduced from, or
suggested by, a prior value-neutral account of the structure of the universe or
“metaphysics of morals”; rather, once again, “ethics opens the way to
knowledge, epistemology is value-driven, not vice versa.” This portrait of a
moral universe is not properly understood as a set of false (or at least
unproven) beliefs or assumptions. Such a view puts “too much stock in the word
‘philosophy’.” As Deloria’s account shows, in the words of the quotation that
stands at the beginning of the present essay, “there are alternative ways of
intelligently engaging the world. To construe one’s thinking in terms of belief
is characteristic of a particular kind of world view” and indigenous peoples do
not seem to “conceive of experience in such an overtly intellectualized
manner.” Ceremonial worlds do not interfere with, or contradict the projects of
Western science, though they arguably provide a better understanding of human
existence in the natural world than does Western science, for they place
communication and reciprocity with natural environments, rather than the desire
to dominate those environments, at the very heart of the production of
knowledge.
Indian thought on the notion that the universe is
alive is truly remarkable. “It cannot be argued,” Deloria says, “that the
universe is moral or has a moral purpose without simultaneously maintaining
that the universe is alive. The old Indians had no problem with this concept
because they experienced life in everything, and there was no reason to suppose
that the continuum of life was not universal.”
Is this a scientific claim with supporting experiential evidence? A
metaphysical world view? Not likely in view of our discussion to this point.
But Indian thinking concerning what they think of as a living planet is more
revealing:
The practical criterion that is always cited to
demonstrate its validity is the easily observable fact that the earth nurtures
smaller forms of life—people, plants, birds, animals, rivers, valleys, and
continents. For Indians, both speculation and analogy end at this point. To go
further and attribute a plenitude of familiar human characteristics to the
earth is unwarranted. It would cast the planet in the restricted clothing of
lesser beings, and we would not be able to gain insights and knowledge about
the real essence of the earth.
If speculation and analogy end where Indians end it, then the idea of
the living earth isn’t even speculative: it is obvious on the face of
it. Not that it can’t be denied, but at that point speculation, theory
construction, or metaphysics is necessary. The last sentence in the
quotation puts another twist on the matter: It folds the idea of the living
earth into a ceremonial world orienting Indians on the moral road. The notion
of a living world is not part of an Indian world view, it is an
everyday observation fitted into a ceremonial world in a way that enhances its
epistemological effectiveness.
That is, by casting humans as lesser beings in relation to the living
earth, we more effectively “gain insights and knowledge about the real essence
of the earth”: “Coming last, human beings were the ‘younger brothers’ of the
other life-forms and therefore had to learn everything from these creatures.
Thus human activities resembled bird and animal behavior in many ways and
brought the unity of conscious life to an objective focus.”
The notion of a living universe, therefore, is not
merely obvious on the face of it, but it also provides epistemological
direction in the search for knowledge (as just stated) as well as powerful moral
direction. The epistemological direction is itself ethically informed, as we
have seen. There is more:
The living universe requires mutual respect among its
members, and this suggests that a strong sense of individual identity and self
is a dominant characteristic of the world as we know it. The willingness of
entities to allow others to fulfill themselves, and the refusal of any entity
to intrude thoughtlessly on another, must be the operative principle of this
universe. Consequently, self-knowledge and self-discipline are high values of
behavior. . . . Respect . . . involves two attitudes. One attitude is the
acceptance of self-discipline by humans and their communities to act
responsibly toward other forms of life. The other attitude is to seek to
establish communications and covenants with other forms of life on a mutually
agreeable basis.
These conclusions aren’t forced upon us by the notion of a living
universe, of course, but they are the sorts of conclusions one might
expect within a ceremonial world built around the moral purpose of “finding the
proper moral and ethical road upon which human beings should walk.” They extend
in quite natural ways (1) the general attitude of universal consideration
discussed earlier as a feature of Indian worlds as well as (2) our earlier
reflections on the geo/biological world as seen through the lenses of Meeker’s
notion of the “comedy of survival” and Birch’s thought that “wilderness treats
me like a human being.”
The central value that informs Deloria’s principles of
epistemological method is that of “adaptive fit”—finding the proper road upon
which human beings should walk—rather than domination and control. Oriented to
the natural world by a set of what non-Indians would think of as beliefs about
the world but which are better understood as a set of epistemological
guidelines, those who adopt these guidelines become remarkably attuned to what
the world tells them about human adaptive fit in the larger
more-than-human land community. Just as the land community is the source of
human existence and the knowledge encoded in the human body, so it continues to
play the central role in the production of knowledge. Knowledge shaped by
indigenous principles of epistemological method guarantee that knowledge is the
result of deep and continuous communication between person and natural world.
Epistemologies shaped by values of domination and control of nature virtually
guarantee that the resulting “knowledge”—certainly not wisdom—is a human
monologue that structures its understanding of the world around human order and
purpose. The world is not permitted to speak on its own behalf. It merely
answers questions posed by human culture and answers these questions, not in
its own voice, but in a vocabulary, and according to an agenda, not its own. In
Francis Bacon’s graphic imagery, nature is put on the rack and forced to
confess. Indian epistemology, by contrast, is marked by respect. To repeat:
Respect . . . involves two attitudes. One attitude is
the acceptance of self-discipline by humans and their communities to act
responsibly toward other forms of