Winds of Change Blowing in the Humanities

Post-modernismALL EXPRESSIONS OF

Post-humanismRHETORIC A PROFOUND

Post-colonialism PHILOSOPHY OVERTURNING OF

De-colonization LITERATURE MODERNITY

Vital materialism POLITICAL THEORY Agency (and politics) of things

What is Modernity?

Different definitions in different fields

Art history—20th-century painting/sculpture, e.g., Picasso

Architecture—20th-century functionalism, e.g. Le Corbusier

Literature—20th-century novel, e.g., Hemingway

Philosophy—17th-/18th-century, e.g., Hobbes, Descartes, Kant

Hallmarks of Modern Philosophy—Dualisms

Mind/Body—Mind more essential and more valuable

Man/Nature—Man the knower and master of Nature

Man/Woman—Man rational/mental; Woman emotional/bodily/natural

White-man/Color-man—(same as Man/Woman dualism + sauvage)

Euro-man/Other-man dualism (same + “orientalism” à la Edward Said)

Nature: inert, material, atomic, mechanical, quantitative, passive,deterministic, intelligible, comprehensible, controllable

Mind & Man: immaterial, active, autonomous, free

Post-modern Resistance

Modernity overturned not by unhappy romanticists, but bythe unruly resistance of the dark sides of these dualisms

Independence movements (India and elsewhere)

Civil-rights/Anti-apartheid movements (N. America, S. Africa)

Feminist/Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transexual movements

Animal liberation and environmental movements.

Revolt of Nature: Coup de Grace of Modernity

Environmental Crisis = Nature’s Resistance Movement

Technological human mastery of nature —> untoward “sideeffects,” unintended consequences:

Air and water pollution, carcinogens, soil erosion, desertification, species extinction, biodiversity loss,

erosion of stratospheric ozone, global warming/climate change, increasingly violent

weather, rising sea levels, ocean acidification

Hallmarks of Post-modern Philosophy

Agency and politics of things à la Bruno Latour

Unruly intractability and unpredictability of Nature isagent-like—like dealing with another free, active,

autonomous being.

Latour envisions Nature as being represented politically byscientists who decypher Nature’s moods and desires

and environmentalists who advocate for naturein a multi-species “parliament of things.”

Nature Epistemologically Untrammeled

US Wilderness Act of 1964: places “where the earth and itscommunity of life are untrammeled by man”

Now in one sense—the ontological sense—nowhere: human impact ubiquitous in the Anthropocene.

Now in another sense—epistemological sense—everywhere:human mind cannot trammel nature, cannot net and

capture it all with our skein of ideas.

Nature is ultimately unknowable, un-namable, uncontrollable

Hallmarks of Post-modern Philosophy

Epistemological humility and pluralism

No Cartesian-Newtonian dream of attainting Certainty about Reality by means of a rational/experimental method

Therefore, no epistemological hegemony: many ways ofknowing, many partial knowledges, none with an

exclusive claim to truth—à la Walter Mignolo

Decolonization—a form of epistemological independenceas well as political independence for oppressed peoples

Hallmarks of Post-modern Philosophy

Reintegration of mind and body—We engage the world . . .

First via the media of our human senses,

Then through the media of the “deep grammar” of human cognition (space, time, unity, causality, identity),

Then through the media of culturally constructed concepts(God, soul, ghosts, race, biological & chemical taxa),

Finally through the media of how others construct usculturally in terms of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability

Hallmarks of Post-modern Philosophy

As mindful bodies we encounter the “vibrancy of matter” à la Jane Bennett and “material feminism” à la Stacy

Alaimo and a recognition of the “force of things” as they impinge on and penetrate our bodies.

Greater awareness of the food we eat—its sourcing, method ofproduction, processing, cost in terms of human labor and

animal suffering

Greater awareness of the insidious chemical assault of our bodies in plastics, dissolved in water, as aerosols, etc.

The emergence of “post-humanism”—humans are animals

Other animal bodies also evidently mindful. In Cartesian modernity their bodies were not inhabited by a “thinking

thing”; thus they were not agents but mere automata, subject to our will—just as

peoples of color were subjectedto the wills of colonial masters

Interest in animal consciousness, animal subjectivity, animal agency, and animal ethics

Hallmarks of Post-modern Philosophy

A Parallel Philosophical Universe of Discourse

For 40 years environmental philosophy has been thinkingsimilar thoughts.

Critiqued modern Cartesian/Newtonian philosophy of nature+ legacy of ancient Greek philosophy and the Judeo-

Christian worldview.

Explored alternative non-Western worldviews/epistemologies—both Asian and indigenous

Developed ecofeminist and environmental-justice critiquesof modernist hegemonies

Opportunity for Philosophical Convergence

Environmental philosophy has long explored non-anthropocentrism (similar to post-humanism)

Has long characterized Nature as alive and organic and has extensively developed animal and environmental ethics

Post-modernism, post-humanism, post-colonialism, vibrant (vital) materialism, and a political ecology of

things has much in common with the 40-yearcorpus of work already existing in the

field of environmental philosophy

Geneology of Parallel Philosophical Traditions

Unruly Postmodernism Environmental Philosophy

Maurice Merleau-PontyRachel CarsonGilles DeleuzeFélix GuattariMichel FoucaultMichel SerresBruno LatourJane BennettStacy AlaimoCary Wolfe

Henry David ThoreauCharles DarwinJohn MuirAldo LeopoldArne NaessPaul ShepardHolmes Rolston IIIEdward O. WilsonPeter SingerJ. Baird Callicott