Climbing Ethics, Style, and Practice on the Public Resource

Informing my particular understanding of permissible action on the public resource is Stephen Vogel’s book Thinking Like a Mall. Meant to dissuade environmental philosophers of human-nature dualism, Vogel spends much of his thesis delineating artificiality and wildness, showing how both concepts permeate every entity. To Vogel, wildness designates the realm beyond human intention, something he describes as “the gap”. He contends that all objects have some amount of wildness within them, but agrees that some things are more wild than others. In opposition to wildness, he uses the term “artificiality” to describe the comparative degree of human-madeness. Vogel’s anti-dualist claim is two-fold.

First, because of global climate change and pervasive human impacts, there is no such thing as “pristine nature”. Everything on Earth is now a human artifact to some extent, what Vogel calls “the artifactuality of nature”. Global capital has dug its claws into nearly every profitable inch of land on the planet—pumping oil from the northern coasts of Alaska to mining diamonds on the ocean floor. Less obviously, anthropogenic climate change has directly affected the Earth’s climate—meaning things so natural as storms and seasons now bear some mark of artificiality. Historically, humans have cultivated the environment to some extent regardless of their technological sophistication; neolithic hunter-gatherers most likely led to the extinction of most of North America’s megafauna over 10,000 years ago, with similar events happening worldwide. Seemingly, pristine nature is impossible wherever humans have transformed the land to such an extent—Vogel claims this transformation has “always already happened”.

Second, even our most engineered artifacts are somewhat beyond our intentions. The plants popping up through the cracks in the sidewalk are evidence of extra-human nature’s tenacity. The crumbling of an old railyard, train cars rusting to nothingness shows wildness’s indomitable spirit. Even as anthropocentric of structures as economic markets possess some qualities beyond our control and understanding—a sort of inherent wildness to human beings. There is a degree of wildness imbued in everything—from Shishapangma to the Sears Tower. All entities exist on this wildness-artificiality spectrum.

We might practice climbing development in tandem with this sort of spectrum. More developed climbing infrastructure may be more permissible in areas that are more heavily human influenced. Sport climbing areas--heavily bolted, trafficked, and supported--are appropriate close to human improvements--mainly, roads. Deeper in the backcountry, a different sort of development ethos should rule. Alpine climbing exists at the other end of the spectrum--routes blazed in a single push, with little permanent installations or impacts are more proper types of routes to establish in this case.

A significant focus of my philosophical communicative project aims to develop a distinction between climbing ethics and climbing style. This distinction, well-articulated by climbers, is essentially a difference between aesthetics and ethics. There are many philosophical accounts of this distinction—two fields described and explored by different philosophical thinkers. It seems abundantly clear why we should make a distinction between aesthetics and style in philosophy—how we appraise a painting is quite different from how we appraise a person or action. Moreover, ethics is (often) normatively motivated—we want to understand how best to act, think, or value. Some thinkers have, and still, conceive of aesthetics as a similarly normative pursuit, but I think such accounts are misleading. Even those thinkers who believe in a sort of universalized aesthetic paradigm—Immanuel Kant, Clive Bell, Edmund Burke, etc.—would hardly say the metrics for right aesthetic appreciation are indistinguishable from ethical concerns. It is uncontroversial to say: different philosophical fields are different within philosophy.

Thi Nguyer, climber and philosophy professor, uses climbing to describe how he concieves of an aesthetic practice. Climbing is an activity in which the qualities of the practice are appraised on aesthetic grounds—meaning, in a basic sense, having something to do with beauty. Climbing is a practice concerned with beauty—a splitter crack in stark red Wingate against a blue sky, a bold line striking up the middle of a big wall—but also a practice of beauty—the actual experience of the climb is often described in aesthetic terms. Climbs can even be considered ugly—either because of the makeup and quality of the rock or the nature of the climbing itself (whether it’s “thuggy”, or “grunty”, or physical). To be an aesthetic practice does not necessitate gracefulness. Nguyen goes on to describe climbing like a dance because of the internal embodied experience of the climber and the appreciation others might have towards a climber’s experience determined by their own bodily experience. Meaning, I empathize with a climber’s aesthetic description of a climb because I can appreciate what it would bodily feel like to engage in such a climb. Nguyen argues that this aesthetic appreciation is best appreciated by climbers themselves. 

If we buy Nguyen’s account of the aesthetic concerns of climbing—how might we differentiate it’s aesthetic concerns from its ethical ones? Simply put, climbing is a game: “the voluntary attempt at overcoming unnecessary obstacles.” Nguyen expands such game playing beyond the purely physical, stating: “what constitutes game-playing is not the physical movement, but the intentional state of the player towards that action. In short: in ordinary practical activity, we take the means for the sake of an independently valuable end. But in gaming activity, we can take up an artificial end for the sake of going through a particular means.” Climbing is a game not only because of its physical playfulness, but because of its artificial restrictions which propel particularly engaging action. This distinction follows through from the aesthetic action of climbing to the stylistic conversation and concerns of climbing. Climbing aesthetics can be discerned from climbing ethics insofar as that ethics here is a practical activity—we go through the means of ethical discourse to conclude about correct or incorrect actions, intentions, or attitudes. Stylistic conversations do not hold the same sort of weight—there is no “right” answer to which style of climbing is “best”—regardless of whatever old-timers might say. Famously, the only thing climbers like more than climbing, is talking about climbing.

If climbing is an aesthetic practice, with aesthetic concerns, who are responsible for outlining the proper aesthetic orientation climbers should have? Bence Nanay, in his essay “Unlocking Experience”, claims that we participate in aesthetics not simply to levy judgements or impress others or be entertained, but to have aesthetic experiences. We enjoy aesthetic experiences for the sake of those experiences, in addition to any other benefit we might get from such experiences. One obvious benefit is the sociability of having aesthetic experiences alongside others. We seek out others to have aesthetic experiences with, and pontificate over those experiences. Nanay conceptualizes aesthetic experience as a sort of achievement—appreciating an experience in the correct way takes a certain amount of attention and work. We care about others achieving in the same way because it somehow validates our achievement, and solidifies the bond we have with other people: “Aesthetic experiences can bring us closer to each other. Listening to the same music can be a binding experience, as long as you both have the same kind of experience. And nothing can be as alienating as having radically different aesthetic experiences when listening to the same music or watching the same film.” Appreciating experiences has the added benefit of relationship building. This is doubly true in climbing—sharing a rope with someone on an incredible alpine climb not only solidifies the experience as aesthetically worthwhile, but associates your climbing partner with such an experience. Climbing has a long history of powerhouse partnerships, experiencing with others as well as for yourself. Jim Bridwell, Yosemite pioneer and dirtbag ringleader noted this social benefit of shared aesthetic experience: “I don’t need to solo, I got friends.”

One of the more radical, controversial, and visible branches of environmental philosophy manifests itself as a collection of quasi-independent thinkers, activists, and monkey wrenchers. Deep ecology, while attractive to some environmental firebrands, is generally self-absorbed, exclusionary, and ineffective. In part a reaction to deep ecology’s masculine and monist principles, ecofeminism as “the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race, and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment.” Whereas deep ecology is exclusive, ecofeminism is inclusive; while deep ecology seeks to subsume otherness into the viewer; ecofeminism acknowledges and celebrates the differences in the coalition of the human and extra-human environment.

Deep ecology, in its more contemporary articulations, has two major problems: one easy to identify and one more sophisticated. First, deep ecology cares so much about the extra-human world—it often is apathetic, even antagonistic, towards human beings. Misanthropy, whilst deeply unsettling, can nearly be understood under the gross weight of global climate change. Worse, for some deep ecologists, this misanthropy can manifest as bigotry. 

Second, whilst deep ecologists claim some sort of sympathy with the extra-human world, at times to the point of discounting human environmental actors, Noel Sturgeon identifies this sympathy as a sort of subsumption of the individual over the environment. While seemingly diverse and pluralist, deep ecology showcases a dangerous self-importance. This philosophy is a particular brand of self-realization—a self-in-nature. Connected to Eastern understanding of atman, the self in deep ecology does not enter into relationship with a diverse coalition of others, but expands to a Self—an expanded Self, beyond the egoistic and physical trappings of an individual and a body to the world around it. It is an attempt to close the distance between self and Other, a way to understand the world exterior to the individual. This attempt to reach the Other, however, tends to lead to poor understanding of others—it conflates the differences in the world around us.

Such a Self tends to flatten the particularities in qualities and proper treatment of other members of the environmental community. If you expand yourself to incorporate the totality of the world around you, that tends to lead to poor consideration of the interests and needs of others. Furthermore, this sort of centered individual expansion, so Sturgeon writes, is an effect of the Androcentrism of western thinking, not the Anthropocentrism that deep ecologists claim to rage against. Were these thinkers to correctly identify the male-centeredness of the philosophical claims, they might better avoid this blunder. Without attending to the sexist, gendered, discourse within deep ecology—the field will fail to reach its goal of biocentrism or egalitarianism so laid out in Naess’s inciting document.