Arne Naess, Norwegian philosopher, dies at 96

By William Grimes
Published: January 15, 2009

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/15/europe/15naess.php

Naess, a Norwegian philosopher whose ideas about promoting an intimate and all-embracing relationship between the earth and the human species inspired environmentalists and Green political activists around the world, died Monday. He was 96.

His editor, Erling Kagge, confirmed his death to Agence France-Presse.

In the early 1970s, after three decades teaching philosophy at the University of Oslo, Naess (pronounced Ness), an enthusiastic mountain climber and an admirer of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," threw himself into environmental work and developed a theory that he called deep ecology. Its central tenet is the belief that all living beings have their own value and therefore, as Naess once put it, "need protection against the destruction of billions of humans."

Deep ecology, which called for population reduction, soft technology and non-interference in the natural world, was eagerly taken up by environmentalists impatient with shallow ecology — another of Naess's coinages — which did not confront technology and economic growth.
It formed part of a broader personal philosophy that Naess called ecosophy T, "a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium" that human beings can comprehend by expanding their narrow concept of self to embrace the entire planetary ecosystem. The term fused "ecological" and "philosophy." The T stood for Tvergastein, his name for the mountain cabin he built in 1937 in southern Norway, where he often wrote.

Arne Dekke Eide Naess was born in Slemdal, near Oslo, in 1912. His older brother was the shipping tycoon Erling Naess, who died in 1993. After earning a degree from the University of Oslo in 1933 Arne Naess continued his education in Paris and in Vienna, where he became part of the Vienna Circle, a philosophical school dedicated to empiricism and logical analysis. In the belief that philosophers should be self-aware, he also underwent psychoanalysis.

After completing "Knowledge and Scientific Behavior," his dissertation, in German, he was given a teaching position at the University of Oslo, where, as Norway's only professor of philosophy until 1954, he was the animating figure in the Oslo School. Working in teams, the Oslo School's adherents used questionnaires to investigate the meanings that ordinary people assigned to terms like "truth," "free enterprise" and "democracy." In 1958 he founded the journal Inquiry.
Over his career, Naess progressed from a radical empiricism to pluralism and skepticism. In his many publications, he took on a wide variety of philosophical problems. Harold Glasser, the editor of "The Selected Works of Arne Naess" (2005), has called him "the philosophical equivalent of a hunter-gatherer." He was interested in language, meaning and communication, a subject he wrote about in "Interpretation and Preciseness" (1953) and "Communication and Argument" (1966), and in the relationship between reason and feeling. He also wrote books on two thinkers central to his worldview, Spinoza and Gandhi.

In 1969 Naess left the university to develop his ecological ideas, which, he believed, demanded political action. With other environmentalists, he chained himself to rocks in front of the Mardal waterfall, successfully pressing the Norwegian government to abandon plans for a dam on the fjord that feeds the falls. He also wrote extensively on the ethics of mountaineering, a field in which he had considerable expertise. In 1950 he led the first expedition to climb Tirich Mir, a 25,000-foot peak in the Hindu Kush in Pakistan.

His ideas on ecology and ecosophy were developed in numerous books and articles, notably "Freedom, Emotion and Self-Subsistence" (1975), "Ecology, Community and Lifestyle" (1989) and "Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World" (2002).

Surveying the continuing destruction of the environment, Naess was pessimistic about the 21st century but optimistic about the 23rd. By then, he predicted, population control would show results, technology would be noninvasive and children would grow up in a natural environment. At that point, he said, "we are back in the direction of paradise."

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEEP ECOLOGY

http://www.inglesnoexterior.com/Dictionary.aspx?l=en&q=Deep_ecology

The phrase "deep ecology" was coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in 1973,Næss, Arne (1973) 'The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.' Inquiry 16: 95-100 and he helped give it a theoretical foundation. "For Arne Næss, ecological science, concerned with facts and logic alone, cannot answer ethical questions about how we should live. For this we need ecological wisdom. Deep ecology seeks to develop this by focusing on deep experience, deep questioning and deep commitment. These constitute an interconnected system. Each gives rise to and supports the other, whilst the entire system is, what Næss would call, an ecosophy: an evolving but consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world, that embodies ecological wisdom and harmony."Harding, Stephan (2002), "What is Deep Ecology" Næss rejected the idea that beings can be ranked according to their relative value. For example, judgments on whether an animal has an eternal soul, whether it uses reason or whether it has consciousness (or indeed higher consciousness) have all been used to justify the ranking of the human animal as superior to other animals. Næss states that from an ecological point of view "the right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species." This metaphysical idea is elucidated in Warwick Fox's claim that we and all other beings are "aspects of a single unfolding reality".Fox, Warwick, (1990) Towards a Transpersonal Ecology (Shambhala Books). As such Deep Ecology would support the view of Aldo Leopold in his book, A Sand County Almanac that humans are "plain members of the biotic community". They also would support Leopold's "Land Ethic": "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Daniel Quinn in Ishmael, showed that an anthropocentric myth underlies our current view of the world, and a jellyfish would have an equivalent jellyfish centric view Quinn, Daniel (1995), "Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit" (Bantam).Deep ecology offers a philosophical basis for environmental advocacy which may, in turn, guide human activity against perceived self-destruction. Deep ecology and environmentalism hold that the science of ecology shows that ecosystems can absorb only limited change by humans or other dissonant influences. Further, both hold that the actions of modern civilization threaten global ecological well-being. Ecologists have described change and stability in ecological systems in various ways, including homeostasis, dynamic equilibrium, and "flux of nature".Botkin, Daniel B. (1990). Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford Univ. Press, NY, NY. ISBN 0-19-507469-6. Regardless of which model is most accurate, environmentalists contend that massive human economic activity has pushed the biosphere far from its "natural" state through reduction of biodiversity, climate change, and other influences. As a consequence, civilization is causing mass extinction. Deep ecologists hope to influence social and political change through their philosophy.

WHAT IS DEEP ECOLOGY?

http://www.inglesnoexterior.com/Dictionary.aspx?l=en&q=Deep_ecology

Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological philosophy (ecosophy) that considers humankind an integral part of its environment. It is a body of thought that places greater value on non-human species, ecosystems and processes in nature than established environmental and green movements. Deep ecology has led to a new system of environmental ethics. The core principle of deep ecology as originally developed is Arne Næss's doctrine of biospheric egalitarianism — the claim that, like humanity, the living environment as a whole has the same right to live and flourish. Deep ecology describes itself as "deep" because it persists in asking deeper questions concerning "why" and "how" and thus is concerned with the fundamental philosophical questions about the impacts of human life as one part of the ecosphere, rather than with a narrow view of ecology as a branch of biological science, and aims to avoid merely utilitarian environmentalism, which it argues is concerned with resource management of the environment for human purposes.