Back to the speakers'list
Back to the program

The principle of "sustainability" in the field of tourism from a philosophical and ethical viewpoint and from the point of view of future generations
Where does the voyage lead ? Who is going to participate ?

Olga RUBITSCHON - Philosopher, Basel, Switzerland

 

I. Introduction

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted that you are ready to devote yourselves to philosophy for the next 20 minutes. My intention is to exert a lasting philosophical influence on you. I am anxious to specify immediately what I do not mean by this. I do not intend to give you a miracle recipe, nor absolution for committed or foreseen mistakes, nor consolation for the dangers that threaten us. In short, I will not try to calm your fears. Rather the opposite, but in a particular manner.

I make this clarification in order not to encourage false hopes, in spite of my delight at having been "invited as a philosopher". Philosophy does not make life easier in general.

But what has it to offer and what must one expect from it ?

Since Plato, the word "philosophy" has meant "love of wisdom" and not the possession of knowledge. The philosopher's art first consists in the method of questioning. According to Emmanuel Kant, the whole philosophical domain can be summed up in four questions: What can I know ? What do I have to do ? What can I hope for ? What is man ? The philosophical handicraft consists in developing and justifying answers to these questions.

For this discussion about the philosophical consideration of tourism, ethics is the centre of the debate and Kant's second question : what must I, what should we do ? Duty in the sense of moral obligation and the requirement of a justifiable action.

Do you now understand what I am talking about ? I am going to make another small detour. We are in a very beautiful and attractive place, surrounded by magnificent mountains - in Chamonix at the foot of Mont Blanc, a tourist pearl. We are enjoying the hospitality and (at least sporadically) the beauty of the nature that surrounds us. What we are doing here is part of a tradition, even though it has not existed since time immemorial. We arrived from the four corners of the planet, sometimes after a long journey, but which usually only took a few hours and is at most the subject for small talk - in any case, it has not prevented us from being here today.

What was it like 200 years ago ? After Salomon had finally convinced him to accept an invitation in London, Joseph Haydn left Vienna on 15 December 1790, travelling in a horse-drawn carriage, passing through Munich, Wallerstein and Bonn. He reached Calais towards the end of the month, sailed to Dover and arrived on New Year's Day 1791, thanks to a relatively favourable wind. He arrived in London one day later, two and half weeks after leaving Vienna.

Nowadays, we travel in a different way and, except when we attend a meeting or travel on business, it is usually for our personal pleasure. From that point of view, after some pioneering achievements in the 19th century, tourism is a 20th century success story. One could say, to use a formula that is a little controversial, that the world has become consumer-oriented, through the different stages of the civilisation, clearing woodland for agriculture to the mining of mineral resources and industrialisation, including the organisation of leisure.

The result: the conceivable collapse of the ecosystem has made astonishing demands on philosophy and ethics. Who can propose a line of behaviour that will rectify our current situation ? How can we counter the threat that we ourselves have caused ? What have we done wrong ? In short: what should we do now ?

Two basic expectations are indirectly required from philosophy. I call them: diagnosis and therapy, using two well-known notions from medical science. Remember: "no instructions for use" and "no absolution" !

Here is how my thoughts continue: for diagnosis (Section II), I call on two very different temperaments: Ulrich Horstmann and Gernot Böhme. For a possible therapy (Section III), I submit to your examination: Hans Jonas. The conclusion (Section IV) will give my "sustainable" summary.

II. Diagnosis

Ulrich Horstmann : the apocalypse has already begun
"The apocalypse has arrived. We monsters, we have known for a long time, and we all know it ... (There exists) a secret agreement, an unspoken agreement that we must put an end to our existence and the likes of us, as soon and as thoroughly as possible - without forgiveness, without scruples and without survivors... What is it that the monster calls "the universal story", unless it is the hope of disaster, of the end, of erasing the traces..., the monster (has today) finally become tired of old wives' tales, utopias, heavenly visions and the holy histories, and has plucked up courage to look the inevitable in the eyes... The true Garden of Eden is solitude. The goal of history is a decaying field. The meaning is the sand blown by the wind that flows out through the eye sockets in the skull." ¹

"Indecent and pretentious"², is how Ulrich Horstmann himself describes these sentences at the beginning of his short work, "The monster contours of a philosophy of human flight". To say this requires an anthropofugal perspective, as one could have from a spaceship that is on an orbit that does not allow a return to Earth and everyone knows it. All the history of humanity is seen from such a point of observation, from early mythology through the history of philosophy, from Plato to Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Leibniz, Voltaire, from Holbach, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche to our century with Gehlen, Cioran and Foucault. The resulting revelation : "... that we would not be better"³, unveils the sense of the history of the monster, its own physical extinction and the erasing of all memory of the euphemism Man. Only then will "paradise exist again on Earth"⁴. The duty of an anthropofugal reason to contribute to it : "Let us pluck up courage... Let us unite our sick planet !"⁵

In 1983, six years before Rio⁶, Horstmann Ulrich published his "monster", and dedicated it: "To those not yet born and to the Yahoos who know how to distinguish between science and satire". As a reminder, the "Yahoos" are human animals who live in the noble horse kingdom in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". Horstmann's horizon is the history of reason that has always discerned what could be and is not, that we are, as Horstmann once said, delivered powerless to a process that makes us eliminate ourselves and that we cannot control, even though some philosophers would like to persuade themselves of it.

Ulrich Horstmann is not a philosopher by profession, he is an English professor. I understand that with his book he is making an attempt at diagnostic philosophy, out of regard for the most dangerous gift of the "monster", that of repression and making harmless.

Gernot Böhme : our relationship with nature is misplaced

"If one had the choice between a swim in the sea and in a swimming pool, if one had the choice between a non-treated apple and a sprayed and washed apple, if one had the choice between spending a holiday in a preserved natural site and in an industrial centre such as Tenerife, the answer would be obvious: nature, of course. On condition, of course, that there are no sharks, venomous jellyfish, nor plastic bags in the sea, that the apple is not pitted or full of worms. Provided that wild nature is a paradise."⁷

It is with these slightly challenging sentences that Gernot Böhme began his book "Natürlich Natur" ("Nature naturally") which appeared in 1992, three years after Rio. He analyses our relationship with "nature" with amazing clarity: it is a disturbed relationship. The word "naturally" has lost its meaning. No definition of nature proposed by natural philosophy throughout history can completely comprehend the relationship between contemporary man and nature.

An examination of the five "classic" attempts to define "nature" is sufficient. Different notions have been expressed of "nature" and "natural" quality but they have basically obstructed our vision of nature rather than clarified it.⁸

First, it is necessary to mention the distinction (sophists) between nature and what is determined by man, as we know it in the difference,between natural and positive right. After all, it is on this background that human rights have been defined.

A second definition compares (according to Aristotle) nature to technical systems. What is natural lives by itself, what is technical depends entirely on humans. Aristotle gave the following example: if one buries a bed made from willow, a bed is not born but a willow tree. Nature regenerates itself.

Third, the notion of natural can be defined by the opposite of what is artificial and spoilt (tradition of Socrates, cynics, stoics). In this sense, a moderate life style is natural. However, this distinction also excludes what is not considered natural or that which is in contradiction to the order of the Creation (tradition of Saint Paul) - for example, homosexuality.

A fourth definition compares nature with culture, separates natural from civilised (e.g. Rousseau's maxim "Return to nature !" exposes this idea, even though Rousseau rejects historic interpretations). Journeys of exploration in the 18th century made the picture of "good savage" popular (famous examples: Karl May and Castaneda).

Finally, a fifth finds the suggestion to differentiate between the internal nature and the outside nature (Descartes, Kant). From that point of view, there is the nature of the outside world (objects) that we discern by our senses; but there is also internal nature - the soul. It corresponds, in another terminology, to the distinction between me and not me. This difference exists throughout nature itself.

According to Böhme, the conclusion that can be drawn from the main philosophical definitions of nature is the following : "Even today, they are effective suppositions where nature is mentioned. It could be that these suppositions are no longer legitimate, because the mentioned ... oppositions are not evident. The notion of nature adopts an indefinite character, therefore, where the mention of nature becomes ideology..." ⁹

What does it really mean ? Today, whoever speaks for nature only refers in appearance to something obvious, because it is not clear what nature is and what we mean by nature, and it is also unclear which nature we want. At the same time, it should not be ignored that the old concepts of nature are also partly responsible for current environmental problems. Philosophy is therefore expected to provide an alternative answer to the question: what is nature ?

For Gernot Böhme, it is man's relationship with nature that is central to the philosophical question : "what is nature ?". It is necessary to review this relationship that develops from the dialectics of the adherence or man's non-adherence to nature¹⁰. The aim is a notion of nature that has a normative influence on our behaviour. According to Böhme, the search for new ethics is fundamental to the requirement of a new philosophy of nature; it is the requirement for responsible ethical recommendations on how we must behave towards nature and ourselves¹¹. It is also clear where we should begin. "If it is possible to introduce a revision of man's relationship with nature by thinking, it is the criticism of the philosophy of reason, the conscience and the topic, currently in progress, that will provide the basis" ¹²

In collaboration with his brother Hartmut, Gernot Böhme delivered this criticism. "The other side of reason" has critically described the explanation, describing it like a process of demarcation of everything that is not reasonable, the irrational, what is inappropriate, the body, desire, feelings, imagination - and nature. "What appeared in history in the shape of an anthropological universality at the end of the 18th century, as "man", "intelligible me", "responsible citizen", is a product and a decision"¹³ This decision to review, and therefore to create the basis of new ethics, is the task of a new nature philosophy.

And now ? How should we continue ? What should we do with Horstmann's anthropofugal provocation and the call to "The other side of reason" and to a new philosophy of nature and ethics ?

Hans Jonas has in my opinion understood and accepted - in a manner of speaking preventive - the provocation and the exhortation. The "preventive" aspect should not surprise us : philosophers invent problems that do not worry us ; first, they are simply concerned personally, and secondly, the dialogue has always already begun. For example, Horkheimer and Adornos have already spoken about "Enlightenment Dialectic" as early as 1944¹⁴.

Therapy
Hans Jonas : the principle of responsibility

Hans Jonas does not speak directly of an ethics of philosophy of nature. The sub-title of his main work "The principle of responsibility" is : "Attempt for ethics for the technological civilisation"¹⁵. However, Jonas also requests new ethics.
"Prometheus, unleashed definitively, to whom science gives unprecedented strengths and economy an untiring impetus, calls for ethics that through voluntary restraints will restrain its power to harm humanity... The conquest of nature, which was supposed to make men happy, through excessive success, which is now spreading to man's nature itself, has become the biggest challenge that man has himself given in his own existence".¹⁶

What must "new" ethics therefore bring ? Jonas nearly uses a platonic formula : it dedicates itself "not only to man's fate, but also to man's image, not only to physical survival, but also to a being's intact preservation (human)"¹⁷. The new ethics do not only speak of me and of my neighbour, here and now. They speak of the possibility of the human existence in the absolute - including future life. No ethics have before included this future dimension. The absolute novelty consists in the fact that it is about actions whose effect will make themselves felt in a distant future.

In other words: the Good, from which new ethics must come, does not concern all men with whom I deal or who will be touched directly by my action, men who live today, but humanity as an idea. The Good, from which new ethics must come, does not only concern the immediate present, nor the future time that I will live, nor the future of future generations, but the future in general. The Good, from which new ethics must come, must be able to indicate the path to follow when one cannot clearly foresee what damage, what threats nor what advantages will result from a given action, or even if these effects are irrevocably bound together.

Good of this type represents a complete challenge to responsibility, the fundamental element of ethics. Giant steps must be made: from individuals to the world community, from here and now to a future without limit, from "be good or be bad" to the accomplishment of "good and bad at the same time". In addition, the force of persuasion will be needed to make sure that such a notion of Good is generally accepted.

Hans Jonas believes he has found an imperative that takes all these requirements into account. It is : "Act in such a way that the consequences of your acts are compatible with the permanence of a true human life on Earth !"¹⁸

This formula indirectly implies the following judgements: the true human life includes liberty and the dignity of the individual. We certainly have the right to put our own life at risk if the case arises, but not that of all humanity. All actions are judged in the end by the effects that they produce. Future humanity has a right to an existence that corresponds to a duty for us who live today.

Jonas knows that his imperative is not easy to justify. He only arrives there by invalidating a theorem that has never been refuted in the history of philosophy. The English philosopher David Hume has established that it is not possible to conclude a person's duty. As many observations can be made as you want on things as they are, but one can never logically come to the conclusion how they should be¹⁹.
(He who does it anyway commits a "false naturalist deduction".)

Jonas does not accept it ; according to him, the opposite is true. Every human being has a duty. The typical example of the requirement of a duty bound to all human beings is the responsibility of parents for a baby. For Jonas, it is the concrete proof that life must exist in the world. In daily life, the responsibility appears in the relationship that exists between power and knowledge. The fact that parents are capable of taking care of the child is the proof that they must also do it. Jonas turns the sentence of Kant. Kant said : "You can, because you must !" Jonas replies : "You must, because you can ! "²⁰

The actual perception of responsibility, which this imperative requires, is possible thanks to a type of preventive virtue of which all human beings are capable: anticipation of danger. Jonas calls it "the heuristic of fear"²¹. This is not easy to understand , because the notion of fear normally has a negative connotation. However, the fear of which Jonas speaks is not a hopeless fear, but an energetic fear.

What is there to say ? It is a lot easier for us to recognise bad than good. It is only when we are afraid for something that we become aware of its value. Only fear of the loss gives us the ethically justifiable means, especially if the outcome of an action is uncertain and if possible damages and potential benefits cannot be clearly identified. In similar cases, Jonas believes, our actions should be guided by the worst prognosis. In this sense, to follow the means of fear requires courage and determination. The ethical action is based on a feeling that acts on all and that is comprehensible inter-subjectively. It is the living strength that makes Jonas' imperative effective : "Do not endanger the conditions necessary for the indefinite subsistence of humanity on earth !" ²²

With his "principle of responsibility", Hans Jonas outlined ethics that are conscious of the danger of our situation, even though he "only" mentions Prometheus and does not promise the apocalypse. With "the heuristic of fear", he has given these ethics a basis that breaks with the one-sided rationalism of enlightenment and gives an active role to "the other side of reason" without giving up reason. Even though the notion does not appear in his work : the ethics of responsibility as proposed by Hans Jonas are ethics of sustainability. It is a possible therapy.

IV. Conclusion

My discussion is coming to an end. What I have told you ? I will sum up quickly : first : we are in full swing of the subject and we do really lack any elements. Second : what is really happening ? Two exemplary diagnoses. Ulrich Horstmann's "monster" and "nature, naturally" from Gernot Böhme. Third : therapy. Hans Jonas' "principle of responsibility", the exemplary test of an ethics of sustainability.

Where is the answer to the question that I was asked and that I in my turn asked ? Where does the voyage lead us ? And who takes part in it ? What do we have to do, for example, to achieve a development of tourism that is sustainable, today and in the future, and which allows future generations to practise it in a lasting and responsible way ?

No instructions for use, no secular absolution - I warned you at the beginning of my talk. But what, then ?

Here is my conclusion: we have no other choice but to prescribe ourselves the principle of responsibility. We must (!) voluntarily (!) submit to a therapy that liberates strengths that we had discounted until now. We must learn to use the fear of that which is at stake. We must have a global view of that which is at stake. It is not about individual interests (whether it is my interests, egoistically, or in a more selfless manner, those of others), but the world as a whole and, simply, of the possibility of humanity. To apply this principle to every small isolated case, to every decision, even very complex, courage is necessary. It is also necessary to admit that, whatever we decided and did, we must decide and act in the realm of "good and bad at the same time".

One day, Günther Eich said : "Everything concerns you."²³ It only remains to add : "Nothing is simple." To become aware of that and to understand its practical consequences : that is where the journey must lead us. And - whether we want it or not - we are all part of it.

 

Bibliography and notes

(1) Ulrich Horstmann, Das Untier, Vienna/Berlin 1983, p. 7 Back to text

(2) ibid., p. 48 Back to text

(3) ibid., p. 8 Back to text

(4) ibid., p. 111 Back to text

(5) ibid., p. 110 Back to text

(6) UN Conference on the development and the environment, Rio de Janeiro,1992 Back to text

(7) Gernot Böhme, Natürlich Natur Über Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt, 1992, p. 9 Back to text

(8) ibid., p. 11 ss Back to text

(9) ibid., p.15 Back to text

(10) cf. ibid., p. 37 Back to text

(11) cf. ibid., p. 45 Back to text

(12) ibid., p. 51 Back to text

(13) Hartmut and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätstrukturen am Beispiel Kants, Frankfurt 1983 Back to text

(14) The works mentioned in this section are the following: Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation, Frankfurt 1979 Hans Jonas, Technik, Medizin und Ethik Zur Praxis des Prinzips Verantwortung, Frankfurt, 1985 Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Leben Ansätze zu einer philosophischen Biologie, Frankfurt, 1994 (first published under the title: Organismus und Freiheit, Göttingen, 1973) Max Horkheimer / Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Amsterdam, 1947 (New York 1944) Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt, 1966 Back to text

(15) Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, Frankfurt, 1979 Back to text

(16) ibid., p. 7 Back to text

(17) ibid., p. 8 Back to text

(18) ibid., p. 36 Back to text

(19) We talk about "Hume's law"; cf. David Hume, Tract about human nature, Book II, 1739. Cf. Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, p. 92 and p. 153. Back to text

(20) Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, p. 230 Back to text

(21) ibid., p. 6355., cf. p. 39255. Back to text

(22) ibid., p. 36 Back to text

(23) Günther Eich, unfortunately not possible to check for the moment Back to text