Process Studies Supplement Overcoming Anthropocentric ... - Here

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PROCESS STUDIES SUPPLEMENTS 12 (2008)
better” must not be seen one-sidely to be synonymous with “attacking
the environment” and pursuing development without novelty, but rather
with adopting a way of life that takes the health of the biosphere into
consideration; the health of the natural world being here associated with,
but not reducible to, the well-being of human individuals. To illuminate
this interrelationship, it stands to reason that if environmental conditions
deteriorate, then human societies will become increasingly unable to
guarantee the human rights and freedoms that we enjoy today. Hence, a
defense of the environment is a long-term defense of human rights and
the ability of human beings “to acquire an increase in [life] satisfaction”
(FR 8). In applying Whitehead’s descriptions of the features of the creative
process to the issue of sustainability, whereas the modern worldview aims
to maximize human self-realization by way of maximizing the appropriation
of “the natural” (largely taken for granted in the process), and
whereas the extreme anti-humanism of radical ecologism aims to arrest
both the appropriation of “the natural” as well as human self-realization,
and, in turn, arresting human creativity in general, the process-relational
environmental epistemology offers a sustainable “middle way” between the
two. It points to the wisdom of tempering both contemporary society’s
decadence, as well as each individual’s appropriation of “the natural” in
terms of human self-actualization, while allowing for naturally sustainable
levels of development, human creativity, life-satisfaction, and self-enjoyment.
In Aristotelian language, Whitehead’s perspective is that of a return
to the “golden mean” between extremes, for not only does immorality
consist in a person’s thwarting of the ability, either in themselves or in
another, to actualize their potential, as in the cases of alcoholism, anorexia,
murder, theft, adultery, or withholding food or water from another, but
conversely, it is also found in the vice of human self-maximization in
relation to the actualization of one’s potentiality, beyond the bounds of
planetary sustainability.
Whitehead’s critical, non-anthropocentric organicism recognizes that
it is in the highest interest of human beings to maintain the well-being
of the natural world around them. “The natural,” for example, wild or
undeveloped land not yet subordinate to human ends, ought not to be
merely dismissed into irrelevance or negatively prehended in favor of
development, for that which is wild or undeveloped is indeed relevant
to human life. Process-relational philosophy holds that “the natural” has
aesthetic value, which gives human beings pause to contemplate the deeper