Abstract
Environmental ethicists, each in their own way, struggle with the moral sense of nature. Whether or not this is explicitly admitted, each normative position within the debate turns out to rely on a particular normative concept of nature. However, the use of any of these particular normative interpretations cannot by legitimized. The starting point of this inquiry is the assumption that today's environmental crisis is intrinsically related to this ambiguity with regard to the normative meaning of nature. This ambiguity has a foundational character, and the conflicts and dilemmas that stem from it cannot be solved easily. In order to clarify this relation between the environmental crisis and the crisis in morality, we analyze the relation between nature and morality in the work of the late 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and ask whether his philosophy can help us clarify the problematic relationship between nature and morality in contemporary environmental ethical debates. From Nietzsche's viewpoint, environmental ethics appears as a paradoxical undertaking, on the one hand, interested in nature in so far as it transcends human seizures of power (wildness as a critical concept), on the other hand restricted in its possibility to model this interest on anything else than yet another interpretative appropriation. That is to say, we can only articulate the moral significance of nature 'itself' by interpreting it, but each interpretation inevitably implies a moment of appropriation. However, some environmental ethicists appear to do more justice to this profound problematic character of our relationship with nature by explicitly acknowledging the inaccessibility and radical otherness of wild nature. The newly developed perspective is tested on its fruitfulness for the case of 'new nature development'.
