ABSTRACT
Modern science, according to Michael Zimmerman and Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, views nature in a reductive manner, as a “perfectly harmonious and interrelated system,” in terms of a great “interlocking order of beings, each mutually interwoven with all others, but wholly lacking interiority and intersubjectivity.” Modern science is skeptical about the idea of interiorities and tends to privilege exteriors to the extreme of relegating the idea of nature’s interiority to “the same category as other discredited ideas, such as the soul.” Deep Ecology moves toward the “popular environmentalism of nature-as-self, the view that postulates a kinship relation between humans and the larger eco-system.” Graham Harman corrects and reverses the understanding and provides an interpretation that is truly unique in the annals of Continental and Analytic Heideggerian scholarship. Harman claims that the “primary meaning of ‘cause’ is to create a new object,” and only secondarily does it mean that an “object has an effect on others or retrograde impact on its own parts.”
