I will focus my intervention on the similarities of thought around science and nature of three of my preferred philosophers and naturalists, Alexander von Humboldt, Robert Hainard and Arne Naess.
Beyond describing unnumerable species, their behaviour and the ecosystems they live in the great Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) combined his immense scientific curiosity with a holistic and poetic approach to nature, which he observed rationally and experienced from the inside. He understood that nature forms a whole whose components are all interconnected, and he highlighted the influence of biodiversity and human activities on the climate and the importance of forests and natural ecosystems for the water cycle. Von Humboldt’s holistic approach differs from the tendency to specialise and reduce nature to a mechanism only governed by mathematical laws.
Robert Hainard (1906 – 1999) who combined these three experiences in a holistic view of the relationship between Humankind and Nature. He
considered, that science is a limited way of knowledge. The following quotes illustrate his thoughts about science, art and experience being complementary ways of knowledge:
“Our scientific knowledge is to reality what a cadastral map is to a landscape.”
“Science does not know reality in its entirety, but describes a mechanical model based on it. “
“If for millennia we have relied on our reason to distinguish ourselves from animals, the time has come to invoke our animal faculties to distinguish ourselves from robots and justify our existence.”
“Our unilaterally scientific, rationalized, mechanical, and specialized era pays for these advancements with a terrible regression of global faculties.”
“The artist perceives through sympathy. He puts himself in the place of things, from the inside. “So I became the beast, I embraced its movement and it is in the memory of my muscles, even more than in that of my eyes, that I found it again.”
Arne Naess (1912 . 2009)
I feel close to Arne Naess’s deep ecology in his search for ecological harmony and balance and his closeness to Nature. Having read several of his books, I had the chance to meet one of his nieces, Christine Blom, who made it possible for me to immerse myself for four days in the mountain cabin of Tvergastein built at 1500 meters altitude by Arne Naess himself, where he stayed countless times.
Naess was inspired by early American ecological thinkers, advocates of immersion in Nature such as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold, the initiator of an Earth ethics. He shared with the latter the concept of biotic community and the idea of « thinking like a mountain. » He sympathized with James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia concept, which considers the Earth as a self-regulating living being within which all organisms interact systemically. I provide an overview of these precursors of ecological thought in the chapter « La famille philosophique » of my book « Le Penseur Paléolitique”. Close to Descartes in his commitment to reason’s eradication of religious superstition, Arne Naess clearly positioned himself against Cartesian dualism, which separates humans, deemed the only rational beings, from the rest
of a conscious-less world populated by animals functioning like machines.
Philippe Roch
References :
Roch Philippe (2022) Le penseur paléolithique, Labor et Fides, Genève
On Arne Naess: https://lapenseeecologique.com/ecologie-profonde/
On Robert Hainard: https://lapenseeecologique.com/philippe-roch-robert-hainard/
About Philippe Roch : https://www.pirassay.ch/biographie-detaillee