Arne Næss

Works

• 1973The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary

  Short paper in Inquiry, based on a lecture in Bucharest in 1972: it contrasts a “shallow” movement against pollution and resource depletion, concerned with the health and affluence of people in rich countries, with a “deep” movement that rejects the human-centred image of nature.

• 1976Ecology, Community and Lifestyle

  Book version of his “ecosophy”: from the norm of self-realisation, understood as identification with ever wider circles of life, it derives an ethics and politics of simple living, local community and nonviolent change; English edition revised with David Rothenberg (1989).

Position

Næss is on the map for two bodies of work. The first is “empirical semantics”: instead of deciding a priori what words such as “truth” mean, he surveyed how ordinary people used them and developed methods of making statements more precise for clearer discussion (Interpretation and Preciseness, 1953); his scepticism and pluralism set him apart from the stricter members of the Vienna Circle. The second is deep ecology. In 1973 he distinguished a “shallow” environmental movement, concerned with pollution and resources for the sake of people in rich countries, from a “deep” movement that questions the human-centred view of nature and recognises the value of all life in itself. His own “ecosophy T” derives everything from the norm “Self-realisation!”: through identification with other living beings the self widens until their flourishing becomes part of its own – an idea he drew from Spinoza and from Gandhi, whose ethics of nonviolence he had analysed with Johan Galtung. With George Sessions he formulated an eight-point platform (1984) meant to unite people with different ultimate premises. Deep ecology became one of the main positions of environmental philosophy and was criticised from social ecology and from the global South; see “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Arne Næss was born on 27 January 1912 in Oslo. He studied philosophy in Oslo, Paris and Vienna, where in 1934–35 he took part in Moritz Schlick’s circle, and took his doctorate in Oslo in 1936. In 1939, at the age of 27, he became professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, a post he held until 1970. His textbooks shaped the examen philosophicum, the introductory course in philosophy required of all students in Norway. He founded the journal Inquiry in 1958 and was also a mountaineer who led the first ascent of Tirich Mir in Pakistan in 1950. He gave up his chair in 1970 to work on ecological questions and took part in protests such as the action against the damming of the Mardøla waterfall that year. He died in Oslo on 12 January 2009.

Further main works

• Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten (1936)
• Interpretation and Preciseness (1953)
• Gandhis politiske etikk (with J. Galtung, 1955)
• The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement (Inquiry 16, 1973)
• Freedom, Emotion and Self-Subsistence: The Structure of a Central Part of Spinoza’s Ethics (1975)