심층 생태론의 인간 해석에 대한 비판적 연구 — 사회생물학과 가이아 이론의 인간 이해를 중심으로 —

Abstract

It is not unusual that we are in the ecological crisis of humankind such as resources exhaustion, environmental pollution and climate change. The study tries to find out the diagnosis of those crisis and the way out of them from deep ecology. Ecological philosophy representing as deep ecology urges the humankind to reflect human reflectionships of the nature deeply. However, deep ecology tends to be mysticism or a strong anti-humanism. So the study tries to establish the new interpretation of human beings on the basis of sociobiology and Gaia theory. The term of sociobiology originated by Edward Wilson can be understood to find out newly human nature and to converge human knowledge into evolutionary biology on the base of the understanding evolution and its scientific basis. Evolutionary biologists figured out human thinking, behavior and ethics as the produce of human brain, so human brain can be understood as kind of machine produced by nature selection. In the name of consilience Wilson tries to newly construct the traditional knowledge system and th consile all the sciences into one such as philosophy, religion, ethics and aesthetics. However, sociobiology is falling in the fallacy of naturalism which tries to induce its value from facts and the morals from sciences. Wilson’s concept of consilience would be an interpretation of human beings beyond natural science and he defined the fact that a human understanding of the evolutionary biology can be a kind of approach to human understanding. The philosophy of evolutionary biology which tries to interpret the findings of natural science as the norms and truths, should make its metaphysical horizon clear. The Gaia theory proposed by James Lovelock understands the earth as a self control and organic system formed by the live and the liveless. The earth controls surprisingly the quantity of O2 and CO2 in the air by its life network and keeps the temperature of its surface regular for the life to live on the earth. In the situation human beings would be like kind of cancer increasing the earth’s entropy, which induces the extinguish of all the species on the earth. However, the theory of Gaia tends to be a mysticism and could not establish its own theory as a science. Despite its mystical figures and uncertain self-horizon, Gaia theory and sociobiology can be an important topic of deep ecology in that the theories can provide us with a newly established human perspective with diverse horizons.