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On the Significance of Eco-Phenomenology for Theories of Sustainability
Kira Meyer and Konrad Ott
Abstract
The Ecosystem Service Approach lays down the several ways in which nature contributes to the welfare of human beings. One important category of this approach is the cultural services that nature offers, which conform to the eudaimonic values in environmental ethics. The cultural services of nature are an important reason in choosing a concept of strong sustainability, as developed by Konrad Ott and Ralf Döring; eco-phenomenology is a method to immerse into these cultural-eudaimonic values and articulate them in nuanced ways. Our overall argument will substantiate the uncommon claim that eco-phenomenology is of focal significance to theories of sustainability.
Key Words
cultural services; eco-phenomenology; Ecosystem Service Approach; eudaimonic values; sustainability
1. Introduction
I sat here, biding, biding – but for nought,
Beyond good and evil, now the light,
To savor, now the shade, all merely mime,
All lake, all midday, all untending time. [1]
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In his poem, Sils Maria, Nietzsche describes in the first lines an aesthetic experience of nature he had while being immersed in the landscape around Lake Sils. He corporeally and sensually experiences the manifold qualities that the nature around him offers and is completely absorbed by them. Being able to forget his everyday life and needs, tasks and appointments, Nietzsche recreates. His poem can be read as a sign of his appreciation of the aesthetic pleasure and recreation that nature offered him. Nietzsche thereby addresses two important aspects of what are nowadays called the cultural services of nature. The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment Report, a survey initiated by the United Nations and published in 2005, develops the concept of ecosystem services of which cultural services build one important category.[2] Cultural services are being defined as the nonmaterial benefits that humans can gain from nature. They include aesthetic values, the symbolic meaning of nature, sense of home, leisure and recreation, and spirituality and transformation.[3] They conform, in turn, to the eudaimonic values in environmental ethics, which refer to natural entities that are an integral part of the good life of human beings. We assume that these cultural-eudaimonic values are being rightly highlighted. Otherwise, we would only be able to refer to nature either as instrumentally or inherently valuable.
However, this falls short of the experiences most of us make in and with nature, namely that nature does not only have an instrumental value for pursuing our aims—while at the same time it is only possible to offer arguments for the inherent value of some, but not of all, natural entities. When we take a walk through the woods, when we lose ourselves in the sight of a lake, when we lie in a summer meadow and listen to the sounds of the insects, one values these natural entities insofar as they build an integral part of one’s good life. It seems crucial to recognize these cases that cannot be reduced to instrumental valuation of nature, but neither include the claim that these natural entities should therefore be understood as inherently valuable. Thus, nature has an eudaimonic-cultural value insofar as natural entities are part of the good life of many persons; we owe it to them to morally consider the goods of their notion of a good life.
While the terminology of ecosystem services is now common parlance and has been used in many scientific examinations, the subcategory of cultural values so far is underrated. This has to do with the difficulties in monetizing cultural services, unlike the other three service categories.[4] In this paper, we wish to shed light on the important but underrepresented category of cultural services of nature. Cultural services of nature (eudaimonic values) are an important reason in favor of choosing a notion of strong sustainability that builds an integral part of a transition towards a sustainable attitude. We will also argue that these values can be developed by an eco-phenomenological reconstruction.[5]
We advance this argument in three steps. First, we present the notion of strong sustainability and show that it avoids the widespread anthropocentric character of sustainability. Secondly, we argue why cultural services (eudaimonic values) are one of several reasons to choose strong sustainability. We can philosophically and methodologically develop these values with the help of eco-phenomenology. Thus, thirdly, we will argue that while the ecosystem service approach operationalizes cultural services in economic terms, environmental ethics can use the methods of eco-phenomenology: This enables a deeper and more fine-grained perception of the respective natural entities that, in turn, provides a particularly suitable basis for a subsequent analysis. To put in other words, eco-phenomenology makes humans more attentive and sensitive in encountering nature. The overall argument will substantiate the uncommon claim that eco-phenomenology is of focal significance to theories of sustainability.
2. Strong sustainability: going beyond shallow anthropocentrism
It is often asserted that the term ‘sustainability’ is indeterminate. Even though it is right that sustainability is on everyone’s lips and several disciplines work on the topic of sustainability, great efforts have been made to adequately conceptualize the term ‘sustainability’ over the last decades. In order to better differentiate between the various conceptions of sustainability, the distinction between weak sustainability, on the one hand, and strong sustainability, on the other hand, has been proposed. This rough bisection, in turn, was refined so that different gradations were possible: In the literature, five different grades of ‘sustainability’ have been carved out: very weak, weak, mediating-critical, strong, and very strong.[6]
Shortly, we will explain each grade and argue why a notion of strong sustainability should be adopted. Very weak notions of sustainability consider the continuous growth of the gross national product (GNP) as the central criterion. Since the GNP is only an economic measure, but does not say anything about welfare, justice, and the responsibility for the future, we take it not even to be a concept of sustainability anymore.[7] We claim that sustainability comprises two normative sources, that of (intergenerational) justice, on the one hand, and environmental ethics, on the other hand. Both, however, cannot be derived from a notion that only looks at the measure of economic activity. Since the GDP only measures economic activities at markets, it is an insufficient measure to assess the quality of collective environmental goods.
Conceptions that claim that natural capital can be substituted are weak sustainability notions. Every natural entity can, in principle, be replaced with another human-made artifact. Thus, the fair bequest package for advocates of weak sustainability consists of a constant, summative, total stock of capitals. Future generations can be compensated for the loss of natural capital with substitutes that may imply that they will be paid, or that more and better consumer goods or cultural offers will be provided. Such notions regard nature as pure matter that can be used, quantified, and technologically manipulated. Against this background, it comes as no surprise that weak notions of sustainability are characterized by a great technology-optimism, assuming that, in the future, ideally every natural resource can be technically substituted. In the previous section, we argued that nature, among other values, has eudaimonic value; that is, it has an intrinsic value that stems from its contribution to the good life of many human beings—presuming that we owe people respect for their conception of a good life and thus also for the goods that are included in it. But notions of weak sustainability do not acknowledge this eudaimonic value; they only include the instrumental value of nature for human well-being. Weak sustainability is only interested in nature as an input factor in production.
If weak sustainability would adopt more refined concepts of evaluating nature, such as Total Economic Value, it would have to modify its axiom of unlimited substitutability. This is because one important value category within the Total Economic Value concept is the so-called “existence values” that a natural entity has when an agent appreciates its mere existence as good, without further interest to utilize it. ‘Existence values’ can refer to special sites, as the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, Lake Baikal, and so on, but also to the existence of wild species, such as whales, tigers, mountain lions, and the like. In the perspective of the evaluator, the existence of natural beings counts for its own sake. There is natural goodness that should continue to exist. Thus, the axiom of unlimited substitutability that characterizes weak sustainability would be challenged.[8]
Furthermore, it can and should be questioned that future generations will agree on being compensated for the loss of natural capital—the assumed, absent preference for nature/natural capital is not justified. Given the uncertainty about future human beings and their preferences, we should leave open the possibility of preferences for natural capital and thus the existence of natural capital. Much more could be said and criticized about conceptions of weak sustainability, but for our purposes, the argument against weak sustainability’s disregard of eudaimonic values and the argument in favor of leaving open the possibility of preferences for natural capital must suffice.[9]
Mediating notions of sustainability assume that natural and physical capital are partly substitutable and partly complementary.[10] In economic theory, the notion of complementarity implies that natural capital is a necessary input for the production of goods or the supply of services. Mediating conceptions propose that each individual case should be checked; substitution is allowed as long as the essential substance of natural capital, called ‘critical natural capital,’ isn’t being endangered. As Fridolin Brand has argued, criticality of natural capital is a multidimensional concept that entails six domains under which natural capital may become critical. These domains go beyond survival and include socio-cultural criticality.[11] To Brand, ecological resilience can be used as measure for criticality.
Fishers, for example, would claim that the population of sardines are a critical nature capital since without them the basis of their livelihood would be omitted, which, in turn, would have very negative consequences for their well-being. Yet, other groups of people would call other forms of natural capital as critical. So, how can we clearly determine what belongs to this critical natural capital? Since natural systems are highly interwoven, it seems difficult to differentiate between critical and noncritical natural capital. If we accept, for example, that sardines are critical natural capital, then what about the plankton that nourishes the sardines and produces oxygen? Therefore, the debate on criticality provides reasons to go beyond mediating conceptions of sustainability and heads towards strong sustainability.[12]
The concept of strong sustainability argues that natural capital cannot be substituted by human-made capital; therefore, natural capital must be constant over time, and investments in it must be made.[13] The basis for these claims is the assumption that natural and physical capital are complementary. The conception of strong sustainability, as introduced by Ott and Döring, includes several layers (or platforms) of inquiry, including the history of the idea of sustainability since 1713, its ethical foundations (environmental ethics, intergenerational justice), and the competing conceptual frameworks (weak, intermediate, strong), but also guidelines (consistency, resilience, sufficiency), rules, targets, and more. The theoretical core can be applied to fields of environmental policymaking, as climate change, biodiversity, forestry, freshwater, soils, and oceans, among others. By application, the theory becomes eminently practical. On the platform of the ethical foundations of sustainability, the ethical premises regarding justice and the values of nature are included. An overview of this theoretical approach is given by Michel Bourban.[14] Regarding the values of nature, the concept assigns inherent moral value not only to human beings but also to sentient animals, and eudaimonic value to those natural entities that are an integral part of the good life of human beings. Therefore, strong sustainability is “deep anthropocentric”: It goes beyond the purely instrumental value of nature and gradually overcomes a shallow anthropocentrism that only recognizes the inherent moral value of human beings and claims that natural entities are only instrumentally valuable insofar as they are useful for humans.[15] This classical, shallow anthropocentrism is characterized by attributing only instrumental value to nature and denying that it has a moral value for its own sake. Human beings are seen as the only “moral patients,” who possess, due to their ability to reason, an inherent value that should be respected. They can make use of nature as they please and use the natural resources as means to their ends.
In contrast, deep anthropocentrism does not stop at the instrumental value of nature, but acknowledges the inherent moral value of sentient beings and assesses this inherent value based on the ability to communicate.[16] Cultural-eudaimonic values highlight why nature cannot be substituted by something human-made and thus support the important complementarity-thesis of strong sustainability: Natural entities often provide meaning and significance within cultural life and specific practices (as hiking, diving, climbing) that cannot be substituted by artifacts that lack those significances. If a certain forest offered you a transformative spiritual experience that had an high impact on your way of life, you will not accept that instead of the forest a wellness-center with mindfulness courses will be built. Indoor climbing is not the same as climbing real mountain peaks. Thus, cultural services that equate eudaimonic values of nature are one important step towards a conceptual framework for strong sustainability that avoids the purely instrumental anthropocentric character. Even if it might be technological feasible to substitute natural resources in our economy, eudaimonic values give strong reasons why we should not be willing to substitute nature with artificial sources of pleasure and entertainment.
Very strong conceptions of sustainability furthermore acknowledge the inherent moral value of natural entities.[17] Since sustainability refers to nature, it cannot simply abstract away the demarcation problem, that is, the problem of where to draw a line between those entities that deserve moral consideration and those that do not.[18] If strong sustainability relies on environmental ethics, it cannot simply stipulate anthropocentrism. Thus, very strong sustainability is a serious option.
If inherent moral value is attributed to nonhuman beings, such beings are not just singular entities within a living fund of natural resources that should be kept intact over time in their entirety. Such beings, then, morally count as individuals. The demarcation problem allows for different nonanthropocentric (synonymous: ‘physiocentric’) solutions such as sentientism, zoocentrism, biocentrism, geno-centrism, ecocentrism, and holism.
All such physiocentric solutions of the demarcation problem can be defended either in an egalitarian or a gradual variant. In egalitarian variants, the resource base of humans dramatically shrinks and comes close to a permission to continue one’s bare life.[19] Egalitarian variants of sentientism force humans to abolish domestication of and hunt for sentient animals.[20] Gradual variants entail commitments against cruelty and infliction of unnecessary harm, but allow specific practices in sustainable and ‘humane’ ways to continue. For instance, if all vertebrates, including fish, are sentient and may have a right to live, there is no such thing as “sustainable fisheries.” If one allows grading, whaling might be banned, but fishing sardines might be permitted, since the sensory apparatus of whales is highly different from that of sardines. Such differentiations, however, can be easily accused of arbitrariness and of lacking moral rigor and stringency. Grading inherent moral value is “weak very strong sustainability.” There is always a complex casuistry for sustainability theorists who go beyond anthropocentrism.[21]
This short overview over the five different conceptions of sustainability should make clear that the term ‘sustainability’ is far from being indeterminate. As we have argued, a concept of strong sustainability is preferable to the weaker conceptions (very weak, weak, mediating). Adopting such a (very) strong notion of sustainability would mean overcoming shallow anthropocentrism: first, because it acknowledges an inherent moral value not only of human beings but of all sentient beings, even though it is possible to graduate according to the ability to communicate, and second, because the cultural-eudaimonic value of nature is being acknowledged. For our line of argument, it is this second reason that is of special interest. In the following section, we will introduce this category of values and argue why cultural services (eudaimonic values) are one of several reasons to choose strong sustainability.
3. Cultural services of nature
The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment Report lays down the several ways in which nature contributes to the welfare of human beings, and therefore introduces the concept of ecosystem services. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEB) study adopted it in 2011; it is increasingly used in scientific analysis ranging from economics to philosophy. The concept of ecosystem services should link nature and human welfare. However, the term ‘services’ might be misleading, if understood in a purely economic sense, and could invite misunderstandings, for example, that nature is regarded in the same way as a company that offers services. We do not follow such an understanding of nature, but nevertheless think that it is possible to continue using the term ‘services.’ Since the terminology of services has spread around the world, we won’t discard it; rather, we think it should be integrated into a broader environmental ethical framework.[22] We will speak of services in a technical sense, understanding it in the broad sense of something that is useful or beneficial for human beings.
In the report, four categories of services are identified: supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural. We will explain shortly what is meant by each category, so that the category of cultural services will become clearer in contrast to the other three ones. Ecological functions and structures that underlie the natural processes and sustain an ecosystem in its entirety belong to the supporting services.[23] Photosynthesis and the water cycle are just two of them. Provisioning services of nature include all services that can be extracted from nature and used by human beings, for example, food, oil, gas, and the like. Regulating services include ecosystem processes that moderate natural phenomena—think of water purification, carbon storage, or decomposition. All these three kinds of services can be quantified economically and/or physically and monetized. In this sense, they fundamentally differ from the fourth category, the cultural services, which hardly can be translated into monetary terms. As has already been mentioned in the introduction, here ‘cultural services’ are defined as the nonmaterial benefits that humans can gain from nature. They include aesthetic values, the symbolic meaning of nature, natural heritage, sense of home, leisure and recreation, and spirituality and transformation. In the following, we will exclusively focus on cultural values of nature and their function for a transformation towards a sustainable attitude.
Nature and natural entities are often appreciated for their beauty or sublimity because they represent something meaningful and are closely related to the cultural history of tribes, nations, social groups, or individuals; thereby, certain landscapes or places become home for many people. Furthermore, human beings seek out nature to recreate or spend their leisure time—the list of possible activities is almost endless and spans from snorkeling to climbing, from birdwatching to paragliding, and much more. In addition, nature is often referred to as a place of spiritual encounters or experiences that can become transformative experiences, even though these might also take place without preceding spiritual encounters. All the mentioned aspects that nature provides belong to the category of cultural services. In the introduction, we claimed that cultural services conform to the eudaimonic values from environmental ethics. ‘Eudaimonic values’ refer to those respects in which nature contributes to the good life of human beings. Next to instrumental and inherent values, they are an important third category of values that long was overlooked in environmental ethics.[24] Since concepts of the good life are inextricably linked to the attribution of significance or meaning, eudaimonic values are accordingly linked to meaningful experiences of nature, which are perceived as enriching and gratifying not least for this reason.[25] In summary, cultural services of nature have an eudaimonic value because the nonmaterial benefits that nature offers human beings through them is an integral part of the good life of many individuals, which cannot be reduced to instrumental value. If one appreciates hiking, one appreciates the alpine landscape and the fresh mountain air as such, not because they might help with pulmonary problems or the like. If an activity is undertaken for its own sake, it has an intrinsic eudemonic value.[26]
Thus, cultural services of nature give expression to cultural-eudaimonic values within the scope of the ecosystem service approach. Taking cultural services seriously gives us a powerful reason to adopt a notion of strong sustainability; that is, as we have argued above, to adopt a position of deep anthropocentrism. Hence, cultural-eudaimonic values of nature can help us to overcome currently widespread shallow anthropocentrism and help to accomplish a transformation towards more sustainable lifeforms. It should be kept in mind that there are even more reasons for choosing a notion of strong sustainability—some of them were briefly mentioned in the previous section—even though we do not pursue them any further here.
4. Eco-phenomenology
But how can we develop the cultural-eudaimonic values philosophically and methodologically? While the ecosystem service approach operationalizes cultural services in economic terms, environmental ethics can enhance access to natural entities through corporeally sensing in the form of eco-phenomenology.
Eco-phenomenology involves, on the one hand, the accurate phenomenological description of experiences of the natural world and, on the other hand, the development of a phenomenological approach to a “value-laden domain of experience (…) that can help us understand and justify alternative, eco-friendly conceptions of rationality and ethical action.”[27] The focus lies on the understanding of nature and how this, in turn, is influenced by aspects such as intentionality, corporeality, or temporality.[28] Eco-phenomenology also asks what is going on in sensual encountering natural beings (animals, plants, mountains, coastlines, forests). It is possible to understand human beings as belonging to nature because of their own corporeality.[29] Following such an account, individuals can sensually-corporeally experience nature, and that means at the same time their own naturalness. The lived body thus becomes important, as the access point of the subject to nature and its cultural-eudaimonic values. Ranging from smelling, listening, tasting, touching, seeing, and sensing to corporeal impulses, nature offers human beings several possibilities to make corporeal experiences. Humans have access to the “more-than-human world”[30] through their lived body and are able to corporeally communicate with nature.[31] With the help of eco-phenomenology, it is possible to give “thick” descriptions of how individuals experience nature as home, aesthetically valuable, and offering recreation and leisure, spirituality, and transformation. Such descriptions can be found in (eco)phenomenological writings just as in nature writing, nature essays, and poems, and in non-Western, indigenous stories, songs, chants, and the likes. So, cultural-eudaimonic values cannot only be operationalized in economic terms, as is commonly done within the ecosystem service approach, but also through a phenomenological reconstruction.
Now, such sensual-corporeal experience of nature can be cultivated in different grades. Autogenous training, yoga, meditation, and the like all try to shape an awareness of the lived body and sensibilize the subject for its corporeal impulses. Having a (sharpened) awareness of one’s lived body and practicing corporeal attention can lead to noticing aspects of nature that otherwise would be overlooked. In this sense, the corporeal experience of the cultural values of nature can be an impulse to rethink what attitude or virtue would be adequate to them. The central role of individual attitudes and the focus on practices represents a parallel to environmental virtue ethics. For environmental virtue ethics, too, it is particularly about the right (“virtuous”) attitudes of individuals that cannot be acquired at once, but rather need to be practiced and demonstrated again and again. Thus, acknowledging cultural-eudaimonic values from an eco-phenomenological perspective can lead to an environmental virtue ethics.
There is also a second path towards environmental virtue ethics that leads from transformative values, which are part of cultural-eudaimonic values. Following Bryan G. Norton,[32] nature offers human beings manifold possibilities to make transformative experiences that are able to transform the value system of the individual and his or her own self-understanding. Such experiences also are dubbed “deontic experiences” if they motivate one to adopt a specific ethical stance beyond anthropocentrism. A lot of nature writing literature is exactly about such experiences, but one can also find them in the writings of environmental ethicists. Think of Albert Schweitzer, for whom a boat trip down the Ogowe River had such a transformative power as to ground his complete ethical system upon it; looking at the hippos bathing in the river, the idea of reverence for life suddenly came to his mind.[33] Aldo Leopold also had a deontic-transformative experience as he looked into the eyes of a dying wolf he had shot. Those eyes ‘told’ him that it is wrong to exterminate wolves. Norton claims that nature has transformative value because we can make experiences in and with it that can lead to leaving behind consumerist values and reaching out for less materialistic ones. Transformative and deontic experiences are neither common nor idiosyncratic. The transformative value of nature doesn’t imply that everyone has to make the same experiences in such a situation. Perhaps such experiences have been silenced because persons prefer to keep them private because they deviate from ‘rational’ common sense. However, this is sufficient to argue that nature has the potential to transform the attitudes and beliefs.
They can lead to the question, in which society do we wish to live in?[34] This shows that transformative values sensu Norton lead to an environmental virtue ethics:[35] What human-nature-relationships are desirable? What values (here especially regarding nature) should we (wish to) have? What social system advances these desirable relationships and values? [36]
With view to arts and aesthetics, the eco-phenomenological approach comes with a completely different understanding of the aesthetical. Aesthetic experiences that themselves form one dimension of cultural values are thus especially suited for showing that methodologically; we can develop cultural-eudaimonic values best from an eco-phenomenological position. In a narrow sense, aesthetic nature experiences refer to meaningful experiences of beautiful or sublime nature. But phenomenological work has shown that this fixation on beauty and sublimity does not live up to our real, everyday life, aesthetic experiences: Rather, we should focus on the atmospheres that we sensually-corporeally experience.[37] This comes with an expansion towards other phenomena, like the distracting, the ugly,[38] and also synesthetic experiences that include several sensual experiences.[39] Some authors, like Angelika Krebs, even understand aesthetics in such a broad way that nature as home and as the nonmetaphysical-sacred are included.[40] Art can enable aesthetic experiences, thereby also facilitating the realization of the eudaimonic value nature has by providing cultural services. Together, with the additional assumption that these are a reason for the choice of a notion of strong sustainability, art can be an initiator towards (strong) sustainability and thus contribute to fostering a sustainable attitude. The other way around, from the experiences that can be made because of the cultural services of nature, art can emerge. Nietzsche’s poem is a good example of that: The experience of the lazy midday-atmosphere of the lake and its surrounding landscape were the impulse for his poetic work. Next to the aesthetic experiences discussed so far, transaesthetic experiences that link beauty and spirituality are also especially suited for initiating a process that can lead to the creation of artworks.[41] In such experiences, an individual perceives not only the beauty of nature, but also something “more.”[42] Konrad Ott examines eight readings of what exactly this perceived “more” might consist of. We cannot go into detail here, but it should suffice to say that transaesthetic experiences are highly meaningful for those who have them, since they are by definition something rare and extraordinary (maybe even in a sense extramundane) and, as such, particularly well suited as a starting point for artistic treatment.
If eudaimonic values are integrated in reasoning about concepts of sustainability, and if eco-phenomenology is a method to immerse into eudaimonic values and articulate them in nuanced ways, eco-phenomenology contributes to the deeper understanding of what strong sustainability is all about. We regard our argument as a step on the way towards a deep anthropo-related (not “centered”)[43] environmental ethics that is open for inherent moral value in nature and spiritual encounters with/in nature, but is neither fixed to a specific solution of the demarcation problem nor to a specific religion.
5. Conclusions
This paper offered a presuppositional analysis of the conception of strong sustainability, with the result that eco-phenomenology is highly relevant for sustainability theory. A notion of strong sustainability transcends shallow anthropocentrism, first because it acknowledges the cultural-eudaimonic values of nature; second, as we have argued, because there are reasons to attribute inherent moral value to sentient beings. We have focused on the first aspect. Taken together, strong sustainability is deep anthropocentric, that is it strives to gradually overcome shallow anthropocentrism. We have argued that the notion of cultural services, which are part of the ecosystem service approach, can be brought to fruition for an argument for strong sustainability. Taking the cultural-eudaimonic values of nature seriously implies acknowledging the more-than-instrumental value of nature. For nature is part of the good life of many human beings, not least because of the cultural services it provides, such as recreation, leisure, a sense of home, transformation, aesthetic experiences, and spirituality, it has an eudaimonic value. Human beings have access to these cultural-eudaimonic values through their lived body; thus we can reach a deepened understanding of them by an eco-phenomenological account. The economic operationalization of ecosystem services can and should be complemented by an eco-phenomenological reconstruction.
Kira Meyer
kirameyer@philsem.uni-kiel.de
Kira Meyer is a research associate at Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. Her research interests include environmental ethics, philosophy of nature, phenomenology, and political philosophy.
Konrad Ott
ott@philsem.uni-kiel.de
Prof. Dr. Konrad Ott is full professor of Philosophy and Ethics of the Environment at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. From 2000 until 2008, he was a member of the Environmental Advisory Council of Germany, and from 2019 to 2022, he was a member of the DNK for Future Earth at the German Research Foundation (DFG). He works in the following fields of research: environmental ethics, discourse ethics, critical theory, theories of sustainability, analytic philosophy of history, archaeology, repository for high-level nuclear waste, and climate ethics.
Published July 13, 2025.
Cite this article: Kira Meyer & Konrad Ott, “On the Significance of Eco-Phenomenology for Theories of Sustainability,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 11 (2024), accessed date.
Endnotes
We would like to thank the participants and organizers of the international conference “Toward a Sustainable Attitude” at Ca’ Foscari University Venice, where we presented the ideas of this paper. Two anonymous reviers of Contemporary Aesthetics provided helpful comments, for which we are thankful, too.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Sils Maria, trans. Mark Daniel Cohen, Hyperion: On the Future of AestheticsII, no. 4 (2007), 3, http://www.nietzschecircle.com/N_poetry_MDC1.pdf.
[2] Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis, Island Press (Washington, DC, 2005).
[3] Konrad Ott, “Mapping, Arguing and Reflecting Environmental Values: Toward Conceptual Synthesis,” in Between Closeness and Evil. A Festschrift for Arne Johan Vetlesen, ed. Odin Lysaker (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2020).
[4] Konrad Ott and Karl Christoph Reinmuth, “Integrating Environmental Value Systems: A Proposal for Synthesis,” in Transitioning to Sustainable Life on Land, ed. Volker Beckmann (Basel: MDPI, 2021), 54.
[5] Konrad Ott and Ralf Döring, Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit, Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit 1, (Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 2004).
[6] Ott and Döring, Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit, 103.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ott and Reinmuth, “Integrating Environmental Value Systems,” 50f.
[9] For a deeper discussion about weak and mediating concepts, see Ott and Döring, Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit: chapter 3.2 and 3.5.
[10] Ott and Döring, Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit, 155.
[11] Fridolin Brand: “Critical natural capital revisited: Ecological resilience and sustainability.” Ecological Economy 68, no. 3 (2009): 605-612.
[12] Paul Ekins, Sandrine Simon, Lisa Deutsch, Carl Folke, and Rudolf De Groot: “A framework for the practical application of the concepts of critical natural capital and strong sustainability.” Ecological Economics 44, no. 2-3 (2003): 165–185.
[14] Michel Bourban: “Strong Sustainability Ethics.” Environmental Ethics 43, no. 4 (2022): 291–314.
[15] Konrad Ott, “On the Meaning of Eudemonic Arguments for a Deep Anthropocentric Environmental Ethics,” New German Critique 43, no. 2 (128) (2016), https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-3511895.
[16] Ott and Döring, Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit, 174f.
[17] Ibid., 103.
[18] Konrad Ott, “A Modest Proposal of How to Proceed in Order to Solve the Problem of Inherent Moral Value in Nature.” In Reconciling Human Existence with Ecological Integrity, edited by Laura Westra, Klaus Bosselmann, and Richard Westra, 39-60. (London/Sterling: Earthscan, 2008).
[19] Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature. A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986). Martin Gorke, “Was spricht für eine holistische Umweltethik?,” Natur und Kultur 1/2 (2000).
[20] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
[21] A possible concern regarding the proposed deep anthropocentric position might be that it could lead to conflicts with social justice towards other people, insofar as it involves the enlargement of the circle of moral patients and thus obligates us to consider not only the interests of human beings but also those of sentient beings, for their own sake in addition to the eudaimonic intrinsic value of nature. Of course, such an objection depends on the understanding of social justice. We focus on environmental ethics in this article, but theories of justice constitute the second important normative source of sustainability. Elsewhere, Konrad Ott argued together with Ralf Döring for a Rawlsian conception of justice, see: Ott and Döring, Theorie und Praxis starker Nachhaltigkeit, especially chapter 2. They argue for an absolute intragenerational standard that includes the recognition of the entitlement to the satisfaction of basic needs or the safeguarding of elementary human capabilities of all existing persons. In addition, they argue for a stronger limitation of social and economic inequality within people living today, as this could facilitate or even promote the achievement of a societal transformation towards (strong) sustainability. The absolute intragenerational standard and the egalitarian intergenerational standard should suffice to meet the objection that adopting our deep anthropocentric position would be in conflict with social justice.
[22] Ott and Reinmuth, “Integrating Environmental Value Systems: A Proposal for Synthesis,” 53.
[23] The status of supporting services is controversial, see Ott and Reinmuth, “Integrating Environmental Value Systems: A Proposal for Synthesis,” 53: Some authors claim that they aren’t services themselves but rather their necessary preconditions. Others fear that they will be double counted and therefore propose to discard them from scientific analysis.
[24] With few but important exceptions, see: Martin Seel, Eine Ästhetik der Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991); Angelika Krebs, “Naturethik im Überblick,” in Naturethik. Grundtexte der gegenwärtigen tier- und ökoethischen Diskussion, ed. Angelika Krebs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Angelika Krebs, Ethics of Nature: A Map, ed. Bernard Williams, Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie 22 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 1999); Konrad Ott, “Begründungen, Ziele und Prioritäten im Naturschutz,” in Projektionsfläche Natur. Zum Zusammenhang von Naturbildern und gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen, ed. Ludwig Fischer (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2004).
[25] Ott, “On the Meaning of Eudemonic Arguments for a Deep Anthropocentric Environmental Ethics.”
[26] Krebs, Ethics of Nature: A Map.
[27] Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, “Eco-Phenomenology. An Introduction.,” in Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, ed. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), xvi.
[28] David Wood, “What is Ecophenomenology?,” Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001).
[29] Gernot Böhme, Natürlich Natur. Über Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). Gernot Böhme, Leibsein als Aufgabe. Leibphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Zug: Die graue Edition, 2003). Gernot Böhme, Leib: Die Natur, die wir selbst sind (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019).
[30] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
[31] Hermann Schmitz, “Leib,” in Online Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature, ed. Thomas Kirchhoff (2019).
[32] Bryan G. Norton, Why preserve natural variety? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1987).
[33] Albert Schweitzer, Die Lehre von der Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben: Grundtexte aus fünf Jahrzehnten, ed. Hans Walter Bähr (München: Beck, 1966).
[34] Norton, Why preserve natural variety?, 190.
[35] Konrad Ott, Umweltethik zur Einführung, Zur Einführung 377, (Junius, 2010), 95.
[36] For an in-depth analysis of environmental virtues, see Philip Cafaro and Ronald Sandler, eds., Environmental Virtue Ethics (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield 2005) and Michael Hannis, Freedom and Environment: Autonomy, human flourishing and the political philosophy of sustainability (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2017)..
[37] Hermann Schmitz, “Herkunft und Schicksal der Ästhetik,” in Kulturwissenschaften. Festgabe für Wilhelm Perpeet, ed. Heinrich Lützeler (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980). Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). For a further analysis of the role of atmosphere in nature aesthetics, see Kira Meyer, “Die Rolle von Atmosphären in der Naturästhetik,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 67, no. 2 (2022).
[38] Seel, Eine Ästhetik der Natur, 94ff. Hermann Schmitz, Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand. Grundzüge der Philosophie, 4. Auflage ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 2018), 406.
[39] Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, eds. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004).
[40] Angelika Krebs et al., Das Weltbild der Igel. Naturethik einmal anders (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2021).
[41] Konrad Ott, “Beyond Beauty,” in Aest/Ethics in Environmental Change. Hiking through the arts, ecology, religions and ethics of the environment, ed. Sigurd Bergmann, Irmgard Blindow, and Konrad Ott (Wien/Zürich/Münster/Berlin: LIT, 2013).
[42] Ott, “Beyond Beauty,” 26.
[43] In the same vein, Uta Eser and Thomas Potthast propose to speak of “inclusive environmental ethics” in order to overcome the “centrism” that until now was so vital for environmental ethics. Uta Eser and Thomas Potthast, Naturschutzethik: Eine Einführung für die Praxis (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999); Uta Eser, “Ökologische Ethik: denken wie ein Berg und handeln wie ein Mensch,” Natur und Landschaft 95, no. 9/10 (2020), https://doi.org/10.17433/9.2020.50153841.425-432 .