Page 192 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 185

emerging human beings developed their intellectual abilities into
compensating instruments of power and control. Suppression of anxiety
and compensation: the ultimate ground of all this never-ending violence
and aggression are, according to Bahro, unresolved original problems of
the human psyche. It has never come to terms with its traumatic
anxieties of its own inner nature, of outward nature and of the other
human being. If the ultimate roots of the present crisis reach back into
the origin of our species then it follows that only a kind of anthropologi-
cal therapy will be able to dehver us from evil. Bahro talks of an
anthropological revolution, an evolutionary leap, a second birth.
This anthropological revolution must bring about a new economy or
ecology of the mind, a new configuration of our psychic forces and
capabilities. Instrumental, calculative and manipulative reason driven by
the will for power has alienated itself from the rest of our subjective
forces, it has turned into a demon, an evil spirit which leads us to invest
all our energy into the reproduction of the alienating and exterministic
industrial machine. Bahro stresses that analytic and instrumental reason
is certainly a highly valuable human capacity but that it has to be
reintegrated into the ecology of the mind where it occupies a specific
niche and where it is constrained and checked by other forms of
awareness and knowledge.
The ecological crisis is for Bahro the final crisis of human history
under the exterministic sway. This is irrevocably the last stage of this
history. Either it will be followed by the silence of an ecologically
devastated lifeless planet or humankind will succeed in surviving
civilization and history, and will begin anew, reborn, in what L6vi-Strauss
called a cold society, that is, a meditative, non-expansionist, com-
munitarian culture with a simple reproduction rooted in a new ecology
of the mind.^ In this perspective the ecological crisis indeed has a truly
apocalyptic character: it is the final chance, a final call for us human
beings to come to terms with ourselves, to gain our center. As Bahro
puts it succinctly in an interview: "The crisis is not in the trees, it is in
us.'^
It is not difficult to criticize Mumford and Bahro for their sweeping
generalizations and speculative reconstructions of the whole of human

" Please add note.
" Rudolf Bahro, "Theology not Ecology," interview in New Perspective
Quarterly 6.1 (Spring 1989), 36.