The Return of Nature by Sallis John;

Author:Sallis, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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THE ELEMENTAL TURN

A turn will become imperative, a turn to nature, to the natural elements. It will be required most directly and most urgently, not by theoretical exigencies, but by the necessity of confronting, in word and action, the devastation to which nature is increasingly exposed, devastation that has now assumed such gigantic proportions that the life-sustaining capacity of the earth itself is threatened. Already foreseen by the most farsighted thinkers as the turn began to be enacted from the heroism of the mastery of nature to the advocacy of ecological restraint, the assault on nature has now been mounted on a scale that could hardly have been envisaged a few decades ago. Driven not just by technology but at a deeper level by political and economic interests, this assault has produced a situation for which the word crisis—even if heightened by multiple superlatives—is an extreme understatement.

It is a situation that calls for new insight and concerted action. Yet if these responses are truly to bear on all that is at stake, they must avoid replicating, in their aim and their strategy, the very comportment to nature that has led to the present impasse. Simply to propose to control technological development, to limit its application, to bring it under human mastery, is to repeat at another level the strategy by which technology itself brings nature under its control. To propose to master the political is even more repetitive; such a venture recoils on itself, since the task of controlling the political could only be carried out by political means, thus employing the very constellation of forces that it would seek to displace. On the other hand, the incapacity, in both the technological and the political spheres, to address successfully the assault on nature must not be used to support a retreat into quietism nor a repose in which one would wait for an unforeseeable event capable of providing deliverance from the advance of technology—if for no other reason than that the assault would in the meanwhile gain ever greater ascendancy. What must intervene is theoretical reflection capable of setting its sights upon nature in another way, in a way that is more attuned to the natural elements themselves and that attests to this attunement.

Thus, a turn to nature will become imperative for philosophy; or rather, it has already become imperative and will only become ever more urgently so. This turn will be a return, for in the course of its history, philosophy has repeatedly undertaken to return to nature, to catch sight again of elements of nature that had been obscured through adherence to the artifices of custom, to the excesses of theologically motivated thought, or to the hegemony of economic processes. Yet the return to nature that is now to become ever more imperative is one that must span the entire course on which philosophy has previously carried out the turn to nature. Returning to the point where the turn away from nature is first ventured, philosophy will be

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