Winds of Change Blowing in the Humanities
Post-modernism
ALL EXPRESSIONS OF
Post-humanism
A PROFOUND
RHETORIC
Post-colonialism
OVERTURNING OF
PHILOSOPHY
De-colonization
LITERATURE
POLITICAL THEORY
MODERNITY
Vital materialism
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 by
the 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 “side
effects,” 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 is
agent-like—like dealing with another free, active,
autonomous being.
Latour envisions Nature as being represented politically by
scientists who decypher Nature’s moods and desires
and environmentalists who advocate for nature
in a multi-species “parliament of things.”
Nature Epistemologically Untrammeled
US Wilderness Act of 1964: places “where the earth and its
community 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 of
knowing, many partial knowledges, none with an
exclusive claim to truth—à la Walter Mignolo
Decolonization—a form of epistemological independence
as 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 us
culturally 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 of
production, 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.
Hallmarks of Post-modern Philosophy
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 subjected
to the wills of colonial masters
Interest in animal consciousness, animal subjectivity, animal
agency, and animal ethics
A Parallel Philosophical Universe of Discourse
For 40 years environmental philosophy has been thinking
similar thoughts.
Critiqued modern Cartesian/Newtonian philosophy of nature
+ legacy of ancient Greek philosophy and the JudeoChristian worldview.
Explored alternative non-Western worldviews/epistemologies
—both Asian and indigenous
Developed ecofeminist and environmental-justice critiques
of 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-year
corpus of work already existing in the
field of environmental philosophy
Geneology of Parallel Philosophical Traditions
Unruly Postmodernism
Environmental Philosophy
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Rachel Carson
Gilles Deleuze
Félix Guattari
Michel Foucault
Michel Serres
Bruno Latour
Jane Bennett
Stacy Alaimo
Cary Wolfe
Henry David Thoreau
Charles Darwin
John Muir
Aldo Leopold
Arne Naess
Paul Shepard
Holmes Rolston III
Edward O. Wilson
Peter Singer
J. Baird Callicott