|
|
|
Book Review
Comparative/World
| Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, editors. The Moral Authority of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004 Pp. vii, 519. $26.00.
|
| It is surprising that there is anything left of the idea that nature has moral authority. David Hume famously argued that "is did not imply ought," and, just to be sure, enormous intellectual effort over the last half century has, in the interests of equality and liberty, gone into shoving what might have seemed "natural" across the divide back into the realm of culture. Thinkers from Robert Boyle to Arthur Lovejoy have demonstrated that "nature" has so many meanings as to be virtually meaningless in any case. |
1
|
|
In fact, it is a little surprising that the idea exists at all. If nature as a source of authority ever had a Golden Age, it is not clear when it was. Archaic Greece did not quite have the category, as Laura M. Slatkin writes in a lovely essay on Hesiod's Works and Days, even though the rhythms of the natural world were both explanatory and prescriptive in the making of culture. Medieval philosophers certainly had the idea of "nature" but, as Joan Cadden points out, it often carried little authority in legal contexts and was muddled in theological ones. Perhaps in the Middle Ages, as Katharine Park shows, nature was personified as a female figure who spoke articulately about important matters, but by the Renaissance her voice was increasingly enigmatic and available only through the questionable mediation of self-appointed experts. |
2
|
|
And today, despite—perhaps because—everything from alcoholism to homosexuality and the inability to concentrate have been posted on the nature side of the ledger, biotechnology has, as Michelle Murphy argues in her essay, evacuated the term of its power. The molecular-genetic revolution, which seems the foundation of a new naturalism, has ironically turned nature into artifice, something to be manipulated, natural only in the sense of a piece of Robert Smithson's earth art: it is made of natural material. Thus sex itself no longer has the ontological power it once had, so that the focus of feminist politics shifts away from dismantling the sex/gender system and toward efforts to control the manipulation of reproduction and women's bodies more generally. |
3
|
|
The editors and the eighteen contributors to this volume have embraced these difficulties as their subject and have produced something rare in a collection of essays: a real book on an intellectually and politically exigent topic in which the whole is greater than the sum of its consistently strong individual parts. There is, in the first place, a strong argument made by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal in their introduction. Whatever the sources of nature's authority—as the foundation of value; as a way of thinking about "necessity and freedom"; as a boundary between people, social groups, and other categories—and however that authority makes itself known— through punishing directly those who contravene its dicta; through human norms that give it voice; through internalized moral and aesthetic experience—"nature stands for order." "The natural," they conclude, is "synonymous with the self evident, melding habit with duty" (p. 14). "Is" and "ought" are not distinct; like something of real value as opposed to the artificial value of money and like the country in relation to the city, nature seems to stand to its opposite (art, nurture, culture) as "natural" and hence good. It will not go away. |
. . . |
There are about 871 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
