Standard defences of preservationism, and of the intrinsic value of nature more generally, are vulnerable to at least three objections. The first of these comes from social constructivism, the second from the claim that it is incoherent to argue that nature is both 'other' and something with which we can feel unity, whilst the third links defences of nature to authoritarian objectivism and dangerously misanthropic normative dichotomies which set pure nature against impure humanity. I argue that all these objections may be answered by recasting the relationship between man and nature into a tripartite spectrum of ontological form between nature and artifact, with the key question being the extent to which nature has been humanised in accordance with certain modes of strongly instrumental rationality, these in turn being defined by reference to the split between abstract reason and natural feeling which was exacerbated by specific elements in the Enlightenment period. This new model may grant normative force by linking external nature to a broader conception of human psychological wellbeing than that offered by the quantitatively orientated models of human rationality and agency.
This chapter discusses the history of environmental concern within the liberal tradition from the latter’s roots onwards, moving from the private property orientated “old liberalism” of John Locke into the self-development orientated “new liberalism” of John Stuart Mill, then onwards into American pragmatism and the neutralist liberalism of John Rawls and his contemporary followers. This leads into an overview of the current debate, which started in the 1990s, over the possibilities of synthesizing environmentalist goals of sustainability and nature protection with some variant of liberalism. The chapter concludes with an argument that yokes the new liberal concern with self-development to the environmentalist emphasis on nature protection, arguing that the continued existence of relatively untransformed nonhuman nature is a vital precondition and assistance to human imaginative development and thus freedom.
The relationship of human liberty to both external nature and human inner nature entails a complex knot of questions that have long been the subject of intense philosophical discussion. In the modern era, a strong dichotomy developed between these concepts in which human freedom was counterposed to an apparently determinate nature that existed as a valueless res extensa. In this article, however, the author argues for the presence and vitality of an alternative concept of human liberty, one that relies not on the ownership of property but on nature as a point outside the system of human instrumental control and as the hall of mirrors represented by collective solipsism. The author arrives at this point through careful study of the underresearched naturalistic scenes and elements in George Orwell’s highly influential 1984, drawing out the complex interconnections of nature, liberty, and fulfillment found within them. This study illustrates the usefulness of the dystopian imagination to theorizing relationships between nature and humanity.
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