Annie Dillard's Ecstatic Phenomenology

Abstract

As a philosopher who understands herself as the heir of both the German thinker Martin Heidegger and the American Nature Writing tradition, I am often pressed about what kind of real contribution the humanities can make today. When confronted with the present environmental crisis, we trust the answers given by science more than we trust the questions posed by philosophy. Callicles's charge against Socrates in Plato's Gorgias that philosophy is, in fact, not about the “real world”—Callicles finds it an adolescent indulgence in the face of genuine danger—still applies (484d–6d). In teaching my 200-level “Environmental Thinking” class in which I use Heidegger to try to demonstrate a conceptual shift from a violent to a nonviolent style of thinking, I am inevitably confronted with the students' question, “But what can we do?”2 I am also inevitably taken aback by what the specific wording of this question betrays about what students think they've been doing (or not been doing) during the course of the semester. Let me be explicit about what is really being asked here: “But”—and the ‘but’ is the important part—“But what can we do—since of course, Professor Ireland, shifting your thinking doesn't really do anything, which is to say that this class isn't really doing anything, at least not doing anything that pertains to our lives in the ‘real world.’” In the eyes of the average Whitman student, thought could not be any further from action. When asked a presuppositional question about how they understand the relationship between thinking and acting, a relationship with its own conflicted history within the philosophical tradition, well, they simply don't have the time. You see, there's just so much to do.