RAMBLINGS

Dr S Murali Essay 1


MEANING, VALUE AND RESPONSIBILITY:
Contextualising Environmental Aesthetics
Some Theoretical Issues


My presentation intends to problematise some of the key issues related to Environmental Aesthetics. The study of literature and literary studies have undergone many significant changes over the last century, and the focus of attention has shifted many times from the text through the author to the reader. History and ideology have been challenged within the corpus of literary production and their means and methodologies most minutely examined and critiqued. Strategies of reading and reception have been reexamined from the points of view of gender, class, ideology, race and nation. Wave after wave of theory and counter theory have subverted earlier readings and their strategies. It would not do now to hold naively on to the idea that the acts of reading and meaning production are such simple procedures. And yet, as I would attempt to present, these successive theorisings have left the text bare and tattered as the denuded earth in the march of blind science and its handmaid, technology. Value and responsibility have been laid aside conveniently. The literary has been trimmed down to the insignificant play of text and desire and pleasure. However, in my argument I shall endeavour to show how the text spills on to the globe and how environmental issues have served to re-contextuslise the text in renewed light—what I call environmental aesthetics.

Many years ago when the dispute over the Silent Valley in Kerala was rampant and the great debate over the whole philosophy of Nature Conservation was in its incipient stages, a senior friend of mine who later was to become a naturalist of considerable renown, turned abruptly to me and opined: “you are more of an aesthete than a naturalist!” His dismissive tone was on account of the significance that I advocated for the idea of beauty and value in nature. Nature conservation, I had then argued, began with the love and devotion to nature and the natural. However, the late seventies in Kerala, were quite unsuitable times for the aesthete and idealist! And by then, the Sastra Sahitya Parishad-- the advocates for peoples’ science movement-- who radicalized the idea of science and technology, and who were development-oriented and forward-looking, had taken over the entire struggle and popularized the idea of conservation and preservation. Ecology had become a household term and the idea of conservation of biodiversity was indisputably foregrounded as an integrated part of the agenda of development studies. Equating development with the progressive adaptation of science and technology was always held to be logical and unquestionable.

Of course, the arguments for and against conservation have not yet subsided. Even now there are many who believe that the entire idea of nature conservation is only suited for the developed countries, while the poor and needy in our part of the world can not afford such a measure! Economically such proceedings are not quite feasible at all. Ecology we need to remember was a comparatively recent science and it has been necessitated by the inadvertent march of human civilization! Because we overexploit our natural resources and remorselessly indulge in species annihilation, lethally poison our rivers and seas over and above damming and polluting them, smoke out holes in our atmosphere, and engage in a hundred different ways of self-destruction, we need to sit up and take stock before things go out of our hands. If only we had listened to our poets and artists! If only we had heeded our now over-interpreted spiritual texts and good old religious seers! It is not as if everything about the past and those days of yore is to seen as conservation-oriented. But then there had been one too many voices of dissent and disapproval raised against the mad march of development in the past. And the point is that they had perhaps resorted to the heart rather than the head. And that is where it all leads us to.

The argument that my scientist-friend disapproved of was that nature conservation was largely a matter of the heart than the head. I had cited the green poets and pointed out that the ultimate historical foundations of nature preservation are aesthetic (which I much later came to realize was the basis of the environmental ethics as formulated by the deep ecologists). We start by loving nature and the natural, and begin to care for what we love and cherish. The deep blue sky, the wide expanse of the green earth, the songs and flutter of the birds and butterflies, the gamboling animals—all these begin to crystallize in our hearts a deep fondness of indistinguishable delight, a sense of nature. This crystallization is not without its cultural and historical contexts. Nevertheless it is what binds us the great wide world. The hard data of the like that today a significant portion of the 15000 plant species and 75000 animal species found in India are threatened by the pressure of human activity on land and forests, and so many hectares of forest land are ransacked per the hour in the rain forests of the world, are only supplementary and they add to our agony. The fragility and the resilience of earth is first borne into our hearts through the wonder and amazement that our hearts accord. Perhaps this is the experience of the intangible behind the tangible that the spiritual masters have spoken of. This would bring us to the brink of metaphysics and religion. Perhaps, this is the right place to begin.

Religious thought, the world over, dovetails with that of the nature lover, because religion in its beginnings and ends has a bearing on nature. Almost all religions, sociologists would agree, have their roots in the worship of nature. The adoration of trees, birds and animals, the worship of sacred groves, and the attribution of sacredness to all life forms are true to the spirit of ancient religions. It may be that the reasons for their being so sacred might be slightly different from the ecological angle that we are seeking for, but however, in spirit, they come quite close to that. Of course, we are saddled with the virtues and hindrances of hindsight and therefore can see in history the reverence attributed to all life forms in the sacred texts of almost all religions. The finer aspects of differences may be a matter of significance only for the scholar: while most “pagan” religions identified the immutable with the divine, the Hebraic, especially the Christian religion, maintained the natural superiority of the human being over all other life forms, and insisted on his (His?) superior ability to break the immutability of natural laws. As many perspective scholars have noted it might be this underlying patriarchal power that laid the foundations for classical science and its strains are still visible despite the claims to universality and understanding of contemporary science. However, pre-scientific societies cherished a celebratory attitude to nature.

In the march of Western history of ideas, the Enlightenment is often looked upon as the age of reason. Whatever else this might have entailed, the most significant aspect is that this age gave rise to a belief in scientism—a dangerous attitude indeed—a deep faith in the order of scientific thinking. Human emotion, feeling, and the entire “irrational” sphere of mankind were delegated a secondary insignificant position in the understanding of life. The intellect superceded the heart and analytical thought sought precedence over the intuitive. Values came to be reinterpreted, religion was relegated to superstition, and science got itself the supreme role as the interpreter of truth. In our own times even to speak of one’s beliefs is to rake up the ghost of pre-renaissance nescience! How could one speak of being moved by nature and the natural forms? Poetry and imagination are things of the past. These are days of rationality and intelligence. Religion breeds only superstition and nonsense; it works as opium! This is not to demean rationality and intelligence per se but only to challenge their claims to being the only valid means of approaching the truth. While this being so, truth, in the logic of the postmodern, is multi-dimensional and multifaceted. Let us reorient ourselves to this fact that is not a fact! If fiction differentiates itself by not being fact let us create the faction of the present! In the search for alter/native truths we need to heed and understand the other logic that may not resemble the logic we are used to. If the post-enlightenment logic declaims the validity of religion and metaphysics, then we need to reorient ourselves with regard to these two as well.

To believe Theodore Adorno, it is barbaric to write poetry after Auswitz. And to believe Michael Foucault and Edward Said, it is impossible to think of any social situation without relating it to the politics of power and oppression. And of course after the great movements in Feminist thinking it is virtually impossible to understand any situation without relating it to the ideas of gender and politics. Likewise race, class, ideology—these concepts have all altered our ways of understanding the present. In such a situation how could we relegate the idea of nature? What we understand by nature most certainly has a bearing on what we make of ourselves. And our understanding needs necessarily be holistic and not discriminative. The efforts of environmental historians and environmental geographers have enabled us to understand the profound implications of the natural environment and our ways of responding to it.

Thus in our understanding of the world we live in we need to reorient ourselves with regard to the values and our ways of response. It is my strong contention that aesthetics belongs to the order of values of which ecological value too forms a significant part. In fact the value which we attribute to the environment cannot be seen distinct from our general aesthetico-ethical frame of reference. The value which we attribute to the environment is holistic and complete and not peripheral or derivative. Aesthetic value cannot be and should not be dismissed as subjective (in a Cartesian sense) when considering the value of environment and issues pertaining to conservation and preservation. The ecological activism that globally politicized these issues has come to be known as the Green Movement. There is a green politics and even a green speak! And over the last fifteen years a whole aesthetics of the green has also emerged under the name of ecological criticism or eco criticism. In the great welter of socio-political theorizing that had held sway over the last half of the twentieth century the concerns of the human individual and nature were virtually submerged. After the death of the author the individual artist/poet ceased to have any space to speak afterwards, and after the closure of the text history ceased to exist at all. If one were to take the pains of going over the warp and woof of socio-political theorizing carefully, one can perceive the struggles of the author and the text in the light of meaning production. When we reinstate class, race and gender along with the voice of nature we regain the fuller meaning of human’s being. When Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” and when Aldo Leopold spoke of the land ethic, they were giving voice to an aesthetics of commitment and engagement.
DeepEcologyWhat came to be called Deep Ecology stemmed primarily from the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. According to Naess, “the aim of supporters of the deep ecology movement is not a slight reform of our present society, but a substantial reorientation of our whole civilization.” Hence it is an ecosophy. It concentrates on the human relationship with the natural world and supplies a substantial reorientation to a world run astray. Let me provide the major points of this ecosophy as it is developed by the practitioners of deep ecology:
A rejection of anthropocentrism. All life on earth has an intrinsic value irrespective of the human angle.
Richness and biodiversity are valuable in themselves and humans have no right to reduce this diversity.
An identification with all life
Caring for the other life forms is part of individual self realization.
A critique of instrumental rationality (emphasis should be not on quantity and efficiency but quality)
Personal development of a total world view. Individual thinking and action are of utmost significance and later the collective and the social.
As can be seen the concept of deep ecology is akin to the spiritual. What is aimed at is life enhancing qualitative values very much similar to spiritual enlightenment or artistic fulfillment. After all, life becomes meaningful only when we start to live fully and selflessly.
In our present day to day life of hard reality at every point we are habituated to turn to the physical sciences for concurrence and approval for only they can account convincingly for our corporeal existence. Similarly, in spite of their theoretical differences the so-called social sciences get their sanction only because they meekly follow the methodology of the non human mathematical sciences. And yet many perceptive minds have pointed out time and again that our thinking and perception have been determined by the technological environment rather than the natural. There is apparently little of nature that is left in us. Technology has taken over. This has become an automatic universe for us. Our constructions of our environment and our lives have become so removed from the organic unity of the poetic and the spiritual and so how could we sense and see the elemental harmony that is so apparent to the poet when he writes:
My beloved is the mountains
The solitary wooded valleys,
Strange islands…silent music
(St John of the Cross)
or
iyam prithvi sarvesam bhutanam madhu, asyai prithvyai sarvani bhutani madhu
this earth is like honey for all creatures and all the creatures are like honey for this earth, Brhadarnyaka V brahmana1.

Environmental Aesthetics
It is however in imaginative writing and narratives the world over that a deep felt affinity to nature can be discovered. Some are overtly evident while some remain submerged under the rubble of dominant cultural narratives ill disposed to nature. In what has come to be called Green Aesthetics or Eco aesthetics, efforts are being made by scholars in various disciplines to study the interrelationship of nature, human life and creativity. Of course, Eco Aesthetics is not too far from the ecosophy of deep ecology.

In the woods, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, we return to reason and faith. Despite the fact that this statement is loaded with nineteenth century American transcendentalist overtones, one could still see in it the essence of an environmental aesthetic. Ching-yuang, an early follower of Zen reflects on his understanding of nature as follows:

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters. (quoted in Lawrence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 1)

It is an experience of perceptual transformation that the Zen master undergoes. The difference is between the guileless innocence of the Child and the achieved innocence of a yogi. The very first level of perception—seeing mountains as mountains-- preceded all logic, ratiocination and language, while the second bracketed the world of nature as the other that is just a creation of the human unconscious (recall the Lacanian aphorism “the unconscious is structured like language”) where in the signifiers and the signifieds overlap to create a parallel reality or the reality as we understand it. The third stage is beyond all experience and transcends logic, reason, and language, having “got its very substance.” This is where eco aesthetics or green studies steps in, in the wake of theories and counter theories in the academia of twentieth century. It is post-deconstruction. As one green critic has claimed: these are days when the critic has turned from red to green! Green studies attempts to reinstate the real world of men and women and nature and human history. Kate Soper, hits the nail on its head directly when she pronounces dramatically: “In short, it is not language which has a hole in its ozone layer; and the real thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier.” (The Green Studies Reader, p. 3). Green studies thus aims not merely to speak about nature but also to speak for nature. This is just where literature and the environment meet and the text spills over on to the globe, when we learn to see mountains as mountains and waters as waters once again. So much depends upon our sensibilities, the self-realisation of the human being and the humanization of nature. Aldo Leopard one of the pioneers of this kind of thinking has spoken about the land ethic that called for a biocentric vision. The point we have to remember is that the genuine environmentalist cherishes the values of love and affection that makes him/her a human being. The path of the Mahavira and the Buddha is not too far to seek. Or to put it in the words of the German poet Holderlin: “…poetically man dwells…”
The Implications of Environmental aesthetics
In the post deconstructive academic world of today many sensitive critics are turning to green. It is in the US universities that green studies picked up in the beginning and later British universities followed suit. Prof Scott Slovic of the University of Nevada at Reno has attempted to formulate certain key issues that the environmentally conscious literary critics are concerned with. Ecocriticism, for him “means either the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human nature relationships in any literary text, even texts that seem at first glance oblivious of the non human world.” This leaning towards an environmental aesthetic is an indication in the present day world of the growing consciousness of the importance and fragility of the non human space. Eco aesthetics has thus a wide range of significance and possibility.
The major aspects of green studies:
environment and ecology—basic awareness of nature
writing about nature and nature writing—poetry, fictional/non fictional narratives
rereading history—Romanticism etc, Women and nature-- ecofeminism
reclaiming the past—tracing roots of environmental writing and awareness
Especially in non-anglo-American situation—traces of environmental culture
religion and society and nature
environmental philosophy
environmental history
landscape studies
landscape and memory—mythical and spiritual connections to non-human world

Aesthetics as it began was that branch of philosophy which dealt exclusively with sensory experience. Now after the wealth of theoretical movements and counter movements aesthetics has come to signify wider implications not only in terms of the text but also in the manner and methodology of its reception and the production of meaning.
Class, race, gender, ideology --are all significant factors that contribute to the production of meaning And as we have seen, the idea of nature is equally, if not more significant. It not only contributes to meaning, but also constitutes the meaningful. Eco aesthetics belongs not only to that order of the study of nature and the non human world, but also implicates the human in the non human. It is holistic and inclusive not exclusive and fragmentary. It bespeaks of meaning, value, and responsibility. However, it should not be reduced merely to being just another technical aspect of the theoretical framework, just as another policy or strategy of reading like deconstruction. It brings with it more than a sign of the times—it bears responsibility. Let us examine these concepts one by one.
1. Meaning
Eco aesthetics looks upon the act of literary and artistic production as a meaningful activity. Wave upon wave of linguistic and semantic theories have almost deprived the work of art of any worthwhile meaning. Meaning has become a guessing game. If with the New Critics it was the fallacy of Intention that came to be challenged, the structuralists and the poststructuralists ripped off the meaningful world from the space of the linguistic sign altogether. There was ultimately nothing but the play of signifiers and signifieds while the referent was altogether bracketed off. Literary and art activity was but a meaningless engagement of the intellect – a rhetoric of signs. Eco aesthetics reinstates meaning at the heart of the aesthetic activity. The aesthetic revolves round the idea of values.
2. Value
“Literature and the other arts,” writes Scott Slovic, “are ideal media for exploring and communicating systems of values—ethical frameworks—within specific communities and between one culture and another. This is not a particularly novel idea, but it flies in the face of postmodern critical theory, which is frequently noted for its indeterminacy, its devolution to textual (and meta-textual) problematics, and its indifference to real social problems. Many literary scholars in recent years have forgotten the traditional social function of the arts….” (A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ed Dale Jamieson. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001,p. 254). Literature and the arts have a social dimension—a history and an ideology—a need to be committed to the here and now. Values are not peripheral and incidental—they are holistic and born out of a recognition of the responsibility of the writer the artist as well as the critic and the reader. The most significant of all values no doubt would be that which links the human and the non human worlds. Nature is the most valuable of all values and a transvaluation of all our value systems is the essential need of the hour.
3. Responsibility
There is more than ever an increasing need to recognize the social responsibility of literature and the arts. The aesthetic act is not something that takes place in emptiness. It is here and now, and the artist/writer needs to recognize the responsibility that she bears to the world at large. This need not reduce literature to the simplistic and the didactic. The text actually spills over on to the globe and the web of life implicates us in it. This is where eco aesthetics reaches into the sphere of ecosophy, as outlined earlier. The ideas of meaning, value and responsibility, actually is the recognition of the creative act as one that is sanctioned by the ethical – and it up holds the text as holistic, complete and harmonious with the rest of creation. In the end it is nature that triumphs.

All this might sound so remote and alien to those literary minded writers and critics trained in the traditional or modernist academia. The long-time-too-familiar debate of the two cultures has now finally ceased to be. After all we have only one earth and a global recognition has dawned on us that our life itself is too brief and rounded with a sleep… The literature class room should once again be informed by science, this time more sure footed and alert, recalling at every step the too scientistic fate of the New Critic of the Anglo American schools. For the text is not too confined in its form and meaning. It spills over on to the globe. As Terry Gifford has put it succinctly: Literary criticism should also be informed by science and apply that learning with what appears to be the best rigour of clarification available at the time. (Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1995; p. 141) And, he continues: When an engaged commitment is made to either work, or place , or inner energies in relationships, a responsibility for nature can, in turn, make a recognition of connectedness. (ibid) In the final analysis the plea for environmental aesthetics is this recognition of interconnectedness and totality.
I shall close this with a poem of mine:
The Golden Oriole
I had not known so much happiness
Until that rainy afternoon
When the first oriole fluted
From across the mango trees
A clear delightful call
Filled with the brightness of sunshine
Slowly fading in the afternoon light.
No night and day after that
Could take away
The golden oriole’s fruity call
It hung like a rhyme
Over the mango trees.
And it still does. The rains have come and gone.
I cannot say the same thing about happiness.




References

A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ed Dale Jamieson. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001
Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Ed Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000
Gifford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry.Manchester: Manchester Univ Press, 1995
Lawrence Coupe.The Green Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2000