Arne Næss - internasjonlt anerkjent filosof

[Roald B. Larsen]

Arne Næss er død. Han var kanskje ikke først og fremst anerkjent som
filosof, men som filosofisk miljøverner, færst og fremst hans
"dypøkologi", som dog satte mennesket i sentrum. Såvidt jeg vet var
Arne Næss æresmedlem i Miljøpartiet De Grønne.

På forsiden av New York Times webside under Science:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/europe/15naess.html

January 15, 2009
Arne Naess, Norwegian Philosopher, Dies at 96
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher whose ideas about promoting an
intimate and all-embracing relationship between the earth and the
human species inspired environmentalists and Green political activists
around the world, died Monday. He was 96.

His editor, Erling Kagge, confirmed his death to Agence France-Presse.

In the early 1970s, after three decades teaching philosophy at the
University of Oslo, Mr. Naess (pronounced Ness), an enthusiastic
mountain climber and an admirer of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,”
threw himself into environmental work and developed a theory that he
called deep ecology. Its central tenet is the belief that all living
beings have their own value and therefore, as Mr. Naess once put it,
“need protection against the destruction of billions of humans.”

Deep ecology, which called for population reduction, soft technology
and non-interference in the natural world, was eagerly taken up by
environmentalists impatient with shallow ecology — another of Mr.
Naess’s coinages — which did not confront technology and economic
growth.

It formed part of a broader personal philosophy that Mr. Naess called
ecosophy T, “a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium” that
human beings can comprehend by expanding their narrow concept of self
to embrace the entire planetary ecosystem. The term fused “ecological”
and “philosophy.” The T stood for Tvergastein, his name for the
mountain cabin he built in 1937 in southern Norway, where he often
wrote.

Arne Dekke Eide Naess was born in Slemdal, near Oslo, in 1912. His
older brother was the shipping tycoon Erling Naess, who died in 1993.
After earning a degree from the University of Oslo in 1933 Arne Naess
continued his education in Paris and in Vienna, where he became part
of the Vienna Circle, a philosophical school dedicated to empiricism
and logical analysis. In the belief that philosophers should be self-
aware, he also underwent psychoanalysis.

After completing “Knowledge and Scientific Behavior,” his
dissertation, in German, he was given a teaching position at the
University of Oslo, where, as Norway’s only professor of philosophy
until 1954, he was the animating figure in the Oslo School. Working in
teams, the Oslo School’s adherents used questionnaires to investigate
the meanings that ordinary people assigned to terms like “truth,”
“free enterprise” and “democracy.” In 1958 he founded the journal
Inquiry.

Over his career, Mr. Naess progressed from a radical empiricism to
pluralism and skepticism. In his many publications, he took on a wide
variety of philosophical problems. Harold Glasser, the editor of “The
Selected Works of Arne Naess” (2005), has called him “the
philosophical equivalent of a hunter-gatherer.” He was interested in
language, meaning and communication, a subject he wrote about in
“Interpretation and Preciseness” (1953) and “Communication and
Argument” (1966), and in the relationship between reason and feeling.
He also wrote books on two thinkers central to his worldview, Spinoza
and Gandhi.

In 1969 Mr. Naess left the university to develop his ecological ideas,
which, he believed, demanded political action. With other
environmentalists, he chained himself to rocks in front of the Mardal
waterfall, successfully pressing the Norwegian government to abandon
plans for a dam on the fjord that feeds the falls. He also wrote
extensively on the ethics of mountaineering, a field in which he had
considerable expertise. In 1950 he led the first expedition to climb
Tirich Mir, a 25,000-foot peak in the Hindu Kush in Pakistan.

His ideas on ecology and ecosophy were developed in numerous books and
articles, notably “Freedom, Emotion and Self-Subsistence” (1975),
“Ecology, Community and Lifestyle” (1989) and “Life’s Philosophy:
Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World” (2002).

Surveying the continuing destruction of the environment, Mr. Naess was
pessimistic about the 21st century but optimistic about the 23rd. By
then, he predicted, population control would show results, technology
would be noninvasive and children would grow up in a natural
environment. At that point, he said, “we are back in the direction of
paradise.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/europe/15naess.html

--
Roald B.L.
http://klima-og-miljosonen.origo.no/