Any discussion of Heidegger that attempts to draw political purposes or an ethic from his work should confront both his denial of the possibility of any ethics that surpass our historical situation and his further, notorious derivation of the consequences of such a position. To his great credit, David Storey, in his welcome new study of Heidegger and environmental philosophy, faces these difficulties more squarely and discusses them more candidly than most. Storey draws from Heidegger in order to correct the approach to nature taken by contemporary environmentalism, but he explicitly departs from Heidegger as well. Storey's understanding of the problem faced by environmentalists is keen: if they understand themselves as naturalists, and if they subscribe to an understanding of nature informed by modern philosophy—mechanistic, lifeless, and valueless—then their predicament is nihilism; there are no resources in nature so understood that instruct us to value nature. He therefore proposes that certain overlooked, submerged strands of Heidegger's thought can help environmentalists to apprehend a “nonreductive naturalism,” that is, a naturalism that both appreciates life and supplies some orientation by values.

Storey develops an approach to Heidegger on the question of nature that is distinct from that of several leading scholars (with whom Storey ably and helpfully engages throughout his argument) who turn to Heidegger's later work. By looking to Heidegger's early lectures on Aristotle and Jakob von Uexküll from the early twenties up through the 1929–30 lecture course Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Storey charts a new course for those interested in using Heidegger to develop an environmentalist ethic. Storey also draws on Nietzsche—contra Heidegger's interpretation of him—for the same purposes.

When Storey looks to Heidegger's early work, he carefully disentangles two strands of Heidegger's thought that he finds in tension there. Of these, the dominant one becomes especially ascendant after 1930. This strand of “transcendental” phenomenology is hostile to naturalism, seeing it as a reappearance of the reductive psychologism against which Husserl originally directed phenomenology. To recur to nature, from this view, is to overlook humans’ freedom and distinctive transcendence of the natural, which tends to be understood mechanistically.

Storey directs the reader to something of a minority report in the second strand, which might be usefully appropriated for developing a less fraught relationship between humans and nature. This “biological” approach to phenomenology takes the phenomenon of life as central. It derives meaning and value from the ontological continuities between living humans and the other living parts of their surrounding world. Biological phenomenology of this sort—drawing on Aristotle and von Uexküll, and looking forward to Hans Jonas—avoids reductively mechanistic accounts of nature and suggests the ground of a “nonreductive naturalism.” In addition to his vivisection of Heidegger, Storey gives a reading of Nietzsche that draws on his understanding of life, his openness to evolutionary theory, and his value theory. The aim in these readings is to reconstruct the “great chain of being,” wherein organisms’ intentional relationships to each other are respected, but without recurring to the errors of speculative metaphysics or pre-evolutionary biology.

Storey's lucid, scholarly, and provocative account raises two sorts of difficulties. First, practically or politically: given the environmentalist purposes of the retrieval from Heidegger, why would the nature uncovered by such a phenomenological method be gentle or friendly, if these terms are apposite? Why should recurring to nature, in particular a nature that expresses itself in the survival of the fittest, supply the kind of ethic that Storey seeks? Why not rather one that is red in tooth and claw, or where the significance of human life is vanishingly small? The modern approach to mastering nature that Storey rejects was informed by a desire to relieve man's estate, that is, the mastery of nature was undertaken for the sake of broadly humanitarian purposes. Storey does not seem to reject these purposes; is it possible to retain them and still reject the understanding of nature that informs them?

Second, a reader must wonder what Heidegger would think of the attempt to separate the two traditions or approaches that Storey disentangles. Storey notes that in both his objections to the philosophy of value (22–24) and likewise in his objections to life philosophy (64–65), Heidegger relies on an excessively narrow interpretation of these positions (81). By doing so, Heidegger makes his own position more, not less, anthropocentric. This is true in the sense that Dasein remains the locus of the revelation of Being throughout all periods of Heidegger's career. Storey is correct to focus on this point in his break with Heidegger, but Heidegger's objections to Lebensphilosophie and the philosophy of value do not come simply from him construing them too narrowly.

This may perhaps be seen most clearly by attending to Heidegger's own understanding of phenomenology, of the practice of philosophy that he thought he was himself engaged in. Heidegger's attachment to phenomenology, it could be said, derives less from its fulfillment of Husserl's motto, “To the things themselves!” than from its refusal to settle into any fixed position—to “bracket all standpoints,” as he expresses it in 1919, or to “think without presuppositions” in a program of “radical suspicion,” as he puts it in his “Comment on Karl Jaspers.” A philosophic program that aims to dispose of all of the conceptual baggage of the history of philosophy—both theoretically and practically—to “unbuild” (Abbau) it, may return us, Heidegger avows as early as 1921, to the philosophic situation within which Plato and Aristotle originally found themselves. As such, he rejects the various versions of value philosophy and life philosophy not because he construes them too narrowly, but because his demand for rigor, expressed as “radical suspicion” that their conceptual language can adequately express the fundamental experiences, finds these forms of rationalism untenable; their presuppositions are insufficiently scrutinized. Without apprehending the centrality of “limit situations”—again, from the “Comment on Jaspers”—they fail to capture the full experience of the phenomenologist himself. It is precisely the unrelaxed insistence of such demands that drives Heidegger later in his career to explore the possibility that poetry is deeper than philosophy, and to reject even nonmechanistic, vitalist accounts of nature.

Heidegger's possible objections notwithstanding, this refreshing, deft exploration of an important intellectual and political topic will be of great worth to scholars of environmental philosophy as well as of Heidegger.