Towards an Existentialist Ecology

Abstract

Towards an Existentialist Ecology Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei While in recent decades the intellectual and literary landscape of modernity has been explored in ecologically oriented criticism, existentialist thought has been for the most part neglected by ecocritics. Taking as its starting point individual human consciousness rather than systematic and global concerns, subjective rather than global anxiety, existentialism may appear an unlikely resource to consider our ecological future. How this need not be so and how we might conceive of an existentially oriented ecology will be what I propose in this essay. Beyond the longstanding but politically problematic Heideggerian inspiration for deep ecology,1 I will draw from across philosophies associated with existentialism, including invocations of earthly experience and its relation to human embodiment in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, the idea of ambiguity and its attending ethics in Simone de Beauvoir’s thought and Gabriel Marcel’s notion of ontological mystery. The point is not merely to rescue existentialism’s relevance for an age marked by the exigency of ecological concerns but also to draw from the wider resources of existentialist thinking, heretofore only rarely considered in this context, in reconceiving our existence ecologically.2 [End Page 892] The Ecological Critique of Existentialism: Personhood and Planethood Before considering the prospect, it may be helpful to outline the potential challenges of an ecologically oriented existentialism. To begin with, although the “canon” of existentialist philosophy is itself debated, it is uncontroversial to say that all philosophies associated with existentialism are concerned with the existence of the human individual and our consciousness of such existence.3 Described by Jean Wahl as the “founder of the philosophy of existence” (3), Søren Kierkegaard philosophized about the fate of the individual in the mass culture of modernity, the anxieties of being a self and the difficulties of inwardness necessary for a commitment of faith. Martin Heidegger wrote of the human being as irreducibly personal: “Because Dasein has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit] one must always use a personal pronoun when addressing it: ‘I am,’ ‘you are’” (Being 68). Jean-Paul Sartre diagnosed an ontological cleft between human consciousness and the material world and, in his novel Nausea, dramatized an acute realization of their estrangement. Even Camus, upon whom I will draw extensively later in this essay, expressed the absurdity of existence for an individual, refiguring for the modern imagination the mythical Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push his boulder up the mountain [End Page 893] only to watch it roll down again ad infinitum. Only in spite of such material futility could one affirm happiness. I will return to some of these figures later but must briefly intervene to note the ecological significance of other aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy that, despite its (early) focus on individual Dasein, depicted the environment, Umwelt or “surrounding world,” as integrally connected with the self. As Heidegger argued in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), “To Dasein, being in a world is something that belongs essentially” (33). Of course, his syntactical jointure of the terms in being-in-the-world—in-der-Welt-sein, a term which would be adopted by both Sartre and Beauvoir—expresses how they are inseparably linked. Even prior to Sein und Zeit, Heidegger had identified this jointure as a categorical concern of phenomenological ontology: “I myself experience not even my ego in separateness, but I am as such always attached to the surrounding world [Umwelt]” (Phenomenology 10). The phenomenological interest in environment is longstanding, as Umwelt appeared in the second volume of Husserl’s Ideen, to designate a pretheoretical sphere intrinsically connected with the person, and in his later Crisis, addressing what he saw as the estrangement of the naturalistic sciences from their pretheoretical foundation.4 Beyond Dasein’s Umwelt, after Sein und Zeit, Heidegger recognized “earth” in its tension with “world” in our disclosure of being and promoted the notion of poetic dwelling on the earth over its technological capture, thus providing a philosophical grounding for the deep ecological movement.5 Yet there are difficulties with a Heideggerian existential ecology apart from the fact that Heidegger, despite inspiring existentialism, distanced his thinking from it. For all his rejection of anthropocentrism...