exceptionalism and nature

The epistemological distinction in the subject-object relationship between human and nature is becoming increasingly sharpened. The most important consequence of this is that the perception of "us" versus "them" is normalised and mind assumes a constitutive role and initiates a process in which it legitimises its own actions. The fact that humans position ourselves as exceptional in nature is not much more than a point of view. Val Plumwood, regarding the discussion of exceptionalism, shares a memory of a river accident she had experienced. This accident, which was an encounter with a crocodile, took place in 1985 in Kakadu National Park in the north of Australia. Plumwood, who was on a canoe trip in the national park, found himself in the crocodile's mouth when his canoe was overturned by the tail blows of a crocodile.

"Some years ago, as an already established environmental philosopher, I had a close encounter with food/death, death as food for a large predator. I was seized by a Saltwater Crocodile, largest of the living saurians, heirs to the gastronomic tastes of the ancient dinosaurs. By a fortunate conjunction of circumstances I survived. Since then it has seemed to me that our worldview denies the most basic feature of animal existence on planet earth - that we are food and that through death we nourish others. The food/death perspective, so familiar to our ancestors, is something the human exceptionalism of western modernity has structured out of life. Attention to human foodiness is tasteless. Of course we are all routinely nibbled both during and after life by all sorts of very small creatures, but in the microscopic context our essential foodiness is much easier to ignore than in one where we are munched by a noticeably large predator.......I vividly recall my own disbelief and outrage when confronted with being food for a crocodile. It was as if I had fallen into another universe, where I was just a piece of meat, all my special individual and species accomplishments subordinated to this one thing of being food! Certainly the predation experience is profoundly disruptive of Human Exceptionalism, which remains important force in our culture, and has profoundly shaped dominant practices of self, commodity, materiality and death - especially death."

Santas, A. (1999). Subject/object dualism and environmental degradation. Philosophical inquiry, 21(3/4), 79-96.
Plumwood, V. (2008). Tasteless: Towards a food-based approach to death. Environmental Values, 17(3), 323-330.
Çelik, E. E. (2017). Val Plumwood ve animist materyalizm. ViraVerita E-Dergi, (5), 71-86.