This post is a part of the Blog's 2023 APA Conference coverage, showcasing the research of APA members across the country. The APA Eastern Conference session on Comparative Environmental Philosophy covered in this post was organized by the APA Committee on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies.
Environmental philosophy, as with the rest of philosophy more broadly, ought to engage freely with different cultural traditions rather than be restricted, as it so often has been, to a Western context. And due to the global nature of our worsening climate crisis, which poses an existential threat to us all, there is even more urgency and reason for environmental philosophy to search for wisdom wherever it can. With the goal of contributing to such important cross-cultural ecological thinking, the APA Committee on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies organized a session at the 2023 APA Eastern Division Meeting on comparative environmental philosophy that centered and engaged with Asian philosophical traditions. The following papers were presented:
“Living Together in the Anthropocene: Environmental Ethics in Japanese Buddhism”
James McRae (Westminster College)
“The Environmental Significance of Nishida’s Concept of Historical Nature”
Lucy Schultz (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
“Daoist wuwei in the Anthropocene”
Eric S. Nelson (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Below are extended abstracts of each paper. The session was organized and chaired by Jonathan Kwan (NYU Abu Dhabi) who serves on the APA Committee on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies.
“Living Together in the Anthropocene: Environmental Ethics in Japanese Buddhism”
James McRae (Westminster College)
In “Living Together in the Anthropocene: Environmental Ethics in Japanese Buddhism,” James McRae explores some of the ways in which the Japanese Buddhist traditions of thought can be used to develop a strong environmental ethic to respond to the current ecological crisis. The first section examines climate change and the effects that it will have on economic and political stability. The next section uses Japanese Buddhist philosophy to criticize the consumerist worldview that has caused this environmental degradation and offers an alternative worldview grounded in the concept of symbiosis (kyōsei/tomoiki). The third section argues that Buddhism is not an anthropocentric (“human‑centered”) ethic, but rather an ecocentric ethic that recognizes the intrinsic value of human beings, nonhuman organisms, and even the inorganic components of the natural world. The final section explains how East Japanese Buddhism can be understood as a type of environmental virtue ethic. Ultimately, Japanese Buddhism is a valuable conceptual resource for environmental ethics because it forces us to critique many of the foundational assumptions that we have taken for granted, such as consumerism and anthropocentrism, and it encourages us to cultivate intellectual and moral virtues that promote a flourishing existence.
“The Environmental Significance of Nishida’s Concept of Historical Nature”
Lucy Schultz (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
The “Anthropocene” presents a paradox in which the separation of humanity and nature collapses into contradiction. From the standpoint of science, whatever was once conceived as part of the “human spirit” is now coextensive with the material body, which is governed by biology. Thus, human beings, their behavior, and cultural artifacts are increasingly understood as extensions of nature. At the same time, within the Anthropocene, all of nature has been covered with the trail of the human serpent, which has led many to claim that nature, as such, no longer exists. This reinforces Bill McKibben’s now 40-year-old proclamation of the “end of nature.” Strangely, within the Anthropocene, nature is both everywhere and nowhere.
The root of this paradox is an equivocation resulting from the problematic separation of the human and the natural, commonly identified as the nature/culture distinction. Japanese philosophers Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960) offer two compatible visions that go beyond the metaphysical dualism of nature and culture that pervades much of Western philosophical discourse. Nishida’s concept of historical nature and Watsuji’s notion of fūdo (or climatic milieu) offer a timely alternative through which we can reimagine the nature/culture relationship. Furthermore, their philosophies provide a framework for thinking through contemporary debates in environmental philosophy, particularly those surrounding the issues of ecological restoration and geoengineering.
In his essay “The World as Dialectical Universal” in Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Nishida develops his own dialectical worldview through a sustained engagement with elements of Hegel’s thought. Nishida coins the phrases “acting intuition” and “the movement from the created to the creating” to articulate the dynamic between the self and world animating his conceptions of expressive action and the dialectical world. Nishida’s recognition of the role nature and materiality play in the formation of the historical world led him to develop the concept of “historical nature.” The physical world of nature cannot be conceived independently of the ways has been shaped and apprehended by various cultures through time. In other words, according to Nishida, nature and culture are always fundamentally intertwined.
Watsuji’s concept of fūdo (climatic milieu) and traditional satoyama landscapes of Japan provide concrete illustrations of Nishida’s concept of historical nature. Satoyama landscapes are a patchwork of human settlements, farm fields, rice paddies, irrigation channels, roads, and woodlands developed over many generations, demonstrating how human production and natural processes can work together in ways that are mutually sustaining.
Together, the philosophies of Nishida and Watsuji provide a framework for thinking through contemporary debates surrounding the issues of ecological restoration and geoengineering. Applying insights gleaned from Nishida and Watsuji, and the example of satoyama, I argue that community-engaged ecological restoration projects are essential for healing the rift between societies and the natural systems in which they are grounded. Restored ecosystems demonstrate a positive example of the transformations of historical nature. In contrast, geoengineering practices involve technological domination that further entrenches societies’ alienation from and degradation of natural systems.
In our time when the Earth itself is on its way toward becoming a human artifact, the philosophies of Nishida and Watsuji can help us evolve our understanding of nature in a way that promotes both human and ecological flourishing.
“Daoist wuwei in the Anthropocene”
Eric S. Nelson (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
The expression wei wu wei 為無為, often abbreviated to wuwei, literally denotes “acting without acting.” It has been taken to mean a variety of behaviors and dispositions from indifference and inaction to minimalism and adaptability to responsive resonance and releasement. It is associated in the popular imagination with: (1) hermits, recluses, and religious, poetic, and philosophical wanderers as in visionary “far roaming” (yuanyou 遠遊) and the “free and easy wandering” (xiaoyao you 逍遙遊) of Zhuangzi 莊子; (2) simple non-hierarchical self-organizing agrarian communities labeled “primitivist” by scholars; and (3) exemplary sage-kings and sagely advisors who rule and instruct through wuwei understood as Daoist relational self-ordering that is concomitantly an autopoiesis and sympoiesis, Confucian moral exemplarity, or “legalist” concealed leadership.
Despite prevalent tendencies toward depoliticization and privatization in which wuwei is taken as a private mystical state, a flexible reflexive knack, and psychological flow-experience, its early meanings were primarily ethical, political, and social. In the Daodejing 道德經 attributed to Laozi 老子, it directly concerns the art of rulership and the way in which people and things “anarchically” organize and nourish themselves (ziran 自然). Ziran, the participatory and interactive self-patterning and self-ordering of the myriad things, (wanwu 萬物) and the correlate of wuwei and the shared nourishing of life (yangsheng 養生), only partially overlaps with traditional and modern European conceptions of “nature” as object, as the relational oneness and multiplicity of things concern neither a determining collective substance nor isolated atomistic entities. This historical context allows us to answer several objections raised against deploying wuwei in environmental philosophy.
The first objection is that early Daoism cannot address the complexities of bureaucratic and technological modernity. The second is that it advocates an agrarian “primitivism” and simplicity of life that are incompatible with developed forms of cultural, social, and technological life. The third is that it calls for a merely passive inaction, reactive adaptation, or an unreflective immediacy that are inadequate to respond to environmental crisis-tendencies through ensembles of complexly mediated practices and reflective policies such as ecological activism, degrowth, intergenerational justice, restoration, and sustainability. These are justifiably perceived to demand not merely personal nature-mysticism but participatory public and democratic dialogue, deliberation, and decision-making, scientific knowledge of changing environments and new more ecologically responsive technologies, as well as intellectual reflection and insight that have been obstructed through systematic power and market relations.
As such objections reveal, “ziranist” Daoism has been inadequately conceived in dualistic and oppositional terms: action vs. inaction, complexity vs. simplicity, culture vs. naturalness, and hierarchical society vs. “primitive” freedom and equality. Its point is, however, participatory relationality rather than static opposition, as it fosters simplicity in complexity, naturalness in culture, responsive attunement in activity, and mutually shared self-ordering within natural and social systems. Daoist freedom and uselessness concerns the appropriate uses of things and technologies rather than their negation. Early Daoist wuwei accordingly indicates suggestive ways of questioning and reimagining the environmental crises of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.
James McRae
James McRae earned his PhD in comparative philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with specializations in Japanese philosophy and ethics. He currently serves as professor of Asian philosophy and religion and chair of the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He regularly teaches courses on Buddhism, Asian thought, applied ethics, and critical thinking. His publications include Introduction to Buddhist East Asia (with Robert H. Scott, forthcoming in 2023 from SUNY Press), Japanese Environmental Philosophy (with J. Baird Callicott, Oxford University Press, 2017), Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought (with J. Baird Callicott, SUNY Press, 2014), and The Philosophy of Ang Lee (with Robert Arp and Adam Barkman, University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
Lucy Schultz
Lucy Schultz is Associate Lecturer of Philosophy and Co-director of Environmental Studies at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oregon and an M.A. in Philosophy and the Arts from SUNY Stony Brook. Her research interests revolve around questions pertaining to dialectic, philosophy of nature and environment, and the genesis of art as they are developed within the traditions of German idealism, phenomenology, and modern Japanese philosophy. She is currently working on projects drawing out the philosophical resources within these traditions for thinking through and addressing the challenges presented by climate change. Her work has appeared in journals such as Philosophy East and West, Environmental Philosophy, and Hegel Bulletin, and she is co-editor of Tetsugaku Companion to Nishida Kitaro (Springer Nature, 2022).
Eric S. Nelson
Eric S. Nelson is Professor of Philosophy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has published extensively on Chinese, German, Jewish, and intercultural philosophy. He is the author of Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2023), Daoism and Environmental Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other (SUNY Press, 2020), and Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought (Bloomsbury, 2017). He edited Interpreting Dilthey: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-edited The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger (Bloomsbury, 2013/2016), Between Levinas and Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2014), Rethinking Facticity (SUNY Press, 2008), Anthropologie und Geschichte: Studien zu Wilhelm Dilthey (Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), and Addressing Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2005).
Jonathan Kwan
Jonathan Kwan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research is in social and political philosophy, especially as it intersects with environmental philosophy, decolonial philosophy, and the philosophy of race, as well as Chinese philosophy. His work has appeared in Social Theory and Practice, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and Film and Philosophy. Jonathan currently serves on the APA Committee on Asian & Asian American Philosophers & Philosophies.
