Ethics of Situated-ness, Sustainability and Ecology

This article illuminates the relationship between the human being and the surrounding things by referring to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Criticizing our habitual approaches to apprehending 'what a thing is,' the two thinkers elucidate how 'what a thing is' can be understood only in conjunction with situations in the everyday and how humanity is joined with the qualities of the thing. In addition to the situated-ness of a thing, this article demonstrates the situated-ness of the human being, too, by referring to the notion of the horizon in the tradition of phenomenology. The last part of the paper discusses the basic premises of sustainability in reference to the situated-ness of both things and human beings. Framing natural things such as light as the alternative sources of energy propagandized in sustainability seems progressive. However, this attitude maintains fundamentally the same instrumental attitude we had towards nature, an attitude that has caused the current ecological crisis. By pointing this out, this article seeks to shape a ground for a broad spectrum of sustainability that embraces non-instrumental dimensions such as the practical, the ethical and the spiritual. This article also points out the limits of some of the currently available versions of ecology such as Shallow Ecology and Deep Ecology. In so doing, it seeks to lay out the parameters that any future version of sustainability and ecology needs to address.