This past Tuesday on The
Daily Show, Jon Stewart spoke to Elizabeth Kolbert about her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which
addresses our role in an impending mass extinction. Kolbert notes (jokingly,
naturally) that “the really impressive thing” about our self-extinction “is
that we’re doing it without even trying.”
This segment came to mind as I was reading “Estranged
Labor,” and struck me as a particularly powerful illustration of estrangement
from “species being.” Species being implies, I think, not only an awareness of
other humans, but also a historical consciousness of the human species—an
awareness of the past and future development of the species, and a recognition
of the individual’s participation in this larger historical development. As
species beings, then, humans understand their relationship to a natural system
that exceeds their individual needs. Estrangement from the species being turns
“the life of the species into a means of individual life” and “makes individual
life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species” (75). This
prioritization of the individual over the species reminds me of Hegel’s Acting
Consciousness and its confusion of individual needs with universal good, though
the estranged human does not mistake his individual needs for the universal so
much as disregard the universal altogether. The human estranged from the
species places individual, and short-term, needs and wants above the long-term
development of the human species. Relationships with other humans and with
nature become means to individual ends, and perhaps become expendable in this
process.
It seems the extinction Kolbert discusses illustrates the
estrangement of the individual and the species. This estrangement enables us to
drive the world towards extinction “without even trying”; no matter how many
times we’re told about the consequences of our actions, we can’t seem to
relinquish our individual needs for the sake of the “species being” and the
environment that sustains it. Environmentalist arguments reminding us that the
continuing depletion of resources will eventually prohibit certain lifestyles fail
to reinstate the individual’s relationship to the species. In fact, this type
of argument only encourages us to curb certain behaviors so that we can
continue to use nature as a “means to individual existence” (77). Perhaps the
only way to reverse the “sixth extinction” (if we haven’t already run out of
time) would involve reorienting our relationship to our “species being.”
I think you've struck an interesting chord here in your defense of being more connected to one's "species being." Marx raises a similar point in his critique of capitalism. If we were to go along with Marx's claim that our labor is isolating from our true selves, then no amount of accumulated wealth and no garnered distinction could negate this effect. Capitalism, Marx says, reduces humans' creative, productive capacities by isolating them from their labor, and thus reduces humans to animalistic forms of themselves. If this is the case and if being in touch with our "species beings" is so important, then perhaps the whole system of capitalism should be - if not done away with entirely - reformed.
ReplyDeleteWe often hear from environmentalists that the environmental debts of today will be paid by future generations (wouldn’t Marx love the economic terms), and the commodification of the environment is utterly undeniable, but I had never connected environmental degradation to estrangement from the species being, but it makes perfect sense. We are essentially leveraging the problems of our progeny against our own current comfort, making our future a means to our present. In fact many environmental scientists predict that we will see some major climate impacts in our own lifetimes, and defiantly in those of the our children. Our failure to act in spite of the evidence is evidence of not only our estrangement from our species being, in the form of our offspring, but also evidence of our estrangement from even our future selves, who may well be impacted by, at the very least, rising sea levels and severe weather.
ReplyDeleteWe are so thoroughly alienated from nature that we do not even see ourselves in it, the products we create, which for Hegel allowed us to see ourselves it the world, are utterly un-natural, and because we are estranged from them and from our labor we can no longer see ourselves in them. Ultimately, they, as objects, are othered from nature, think of landfills, and the treatment of hazardous waste; our creations are so un-natural that even nature cannot re-absorb them. Although we vainly see ourselves as outside of, and above, nature, safe in our cities, we do not rely on nature for survival today any less than we have at any point in our species’ history. To live, we still rely on earth’s systems to renew our air and water, to grow our food, to process our waste, and to provide us with building materials and energy, yet we, being so estranged from nature, somehow fail to see our poverty. Instead we believe ourselves to have dominion over nature, to exert our will upon it, and shape it as we see fit, just as consciousness did in the beginning of the phenomenology, for we have not yet had the realization of the slave. We have yet to comprehend that to be recognized by another consciousness we need to be alive, and that to be alive we need nature.
I am not so sure I agree. Is it necessary that estrangement from species being would result in the extinction of the species? If we take examples from non-human species, I do not think this is the case. Many of these exist sustainably without a consciousness of their species. Although, it is certainly the case that other species certainly have not had, and most likely cannot have, the kind of connection or understanding of a species being that humans possess. Is this kind of species being, then, an essential element of humanity? I am not so sure, but we tend to use the word “humanity” in relation to species being (e.g. “Have you lost your sense of humanity, man!?). This sense of humanity, however, is an altruistic one and I am not sure that it necessarily corresponds to species being.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of whether or not species being is fundamental to human being, even in estrangement of the individual from the species being it seems that the species would survive, but it may not thrive. When the life of the species being serves the life of the individual being, then the species as a whole is working to serve the individual and this work does serve to maintain the species, though perhaps not the species being. Not every individual is treated as they might be in a mode of living where species being is the end, but the species itself would not go extinct.
It appears that the battle you propose—or that Marx proposes—is one between self-interest and awareness of species being. That is to say, which mode of living will produce the most sustainable route to ensure the survival of human beings?
Still, I am not so sure that I understand species being properly. It appears that within your post and the following comments, there has been an assumption of altruism in species being, but I am not sure this would be the case. To clarify, would it not be the case that an emphasis on species being would avoid altruism and concern for the fellow human by prioritizing the species as a whole first? In other words, is not altruism intended for the sake of an individual or group of individuals? The issue here appears to be one of prioritization: species before individual, individual before species, or is Marx’s proposal actually individual and species (doing away with prioritization altogether).
I think it is clear that most of my qualms with your point derive from a vague understanding of species being.
As long as private property predominates the private individual's concerns, he or she cannot help but respond to environmental devastation in this way. Clearly, capitalism and American atom-ism are coterminus, to a large extent. Each framework--the former economic and the later sociopolitical--reinforces and justifies the other. I'm not convinced that framing environmental concerns within an anthropocentric lens undermines species-being, however. Obviously, the artificial schism between the unbidden, natural, phenomenal world and the designed, built, artificial phenomenal world impedes the necessary recognition of each world's co-extension with the other. The political and social differentiation between these two aforementioned worlds ultimately impedes the subject's attempts to see themselves in the world around them.
ReplyDelete