Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene 9781793638687, 9781793638694, 1793638683

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Earthly Engagements

Earthly Engagements Reading Sartre after the Holocene Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Ally, Matthew C., 1965- editor. | Boria, Damon, 1981- editor.   Title: Earthly engagements : reading Sartre after the Holocene / edited by     Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria.   Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, an imprint of The Rowman &     Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2023] | Includes bibliographical     references and index. | Summary: "Earthly Engagements brings together     scholars who take up Jean-Paul Sartre's thought as a critical and     heuristic resource to think through the planetary socio-ecological     crisis. The volume advances the ecological voice in Sartre studies and     the Sartrean voice in environmental studies, from environmental     philosophy to eco-criticism"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2022057227 (print) | LCCN 2022057228 (ebook) | ISBN     9781793638687 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793638694 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980--Criticism and interpretation.     | Ecology--Philosophy. | Existentialism.  Classification: LCC B2430.S34 E237 2023  (print) | LCC B2430.S34  (ebook) |     DDC 194--dc23/eng/20230203  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057227 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057228 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

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Foreword: Why Sartre, Today? Ronald Aronson

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Introduction 1 Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria PART I: SARTRE AND ECOLOGY



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Chapter One: Sartre and Problems in the Philosophy of Ecology— with a Thirty-Year Update William L. McBride‌‌

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PART II: ART AND PHENOMENOLOGY

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Chapter Two: Soundscape Ecology and a Sartrean Phenomenology of Listening Craig Matarrese‌‌

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Chapter Three: The Environmental Gaze: Re-Reading Sartre Through Guido Van Helten’s “No Exit” Murals Joe Balay‌‌

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PART III: ETHICS

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Chapter Four: Three Sartrean Motivations for Environmentalism Kiki Berk and Joshua Tepley‌‌ Chapter Five: I Am What I Buy: Bad Faith and Consumer Culture Elizabeth Butterfield‌‌

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71 93

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Contents

Chapter Six: Buying Green: A Trap for Fools, or, Sartre on Ethical Consumerism 123 Michael Butler‌‌ PART IV: DIALECTICS AND POLITICS



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Chapter Seven: Heralding Kairos: The Depths of Seriality and Creating Earth as a Work of Art Austin Hayden Smidt‌‌ Chapter Eight: Counter Finality and the Living World Paul Gyllenhammer‌‌



143 171

Chapter Nine: Hyperobjects and the Practico-Inert: Ecology and the Critique of Dialectal Reason 189 Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink‌‌ PART V: ONTOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS



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Chapter Ten: Sartrean Ethics Meets Deloria’s Native American Metaphysics: A Spatialized Existentialist Ethic Kimberly Engels‌‌

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Chapter Eleven: Nothingness, Emptiness, and Ecology: A Reframing of Sartre’s Early Ontology through Buddhist Metaphysics 233 Dane Sawyer‌‌ PART VI: REIMAGINING PAST AND FUTURE



Chapter Twelve: Toward Ecologically Oriented Political Projects: Reimagining Existentialism at Algren’s Cabin Damon Boria‌‌ Chapter Thirteen: After the Holocene: Reimagining Sartre’s Venice Matthew C. Ally‌‌ Index

255 257 281

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Contributors

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List of Figures

Figure 3.1. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2014.

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Figure 3.2. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2014.

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Figure 3.3. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2014.

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Figure 3.4. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2014.

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Figure 3.5. Reykjavik harbor and Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2014.

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Foreword Why Sartre, Today? Ronald Aronson

Is it outlandish to hope that a thinker born well over a century ago can help us understand and combat today’s nightmares, born of the Anthropocene? After all, Jean-Paul Sartre, in novels, plays, essays, works of philosophy, political writings, and biographies, passionately immersed himself in his epoch—the ideas, the writers, the artists, the political movements, the personalities. “We don’t want to miss out on anything of our time,” he wrote in 1945. “There may be better ones, but this one is ours: we have only this life to live, amid this war, and perhaps this revolution.” And so he lived, and wrote, and agitated, for the next thirty-five years. But even so his great work of engaged philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason, was brushed aside in the 1960s by rising star Michel Foucault as “the magnificent and pathetic attempt by a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century.” Foucault’s withering dismissal of Sartre came to be shared for different reasons by many in the radical younger generation, who likewise saw the once-inspiring but aging Sartre as not belonging to their time. During the near-revolution of May, 1968 and its aftermath Sartre was fated to lend his name, image, financial support, and little else to the new activists, famously finding the note “Sartre: Sois bref” as he stepped up to the Sorbonne podium to address the revolutionary students with whom he identified so much. In intellectual power as well as stature, the story is that Sartre faded early, the old man struggling to keep up with his self-assured young comrades, for example, in the 1972–1974 interviews gathered as It Is Right to Rebel. Toward the end of his life, the half-blind Sartre defiantly still voiced a vague hope for a better world in the face of sharp criticism by Benny Levy, in full flight from his onetime activism en route to becoming an orthodox rabbi. When Sartre died in April 1980, even though his ideas had long since been regarded as dated by fashionable thinkers and present or former political ix

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radicals, fifty thousand people still thought enough of him to accompany his coffin through the streets of Paris to burial in the Montparnasse cemetery. And the old man had strategized against being forgotten by leaving behind a whole stream of important mostly unfinished works—including The Freud Scenario, Truth and Existence, Notebooks for an Ethics, and the second volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason—to be published posthumously by his adoptive daughter. And now, as the civilizational assault on nature continues, dredging up pandemics, hurricanes, heat waves, fires, tsunamis, drought, and who knows what else, we have changed enough, and our world has changed so starkly, that his work has become relevant once again. A philosopher of our time? The essays in this book show that we can be helped enormously today not only by some of Sartre’s key concepts and lines of thought, but also by how he thought and acted. This shows that Thomas Flynn is correct against Foucault in suggesting that Sartre (if indeed “a Man of the Nineteenth Century”) in many ways is “Addressing the Twenty-First.”1 But first, it is worth reminding ourselves about his itinerary. Most famously, of course, he was author of No Exit, Being and Nothingness, Nausea, and his autobiography The Words, which led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (which he turned down for political reasons). Famous as an existentialist, Sartre became politically committed on the left after World War II and remained so for the rest of his life. The details are relevant. He first joined those trying to find space between the American and Soviet Behemoths and create an independent force for socialism. After the Cold War destroyed that possibility, he sided with the Communist Party because, as he said, that was where the workers were, and because the Soviet Union with all its flaws offered the only hope for going beyond capitalism. His famous break with Camus was one result, and Sartre became a fellow-traveler for five years. But after the invasion of Hungary he broke with the French Communist Party and after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague a dozen years later he called for an end to “reformist illusions” about the Soviet system and demanded that the people must throw it “in the junkyard.” During the period after 1956 Sartre became the world’s foremost independent radical intellectual, articulating an existentialist Marxism that still has life today,2 and devoted his enormous energies to understanding why Communism had turned out so badly. During the second half of his life Sartre commented on virtually every major political issue. He had already been publishing a dazzling series of literary and philosophical essays, and with this political turn, now established himself as one of the great masters of the contemporary essay form, his occasional writings eventually gathered in the ten volumes of Situations. Sartre wrote about other authors, music, art, sculpture, and poetry, and became one of the foremost writers seeking to explain the experience of Jews, Blacks,

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workers, and colonial people, and the great champion of their movements and revolutions. Sartre was notorious for his extravagant pronouncements—“Hell is other people,” “Man is condemned to be free,” “The slave in chains is free to break them,” “We were never so free as during the German Occupation,” “You are . . . your life, and nothing else,” “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him,” “We are all murderers.” And, most outrageous of all: “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.” By the 1960s such statements had made Sartre the most hated man in France. Long after both Camus and Sartre were dead, the original 1950s consensus that Sartre had bested Camus would reverse itself and proclaim that Camus had won—because it was Sartre who had backed losing causes, because he had condoned revolutionary violence and even terrorism while Camus had sided with moderation, and because Sartre had seemed to be the unrestrained aggressor against his friend/antagonist. Especially among those who backed the “war on terrorism,” there was little audience for Sartre’s anti-Western extremism. And on the other hand his remarkably even-handed stance on one specific struggle, between Israelis and Palestinians, soured many on the pro-Palestinian left. Today, however, Sartre rises anew at the dawn of the Anthropocene, as we are forced to face our climate crisis. For one thing, several philosophical themes of his work highlighted by Flynn become relevant all over again. Humans called to embrace our stewardship of nature can profitably pay attention to the depth and detail of Sartre’s notions of being-in-situation, commitment, authenticity, and responsibility. Each of these ideas has special bearing today, and can be traced from Being and Nothingness through his career. Related to all of them and challenging as never before is the overarching theme of existentialism as a way of life. Alongside these ideas, we should bear in mind Sartre’s amazing body of work, of ideas and interventions, of struggles to understand—of results that we can use and build on. It forms a comprehensible itinerary of several complex and overlapping projects. First is his alpha and omega, Sartre’s development of his signature idea of freedom. As his stunning early formulations encountered the social and historical world, one of his driving concerns became to show how freedom remained relevant in each and every situation: to describe precisely in what ways not only the slave in chains, but also the Jew in a concentration camp, oppressed Blacks, colonial subjects, or anyone living under the control of others, remain, in some essential sense, free. That meant understanding the paradox that oppression takes place with both the

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complicity and the resistance of those who are oppressed, and that submission is never the only alternative. Sartre sought to understand that and how we constitute ourselves from what has been made of us and with tools we have been given or developed under conditions beyond our control. As the author of Being and Nothingness encounters Marx and Freud two revealing statements of this project appear in little-noticed places during the 1960s. In an interview with New Left Review the Marxist Sartre spoke of how he viewed freedom a quarter century after the Liberation: “the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.”3 In his foreword to Reason and Violence, by psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, Sartre wrote that even an individual’s neurosis is a choice, made under duress, the path chosen by the organism “in order to be able to live an unlivable situation.”4 These quotes give the flavor of a project which, despite its flaws and limitations, and despite the fact that its two mammoth key works—the Critique and his multi-volume biography of Gustave Flaubert—remained incomplete, is one of the greatest efforts of human self-understanding ever undertaken, its appreciation of how humans remain both free and deeply conditioned still not widely understood. A second dimension of his itinerary is Sartre’s radicalism, in the original sense of going to the root, again and again. Already in Being and Nothingness, and the psychological writings that preceded it, Sartre was looking for the key springs of human action. His 1940s turn toward the world stressed that freedom exists only in historical and social situations, including such aspects as one’s social class, race, gender, and political and cultural background. If “there is no such thing as a non-human situation,” and if understanding situations means looking at their social, cultural and political dimensions, going to the root also means looking closely at social relationships of domination and subordination, and human relationships with nature. Sartre’s ever-more-radical look into situations meant making connections among all of these aspects. Another part of Sartre’s itinerary turns on his visceral hatred of oppression. This is clear in his fiction, all the way back to Nausea. His rage was stoked by humans turning other humans into things, especially in the process of torture, which he wrote about concerning the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Algerian War. After the war he focused on the social and political oppression experienced by Jews, Blacks, the colonized, and workers under capitalism. Sartre listened to their voices and supported their struggles. This partisanship contained its own flaws, as Camus pointed out regarding Communism, and at times went so far as siding with extreme violence and terrorism. But his writing and wide travels also gained him recognition as a Western prophet of the “Tiers monde.”

Foreword

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The least appreciated dimension of Sartre’s itinerary—and perhaps the one most relevant today—is located in efforts of the two volumes of Critique of Dialectical Reason to understand the results of collective human action, both in relation to nature and in creating social institutions. Sartre’s description of the dialectic begins by showing that what we shape in turn shapes us. The famous discussion of the practico-inert describes how worked matter reacts back on its shapers so as to dominate their subsequent practical activity, making individuals into the “product of their product.” This core theme of the Critique becomes the key to Sartre’s profound analysis of the fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Precisely because of his emphasis on subjective human action—praxis—the philosopher of freedom becomes able to untangle the logic whereby the Revolution in power, in order to survive and carry out its goals, interiorized and re-exteriorized the scarcity under which it had to labor. And in the process, it created a totalitarian society. How, he asked in Volume II, to undo it and return to its original socialist goals? While Les Temps modernes contributor and great biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, expected core socialist values to eventually re-surface, the force of Sartre’s analysis left little room for hope. Over time, “these men have become other men occupied in attaining other objectives by other means: and they do not even know it.”5 There is no place to return to. This praxis-process of deviation reflects the “law of dialectical circularity”: matter determines human beings to the extent that humans determine matter. In order to survive, we reshape the material world into our own tools, but to continue to survive we must adapt ourselves to the practico-inert field we have created. That is what the Soviet leadership has done. Future praxis cannot help but obey the imperatives of this humanized material world. No wonder, then, there was no Soviet Solidarity, demanding a return to the original goals of the Revolution. Sartre’s projects to understand how humans can be free despite all the limits of their situations, of constantly going to the root, his hatred of oppression, and his “law of dialectical circularity” encompassed the deepest level, and yielded the richest fruits, of his effort to not miss out on anything of his time. Foucault, of course, was wrong. More, as Flynn said, and indeed as Annie Cohen-Solal said in the title and substance of her book marking the 100th anniversary of his birth, Sartre was “un penseur pour le XXIe siècle.”6 His profound efforts to understand the twentieth century help give us some of the keys to the twenty-first.

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NOTES 1. Thomas Flynn, “Sartre at One Hundred: A Man of the Nineteenth Century Addressing the Twenty-First?, Sartre Studies International 11, no. 1 (2005): 1–14. 2. Ronald Aronson, “Philosophy of Our Time: Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism offers a radical philosophical foundation for today’s revitalized critiques of capitalism.” Boston Review, November 14, 2018. [Last accessed 23 January 2023]. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” New Left Review I/58, November-December (1969): 45. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Foreword to R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy 1950–1960 (London: Pantheon Books, 1964), 7. 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 248; Ronald Aronson, Sartre’s Second Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 168. 6. Flynn, “Sartre at One Hundred,” 12.

Introduction Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria

Despite Jean-Paul Sartre’s decades-long commitment to engaging many of the major social and political challenges of his times, and despite contemporary Sartreans following suit by engaging the same sorts of challenges today, there has been little confluence between Sartre scholarship and thinking— both humanistic and social scientific—on the planetary ecological crisis. This volume contributes to the rectification of this unfortunate gap in Sartre scholarship. Signaling among Sartreans an uptick of interest in the ecological crisis, most of the contributions were presented at a meeting of the North American Sartre Society between 2017 and 2019 or encouraged into development during conversations at one of those meetings. The contributions vary methodologically and substantively, focusing on different aspects of Sartre’s thought, engaging different ecological and broadly environmentalist concerns, and taking different ontological and ethical positions. Collectively, though, they all read Sartre’s philosophy as a worthwhile heuristic and critical resource to aid us in thinking through the great crisis of our time. This crisis is, if it needs to be said, a confluence of crises, with climate change first among equals, alongside ocean acidification, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, and land-use change and soil degradation, to name but a few of many imbricated problems, with all the associated social and political problems, manifesting at local, regional, and global scales. It is, in short, a planetary socioecological crisis. The contributors vary on whether their attention is on a more global or local scale, with some attending to both. Additionally, the suite of ecological crises is complicatedly tied up with unfolding histories shaped by a multitude of interrelated practices and systems, including some that Sartre sharply and extensively criticized, such as capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Several contributors to this volume attend to these ties, though there is much more to be said about these ties and, in fact, much has been said about them elsewhere. This volume opens numerous doors for increasing the presence of Sartrean thought in studies of 1

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many burgeoning ecological crises and their direct and indirect ties to social, economic, and political systems. In stark contrast to the enduring interest among, for example, philosophers of race and decolonial theorists, Sartrean philosophy is largely ignored or, when mentioned, treated as a foil among eco-critics and eco-philosophers, as noted in Matthew Ally’s 2017 book, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge, which names representative Sartre-skeptics such as Erazim Kohák, John Llewelyn, McKenzie Wark, and Neil Evernden, and, though less skeptical, Ted Toadvine.1 Ally adds that, broadly speaking, when scholars approach ecological issues in a manner animated by phenomenological or existentialist philosophy, Sartre is typically avoided. There are exceptions: William McBride’s 1991 article “Sartre and Problems in the Philosophy of Ecology,” which we are pleased to reprint in this volume; Nik Farrell Fox’s 2003 book, The New Sartre, which acknowledges that Sartre “distanced himself from a simplified, instrumental and reductive view of nature” and that parts of his philosophy (that Fox considers to be, in some sense, postmodernist) “call into question a purely exploitative relation to the natural world”; and Ally’s Ecology and Existence, which extensively explores possibilities for an existential ecology that insists on learning from the best of Sartre’s insights (the ecological salience of which is often apparent only after rethinking conventional views of his philosophy). Typical, though, appears to be the view of Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, who recently wrote: “We must look beyond Sartre to other existentialist thinkers [to] understand the scope of more generous relations to nature in an existentialist light.”2 The contributions to this volume challenge Gosetti-Ferencei’s hasty dismissal of Sartre, just as they challenge the antagonistic or dismissive view of Sartre adopted by so many eco-critics and eco-philosophers. This is not to say that the contributions add up to a uniform, or even non-contradictory, view of Sartrean philosophy in an ecological register. In keeping with Sartre’s abiding rejections of all forms of system building—social, political, economic, artistic, philosophical—the contributions do not flow together to present a unified Sartrean eco-philosophy, nor a unitary Sartreanism that is compatible with, for example, eco-pragmatism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, eco-socialism, or any other such systematic position. We offer this as a feature, not a flaw; it is a heuristic and critical strength of the multifarious perspectives gathered into this volume. This is not to say that there is no underlying unity in what follows. Here we put forward six theses that can plausibly be endorsed, in part or in whole, by those examining Sartrean philosophy in light of ecological issues or vice versa. In offering these, we hope to set the shared stage for this volume, including making a concise case for its value. Some of the theses reflect

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evident commonalities among at least some of this volume’s contributions. Other theses are additions the absence of which would impoverish this volume. We begin with the thesis that there ought to be Sartrean alternatives for an existential ecology, or, if you prefer, an ecological existentialism. For options of figures who may provide resources for “more generous relations to nature in an existentialist light,” Gosetti-Ferencei points readers to Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, and Albert Camus. While all four figures are commonly associated with existentialism, and acknowledging that existentialism is a diverse movement both philosophically and culturally, none of them can be comfortably identified with the existentialism of figures such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Nietzsche was arguably a skeptic, if not outright denier, of human freedom. Heidegger was a critic of humanism, including its Sartrean existentialist version. Many scholars have found this criticism highly attractive, fueling many versions of Heideggerian environmentalism, including some aligned with deep ecology, despite the (contested) connections between Heidegger’s reactionary anti-humanism and his repugnant fascist politics. Marcel was a Catholic, leaning on metaphysical presuppositions not shared by Sartre, Beauvoir, or Merleau-Ponty. Finally, Camus had enough significant differences that some scholars identify him as an absurdist tout court rather than any sort of existentialist. It seems more than likely, then, that Sartrean alternatives would also be meaningfully different. At the outset, there is no guarantee that Sartrean alternatives will encourage generous relations to nature. But this cannot be determined a priori. The only way to know is to strive to develop distinctly Sartrean perspectives on our ecological circumstances, and see what comes of it. Sartre, the existentialist who listed generosity at the top of a hierarchy of action values, might prove to be more insightful and more interesting than the dominant image of his philosophy as hopelessly instrumentalist, exceptionalist, and anthropocentric suggests. Our second thesis is that changing our historical (sociopolitical and ecological) trajectory for the better requires multitudinous and expansively distributed collective action from the bottom. Sartre, philosophical champion of freedom, argued forcefully against historical inevitabilities. Indeed, believing in such inevitabilities is to succumb to fatalism (Sartre’s preferred term), and sufficient for exiting a Sartrean philosophical framework. Sartre did, however, urge his readers to be honest about and take responsibility for our historical trajectory, understood as our future in its foreseeable possibilities depending on the choices we make. Consider, for example, Beauvoir’s guidance to evaluate current choices in lieu of the futures they would attempt to actualize. Consider, too, Sartre’s attention to the relationship between means and ends. To place a strictly normative limit on our political means is to risk

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denaturing our ends such that the latter are no longer liberatory. Such recognition is only possible if we see the historical trajectory of our present actions. Of course, honesty about both present circumstances and our trajectory is not a necessary condition for historical change. What is a necessary condition for historical change, according to Sartre, is collective action. Sometimes the collective action is serialized, other times it is highly structured, and so on. Individuals may have influence and impact, to be sure. But what changes historical circumstances and the shape of our trajectories into the future is collective action, for better or for worse (or, as is often the case, for better and for worse). Sartre is also clear that if historical change is going to be a change largely for the better, it must be liberatory for the oppressed. With a lot of historical precedent in hand, Sartre is generally skeptical about the liberatory intent or potential of projects by states, corporations, or other actors “from the top.” Hence his commitment to collective action projects by those “from the bottom.” For projects engaging large-scale problems, multitudinous and expansively distributed grassroots collective action is needed. Given Sartre’s assessment of the challenges faced by groups striving for liberatory collective action in Critique of Dialectical Reason, the need for multitudinous and expansively distributed collective action may be a hard pill to swallow, but that makes it no less true. This reminder about Sartre’s commitment to collective action projects by those “from the bottom” encourages our third thesis, that whatever ecological projects might emerge from Sartrean thinking on our ecological circumstances must be fruitfully engaged with projects already long-familiar to Sartrean politics. (Needless to say, this does not mean that new or unfamiliar projects cannot or should not be engaged.) While the shape and priorities of a Sartrean politics can be contested, Sartre’s political life and oeuvre consistently point to solidarity with those oppressed via economic exploitation, racism, colonialism, and other forms of social, political, and cultural domination. With Beauvoir, we can also point to solidarity with those oppressed via sexism and misogyny. Some ecological projects (including academic ones) and environmental movements have a lamentable track record of ignoring or being hostile toward such projects. Any Sartrean engagement of ecological projects or environmental movements effectively mandates a political orientation resistant to such ignorance or hostility. Our fourth thesis is that a coherent Sartrean approach resists essentializing not just human nature, but nature as such and our relationship to nature. Evident among scholars both generally receptive and generally hostile to Sartre’s philosophy, there is a tendency to read Sartre as promoting an essentialized view of nature or our relationship to nature. One typical essentialized view is that nature always bears a negative value, to be contrasted with human creations like novels, jazz, and cocktails. Another typical essentialized view

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is that our relationship to nature is always an antagonistic one. To experience nature is to risk a bout of nausea. Nature is best avoided or, better yet, dominated and transformed to bear the imprints of the human. We contend that attributing these essentialized views to Sartrean philosophy follows from misreading Sartre. An analogy might be helpful. Scholars both receptive and hostile to Sartre have likewise attributed to his philosophy an essentialized view of dyadic and triadic human relations. They are always hellish. This view, and other simplistic views like it, are a gross misreading, often accomplished by either making too much of fictional characters in specific circumstances, or momentary dramatic hyperbole that pepper otherwise rigorous and staid investigations, or, more broadly, incomplete awareness or consideration of Sartre’s oeuvre. In each case, this is an affront to Sartre’s philosophical commitment to human freedom. The same can be said for the essentialized views about nature and our relationship to nature so often attributed to Sartre. Minimally, to deny us the possibility of identifying positive value in nature and of relating to nature in uplifting ways is to deny the heart of Sartrean philosophy, namely, freedom. We can say, then, and this is our fifth thesis, that how we view nature and our relationship to nature is open, just as the methods with which we will examine our ecological circumstances must also be open-ended. Sartre viewed nature from more than one angle (knee-jerk criticisms to the contrary notwithstanding), and he employed multiple methods, including phenomenological, existential, biographical, historical, and dialectical modes of investigation. New Sartrean approaches to nature and the examination of our ecological situation are likely to vary too, just as they are likely to employ familiar Sartrean methods. But the approaches are not restricted to Sartre’s, any more than the methods should be. There is no Sartrean case for substantive or methodological narrowness (which is not to say that anything goes). New examinations may, for example, employ empirical methods more readily than Sartre did. The substantive questions are necessarily many and varied, and so must our methods be, if they are to be sufficient to the task. Our sixth thesis is that there are two loci in Sartre’s oeuvre that merit special attention for being rich texts through which to integratively engage Sartrean philosophy and ecology. One locus is the description of deforestation and the resulting floods of China’s Great Plain in Critique of Dialectical Reason. This description is discussed in many of this volume’s contributions. The second locus is Typhus, a screenplay Sartre wrote during World War II. (The screenplay is not taken up in any of this volume’s contributions but, as more scholars familiarize themselves with the text, it will likely animate future work on Sartrean philosophy and ecology.) In a recent post on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, Jonathan Webber calls attention to Sartre’s screenplay, arguing that it, not Albert Camus’s popular novel The

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Plague, is “the existential plague fiction we need” during the COVID-19 pandemic.3 While we do not claim (nor does Webber) that Typhus measures up to The Plague aesthetically or literarily, we share Webber’s view that Sartre’s effort invites us to understand the “social shape of our pandemic” in ways that Camus’s novel does not. Put differently, Sartre’s Typhus promotes necessary ecological, as well as existentialist, thinking on pandemics such as the one raging while this volume was put together. This volume is divided into six parts. Part one, titled “Sartre and Ecology,” is dedicated solely to the lead chapter. As mentioned above, we are pleased to reprint William McBride’s 1991 article on Sartre and ecology, which was originally presented at a conference at the University of Łødz, and subsequently published in the conference proceedings. McBride’s prescient article is an early forerunner of the animating theme of this volume. Anticipating the increasing importance (and urgency) of ecological issues that has been realized in the ensuing three decades, McBride presents a strong schematic case for the suitability of Sartre’s later writings for developing an ecological philosophy and at least the outlines of an ecological ethics. Part two, titled “Art and Phenomenology,” includes a chapter from Joe Balay, ‌‌‌who takes up Guido van Helten’s murals of No Exit characters in Reykjavik, Iceland, as an invitation to rethink the role of nature in Sartre’s theory of the Look. Reading Being and Nothingness and No Exit as well, Balay finds nature’s role through an interrelated focus on embodiment and freedom. In the process, he uncovers two kinds of bad faith—embodied and ecological—and concludes with some compelling reflections on art’s potential for (re-)orienting ourselves toward socially cooperative and ecologically collaborative (as opposed to dominative and instrumental) relations with nature. In chapter 2 ‌‌‌Craig Matarrese draws together several strands from Sartre’s philosophy—ranging from phenomenology to social theory—and soundscape ecology to reveal our sonic situatedness. He argues that if we learn how to truly listen and recognize ourselves as members of an animal orchestra, which entails hearing reciprocity and creativity from non-human animal members, then we have a way into the project that Aldo Leopold called a “land ethic.” Part three, titled “Ethics,” begins with a chapter from Kiki Berk and Joshua Tepley who, with a clear analytical style, articulate an environmental ethics developed largely from ideas in Being and Nothingness. They identify two reasons to mitigate climate change. One is a moral reason that considers freedom and future generations. The other is a self-interested reason that considers posthumous legacy. They add a second-order reason to act on the two first-order reasons based on avoiding bad faith in the interest of authenticity. In chapter 6‌‌‌, Michael Butler critically examines the misguided effort to

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shop our way out of climate change problems. After expositions of some key concepts from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, he criticizes ethical consumerism in a way reminiscent of Sartre’s criticism of voting as a trap for fools. His concluding section juxtaposes two competing responses to climate change mitigation as a collective action problem, namely, the Nudge Agenda and the Green New Deal. In chapter 5, Elizabeth Butterfield continues this criticism of consumer culture, focusing on its failure to satisfy true human needs and its deleterious environmental impacts. The chapter includes brief accounts of some critical tools drawn from Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, and Sartre. Following the lead of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the use of memorable, pithily named examples of inauthentic individuals, her critique includes illustrations of seven examples of bad faith in relation to overconsumption and its environmental impacts. Part four, titled “Dialectics and Politics,” begins with a chapter from Austin Smidt, who reads Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason as an important investigation into different kinds of reason, or alternatively, different logics. The kind associated with what Sartre terms “seriality” receives significant critical attention here, as Smidt reveals its connection to the becoming of our ecological predicament that some have called the Anthropocene. Ultimately, he shows how the Critique’s frequently inventive conceptual tools might prove useful for understanding our ecological predicament, and thereby to find the imaginative capability to reject it in favor of artistically creating new worlds. In chapter 8, Paul Gyllenhammer charts a Sartrean path toward a respectful relationality with the living world. Starting with a rereading of Sartre’s account of embodiment and being-for-others, he makes a strong case for reorienting ourselves away from the typically consumerist and instrumentalist relations with animals and other non-human living beings. Gyllenhammer then focuses on Sartre’s account of counter-finality to make a case for less glamorous but more respectful, dignified, and sustainable relations with nature. In chapter 9, Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink argue, against common views to the contrary, that Sartre’s theory of the practico-inert in Critique of Dialectical Reason has important critical commonalities with object-oriented ecological philosophy, specifically Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects. In a co-constructive gesture, they also argue that Sartre’s theory of agency—particularly collective agency—can enrich object-oriented ecological philosophy. Part five, titled “Ontology and Metaphysics,” begins with a chapter from Kimberly Engels, who reads Sartre as aligned with a broad philosophical tradition that privileges time over space. Encouraging an alternative view of Sartrean thought as open to a more spatial orientation, she draws on the Native American metaphysics of both Vine Deloria Jr. and VF Cordova for a corrective that helps Sartrean thought be better attentive to environmental

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issues. In chapter 11, Dane Sawyer puts Sartre’s philosophy in conversation with Buddhism. With a focus on Sartre’s ontology and Buddhist metaphysics that neither ignores differences nor shies away from criticisms, he ultimately finds relevant common ground between the Buddhist Arahant and the Sartrean authentic individual, both of whom are characterized by honesty about the interdependence of Earthly beings and a commitment to treading lightly upon the Earth. Part six, titled “Reimagining Past and Future,” begins with a chapter from Damon Boria, who takes up the task of ecologizing Sartre’s political theory, which he casts as a “politics of possibility.” Highlighting the core freedom and inherent openness of Sartre’s politics, Boria first offers “a short exercise in historical fiction” that interweaves ideas and experiences (some real, some imaginary) of Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sartre as they sort through their complex relations to the sociality of America’s “second city,” Chicago, and the ecology of the Indiana Dunes and Miller Beach neighborhood of Gary, Indiana, where Algren had a cabin. Giving pride of place to the systemic oppressions that most preoccupied Sartre (racism, colonialism, capitalism, totalitarianism), now seen through the dual lens of ecological science and environmental justice, Boria sketches key contours of a Sartrean ecoexistentialist political theory with a decided emphasis on collective action. Finally, in chapter 13 Matthew Ally takes a cue from Sartre’s fascination with and writings on Venice, Italy. With a style deliberately inspired by Petrarch and Montaigne, a sometime Venetian resident and tourist respectively, the chapter is organized around alternating sections on Earth and world. Each section opens with an epigraph from Sartre’s Venetian writings, serving at once as linchpin for the section and, collectively, as a unifying thread for the entire chapter, to reveal today’s Venice as a phenomenological metaphor for the present, and its history and future as a dialectical allegory of Earth and world “after the Holocene.” For an end to this beginning, we offer a few brief remarks on our post-Holocene circumstances and our post-Holocene language. The Holocene is a geological epoch, spanning from the present back about 11,700 years. While the Holocene remains the official epoch according to the International Union of Geological Sciences, some people both inside and outside the scientific community are following the biologist Eugene Stormer’s and the chemist Paul Crutzen’s claim in the year 2000 that a new epoch has arrived, namely, the Anthropocene. The proposed term has rankled some people for its apparent anthropocentrism, that is, for its apparent valorization of human dominance via extension of anthropos into the geologic time scale. Others, however, have embraced the term—often irrespective of its geologic validity—not for its anthropocentrism, but for its capacity to call attention to anthropogenic impacts on the Earth, particularly the suite of ecological crises

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noted above. (For more on all this, see Matthew Ally’s chapter.) This is the sense of “Anthropocene” as it appears throughout this volume and the circumstance to which the subtitle’s “after the Holocene” alludes. Among other frequent terms that appear throughout this volume are “nature,” “ecology,” “environment,” “animal,” “nonhuman,” and “Earth.” We encourage readers to pay attention to different senses these terms may have in different chapters. As a whole, this volume does not take a position on the many philosophical questions related to terms like, particularly, “nature” and “animal.” That said, we will take this opportunity to invite readers to approach such terms mindful of Matthew Ally’s Sartrean effort to integrate pairs often strictly separated (environmentalism and humanism, nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, Earth and world), Ally’s notion of the “other-and-more-than-human” (which is a “critical recasting” of David Abram’s “more-than-human”),4 Damon Boria’s Sartrean phenomenology of the animal encounter,5 and other Sartrean scholars’ similar efforts at terminologically perspicuous Earthly engagements. Last but not least, a note about “Earth.” Readers will find many instances of both “earth” and “Earth.” We left the question of capitalization to the authors’ discretion. That said, it is standard usage to capitalize the names of all the other seven (formerly eight) planets in our solar system, and even the named moons of those planets. Why it would be otherwise for the third planet from the sun is hard to say. When used to refer to this planet, our celestial home, we prefer “Earth,” which we think better captures its singular and integral relation to all who exist thanks to it. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. Boria, Damon. “Reading Nietzsche and Sartre Toward an Eco-Existentialism.” In Nietzsche und der Franzosische Existenzialismus, eds. Alfred Betschart, Andreas Urs Sommer, and Paul Stephan. Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2022. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Webber, Jonathan. “Never Mind the Camus: Sartre’s Typhus is the Existential Plague Fiction We Need.” December 15, 2020, https:​//​blog​.apaonline​.org​/2020​/12​/15​ /never​-mind​-the​-camus​-sartres​-typhus​-is​-the​-existential​-plague​-fiction​-we​-need​/.

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NOTES 1. Matthew C. Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (New York: Lexington Books, 2017), 22–25. 2. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 170. 3. Jonathan Webber, “Never Mind the Camus: Sartre’s Typhus is the Existential Plague Fiction We Need,” December 15, 2020, https:​//​blog​.apaonline​.org​/2020​/12​ /15​/never​-mind​-the​-camus​-sartres​-typhus​-is​-the​-existential​-plague​-fiction​-we​-need​/. 4. Ally, Ecology and Existence, 36. 5. Damon Boria, “Reading Nietzsche and Sartre Toward an Eco-Existentialism,” in Nietzsche und der Franzosische Existenzialismus, eds. Alfred Betschart, Andreas Urs Sommer, and Paul Stephan (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2022).

PART I

Sartre and Ecology

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Chapter One

Sartre and Problems in the Philosophy of Ecology— with a Thirty-Year Update William L. McBride‌‌

PROLOGUE 2020—A GENERATION HENCE The paper that is being republished here was presented at a conference, sponsored by the University of Łødz, officially entitled “Mensch—Natur— Cosmos.” Why this grandiose title in German? I do not know. But it had been made clear to me that it was intended to deal primarily with ecological and environmental issues, and this triggered in my mind the question of just how, if at all, Sartre had conceived these issues. The paper, which was published in the Proceedings about three years later, makes no reference to the setting in which the conference was held, and it is with that setting that I would like to begin this brief prologue. It was in Sulejow Podklasztorze, in the countryside, and specifically in a Medieval monastery (the “cloister” referred to in the word “Podklasztorze,” or under the cloister) that had been converted into a hotel/conference center. It took place in the month of May 1988. Sartre, from some passages in the text of Being and Nothingness concerning the meaning of the past (for example, he points out the real possibility that the United States could have taken the side of Germany in World War I, and the huge difference in the propaganda narrative that would have been produced) on to some of his later writings, was always very much attuned to the question of “generations” and how they may differ from one another. Consider the diversity of meanings that apply to May 1988 in Poland. The government, loyal part of the Soviet Bloc (or “Warsaw Pact,” as it was known), had recently succeeded once again in quelling workers’ unrest led by 13

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the movement known as “Solidarity.” I remember listening, during a break in the scholarly activities, to a graduate student who explained that, in his opinion, Solidarity was finished, although he could imagine a group with similar goals arising in the next generation. Little could we know that within about a year and a half Solidarity would become the dominant force in Poland, the Berlin Wall would be destroyed, and there would be no more Warsaw Pact. In any event, the setting, as I recall it, was rather idyllic. It was not far from the modern, middle-sized urban city of Łødz; not far, either, from smaller towns in which pogroms had occurred in the past and Jewish populations had been removed by the Nazis during World War II, destined for the Holocaust, towns which a couple of our Jewish colleagues visited. In fact, it was not even terribly far from Oświęcim, which is more usually referred to in Western literature by its German name, Auschwitz. But if a generation is typically thought of as a period of twenty-five or thirty years, then the story of all that horror was already more than a generation in the past and even somewhat peripheral to the consciousnesses of some of the younger Polish philosophers. How much further removed, in any of our consciousnesses, was any conception of what the life of the monastery must have been like in its heyday! Reconstructed ruins can indeed seem idyllic. But the principal focus of the conference was in fact rather on future generations, from the perspective of which, assuming the continuing existence of the human race in some form or other, the entire civilization exemplified, modestly, by the city of Łødz, might itself appear as a ruin—and not necessarily capable of much reconstruction. It was a time when, finally, more than a few isolated intellectuals were awakening to the possibility that what is now, as in a number of articles in the present volume, called the Anthropocene, might be heading toward self-destruction. The dawning consciousness of a new generation. After I presented my paper, a young French philosopher, already beginning to become well known, expressed strong skepticism about my invocation of Sartre to obtain any ecological insights. I myself had had some doubts, but his objections reinforced my conviction that I was on the right track in this regard. In returning to this essay many years later, having thought and written a good deal more about the nature of history and Sartre’s various discussions of it, I now have a clearer understanding of why I found his work to be such a good vehicle for beginning to generate a philosophy of ecology: It was not just his treatment, especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, of the role of matter and of material scarcity in the world, which I discuss in my essay, and not just, additionally, his attunement to temporal succession both past (the centuries of deforestation in China, with its unintended consequences) and future; but it was also his strong skepticism (to which I allude in the last paragraph of the essay) about the still-widespread assurance, at least in his



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day, that the future would necessarily bring more “progress.” From his earliest adult years, Sartre was somewhat obsessed by the notion of contingency, which entails the strong possibility that “things may go wrong.” That possibility, along with its alternative, serves as a backdrop to most, perhaps all, of the contributions to this volume. In any event, it was through a chance conversation with me some years ago, but also some years after the publication of this obscure paper, that Matthew Ally learned of it and read it. He was at the time already well into his own pursuit of the intersection of ecology and Sartre studies that eventually led to his magisterial volume on the topic, and now, with the editorial collaboration of Damon Boria, to the present volume. I am of course delighted, and thank them very much for giving me this opportunity to see my essay—to the ideas of which, be it understood, I still thoroughly subscribe—republished along with this little prologue to it. SARTRE AND PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECOLOGY One of the principal purposes of this conference is to examine the relationship between human beings and nature within the European philosophical tradition. Although I do not wish to anticipate colleagues’ conclusions here, I think it may be helpful for me to begin by restating what has become, I take it, a commonplace, namely, that the mainstream of Western thought, inspired in part by the biblical injunction to subdue the earth and then reinforced in its direction by early modern science and the further metaphors about the dominance of nature that were employed by such proponents of that science as Francis Bacon, has until recently encouraged rather than questioned the almost unlimited exploitation of the human ecosystem. The two individuals who are, in my opinion, the most important social philosophers of the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, can be and have both been accused of continuing this attitude, at least by not doing anything to reverse it. Mill was, on the whole and despite the critical stances that he took toward sex discrimination and even, later in life, classical liberal economic theory, an optimistic believer in the reality of human progress and hence in the rightness of what were considered “progressive” nineteenth-century views about the exploitation of nature. The case of Marx, with which I am much more familiar than that of Mill, is, I suspect, more complex and would constitute a paper, indeed a monograph, in itself; but at any rate the initial impression conveyed by such Marxian writings as those passages in The Communist Manifesto in which he appears to praise the bourgeoisie for having performed its historical task of eliciting thitherto undreamt-of forces from

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“the lap of social labour” through the subjection of Nature to man is that he certainly did not anticipate some of the deep ecological concerns that bring us together here, 140 years later. Western ethics and social philosophy in the middle portion of our century, the twentieth, were dominated, among living thinkers, by two individuals above all, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Since this is a highly controversial claim, though it is of course of a kind that can neither be proved nor disproved, I need to expand and qualify it a little bit in order to make it at all plausible. First of all, I said “among living thinkers”; I would not for a moment wish to deny the continuing influence, throughout the middle of our century, of Marx, Mill, and other great figures of the past. Secondly, I am confining my claim to those middle decades—roughly the forties, fifties, and sixties; it is obvious that other voices are being heard more frequently now, though I believe that it is too early to say just which among them will prove to have been most influential for these final decades of our century. Thirdly, by referring to “Western ethics and social philosophy” I am deliberately excluding other aspects of philosophy in which American and British thinkers had a considerable influence during the period in question; Anglo-American ethics at the time was largely confined to a normatively sterile, though often interesting and clever, analysis of meta-ethical issues, and social and political philosophy was virtually moribund. Fourthly, there are those who would deny that Heidegger’s thought yields an ethics or a social philosophy at all, much less one that exerted any intellectual, cultural dominance; but without saying anything about the thorny and, to my mind, still significant and unfinished question about Heidegger and Naziism, I can simply attest to the enormous importance, in forming the social and ethical attitudes of so many of my past students and colleagues, of Heidegger’s explorations of everydayness, authenticity, the technical Gestell, and numerous other phenomena that he stressed. This brings me, fifthly and finally, to Sartre, who will occupy center stage for the remainder of this paper. Sartre fascinates me. From my earliest university years, I found both his early philosophical and his literary works quite attractive on the whole; in those years, I knew virtually nothing yet about his political essays, some of which include important anticipations of the more systematic social and political philosophy of his later life, although European intellectuals were already quite aware of this developing aspect of his philosophy by the middle 1950s. At any rate, it seems to me unquestionable that Sartre came to be looked upon as one of the great intellectual “consciences” of the Western world during that quarter century following World War II that constituted the troubled, often very angry, often very frightening youth of my generation, the immediate historical background to the rather different world of today. I need only recall that it was the initiative of some Polish intellectuals, who decided in 1956 to



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solicit an article by Sartre on his view of the relationship between Marxism and existentialism in France for the special April 1957 issue of Twórczość that motivated his own decision to compose his monumental Critique de la raison dialectique, for which that article, Questions de méthode, eventually came to serve as the introductory essay. However one may evaluate the successive phases and the various aspects of Sartre’s social and political stances during those years—for example, his contributions to the magazine, France—URSS, the vicissitudes of his relationship with the French Communist Party, his principled opposition to his government’s war against the inhabitants of Algeria, and so on—the fact is that his views always figured prominently in every important debate and hence can be said, without exaggeration, to have contributed importantly to the consciousness of those times, the immediate prelude to our own. And so it should be of considerable interest in these new times, in which the last of the older generation of Cold Warriors, the generation of Sartre, are disappearing from the scene and our principal social and ethical preoccupations have begun to shift and become somewhat different, to take a backward look at his philosophy in order to examine what, if anything, it has to say about our present social concerns. Since questions of social ethics and ecology are central among these and the focal-point of our attention here, I propose to deal with this matter of Sartre and problems in the philosophy of ecology by considering the following sequence of topics: 1) reasons for regarding Sartre as indifferent or even hostile to ecological concerns on the basis especially of his early writings; 2) Sartre and ecology in the Critique de la raison dialectique, with special focus on his analysis of deforestation in ancient China; and 3) some hints at a more comprehensive Sartrean ecological ethic and philosophy of history on the basis particularly of posthumouslypublished works. I hope, as I shall try briefly to indicate again at the end, that this reevaluation of the evolution in thinking about nature and ecology on the part of one of the most prominent philosophers of the previous generation will provide some useful guidance to us as we attempt to attack these issues anew from the vantage point of our more recent historical experiences. Particularly in the early years of his career, Sartre furnished abundant grounds for regarding him as an implacable enemy of nature and the natural and hence, by a very natural extension, of ecological concerns. There is evidence for this even at the level of his personal life, although at this level the evidence is mixed: he frequently admitted to feeling much more at home in cities, especially in Paris and Rome, rather than in the countryside, as has become even clearer from passages in his posthumously published personal letters. On the other hand, he probably spent more time engaged in recreational outdoor activities—hiking, bicycling, vacationing at the seashore, and so on—during

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the summers of his early adult years than do, I would guess, most of my fellow countrymen of comparable age today; he was no Marcel Proust! It is at the philosophical level that the early Sartre’s antipathy to nature was most clearly manifested. He has been called, not without some justification, “the last of the Cartesians,” a thinker who emphasized the polar opposition between a sort of undifferentiated matter, called being-in-itself or sometimes simply l’en-soi, and a region of being called l’être-pour-soi, which though not substantial like the Cartesian soul or mind, is locatable only in human reality and accounts for all activity and freedom in the world. While it would be erroneous simply to equate Sartre’s en-soi with nature, a concept that is of human construction and that, as the more historically-minded later Sartre recognized better, has changed in its precise reference over diverse societies and epochs, or even with matter, nevertheless there always remained a sense in which Sartre, even in his later years, retained a negative attitude toward natural phenomena by virtue of the fact that he saw them as lacking what was quintessentially human. Nature, for him, is explicable in terms of causality, whereas intentional acts and other types of free human activity are not, in the final analysis. A good illustration of the role assigned to natural phenomena in the early Sartre’s systematic philosophical thought is his treatment, in L’être et le néant, of “my surroundings,” one of the elements of what he calls human “facticity,” as consisting of “coefficients of adversity,” limitations on the exercise of human freedom though not limitations of that freedom itself. Personally, I have always found his phenomenological survey of some of the diverse possible responses to such a “coefficient of adversity” as a hill that I approach and am expected to climb to be rather illuminating, a good way of capturing the moment of free choice that is involved in our responding to what may at first appear to be the sheer necessity imposed on us by things in our environment; but his choice of term well illustrates the antipathetic or antagonistic character of Sartre’s view of the confrontation between nature and freedom. This sense of confrontation was if anything reinforced by the increasing influence of Hegelian categories and ways of thinking on Sartre during the years following the publication of L’être et le néant in 1943. Now, Hegel’s opposition of nature to history could be regarded by Sartre as complementary to his own fundamental polarity of in-itself and for-itself. One can see this influence at work in the important essay of 1946, Matérialisme et révolution, in which Sartre criticizes what he takes to be the freedom-rejecting implications of dialectical materialism, and in the transcript of a 1961 symposium, in which Sartre participated along with the Hegel scholar, Jean Hyppolyte, and several others on the subject of whether the dialectic is a law of nature as well as of history, or a law of history only. At that symposium, Sartre expressed



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agreement with Hyppolyte’s position that to claim, like Engels, to find dialectical principles at work in nature is at least to run the risk of naturalizing history—in other words, of “reducing” history to the level of natural phenomena. Similarly, the binary Hegelian opposition between nature and history was a significant subject of reflection for Sartre in the unfinished notes, written in part during a period of fairly intensive study of Hegel’s thought by Sartre, that have been published posthumously under the title, Cahiers pour une morale. Although to identify the relationship between human beings and their environment, or history and nature, as fundamentally oppositional is not eo ipso to take an ethical stance of unconcern toward issues of ecological ethics, nevertheless to make an inference from the former position to the latter would be quite understandable. In fact, in Sartre’s case, it would be a mistake to look, not only for an ecological ethics, but indeed for any positive ethical doctrine in L’être et le néant. At the end of this book, he promised a future writing on the subject of ethics, but he was never straightforwardly to fulfill that promise. The Cahiers pour une morale, along with a large pile of as yet unpublished notes from the 1960s, constitute incomplete sketches toward such an enterprise, and the Critique de la raison dialectique can be seen as a sort of substitute for the promised ethics in the form of a social theory. What is of most relevance to ethical considerations in Sartre’s early work, even though it does not amount to a positive ethical doctrine, is the critical stance that he takes there toward a number of traditional ethical positions, and it is his focus on some of these positions that, more than any Cartesian or Hegelian influence, to my mind best explains the pejorative overtones that usually accompany Sartre’s, especially the early Sartre’s, references to “nature.” For it is the traditional ideological reinforcement of certain conservative behaviors and values as unquestionably, indisputably normative because they are said to be “natural” that most arouses Sartre’s ire as an ethical critic. He is famous for insisting that there is no human nature, meaning that human beings, taken collectively, share no fixed, unchangeable characteristics that can be cited to determine a priori what is morally right and wrong, better and worse, within the limitations of our physical powers. And the latter, our physical powers, vary greatly according to changing circumstances both of individuals and of socially shared technologies. Indeed, it is reasonable to infer that for Sartre there is no “nature” tout court, if by “nature” one understands a set of fixed, unchangeable characteristics about the physical world as a whole that can be cited for the same purposes as those for which so-called human nature has been evoked, namely, to provide an a priori basis for a systematic ethic. Rather, the future, for Sartre, is open and to be forged in light of changing human possibilities—an idea that is reinforced by the work of his close collaborator, Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale

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de l’ambiguïté, which places heavy stress on looking to the historical future as a guide to moral conduct in the present. Indeed, from this point of view, the early existentialist critique of traditional nature-based and natural law ethics leaves much more room for attempting to generate a consistent ecological ethic than do, for example, either cost/benefit utilitarian views, which must make somewhat ad hoc provisions to include utilities and disutilities to future generations within the range of costs and benefits to be considered, or possessive individualist liberal views, which, contrary to the spirit of the existentialist critique, assume the naturalness and eternal inviolability of private property and hence must treat ecology-based limitations on property use as justified only in exceptional circumstances. Conversely, it seems to me that it would be a serious mistake even if it is a tempting one under present circumstances, to try to develop a new ecological ethic, however much we may need one, by imputing a set of intrinsic values to a new, generalized conception of nature—in other words, by reviving in some new form the notion of existing nature as being somehow normative and hence as a source of norms, or natural, ethical laws. I find the early Sartrean critique of the conservative dangers of all such positions, which complements elements of a similar critique in Marx, Nietzsche, and others, to be decisive, even though the early Sartre is of little use for the more positive task of constructing a suitable ecological ethic. Nevertheless, it remains true to say, as I have already pointed out, that both nature and the related concepts of “matter” and “materialism” play generally either nugatory or negative roles in the thought-framework of the early Sartrean philosophy. Although I do not for a moment wish to pretend that there was ever a complete reversal on this topic in his thinking, or even that such a complete reversal would have been desirable, I now wish to discuss briefly a certain shift in Sartre’s attitudes and emphases that took place in the years between the publication of L’être et le néant and that of the first volume of the Critique de la raison dialectique, a shift that leads him in the latter to treat ecological factors as absolutely central to an understanding of human society and history. On the issue of Sartre and materialism, some very useful clarifications are to be found in an article by the English-language translator of L’être et le néant and Questions de méthode, Hazel Barnes, that appeared in an important collection of critical essays, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Paul Schilpp (LaSalle, Open Court Press, Illinois 1981). Barnes correctly claims, citing though in part also criticizing an earlier article of mine, that by the time of the writing of Questions de méthode Sartre had accepted a certain version of materialism, whereas of course in Matérialisme et révolution and other earlier writings he had rejected it in all of its versions.



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If one proceeds to consider the general worldview that is unfolded in Critique de la raison dialectique, something that is obviously of much greater importance than any question of mere labels like “materialism,” one finds a social theory according to which human history and social structures have been thoroughly and completely conditioned by our natural, material environment, so that what is still a matter of collective free choice is only the forms that the social structures will take, and even this is subject to many constraints. In short, the Sartre of the Critique emerges, in contrast to the popular and still better-known Sartre of L’être et le néant, as a philosopher of ecology, if not of an ecological ethic, whose sense of the relevance of the ecosystem to an understanding of who we are is probably deeper and certainly more informed by detail than that of any other prominent European contemporary. I shall now proceed to elaborate on this, first in terms of the overall scheme of the book, and then with reference to a specific example, that of the deforestation of China. For the Sartre of the Critique, the single most significant fact about all of human history up to our time—a fact that is contingent, in the sense that he claims to be able to imagine societies of intelligent beings in which it would not be present, but also all-pervasive—is that of material scarcity. There have never been enough material resources for the satisfaction of all needs, and all of human praxis is and must of necessity be conditioned by this reality. Activity, change, history originates in human beings, never in the material environment; in this sense features of the environment still remain, in the later Sartre’s thought, coefficients of adversity, though he rarely if ever uses the latter term in the Critique. But with this newly-acquired sense both of human materiality and of the profound meaning of dialectical interaction, Sartre now stresses the paradoxical but fundamental process whereby the effect of human praxis, particularly when it is on a large scale, operating on matter under conditions of material scarcity may result in a kind of role reversal, such that matter or Nature ends up determining the outcome. The intentions of human beings, in other words, acting on or often even against nature—Sartre invents the word “antiphysis” to identify this type of action—often become counterfinalized as a result of their own praxis combined with certain inherent features of the natural world. One of the first and clearest examples that he provides of this antiphysis is deforestation in China. The discussion of this phenomenon occurs early in the first volume of the Critique. The facts are relatively well known. For several thousand years, it was the practice of Chinese peasants systematically to eliminate trees from the fields and mountainsides as the agricultural frontier advanced. The cumulative effect of all these individual actions has been to dislodge the topsoil and allow it to clog the great rivers, thus causing the massive periodic floods

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for which certain regions, especially the great plain of the north, are famous. As Sartre says: Ainsi, le processus entier des terribles inondations chinoises apparaît comme un mécanisme construit intentionellement. Si quelque ennemi de l’homme avait voulu persécuter les travailleurs de la Grande Plaine, il aurait chargé des troupes mercenaires de déboiser systématiquement les montagnes. Le système positif de la culture s’est transformé en machine infernale. Or, l’ennemi qui a fait entrer le loess, le fleuve, la pesanteur, toute l’hydrodynamique dans cet appareil destructeur, c’est le paysan lui-même.1

And yet it never seemed that way, at least until recent times when they began to be made aware of it, to individual peasants clearing their individual patches of land over those millennia. Human beings, in an instance such as this, working together, as it seemed, in a common struggle against nature, became, through natural means, their own worst enemies. It is in the context of a reflection on the significance of this example, several pages later, that Sartre affirms his adherence to a materialist monism: “Le seul monisme qui part du monde humain et qui situe les hommes dans la Nature [. . .], le seul qui puisse dépasser ces deux affirmations également vraies et contradictoires: dans l’Univers toute existence est matérielle, dans le monde de l’homme tout est humain.”2 Of course, as Sartre well realized and the structure of his book indicates, this is a particularly simple example of the role of the ecosystem in human history. Further complexities could be introduced even in this example if one were to add an account of the social organization of traditional Chinese agriculture, and surely any comprehensive understanding of most contemporary ecological problems requires a strong awareness of the dominant mode of production that is involved. But Sartre’s principal concern in this discussion, as my last citation from him should have made clear, is to insist on the element of human intentionality that underlies and ultimately explains ecological catastrophes, however deeply hidden that element may sometimes be. The theoretical implication of this is, obviously, to refuse to treat Nature as a fixed, closed entity at a distance, as a God might; the practical implication is to combat pessimism about past and present threats to the ecosystem, however grave and seemingly overwhelming they may be, and to work consciously to take these matters, so to speak, into our own hands—in which, whether we have been aware of it or not, they have always been. Sartre mentions in passing, for example, that a program of reforestation would have been needed to avert the consequences of the initial deforestation in China; but is it not the case that a reforestation program, both in China and in the Amazon region, where deforestation with even more global potential consequences is



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taking place at the present time, remains within the realm of human possibility? On the other hand, such a possibility can only be actualized if and when appropriate, non-exploitative socioeconomic structures are in place. My confidence that this is a reasonable interpretation of the implications of the later Sartre’s thought for a philosophy of ecology is strengthened by the fact that such is the message of a very suggestive, though more journalistic than strictly philosophical, book on the subject that has been written by one of Sartre’s closest and best French interpreters, André Gorz. His Écologie et politique contains, as far as I could tell from a cursory search, only one explicit reference to Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique, but that friendly reference makes it clear that Gorz thinks of his strong ecological activism as carrying out, rather than contravening, the spirit of Sartrism. This word, Sartrism, sounds a bit humorous, perhaps, to those who are familiar with Sartre’s thought, because Sartre did not feel attached to any particular set of past philosophical formulas and was perfectly happy to move in new directions of thinking whenever it seemed appropriate to him, however much they might appear to be at odds with earlier directions. Thus, the contrast between the individualism of L’être et le néant and the strong social orientation of the Critique is superficially very striking, despite the fact that, at a deeper level, one can readily discern a great many elements of continuity. Sartre’s comparative lack of ego-involvement, as a philosopher, in his own previous formulas should serve, I think, as a good example to all of us who participate in the enterprise of Western philosophy: the fact that neither problems of ecology nor the partly related, partly separate problems of our societies’ relationships to the less developed countries of the world have been matters of major concern to most of our intellectual ancestors or even, perhaps, to many of us in the past, should not serve as a barrier against our acknowledging the centrality of these problems today, as we are attempting to begin to do at this conference. With these remarks as background, I would like to conclude by briefly reviewing some hints at a more comprehensive Sartrean ecological ethic and philosophy of history that are to be found both in works published during his lifetime and particularly in certain passages in his often very rough but interesting Nachlass. The Cahiers pour une morale, on which Sartre was working during the late 1940s, contain some interesting and useful extended reflections on the question of historical progress and its relationship to any possible ethics. Ecological concerns as such play very little role in these reflections, but it is interesting to observe in them Sartre’s strong skepticism about any attempted equation of technological and scientific progress with progress in history, a skepticism that is not, however, reducible to the sort of anti-technology attitude that some have claimed to find, for example, in Heidegger. In addition,

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the Cahiers are useful for the sense that they provide, in a few scattered passages, of the importance of generational differences in shaping social perceptions; our heightened awareness of ecological problems today must in part be explained by referring to such differences. There are also passages in the Cahiers that contain ethical formulations of an almost apocalyptic sort, unacceptably idealistic in their implications, concerning the remote possibility of a society-wide “radical conversion” to authenticity, which would in some vague sense constitute the end of history. A soil in which formulas of this sort are disseminated is a soil that is still not very propitious for the development of an ecological ethic. In the first volume of the Critique de la raison dialectique, the product of a decade later, Sartre’s vastly heightened awareness of the importance of our material environment, which I have just discussed, occurs within the framework of a notion of history—both of the garden variety of short-term histories of small groups and movements in which we all become involved from time to time, and of history in its larger senses up to and including world history—as what he calls “totalization.” There is nothing closed or fixed about history so conceived, as there would be if we were to think of past history as a settled “totality”; history as totalization is and always will be, as long as the human race survives, an ongoing process, but it is certainly one of which the twentieth century is more aware than were past epochs. In the posthumouslypublished second volume of Critique, which was composed at the same time as the first volume but never completed, this sense of history as totalization becomes even more prominent in Sartre’s thought. Especially in his detailed discussion of the evolution of the Soviet Union during the late 1920s and early 1930s, a discussion in which Sartre appears to be more reluctant than in any of his other writings to allow that the sequence of events, at least on a large scale, could have taken a different course from the one that it did take, in light of the nation’s commitment to revolutionary development, Sartre uses the new expression, “totalisation d’enveloppement.” This is meant to indicate the sense in which major historical projects ultimately involve all the members of a modern society. In this same unfinished second volume of the Critique, near the end, we find Sartre much more willing than at any previous time to entertain what might be called “science-fictional” hypotheses, both about the possibility of our being observed by intelligent and more advanced visitors from other planets and about more immediate possibilities of both a positive and a negative sort—substantially lengthening the duration of human life, or the premature ending of human history through some catastrophe—that have been introduced by contemporary science and technology. In the face of all of this variety of considerations, Sartre wishes once again to affirm that it is we human beings who make our own history, that that history is never, in the



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final analysis, a fatality imposed externally upon us, and he argues eloquently and in great detail in continued support of this basic position of his. It is a position with which I personally am in strong agreement, and it serves as the basis of an ethical attitude, vis-à-vis our present ecological concerns, that is activist and that, while not complacently optimistic, leaves open the possibility of a certain optimism. But it is still not by any means a developed ethic. Sartre did, however, make one last effort, which of course he also left incomplete, at developing a systematic ethical stance, and as my final point I would like to report on one portion of these as yet unpublished notes of the mid-1960s by way of suggesting something about the lines that such a stance might have taken. This particular set of notes was written in preparation for a lecture that Sartre gave to the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, although the lecture itself is said to have been much shorter than the notes themselves; they exist in manuscript and typescript form and have been briefly and partially summarized by my American colleagues, Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman, in an article that has appeared in English in the journal, Social Text (13/14, winter/spring 1986), and in French in the Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie et de Sciences Morales of the University of Brussels, 1987. The portion of these notes that interests me here concerns a certain kind of ecological disaster that was brought about by the widespread use of a potent form of “antiphysis,” a drug containing thalidomide with the brand name of “Softénon,” that was prescribed as a sleeping pill for pregnant mothers in the late 1950s, but that turned out to have the effect of causing enormous deformities in the infants born to the mothers who had taken it. A number of mothers in the city of Liège, when they discovered what had happened, decided either to abort or, in a certain number of cases, to commit infanticide. This is the historical event that Sartre proceeds to analyze. The thrust of his analysis is that the actions of the Liège mothers should not be assessed in the traditional terms of what he calls “neo-positivist” ethics—was such infanticide morally permissible in light of the supposedly supreme value of human life and of the sometimes countervailing considerations that are contained in the notion of “quality of life”? For this neo-positivist way of thinking, according to Sartre, presupposes a repetitiveness and unchangeability in the structures of human life, and hence in its moral codes, that is undermined both by the “antiphysis” of modern technology, however badly, as here, it may at times fail us, and by the mothers’ actions. The broader implication of those actions, he says, is to posit an historically different possible future in which no child would be born with a sub-human destiny, as is still the case now for a large percentage of the human race. Thus, even though the mothers in question came primarily from the middle classes of a privileged, advanced industrial society, Sartre sees what they did as raising larger issues about global dominance

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and subordination and, concurrently, about the nature of ethics itself. The Kantian idea of a kingdom of ends and all similar notions that presuppose a fixed, stable, universal domain of moral rules are undermined by the kinds of radically new possibilities, both positive and negative in terms of humanity’s historical future, that are opened up to us by technology at the present time. Any ethic that will be appropriate to our new understanding of the ecosystem and of our role in it, then, according to Sartre, will have to involve a rejection of past ethical structures, systems, and assumptions. All of these texts, published and unpublished, taken together amount to nothing more than suggestions toward an ecological ethic for our times. They do not directly resolve such major concrete issues as that of the desirability of the widespread use of nuclear energy, and they fly in the face of what I perceive as a vague but broadly-based current tendency, resulting in part from our enhanced awareness of some of the disasters that we have inflicted upon ourselves by severely damaging the ecosystem, to restore ancient attitudes of quasi-religious respect for nature and for “her” rhythms. I confess that I often indulge in the luxury of such nostalgic attitudes myself, at fleeting moments. But Sartre is correct, I think, in saying, as I pointed out near the outset of this paper, that “nature” is a concept that human beings construct and reconstruct across time, rather than some entity in itself, and that it is ultimately our collective free choice to make of it what we will, constrained by the technological limitations of what we can. While such a view might well be accompanied by a complacent optimism about “progress” on the part of some thinkers, in Sartre’s case it was complemented by an uncompromisingly harsh critique of the use to which human beings have put and are continuing to put so much of our modern technology in the service of perpetuating or even intensifying social relationships of domination. Thus described, these complementary attitudes—awareness of radically different and better future human possibilities, severe criticism of the role of existing social structures in the exacerbation of ecological problems—are ones that I endorse. BIBLIOGRAPHY Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.

NOTES 1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 273. 2. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, 291.

PART II

Art and Phenomenology

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Chapter Two

Soundscape Ecology and a Sartrean Phenomenology of Listening Craig Matarrese‌‌

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) and Sigurd Olson (1899–1982) were both environmentalists and conservationists who wrote about their experiences in nature, typically in areas we would designate today as ‘wilderness.’ Whether we’re reading about Leopold’s practice of getting up early to sit on a bench and listen to the morning bird chorus (A Sand County Almanac), or about Olson’s finding a perfect ‘listening point’ in the Northwoods of Minnesota (The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point), we’re offered a rich phenomenological description of how one finds oneself situated in a natural soundscape.1 Neither writes about an abstract confrontation with ‘nature as such,’ or with some generic ‘object’ of experience; rather, their descriptions are particular and fine-grained, and infused with seemingly mundane contours and activities. And they both have real sensitivity to our sonic situatedness, to the ways we acoustically engage the world, indeed anticipating the later efforts of phenomenologists to expand the language of our descriptions to fit our ways of listening. Don Ihde, for example, a phenomenologist working in the decades after Leopold and Olson were writing, helped us pull away from visualist phenomenology and make an ‘auditory turn,’ by paying particular attention to our experience of the sound of spaces, shapes, and surfaces.2 Leopold and Olson were not using the technical language of European phenomenology, but they were certainly describing features of the soundscape that function like ‘figure’ and ‘ground,’ ‘field,’ and ‘horizon,’ terms familiar in desriptions of visual experience. And their writings show an interest in what is distinctive to being sonically situated. Whereas visualism tries to 29

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make things clear and distinct, a turn to auditory experience must accept, for example, that sounds are increasingly omnidirectional as frequencies get lower, and that much of what we hear in any given soundsape is acousmatic, heard but not seen.3 Leopold and Olson were also showing us new existential possibilities in our ways of listening, that we can reimagine our relationship with nature and its ecosystems, and that we can hear the world differently and through that engagement, make the world different than it would otherwise be. One feature of the Anthropocene is the omnipresence of anthropogenic sound, which should make us wonder whether Leopold and Olson’s form of listening is still available for us today: if human sound is everywhere, then how do we listen to nature or wilderness without, in some sense, just listening to ourselves? In what follows, I will draw on some central ideas in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology and social theory, along with insights from the relatively new field of soundscape ecology, to argue that we can, in fact, cultivate the kind of ecological listening that Leopold and Olson practiced. Cultivating this kind of listening means struggling to understand our sonic situatedness, actively engaging the soundscape in which we find ourselves, and considering our existential possibilities. I will also argue that we should learn from the way improvising musicians listen to each other, particularly the way they are sensitive to harmonic scarcity, as well as the rhythmic time-feel of music, the groove. In the Anthropocene, we may not be able to escape anthropogenic sound, or the effects of human activity on what we hear (and don’t hear), but we can nonetheless try to understand the dialectical processes at work, and use our listening practices to guide our praxis. SOUNDSCAPE ECOLOGY Soundscape ecology formulated its research program in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on rapidly evolving recording technologies, and seeking to examine and analyze the whole variety of sounds emanating from landscapes. The earliest examinations of soundscapes occurred in the context of urban planning, specifically considering the way urban soundscapes shaped people’s perception of space and their particular understanding of what it means to live in that environment.4 In the 1970s, other researchers started considering natural soundscapes in particular, and sought to understand the systemic connections between sound and natural processes.5 Bernie Krause would soon thereafter introduce the basic categories of sound that still characterize soundscape ecology today: geophony, biophony, and anthrophony.6 Geophony refers to all of the non-biological sounds of the earth, for example, the various sounds of water (rain, rivers, waves, ice, snow) and the various sounds of air (wind,

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thunder, lightning). Biophony refers to the sounds of non-human biological creatures such as birds, insects, mammals, and fish. And anthrophony refers to all the sounds created by humans, including speaking, crying, singing, other sounds of the body (breathing, heartbeat, footsteps), and all sounds produced by technology (transportation, mechanical sounds, phones, and computers). Soundscape ecology appreciates that sound is an important feature of the whole system of relations between humans and the natural world, and has been developing tools that help us understand that system and what our influence has been, and continues to be, on that system. Krause’s pioneering work in soundscape ecology also develops two central ideas, the ‘animal orchestra’ and the ‘acoustic niche hypothesis,’ both of which draw on his experience as a musician and composer.7 When he first started venturing out into undeveloped natural areas to record the sounds there, Kause explains that he started to hear the biophony as separable into ‘parts,’ as though each creature was playing a part in an orchestra, as though what he was hearing had been composed.8 From the idea of the animal orchestra, Krause was able to apply a basic insight from music composition, namely that there must be some sonic ‘space’ for each part in a composition to be heard, some ‘room’ for each part to utilize; if multiple parts were written in the exact same frequency range, the result would sound muddy and indistinct. The biophony sounds like a well-composed orchestral piece, because there’s just enough sonic space for each type of creature; they each have their own ‘acoustic niche.’9 Krause and others who work in soundscape ecology have helped us, as listeners, understand our situatedness. The large archive of sound recordings from around the world (including multiple recordings of the same places at different times), from rainforests to deserts, mountains, prairie, and oceans, have shown us that we are always listening to a soundscape, and that the soundscape is a dynamic ‘object.’10 When we compare a soundscape recording of a forest to that same soundscape ten or twenty years later, we will hear that they’re not identical, and in most cases, the differences will have causal roots in human activity. Krause has carried out this sort of comparison many times, and has found that roads, in particular, disrupt the lives of many creatures, particularly birds.11 To see how this is so, consider just how loud highways and traffic can be. Vehicles on roadways produce low rumbling frequencies (larger, heavier vehicles are louder), and the roadway itself is made of dense material, which transmits sound much faster than air, and sends this sound in all directions, as though the roadway was itself a giant passive subwoofer.12 These low frequencies have longer wavelengths than higher frequences, which means they have more carrying power across distances, and fill spaces up entirely. Like a foghorn that sends sound waves through objects

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and creates an omnidirectional, immersive and enveloping sound, trucks rumbling down a highway dominate the lower frequencies of the soundscape in a comprehensive way. When a person walks into a loud, crowded bar and tries to speak with the bartender or another patron, she will naturally speak much more loudly than usual, and in a truncated fashion, to overcome the noise of the room and be understood. Birds, it turns out, will do the same thing as they try to find their ‘acoustic niche’ while competing against anthopogenic sound; and finding this niche is a matter of survival, since they need to communicate with each other for a variety of essential purposes. Some birds are quite adaptable when confronted with overwhelming anthropogenic sound: they will adjust the frequency range of their song, or simplify, or shorten it, or just start singing earlier in the morning before the noise gets too extreme. For humans, it might be a stressful situation to be shouting at others in a loud bar, trying to be understood; for birds, the stakes are higher, and they experience stress in seeking a usable acoustic niche, because without it, they won’t survive.13 The recording archives of soundscape ecology, then, show us that anthropogenic sound has been disrupting bird populations (and lots of other non-human animal populations). When we compare recordings of the same area from different times, we can measure the impact of human activities: some birdsongs have changed, some have decreased in frequency, and some have disappeared entirely. I’m using soundscape ecology to emphasize our sonic situatedness, but there’s a temptation toward a certain kind of de-situatedness that is often associated with the recordings that soundscape ecologists obtain from wilderness areas. The temptation is to think that a given recording of a wilderness area captures something ‘pure,’ uncorrupted by human activity, or perhaps even, the ‘lost sound’ of the Holocene, or some such. The Wilderness Act of 1964 suggests this kind of purity in its definition of wilderness areas as “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain.”14 And just as musicians say, “the mic don’t lie,” one wants to think that the microphone in the wilderness is telling us something true about nature. But this would be de-situated in two ways: first, the place you’re listening to is itself dynamic and has a history, likely one that undermines any claim to purity, and second, the recording itself requires technology, and contributes to the listening practices of a particular culture and history. There’s no necessity that soundscape ecology fall prey to this temptation; in fact, it’s those same recording archives that should lead us away from such de-situated listening. But it’s also on this point that the project of understanding our sonic situatedness can most benefit from Sartrean phenomenology and social theory.

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ACOUSTIC SCARCITY AND THE SOUND OF A PLACE If one thinks of Sartre’s early works, it would seem that his world is primarily the social and human world, and may not have much to say about ecology, but in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he argues that scarcity lies beneath all human struggle, and that this scarcity is lodged in the natural world. The dialectial project then, in addition to understanding the social world in its own terms, is to understand how the human world and the natural world mutually determine each other. Sartrean dialectics and ecological thinking are a good fit: they both attempt to grasp a systems-level understanding of the whole, and they want to integrate many levels of analysis into a totalization in process. Sartre’s ‘progressive-regressive’ method takes each of these levels of analysis seriously, including the direct experience of individuals, captured by phenomenological description, as well as the various mediations of individuals, their culture and historical backgrounds, their shared social practices, and so on.15 I’ve mentioned how the ‘acoustic niche’ hypothesis addresses the non-human animal response to a kind of acoustic scarcity, and I want to expand this form of scarcity to capture a number of features of our lived experience as human listeners. Acoustic scarcity will not sound as dramatic as, say, habitat scarcity in the context of global warming, and nothing about human generated noise will seem as urgent as extreme surface temperatures, desertification, and flooding; but I will try to show that acoustic scarcity matters, and that we should want to be aware of its mechanisms and of our situatedness.16 One way that our world is lodged in the natural world is sonically: the audible range of human experience (roughly 20Hz–20kHz) is narrower than the full range of sound. Soundscape ecology, it’s worth pointing out, studies the entire recordable spectrum, with oscillograms (which measure amplitude changes in pressure) and spectrograms (which measure amplitude changes in frequency), along with exceedingly sensitive microphones to study sounds made by small creatures, or viruses, or even neurons. For the purposes of phenomenology, though, the sonic range of interest is the one determined by this fundamental kind of natural harmonic scarcity: humans cannot hear beyond a certain frequency range (though we might feel certain lower frequencies). But we still need an understanding of what is sounding at the edges of our possible experience, how ‘natural’ bandwidth scarcity mediates our experience, since Sartre would be very interested in those cases where human activities have, over time, altered the natural world in ways that come back to constrain and limit our freedom. An interesting and revealing case of how the social world can be decentered by the natural world is the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which also supplies a

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kind of ‘breakdown’ case for a phenomenology of listening. Breakdown cases are breeches in mundane experience that reveal something previously hidden, and the pandemic presented a breech that was unusually broad in scale and participation. In the early days of the pandemic (Spring 2020), as much of the world was coming to realize the magnitude of what was underway, major cities were locked down, most everyone was sheltering in place, air and shipping traffic came to a near standstill, and the world became much quieter.17 The overall volume of things had been turned down, lower than it had been in generations. People in cities, who had long been habituated to a high level of noise, ventured out and noticed birds singing, as though for the first time. People could hear previously unheard birdsong, now audible because they were not drowned out by anthropogenic sound; and people could hear more detail and nuance, even the flapping of birds’ wings as they flew overhead, the sound of air repeatedly pressed through feathers. The background hum of the human world was radically attenuated, acoustic scarcity was diminished, and we experienced what came to be called ‘the pandemic silence.’18 The ‘silence’ united everyone, as we all came to awareness of what we hadn’t been hearing for so long, as the absence became a presence. At that moment we could acquire a sense of loss, as we now heard what we had been covering up with our own noise. But of course, the ‘pandemic silence’ wasn’t really silence at all; the acoustic space that opened up was immediately filled with non-anthropogenic sounds. Some of those newly heard sounds were there all along, and some were from non-human animals stepping into a newly available acoustic niche. In any case, instead of a contrast between ‘silence’ and ‘noise,’ a better description of the soundscape will be one that tries to capture the effects of constructive and destructive interference. Constructive interference refers to a situation where some sounds make other sounds easier to hear, and destructive interference is where some sounds make other sounds more difficult to hear.19 The most familiar example of destructive interference is sound masking, such as when ‘white’ or ‘pink’ noise is used to cover up other sounds, so that people can sleep or work without disturbance. Sound masking works because we can’t fix our focal attention on anything in the masked span of frequencies, there’s just too much competition there, and sounds can’t be picked out or focused upon. For any soundscape, then, there will be both destructive and constructive interference at work. So, for example, the acoustic properties of a snow-covered landscape will both make some sounds more hearable and others less so, because some frequencies are being absorbed by the snow while others are reflected. And the type of snow, whether it’s heavy and wet or light and dry, will make a difference. The general point, though, is that the way acoustic scarcity shows up for us, will be, in part, a story of constructive and destructive interference.

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For any given soundscape, the interplay of constructive and destructive interference will give rise to the distinctive sound of a place, the sound of particular surfaces and shapes at particular distances from each other and from where one is listening. The sound of a space is enhanced when there’s more usable bandwidth; for example, during the pandemic ‘silence,’ people could hear things that were further away from them than before, which added space and depth to one’s listening. Being able to hear ‘space’ and ‘air,’ it turns out, is difficult to do with earbuds or closed-back headphones, which form a sealed and pressurized area through to the inner ear; soundscape ecologists typically prefer open-back headphones for listening to soundscapes, because they have this ‘open air’ sound, without pressure, without feeling unnaturally closed-in. Different rooms, of various dimensions, materials, and with various objects in them, will of course sound different. For example, a room with lots of limestone surfaces will constructively interfere with the human voice, since limetone absorbs low and muddy frequencies while reflecting and amplifying the frequencies of the human voice. These examples show that part of our sonic situatedness will be tied to the sound of a particular location: every listening is also a locating. LISTENING FOR COUNTERFINALITY In a short section of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, titled “Matter as Inverted Praxis,” Sartre considers farming practices in China, and the deforestation carried out by peasant farmers spanning across recent centuries.20 Sartre is looking at deforestation as an example of how we confront the unforeseen consequences of our own prior praxis: as we confront ‘nature,’ our practices are passively determined by this confrontation, but we hardly see the forces against us as a reflection of our own now inverted praxis. The problem is that the peasant farmers weren’t in a position to understand the consequences of what they were doing; their own experience, their praxis, was that they were expanding their workable acreage, being productive farmers, and deforestation was the obvious thing to do. The absence of trees and how that would increase the threat of floods was not part of their experience.21 Over time, these farmers became united in a form of culture, a distinctive set of practices developed around the river and flooding, where ‘nature’ was confronted as a hostile force that threatened to undermine their projects.22 In Sartre’s language, this is a story of counterfinality: we find ourselves joined with others in carrying out what seems to be obvious responses to obvious threats, but we fail to understand how we ourselves created the conditions of that threat.

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From what I’ve been considering so far, I want to consolidate a few points in Sartrean language. One basic way that our sonic situatedness will show up is in our locatedness in a soundscape, and this kind of situatedness seems capturable by the language of phenomenology (Sartre’s ‘regressive’ analysis). But our situatedness also shows up in our histories, our collective and habituated listening practices, our class background, and such (Sartre’s ‘progressive’ analysis). Since there is no such thing as a ‘general’ or ‘universal’ listening orientation (a ‘listen from nowhere’), we will always have particular listeners, each with their own experience, but each of whom participates in collective habits of listening with others. These collective habits must be made intelligible in the context of history, where at any given time, certain human activities seem like the obvious thing to do, where there’s a sense of fatality and inevitability to what people do. We need both levels of analysis if we are to make intelligible the dialectical process through which we change nature, and nature changes us. Our efforts to grasp what’s going on as a totality will never quite make it, precisely because we are situated—we simply can’t hear everything at once. But we can try to make things intelligible by relating them to praxis, and we can reach for a totalization of the processes at work. We will typically find a story of praxis and antipraxis: we act on matter by fabricating new technologies, we use these technologies in our everyday lives, where each of us is just trying to make her situation better, but where all of us collectively respond in serialized ways to the conditions we’ve blindly made for ourselves. Suppose we tried to follow the path of Leopold and Olson today, and headed for the Northwoods to escape anthropogenic sound and listen to nature, and suppose that we also tried, as comprehensively as possible, to account for our sonic situatedness. First of all, even the effort to escape anthropogenic sound is likely doomed. In Northern Minnesota today, one must travel deep into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) to get beyond the reach of road noise, and even then, there will still be commercial airplanes flying overhead. Anywhere near the edges of that designated wilderness area, one finds privately owned property, subject to ongoing development, with all of its related noise (one of the loudest noises in this regard is from drilling wells for private cabins, drilling through granite for days on end, and this is hearable for miles). And even though the number of visitors to the BWCA is highly regulated, paddlers still make a fair amount of noise (particularly novices who don’t realize how well human voices travel across flat water). I mentioned earlier the temptation to think that we can listen to a soundscape as something ‘pure’ and ‘wild,’ apart from human activity, but even a quiet spot in the BWCA will not be entirely separate from human praxis. When Olson paddled around the Northwoods looking for the perfect ‘listening point,’ he no doubt was making use of portages and campsites that had

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been used by fur traders for centuries, by Ojibwe and Dakota hunters and trappers, and by Europeans looking to bring beaver furs to markets overseas. For that matter, those same locations of human activity likely stretch back fourteen thousand years: humans were present soon after the Wisconsin glacier receded, and continuously thereafter. So when someone selects a nice location in the BWCA to sit and listen, they’re likely picking a location that’s accessible and appealing for humans, judged similarly by other humans who came before, and that will sound a particular way given that location. One’s locatedness in a soundscape, even a soundscape in a wilderness area, will not be free of the influence of human praxis. And what are we not hearing when we try to listen like Leopold and Olson? What absences are we unaware of? In this regard, I would suggest that when we go to the Northwoods and listen, we are hearing a whole history of deforestation and development in Minnesota. In the early 1800s, there were about thirty-one million acres of forest in Minnesota, but today there’s less than eighteen million acres.23 Whatever birds you might hear today are only those that survived this drastic reduction in forested areas, and that also survived the increasing anthropogenic noise from roads and development associated with this deforestation. Whatever sound the wind makes blowing through trees will be tuned in accordance with the mix of tree stands that remain after deforestation, and after the selective removal of white pines around the state (white pines are the majestic trees that Henry David Thoreau wrote so much about—“like great harps on which the wind makes music”).24 Even fire suppression policies in and around wilderness areas will change the composition of the forest and its sounds, as in the case of jack pines, which release seeds from their cones in the heat of fire. In Minnesota, both deforestation and wilderness preservation have led to counterfinality in the form of devasting fires. In the first case, logging practices in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries left lots of ‘slash’ (the cast-off debris, treetops, branches and such) in the deforested areas. As the slash dries out, it becomes fuel waiting for a fire, which is what happened with dramatic consequences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in the towns of Hinckley, Chisholm, Baudette, and Cloquet-Moose Lake).25 The responses to these fires shaped the cultural practices at the time, and had an analogous, though compressed, dynamic as Sartre saw in the history of Chinese farming. In the case of wilderness preservation, it was deliberate inaction that led to a form of counterfinality. In 1999, an exceedingly strong windstorm blew down around twenty-five million trees in the BWCA, and in accordance with the Wilderness Act, there could be no roads or motorized vehicles used to remove these blown down trees. Over time, these downed trees dried out and become fuel (worse than just slash, since here, whole trees

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become fuel) for one of the most devastating fires in Minnesota history, the Ham Lake fire of 2007. The Sartrean project, then, should help us hear counterfinality as counterfinality, assuming we’ve struggled to understand our sonic situatedness, including the way our listening orientations are connected to a history of human activities. So, for example, if we go to the Northwoods and listen to the evening sounds, will we hear wolves howling? Whether we hear a presense or an absence in this case will be the result of a long history of the relationship between humans and predators. In this regard, both Leopold and Olson changed their thinking as they came to understand the structure of ecosystems, abandoning the enthusiasm in their youth for hunting predators. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold describes how he and others killed a wolf, motivated by the common idea at the time that predators ought to be eradicated, but found that this was a turning point for him in realizing that wolves, and predators generally, have a function in an ecosystem that is necessary for its stability and integrity; he had learned to ‘think like a mountain.’26 Leopold realized what most Minnesotans today understand: without predators, the deer population will explode, to the point where there are not enough resources in the environment to support them.27 The now oversized herd will be subject to starvation and increasingly desperate efforts to find food, often consuming plants and food raised by and for humans. In Minnesota today, car-deer collisions are common, and there’s a set of practices built around avoiding these accidents that has developed over time. Leopold saw this coming, and the insight radicalized his entire approach to thinking about ecosystems and what he would come to call ‘the land ethic.’ He argued that over time, humans would expand their basic ethical perspective, moving from primarily thinking about relations between individual humans and groups of humans, to a new focus on the relations between humans and the natural environment; he insisted that this was evolutionarily possible, and ecologically necessary.28 RECIPROCAL AND ECOLOGICAL LISTENING So far in this chapter, I’ve been exploring a number of ways that our listening practices are situated, and I’ve been drawing on soundscape ecology and Sartre’s insights in the Critique to make these clear; I want now to turn to a kind of ‘reciprocal’ listening orientation that comes from improvised music. Recall that one of Krause’s main contributions to soundscape ecology is the notion of the ‘animal orchestra,’ and that he derives the ‘acoustic niche hypothesis’ from this idea. This has been a fecund idea that helps us listen to a natural soundscape as a composition, as music, and this orientation leads us to hear more of what’s going on. But the orchestra analogy suggests that

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there’s a composer at work, whose creativity occurred prior to the orchestral performance, in the composing of the score, rather than in what various creatures are up to in their environment. I would suggest that we think of a composition without a composer, more like what improvising jazz musicians create when they play. Improvising musicians operate on the same principles that composers do, leaving harmonic space for others, being careful to avoid overplaying, and understanding the complex interrelationships that lead to the final musical outcome. If we think of non-human creatures as improvisors (instead of as just playing their assigned parts), then we can hear their sounds as a mark of creativity and reciprocity. Improvising musicians also know about the importance of musical grooves, the rhythmic ‘time-feels’ that underlie melody and harmony. A groove consists of all the nuances in-between and around the primary beats of the music, the nuances that establish the ‘feel’ of the music, as ‘leaning back’ or ‘leaning-forward,’ as ‘shuffling’ or ‘stomping’ or ‘swinging.’29 Grooves condition the way we hear melodies and anticipate musical events, just as moods condition the way we experience things in our environment. If a groove is ‘lazy’ or ‘lethargic,’ sounds will show up in a particular way, notes will sit on the back of the beat, phrases will feel long, some musical nuances will be more hearable, some less.30 It’s fundamental for moods and grooves that their primary mediation is temporality, that they structure our experience of time in a particular way. Musical grooves direct our focal attention to particular features of sound: a dense and busy atonal groove will make a sparse major interval stand out, whereas that same major interval might struggle to be heard against a similarly sparse major-sounding groove. Listening from the point of view of a rhythm section, this example represents another type of acoustic scarcity (in addition to the bandwidth scarcity I mentioned earlier): rhythmic scarcity. Since all sounds have frequency profiles, one could argue that rhythmic scarcity is just a redescription of bandwidth scarcity, but I mean to draw attention to rhythmic density, how often sounds are occurring. Musical grooves work the same way soundscapes do, with constructive and destructive interference; harmonically and rhythmically dense grooves destructively interfere with other sounds, just as soundscapes with lots of anthopogenic noise destructively interfere with all creatures’ efforts to make themselves heard. I want to anticipate a common misunderstanding of grooves, the idea that participating in a groove reduces to mere entrainment, which seems less interesting than reciprocity. Entrainment is something found in nearly all animals and plants, wherever there is the synchronization of a biological process to an external rhythmic source. And we can distinguish between ‘symmetrical’ and ‘asymmetrical’ entrainment. In the first case, symmetrical entrainment, neither rhythmic source is fixed, and there are two systems or organisms

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simultaneously adjusting to each other, for example, crickets chirping or fireflies illuminating in synchrony. Asymmetrical entrainment, though, is where one rhythmic source is fixed, and the other systems or organisms are doing the adjusting. For example, circadian rhythms are cases of asymmetrical entrainment, where our bodily processes entrain to the external and fixed rhythm of our planet and the sun. We might add to these definitions self-entrainment, when two or more of the body’s own systems are entrained, say, one’s heartbeat and breathing, walking, running, blinking, and such. In the context of music, we have a ready example of asymmetrical entrainment: tapping one’s foot, or bobbing one’s head, in synchrony with some recorded music. And a good example of self-entrainment is kit drumming, since the drummer has to coordinate the movement of hands and feet so that everything is synchronous. When musicians play together and keep time together, they are symmetrically entraining with each other. But entraining with each other means only that they are locking in metronomically with the primary beat: this is necessary but not sufficient for grooving. Entrainment is seriality; grooving is the overcoming of seriality, as genuine reciprocity emerges. If soundscapes function like grooves, then there’s a Sartrean concern that we might become passively and serially entrained to it. Consider the typical urban soundscape, with its constant hum of motors, machines, engines, and appliances, punctuated intermittently by the sounds emanating from our computers, phones, and other devices. To what extent have our biological processes synchronized with this rhythm? The devices that dominate our soundscape are Sartre’s ‘vampire objects,’ those manufactured things that we all must be interested in, that direct our attention and impose obligations on us, that establish a rhythm that we must respond to.31 We have asymmetrically entrained with them: every time they make a sound, we take them out of our pockets, look at them, and become involved with the possibilities that then present themselves. We’ve entered a kind of ‘smart phone culture,’ which passively unites us as our projects intersect through layers of social media and networks, and we all participate symbiotically with these objects we hold in our hands and stare at.32 We even deepen the loop here, by using our phones to produce white noise so we can sleep or concentrate: a device to cover up the noise from all those other devices.33 And the allure is that it all seems like human communication and interaction, it seems like we’re overcoming seriality, but perhaps it’s just what Sartre sees in the radio broadcast, a ‘lateral totalization of seriality.’34 All of us participate in cellphone and social media culture, but our involvement can easily become unidirectional, disempowering, and ironically, isolating.35 Reciprocal listening is something that improvising musicians practice, and good musicians are always good listeners. Good musicians will not play too loudly, or busily, and they will always be attentive to the groove that is

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underway. They will be sensitive to allowing other players to find an acoustic niche. They will know how they have to play to be heard, how to get out of the way of others, what things they can only play at low volumes, things that might not be heard, and how their voice fits into an ensemble of voices. They will know that the attack of a note usually has greater destructive interference than the body and decay of that note. Musicians are interested in having ‘good time,’ and they typically don’t want to be heard as rushing or dragging the tempo—in this sense symmetrical entrainment is important, and it should happen as automatically as possible. So, for example, at the start of the tune, there might be some push or pull on the tempo, for just a second or two, but good musicians will typically have no problem finding a tempo, locking it in, and sticking with it for the duration of the tune. But whereas symmetrical entrainment to the primary beat and tempo is automatic, finding a good groove is not automatic at all. Two systems entrained to each other could have the same tempo but be out of phase, just like musicians can be locked into a tempo but still fail to groove. They are just a serial gathering instead of a group. In general, improvising with others will not result in good music if one player is trying to dominate the others; domination is a refusal to listen to others, a refusal to enter into genuine reciprocity.36 Reciprocal listening can become ecological listening if we can think of ourselves as members of the animal orchestra, as opposed to standing outside of it in some way, and hear reciprocity and creativity in the non-human animal world. It’s not so difficult to see ourselves this way, since even a simple hike in the woods can bring one into an improvisation with any number of creatures, if one is willing to leave enough room for them in the conversation. Whereas Leopold argued that a ‘land ethic’ is one that assigns intrinsic value to ecosystems, that grants moral standing to the whole biotic community, I’m suggesting that the way into this project is to enter into a reciprocal relationship with the natural world, namely by hearing the music we produce along with non-human animal improvisors. This, to me, seems like a more praxis-oriented, Sartrean approach: rather than just thinking about how we might assign values to things, we’re actively projecting our values through our activity. The idea of reciprocity between the human and non-human world might seem like a reach beyond what Sartre’s texts support, but I think we need to listen like this if we’re to understand our sonic situatedness.37 If humanity acts like a bad musician, playing too loudly, taking up all the space, ignoring others, or generally dominating the scene, then we’ll never be able to hear what’s going on, and we certainly won’t be making good music.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Coffin, Barbara, Executive Producer. Minnesota: A History of the Land. University of Minnesota and Twin Cities Public Television, 2000. Flato, Ira. “Listening to Wild Soundscapes.” Talk of the Nation/Science Friday, National Public Radio, April 22, 2011, https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/2011​/04​/22​/135634388​ /listening​-to​-wild​-soundscapes. Horowitz, Seth S. The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Krause, Bernie. “Bioacoustics, Habitat Ambience in Ecological Balance,” Whole Earth Review, 57, December 1987. Krause, Bernie. “The Niche Hypothesis: A virtual symphony of animal sounds, the origins of musical expression and the health of habitats,” The Soundscape Newsletter 06, June 1993. Krause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra. Back Bay Books, Reprint Ed., 2013. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. McKibben, Bill. “Life on a Shrinking Planet,” New Yorker, Vol. 94, Issue 38 (11/26/2018), pp. 46–55. Martin, Michel. “Recordings Might Sound a Silent Alarm About California Drought.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, November 29, 2015, https:​//​ www​.npr​.org​/2015​/11​/29​/457795116​/recordings​-might​-sound​-a​-silent​-alarm​-about​ -california​-drought. Matarrese, Craig. “Hegel, Musical Subjectivity, and Jazz,” in Creolizing Hegel, ed. Michael Monohan. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. McBride, William. Sartre’s Political Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. Olson, Sigurd. Listening Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Olson, Sigurd. The Singing Wilderness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pijanowski, Bryan C., and Villanueva-Rivera, Dumyahn, Farina, Krause, Napoletano, Gage, and Pieretti. “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape.” Bioscience (March 2011), Vol. 61, No. 3: pp. 203–16. Pijanowski, Bryan C., and Stuart Gage, Almo Farina, and Bernie Krause. “What is soundscape ecology? An introduction and overview of an emerging new science,” Landscape Ecology (November 2011). Raz, Guy. “How Does Listening to Nature Teach Us About Changing Habitats?” TED Radio Hour, National Public Radio, September 27, 2013, https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/2013​ /09​/27​/216100454​/how​-does​-listening​-to​-nature​-teach​-us​-about​-changing​-habitats.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol.1 Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. New York: Vintage, 1968. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993. Southworth, Michael. “The Sonic Environment of Cities,” Environment and Behavior, June 1, 1969. Spiegel, Alix. “The Last Sound.” Invisibilia, Season 6, Episode 6. National Public Radio, March 8, 2020, https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/programs​/invisibilia​/831286311​/the​ -last​-sound. Varner, Gary. “Can Animal Rights Activists Be Environmentalists” in Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism, ed. Don Marietta, Jr., and Lester Embree (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1995). von Bubnoff, Andreas. The Pandemic Silence Project (www​.pandemicsilence​.org) Whitehead, John. Director/writer, Minnesota: A History of the Land. Produced by the University of Minnesota, College of Natural Resources and Twin Cities Public Television, 1999.

NOTES 1. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1968); Sigurd Olson, Listening Point (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Sigurd Olson, The Singing Wilderness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 2. See Don Ihde, Listening and Voice, 42. 3. See Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Destiny Books, 1993), 208–09. 4. See Michael Southworth, “The Sonic Environment of Cities,” Environment and Behavior, June 1, 1969. 5. See Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Destiny Books, 1993). 6. See Bernie Krause, “Bioacoustics, Habitat Ambience in Ecological Balance,” Whole Earth Review, 57. 7. Raz, Guy. “How Does Listening to Nature Teach Us About Changing Habitats?” TED Radio Hour, National Public Radio, September 27, 2013, www​.npr​.org. 8. See Alix Spiegel, “The Last Sound,” (Invisibilia, Season 6, Episode 6. National Public Radio, March 8, 2020, www​.npr​.org). 9. Bernie Krause, “The Niche Hypothesis: A Virtual Symphony of Animal Sounds, the Origins of Musical Expression and the Health of Habitats,” The Soundscape Newsletter, No. 6, June 1993. 10. Bernie Krause’s own archive project, Wild Sanctuary, is at www​.wildsanctuary​ .com. 11. Martin, Michel. “Recordings Might Sound a Silent Alarm About California Drought.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, November 29, 2015,

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12. See Horowitz, Seth S. The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 40. A ‘passive’ subwoofer is a structure that amplifies sound without electricity. 13. For a related and interesting case regarding frogs and airplanes, see Horowitz, 43. 14. Wilderness Act of 1964 Public Law 88–577, 88th Congress, 1964, Section 2(c). 15. See Sartre’s Search for a Method (Vintage, 1968). 16. See Bill McKibben, “Life on a Shrinking Planet,” New Yorker, Vol. 94, Issue 38 (11/26/2018), 46–55. 17. See Douglas Quan, “Listen Up: In these disquieting times COVID-19 times, hushed cities are making a loud impression on our ears,” The Star (Vancouver), April 18th, 2020. 18. See Andreas von Bubnoff, The Pandemic Silence Project (www​.pandemicsilence​ .org). 19. See Horowitz, Seth S. The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 31. 20. See Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, pp. 161–65; Joseph Catalano (A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason) and William McBride (Sartre’s Political Theory) have helpful comments on this section, but the most extensive treatment of this section of CDR is in Matthew Ally’s Ecology and Existence (2017), 391–455. 21. See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 162. 22. See Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, 122. 23. See Barbara Coffin, Executive Producer, Minnesota: A History of the Land (produced by the University of Minnesota and Twin Cities Public Television, 2000). 24. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, September 16th 1857, in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. 10, August 1857–June 1858 (Sportsman Vintage Press, 2016). 25. See the Minnesota Historical Society’s Forest History Center resources (www​ .mnhs​.org). 26. Aldo Leopold, “Sketches Here and There,” in A Sand County Almanac, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1968). 27. See Gary Varner, “Can Animal Rights Activists Be Environmentalists” in Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism, ed. Don Marietta, Jr., and Lester Embree (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1995). 28. See Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” from A Sand County Almanac, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1968). 29. See Tiger Roholt, Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 30. For more on this analysis of melody’s relation to groove, in the context of Hegel’s philosophy, see Matarrese, “Hegel, Musical Subjectivity, and Jazz,” in Creolizing Hegel, ed. Michael Monohan (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 31. See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 161. 32. See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 169. 33. See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 165.

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34. See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 275. 35. See Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 271, 276. 36. See Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 12 (1992), and Andrew Light, “Ecological Restoration and the Culture of Nature: A Pragmatic Perspective,” in Restoring Nature, eds. Paul Gobster and R. Bruce Hull (Island Press, Washington DC, 2000); see also Ally, Ecology and Existence, 420–30. 37. For a full development of Sartre’s thought in this direction, see Ally’s Ecology and Existence.

Chapter Three

The Environmental Gaze Re-Reading Sartre Through Guido Van Helten’s “No Exit” Murals Joe Balay‌‌

INTRODUCTION Walking down the Grandagarður boulevard into the Grandi harbor area of Reykjavik, Iceland, today one encounters a strange sight. Overlooking the North Atlantic Sea, the industrial sheet metal buildings, the coffee shops and moored fishing boats, sit the massive black-and-white No Exit murals on the Loftkastalinn building. Gazing out from across the different sides of the building at the city’s edge, the murals seem to ask a simple question: What

Figure 3.1. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2014. Photograph taken by Melanie Waters, 2018.

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does it mean to look? They ask this question, however, in a quite complex way. Garcin looks at Estelle. Estelle looks back at Garcin. Inez gazes at Estelle. Estelle looks off canvas at the gas station across the street, the construction site in progress, the spectators standing below.1 Commissioned in 2013 as part of Iceland’s burgeoning international street art scene, the murals were painted by the Australian artist, Guido van Helten, based on photographs of a 1961 performance of Sartre’s play at the Tjarnarbíó theater.2 Van Helten has painted many murals around the world, each with different subject matter, most large in scale, and almost always portraits of human figures and faces.3 In a recent interview he explains that when he commences a new piece he begins with the eyes because they constitute the real power of the artwork.4 And it is true; when you survey his work you find that the eyes have an aesthetic control, centering the image and appealing outward, pulling the world into its orbit.5 Elsewhere, however, Sartre reminds us that it is not the physical eyes that characterize the phenomenological event of looking (le regard) with which his philosophy and play are concerned.6 As he observes, “it is never when eyes are looking at you that you can find them beautiful or ugly, that you can remark on their color. The Other’s look hides his eyes; he seems to go in front of them.”7 This is because, for Sartre, looking is more than the physiological power of vision; it is an intersubjective event of recognition concerning the self and Other. One will recall that in No Exit the three main characters lack eyelids and threaten to gaze at one another even where they are not immediately in view. They watch with their thoughts. They regard with their words. They witness each other in their very “pore[s].”8 All of this climbs to a strange climax, however, when one turns around now and realizes that the murals also look out at the North Atlantic Sea. Suddenly we encounter an artwork looking at nature, a mysterious intersection separated only by the narrowest remainder of a road, a few spectators, and the history of philosophy. The strangeness of this moment extends, in particular, from the prevailing view that Sartre’s thinking of the gaze, like western philosophy more generally, is anthropocentric. As is well known, Sartre associated his existentialism with a kind of humanism,9 and he went so far as to define himself as an “anti-Nature philosopher.”10 Accordingly, if the phenomenological event of looking is a relational event that takes place only between persons, then in what sense can we say that the No Exit murals look at the sea? Departing from this aporia in van Helten’s engagement with Sartre’s play here, the following study aims to re-examine the ambiguous place of nature and the environment in Sartre’s thinking of the gaze.11 Prima facie it will be seen that, consistent with the western tradition, the Sartrean gaze appears to exclude nature as an intersubjective event reserved for human beings. Turning

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to the special place of the body in this experience, however, I will argue that a closer reading of Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism—especially Being and Nothingness and No Exit—finds nature at the center of the gaze as the problematic hiatus between our bodies, our place on Earth, and our free consciousness. I conclude then by offering a potential reconciliation of this problem found in Sartre’s thinking of the dialectic power of the artwork.12 NATURE The three figures of Estelle, Garcin, and Inez sit at the center of van Helten’s murals attracting the spectator’s gaze through the dynamic interplay of their own. These black and white images resemble an old Hollywood tabloid cover. In both their size and beauty, they seem to perform a romanticization, almost a celebration of the human. Importantly, however, this humanism is attested to as much by what is not found here as what is here. Over against the

Figure 3.2. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2014. Photograph taken by Brian Hummer, 2018.

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figures at the murals’ fore, the background holds only an empty, white space. There is no sign of nature—of plant, animal, or landscape—to distract from this entirely human world. It is, of course, hard to imagine a play more removed from nature than No Exit. Like Descartes’s famous narrator in the Meditations on First Philosophy, this fictional interrogation of the human gaze appears to go out of its way to withdraw from the outside world. The setting is an interior room in a placeless place with a non-functional door and no windows. The room, we are told, is furnished sparingly in Second Empire furniture, a single bust, and a paper knife with no books or correspondence to open. The characters are presented postmortem. In the few moments where natural phenomena are referenced, they are coded negatively. The lake, for example, is the place where Estelle has drowned her child. Estelle’s beauty, it is said, would be wasted on the desert, and the wind threatens to disturb her funeral back on Earth. Inez describes herself as a dead twig ready to be burned. And beginning to grasp this nightmare, Garcin observes that the Others are, “soft and slimy [. . .] [l]ike an octopus.”13 In many ways, it appears that the existential hell of No Exit is intended to look at the human condition divorced as much from the natural as the supernatural. But just what does it mean to look? In his historical survey of the visual dimension, Martin Jay suggests that it is important to recognize how Sartre’s understanding of the gaze is situated within a longstanding western tradition of ocularcentric anthropocentrism.14 Whereas in the epic and tragic Greek periods idein, idea, and eidos largely meant the shape, face, or look of something, beginning with Plato’s introduction of the doctrine of the forms the sensible look became subordinated to an idealized noetic prototype. As Hans Jonas points out, however, the philosophical transformation of sight that takes place here entails not just the change of one sense, but a complete synesthetic transformation serving to distinguish the human being from the rest of nature: “There is a mental side to the highest performance of the tactile sense, or rather to the use which is made of its information, that transcends all mere sentience, and it is this mental use which brings touch within the dimension of the achievements of sight.”15 As is well known, this theoretical determination of vision finds a special culmination in the self-representational look of the cartesian cogito over against which the natural world becomes measured as a system of automata. More contemporary thinkers, however, have questioned this privilege of theoretical vision, from Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s suspicion of the pensée de survol, or god’s-eye view,16 to Zizek’s and Foucault’s exposure of the role of the gaze in the construction of power.17 Sartre’s own understanding of le regard belongs to this more recent critical interrogation. This begins with his deep suspicion of the theoretical ego in “The Transcendence of the

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Ego.”18 This is because, like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre believes that, for the most part, the human does not gaze at the world like a spectacle, but navigates the world in a pre-reflective, instrumental immersion with things. Only derivatively does an ego appear via a reflective attitude and across our interactions with others. Thus, in No Exit, Inez boasts insincerely, “I’m always conscious of myself,” to which Estelle retorts, “Ah yes, [. . .] [b]ut everything that goes on in one’s head is so vague, isn’t it?”19 As Derrida reminds us, however, despite this critical revision, Sartre continues to belong to a long history in which the non-human Other is excluded from this gaze.20 For Sartre, the exclusion of nature from such looking is justified first and foremost on ontological grounds. This begins with his distinction between the regions of the in-itself (en-soi) and for-itself (pour-soi).21 The former, which he equates in Being and Nothingness with a kind of brute matter, is characterized by a full positivity. It is said to be self-identical, meaningless, and devoid of differentiation. “Coiled” in this region, “like a worm,” being-for-itself introduces differentiation, order, and meaning to the in-itself through the nihilation of freedom.22 He reserves the latter mode of being for human consciousness, and he associates the non-conscious, bio-chemicalphysical world (e.g., of soil, plant, and animal) with in-itself being.23 Drawing on this fundamental distinction, Sartre argues that the ability to gaze in the phenomenological sense, as opposed to the mere stimulus-response function of physiological vision, involves a relation of desire characteristic only of human consciousness. In an important passage from Being and Nothingness, in which he considers the example of thirst, he helps clarify this distinction as it pertains to the distinction between the natural organism and the human being: Thirst as an organic phenomenon, as a “physiological” need of water, does not exist. An organism deprived of water presents certain positive phenomena: for example, a certain coagulating thickening of the blood, which provokes in turn certain other phenomena. The ensemble is a positive state of the organism which refers only to itself, exactly as the thickening of a solution from which the water has evaporated can not be considered by itself as the solution’s desire of water. [. . .] If desire is to be able to be desire to itself it must necessarily be itself transcendence; that is, it must by nature be an escape from itself toward the desired object. In other words, it must be a lack—but not an object-lack, a lack undergone, created by the surpassing which it is not; it must be its own lack of ------. Desire is a lack of being. It is haunted in its inmost being by the being of which it is desire. Thus it bears witness to the existence of lack in the being of human reality.24

On Sartre’s reading then, non-conscious natural beings cannot experience desire in the form of a lack or a want because, as the pure positivity of

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self-identity, they fail to exhibit the requisite differentiation.25 Rather, the phenomenon ordinarily associated with such desire is marked in the non-human organism only by its physical side effects (for example, changes in blood pressure and cellular developments). Any genuinely self-reflexive relation to these events is denied. By contrast, the nihilating freedom of the human being constitutes just the kind of absence that gives rise to an interrogative and desiring attitude. It is this attitude, however, that is necessary on Sartre’s view for a genuine experience of looking. To look is to look for something, against which always sits the possibility of absence, as illustrated for example in his famous example of Pierre (not) in the café. These observations lead to the conclusion that while looking is not first and foremost a theoretical activity, neither is it a physical one. This is illustrated rather macabrely in the description of the characters’ lid-less eyeballs in No Exit, an ocular deviation that forces them to remain permanently awake and engaged in the visual field. As the play unfolds, however, we witness the characters move from the willful blindness of bad faith to an increasing self-awareness, a change that would be impossible if looking was tied to the permanent condition of the physical organ. Elsewhere, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre explains the proper relation between the physical eye and the phenomenological look more precisely: Every look directed toward me is manifested in connection with the appearance of a sensible form in our perceptive field, but contrary to what might be expected, it is not connected with any determined form. Of course what most often manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. [. . .] [However,] the eye is not at first apprehended as a sensible organ of vision but as the support for the look. They never refer therefore to the actual eye of the watcher hidden behind the curtain, behind a window in the farmhouse. In themselves they are already eyes. [. . .] [M]y apprehension of a look turned toward me appears on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which “look at me.”26

As this passage helps make clear, looking concerns an event of nihilation performed by the empty transparency of consciousness (its lack) that supervenes the sensible occasion of such looking (e.g., two physical eyeballs). On its own, the bio-physical eyeball cannot look. Sartre nuances this claim, however, when he observes elsewhere that it is possible to infer the look through nature. He notes, for example, that, “the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches [. . .].”27 But this only happens where one takes this noise to indicate the concealed presence of another foritself, such as a person hiding in the woods. In the end, however, it does not matter if the noise originates from a person or a bird. This is because, “the bush [and natural objects like it] [. . .] are not the look; they only represent

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the eye.”28 And as we know, the eye is only the sensible analog for the onto-existential look that requires a (self)conscious relation with it. While these reflections offer a strong ontological justification for Sartre’s exclusion of nature from the gaze, a still more provocative challenge rests in the fundamental premise of No Exit itself: Looking concerns an intersubjective event of recognition between persons. Garcin, Inez, and Estelle never look alone. Trapped in a room together for eternity, they are a microcosm of the human condition that always looks from its place in-the-world-for-andwith-Others. This is symbolized by the persistent image of the mirror in the play. Estelle observes, “[w]hen I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist.”29 This is because, for Sartre, prior to the event of the look one exists in a non-egological, pre-reflective, state of instrumental absorption in the world. In the encounter with the Other, however, one spontaneously comes to see one’s self as a self in-the-world. This simultaneously shows then the shortcoming of the mirror example. For the looking glass can only provide a limited reflection of the self to itself from a given perspective. A more genuine ontological mirroring requires another free for-itself being. Drawing on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, however, this mirroring is deeply agonistic for Sartre, culminating in the play’s infamous tagline, “Hell is—other people!”30 It is this ongoing attempt to turn the Other into an expression of one’s own free being, while remaining in need of their free validation, that the play follows in detail. We watch as the characters sit on their respective sofas, go to their respective corners, dissemble their respective stories, and hide in their own minds. But they always fail. In the end, this is because they each require the reflection of one another like Estelle needs Inez’s glossy pupils to see her makeup. To look, for Sartre, is an agonistically social affair. In this way, Sartre’s understanding of the gaze shows itself to be a critical repetition of the anthropocentric ocularcentrism that Jay highlights above. As we have seen, this privilege of the human is traditionally established by its ability to look through nature to the noetic eide underlying it in a way that mere sensory vision cannot accomplish. While Sartre agrees with this priority of human consciousness, however, he revises this legacy in two important ways. First, he replaces the positive realization of theoretical insight with the nihilating de-realization of the existential look. Second, by making this gaze a dynamic of social recognition between persons he not only denies nature the status of ocular agent but also of object. That is, in the most proper sense, nature neither looks, nor serves as the object of the human look. In this way, we come back to our initial observations concerning No Exit and the exclusion of nature, but with a caveat. It no longer seems quite right to say here that the Sartrean look is as removed from the natural as the supernatural, so much as the look appears to be something extra-natural. That is,

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if the foregoing observations are correct, looking on Sartre’s account is by its very (non)essence something ontologically beyond nature, something that, while supervening the bio-physical-chemical realm, emerges only at the level of intersubjective human consciousness. BODY Sitting down by the water, van Helten’s murals continue to keep watch, ashen and strange, unfazed by these philosophical reflections. Garcin looks at Estelle. Estelle looks at Garcin. Inez looks at Estelle. Estelle looks away. In our first encounter with the murals, we showed how their romantic beauty seemed to confirm the privilege of the human in Sartre’s thinking of the gaze through a parallel exclusion of nature in their background. Lingering with the murals further now, however, one begins to have a different impression. Indeed, the longer one looks at the murals the more one comes to find something almost grotesque about these figures in their giganticism, their bloodless tonality, and their cephalic isolation. It is as if they are heads without bodies. This raises an important question, however, about our discussion of nature up to this point, namely the question of the relationship between nature and the human body.

Figure 3.3. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland. 2014. Photograph taken by Julia Garrison, 2018.

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In his commentary on Being and Nothingness, Joseph Catalano reminds us that there is a common mistake in reading Sartre too quickly and piecemeal, either focusing on selected works or sections of selected works. Sartre’s project, however, is a synthetic one, increasingly bringing the pieces of his disparate but not separate analyses together into the fullness of their interrelation. Keeping an eye to this fuller picture, one will note that the important phenomenon of the look depicted in No Exit shows up in Part Three of Being and Nothingness. In the prior two parts of his treatise, Sartre considers the regions of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, and their initial interaction. The third part, in which the look is examined in detail, is intended to introduce the third region of being-for-Others to this ontology, and thereby provide a pivotal synthesis. Up until this moment, Sartre explains that while the human is marked in a special way by for-itself being it is actually a strange interrelation of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. This is because while the human always has the free capacity to transcend itself toward new meaning, thrown into existence without a say or explanation the human condition is also one of facticity. This facticity haunts the human as its past at the same time that consciousness introduces the groundless for-itself freedom of its present and future, defining it as, “what it is not and not being what it is.”31 In the third part of Being and Nothingness, however, Sartre explains that this facticity haunts human being in yet another way, namely in the awareness engendered by the experience of the look of the Other. Thus in Being and Nothingness, the jealous voyeur stands at the keyhole alone with his jealousy, unreflective of his self or situation. In No Exit, the characters describe their lives before death as unreflective of anything or anyone but their own projects. Then suddenly something happens. The voyeur hears a noise in the hallway. The characters are locked in a room together. They are not alone. Of course, these figures have always lived in a world with other humans. Sartre’s austere description of a pre-personal, transcendental consciousness is both rigorous and yet abstract until it is situated in the social orientation of human reality. In this moment, however, the ambivalence of that free-floating state of pre-personal consciousness is lost. Consciousness becomes a my-self at the same time that it becomes a potential object for another subject in the experience of being-for-Others. But how does this happen? Sartre tells us now that it happens through the body. More precisely, he observes that whereas our previous relation to our body was one of “neglect,” like the mute origin of something “passed by in silence,” the spontaneous event of the look makes us shamefully aware of our bodies as potential objects for another free for-itself subject.32 Suddenly, Sartre observes, “I have an outside, I have a nature.”33 What are we to make of this surprising appearance of nature in the midst of the exclusively human gaze? Sartre explains that, in a sense, it has

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always been here, vis-à-vis the body, but that initially it is unthematized for pre-reflective consciousness, a relation he calls the body-for-itself. It requires an encounter with the Other to inaugurate the recognition of this embodiment precisely because the body is that which, while being isomorphic with it, (my) consciousness cannot fully take in. I see (my) hands, I see (my) feet, but I cannot see (my) back. It is only through an encounter with the Other that my body is first exteriorized as a nature for me. In this shift, I come to realize that I have a bodily being-in-the-midst-of-the-world, and that I overlap the natural world precisely at the site of my natural body. Of course, Sartre believes that we are always already interrelated with the being-in-itself of nature by the very structure of intentionality, that is, by the very structure of the for-itself to be directed outward. But the radical change that takes place in the event of the look must be emphasized here.34 Sartre contends that whereas our previous relation to our body is something overlooked, the event of the gaze modifies this relation into a thematic hiatus between consciousness, body, and Other. In the event of the gaze, I discover that, “my body’s depth of being is for me this perpetual ‘outside’ of my most intimate ‘inside.’”35 Thus while our interrelation with nature vis-à-vis the body does not initially appear to be a problem at the level of pre-personal consciousness, it becomes an emergent, concrete, and significant problem in the full, triadic ontology of human reality. As we know, this is not a happy event for Sartre. He notes that the typical response to the discovery of the body is a feeling of shame. Shame, he tells us, is, “the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have ‘fallen’ into the world in the midst of things.”36 This feeling of shame extends then from an identification with the in-itself associated with this embodiment. For this reason, the experience of the gaze is also tied to the important phenomenon of bad faith. As Sartre observes, human reality is comprised of its suspension across the for-itself and in-itself, and, “these two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination.”37 In bad faith, however, one, “does not wish to either coordinate them or to surmount them in a synthesis,” but flees toward one or the other alone.38 Interestingly, while Sartre’s notion of bad faith is commonly understood in terms of this fall of human freedom into the various in-itself projections of biology, culture, or the Other, it will be remembered that the problem goes both ways. As Thomas Flynn points out, this is because there is also bad faith where we threaten to, “volatize our facticity into pure transcendence (possibility),” making our for-itself being effectively the only mode of being and distorting our relation with the in-itself.39 In this way, the evasion of the complex interrelation of consciousness with the nature of the body in the wider, social world leads one into the trap of what Lewis Gordon elsewhere calls, embodied bad faith.40

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Taken together, these discoveries begin to show No Exit in a new light. Whereas the play is typically interpreted as a play about the gaze of intersubjectivity, seen in this manner it also becomes a play about embodiment, nature, and the alienation we experience in the disruption of these dimensions of our being. This is witnessed by the fact that the characters are not only transcendentally incapable of facing their freedom, they are also physically impotent. Postmortem, eyelid-less, blood-less, stripped of the body’s transcendental efficacy, they become both literal and figurative corpses. As Mark Drwiega explains, “for Sartre a corpse is a form of body-for-other, but it is the body which has lost transcendence—it means that it is no longer in a dynamic situation. It has become body-in-itself, a corpse, and from now on it remains in relation of pure externality in reference to other objects.”41 In the inability to reconcile free consciousness with their embodied place in the natural and social world, Inez, Estelle, and Garcin cease to be living human beings. These inter-natural and inter-personal relations are deeply intertwined for Sartre. In his discussion of Concrete Relations with Others in Being and Nothingness, he explores these tensions in sexual relations like masochism and sadism. This is illustrated in No Exit, in particular, by the interaction between Estelle and Garcin as the former tries to capture Garcin with her body, while the latter tries to incarnate validation from her through the sexual act. Garcin observes, “So I attract you, little girl? It seems you were making eyes at me? [. . .] Why not? We might, anyhow, be natural [. . .]. And presently we shall be naked as—as newborn babies.”42 This physical nudity is juxtaposed several scenes later with the nakedness of honesty and good faith. Thus we hear Garcin implore, “Look at me, we’re naked, naked right through, and I can see into your heart.”43 The failure to really accomplish this moral nudity of authenticity, however, ultimately contributes to the alienated perversion of its physical state. Thus, in response to his demand for pity and trust, Estelle says, “I’m giving you my mouth, my arms, my whole body—and everything could be so simple.”44 But it is not enough. Ultimately, they are unable to consummate the act. This is not simply because of the presence of another person in the room however. As we have learned, it is because what is really called for in response to the shameful event of the gaze is a richer coordination of natural embodiment and free consciousness that both characters lack, a relation that Sartre terms, my body for myself. To be alienated from this relationship on either side is to become something not quite human, yet not quite natural. Following this line of analysis then, it seems that we must revise our opening claim once more. It turns out that it is only where we sought nature as a strictly non-human relation that it is invisible in the gaze. If, however, it is the discovery of our own natural body that first gives rise to the experience of self-consciousness in the gaze, then it turns out that we can no longer

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maintain nature’s complete absence. Revealed as the forgotten mark of nature in the event of the look, the body serves as a special hinge between our being-for-itself and being-in-itself. And yet, as we have also seen, in this event our naïve, pre-personal absorption in the world is interrupted by the painful development of consciousness into self-consciousness, a finding that we tend to flee in embodied bad faith. ENVIRONMENT Returning to van Helten’s murals again, we glimpse a certain embarrassment in the gaze that seems to have gone undetected before. Not simply because we have, up until this point, overlooked the place of nature in embodiment, but because with this occlusion we may also miss the gaze’s relationship with the environment. Previously, we drew attention to the blank background of the murals against which the human figures appear strangely removed from all context. Looking more closely now, however, one observes that in the years since their installation the murals have slowly taken on the green patina of the sea’s algae; they have been graffitied in dialogue with other artists; they have borne witness to the changing landscape and city surrounding them. In this way, we are reminded that artworks, like bodies, are not temporally or spatially isolated entities. They both undergo and help enact space and time. They interact with their surroundings and history. Accordingly, we must now

Figure 3.4. Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2014. Photograph taken by Joe Balay, 2018.

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ask how this transformed relationship with one’s nature found in the encounter with one’s body bears on the wider relationship between the human and non-human environment. In the fourth part of Being and Nothingness, Sartre gives us an important insight into this question. He explains that the freedom of transcendence is always realized in its situation. In Existentialism is a Humanism, however, Sartre observes that, “what we call ‘situation’ is precisely the combination of the very physical and psychoanalytical conditions which, in a given era, accurately define a set.”45 This situatedness includes such dimensions as one’s relation to their personal and shared past, their relation to their death, and their relation to their culture, place, and environment.46 Together, these dimensions of situatedness help constitute the contextual frame within which transcendent freedom can thematize and perform its projects.47 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre begins with the situation of place. Insofar as human existence is always a thrown, embodied existence one is always emplaced. Sartre traces this all the way back to the original placing of birth before which one cannot go any further. Indeed, due to the very nature of human finitude, “it is not possible for me not to have a place; otherwise, my relation to the world would be a state of survey, and the world would no longer be manifested to me in any way at all.”48 This emplacement, however, cannot be separated from its environment. On the one hand, this is because, “my place is defined by the spatial order and by the particular nature of the ‘thises’ which are revealed to me on the ground of the world. It is naturally the spot in which I ‘live’ (my ‘country’ with its sun, its climate, its resources, its hydrographic and orographic configuration).”49 On the other hand, this is because an environment is, “made up of the instrumental-things which surround me, including their peculiar coefficients of adversity and utility.”50 While these observations are important in their own right, what becomes especially significant in all this is Sartre’s accompanying observation that it is the body that first opens up our interrelation with an environment.51 He explains that this is because, “the body as a point of view on the world” gives us this emplacement and—when coupled with the transcendence of consciousness—inaugurates the ability to ecstatically stand out into an environment.52 This means then that the body not only serves as a nature—our own—but as the hinge that connects us to the rest of the world. That is, the discovery of my nature vis-à-vis my body in the event of the gaze simultaneously becomes the discovery that my freedom is situated within the broader natural and artifactual environment that helps make freedom’s projects possible. If the ordinary response to the discovery of our natural bodies is one of shame and bad faith, however, then we might not be surprised to find a similar response toward this environmental discovery, not simply an embodied bad faith but an environmental bad faith.53 Elsewhere, Sartre points to this

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problem in his analyses of racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. In these contexts, Sartre emphasizes that the sense of alienation felt before the body in the event of the look is not simply one of shame before its objectification, but of a body become out-of-place with its environment. In Anti-Semite and Jew, for example, he argues that whereas for the Aryan the environment and body are often viewed as united, the Jew experiences an alienation from both, first in a sense of shame before its lower functions and revealing physical features, and second in exile from the homeland of Israel.54 Similarly, in Black Orpheus Sartre suggests that the effect of the colonial gaze on the black subject is to engender a disdain not only for their bodies, but for the natural land that these bodies are said to share in common. For this reason, Sartre refers to the experience of the colonized, black individual as: a double exile: the exile of his body [taken from Africa] offers a magnificent image of the exile of the heart. [. . .] The ancestral bodily exile represents the other exile: the black soul is an Africa from which the Negro, in the midst of the cold buildings of white culture and technics, is exiled.55

This becomes, in turn, the catalyst for a double violence, visited first on the colonized subject’s body and land by the colonial Other, and, again, by the colonized subject on its own body and land as an internalized response to this alienation. These reflections suggest that we might read No Exit as a play not only about the alienation of natural bodies but, by extension, the environmental world in which embodied consciousness is situated. In the preceding we have already seen evidence of the characters’ broken relationship with their bodies and the bodies surrounding them (e.g., Estelle’s infanticide, Garcin’s violence against his wife, Inez’s sadism, etc.). As we now know, however, this violence cannot be separated from its social, historical, and natural contexts. This is echoed by the latent colonial and patriarchal settings of the play. While Estelle and Inez both come from the European center of Paris, Garcin comes from Brazil, a former colony of European (primarily Portuguese, but briefly French) subjugation. On the one hand then, we find a certain continental superiority in Estelle’s and Inez’s persistent attempts to control Garcin’s body in the landscape of the room (telling him what he can wear, where he can sit, if he can have sex, etc.). On the other hand, we find that Estelle is defined by a kind of reductionist self-identification with the male’s view of her body represented by Garcin’s own gaze, while Inez’s persistent disdain for the latter drives her ongoing attempt to force Others to see the world through her eyes. Drawing these reflections together, we arrive once more at a revision of our initial thesis. Contrary to the suspicion that nature is occluded from the gaze, it turns out that it is precisely in the gaze that one experiences the

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concretion of the situated being of consciousness in its embodied, social, and natural environment. Accordingly, rather than romanticize the human world, No Exit seems to help demonstrate how the failure to own this ontological interrelation leads to the bad faith relations of an alienated relationship with the Earth itself. This is perhaps most clearly signaled by a powerful and under-considered litany running throughout the play. As their situation becomes increasingly evident to them, each of the characters lament that, “the earth has left me,”56 “nothing on earth belongs to you any more,”57 “the curtain’s down, nothing of me is left on earth.”58 To understand the Earth here, however, is to understand the important interconnection of consciousness, embodiment, and environment in Sartre’s ontology. If the body opens consciousness onto the physiological and psychoanalytical environment, then we might say that the Earth functions like the unifying context of this transcendent freedom. In this sense, Earth is not to be understood, first and foremost, as a distinct physical body—for example, as one planet among others—but more akin to what Husserl elsewhere calls the “original ark” of the life-world.59 In turn, the progressive alienation from this situatedness commenced in the feeling of shame before the body leads to a parallel loss of the situatedness of freedom. This points then to the true meaning of the placeless-ness of Sartrean hell in No Exit—a room in a sea of rooms in a maze of corridors without entrance or exit. Hell is nothing less than the broken emplacement of an embodied consciousness and its world. CONCLUSION Returning to van Helten’s murals one last time here, we find that we have arrived at a complete revision of our initial assumption that nature is excluded from le regard in Sartre’s thinking. Lingering with the different dimensions of the murals’ gaze we have moved from a position of romantic humanism, to contested intersubjectivity, to bodily dysmorphia, to environmental displacement. Finally, following Estelle’s long look off canvas, out to sea, and back again to her drama with Garcin and Estelle, it has been found that it is precisely through the gaze that human being first thematically discovers its own interrelation with the wider social and natural world—a finding that undergirds the synthesis of Sartre’s ontology. As we have witnessed, this is a finding from which the human largely flees, first in an alienated relation with their own nature that we have called, embodied bad faith, and again in an estrangement from the Earth that we have termed, environmental bad faith. Significantly, however, the play presents this alienation as something that is left undetermined. This means that our estrangement from embodiment and environment is not a necessary

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Figure 3.5. Photo on the left: Reykjavik harbor, taken by Joe Balay, 2017. Photo on the right: Guido van Helten, No Exit Murals, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2014, taken by Melanie Waters, 2018.

conclusion in Sartre’s ontology, but something that may be won and lost. This is illustrated by the fact that at the beginning of the play the characters still have the ability to see and hear what is happening on Earth. It is only as the plot progresses, and as their alienation in the face of the look grows more complete, that the characters ultimately lose all touch with this connection, a finding signaled by their ultimate inability to walk through the open door at the end of the play. In following the example of an artwork to help explore this question, however, we may encounter a provisional response to this bad faith of the gaze. As is well known, Sartre viewed art, along with philosophy, as the privileged mode of exploration for these questions. In the essays comprising What is Literature? however, Sartre offers an important remark about the power of art to address this particular problem. He observes that in the gaze of art, as opposed to ordinary experience, there is not an experience of objectification that gives rise to shame, but a space of reconciliation that helps surpass it. This is because, for Sartre, in the artist’s free appeal to the validation of their reader/spectator the freedom of humanity is united in its common dominion over the world. This remark suggests then that art helps overcome social objectification while reinforcing a fundamental humanism. In Black Orpheus, however, an essay in which Sartre offers his most concrete examination of the racial, colonial, and environmental implications of the gaze, Sartre draws a strikingly different conclusion. Specifically, he observes that where one has only, “a technical rapport with Nature [. . .] Nature dies,” but, in turn, so too does the one who loses Nature. By contrast, in the critical epoche found in

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poetry’s “refusal to be homo faber,” one glimpses the entanglement between “man-nature,” and gives them both “life again.”60 Let us conclude then with a provocation. In the foregoing, we have seen that in its pre-personal, pre-reflective state human reality is absorbed in an instrumental domination of the world. In turn, it is in the event of the gaze that we first glimpse our relation to nature vis-a-vis our embodiment, a finding from which we tend to flee because of the threat of objectification. If in the free gaze of art, however, consciousness finally glimpses this inter-human-natural relation without fear of alienation, then might not this offer the possibility for a new attunement, one not of domination but cooperation, not of instrumentalism but ecology?61 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2017. Beauvoir, Simone de. Force of Circumstance. Great Britain: A Deutsch, 1965. Beauvoir, Simone de. Letters to Sartre. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011. Catalano, Joseph. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. I. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and Sovereign. Vol. 2. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Drwiega, Mark. “Dimensions of Human Corporeity in the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre.” Phaenomenologische Forschungen, no. ½ (2001): 143–61. Flynn, Thomas. Sartre: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Gordon, Lewis R. “Sartre and Fanon on Embodied Bad Faith,” in Sartre on the Body. Edited by Katherine J. Morris. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Helten, Guido van. “Listamaðurinn Guido Van Helten skreytir Reykjavík,” interview by Lara Hanna Einarsdottir, December 29, 2013, YouTube, Video, https:​//​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?time​_continue​=105​&v​=​_2HE​-3WVvjE. Helten, Guido van. “Untitled Interview,” interview by Joe Balay, August 22, 2019, Audio, unpublished. Husserl, Edmund. “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth Does Not Move,” in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Edited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

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Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Contemporary French Thought. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993. Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Langer, Monica. “Sartre in the Company of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Duden,” in Sartre on the Body. Edited by Katherine J. Morris. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Black Orpheus,” in What is Literature? and Other Essays. Edited by Steven Ungar. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot. Vol. 1. Translated by Carol Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. La Salle: Open Court, 1981. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 2013. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “No Exit,” in No Exit and Three Other Plays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Transcendence of the Ego. Translated by Andrew Brown. Oxford: Routledge, 2004. Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do—Enjoyment as Political Factor. New York: Verso, 2008.

NOTES 1. Sartre and Beauvoir visited Iceland in 1951. However, this is a decade before the theatrical performance of the play in Iceland and they would not have seen its production. See Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), 480fn487. 2. The play was performed by the Gríman Theater group. The photographs were taken by Andrés Kolbeinsson. These photographs are housed at the Reykjavik Photography Museum. 3. One can find an excellent survey of van Helten’s work at his website: https:​//​ www​.guidovanhelten​.com 4. Guido van Helten, “Listamaðurinn Guido Van Helten skreytir Reykjavík,” interview by Lara Hanna Einarsdottir, December 29, 2013, YouTube, Video, https:​//​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?time​_continue​=105​&v​=​_2HE​-3WVvjE

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5. Regarding the No Exit murals, in particular, van Helten reports that he chose the photographs as the source of his murals because he found in them a certain emotional power in the eyes, face, and look of the characters. (Guido van Helten, “Untitled Interview,” interview by Joe Balay, August 22, 2019, Audio, unpublished. 6. Sartre’s French term, le regard, is typically translated as the look or gaze, and is distinct from the physiological sense of sight or vision. To indicate this Sartrean sense of le regard here I will italicize the terms look or gaze and their derivatives where appropriate. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 346–47. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit,” in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 22. 9. See for example: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Sartre’s association with humanism is heavily qualified. He is critical of most traditional forms of humanism insofar as they involve an unfounded celebration of the human according to some essence (e.g., rationality, made in God’s image, etc.). By contrast, his own form of humanism surrounds the individual’s free ability to pursue their own meaningful projects in life. Beauvoir also reminds us that the original title for Sartre’s famous lecture was written in the interrogative mode: “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” (Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance [Great Britain: A Deutsch, 1965], 38). 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle: Open Court, 1981), 29. Note that in the fuller passage, Sartre qualifies this claim as follows: “I am an anti-Nature philosopher, but only in certain respects.” 11. The term nature is of course a contested one. The present examination is restricted to Sartre’s early existential phenomenology. In this period, Sartre primarily equates “nature” (nature in the French) with the non-conscious, bio-chemical-physical world (e.g., of soil, plant, animal) distinct from 1. human consciousness, and 2. artifacts. Like artifacts, Sartre attributes nature the quality of in-itself being in contrast with the free for-itself consciousness of human being. Sartre also emphasizes that our understanding of nature is always shaped by our practical and theoretical interventions in the world (e.g. by the discourses of Biology, Botany, Chemistry, etc.). As we shall see in his thinking of the gaze, however, nature is also associated with a certain quality of “exteriority,” which the human body shares with non-human nature. 12. While the critical literature has traditionally treated Sartre as an unrepentant anthropocentrist, there is a growing interest in the ecological and environmental possibilities of his work as evidenced by the contributions in this volume. See also Matthew Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2017). 13. Sartre, No Exit, 41. 14. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Contemporary French Thought (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993). 15. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 141.

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16. This is sometimes translated as “high altitude thought” or “high altitude hovering.” In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty accuses Sartre of this perspective. The present reading provides a certain qualified defense of Sartre against this criticism. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998], 13 and 69). 17. See for example: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), and; Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do—Enjoyment as Political Factor (New York: Verso, 2008). 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Andrew Brown (Oxford: Routledge, 2004). 19. Sartre, No Exit, 19. 20. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). While Derrida does not name Sartre explicitly, it is clear that he counts the phenomenological-existential tradition in this critique, and his own attempt to think the gaze of his cat is a direct challenge to the persistent exclusion of the animal from this event. 21. As will be made clear, Sartre’s ontology is not dualistic but also includes the third category of being-for-others, which helps resituate these first two regions in a more comprehensive perspective. 22. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 56. 23. While Sartre maintains a certain agnosticism about the capacity of animals to manifest free, for-itself consciousness, in his early existentialism he largely draws the inductive inference that non-human nature does not seem to exhibit this trait. Consider the following passage from Existentialism is a Humanism: “But that kind of humanism is absurd, for only a dog or a horse would be in a position to form an overall judgment about man and declare that he is amazing, which animals scarcely seem likely to do—at least, as far as I know” (52). In his later work—for example, in his description of a dog’s boredom in The Family Idiot—Sartre appears more ambivalent on this claim (Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot, Vol. 1, trans. Carol Cosman [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 137–38). 24. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 137. As Joseph Catalano explains elsewhere, Sartre’s position is not to deny sentience to non-human organisms. It is rather that, “there is no reason why a living organism must have senses that can be turned on its own body. This is purely the contingent way in which consciousness exists its facticity” (Joseph Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 179). 25. Sartre drives this point home in another important passage from Being and Nothingness: “it is the upsurge of the for-itself in the world which by the same stroke causes the world to exist as the totality of things and causes senses to exist as the objective mode in which the qualities of things are presented” (421). 26. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 346. 27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

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28. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 29. Sartre, No Exit, 19. 30. Sartre, No Exit, 45. 31. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 28. 32. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 434. 33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 352. 34. As Sartre puts it: “essential modifications appear in my structure [. . .]” (Being and Nothingness, 349). 35. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 461. 36. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 384. 37. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 98. 38. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 39. Thomas Flynn, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 186. 40. While he explores this question in the context of questions of race and colonialism, I believe the phrase is quite suitable here as well. Lewis R. Gordon, “Sartre and Fanon on Embodied Bad Faith,” in Sartre on the Body, ed. Katherine J. Morris (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 41. Mark Drwiega, “Dimensions of Human Corporeity in the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre,” Phaenomenologische Forschungen, no. ½ (2001): 158. 42. Sartre, No Exit, 23. 43. Sartre, No Exit, 30. 44. Sartre, No Exit, 36. 45. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 70. 46. This is not an exhaustive list. In Anti-Semite and Jew, for example, Sartre explicitly adds others such as biology and economics. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1970). 47. One should not interpret this situation as the limits of a pre-determined reality so much as what Sartre calls the co-efficient of adversity within which freedom and its context are mutually bound. 48. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 629. 49. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 50. Ibid., 647. 51. As Sartre puts it: “there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom” (Being and Nothingness, 629). 52. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 626. 53. Monica Langer has drawn a similar conclusion in her study of Sartre’s thinking of the body. See Monica Langer, “Sartre in the Company of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Duden,” in Sartre on the Body, ed. Katherine J. Morris (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 200. 54. Sartre states, for example: “We know that the sole ethnic characteristics of the Jews are physical. The anti-Semite seized upon this fact and has transformed it into a myth: he pretends to be able to detect his enemy at one glance. The reaction of certain Israelites, therefore, is to deny the body that betrays them. [. . .] [I]n any case, they do not feel toward their bodies that complacency, that tranquil sentiment of property

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which characterizes most ‘Aryans.’ For these latter the body is a fruit of the French soil; they possess it by that same profound and magical participation which assures them the enjoyment of their land and their culture” (Anti-Semite and Jew, 118–21). 55. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in What is Literature? and Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 298–99. 56. Sartre, No Exit, 33. 57. Sartre, No Exit, 32. 58. Sartre, No Exit, 43. 59. See Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth Does Not Move,” in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 60. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 315. These remarks must be situated within Sartre’s well-known dichotomy between prose and poetry. The former is associated with instrumentalism, and a political discourse that bends language to its pragmatic goals. The latter is associated with the idiomatic quality of other forms of art and their disruption of the relationship between sign and meaning. While Sartre valorizes the former in the earlier essays comprising What is Literature? in Black Orpheus one finds a recovery of the poetic mode in its ability to disrupt instrumentalism and to reveal the fundamental entanglement of freedom, Other, and nature at the heart of life. I offer a fuller exploration of this development in my forthcoming book on this topic. 61. As of the completion of this chapter, the No Exit murals were damaged by renovations to the building by a hotel developer. In response to popular demand, however, van Helten has been invited to restore the murals. I would like to thank Guido van Helten for his interview and support, Christopher Newport University for their generous Faculty Research Grant, the Reykjavik Photography Museum for their assistance, Jillian Balay, Matthew Ally, and Damon Boria for their helpful comments on the present chapter, and Brig George, Kip Redick, and my study abroad students for sharing the spirit of dialogue with me in Iceland.

PART III

Ethics

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Chapter Four

Three Sartrean Motivations for Environmentalism Kiki Berk and Joshua Tepley‌‌

Does the early Sartre have an environmental ethics?1 This seems like an odd question with a straightforward answer. The focus of Being and Nothingness is human reality, and Sartre says virtually nothing in this work about plants and animals, let alone pollution and climate change. Furthermore, Being and Nothingness is a work in descriptive ontology, not normative ethics. For a discussion of the latter, Sartre asks readers to wait for a sequel,2 which was never published in his lifetime.3 In light of these facts, Sartre’s early philosophy seems like an odd place to look for an environmental ethics. He simply doesn’t have one, and anyone who goes looking for one is bound for failure and disappointment. We agree that the early Sartre doesn’t have an explicit ethics of the environment. But we disagree that we shouldn’t go looking for one. After all, even if he doesn’t offer us an environmental ethics, Satre might give us the resources to develop one. And this possibility is appealing for two reasons. First, although more and more people are taking climate change and other environmental issues seriously, these problems remain. We simply haven’t done enough as a species to save our planet, and those of us who are deeply concerned about this can use all the help we can get. Second, by taking Sartre’s philosophy in a new direction, we are very likely to discover in it something new and interesting. Sartre’s philosophy is a treasure trove, and probing it from a new angle—such as that of environmental ethics—is almost certain to repay us with some novel philosophical ideas.4 In this chapter, we argue that Sartre’s early philosophy gives us the resources to develop three motivations for environmentalism—the view that we have a moral obligation to be active in protecting the environment. 71

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We call these “motivations” in order to cover both first-order reasons (i.e., reasons to be active in protecting the environment) and second-order reasons (i.e., reasons to act on these first-order reasons). To keep things simple, we will focus our discussion on one specific environmental problem: climate change.5 We argue that Sartre gives us the resources to develop two first-order reasons to mitigate climate change and one second-order reason to act on these first-order reasons. These Sartrean motivations apply mutatis mutandis to other environmental problems—including air pollution, water pollution, and deforestation. Thus, although the early Sartre lacks an explicit ethics of the environment, his philosophy is still relevant for, and helpful to, the cause of environmentalism. Our primary aim in this essay is to identify and explain three Sartrean motivations for environmentalism. But we also have a secondary aim: to show that these motivations are defensible. Toward this end, we will address and rebut a number of objections to these motivations. We cannot address every possible objection, and we will not consider—let alone defend—any arguments for these motivations. But we do hope to show that these three motivations are worth taking seriously and cannot be dismissed out of hand. ETHICS The first Sartrean motivation for environmentalism is based on Sartre’s ethics. This might sound odd, as Sartre is often said not to have an ethics in his early period, or else, if he does, to have a crude ethics of subjectivism, according to which values are chosen by the individual and have no objective standard. We disagree with both of these claims. Following Thomas Anderson and David Detmer, we think that Sartre does have an ethics in his early period, and it’s not a simple version of subjectivism.6 As we understand him, Sartre has an ethics according to which freedom is the highest value. To say that freedom is the “highest” (or “primary” or “ultimate”) value is to say that either (i) freedom is the only thing of intrinsic value, and all other things of value are instrumentally valuable insofar as they promote freedom; or (ii) freedom is just one of multiple things that have intrinsic value, but it is substantially more intrinsically valuable than any of these other things. That Sartre values freedom in his early period is hard to dispute. While Being and Nothingness is a work in ontology, not ethics, its pages are filled with implicit suggestions that freedom is a good thing, that freedom ought to be promoted, and that people ought to express their own freedom properly and authentically. And this promotion of freedom as the highest value is even more explicit in Sartre’s famous lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” and in his posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics.

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Clearly the early Sartre values freedom. And yet, saying that freedom is a value—or even the highest value—is not yet a normative theory. The most straightforward way of turning this idea into such a theory is to conjoin it with consequentialism, according to which an action is morally right if, and only if, it maximizes good consequences. The result is an ethics according to which we ought, morally, to promote freedom (both our own and other people’s) whenever and wherever we can, and as much as we can. But even granting Sartre’s promotion of freedom as the highest value, consequentialism is not the only direction that one could take in developing a Sartrean ethics. In his lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre uses language that is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative.7 Perhaps Sartre thinks about freedom in deontological terms, holding that freedom is a right of every individual and that we can do whatever we please so long as we don’t violate this right in others. Or perhaps Sartre is best understood in the tradition of Aristotle, as promoting, not a rule-based ethics, but a virtue-based ethics, according to which individuals, for the sake of their own well-being, ought to cultivate in themselves—and in others—the virtue of autonomy (or authenticity). And these might not be our only options. Granting that freedom is the primary value leaves the door open for a variety of normative theories. Rather than decide which (if any) of these normative theories is Sartre’s, we shall proceed hereafter as though Sartre holds a consequentialist ethics according to which we ought, morally, to promote freedom as much as we can. We do this for two reasons. First, which version of Sartrean ethics we adopt is irrelevant, so long as the theory claims that we ought to promote freedom, both in ourselves and in others. As far as we can tell, all versions of Sartrean ethics (other than the crude subjectivism mentioned above) have this in common.8 Second, consequentialism is the simplest and most straightforward way of turning Sartre’s promotion of freedom into a normative theory. Since having a specific Sartrean ethics in mind will be useful in what follows, and which one we pick doesn’t really matter, this one will serve our purposes well. FREEDOM Before we can explain how Sartre’s ethics of freedom implies that we should be trying to mitigate climate change, we need to understand how we can increase or improve a person’s freedom in the first place. After all, it is Sartre who infamously says that our freedom is “total” and “absolute,” and that “the slave in chains is as free as his master.”9 If what Sartre says about freedom is true, then increasing the freedom of other people is impossible. Each of us is

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already as free as that person can possibly be, and there is no point, and no need, in increasing anyone’s freedom further. This objection to a Sartrean ethics of freedom is familiar, and it is based on a clear misunderstanding. According to the standard interpretation, made popular by David Detmer, Sartre has two concepts of freedom: ontological and practical.10 Ontological freedom is the ability to do otherwise—or, more precisely, the ability to try to do otherwise. This kind of freedom is “absolute,” according to Sartre, in the sense that (1) we have it all moments of our conscious existence, and (2) the range of things we can try to do is much greater than we normally think (practically infinite over the course of a lifetime). The other kind of freedom—practical freedom—is simply the ability to accomplish what ones tries to do. Both kinds of freedom can be increased. Ontological freedom, despite being “absolute,” can be increased in its range—that is, in the number of things that an individual can try to do. This number can be increased through better education and by having one’s imagination expanded. This idea is well illustrated by Sartre’s example of a worker who is unable to revolt against his poor living conditions because he cannot imagine them being otherwise.11 Once he can imagine them being otherwise, he is ontologically free to do something about them—such as unionizing or going on strike. Ontological freedom can also be increased by our becoming aware that we have such freedom in the first place. According to Sartre, we often can do otherwise but don’t realize it, not because we can’t imagine things being otherwise, but because we hide this ability from ourselves through bad faith. We often believe that we are compelled to do what we do because of our personalities, our past histories, our places in society, or some other such factors. By realizing that these elements of our “facticity” do not place absolute limits on our freedom, we empower ourselves to do things that we could already do but never believed we could do. The other kind of freedom—practical freedom—can also be increased. Practical freedom is the ability to accomplish what ones tries to do. The ability to accomplish one’s goals can be increased in a number of ways: by having more money, a higher social status, and better healthcare; and by living in a society with better laws, a better criminal justice system, and a better social safety net. The more of these one has, the more one can accomplish if one tries. A second way in which practical freedom can be increased is by lowering opportunity costs—to borrow a term from mainstream economics. Perhaps I can escape from a chain by cutting off my own hand, but this comes at very high price. While I am both ontologically and practically free to do otherwise than stay chained, I would be more free—in the practical sense—if I were not chained up in the first place. This is an extreme example, but the same

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idea applies to more mundane cases. A cashier is free to take a trip to Japan if she took out a personal loan to cover her travel expenses, but afterwards she would have to pay back the loan. A factory worker is free to go on strike in an effort to get safer working conditions, but he could lose his job as a result. And a lawyer is free to quit her job and start another career, but then she would have to go back to school and work her way back up from the bottom. In short, being free to do something does not imply that doing so has no downsides. By lowering the opportunity costs of various alternative possibilities, the extent of a person’s freedom can be increased. In sum, there are at least four ways in which we can promote freedom: (1) by increasing the range of things that people can imagine doing; (2) by making people aware of their own freedom (ability to do otherwise); (3) by increasing the range of things that people can accomplish if they try to do them; and (4) by decreasing the opportunity costs involved in pursuing alternative possibilities. CLIMATE CHANGE How does any of this apply to the environment? In particular, how does it apply to climate change? Global warming has a number of consequences, including rising ocean levels and extreme weather (e.g., hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, flooding, heatwaves, etc.). These, in turn, have other consequences, such as more destructive forest fires, diminished agricultural production, increased ocean acidification, water shortages, and plant and animal extinctions—to name just a few. Such changes to the environment greatly diminish the range of things that people can do: one cannot live in a coastal area once it has been flooded, and one cannot farm if crops will no longer grow. The biggest impact of climate change on human freedom, however, is the dramatic increase in opportunity costs that it brings. Perhaps one can still be a farmer in a hundred years, but it will take much more effort to be as productive as someone farming today. Moreover, the cost of doing virtually anything will be greater in a hundred years, since people will have to spend much of their time dealing with the consequences of climate change by moving inland, building dikes, weatherizing buildings, rebuilding after hurricanes, relocating after forest fires, etc. And many of these costs are being paid already, since climate change is well underway. Climate change, left unchecked, will cause a dramatic restriction in people’s freedom. Indeed, it is already doing so. If Sartre is right, and we have a moral obligation to protect and promote people’s freedom, whenever and wherever it occurs, then we have a moral obligation to mitigate climate change. The more we mitigate climate change, the more we promote the

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freedom of others; the less we mitigate it, the more we limit the freedom of others. This is the first Sartrean motivation for environmentalism. OBJECTIONS Before moving on to discuss Sartre’s second motivation, let us address some objections to the first. As stated in the introduction, we wish in this essay not only to identify and explain three Sartrean motivations for environmentalism but also to argue that they can withstand some basic criticisms. First, one might object that this Sartrean motivation does not qualify as an environmental ethics because it assigns no intrinsic value to the environment. Our obligation to take care of the environment, according to this motivation, derives what force it has from the effects that our treatment of the environment has on the freedom of human beings. In other words, if environmental destruction had no negative impact on the freedom of human beings, then we would have no moral obligation to prevent it. We grant that this Sartrean motivation does not assign intrinsic value to anything besides the freedom of human beings. But it does not follow that this motivation fails to give us an environmental ethics. It simply falls into the category of “anthropocentric” environmental ethics, according to which our obligations to the environment derive from our obligations to other human beings. One may not like such theories, but they do count as environmental ethics nevertheless.12 Second, one might object that this motivation to mitigate climate change is inconsistent: the reason to curb climate change is to protect people’s freedom, but the cost of doing so is my own freedom. According to Sartre, all freedom is important, including my own. So, I shouldn’t have to sacrifice my own freedom for the sake of another’s. Such an obligation would be, if not self-contradictory, then at least self-stultifying. There are two problems with this objection. First, if we attribute to Sartre a version of consequentialism according to which freedom is the primary intrinsic value, then it makes perfect sense to have an obligation to sacrifice one’s own freedom for the sake of another’s—if the loss of the former is substantially outweighed by the gain of the latter. This is almost certainly the case with climate change: small measures taken now will prevent much larger measures from having to be taken in the future. Second, while discharging our moral obligation to future generations might cause us some inconvenience, this is hardly a restriction on our freedom if we engage in such activities voluntarily. According to Sartre, we have a moral obligation to promote the freedom of other people, but this doesn’t mean that we are in any way forced or compelled to do this. We can always shirk our moral obligation. Remember:

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freedom is the ability to do otherwise (ontological freedom) and the ability to accomplish one’s goals (practical freedom). If I choose to be moral of my own free will, then this choice doesn’t take away my freedom in either sense. Third, one might object that we cannot have any moral obligations to future generations because such people do not yet exist. One cannot have moral obligations toward non-existing people any more than one can be friends or lovers with them. Again, we have two replies. First, this is an interesting philosophical problem, but it is a problem for most (if not all) ethical theories. Sartre’s ethics is not unique in this regard, and whatever replies other ethical theories offer to this problem can be offered on behalf of Sartre’s theory, too. Second, climate change is already having negative effects on people’s freedom (just read the latest news on the forest fires in California, or the seemingly endless number of hurricanes battering the southeastern United States). Even if we have no obligations toward future generations (which, for the record, we think we do), we still have obligations to people who are alive now—including young children, for whom the problems that already exist are going to get much worse over the course of their lifetimes if we don’t do something about climate change. So this objection, like the previous two, is a non-starter.13 BEING-FOR-OTHERS We move now to the second Sartrean motivation for environmentalism. In order to understand this motivation, we must take a brief detour through Sartre’s ontology. According to the standard interpretation, Sartre thinks that reality divides neatly into two categories: being-for-itself (l’être-pour-soi) and being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi). This distinction maps roughly onto the distinction between consciousness, which is distinctive of human reality, and everything else— namely, non-conscious being(s). This gloss is fine as far as it goes, but it misses two things. First, it overlooks what Heidegger calls the “ontological difference”—the difference between being and beings (entities). To be fair, Sartre himself ignores this difference, making no terminological distinction between being-for-itself as a kind of entity (conscious individuals) and being-for-itself as a mode of being (roughly, the defining features of such individuals)—and mutatis mutandis for being-in-itself. Fortunately, there is an easy fix. We can use “being-for-itself” and “being-in-itself” as count nouns (either plural or using a definite article) when we refer to entities of a certain kind, and we can use these terms as mass nouns (without a plural and no definite article) when we refer to modes of being. Thus, you and I are beings-for-ourselves (count noun), and our shared

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mode of being is being-for-itself (mass noun). Likewise, the tree outside our window is a being-in-itself (count noun), and its mode of being is being-initself (mass noun). The second thing that this gloss of Sartre’s ontology overlooks is a major development in the second half of Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, beings-for-themselves have a second kind of being, in addition to being-for-itself—namely, being-for-others (l’être-pour-autrui). The classic illustration of this in Being and Nothingness is that of a voyeur caught in the act of watching a couple making love.14 This person, whose consciousness is completely absorbed in what he is observing, is suddenly made aware of himself as an object for another. In other words, the voyeur becomes acutely aware of his being-for-others. According to Sartre, all beings-for-themselves have this mode of being, even when they are not explicitly aware of it (as the voyeur is after being caught in the act). This mode of being depends upon other people and how they perceive us, and as a result we have limited control over it. What we do and how we present ourselves can have some influence on what other people think of us, but other people, as beings-for-themselves, have ultimate control over their own thoughts and perceptions. They, not us, are the ultimate judges of what our being-for-others contains. This third mode of being raises a number of questions. How can a single entity have two modes of being? Is our being-for-others particularized for every other person so that each of us has a being-for-person-X, a being-for-person-Y, and a being-for-person-Z? Or does each of us have one single being-for-others, which is somehow constituted by how everyone else, taken together as a group, is aware of us? If the latter, then what do we do about the fact that people often have different and competing perceptions of each other? These are tough questions. Fortunately, we need not answer them in order to understand Sartre’s basic point: each of us has, in addition to a mode of being defined by freedom, consciousness, and subjectivity (beingfor-itself), a second mode of being, which is fixed by other people and determined by how they perceive us (being-for-others). LEGACY The relevance of being-for-others for environmentalism lies in the fact that, according to Sartre, our being-for-others survives after we die. Since our being-for-others is constituted by other people and what they think of us, this mode of being exists for as long as other people remember us. And since this is a mode of our being, it follows that we (entities) must also exist—at least if being is always the being of an entity, as Sartre (following Heidegger) seems to think. True, after death we will no longer have being-for-ourselves—we

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will no longer be conscious, for example. But this doesn’t mean that we won’t still exist. This notion—that we survive death literally through the minds of other people—is not as bizarre as it initially sounds. Nobody thinks that we exist only when we are conscious. Deep comas and dreamless sleeping are two clear examples of the contrary. Once one recognizes this fact, the possibility of literally surviving death without being aware of it is not out of the question. And even if Sartre is wrong about this, and we don’t literally survive death in virtue of being remembered by other people, surely what Sartre means by “being-for-others”—the way in which other people perceive us—is a real phenomenon that does outlast our lifetimes. We might call this, borrowing a term from ordinary language, a person’s “legacy.” Even if leaving a legacy is not the same thing as literally surviving the death of our bodies, it is something that survives our deaths, and it is something about which many of us care a great deal. Whether we adopt the strict version (we literally survive death in virtue of leaving a legacy) or the loose one (we don’t literally survive death, but we do leave a legacy), the implication is the same: we care about what others will think of us after we are dead. Either we care because we think that we will still exist, and what we are like will be wholly determined by what other people think of us (our being-for-others), or simply because we want to be remembered in a positive light (leave a positive legacy). The application of this to environmentalism should now be obvious: if we do nothing (or not enough) to combat climate change, and the Earth becomes inhospitable to life as we know it, as most scientists predict, then we will be known forever as one of the generations that allowed this to happen. As Greta Thunberg so forcefully put it in her 2019 address to the United Nations: “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.” The second Sartrean motivation for environmentalism is simply this: we ought to do whatever we can to mitigate climate change in order to protect our own legacies after we die. Unlike the first, this motivation is not a moral one. We are under no moral obligation to care about what kind of legacy we leave behind. It is, rather, a self-interested motivation. And note, once again, that this motivation exists even if we don’t buy the strict version of Sartre’s theory of being-for-others, according to which we literally survive death in virtue of leaving a legacy. Even if this position is wrong, and death is literally the end of our existence as entities, we still have a self-interested reason to mitigate climate change by virtue of the fact that we will leave legacies for future generations.

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MORE OBJECTIONS This Sartrean motivation, like the first, faces a number of objections. First, one might point out an apparent tension between Sartre’s concept of being-for-others and the second Sartrean motivation for environmentalism. According to Sartre, we have limited control over our being-for-others, since how other people perceive us is largely up to them, not us. But at the same time, our motivation to do something about climate change is predicated upon the idea that we have control over how others perceive us—in particular, how they will perceive us after we die. So, which is it: do we have control over our being-for-others or don’t we? According to Sartre, we don’t. But in order for this motivation for environmentalism to work, we must. This objection is based on a false dichotomy: either we have total control over our being-for-others or else we have no control over it. The truth is somewhere in between these two extremes. Of course, nothing we do guarantees that others will perceive us in the way we want them to, or even in the way we perceive ourselves. A person who writes very good books, in her own opinion, always runs the risk of being perceived by others as a bad writer. That much is the sad truth. But at the same time, what we do in life can, and often does, make a difference to how others perceive us. A person who writes good books, in her own opinion, is much more likely to be perceived by others as a good writer than is a person who writes no books whatsoever. Likewise, while doing everything we can to mitigate climate change does not guarantee that future generations will remember us in a positive light, doing nothing about it all but guarantees that they won’t. Also, notice that we rarely let the mere possibility of failure stop us from doing other things. Almost nothing we do in life is guaranteed to succeed, but we do things anyway. Allowing the mere possibility of failure to stop us from even trying is at odds with human activity in general and, we think, a clear example of bad faith. A second objection to this Sartrean motivation for environmentalism is that it treats being-for-others collectively—that is, as applying to groups— whereas Sartre means it to apply only to individuals. Moreover, even if groups do have being-for-others, it would be a mistake to confuse a group’s being-for-others with the being-for-others of the individuals within that group. These are different things. Thus, even if our generation goes down in history with a stain on its legacy for not doing enough to stop climate change, this needn’t carry over to our own legacies as individuals. To assume that it would is to commit the fallacy of division—attributing a property of a whole to each of its parts.15 It is true that Sartre applies his notion of being-for-others in Being and Nothingness only to individuals. But there is nothing in this account that

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precludes it from applying to groups. Sartre simply does not address this possibility. In any case, this is beside the point, for the group to which an individual belongs can have an effect on that individual’s being-for-others. The being-for-others of individual members of the Nazi Party, for example, is affected by this membership, regardless of whether the Nazi Party has its own mode of being. The latter ontological issue is simply irrelevant. Likewise, belonging to the generation that allowed climate change to happen will have an impact on our own individual being-for-others, regardless of any modes of being that this group might have. A third objection to this Sartrean motivation for environmentalism is based on the idea that nothing I can do as a single individual will make any appreciable difference to the legacy of my entire generation. And since my own individual legacy is linked to the legacy of my entire generation, it makes no difference—as far as my own individual legacy is concerned—what I do. If I do everything I possibly can to fight climate change, but not enough of my peers do the same, then climate change will happen, and I will inherit a negative legacy in virtue of belonging to this group. If, on the other hand, I do absolutely nothing to fight climate change, but enough of my peers do, and so climate change is prevented, then I will inherit a positive legacy regardless. Either way, my own legacy vis-à-vis climate change is out of my hands. So, fighting against climate change in order to secure a positive legacy for myself is futile. This objection goes wrong insofar as it treats the legacy of our entire generation as homogenous: every individual in our generation gets credit for stopping climate change (if it’s stopped), or every individual gets blamed for not stopping it (if it’s not). That’s too simple. Future generations will undoubtedly recognize that some individuals within our generation tried to do something about climate change, and when they think negatively about the generations that didn’t stop climate change, this will implicitly exclude such individuals. Consider, again, the Nazis. The Nazis have a deservedly bad legacy, but a very small number of Nazis were good—such as Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of over one thousand Jews during World War II. When people think badly of the Nazis, as they should, such individuals—whether we know them by name or not—are implicitly excluded. The same will be true when future generations think about our generation, regardless of the outcome on climate change. A fourth objection to this Sartrean motivation for environmentalism is the idea that the negative legacy I might inherit in virtue of belonging to a generation that allowed this environmental disaster to happen is only part of my legacy—and a nominal part, at that. Even if this does become part of my legacy, it does not follow that it will be the whole of it. I can do other things to secure a positive legacy for myself, such as building a successful business,

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writing a great book, or raising a wonderful family. This Sartrean motivation assumes that only one aspect of my legacy matters—my efforts to stop climate change. That’s not true. Furthermore, we have good reasons to think that one’s efforts to stop climate change will make up only a small part—a negligible part—of one’s legacy. If I’m part of a generation of billions, then I inherit only a small part (less than a billionth) of the overall legacy. Sure, climate change on a global scale is horrible, and if I were the only person responsible for it, then this would outweigh anything else I did in life—good or bad. But that’s not the story. I’m one of many. So, the stain on my future legacy is minor, at best. It’s true that other things we do in life will contribute to our legacies—at least in the short term. But this misses the mark. Our point in this essay is to identify motivations to take care of the environment, not to argue that these must be our only motivations in life. If belonging to this generation is part of one’s legacy, and we care about our legacies as a whole, then we have a reason to do something about climate change. And that’s enough for our purposes. Furthermore, there are reasons to be skeptical of the claim that the stigma of allowing climate change to happen will be miniscule compared to our individual legacies taken as a whole. In the short term, no doubt, this is true. Right after we die, our legacies will be defined much more by other things we did in life (our careers, our parenting, our kindness to others, and so on) than by our actions vis-à-vis climate change. This is for two reasons: (1) such things (working, parenting, kindness, and so on) have a much larger impact in the short term (when one’s children are still alive, for example), and (2) climate change is not yet as bad as it will get. But in the long run, there will be a complete reversal. Regarding the first point: the things that make up our legacies right after we die will slowly fade, as our children forget us, our books are replaced with other books, and so on. And at the same time, regarding the second point, climate change will get worse and worse and worse. If it gets as bad as scientists predict (we are entering a new stage of geological history—the Anthropocene), then our inaction may very well be the most defining thing about our entire generation. Everything else we do—both individually and collectively—could eventually pale in comparison to the disaster we unleashed on the world. In the long run, this could be the defining feature of our entire generation—and of ourselves as individuals, in virtue of belonging to this generation. So, if we care about our own legacies, not just in the short term (a few years after we die), but in the long term (hundreds of years from now), then we have not just a reason to combat climate change, but a pretty strong reason, at that. A fifth objection is that nobody hundreds of years from now will be thinking of us as individuals. Perhaps some famous people will be remembered

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and have their legacies forever affected by what they did or did not do about climate change, but that won’t be the case for most of us. Even if our names survive—on some archived website, or attached to some academic article— virtually nobody will think of us as individuals. So, being a member of a generation that allowed climate change to happen won’t really make a difference to our individual legacies after all. The problem with this objection is that it presupposes that having a legacy after one dies requires being known by others as an individual. There is nothing in Sartre’s discussion of being-for-others to support this, and it seems to be false on its face. We know almost nothing about the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, including whether this was even a single individual. And yet, it would be absurd to say that the author (or authors) of these two works have left no legacy. The same is true of whichever person (or persons) learned how to control fire, invented the wheel, discovered gunpowder, and so on. And the same is also true of individuals whose legacies are defined, not by their individual accomplishments, but by their membership in a group—such as the 300 Spartans, the Spanish Conquistadors, or even the Founding Fathers. AUTHENTICITY We turn now to the third Sartrean motivation for environmentalism. The first motivation is moral (we have a moral obligation to mitigate climate change), and the second motivation is self-interested (we ought to mitigate climate change in order to secure a positive legacy for ourselves). Both of these are first-order motivations—that is, reasons to do something about climate change. The third motivation is a second-order reason. It is a reason to act on these first-order reasons. In other words, it is a reason to allow our first-order order reasons to be effective—that is, to lead us to action. This third motivation is rooted in Sartre’s notion of authenticity (authenticité). According to Sartre, authenticity is a good thing, and each of us ought, as much as possible, to be authentic. The kind of “ought” involved here is both moral and self-interested. Being authentic is both a moral duty and a state we ought to achieve for our own sakes. The fact that Sartre values authenticity is problematic in light of what we said earlier about Sartre’s view of freedom as the ultimate value. Is authenticity another ultimate value, in addition to freedom? Or is the value of authenticity instrumental, perhaps in virtue of making us more aware of how free we truly are? We aren’t sure. However, we needn’t answer this question in order to grasp the basic point—that authenticity is valuable. Whether it’s intrinsically valuable, like freedom, or merely instrumentally valuable, in the production of freedom, can be bracketed. What matters for

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the following is simply that authenticity is, in some sense or other, valuable and worth pursuing. Sartre is not totally clear about what authenticity is. He mentions it just six times in Being and Nothingness, and he intimates that he will address it more fully in a subsequent work on ethics which, as mentioned above, he never finished. One thing, however, is clear: authenticity is opposed to bad faith (mauvaise foi). Authenticity might involve more than just the avoidance of bad faith, but it involves this much at the very least. Thus, since we ought to strive for authenticity, and authenticity precludes bad faith, we ought to avoid bad faith. BAD FAITH Sartre’s discussion of bad faith in Being and Nothingness is among the best known in the entire book.16 It is deeply insightful, full of interesting examples, and relatively clear. Much has been written about Sartre on bad faith, and we cannot hope to offer a complete account of it here. But the basic idea is simple enough: bad faith is self-deception. Being in bad faith involves allowing oneself to believe a lie which, on some deeper level, one knows to be untrue. This is paradoxical, and Sartre leverages this paradox to argue that each of is “a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”17 But one needn’t accept this ontological claim in order to agree that we often deceive ourselves, and that such deceptions are impediments to being authentic human beings. The relevance of bad faith to climate change is this: many of us know about it, think we ought to do something, and yet do nothing. We commute by car to work, eat factory-farmed meat, keep our houses balmy in the winter (and cool in the summer), and do many other things we know contribute to the production of greenhouse gases. We allow ourselves to do such things, despite our awareness of climate change and our convictions that we ought to do something about it, largely as a result of being in bad faith. If we really avoided bad faith, as Sartre advises, then we would act on our convictions. Thus, avoiding bad faith will help us put into action our first-order motivations to do something about climate change. BAD REASONS We will focus on just one kind of bad faith that Sartre discusses: hiding a truth from oneself on the basis of inadequate evidence. In these cases, we have reasons to believe something (call it “X”) and different reasons to believe

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something else (call it “Y”); the former reasons are much stronger than the latter reasons; but we want to believe Y, so we convince ourselves that the latter reasons (for Y) are, in fact, stronger than the former reasons (for X). We can see this kind of bad faith at work in Sartre’s example of a woman on a date who wishes to view her companion as interested in her mind, not her body.18 To maintain this belief, she focuses her attention on his engagement with her in conversation, ignoring his lustful looks and sexual advances. The woman is in bad faith, for she gives higher credence to bad evidence (the man’s apparent interest in their conversation) for something she wants to believe (that he sees her as more than just a sex object), and lower credence to good evidence (the man’s body language) for something she doesn’t want to believe (that he only wants to have sex with her). We think that this kind of bad faith—believing things we want to be true on the basis of bad evidence—is the main source of apathy in our culture toward climate change. When one asks people why they aren’t doing more about climate change, they give such terrible reasons that the only way they can take them seriously is if they are in bad faith. If that’s true, then Sartre’s discussion of bad faith, and especially his advice for overcoming it, can help us remove one of the main impediments to our doing anything about climate change. In order to demonstrate our point, let’s take a brief look at some of the reasons people give for not taking climate change more seriously. As we just said, these reasons are so patently bad that they can be believed only on the basis of bad faith. It Isn’t Real Some people say that climate change isn’t happening. These climate change deniers (or climate change "skeptics," as they prefer to call themselves) offer a number of reasons for this position. They distrust science in general, because scientists are notorious for disagreeing with each other, for frequently changing their minds (for example, about what foods are good or bad for us), and for having been wrong so many times in the past. Climate change deniers also point to recent cold temperature records or summer days when the weather is cooler than one would normally expect. And finally, some climate change deniers offer the hot and cold cycles of our planet throughout history as evidence, not that climate change isn’t happening, but that it isn’t caused by human beings. When we examine such arguments carefully, they are painfully weak. Virtually all scientists agree that climate change is happening and that it is caused by human beings, and those who demur almost all have weak credentials or else are funded by organizations with vested interests in denying climate change. So, while scientists do disagree about many things,

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human-caused climate change is not among them. Furthermore, while consensus views in science do change over time, this doesn’t prevent climate change deniers from believing them when it comes to so many other things— like medicine and technology. We normally don’t allow the “pessimistic induction” to undermine our trust in science, so why do we allow it to do so in this particular case? The same points apply to the third reason—that the world is heating up but this is part of a natural cycle, not something caused by human beings. Virtually all climatologists, who are experts in this field, say that this isn’t true. The consensus among the scientific community is not only that climate change is happening but that it is the result of human activities. Finally, regarding the second reason (record colds and mild summer days), it is easy to spot the fallacy here: average temperatures can rise even if individual cold records are broken. And that’s exactly what all of our scrupulously collected empirical data says is happening. Technology Will Fix It Some people are convinced that future generations will be able to stop climate change with better technology—such as cheap and effective carbon capture. Technology in general is constantly improving, so whatever we can do now to combat climate change will almost certainly look facile by comparison with what will be possible in one hundred or more years. So, while climate change is real and is caused by human activity, it makes no sense for us to do anything about it now. This argument, too, is weak. To start, we have no way of knowing that future generations will have the technology to fix this problem cheaply and easily. We may hope this, but hope is not evidence. Furthermore, even if technology does improve, and future generations can handle climate change more cheaply and easily than we can, we could certainly make their jobs easier by slowing global warming as much as we can now and, obviously, investing in research to develop this future technology. A miracle technology to stop climate change is not going to appear out of nowhere. If it exists in 100 years, it is going to exist because human beings worked hard to develop it. If we really think that the best way to combat climate change is by developing technology, instead of doing the simple things we know how to do (e.g., drive less, stop eating meat, etc.), then we should be devoting our time, money, and energy to the development of such technology. And one final point: even with our less advanced technology, we are in at least one respect better positioned to combat climate change than future generations will be insofar as the latter will be far more preoccupied in dealing with the effects of climate change (e.g., moving inland, building dikes, etc.).

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I Can’t Make a Difference Some people argue that their small part in combating climate change won’t make a difference, either because they are just single individuals in a sea of billions of people or because the real culprits are not individuals but big businesses (like oil companies) or foreign countries (like China). A related argument is based on the idea that combating climate change is not the responsibility of individual citizens but of governments. Since behavioral changes in individuals won’t be effective enough to make any real difference, the onus must be on governments to mandate changes and find solutions. It follows that we as individuals have no obligation to combat climate change. Once again, these arguments are weak. To start, we don’t normally accept arguments of the first sort when applied to other cases—especially when applied to people other than ourselves. Most of us think that littering is bad, stealing from large companies is bad, and cheating on our taxes is bad—even though a single individual’s doing any of these things would cause virtually no harm. Most of us, Kantians or not, adopt the principle that we should act in a way that we want everyone else to act, and so it is wrong to make ourselves exceptions to the rule. If we adopt this sort of principle in other cases (littering, stealing, etc.), then why not in the case of preventing climate change? And if we hold other people accountable to this standard, then why don’t we hold ourselves to it? Regarding the “real” culprits (giant corporations and foreign governments) or those who ought to be taking responsibility (governments): even if these parties are responsible for climate change—either in being its cause or in being the ones who ought to fix it—it doesn’t follow that we are helpless. If you think the government should do something, then you can write your congresspersons or give money to lobbyists for this cause—in addition to the obvious act of casting your vote for the political party that takes climate change seriously. And it is these same sorts of actions that will also be effective if the culprits are big business and foreign countries, since governments have some say in such matters (regulation of business, international greenhouse gas emission agreements, etc.). Furthermore, if the culprits are big businesses, then we can have an even more direct impact by boycotting them and supporting competitors who take climate change seriously. Finally, even if the main contributors to greenhouse gas emission are not individuals but big businesses or foreign governments, we can still do something by changing our individual behaviors. Climate change is not a matter of all or nothing but rather one of degree. Surely individual contributions, at least taken as a whole, can make some difference.

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Nobody Else Is Doing Anything Some people argue that they shouldn’t have to do anything about climate change because nobody else is doing anything about it. If other people aren’t changing their lifestyles to combat climate change, then why should I? The problem here is not that my actions will be ineffective, but that I shouldn’t have to do anything that other people aren’t doing. This is another weak argument. Our own moral obligations to do something are not lessened by the failure of other people to fulfill their obligations. Consider a classic illustration from Peter Singer: I am walking by a shallow pond and see a child drowning. I can save the child, but only if I get wet, ruin my clothes, and miss an important meeting. Do I have any less of an obligation to save the child if there are other people standing by the pond and doing nothing about it? Of course not. No doubt the reasoning behind this objection does, as a matter of fact, convince people not to do things—like give to charity or stop eating meat from animals raised on factory farms. But these are not counterexamples; they are just more instances of bad faith. Furthermore, this argument ignores the fact that some people are doing things to combat climate change. Some people really do have solar panels on their homes, ride their bicycles to work, and give money to lobbies that put pressure on the government to have stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. It’s Too Late Some people might think that it is simply too late to do anything about climate change. We are past the “point of no return.” If climate change is inevitable, then we have no obligation to stop it. After all, “ought” implies “can.” Again, this is a terrible argument. Even if it’s too late to reverse global warming and stop climate change, we can certainly mitigate their effects. The destruction wrought by climate change, and the freedom it will curtail, come in degrees. Even if it’s too late to save future generations from some problems related to climate change, it is still within our power to alleviate such problems. We’ve Got Better Things to Do Some people might think we have an obligation to address climate change but that we have other obligations as well—to provide good lives for our families and to make ourselves happy, not to mention our obligations to help the poor, to fight against racism and other social injustices, and to save animals from being tortured in factory farms. Environmentalism seems to assume that

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we have just one obligation, or that this obligation trumps all others. That’s simply not true. We agree that humans have other obligations—including moral obligations—besides mitigating climate change. But this objection assumes that our other obligations cannot be satisfied if we satisfy this one, and that seems wrong. Assuming one is not in a place of extreme poverty, there are many easy things a person can do to address climate change that don’t preclude one from sacrificing one’s other obligations. Turning the heat down at night in winter, buying a more fuel-efficient car the next time one goes car shopping, spending a bit more money (assuming one has it) on local produce, walking or biking to the store rather than driving, buying responsibly produced goods—these are easy and require only a little bit of time and extra money. Nobody who does such things will be forced to sacrifice their own happiness, their family’s happiness, or their other moral obligations. Furthermore, this reason is a red herring. Environmentalists don’t say that every single one of us must, no matter what the circumstances, do everything within our power to protect the environment. Rather, they say that we have some moral obligation to do so to the extent that we can. How we balance this obligation with other obligations is difficult, and it can depend a lot on a person’s circumstances (e.g., financial situation). But the fact that we have other moral obligations, which may in certain cases trump our obligation to the environment, does not mean that we have no obligation toward the environment whatsoever. It simply means that it is complicated to determine whether and when this is an obligation we should act on. Here ends our list of examples of the ways in which people use bad reasons to avoid doing more to combat climate change, and so live in bad faith. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. And even this kind of bad faith—believing things based on bad evidence—is not exhaustive of bad faith in general. Another strategy people use to avoid doing anything about climate change is to simply distract themselves from the issue—for example, by skipping over news articles about it, changing the channel when the issue comes up on television, not following certain people on social media, and so on. But we cannot discuss every single way in which bad faith is used to lull ourselves into inaction about the environment. Suffice it to say, if we truly cared more about being authentic—as Sartre thinks we ought to, both morally and for the sake of our own well-being—then the vast majority of us would be doing much more than we are doing right now to combat climate change.

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CONCLUSION Sartre’s early philosophy is an odd place to look for an ethics of the environment. Nevertheless, in it we have found two reasons to mitigate climate change: a moral reason (to protect the freedom of future generations) and a self-interested reason (to leave a positive legacy for ourselves after we die). In it we have also found a second-order reason to act on these first-order reasons—namely, to avoid the bad faith that is antithetical to authenticity Climate change is a serious problem, and we as a species are not doing enough to mitigate it. If we care about the freedom of future generations, want to leave behind a positive legacy for ourselves, and value our own authenticity, then we should stop paying lip service to the problem and actually do something about it. That’s what Sartre would do, and it’s what we should do, too. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. Anderson, Thomas C. The Foundation and Structure of Sartrean Ethics. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979. Anderson, Thomas C. Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Detmer, David. Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre. La Salle: Open Court, 1988. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

NOTES 1. By “early Sartre” we mean “Sartre of the 1940s,” whose notable works include Being and Nothingness (published in 1943), “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (delivered as a lecture in 1945; published as an essay in 1946), and Notebooks for an Ethics (written in 1947–1948; posthumously published in 1983). 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 628.

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3. Extensive notes taken by Sartre in preparation for this promised work were published posthumously as Notebooks for an Ethics. 4. For a book-length attempt to show the relevance of Sartre’s philosophy—both early and late—for thinking about the natural world, the current ecological crisis, and environmental ethics, see Matthew C. Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017). 5. We assume without apology in this essay that climate change is real and is caused by human activities, such as fossil fuel consumption and factory farming. 6. Thomas C. Anderson, The Foundation and Structure of Sartrean Ethics (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979); Thomas C. Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity (Chicago: Open Court, 1993); and David Detmer, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court, 1988). 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 24–25. 8. The deontological version of Sartre’s ethics might simply say that we ought not to violate the freedom of others, which one might object is not the same thing as promoting said freedom. We disagree, for we see little difference between actively protecting the freedom of other people and promoting their freedom. However, even if there is such a difference, the weaker thesis—that we are morally obligated only to protect the freedom of others—should suffice for the argument that follows. 9. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 550. 10. Detmer, Freedom as a Value, 35–93. 11. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 435. 12. There is, of course, an easy way in which Sartre’s early ethics could be extended in a non-anthropocentric direction, namely by ascribing freedom to some non-human animals. If animals can have their freedom meaningfully enhanced or diminished, then we might very well also have moral obligations toward them. We think that this is a promising idea, but we will not pursue it any further in this essay. 13. A fourth obvious objection is that nothing we can do as individuals will make any difference. We will address this and some other objections later in the essay. 14. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 259–60. 15. The whole here is not the being-for-others of a group but the group itself, and the parts are not the being-for-others of the individuals within that group but those individuals themselves. 16. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 47–70. 17. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 58. 18. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 55–56.

Chapter Five

I Am What I Buy Bad Faith and Consumer Culture Elizabeth Butterfield‌‌

At the heart of so many of the environmental crises we face today, we find the over-consumption of goods. We in developed nations have more “stuff” than ever before, with bigger houses to put it in, creating more waste, and using more and more resources in its production. And while this current first world way of life is clearly unsustainable, the developing world seems determined to follow our lead in achieving a “developed” state in order to also have the luxury of living in such a consumer culture. But what is driving this almost manic compulsion to “buy more stuff”? As we consider how we ought to respond in this time of crises, it is important to accurately understand and diagnose the underlying causes. So what is driving this compulsion to buy more stuff? On the surface, we could point to external forces and social structures like the capitalist market economy, which needs us to keep consuming more goods. As we will see, American postwar economic policy explicitly encouraged the burgeoning consumer culture. We could also point to more internal human traits like simple greed, or the desire to display social status through conspicuous consumption. Clearly all of these play a role as determining factors of the material and cultural situation in which we find ourselves. But from a Sartrean perspective, of course, we are always both free and determined, free in situation. So in order to truly understand our present crises, we must look beyond external determining factors to examine the individual’s existential experience of freedom and responsibility as well. We must ask, why do these external tactics promoting overconsumption work so well on us? Why do they have such a powerful hold, leading us into choices that are irrational and self-destructive on both an individual and a collective level? 93

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In this chapter, I will appeal to the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Marcuse in order to argue that one of the greatest challenges we face in our current environmental crises lies deep in our pre-reflective consciousness. When the existential anxiety we experience as a part of the human condition is paired with life in a world that makes it very difficult to fulfill our true human needs, we are constantly in search of answers, grounding, and an elusive sense of fulfillment. And consumer culture is there, ready and willing to provide us with a cure to our ills, offering to relieve us of our own existential responsibility. And the solution it presents? What we really need to do is to shop. This is a lie—shopping and the accumulation of ever more stuff will not fulfill our unmet true human needs—but it is a lie that has come to dominate contemporary consumer culture, and a lie that leads us to act in ways that are ultimately, in terms of environmental impact as well as our own human well-being, self-destructive. It is an irrational situation in which we make choices that we think will help us to flourish, but which actually sabotage our possible future flourishing. I will suggest that the intense pull of this lie in our lives cannot simply be explained by the claim that we have been duped and manipulated by external forces, and that at a deep, existential, pre-reflective level, we also actively participate in this lie, choosing to lie to ourselves. This brings us to the topic of bad faith. Sartre and Beauvoir portray “good faith” or “authenticity” as an honesty with ourselves regarding the fact that we cannot look outside of ourselves for an objectively true source of meaning, or for a purpose or justification of our being. As Beauvoir explains, the “genuine man” does not look to foreign absolutes. Rather, to live authentically is to honestly recognize that we are the creators of value, and to take responsibility for our choices. In our contemporary consumer culture, then, one very common experience of bad faith is the attempt to look for a grounding of our being, for a meaning or purpose or justification of our existence, in shopping. We often come to understand our identities and our purpose in terms of what we can and do buy or own. We then find ourselves in the hamster wheel of work to shop to work to shop. But what we really need is to break the cycle and the mystification, to come to a clear awareness that we cannot find true meaning, purpose, or grounding in consumption. Ultimately, this is about environmental ethics. Clearly, we are in a state of crisis, and we are called upon to change our behaviors. But if this hunch I have turns out to be helpful—if we do find that existential anxiety and bad faith play a crucial role in our overconsumption, then this may mean that changing our behaviors will require much more than, say, choosing between paper or plastic. To fundamentally change our attitudes and practices, we may also need to look deeper, addressing existential concerns about our human search for meaning and the potential for human flourishing.

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THE PARADOX OF PROSPERITY AND UNHAPPINESS—HOW DID WE GET HERE? Our particular cultural and historical moment is obsessed with happiness. The topic seems to appear on every magazine cover, in every advertisement, so much so that ideas that are actually deeply profound have become so common that they have been turned into annoying clichés, like “you only live once.” That is a profound truth, with profound existential import. But it can feel hard to even take that seriously anymore in a time when “YOLO” has been so over-marketed. Tal Ben-Shahar, a leading figure in the field of positive psychology, begins his book Happier by asking: Is this interest in the study of happiness timeless, or is it particular to our own historical moment? It could be timeless. Surely people have been asking questions like “Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? And how can I be happy?”1 for as long as our brains have been able to form these perennial questions of human existence. But other aspects of this preoccupation with happiness do seem tied to the conditions of our own moment in history. Consider the fact that we have more wealth and material comfort than ever before in human history. Yes, there is still far too much suffering and poverty and oppression in the world today, and so much more work to do. But really, think about the quality of life of an average person living in the developed world today, and compare that to someone who lived two hundred, or two thousand years ago. Think of all of human history, as people came up against harsh weather, famine, drought, and physical pain. How they must have dreamed of some paradise where there was always enough to eat, where they could be warm in a cold winter or cool in a brutal summer, where as much clean water as you could possibly need or want could come pouring out of a faucet right in your own home! Where fewer mothers and babies would die in childbirth, where there would be simple magic like penicillin, and ibuprofen, and vaccines. Many of us are so blessed to live when and where we do. And if our ancestors could see how we live today, don’t you think they would be overcome with wonder and say to themselves, “wow, how easy our great-great-great-grandchildren in the twenty-first century have it. How happy they must be!” But are we happy? No, studies show the exact opposite. Every social science has its own methods of measuring happiness or life-satisfaction, and across the board, studies consistently show that in general, in developed nations, we are experiencing much more depression, anxiety, and unhappiness than we did fifty years ago. We are also now more comfortable talking about mental health more openly, but experts agree that this can’t be all there is to the story. According to Ben-Shahar, rates of depression in America are

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ten times higher now than they were in the 1960s. The average age for the onset of depression is 14.5 compared to 29.5 in 1960.2 In the (pre-pandemic) TV news, there was a discussion of the fact that one in five Americans suffers from some kind of anxiety disorder, and I thought this phrasing was interesting—the journalist referred to it as “a disorder that hits us in the prime working years.” I find the journalist’s phrasing to be meaningful—notice, he didn’t say in our adult years, or in the prime of life, or in the years of independence and adventure. The most important part of the problem, in this news story, seemed to be that anxiety was interfering with our productivity when we really should be working. So we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation, in which more and more societies around the world are wealthier and more comfortable than ever before, but we are not happier. We also find ourselves in a particular cultural and historical moment in which we seem driven to buy more and more stuff. What is going on? At first glance, we might turn to some simple answers to this question—maybe we are simply driven by human greed, or a craving for novelty, or a desire to use possessions in order to gain social status. But there is also a deeper and more complex story here, to be found in the explicitly designed economic policies of advanced industrial capitalism. Author, filmmaker, and social activist Annie Leonard provides some helpful historical context in her film The Story of Stuff. Leonard observes that the average American now consumes twice the amount of goods as they did in the 1950s, but curiously, it is in this same period of time that our national happiness began to decline. As she explains, this emphasis on buying more stuff didn’t just happen—it was actually intentionally designed in order to boost the postwar economy. To demonstrate this, Leonard draws our attention to an American economist named Victor Lebow who wrote in the 1950s, “Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”3 In a similar vein, an economic chairman under Eisenhower said that the US economy’s ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods. Not to provide healthcare, or education, or sustainability, or justice—but to produce more consumer goods. So Leonard asks, how did they get us to buy into this? Because as a culture, we really have, hook, line, and sinker. Advertising plays a huge role, of course, because as Leonard explains, what’s the point of an ad if not to make us feel unhappy with the things we have, and to encourage us to replace our old stuff with something new? We are encouraged to throw things out when they are still perfectly good simply for the sake of keeping up with current styles.

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Leonard describes the vicious cycle we find ourselves in, where we go to work, maybe even two jobs, then come home too exhausted to do anything, so we sit down and watch tv, or these days, consume social media in its myriad forms. We are exposed to more advertising than ever before, and as Leonard explains, the ads are designed to tell us “You suck,” “your hair is wrong, your clothes are wrong, your phone is wrong,”4 etc. The ads seem to promise that if you would just fix those things by buying something new, you could be loved, successful, and happy. So we go shopping, and then we have to go back to work to get the money to pay for the shopping. Leonard suggests that our current unhappiness may have a lot to do with the fact that we now have less time for things that could genuinely make us happy, like spending time with friends and family, and taking time for activities we enjoy. We’re working harder than ever—social scientists report that we have less leisure time than at any time since feudal society. And what do most Americans do with the little free time they’ve got? They watch tv, and they shop. OBSTACLES TO OUR FLOURISHING—MARX, ALIENATION, AND TRUE HUMAN NEEDS The above discussion of our current unhappiness seems to assume that we know what happiness is, or what would make us happy. Psychologists, sociologists, and economists of course have their own methods for measuring life satisfaction. But for the purposes of this paper, I would like to put this into a Marxist-Existentialist context by introducing an understanding of human flourishing in terms of “true human needs.” In his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse claims that while he does believe that “true human needs” exist, and in our alienation we have an awareness of their lack of fulfillment, we cannot provide an explicit or objective list of these true needs. However, as I have argued elsewhere,5 I do believe it can be helpful to explore this idea of true human needs in more detail, grounded in Marx’s theory of alienation, with the caveat all along that this is not an objectively true or complete list, and is open to revision. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four types of alienation experienced under any capitalist system. The underlying assumption here is that we have true human needs that must be met for us to actualize our potential to fully flourish, and in any capitalist system, this potential is frustrated. I believe that we can use this idea of fundamental shared true human needs, the fulfillment of which is necessary to living a “good,” “flourishing,” or “meaningful” life, in order to articulate a positive understanding of human flourishing itself.

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The first form of alienation is that of the worker from the product of their labor. In the world of nineteenth-century factory workers, we could understand this in terms of the fact that the profit-motive drove the wages of the workers as low as possible, so that the workers were not being paid the real value of their work. In terms of true human needs, we can understand this as the material need for survival. One of the continuing paradoxes of our own particular historical moment is that, while we exist in a time of unparalleled wealth and comfort, this is true only for a fraction of the total global population, and too many continue to live in extreme poverty, genuinely at risk for their very survival. The second form of alienation is that of the worker from the act of production itself, and we can reconceive this more broadly as the true human need for meaningful work. One of the joys of a human life could be doing work that is well-suited to our talents and enjoyable, that we find to be meaningful. For a nineteenth-century factory worker, this alienation could be understood as the meaningless repetition of hours on end mindlessly feeding materials through a machine, so that the human being becomes simply an extension of the machine. The human in this case also becomes serially6 interchangeable with anyone else, with no particular expertise required. While life and work for many in our own time may appear very different from the monotony of a nineteenth-century factory, consider how much of the work we do today tends to be dehumanizing, mind-numbing, futile, meaningless, or soul-crushing. In many ways, society continues to be structured in such a way that the true human need for meaningful work goes unmet, and in which the alienating nature of the work is actually an obstacle to our flourishing. Of course, in an existentialist context from the perspectives of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, there is no objectively meaningful work—we may be creatures that crave meaning, but if our lives or our work are to be meaningful, it will be because we assign them meaning. We are the creators of value. But as we will see, in our particular context, even this becomes difficult when the options we are presented are limited, and we are immersed in a culture that tells us that we should define ourselves by our profession, and that our worth in society is determined by our level of productivity, and the extent to which we can participate in the economy and buy more stuff. The idea of success as a matter of wealth and possessions takes the place of the idea of meaningful work. The third form of alienation is what Marx calls alienation from our “species-being.” We can understand this as alienation from our own human potential. In order to fully flourish, we have a need to explore ourselves, pursue our interests, develop our talents, and to actualize all of this incredible human potential. But to really do this requires time—time to get some

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rest, time to think, enough unoccupied moments to just wonder and explore and to experience creativity. Compared to the drop-dead exhaustion of a nineteenth-century factory worker, you might imagine that in our own historical moment, with the extreme material comforts many enjoy and homes filled with “time-saving” technologies, that our situation would be better. And surely in our time we do place more emphasis on self-exploration. But we also live in a time in which busyness, “overwhelm,”7 and lack of sleep are celebrated as badges of honor. Even in what could be leisure time, we are constantly bombarded by media, and have little to no real down time. As Annie Leonard explains, we actually have less leisure time than ever before, less time for things that matter, and we fill the little time we do have with media consumption and shopping.8 The fourth form of alienation is a social form of alienation. In a capitalist society, Marx argued, our relationships come to be dominated by competition and the class system. In terms of true human needs, we can reconceive this form of alienation as a true human need for relationships of respect, recognition, and care. We continue to be separated from others by inequalities, disrespect, hostility and suspicion. Groups are politically and economically pitted against one another instead of working together for a common good. To meet this need for fulfilling relationships of recognition and respect requires time and attention, two things we rarely have. We are also encouraged by advertising to believe that buying the right products will help us to achieve higher social status. Real authentic relationships of love and recognition are replaced by conspicuous consumption and the drive to buy more stuff. In addition to the four forms of alienation outlined by Marx, I would like to add a fifth, and that is our contemporary alienation from nature itself. This corresponds to a fifth genre of true human needs—the need for a meaningful connection with the natural world. To properly understand what it means to be human, we must see ourselves as part of the living whole of the natural world. But much more often, we see ourselves as distinct from nature, and we treat the planet and other species as tools at our disposal. In our indoor electronic lives, our fundamental human need for connection with nature largely goes unmet.9 THE DANGERS OF OUR TIME—CONSUMPTION AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL CONTROL So we have seen that in any capitalist system, there are significant obstacles to the fulfillment of the true human needs that are necessary to our flourishing. This leaves us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. Marx claimed that when workers feel the dissatisfaction of their true human needs going unmet,

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this plants the seeds of revolution. It is the pain of unmet needs that provides the motivation to rebel against an oppressive system that challenges material survival and stands in the way of flourishing. But in order for this to happen, a person must be able to recognize their own dissatisfaction. A person needs to be able to come to a clear awareness of what they need, what forms the obstacles take, and what could possibly remedy the situation. Marx and many others have explored the roles of ideology, mystification, and false consciousness in obscuring this understanding.10 A crucial step in liberation, then, is coming to see with clarity. However, according to Marcuse in his book One-Dimensional Man,11 in the advanced industrial capitalism of 1960’s America, the situation has become significantly more dangerous. Marcuse argues that society continues to be structured in such a way that people are unable to get their true human needs met. Just as before, this leaves us feeling dissatisfied, frustrated, and unfulfilled. But according to Marcuse, the particular danger of consumer culture in 1960s American advanced industrial capitalism is that it has developed new means of social control that go further than ever before. In the past, when people were motivated by unmet needs to revolt against the powers that be and to demand change, easily recognized explicit state violence would be used to squash the rebellion. However, in advanced industrial capitalism, new means of social control effectively stifle any challenge to the status quo before it can take root, by obscuring a clear understanding of our situation— and this is where material prosperity and consumer culture, the drive to buy more stuff, comes in. In a situation in which our true human needs cannot be met, Marcuse explains, society has presented us instead with a set of predetermined “false needs.”12 We are told that what we really need in order to be happy or to live a good life is to buy the latest fashions, products, technologies, or to pay for the latest entertainment, etc. The promise we are constantly bombarded with in media and advertising is that if we just consume the right products, we will be liked, we will be more attractive, we will find love (or at least sex), we will be normal, we will be successful, we will be good, we will be happy—and, I would add in a more existentialist vein—our lives will have the meaning and purpose that we deeply crave. According to Marcuse, some of these false needs include the needs for “the production and consumption of waste,” “stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity,” and the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction.”13 In the US, we are told that we live in the freest nation in the world, but in place of genuine freedom, which would be impossible or a challenge to the status quo, we are offered “free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.”14

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Why are we so drawn to this? Consider our condition as one of suffering, in which we are experiencing this constant underlying dissatisfaction of unmet true human needs and a stifled or frustrated potential for human flourishing. Our consumption of products and entertainment offers us a dopamine hit—a moment of relief from the pain, a surge of pleasure, and a distraction from our true suffering. As Marcuse writes, we experience “euphoria in unhappiness.”15 Media and advertising of course play a central role in this. As Marcuse writes, “the irresistible output of the entertainment industry” carries with it “prescribed attitudes and habits . . . which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers.”16 As Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out in their work on the culture industry, part of the strategy is to immerse the person so fully in media and messaging that the individual is not allowed to have a moment alone. The reason this is important is that it doesn’t allow them to have a chance to reflect upon their situation—there is no time or energy or attention left to come to a clear understanding of their condition.17 There are multiple layers of deception here. First of all, we are told that our needs can actually be met, and that the underlying dissatisfaction that we experience due to unmet true human needs can actually be soothed. However, the social structures of inequality, and of a system that values economic profit and political power over human flourishing, in our current situation, render this at best unlikely, if not, collectively speaking, altogether impossible. Second, we are presented with a false diagnosis of the problem. The true source of the underlying dissatisfaction is obscured, and we are told instead that the reason we feel unhappy is because we don’t yet have the magical new product or consumer experience that will make everything better. Third, we are presented with a false solution, and along with this, a false notion of success, happiness, and the meaning of life. To live a normal, good, successful, happy, meaningful life is reduced to a life of material wealth and the ability to indulge in material comforts. So why is this so dangerous? Ideology has always obscured our ability to understand our situation with clarity, and that has always involved giving the masses a sense of identity, purpose, meaning, and values that served the interests of the status quo. In the past, the masses experienced their oppression in obvious external and material ways, for example in hunger or state violence. This helped to maintain an underlying, pre-reflective awareness of the need for change, and recall that for Marx, the seed for revolution—the call for change—grows from the dissatisfaction of unfulfilled needs. But in our own contemporary situation, this pain and dissatisfaction, crucial to our own ability to recognize unfulfilled needs, is numbed or soothed by the drug-like dopamine highs of participation in the culture of high-pleasure experiences. The temporary relief and short bursts of intense pleasure feel so good that we

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are less likely to be able to see with clarity, and less likely to be motivated to change. We are addicted to distraction and pleasure. Marcuse fears that we are at risk of losing the very freedom of thought— the ability to think “other than” the status quo, or to imagine any other possibilities or ways of life. In Sartrean terms, we could say that we are at risk of losing the power to “negate.” Marcuse argues that the consumer culture of advanced industrial capitalism has totalitarian features, as it extends social control into all areas of life. The oppression is no longer a primarily external condition of our labor, relative wealth or poverty, or ability to meet our material needs for survival. The oppression extends to our thoughts and values, how we understand ourselves, what we believe we need, and what we are living for.18 So in a situation in which our true human needs can’t be met, rather than challenging the system that poses obstacles to our flourishing, rather than demanding change, we are told that our best option is to buy more stuff. Marcuse shows us that the tools of the new means of social control are technology, efficiency, and “an increasing standard of living.”19 The overconsumption itself, the material comfort and prosperity itself, is at the heart of our oppression. We experience “domination—in the guise of affluence and liberty.”20 Advanced industrial society has effectively suffocated the “needs which demand liberation,” and what we need liberation from now is “from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable.”21 SARTRE AND BEAUVOIR ON THE HUMAN CONDITION AND WHAT MAKES BAD FAITH POSSIBLE So far, we have seen that the culture of overconsumption, at the heart of so many of our current environmental crises, did not just accidentally arise— rather, it was designed in order to serve the political and economic interests of the wealthiest nations. We have explored many of the external forces at play in structuring the facticity of our current situation, and we have arrived at an understanding of consumption and material comfort as a new means of social control in advanced industrial capitalism. But from a Sartrean perspective, recognizing that we are always both facticity and transcendence, free in situation, we must ask, why do these tactics promoting overconsumption work so well on us? And this takes us to bad faith. Marcuse helpfully described the ways in which we may be tricked or confused about the truth of our situation, by external forces of social control that actively attempt to obscure our vision. But as freedom in situation, the individual person must also be understood as bearing some responsibility. We

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must ask, in our freedom, at some level are we choosing to be dishonest with ourselves? And if so, why are we consenting to, and choosing to participate in, the manic drive to buy more stuff? In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, both authors explore the human experience of what we can call “bad faith/ good faith,” “inauthenticity/authenticity,” and “ungenuineness/genuineness.” I will use these terms interchangeably. While this is not to imply that there are not meaningful differences between their two philosophical outlooks, at least in these works the two seem to share a common set of assumptions about the human condition that underlie their analyses of bad faith. First of all, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre explains that the human being is always both “facticity” and “transcendence.” Facticity is the realm of what is determined, the facts of my life that are outside of my control, such as where and when I was born, the languages in which I was raised (and which subsequently provide me with the cultural, conceptual, and linguistic tools for forming an understanding of myself and of my world), the fact that I have a body and material needs, etc. Transcendence is the realm of freedom, namely, the noetic freedom of consciousness to choose how I will interpret, value, and react to my experiences. To accurately understand human experience, then, we require a dialectical approach: I am never fully free, and I am never fully determined—I am always both. I am free in situation. I can always make something out of what I’ve been made into. This experience of freedom and determinism is one of the fundamental ambiguities at the heart of the human condition.22 According to Sartre, this experience of freedom in situation is hard, because the open-endedness of our freedom, and the responsibility it entails, gives rise to anxiety. As we come to realize that we are actually much more responsible for ourselves, our lives, and our world than we may have first believed, and realizing that we have very few excuses, we are tempted to flee this situation.23 This is where we come to bad faith. Sartre’s account of bad faith portrays it as an attitude that we take up in response to the ambiguous duality of our situation. Bad faith can take two forms.24 We might attempt to reduce transcendence to facticity—this would be to claim that I actually have no freedom in the situation, that my actions were fully pre-determined, and therefore, I cannot be held responsible. Or we might attempt to reduce facticity to transcendence, denying that there are any actual limits to the situation at all, and overemphasizing our own freedom. Again, this is an attempt to escape taking responsibility, for example for the real consequences of our actions. Good faith, then, would be to take up an attitude of honesty with oneself regarding freedom in situation, and being willing to embrace responsibility.

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In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir shares these basic assumptions about human freedom in situation, the experience of anxiety, and the common temptation to flee our own responsibility. But she expands the account of human experience with a rich portrayal of human moral development.25 Beauvoir claims that when we are children, we all naturally tend to see the adults around us as authority figures who teach and enforce objectively true values. But at a certain point, she explains, we all come to a moment of realization where we are struck with clarity that all values are actually free human constructions. There is no such thing as objective moral truth. We ourselves are the creators of meaning. We are called to act, but with no guarantees. This lack of objective moral truths is another fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the human condition. Again, it is experienced as difficult and anxiety-provoking. At the moment we come to this awareness of ambiguity, Beauvoir claims, we first enter the realm of morality, as we must now choose how to respond to this truth. Will we take up a “genuine” (or authentic or good faith) attitude in response, honestly admitting that we are free and taking on the responsibility for creating our own values? Or will we choose an “ungenuine” (or inauthentic or bad faith) attitude in response, giving in to the temptation to flee the anxiety of ambiguity, freedom, and responsibility, choosing instead an intentional dishonesty with ourselves? As Beauvoir explains, the “genuine man” does not look to foreign absolutes.26 Rather, to live authentically is to honestly recognize that we are the creators of value and to take responsibility for our choices. One crucial question arises. If bad faith is to be understood as a choice to lie to ourselves, how is that actually possible? How can we know something and pretend like we don’t know it at the same time? The answer to this question lies in the idea of “pre-reflective awareness.”27 In Sartre’s phenomenological account of human consciousness, he asserts that there is a level of consciousness at which we are aware of many things in our surrounding environment, but which are not the objects of our conscious reflection. These are not hidden from us as in a Freudian subconscious. They are there in our awareness, but at the moment, we are choosing not to focus attention on them. For this reason, in contrast with a Freudian subconscious that might drive our actions without our consent, Sartre will argue that we can be held responsible for what we know at the level of pre-reflective awareness. To put this in the context of our contemporary experience of unmet true human needs, we might say that at the level of pre-reflective awareness, we have knowledge of our own suffering, that something is missing, that our potential to flourish is frustrated. But at a certain level, we may choose to

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ignore or to dismiss that, supported by a cultural context that is invested in prolonging this mystification as long as possible. VARIETIES OF BAD FAITH Both Sartre and Beauvoir explored the depths of the human condition with the tools of not only philosophy, but also fiction, and we see this in their studies of bad faith. Even in their philosophical treatises, both authors attempted to explain the experience of bad faith by offering portrayals of characters as if in a novel. With Sartre, for example, we have in Being and Nothingness the famous account of the waiter playing at being a waiter, and with Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, accounts of the nihilist, the adventurer, the seducer, and the writer. Following their examples, I will offer seven examples of bad faith that I see at play in the culture of overconsumption and implicated in our contemporary environmental crises. The first four examples are attempts to reduce facticity to transcendence, overemphasizing freedom, and denying that there are any real material or concrete limits on the situation. The last three examples are attempts to reduce transcendence to facticity, overemphasizing determinism, and denying any freedom and responsibility, as in “you can’t blame me—I had no choice.” The Climate Change Denier The first example is a very simple one: the denial that there is any environmental crisis at all. We see this in climate change deniers who, in face of all the evidence, choose to claim that it is all a hoax and everything is actually fine. This can be understood as an example of bad faith in the sense that it is a denial of the facticity of our situation, in ignoring that there are real material limits on our freedom. Clean water is not an infinite resource. The climate is concretely influenced by human behavior in the Anthropocene, and there are real limits that we come up against. The advantage of this strategy of bad faith for the climate change denier is that if there is no real problem, and there are no real material limits on our situation, then that means that I am not actually called upon to pay attention, to take responsibility for my choices, or to change my behavior. I can conveniently continue living in the status quo, which is—for the moment, until the next hurricane, perhaps—much more comfortable for me.

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The Optimist or Techno-Utopian A second but closely related example of bad faith can be found in the optimist. Unlike the climate change denier, this person may be willing initially to acknowledge that there are material limits in our human relationship to the rest of the natural world, and that we do currently find ourselves facing a set of real problems. The optimist may appear at first glance to respect the science. But the problem is, the optimist places too much faith and hope in science, taking up the convenient attitude that surely science and technology will come up with solutions before things get too bad! They always have before, right? We can trust human ingenuity! Everything is actually fine. Once again, this is a strategy of reducing facticity to transcendence, denying that there are real material limits at play in our situation, and overemphasizing the power of human freedom. While on the surface, the optimist may acknowledge that we are facing several environmental problems, at a deeper level, they are denying the fact that in many ways it is already too late. Extinctions cannot be reversed. Resources that took millennia to develop cannot be replaced. Irreparable damage has already been done, which technology cannot fix. These are uncomfortable truths that can and ought to lead to an experience of existential anxiety. But in order to flee this anxiety, the optimist in bad faith chooses a strategy of dishonesty. Like the climate change denier, the advantage of bad faith for the optimist is that that the optimist is freed from taking responsibility for their choices. There is no need to pay attention, to show concern, or to change their behavior. This account of the optimist is reminiscent of something Beauvoir describes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, as she argues against the claim that morality is contingent on belief in God, and that for an atheist there is no reason to have a sense of responsibility. On the contrary, she explains, the belief in a Christian God is accompanied by a belief in God’s great power, and a faith that God has everything under control, and that it is guaranteed that in the end Good will win out over Evil. If that were the case, then when we encounter injustice in the world, rather than feeling called to do something about it, we might actually be more likely to feel like we are off the hook. After all, God knows what He’s doing, God’s got it all under control, the events of the world are unfolding according to His great plan, and in the end, God will save us.28 So if I don’t take action myself to make the world a better place, well, that is okay. In this way, Beauvoir argues, belief in God actually reduces my sense of moral responsibility or of being called to be engaged in the world. But for the atheist, of course, there is no God. There are no guarantees that everything will be okay in the end. There is no one else who is going to magically swoop in and save us. If we don’t like something that is happening

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in the world, no one else is going to intervene. If we care about the situation, and we want things to change, we are going to have to do it ourselves. We could say the same in response to the environmental optimist—there is no guarantee that everything will be okay, no one is coming to save us, and if we want things to change, we must take responsibility for this ourselves. As Sartre writes, “I’m not being singled out as an Abraham, and yet at every moment I am obliged to perform exemplary acts.”29 We are actually much more responsible than we may at first realize, and more than we may be comfortable acknowledging. The Free Agent In The Ethics of Ambiguity, as Beauvoir provides an inventory of varieties of bad faith, several of the characters she describes take up a strategy of choosing to ignore that their actions have consequences for others. For example, we see this in the seducer who ignores the effects on the series of jilted lovers, and in the adventurer, who chooses to be oblivious to the impact of these adventures on those around them. This is again a strategy of reducing facticity to transcendence, denying that there are real factual limits on our situation— in this case, denying that our actions do have real consequences for others in the world, while overemphasizing individual freedom. Once again, this is an attempt to enjoy freedom without responsibility. In the context of environmental crises, we see this strategy of bad faith arise in the denial that our actions have consequences for other species, for the natural world more generally, for other people currently living, near and far, and for future generations. But if we really are in such a moment of crisis, how is this large-scale ignorance even possible? Well, at one level, this ignorance is supported by another strategy intentionally employed by cultural and economic forces in order to keep the system running smoothly: to a very great extent, both the “before” and “after” of our consumption are obscured from our vision. For those who are blessed to exist with a certain level of material comfort, a crucial element of that comfort is the freedom from having to think about the materials or resources that go into the products we consume. We do not think about the mining of materials that go into our electronics, or the sources of the clean water that comes from the tap, or the cattle on the feedlot before slaughter, or the workers in the sweatshop sewing the clothing. These products simply arrive on the shelves, appearing in their packaging to be clean and morally uncomplicated. And we are raised in an ideology that tells us that we are being “good” people leading “good” lives and fulfilling our purpose when we purchase these products. We are of course also shielded from what happens after we throw out the products we consume. To a very great extent, after throwing the trash in a

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bag and pulling the can to the curb, we no longer need to think about the waste after it leaves our sight. Where in the world will it go? Who will live near the landfills and incinerators? Whose land will absorb the pollution? Who will pick through the mountains of our trash from the neighboring slums? What will future generations experience when the thrown-out goods continue to exist? Those living in comfortable circumstances have the privilege of being blissfully ignorant of the impacts of production. In the words of Annie Leonard, the system is intentionally designed so that all we see is “the golden arrow of consumption.”30 And this ignorance enables an irrational and self-destructive system to continue to function with minimal disruptions. It is in the interests of the status quo powers-that-be to keep us ignorant, because if we could see the real impacts of our choices, and the real destruction and suffering that these choices cause, we might feel motivated to challenge the system. For example, the alternative farmer Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma argues that our current highly problematic industrial meat production can continue only because it is obscured from public view, and that if we really saw the whole process leading up to the packaged meat we find in the store—if we had “glass abattoirs”—our revulsion would lead us to demand change.31 From a Sartrean perspective, of course, we are never fully determined, we are always free in situation. So while these external forces are at play enabling our blissful ignorance, we must also ask—in what ways is this ignorance also a strategy of bad faith? At some level, do individuals freely choose this in an act of dishonesty with themselves? I believe there are two different types of dishonesty at play in this chosen ignorance of the consequences of our actions on others. The first is a more theoretical mistake of adopting a false self-concept. The claim that my actions do not have any real consequences for others, or that I am entitled to ignore these consequences, is supported by the Western ideology of the atomistic individual. We have been encouraged to think of ourselves first and foremost as independent, disconnected from other humans, and disconnected from and superior to the rest of the natural world. But from the Marxist-Existentialist perspective, a more accurate understanding of our existence calls for the use of dialectical reason in order to understand that we are always already both individual and social, free and determined, and independent while also deeply, deeply dependent.32 Ecocentrism and deep ecology, for example, have encouraged us to rethink the nature of the human self in order to recognize these relationships of interdependency. The second type of dishonesty with ourselves is a chosen blindness to the suffering of others. To acknowledge the real fixed limits of the situation with clarity requires an openness to the suffering of other people, near and far, to

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the suffering of other species, and to the suffering of entire ecosystems, as well as enough empathetic imagination to conceive of the likely suffering of future generations if we do not radically change course. It takes courage, patience, and strength to sit with this discomfort that arises from recognizing the pain of others. Add to that a realization that I am partly responsible for this suffering, or a feeling that I am called to respond to the suffering by changing my behavior in ways that may be inconvenient or uncomfortable, and the temptation to flee any acknowledgement of the suffering of others becomes even greater. It is much easier to choose to believe that I am a free agent, independent, and that my actions only affect myself. I don’t need to worry about anyone else. The temptation to flee our responsibility leads us to ignore the suffering of others altogether, or to obscure or erase what we do not want to see. The Tranquilizer/Retail Therapy In the earlier discussion of Marcuse’s notion of “euphoria in unhappiness,” we saw how external circumstances encourage us to misunderstand our own situation, so that we remain blind or confused regarding our unmet true human needs. We are encouraged to buy into the lie that our underlying dissatisfaction can be relieved by participation in consumer culture, affirming our social value by doing what is expected and buying more stuff. The material comforts of our situation and the ready availability of drug-like pleasures and distractions makes it harder and harder to understand our own situation with clarity. If we conceive of the temporary “euphoria” of instant and fleeting gratification at offer to us at every turn, we can understand the contemporary individual as an addict, addicted to the numbing of these pains, and to the dopamine hits of pleasure that we receive when we participate in consumer culture. But once again, from a Sartrean perspective, the human is never fully determined, but always also free in situation. So we must ask—at what level do individuals also play an active role in this mystification, choosing in bad faith to lie to themselves? Just as we have seen how the Free Agent may actively choose a blissful ignorance of the suffering of others, in the case of the Tranquilizer, we see a strategy of bad faith in which someone actively chooses an attitude of ignorance toward their own personal suffering. Once again, this is an attempt to reduce facticity to transcendence, overemphasizing personal freedom while denying that there are any real concrete limits on one’s situation. Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time, explained that in response to the existential anxiety we experience when confronting an awareness of our own mortality, freedom, and responsibility, we are tempted to flee into the

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inauthenticity of “tranquilization.”33 We attempt to numb our anxiety with distractions, busyness, and a reassuring belief that everything is normal and fine and unextraordinary. This notion of tranquilization can help us to make sense of this fourth variety of bad faith, which we might describe as “retail therapy.” In our contemporary historical and cultural circumstances, it is typical that a person might experience multiple types of discomfort at a pre-reflective level of awareness. There is the suffering resulting from unmet true human needs, and the painful longing stemming from the frustrated potential for true human flourishing. There is the sadness and grief when we encounter the suffering of both human and non-human others, and the vast environmental losses and destruction that have already occurred. There is the anxiety that arises when we are called to examine our own responsibility in contributing to this situation. There is fear in response to the idea that we might feel called by our own internal moral voice to change our behaviors in ways that would be inconvenient, unpopular, and difficult. There is resistance to the idea that this may require sacrificing some of our own comforts, conveniences, and pleasures. From this perspective, the strategy of “retail therapy”—shopping in the attempt to find distraction, pleasure, and reassurance—can be understood as an active choice of dishonesty with ourselves, as an attempt to avoid the discomforts we experience at the level of pre-reflective awareness. The tranquilizer actively chooses an attitude of blissful ignorance of their own suffering, in order to avoid having to acknowledge the reality of their own situation with clarity at a reflective level, because it feels like it would be too much or too hard. Easier to avoid it altogether. The Serious One One of the most powerful accounts of bad faith that Beauvoir presents in The Ethics of Ambiguity is that of what she calls the Serious Man.34 Recall that Beauvoir claims that at some point in our development, each of us comes to a moment of clarity in which we realize that there is no objective truth to morality, and that we alone are the creators of our values. She explains that this is a crucial moment in our experience, when we must choose how to react to this anxiety-producing realization. The genuine man in good faith, she says, will not look to “foreign absolutes” for answers to his questions about how to live. He will acknowledge his freedom and take up his responsibility.35 In contrast to this, however, the Serious Man responds in bad faith. In his anxiety, and craving an objective grounding to his being, the Serious Man looks outside of himself for answers. He chooses someone or something as an ultimate authority—it may be a person, a political party, a religion, an identity

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or role, a set of values—and he chooses to follow this external set of instructions for how he ought to live as if it were grounded in objective truth. “This is how things are meant to be. This is natural, normal, and good.” This has the advantage of providing him with a solid sense of identity, answers to his big existential questions, a clear set of instructions to guide his decision-making, and a sense of purpose in his life. The problem, however, is that this is of course grounded in a fundamental dishonesty, and it is an abdication of his own freedom and responsibility. In terms of our contemporary situation, the Serious One can be understood as a person who chooses to accept the ideology of “the good life” that is presented by the culture of overconsumption. The Serious One chooses to be dishonest with themselves, looking outside to a foreign absolute for the answers. This strategy of seriousness is so tempting because it relieves anxiety at multiple levels. First of all, it relieves the anxiety that arises from having to take responsibility for being a creator of meaning and values at all, The Serious One chooses to believe that the way of life presented by consumer culture, along with its portrayal of what it means to live a good, purposeful, successful, and happy life, is objectively true. This is how we are supposed to live, a “normal” life, and how things are supposed to be. This is an attempt to relieve the anxiety that arises from the fundamental ambiguity of the human condition. Second, seriousness relieves the anxiety of having to make one’s own choices about how to live in an ambiguous situation with no guarantees that we will get it “right.” This is the existential anxiety we experience in face of our freedom. The Serious One looks outside to the cultural ideology, to the options presented in advertising, media, and the market, and follows the instructions. Who am I, and how should I live? Well, choose an identity from the range of options and styles presented for sale. For example, if the Serious One takes up the identity of a particular style of mother, the strategy would be—how does our culture define this ideal mother? How does she dress? What products does she own? What activities does she engage in? What media does she prefer? Or in June 2021, as America celebrates Pride Month, are there meaningful political and social changes? Maybe not. But stores are filled with rainbow-colored products you can buy. Someone may even take up the identity of “environmentalist” with an attitude of seriousness, but this would be to live as an “environmentalist” in terms of the new products one could buy—T-shirts, skin care products, reusable straws, etc. Third, as we encounter the suffering, loss, or danger of our situation of environmental crises, the strategy of seriousness allows a person to deny responsibility. As opposed to the chosen ignorance of the Free Agent or the Tranquilizer, the Serious One may actually be open to recognizing the painful realities of the situation. But the strategy of seriousness provides a

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convenient excuse. The Serious One may remark, “it is too bad that we find ourselves in this situation, but this is how things are meant to be. Surely the powers-that-be, the source of these objective values, know what they are doing. So I will continue to do my very best to live a good life as defined by this source, and doing as I am told—this is the best moral response. There is nothing else I could or should do.” This attitude allows the Serious One to avoid having to take any responsibility for addressing the situation. But in the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”36 From an external perspective, it may seem that the Serious One is living a responsible, moral, and even happy life. They may hold down a “good” job, bring home a good paycheck, own a good home in a good neighborhood, dress in a way that is socially acceptable keeping up with current trends in the market, they drive the right car, they go on the right vacations, they keep up with the news the media considers important. They check off all the boxes to demonstrate in our culture that they are normal and good and fulfilling their duty, and to prove their social worth. But as we have seen, the promises that this life will lead to flourishing are a lie, and this sort of life does not actually address the underlying causes of our suffering, individually or collectively. The reality, of course, is that seriousness is a chosen dishonesty with oneself. There is no objective truth to the values of our contemporary culture. These claims about how we should live are simply contingent human constructions, the products of human choices. In an attempt to deny any freedom and responsibility, the Serious One embraces the illusion that they have no choice—this is simply how one has to live. But the truth is that the Serious One freely chooses which set of external values to grant the status of absolute. As Sartre explains in “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” we find that we are actually much more free, and more responsible, than it may feel comfortable to admit. The Reluctant Conformist A step beyond the Serious One, we find the Reluctant Conformist, someone who has enough clarity at a reflective level to see the promise of consumer culture—that you can live the good life by making enough money and buying enough stuff—for what it is: bullshit.37 Such a person may clearly acknowledge that they are the free creator of their own subjective values. They may be open to perceiving the suffering, loss, and danger of our time of environmental crises. They may even feel internally called to respond. In this case, bad faith arises as an attempt to flee a sense of responsibility by claiming that there really are no other viable options. The Reluctant Conformist may argue that changing their behavior to impact the situation

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meaningfully would put them too far outside of what mainstream culture considers normal. To be labeled by society as an outsider would be too inconvenient or even potentially dangerous—there is too much to lose, too much at stake.38 Thus, while the Reluctant Conformist may feel bad about the crises in which we find ourselves, and even though they know that our culture norms are not just bullshit but even dangerous, they feel as if they must continue to participate in this culture for lack of an alternative. Again, this variety of bad faith is an attempt to reduce transcendence to facticity. By suggesting that we don’t have any choice in the matter, it provides a convenient excuse for continuing to behave according to what is determined outside of ourselves. As we are always free in situation, however, this is another case of chosen dishonesty with oneself. The Futilist The final variety of bad faith I would like to explore is one to which even the most open, honest, and compassionate environmentalist may be forgiven for falling prey, and that is the attitude of futility: “the problems we face are so large-scale that nothing I do could possibly make any difference, so therefore I will not do anything at all.” While even the least reflective among us, and those who are the least open to seeing with clarity, may use this as a convenient excuse, we can see how this attitude of futility could be especially tempting for those who really do care. When we really put our minds to observing with clarity the extent of the damage already done, the extent of the dangers we face, and the extent of the suffering both present and future, and we see all of this in the context of a society resistant to change, which seems to prefer blissful ignorance and the highs of euphoria in happiness, it is understandable why someone might reach the conclusion that the factors at play in the situation are so large and so powerful that the actions of any one particular individual would make no difference at all. One reason that this attitude of futility seems so reasonable is that it also contains a partial truth. This harkens back to Beauvoir’s description of the nihilist in The Ethics of Ambiguity, where she explains that to a certain extent, when the nihilist claims that there is no objective moral truth or source of objective meaning or purpose in life, well, that is true. The bad faith of the nihilist then arises in their response, which amounts to the claim that one’s actions don’t matter at all, and a rejection of any responsibility. Similarly for the Futilist, when they claim that their individual actions are too insignificant to make any difference on a grand-scale to the halting of extinctions or climate change, well, to a certain extent, that is true. But it is a choice of bad faith to move on to the claim that this means our actions don’t matter at all, and to give up on responsibility or engagement altogether.

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The Futilist’s version of bad faith is an attempt to reduce transcendence to facticity, overemphasizing the determined limits to the situation, as if the entire situation is out of our hands. It is a denial of freedom and responsibility, it relieves me of any sense of guilt, and it provides an excuse for inaction. It allows the Futilist to continue on as before, because nothing I could possibly change would matter anyway. And yet, the strategy of the Futilist can be understood as a choice of dishonesty with ourselves. There are two mistakes at play here. The first is a misunderstanding of the self as the independent and disconnected atomistic individual. From a Sartrean Marxist-Existentialist perspective, the common human condition is composed of multiple ambiguities: we are both free and determined, and we are always both individual and social. In this particular case, our actions are both insignificant and incredibly meaningful. The individual may see him or herself as apart from the collective, but what is a collective if not a collection of individuals? Both contradictory claims are true. As we shall see, in order to make sense of our situation, what we require is the method of dialectical reason. The second mistake of the Futilist is to respond to a feeling of insignificance with an abdication of responsibility. Just because our actions are small and individual does not mean that they do not also have an effect. To deny that our actions have consequences would again be to choose to lie to ourselves. This paradox of the effectiveness / ineffectiveness of individual action is summed up well in Gretchen Rubin’s “The Parable of the Coins”: If ten coins are not enough to make a man rich, what if you add one coin? What if you add another? Finally, you will have to say that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him so. The one-coin problem captures a paradox that’s familiar to all of us: when we consider our actions, often it’s true that any one instance of an action is almost meaningless, yet at the same time, a sum of those actions is very meaningful. Whether we focus on the single coin, or the growing heap, will shape our behavior.39 Or, to return to the sentiments of Sartre, I may not be called upon like Abraham, but every day I have to make choices that do in fact have radical implications and real consequences in the world. These consequences may take a material or a more elusive cultural form, as they either strengthen and perpetuate or challenge the dominant values of the status quo. RESPONSES (PATIENCE, CLARITY, AMBIGUITY, DIALECTICAL REASON, HOPE . . . ) Okay, deep breath. So we are unhappy, anxious, depressed, overworked, exhausted, broke, lonely, strung out, and all while facing multiple

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environmental crises. What can we do about it? If the culture of overconsumption at the heart of our environmental crises is driven by many varieties of bad faith, what might an attitude of good faith look like? If bad faith is a choice of dishonesty, then good faith could be understood as taking up an attitude of honesty with ourselves. This requires a willingness to see with clarity. Remember that as Marx pointed out, the precondition for revolutionary change is a clear understanding of the situation, seeing past the mystification to recognize the situation for what it is. This understanding must be grounded in a clear awareness of our own suffering and unmet needs. So we are going to have to be willing to give up the perpetual temptation to flee into euphoric tranquilization in order to honestly face the experience of our own discomfort. And in contrast to the Free Agent’s chosen ignorance and disregard of connections with others, good faith also requires an openness to acknowledging others’ suffering. In the context of the irreparable damage already done in the Anthropocene to the planet and to life both human and non-human, to have clarity in recognizing the suffering of others may also require an openness to the sadness of loss and an experience of grief. This requires a certain patience to sit with the discomfort, fighting the temptation to flee into tranquilization. But most of all, a clear understanding of both our own contemporary human situation as well as the greater context of our environmental crises will require the patience to sit with and to tolerate multiple ambiguities. First of all, in good faith we must struggle against the existential temptation to flee the ambiguity that there is no objective truth to morality, and we are free and therefore responsible. We have to honestly acknowledge that we are always already actively making our own choices and creating our own values, and having an impact on others and the outside world, all without any guarantee that we will get it “right.” In contrast to the Optimist, the attitude of good faith recognizes that no one else is coming to save us, and if we are unhappy with how things are going in the world, we ourselves must be the ones to step forward and take responsibility. In contrast to the Serious One who is in search of an objective grounding of being and a set of instructions for how to live their life, the genuine person does not look outside of themselves to foreign absolutes. An attitude of good faith rejects the ideology that tells us that a lifestyle of consumption is the way things are meant to be, or natural, or normal, or our only option, or that the ideal of material success is the best we can hope for in a good life. This is not easy. Being willing to step outside of the norm and to look weird, to do things differently, requires moral courage as well as the creativity to live according to your own values. A second ambiguity that we must embrace is at the heart of our self-concept: that we are always both individual and social. As I have explored elsewhere,40

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the method of dialectical reason developed by Sartre in his later MarxistExistentialist provides a rich framework for making sense of this. This is particularly relevant to correcting the mistaken portrayal of the self as an independent individual, disconnected from the natural world. The truth of who I am is ambiguous; I am both an individual and part of an ecosystem. This shift in perspective found in ecocentrism and deep ecology is necessary for both individual well-being and collective survival. Individual and social flourishing are best understood together, and we can’t truly have one without the other. A third ambiguity with which we must come to terms is found in the actual import of our individual choices. As we have seen, when the Futilist claims that “nothing I do matters—each of my small actions is too insignificant to make a difference,” there is an element of both truth and falsehood in that. Here again Sartre’s method of dialectical reason can help us to make sense of the paradoxical reality that nothing I do matters, and everything I do matters. A fourth ambiguity arises in how we conceive of our individual responsibility in relation to environmental crises. As we in good faith do come to honestly see that our actions have real effects on others, and as we open ourselves to honestly witnessing the suffering, loss, and destruction, it can be easy to fall into an extreme of shame. The danger of shame, of course, is that it can be paralyzing. Here once again, a dialectical approach can be helpful, reconciling that perhaps in our past choices we were doing our best, and at the same time, we are open to feeling regret over them, taking responsibility for them, and committing ourselves to acting differently in the present and future. This dialectical approach requires compassion not just for the suffering of others, but also for ourselves. I would like to suggest an alternative answer to the paradox of “nothing I do matters, yet everything I do matters,” inspired by Virtue Ethics and the notion of character. Yes, sometimes we may succumb to hopelessness, and it may feel like nothing we do matters. But the Futilist who responds to this with inaction, with a denial of responsibility altogether, is assuming that actions are only worthwhile if we can see a clear payoff in the end. What if, however, we temporarily bracket the question of whether or not our individual actions could be effective, and set that aside? And what if instead we ask a different question: what sort of person do I want to be? What can I live with? For example, the first time I chose to become vegetarian, it was out of concern for the environmental impacts of the meat industry. But at the time, I honestly admitted to myself that I did not believe that my one choice to abstain from meat would impact the meat industry in any meaningful way. One customer more or less in a world of ever-increasing meat consumption felt like it would not make any difference at all. But I chose vegetarianism anyway, because after what I had learned about the meat industry, I felt

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disgust. Knowing what I knew, I could not unsee what I had seen, and I would have been disgusted with myself if I participated in meat eating. At this point, then, the decision was not based on any judgment about the effectiveness of my action out in the world. Instead, it became a matter of my own character. What kind of person did I want to be? As Sartre explains, we create ourselves through our self-defining choices. This is always happening, every day in every choice we make, whether or not we openly acknowledge this to ourselves. The attitude of good faith, then, intentionally takes up this responsibility and asks, do my daily choices reflect that I am living in integrity with my values? Just as we create ourselves through our choices, we also create our world. This is true at a concrete material level as well as at the cultural level of the practico-inert and objective spirit. The values that we externalize through our choices can either perpetuate and strengthen or challenge the ideologies at play in our culture. So an attitude of good faith involves recognizing that our choices do matter, as expressions of our values out in the world. There is one final question: if our practices of overconsumption are driven not just by external circumstances, but also by factors at play in our own existential experience, and if this perpetual temptation to flee our anxiety, freedom, and responsibility is actually a fundamental, defining experience of the common human condition, what can we actually hope for? What sorts of changes are actually possible? This harkens back to a question Sartre takes up in his later MarxistExistentialist works about the role of scarcity.41 If scarcity plays such an important role in understanding human conflict and oppression, is it possible to overcome scarcity altogether? Is this what we should hope for, in a future utopia? Sartre’s response is that while some forms of scarcity could be overcome, for example, a material scarcity of food, other forms of scarcity are fundamental parts of the human condition. These would include things like the scarcity of time in our own mortality. But Sartre argues that not all forms of scarcity result in violence. So he does believe that we are justified in daring to hope for a future with less scarcity and less violence. In parallel fashion, we could argue that while as human beings we may always be tempted to flee our own anxiety, freedom, and responsibility, we may not always find ourselves in situations that make this so difficult. We may always be tempted to fall into attitudes of bad faith, but no matter the circumstances, authenticity is always an option, and we may be able to create a world in which seeing with clarity and taking responsibility is easier. So as we face our future, and see the need for real changes in attitude and behaviors, we might also need to consider the larger existential context. We might call for a greater rethinking of what it means to live a meaningful human life, and what it means to flourish. We have seen that an attitude

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of good faith requires an openness to seeing with clarity, a patience to sit with discomfort and with ambiguity, and the rigors of thinking with dialectical reason. But I would argue that all of this is particularly difficult in our contemporary situation, and not just because we are presented with the temptations of tranquilization at every step. I would add that an additional challenge we face is our hectic pace. We are surrounded by media in its myriad forms, in a culture that glorifies overwork, lack of sleep, and an overwhelming fast-paced news cycle. It can be hard to even catch our breath. But if we are going to change the world for the better, we need to be able to slow down, step away, and see ourselves and the situation with clarity. It may not be possible to reverse extinctions, and it may not be possible to eliminate the fundamental human experiences of existential anxiety and bad faith. But as John Stuart Mill observed, there is a whole realm of sources of suffering that are to a very great degree “conquerable by human care and effort.”42 In the words of Sartre, “you can always make something out of what you’ve been made into.”43 We may find ourselves in extraordinarily perilous circumstances, but as long as we retain freedom in situation, there is still reason to hope. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Citadel Press, 1997. Ben-Shahar, Tal. Happier. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007. Butterfield, Elizabeth. “Sartre and Marcuse on the Relation between Needs and Normativity: A Step beyond Postmodernism in Moral Theory.” Sartre Studies International 10 (2):28–46 (2004). Butterfield, Elizabeth. Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012. Flynn, Thomas. Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2007. Leonard, Annie. “The Story of Stuff.” April 22, 2009. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=9GorqroigqM​&t​=753s. Little, Daniel. “False consciousness: A brief explanation of Marx’s conception of false consciousness; some of the ways in which later Marxist thinkers have

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used the concept.” http:​//​www​-personal​.umd​.umich​.edu​/​~delittle​/iess​%20false​ %20consciousness​%20V2​.htm. Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books, 2008. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan. Prometheus, 1988. Mill, John Stuart. “Utilitarianism,” In Utilitarianism and Other Essays. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Perlman, Merrill. “The overwhelming overwhelm.” Columbia Journalism Review, June 27, 2017. https:​//​www​.cjr​.org​/language​_corner​/overwhelming​-overwhelm​ -whelm​-grammar​-noun​-verb​.php. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2007. Rubin, Gretchen. “Do You Make Excuses for Yourself Based on the ‘One-Coin Argument’? I Do.” March 4, 2013. https:​//​gretchenrubin​.com​/2013​/03​/do​-you​ -make​-excuses​-for​-yourself​-based​-on​-the​-one​-coin​-argument​-i​-do​/. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Trans. Bernard Frechtman. In Essays in Existentialism. New York: Citadel Press, 1993. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso, 2004.

NOTES 1. Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), ix–x. 2. Ben-Shahar, Happier, ix. 3. Annie Leonard, “The Story of Stuff,” April 22, 2009. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=9GorqroigqM​&t​=753s, see 12:00–12:20. 4. Annie Leonard, “The Story of Stuff,” see 16:15–16:45. 5. Elizabeth Butterfield, “Sartre and Marcuse on the Relation between Needs and Normativity: A Step beyond Postmodernism in Moral Theory.” Sartre Studies International 10 (2):28–46 (2004). 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Series: The Queue.” In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One, Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Verso, 2004), 256. 7. As a telling sign of the times, the term “overwhelm” is now commonly used as a noun, to name a condition that many suffer in the hectic pace of modern life. See Merrill Perlman, “The overwhelming overwhelm,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 27, 2017. https:​//​www​.cjr​.org​/language​_corner​/overwhelming​-overwhelm​-whelm​ -grammar​-noun​-verb​.php. 8. Annie Leonard, “The Story of Stuff,” see 16:15–16:45. 9. For more on the true human need for connection with nature, see Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.

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10. For an introduction to and general overview of the notions of ideology and false consciousness, see Daniel Little, “False consciousness: A brief explanation of Marx’s conception of false consciousness; some of the ways in which later Marxist thinkers have used the concept.” http:​//​www​-personal​.umd​.umich​.edu​/​~delittle​/iess​%20false​ %20consciousness​%20V2​.htm. 11. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), xliv, 1–2. 12. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 6–8. 13. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7. 14. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7. 15. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 5. 16. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 12. 17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 18. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 11–12. 19. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, xlii. 20. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 12. 21. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7. 22. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Part Two: Being-for-Itself.” In Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press 1984), 119–300. 23. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Trans. Bernard Frechtman. In Essays in Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1993). 24. Sartre, “Bad Faith.” In Being and Nothingness, 86–118. 25. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman (Citadel Press, 1997), 35–39. 26. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. 14. 27. Sartre, “The Pre-Reflective Cogito and the Being of the Percipere.” In Being and Nothingness, 9–16. 28. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. 16, 34. 29. Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism.” 30. Leonard, “The Story of Stuff,” see 10:00–10:30. 31. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2007). For Joel Salatin, see Chapter 12, “Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir.” 32. Elizabeth Butterfield, “The Co-Constitution of the Individual and the Social.” In Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 63. 33. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). 34. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. 45–52. 35. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 14. 36. This quotation is often attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, as found at: https:​ //​www​.goodreads​.com​/quotes​/13620​-it​-is​-no​-measure​-of​-health​-to​-be​-well​-adjusted. However, the provenance of this quotation is somewhat dubious, and the closest to a

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primary source is in Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 264. 37. I use the term “bullshit” as defined by Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005). 38. For more on this topic, see the discussion of the “outsider” in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. 39. Gretchen Rubin, blog post, “Do You Make Excuses For Yourself Based on the ‘One-Coin Argument’? I Do.” March 4, 2013. https:​//​gretchenrubin​.com​/2013​/03​/do​ -you​-make​-excuses​-for​-yourself​-based​-on​-the​-one​-coin​-argument​-i​-do​/. 40. Butterfield, Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism. 41. Sartre, “Scarcity and Mode of Production.” In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One. 122. 42. John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” In Utilitarianism and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1987). 43. This slogan of Sartrean existentialism was coined by Thomas Flynn, Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49.

Chapter Six

Buying Green A Trap for Fools, or, Sartre on Ethical Consumerism Michael Butler‌‌

“What can I do about climate change?” Perhaps, like me, you find yourself asking this question—wondering what you can do about the ongoing process of climate change and the horrifying effects it promises to produce. After all, climate scientists are in almost unanimous agreement that we humans face the possibility of systematic environmental collapse brought on by global warming. According to a 2018 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the burning of fossil fuels promises to make much of the Earth uninhabitable if we, as a species, do not reach net-zero carbon emissions1 by 2050. Perhaps this keeps you up at night. Luckily, there is no shortage of companies and organizations lining up to provide a ready-made solution. The websites of national and international NGOs like the NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund suggest that the average western consumer ought to alter our behavior in little ways, changing our consumption patterns and shrinking our carbon footprint. We can, for instance, buy energy efficient lightbulbs, eat less meat, take public transit, or offset our next plane ticket by paying to plant some trees somewhere. Where I live in Texas, I am allowed to select how much of the electricity for my house comes from “green” energy sources like solar or wind. All these little changes add up, we are told, and in altering our consumer behavior, we are doing our part to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Nevertheless, the dystopian effects promised by unmitigated climate change seem to get closer and more concrete every day, with nine of the ten hottest years on record taking place in the last decade.2 The more one reads 123

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about our situation, the more inevitable seeming is a future where major cities are under water,3 millions of people are displaced,4 previously fertile agricultural drylands become deserts,5 and conflict over scarce resources becomes more common.6 This remains true no matter how many inefficient lightbulbs I replace or commutes to work I make by bus. In the face of such facts, our attempts at action through consumer choices seem futile and ridiculous. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre asserts that this sense of impotence is an implicit recognition of a historical tension. On the one hand, we understand the impending environmental crisis as a human-created phenomenon. As western consumers, we feel responsible for the crisis. It does not seem like a mental leap to tie the gas in our cars or the out of season vegetables in our refrigerators to the growing amount of carbon in the air. Insofar as the structures that make this lifestyle possible have caused the crisis, those who enjoy it ought to take responsibility by acting—this is the right and good thing to do. But the sorts of actions available to us as individuals in a western consumer society seem feeble and impotent in the face of the collective activity of humanity as a whole. Buying green, if everyone did it, might work. But everyone does not do it. Furthermore, many people around the world cannot do it. Green products are neither available nor affordable for everyone. In light of this, my own attempts to “do the right thing” by buying green reveal the limits of my individual agency. Its effectiveness is conditioned by the action of other people elsewhere over whom I have no influence here and now. From a Sartrean perspective, this lived sense of impotence reveals the way our present environmental problems are equally historical human problems.7 For Sartre, history is shaped in part by the collective activity of individual humans working in lived isolation from one another. In the case of climate change, our isolated individual consumption and the production that fuels it collectively produces enough greenhouse gases to raise global temperatures, melt ice-caps, flood coastal cities, displace millions of people, etc. An analysis of this lived isolation, or “seriality,” demonstrates that making choices as a serialized individual—say about whether or not to buy green—positions us not as individuals actively choosing to posit and pursue a future, but as passive members of an ensemble whose anonymous agency shapes a history and posits a future that nobody wills individually. When I buy green, what I might take to be my contribution to making the world better is actually just an expression of my inability to do anything to steer the action of the collective whose agency actually matters. This historical fact is lived as my sense of impotence. If we wish to actively project a different future, we need to form groups that empower us to do so. Green consumerism, put forward as a solution to climate change, is a trap for two reasons. First, it is a trap that prevents such

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groups from forming because it encourages us to think of our individual consumer choices as morally significant and important rather than as the relatively insignificant actions they are. Second, the serialized conditions under which we decide what to buy actually encourage us to disavow responsibility for the state of the world and betray any commitment to green principles we might have expressed ahead of time—it is a trap that maintains the status quo rather than altering the field of action. For this reason, I close the chapter by arguing that in order to address the impending climate catastrophe, governments should create programs that address climate change by allowing citizens to take an active part in imagining and working together towards a post-carbon future rather than trying to manipulate serialized consumers. This chapter has three sections. In the first section I frame climate change as “counter-finality”—the result of historical human praxis that, although willed by nobody, nevertheless is pursued systematically by historical ensembles of humans. In Section Two, I consider buying green as a strategy for altering the behavior of such historical human ensembles from within them so as to avoid the worst effects of climate change. I show how the nature of shopping as a serialized praxis undermines green consumerism as such a strategy. Finally, in section three I consider two policy approaches that might be taken up in light of a Sartrean analysis of green consumerism and seriality. I argue for a certain conception of the Green New Deal over a technocratic “nudge” agenda championed by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.8 FROM “PRAXIS TO PRACTICO-INERT” AND CLIMATE CHANGE AS COUNTER-FINALITY If we ever wish to do anything about the threats posed by unmitigated climate change, we first must get clear on the sort of threat that it poses. The purpose of this section is to frame climate change as a historical threat in Sartrean terms and in doing so to describe the bind we find ourselves in. In order to do so, I unpack some key terms in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. In particular, I lay out Sartre’s notions of praxis, practico-inertia, and, counter-finality. These concepts are central to Sartre’s understanding of humans as historical beings and therefore central to our understanding of the environmental crisis we face as historical. I begin by outlining the dual nature of human praxis as simultaneously individual and collective. I show how our collective praxis returns to us as a practico-inert field that often works against us as individuals. Next, I interpret climate change as neither bare nature nor accidental consequence of human activity, but as what Sartre calls counter-finality—a future posited by our collective activity and pursued systematically despite being willed by no-one in particular.

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Praxis For Sartre, praxis names the struggle in which humans engage to transform our situation in the service of a desired result. Put slightly differently, to engage in praxis is to actively negate the passive presence of material reality and rearrange it in service of some end. That end is both the future state of the world that we aim to bring about and the motivation for beginning the struggle in the first place. In this sense, the end aimed at in praxis is “totalizing” insofar as it makes an environment intelligible, assigning a place and function to a situation’s various components on account of the end aimed at.9 Readers familiar with Sartre’s earlier work will notice a similarity to the freedom described in Being and Nothingness. There, Sartre argues that we never encounter brute reality, rather, a situation appears as “totalized” in terms of the free project one is carrying out. Due to human freedom, I never encounter brute nature or bare materiality, but always my own projects mirrored back to me through matter. For instance, “a particular crag, which manifests profound resistance if I wish to displace it, will be on the contrary a valuable aid if I want to climb upon it in order to look over the countryside.”10 Here, what one encounters depends on what one is doing and the future one wishes to manifest more than the material composition of the crag. This future serves as both the motivation for action—climbing in order to get to the top or engineering some machine in order to move the rock—and as the ordering principle of perception—that which thematizes my situation and presents the crag as an obstacle or an aid. As a future-oriented agent, my situation is never an experience of brute, meaningless nature, but always a human one that reflects my own activity back to me. Put in terms of the CDR, what is encountered in the crag is its significance within my totalizing praxis. If Being and Nothingness was Sartre’s attempt to describe the basic structures that operate within individual experience, what interests Sartre in the CDR are all of the structures beyond individual experience that condition and occasion human existence. Chiefly, this means investigating the way that our collective human struggle shapes the very conditions under which we discover ourselves as individuals. In other words, Sartre is interested in how entities like a society, a nation, a market, or a class, act upon the very individuals that compose them. In turn he examines how we confront and transform such ensembles through struggling against our material situation - be it individually or in more concrete groups like political parties, labor unions, or even mobs. This means that there is a double constitution of our action outlined in the CDR. On the one hand we struggle in a self-conscious way for things we want or need by acting upon and altering our material situation. On the other, through this very struggle, we tacitly contribute to the force that shapes the material reality we struggle against.11

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Once we begin to think about praxis from the perspective of larger ensembles and not just individuals, the dual nature of praxis comes into focus. On the one hand, as we have seen, our praxis is our own struggle to bring about a state of the world in accord with our projects. On the other hand, we embody and contribute to the collective praxis of a larger ensemble whether or not we are trying to or even aware of doing so. Thus, when we confront a situation we don’t just see our own projects reflected back to us. We also encounter the ends posited by the ensemble of which we are a part. The Practico-Inert Sartre’s term for our built environment as one that contains and communicates the historical demands of our ensemble is the practico-inert. Rather than bare materiality or our own activity, our material situation bears the trace of the past praxis of countless others embodied and communicated through seemingly inert matter. As practico-inert our material environment thus functions as a “universal memory”12—preserving the activity of past humans such that it continues to project a future for those passively encountering it in the present. Consider shopping for instance. To wander the aisles of the local big box home improvement store is certainly not to encounter a neutral materiality onto which we can project our own ends. The aisles suggest an activity, a speed, a cautious respect for the space of others, etc. In such routine activity, we passively receive directives communicated through the material of the hardware store that we need not invent and posit ourselves. What this means is that, when we are shopping, our individual existence unfolds in the presence of past others whose struggle and praxis works on us through the practico-inert. People engaging in similar activity elsewhere established the situation in which we find ourselves by establishing the norms of suburban shopping. The material of the store itself reflects and supports those norms, communicating them in the width of the aisles, the size of the shopping carts and the brightness of the lights. This material situation constrains our decisions. Of course, we could decide to rob the store or stage a play in its aisles, but doing so would meet resistance beyond the material resistance of the floor and the lights. If we did this, we would be challenging a certain inertia present in the behavior of others who follow and enforce the norms communicated through the floor and lights. In this way, when we engage in seemingly individual action like shopping, we are not acting only as ourselves but also as agents of the practico-inert. We behave in the way that best suits its needs rather than ones we have had to decide on for ourselves. In going about our day-to-day customary routine,

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we are turning ourselves into one of those people elsewhere, whose activity determines my present as a consumer and for an indeterminate number of other future humans. Such collective praxis takes on material form in our built environment. By engaging material through praxis in order to deal with problems, we reshape material. But because the field we engage is not just natural insofar as it acts back upon human beings elsewhere and defines their future possibilities—in transforming our material situation we also affect the futures of indeterminate others. Thus, our individual praxis when taken in aggregate with other isolated but identical praxis shapes the practico-inert field which prefigures the shape of lives yet to be lived and choices yet to be made. Counter-Finality While wandering the aisles of a big box hardware store is a relatively benign example, the practico-inert also functions in a way that can completely undermine the possibility of individual praxis—indeed, collectively our praxis sometimes posits an end that runs counter to the possibility of individuals positing ends of their own. Sartre calls this “counter-finality.” To illustrate the point, Sartre uses the example of Chinese peasants turning forest into arable land. From any farmer’s individual perspective, the forest appears as an obstacle to their project of getting food from the soil. This project is “totalizing,” allowing the material of nature to always already appear in terms of human ends and aims. For the farmer, trees appear as obstacles and “every tree growing in his field should be destroyed.”13 From an outside perspective, however, it appears as though the peasants are engaged in an altogether different project—something more like collective suicide. Deforestation leads to flooding. Over time the main thing they collectively accomplish is the degradation of the forest and its root structure, thereby allowing the ensuing floods to carry away the soil—the very thing that make their agrarian lifestyle possible. This anonymous collective project is so well organized and so efficient, it is like a praxis of its own that works against each individual peasant. As Sartre observes, unlike nature, whose destruction is “imprecise, [leaving] little islands, even whole archipelagos ” (163), the human caused deforestation is organized and devastating. “If some enemy of mankind had wanted to persecute the peasants of the Great Plain, he would have ordered mercenary troops to deforest the mountains systematically.”14 Thus, Sartre argues, the enemy of the peasants is not a natural disaster in the form of a flood, but an “inverted praxis” or “counter-finality” that works against the future posited by the individual farmers. Their collective praxis makes use of each peasant working in isolation and posits a future in diametrical opposition to the peasants’ way of life. This future can only

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be brought about by the systematic activity embodied in Chinese farming practices—it is human activity through and through, though no individual human wills it. As we have seen in this section, to engage in praxis is to actively project a future onto matter; to be situated within the practico-inert is to passively receive an already suggested future through matter. We can only begin to engage in praxis from within a practico-inert field, but this means that a certain future has already been selected for us. In order to continue, I will have to be a worker of some kind. I will have to have a job. I will have to buy things. I will do these things in order to facilitate projects I have elsewhere that allow me to project a future of my own making. However, in my individual struggle, by making use of human structures and objects, I embody and further the collective praxis of which I may be unaware except through my reception of it as an impending inevitability. In our case, as with the Chinese peasants, that future is a counter-finality—an end posited collectively that undermines the very way of life that calls it forth. The impotence we feel when faced with the bleak future promised by climate change is an implicit recognition of this historical bind. As free beings capable of praxis, we ought to be able to transcend our material situation towards a future of our own choosing. We ought to be able to do something about global warming, for instance. But as historical beings, our environment is never simply material. It is an environment which specifies me and offers me a determinate future that I have not chosen but must make use of in pursuing my own ends. Passively accepting that future as the one in which I will exercise my freedom through praxis as a worker, a shopper, a capitalist or any other predetermined role means contributing to the impending disaster of global warming returned to me as counter-finality. SERIALITY AND IMPOTENCE AS OBSTACLES: BUYING GREEN AS A SELF-UNDERMINING PRACTICE By now it should be clear that if we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, what we need to deal with above all is the collective practice of humans that creates it rather than just the determinate effects. So how best could we do that? From the perspective of the western consumer, buying green is an attempt to alter the behavior of the historical ensemble to which we belong from within it. And it is popular! A 2015 poll of thirty thousand consumers in sixty countries found that 66 percent of consumers tend to choose products from sustainable brands. Numbers are even better for young consumers with 73 percent of millennials (born 1977–1995) and 72 percent of Gen Z (born after 1995) ‌‌‌expressing a similar preference.15 However, the

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so-called “30:3 phenomenon”16 or “attitude-behavior gap”17 causes problems for buying green as a practical solution to global warming. As observed in an oft-cited study, only about 10 percent of consumers who report a preference for such sustainable products actually purchase them.18 As I will go on to demonstrate in this section, through a Sartrean lens, the attitude-behavior gap is produced by the way that we are positioned within the practico-inert field as a serial ensemble of shoppers. Our serialization in shopping creates the perfect conditions for betraying any previously expressed commitment to buying environmentally friendly products. This makes buying green an ineffective strategy if we wish to do anything about global warming. On the face of it, trying to change collective behavior by recognizing oneself as a member of the ensemble and changing one’s own behavior is not necessarily a bad idea. A family or a hockey team, for instance can change the way they behave collectively through the efforts of members who seek to change them from within. But, not all ensembles function the same way. Families and hockey teams are groups in which we participate according to reciprocal, albeit at times asymmetrical, relationships with other members. As members of such groups our roles are defined by what we can uniquely offer in service of the future that our groups aim to bring about—winning a game, or getting over the death of a loved one, say. Of course, these groups can be oppressive in their own ways. Families especially seem like a regular site of misrecognition and oppression. Teams can be dominated by bullies. I simply bring these up as an intuitive point of contrast with serialized ensembles. When reciprocal groups are functioning in a way that supports the freedom of their members, members are valued and recognized by others in the group for what they can contribute to this shared praxis and they likewise value others for reasons unique to them. This is not the same as the sort of ensemble we belong to as shoppers. For Sartre, the collective activity that we engage in as shoppers is marked by individual isolation and impotence with respect to the aim of the group. In such a serial unity, we are not unified by active praxis but by a passive shared interest. We want the same thing to happen and we bring it about by passively allowing our practico-inert field to determine our future and our action. In order to illustrate the concept, Sartre uses the example of a group of Parisians waiting in line for a bus.19 Each person waiting in line has their own independent reasons for being there, and these are all tied to the more reciprocal relationships they have elsewhere.20 Each person is an individual that does not worry themselves with the individual projects and cares of the others and in doing so, actively negates the possibility of a reciprocal relationship from forming at the bus stop. In Sartrean terms, for the Others at the bus-stop, we are not ourselves, but Others. Anyone who has waited for a bus certainly knows this—it is rare and difficult to make conversation

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in such a situation because each person isolates themselves from each other and in doing so presents themselves as a demand that others do the same. In this way, “Everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is other than himself.” We are a collection of isolated individuals rather than a group characterized by reciprocity and the sharing of a common aim. We are nonetheless, a unity. Indeed, from a distance, an observer would see an organized collection of bodies behaving in a coordinated way. The people in the line at the bus stop behave together—they line up according to the sequence in which they arrived at the corner until the bus arrives, at which point they board the bus in order. In this way, the people in the line are a “plurality of isolations”21 passively organized according to the needs of the practico-inert object that acts on them and determines their fate—the bus system. We line up for buses not because doing so suits our needs (if we are late and it is clear the line is too long to get on the next bus for instance), but because it is the most efficient way for the bus system to carry out its project of moving people around efficiently. In waiting in line for the bus, we objectify and instrumentalize ourselves in terms of the bus’s project rather than our own. We become a part of the ­practico-inert field by tacitly reinforcing the norms of the bus system for others by isolating ourselves from them. In shopping, too, we belong to a series.22 When I am in the hardware store for instance, even if I have come there alone, there are other people with me. Though we may not think of ourselves as being together in any meaningful sense, we exist alongside one another and our behavior is more or less coordinated. We remain a respectable distance apart, line up at the cash register, and take turns poking through the various displays. We are all shopping and thus we belong to an ensemble of sorts—we are shoppers. In Sartre’s words, rather than a coordinated group working together towards a common goal through shared praxis, we are unified as “plurality of isolations,”23 a series of experiences “lived separately as identical instances of the same act.”24 We are all there, alone together, shopping for the same things in the same place. Our ability to do so depends on everyone observing the same norms of the hardware store, isolating ourselves from one another. An important thing to notice here, is that we make use of these serialized ensembles all the time in order to pursue our own praxis. We objectify ourselves for others at the bus stop or the hardware store because doing so facilitates a project that matters to us elsewhere. In addition to being a serialized member of a collective, there are other parts of our lives where we are related to others in more reciprocal ways—as a family member or a professional, for instance. In these other groups, “everyone can regard himself both as subordinate to the whole and as essential, as the practical local presence of the whole, in his action.” A family or a professional organization only works if it’s members act on behalf of the group or in the name of the group from time

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to time. Doing so well differentiates you within the group for other members of the group and demonstrates your value within the group. You are able to play a role that is valued for its uniqueness and recognized as mattering by the other members of the group as valuable to the group. At the bus station and in the hardware store, the opposite is true. In those contexts, you subordinate your identity to the material practicalities of waiting for the bus by turning yourself into someone who is substitutable for anyone else. In seriality, we make ourselves other than ourselves by making ourselves just like the others.25 In doing so, we relinquish any say in the ordering principle of our behavior in the name of expedience and efficiency of the process of which we are a part. There may be too many people at the bus station to fit onto the next bus, for instance. Determining who will get a seat need not be the free project of the people at the bus stop. One need not consider the uniqueness of the situations of the various people in line. There need not be a spontaneous deliberative counsel formed to determine the most just way to deal with the scarcity of seats. The decision is already made by the norms of lining up which treat each individual in line exactly the same based on exterior and contingent facts about them.26 We make use of the anonymity at the bus stop or the hardware store to support the projects and identities we engage in elsewhere. We turn ourselves into the passivized parts of the practico-inert field that facilitate the smooth operation of the system in order to make use of the system. There is nothing inherently wrong with this alienation. It is a necessary structure of human existence given we live together and make history. Serialization and the inertia it continues only gives us problems if we wish to alter our situation and relationships with others. The moment we want to change the norms of shopping or waiting for the bus, our serialization itself becomes an obstacle. For one thing, the collective of which we are a part expands to include all the other people who perform the same action at different times and places. I am no longer just alongside the fifty to one hundred people at the big box hardware store or the ten to twenty people at the bus stop, but the millions of people around the world who also need to buy things or take the bus. I am in fact, isolated bodily from these others who anonymously uphold the norms I aim to subvert. But even if I just tried to start with the people at the bus stop with me, the norms of waiting for the bus make this impossible. Trying to engage others at the bus stop will be ignored, or laughed off uncomfortably. The same thing will happen if I try to subvert the norms by behaving differently than others, “leading by example” by waiting for the bus in my own unique way. My action will be shown to be nothing more than a “mad initiative”27 when others pretend not to see or hear. We effect our own isolation from one another at the bus stop so that the bus system can run smoothly and we can all get to the places we need to go.

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My main obstacle to altering the course of the collective is this very isolation and alienation from others that is a condition for the smooth operation of the collective. This poses a big problem for buying green as an ethical practice. The moment I start to think of my purchasing behavior as activity aimed at altering purchasing behavior itself is the moment that I realize my impotence. I no longer make use of the practico-inert unity and the identity it affects in me to get the things that I need. I am now trying to alter its course. If I want my buying behavior to be effective in this pursuit, it depends, not just on my action, or even the action of the few people whose purchasing choices I might actually be able to influence. Rather, it is determined by millions of others in millions of different times and places. It would be impossible for me to affect their action from my position within the series as just one more consumer. As Sartre writes: “I feel my impotence in the other because it is the other as other who will decide whether my action will remain an individual, mad initiative and throw me back into abstract isolation.”28 I realize my impotence when I realize that I depend on these others to whom I cannot speak or influence. I know that what matters here is not whether or not I buy the right products, what matters is that enough people do so. Whether I buy green or not, all I am doing is making myself other than myself - turning myself into one of the very aggregate of others who determine my eventual fate and that of the rest of humanity. I realize that my only power is to relinquish my power and submit to the eventual outcome of the practico-inert field. Thus, through a Sartrean lens the attitude-behavior gap makes sense. When we shop, the isolation effected through serialization posits us as one among many anonymous others and only allows us to affect the behavior of others by behaving as such an anonymous other for someone else. These are the perfect conditions for the betrayal of any commitment. The practicoinert conditions under which I go shopping manufacture a weakness of will. Because, in the end, it will not be my will that decides my fate, but the will of the practico-inert object that objectifies me the moment I begin shopping. The most enthusiastic green consumer must recognize that even if they hold fast to their commitment, others will not. Even if we know we bought all the right things, we also know that we cannot prevent other people from turning our ethically motivated purchases into just another set of consumer choices no different from choosing the color of a sustainable, energy efficient lightbulb. In making our choice, we do so in the presence of these others and as one of them. At the point of purchase, we are left with no real options. Buy green or do not. It makes so little difference as to have the effect of none at all. All that matters is if others buy green. As a result, the preference I might express in conversation with a friend or a survey taker for environmentally-friendly

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products or brands has no purchase here. I am someone else when I shop because I am positioned as an anonymous other within a serial unity. And so, I behave as an other, not as myself. THE NUDGE AGENDA AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL: POLICIES THAT TAKE SERIALITY INTO ACCOUNT By way of conclusion, in this section I outline two possible approaches to confronting climate change in light of the results of this chapter. If it is true that (1) global warming is the result of human praxis returned to us through the practico-inert in the form of counter-finality, (2) this means it is our collective behavior itself that must be addressed, and (3) our feelings of impotence in buying green are justified because my own buying itself does not do anything about the problem, then we have two options.29 Option one: we can try to alter the behavior of the collective by manipulating consumers as a serial unity. Perhaps, by tweaking the contours and exigencies of the practico-inert field in which people shop, it is possible to alter consumption patterns enough to reduce our carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 and avoid the worst consequences of global warming. Option two: we can re-organize social relations such that it is possible for more people to actively posit and pursue a net-zero carbon emissions future instead of impotently hoping for it from the sidelines. The Nudge Agenda first articulated by Thaler and Sunstein aims for the former. Some promising aspects of the Green New Deal proposed in the United States Congress by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey seem to aim for the latter. This is not a chapter about policy. My goal in this section is not to provide a detailed analysis of data or specifics of plans. My aim here is simply to illustrate the way each plan conceives of the problem generally. More specifically I am interested in what each would mean for the average western consumer trying to answer the question we began the chapter with: “What can I do about climate change?” If, as I have suggested, our seriality is an obstacle to each of us finding answers to this question for ourselves, then seriality is something that we ought to try to overcome in the way we address climate change. Between the two, only the Green New Deal seems to recognize this. That said, of the two strategies under consideration, the Nudge agenda is by far the most popular solution among American policy makers and economists. This is not to be discounted. The Nudge is perhaps a necessary part of the solution, albeit a very small and far from sufficient part; after all, there will no doubt be people who just need to get to work or need light bulbs and have no interest in dealing with climate change. These people will have to make use of the practico-inert field at their disposal in order to do these

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things. It makes sense then, to have that field be one which nudges consumers towards green choices to the extent that this is possible. But this does nothing to empower people to work towards a better future themselves. If pursued as the primary policy solution, it puts most of us out of the game. Sunstein and Thaler,30 the architects of the nudge agenda, argue for market-based solutions to social problems, including environmental ones. On their account, the most that governments ought to do is “nudge” consumers towards choices that might be better for them. On their account, every choice is presented within what they call choice architecture—the way choices are presented, framed and structured for consumers and producers.31 Nudges intervene in choice architecture without actually changing the incentives in the situation or the set of available options. The idea is to manipulate the conditions under which consumers make choices so as to push them towards environmentally friendly behavior—precisely in the moment where they couldn’t care less about their own behavior—that is, precisely when they are behaving as an anonymous, serialized, consumer. A nudge involves altering “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. . . . Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”32 The idea is that given the opportunity, within the right choice architecture, enough people will choose to make environmentally friendly decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the impending climate crisis. Proponents of the nudge agenda, argue that such strategies are non-coercive and thus preserve the liberty and autonomy of consumers and producers. This makes them desirable over large scale reforms seen as coercive.33 In some sense this strategy makes sense given what we have uncovered about the nature of serialized unities in the CDR. The Nudgers seek to manipulate the practico-inert field and in doing so, to manipulate uninvested, anonymous shoppers into making pro-social choices. The plan recognizes the non-neutrality of the environment in which we make choices about what we buy and attempts to shape that environment in order to produce a desired result. Through a Sartrean lens, intervening in this way makes far more sense than trying to persuade people about what they ought to buy before they go shopping. As attested to by the attitude-behavior gap and consistent with our analysis of seriality and impotence, if we are going to change the behavior of shoppers, it is this anonymous, inauthentic behavior that we must change and it is not subject to persuasion.34 Ten years after Thaler and Sunstein first published on the idea, there is no shortage of attempts at putting the theory into practice. Results are mixed. Many green nudges appear to be limited in their effectiveness, working in some contexts while not others. Ideological biases in some parts of the

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world are impediments to nudges that work elsewhere for instance. A nudge program around eco-labeling, reminding consumers which products are “green” designed to “capitalize on consumers’ desire to maintain an attractive self-image through ‘green’ behavior” worked very well in parts of Europe, but failed in parts of the United States.35 It has also proven difficult at times to get initially successful nudges to stick.36 It is possible that those in charge just don’t understand the psychology of serial unities well enough to manipulate them effectively with nudges in time. At any rate, we are left with two options in trying to answer the question with which this chapter began. If we trust the Nudgers, we should feel fine passively going about our business, confident that whether or not we buy green, the technocrats in charge will nudge enough people towards the right answer to save the day. All the while acknowledging that as Sartre has shown, it makes no difference whether or not I buy green. All that matters is that enough people buy green. And from within a serialized position, my action does nothing to alter the future posited by the ensemble of which I am a part. To buy green then, is the same as doing nothing. It is out of our hands anyway. If we do not trust the Nudgers, we are going to need to deal with our seriality, the real obstacle to our playing any historically significant role in altering the behavior of humans that produces global warming. A promising option are clauses in the Green New Deal37 that suggest community informed projects around green energy sources, updating public transit, or cleaning up toxic waste sites. The bill itself is only a sketch of policy goals with very few specifics. This leaves it up to our imagination to guess what a post Green New Deal world might look like. Attempts to do so range from propagandistic speculative fiction38 to lists of projects likely to find funding in each state.39 What is common among them is a marriage of the fight against climate change with work—a sphere of American life that offers far more opportunity to engage in collaborative praxis alongside others in reciprocal relationships than shopping. Obviously, this is not true of all or even most work presently conceived. But inviting local input into what kinds of projects get funded and what jobs get created, at least in theory, allows workers and local environmentally concerned groups to begin to project a future of their own design. Thus, rather than appealing to people where they have the least personal investment and the least at stake, where they behave as objects within a practico-inert field rather than humans working together towards a future, and where they make themselves other than themselves, the Green New Deal aims to involve people in reciprocal relations centered on collaborative praxis. Giving people something to care about and work for and recognizing them as caring workers means giving them the ability to posit a future for themselves. It means allowing praxis to self-consciously aim at a future posited by local groups that show local results. Resisting global warming in

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this way means resisting the forces of atomization and serialization at the same time. After a Green New Deal, when we ask the question, “what can I do about climate change?” the answer could be as simple as, “get to work.” BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. “The Logics of the Critique” in The Sartrean Mind. Eshleman, Matthew C., and Constance L. Mui, 362–78. New York: Routledge, 2020. Aronoff, Kate. “With a green new deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation” The Intercept, December 5 2018, https:​//​theintercept​.com​/2018​/12​ /05​/green​-new​-deal​-proposal​-impacts​/. Baugh, Bruce. “From Serial Impotence to Effective Negation: Sartre and Marcuse on The Conditions of Possibility of Revolution” Symposium, 22, no.1 (Spring, 2018) 192. Burrell, A. L., J. P. Evans, and M. G. De Kauwe. “Anthropogenic climate change has driven over 5 million km 2 of drylands towards desertification.” Nature communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 1–11. Carrington, Michal, Andreas Chatzidakis, Helen Goworek, and Deirdre Shaw. “Consumption Ethics: A Review and Analysis of Future Directions for Interdisciplinary Research.” Journal of Business Ethics (2020): 1–24. Engels, Kimberly S. “From In-Itself to Practico-Inert: Freedom, Subjectivity and Progress.” Sartre Studies International 24, no. 1 (2018): 48–69. Froese, Rebecca, and Janpeter Schilling. “The nexus of climate change, land use, and conflicts.” Current climate change reports 5, no. 1 (2019): 24–35. Futerra, S. C. L. “The rules of the game: The principals of climate change communication.” Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: London, UK (2005). House, Congress. “Resolution 109.” Recognizing the duty of the House to create a Green New Deal, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria. Available at: www. congress. gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text, accessed, 2019. IPCC, “Summary for Policy Makers” In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change eds. Stocker, T. F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P. M. Midgley. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). IPCC. “Summary for policymakers.” In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change eds. Field, C. B., V. R. Barros, D. J. Dokken, K. J. Mach, M. D. Mastrandrea, T. E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K. L. Ebi, Y. O. Estrada, R. C. Genova, B. Girma, E. S. Kissel, A. N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P. R. Mastrandrea, and L. L. White. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–32. Nielsen Cabinet. “The sustainability imperative: new insights on consumer expectations.” Nielsen Company New York (2015).

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Reese, April. “What a Green New Deal would look like state by state” Popular Science, February 27, 2020, https:​//​www​.popsci​.com​/story​/environment​/green​-new​ -deal​-state​-by​-state​/. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of dialectical reason volume one. Tr. Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, Tr. Hazel Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Schubert, Christian. “Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical?.” Ecological Economics 132 (2017): 329–42. Shaw, Deirdre, Robert McMaster, and Terry Newholm. “Care and commitment in ethical consumption: An exploration of the ‘attitude–behaviour gap.’” Journal of Business Ethics 136, no. 2 (2016): 251–65. Simont, Juliette. “Intersubjectivity Between Group and Seriality from The Early to The Later Sartre” in The Sartrean Mind. Matthew C. Eshelmen and Constance L. Mui 402–12. New York: Routledge, 2020. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New York: Penguin, 2009. Zollo, Lamberto. “The consumers’ emotional dog learns to persuade its rational tail: Toward a social intuitionist framework of ethical consumption.” Journal of Business Ethics (2020): 1–19.

NOTES 1. “Net zero” means that any carbon emissions are balanced by absorbing an equivalent amount of carbon. 2. National Center for Environmental Information. “NOAA study: Most of the years in next decade very likely to rank as Top 10 warmest years” National Center for Environmental Information, February 14, 2020. https:​//​www​.ncei​.noaa​.gov​/news​ /projected​-ranks. 3. IPCC, Summary for Policy Makers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ed. Stocker, T. F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P. M. Midgley. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4. IPCC (2014) Summary for policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C. B., V. R. Barros, D. J. Dokken, K. J. Mach, M. D. Mastrandrea, T. E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K. L. Ebi, Y. O. Estrada, R. C. Genova, B. Girma, E. S. Kissel, A. N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P. R. Mastrandrea, and L. L. White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA 2014, pp. 1–32.

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5. Burrell, A. L., J. P. Evans, and M. G. De Kauwe. “Anthropogenic climate change has driven over 5 million km 2 of drylands towards desertification.” Nature communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 1–11. 6. Rebecca Froese, and Janpeter Schilling. “The nexus of climate change, land use, and conflicts.” Current climate change reports 5, no. 1 (2019): 24–35. 7. Indeed, as Matthew Ally has argued, Sartre can help us see how natural and human history are really no different at this point, Matthew C. Ally, “The Logics of The Critique” in The Sartrean Mind eds. Matthew Eshelmen and Constance L. Mui, (New York: Routledge, 2020) 363–78. 8. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness (New York: Penguin, 2009). 9. Kimberley Engels, “From In-Itself to Practico-Inert: Freedom, Subjectivity and Progress” Sartre Studies International 24 no.1 (2018) 50. 10. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness trans. Hazel Barnes, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 620. 11. As Juliette Simont puts it, the Critique is a study of configurations “of human intersubjectivity affecting materiality and vice versa” (403) Juliette Simont, “Intersubjectivity Between Group and Seriality from The Early to The Later Sartre” in The Sartrean Mind e. Matthew C. Eshelmen and Constance L. Mui (New York: Routledge, 2020), 402–12. 12. Sartre, Critique, 123. 13. Sartre, Critique, 163. 14. Sartre, Critique, 163. 15. Nielsen, Cabinet. “The sustainability imperative: new insights on consumer expectations.” Nielsen Company New York (2015). 16. Lamberto Zollo. “The consumers’ emotional dog learns to persuade its rational tail: Toward a social intuitionist framework of ethical consumption.” Journal of Business Ethics (2020): 1–19. 17. There is a small pile of literature addressing the attitude-behavior gap. For a recent overview, see Michal Carrington, Andreas Chatzidakis, Helen Goworek, and Deirdre Shaw. “Consumption Ethics: A Review and Analysis of Future Directions for Interdisciplinary Research.” Journal of Business Ethics (2020): 1–24. There is some consensus that the problem arises from a lack of social pressure at the point of purchase. Notable from our perspective are Deirdre Shaw, Robert McMaster, and Terry Newholm. “Care and commitment in ethical consumption: An exploration of the ‘attitude–behaviour gap.’” Journal of Business Ethics 136, no. 2 (2016): 251–65. Argues that care is an under-examined notion in the study of ethical consumer behavior. Zollo, “Consumer’s emotional dog” emphasizes a shift away from methodological individualism. 18. S. C. L. Futerra, “The rules of the game: The principals of climate change communication.”  Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: London, UK (2005). 19. Sartre, Critique, 256–70. 20. “The practical conditions of this attitude of semi-awareness are, first, his real membership of other groups (it is morning, he has just got up and left his home; he is

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still thinking of his children who are ill, etc.; Furthermore, he is going to his office; he has oral report to make to his superior; he is worrying about its phrasing, rehearsing it under his breath, etc.” Sartre, Critique, 256–57. 21. Sartre, Critique, 256. 22. Indeed, we are in series anywhere our conduct is governed by norms of habitual common practice. See Bruce Baugh, “From Serial Impotence to Effective Negation: Sartre and Marcuse on The Conditions of Possibility of Revolution” Symposium, 22, no.1 (Spring, 2018) 192. 23. Sartre, Critique, 256. 24. Sartre, Critique, 262. 25. Sartre, Critique, 262. 26. Sartre, Critique 260. 27. Sartre, Critique, 277. 28. Sartre, Critique, 277. 29. Note that these two options are policy options, not options for consumers qua consumers. Pursuing them already assumes that praxis is possible through political organizations like political parties. Whether or not this is the case and is far beyond the scope of this chapter. 30. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge. 31. Schubert, 2016. 32. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge, 6. 33. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge. 34. Thaler and Sunstein call this “system two thinking” or automatic thinking which is habitual, quick, unreflective and often biased. On their account this is the sort of thinking we perform when making quick decisions about what to buy. Often automatic decisions are in conflict with what they call “system one thinking,” which is reflective, rational and slow, and more in line with the sort of thing we might endorse in conversation with others. Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge 19–22. 35. Christian Schubert,”Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical?” Ecological Economics 132 (2017): 331. 36. Schubert, “Green Nudges.” 37. House, Congress. “Resolution 109.” Recognizing the duty of the House to create a Green New Deal, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria. Available at: www. congress. gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text, accessed, 2019. 38. Kate Aronoff, “With a green new deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation” The Intercept, December 5 2018, https:​//​theintercept​.com​/2018​ /12​/05​/green​-new​-deal​-proposal​-impacts​/. 39. April Reese, “What a Green New Deal would look like state by state” Popular Science, February 27, 2020, https:​//​www​.popsci​.com​/story​/environment​/green​-new​ -deal​-state​-by​-state​/.

PART IV

Dialectics and Politics

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Chapter Seven

Heralding Kairos The Depths of Seriality and Creating Earth as a Work of Art Austin Hayden Smidt‌‌

These are the times we must think; these are the times of urgencies that need stories.1

PRELUDE: THE FUNERAL OF THE OK GLACIER On August 18, 2019, a funeral for the Ok Glacier (Okjökull) was held. This event was monumental for the Icelandic people as this was the first glacier on their island to have lost its glacier status. The accompanying news story, scattershot as it was across varying popular and independent media outlets, was accompanied by two topological satellite photographs taken by Joshua Stevens of NASA’s Earth Observatory. The first, taken in September of 1986, shows Ok Glacier as a large white inkblot centered in the earth-toned terrain. Out of context, the scope of Ok’s cover might not impress. However, when compared with the second photograph, taken just shy of thirty-three years later in August of 2019, the immensity of Ok’s previous sprawl assumes new meaning. In this recent photograph, Ok volcano protruded prominently in the center of the frame, drawing attention to itself. However, where there was once white covering the entirety of this volcanic mass was now only a slight powdering of snow and ice in a milieu of gradated browns, hardly anything to catch one’s 143

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eye if one were not aware of what this photograph was juxtaposing. The news story and NASA photographs carry significant meaning in their own right. They attest to an empirical set of facts. They provide evidence that this planet we call “Earth” is experiencing what scientists deem a “state shift.”2 This report presents the simple facts of the case meant to inform a readership of a predicament: the ecological predicament. As impactful as the news story and photographs may very well be, however, there was another component to the memorial, one that sparked my thoughts and appealed to my affects in ways that have invited much deeper contemplation than the plethora of headlines or even the dramatic juxtaposition of images. Those in attendance marked the occasion by posting a plaque on Ok. It reads: A LETTER TO THE FUTURE‌‌‌ Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.3

This letter to the future is a powerful device. More powerful than journalistic prose meant to stoke our collective guilt, more insightful than before and after photos attempting to provide both telescopic and microscopic ways of seeing the ecological predicament ourselves, this letter’s power comes both in the short story it tells and in the charge it lays at our feet. And it does this by projecting us into the future, into the position of a future reader. As we read the letter from our context today, we imagine ourselves as readers in the future, meeting perhaps a restored Ok Glacier; or standing before a moment of triumph when the clarion call to reverse course was heard and heeded; or maybe even as proud parents or grandparents beaming with pride and joy over how our generation was able to hand down habits of ecological care to subsequent generations to build upon and perfect further; or, perhaps more likely, we project ourselves into a bleak futural position, where we answer the final provocation with a silent sadness at the inertia of our coalitions that neglected our authenticity, in favor of a global and hegemonic bad faith, in the service of solidified roles as deputies of the mining economy.4 There are indeed other images that flood the mind, surely, but flood they come upon reading this hyperstitional poetic.5 For this plaque is not a game; it was not placed in jest; it carries no humor in it (even if there may be irony). No, this plaque is a profound political device that expresses the power of imagination to shock us to thought. Or, in revisionist Sartrean language, this

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poetic carries within it excesses of the differential that can spark subjectivity to life (perhaps for the first time) as it induces praxis to think, feel, and act. The reason this poetic plaque matters for a chapter on Sartre and ecology is that it speaks to the imagination’s capacity to synthesize the manifold of data and to then spur praxis that analytical reason lacks. The viral spread of the Ok Glacier funeral on social media, late night news, and environmental newsletters has a certain force to it. Similarly, there is an attempt at stimulating a type of rational connection with the Icelandic topos by thrusting satellite images of ecological degradation before our eyes. But there is a serial logic that prevents the potency of this exposure from having the desired effect. This, at least, is the Sartrean case. Akin to his analysis of the radio broadcast in Critique of Dialectical Reason,6 the viral spread of exposés and revealing images creates a lateral inert conducting medium where public opinion mimetically mediates the socius, creating a “unity of the discontent.”7 This serial “unity of flight”8 is not a genuine expression of praxis, but is anti-praxis precisely because it is conditioned by an anti-dialectical orientation to the world. This anti-dialectical orientation is what Sartre refers to in various guises but that we can situate, for simplicity’s sake, under the banner of “analytical reason.” And this orientation to the world is a rational form of self domestication, one that makes social ensembles (and the component parts) complicit in their own perpetuation of self-serialization. The potency of story is different. Or at least it can be. Defending how story has a unique potency is the purpose of this chapter. Others have pursued such an endeavor in various ways that we can look to for inspiration.9 The task here is not meant to supplant such efforts, nor is it to merely add to a sequential unfolding of how narrative functions in socio-cultural history. Rather, the present chapter takes a different tack, one that seeks to examine the formal and logical intelligibility of the (im)potency of story via Sartre’s transcendental investigation into the conditions of dialectical reason. If analytical reason is Sartre’s target as the multi-causal tendency toward serial self-reproduction, then dialectical reason is his salve; it is his name for the orientation to the world that knows itself, in its perpetual articulation of itself, out from the isomorphic tendency of seriality’s viral spreading. How this fits into ecological concerns is one application of his investigation into the conditions for making dialectical reason intelligible. We might say that an investigation into the formal and logical conditions of a properly dialectical ecological rationality is an expression of praxis seeking to comprehend its own comprehension in a material milieu that confronts it with exigencies that demand for responses beyond what serial rationality can meet. Thus, an investigation into a dialectical ecological rationality is not an arbitrary project, but a (contingently) necessary moment of dialectical rationality

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in se. How this fits into the value of story and the imagination will become clear as we work toward our conclusion. However, rather than speculatively proposing how we might wield story in the service of ameliorating the effects of our ecological predicament, this chapter focuses on predicament itself, on its serial tendency to reproduce itself. Like Narcissus and Echo in one, the living logic of seriality reveals to us precisely how deep our ecological predicament runs, and leaves us right at the precipice of futures with no definitive solutions; instead, by attuning ourselves to the stranglehold of serial reason itself we can begin to take responsibility for the necessity of story in a different guise—one that will enable us to (for the first time, every time) create earth as a work of art. DOWN TO THE CROSSROADS We are told that we are at a crossroads. Jason Moore warns that “We live at a crossroads in the history of our species—and of planetary life.”10 Jeremy Davies declares, “The world is in the time of transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene.”11 And Matthew Ally, more forcefully yet, declares: “The Holocene is over.”12 But what does it mean to be at a crossroads? In the very least, it implies that we have arrived to some place or some time. It implies that we have been journeying down a path only to find ourselves at a fork in the road. And at this fork, the image of the crossroads is meant to denote that we are now forced to choose which of the diverging paths presented before us we will traverse. In both Moore’s and Davies’s formulations of the crossroads, we are steps from this fork, approaching it while looking back from whence we came and rummaging through our rucksacks for trekking materials to aid us in our decision for where and how to press on. Do we have a compass? A map? GPS? Ally’s formulation is more stark, if not also a tad more dire: we have already diverged from the path; now, we are post Holocenic; now, it may be too late to deliberate; now, we must be always-already transcending. While Ally’s formulation differs from Moore’s and Davies’ slightly, all three present us with the case that we are in a situation that demands resolve. A lengthy quote from Ally explains the stakes of the matter: Consider just a few of the better-known problems. We are already committed to global warming in excess of the 2 degrees Celsius that has been determined, not without controversy, to be the safe limit if we are to avert “catastrophic effects” of climate change. A mere two degrees. Ocean acidification, a direct result of climate change, is raising the pH of sea water everywhere. It has already risen from its historic level of 8.25 to 8.14, a 30% change that is already diminishing

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the capacity of many species of corals to make their skeletons and many species of plankton to make their shells. Coral reefs are a key source of marine biodiversity, and plankton play a critical role in marine foodwebs. If they go extinct, much will change. Speaking of extinction, while experts disagree on the precise extent of biodiversity loss, they do agree that current extinction rates are at a level somewhere between 100 to 1000 times the natural background rate. Hundreds or a thousand: these are numbers we can make experiential sense of; they are separated by an order of magnitude; and in either case and anywhere in between, we are at the beginning of a sixth mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth, a mass extinction that we are causing. According to numerous studies, anywhere from a third to as many as one half of species on Earth could face extinction by mid-century. If it needs to be said, extinction is irrevocable, despite what genetic hackers might be able to do with the remnant DNA of a handful of lost species. Extinction is forever. This is as true of the three to five species that will go extinct today as it is of the tens of thousands that have been lost in the past century. Every minute an amount of forest the size of three football fields is lost, due largely to the expansion of agriculture. And that same agriculture causes the degradation and loss of soil at a rate of something on the order 25 million tons each year, against a topsoil replenishment rate of mere inches per century. Arable land is becoming desert at a rate just under 10 million acres per year.13

As the plaque mounted at Ok reads, “[We] know what is happening.” However, let us indulge in an inversion of the crossroads narrative. Sure, we are aware of the mounting empirical evidence that pieces together bits of information pertaining to the status of ecological viability on this wandering body. And yes, the crossroads image is a type of story that synthesizes this data into (supposedly) manageable variables for us to input into equations as we seek to solve the problem(s). But perhaps we can employ an alternative crossroads story that can aid us in ways beyond the ambit of the algorithmic approach. That is, perhaps we are not at a crossroads calculating how to best mitigate disaster through our cunning analytical skills, but we ought to journey down to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil. As legend has it, guitar virtuoso Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for the opportunity to gain superhuman musical ability. It was the crossroads near Dockery Plantation where Johnson gave up his soul so that he might gain the world. And a world he gained. There is not a single rock musician alive who cannot trace some influence back to Johnson. Johnson’s Faustian deal paid off. Against Christian wisdom, Johnson forsook the afterlife. He rejected the pull of the otherwordly appeals of pastors and saints for apotheosis in the here and now. So, along with Johnson, as we too desire to gain a world, let us travel to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil.

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Bargaining with the devil does not mean signing a contract for eternal torment then in the hopes we might gain fleeting pleasures now. To make a deal with the devil is to choose to ignore the gods of the world that impose their limits and demands upon us. It is to side with an adversarial power in contestation with the hegemon. It is to find that source of excess that is beyond the enclosed sphere of dogma, that in-sists in the more-than of the expressions of the dominant pieties of the day. To make a deal with the devil is to lose the astral selves that have been codified under particular conditions and that carry with them habits of thought, feeling, action. It is to seek new arrangements of subjectivity-in-the-world. This is the adversarial image of the crossroads that is needed to address the ecological predicament—our ecological predicament. For, we are not “at” a crossroads—despite what this image is meant to convey. Rather, we need to venture to the crossroads in order to induce self-comprehension so that praxis might be made translucid to itself in its dialectical overcoming of its serial complicity with the gods of this Earth. So, die to ourselves we must; not in the confessional sense that denies the affirmation of immanent Life, but in order to de-serialize our anti-praxical orientation in the world. The gods of this world can’t and won’t help us. The souls of serialized “men of scarcity” are—even despite the best of intentions at times—incapable of thinking us out of this predicament.14 Therefore, the concerns that undergird this chapter ask: how can we get to the crossroads? do we have the capacity to identify the crossroads? and then once we are there, can we find the productive adversarial power(s) that can enable us to gain a world? These questions are what Sartre’s CDR allows us to begin to investigate. Charting Our Course There is much debate concerning geological periodization.15 At present, we are not going to wade into the terminological debates over how to name a geological epoch. Our concerns are less with terminological specificity than with the undergirding logics that condition how terminological construction happens in the first instance, and further, how terminological debates often get bogged down by focusing too much on logos to the neglect of mythos, pathos, and ethos and how such a narrow focus leads to serial rationality. There is always socio-political meaning imbued into periodization. Deciphering how to name a state shift always occurs from within a serial milieu. There are inherited criteria, methodological restraints, and socio-political pressures that inform the naming process. This means that all lines of demarcation contain worlds within words. Understanding the logic of these significative worlds is what motivates our journey to the crossroads. For our concern is not merely pragmatic but transcendental. Granted, the

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goal is to motivate praxis in its overcoming of the specific material exigencies that confront us in the form of the ongoing ecological predicament, but in order for praxis to engage in such transcending we must make the conditions under which praxis might comprehend itself intelligible. This is not to say that we need to have our theory sorted before we act, as though there is a simple sequential logic that begins with clearly formulated conceptual targets that then issues into adequate actions corresponding with the pre-established theoretical course. Rather, in Sartrean terms, praxis’ self-comprehension is a lived activity of dialectical reason (i.e. praxis-as-totalization) enacting its self-comprehension through its transcending out from and beyond the conditions into which it perpetually finds itself thrown (the meaning of this thrownness and finding will become clearer in the following pages). Therefore, we will leave the debates pertaining to periodization behind in order to cultivate other terrain. The central claim for us is that CDR equips us with tools for making our ecological predicament dialectically intelligible. We are not primarily concerned with prescribing a type of Sartrean ecological political project or ethic. Our concerns are other: the conditions of thinking itself (albeit with qualifications galore pertaining to precisely what “thinking” consists). Thus, our interest in concepts such as “Anthropocene” and “Capitalocene” et al is insofar as they are products of and conditions for thought. This means that our investigation is, in a substantial sense, a transcendental one. That is, what are the conditions under which thought can think freely? Of course, this question is loaded with nested terms, so first we need to define our position in both facing and wielding these terms. This investigation into facing and wielding the nested terms of thought opens us to the value of Sartre’s CDR. It is a text (despite the majority of interpretations) that is preeminently concerned with the conditions of and for Reason.16 Therefore, CDR is a useful and viable resource for an investigation into assortments of thinking that are conditioned by socio-political terminology, namely (as examples) “the Anthropocene” and “the Capitalocene.” As you can hopefully see, the framing of this problem might appear counterintuitive prima facie. To say that “the Anthropocene” or “the Capitalocene” is an assortment of thinking runs counter to how these signifiers are generally tracked, to say nothing of how this all fits into an investigation into Reason. So, in short, for us, they will be granted the status of both conceptual objects (i.e. practico-inert images) and also serial processes of thought. Thus, to think Anthropocenically or Capitalocenically is to think according to the limits and demands established by the practico-inert field that mediates thinking that is thought according to either term respectively. It is, of course, also possible to think according to multiple logics at the same time but to varying degrees of intensity. Our concern will not focus on which term is more apt to describe

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our ecological predicament as much as it is to unveil the constitution of tendencies of thought and to comprehend the resulting outgrowths that flower from their germinal potency. Once we understand the conditions for the growing flora of serial reason, then we can tend to the garden of thought by trimming the weeds to reveal the vital in-sistence of dialectical rationality upon which serial reason nurtures itself. CDR is a valuable resource for political thought of all sub-genres. Thus, using it as material for a political-ecological inquiry equips us in that it sets dialectical reason on course so that we might 1) better identify the serial processes that infect and inform ecological thought and 2) speculatively work toward de-serializing praxis’ engagement with the ecological predicament. Moore values the term “Anthropocene” for bringing the socio-political “into popular awareness.”17 Our investigation into dialectical logic veers slightly. We are examining the intelligibility of “the Anthropocene” (among other epochal designators) as hyperstitional concepts with both serial and dialectical logics. This does not negate any popular practical significance of these terms; in fact, our investigation will buttress the meanings of the popular awareness of the socio-political concerns pertaining to our ecological predicament. But our primary concern is to understand in what ways thought is foreclosed from itself precisely due to the effects of serial reason. Only once the latter is made intelligible will we be able to adequately attune ourselves to the material exigencies that beckon for us to respond accordingly. Comprehending the depths of Infinite Seriality will declare to us that we are thoroughly inhuman, complicit in our own serial un-making, both of subjects and worlds. Therefore, the opportune time to act is always-already passing. This is the time of kairos. Using “kairos” to predicate “seriality,” we will come to see the ecological predicament as a particular expression of the (in) human condition induced by the serial logic of neoliberalism. There will be some jargon used and explained, as CDR is a notoriously difficult text. But as far as this short chapter is able, once we finish, we will have presented a speculative proposal for the value of CDR as a text with far more applicability than is often granted. The following section will spend some time defining the heuristic devices from CDR that are most applicable for this chapter. We will briefly investigate the logic of the practico-inert and the logic of seriality. We assume a cursory familiarity with these broad conceptual abstractions but will present them through a fresh reading of the text, one that eschews the social ontological and normative readings that predominate CDR interpretation. Section 3 will turn to our ecological predicament. Much has been written about this (especially in this volume), so we will not spend time on angles more sufficiently addressed by others. Instead, we will focus on the serial logic of our ecological predicament and the kairotic logic that ensues from it. This

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will lead to the final section of the chapter, section four, which will begin by noting Sartre’s logic of the group in the age of Kairotic Seriality as an imaginative, dispositional orientation that creates itself in its creation of (a) world(s). Then we finish by pointing beyond Sartre to demonstrate that future connections must be made working alongside and productively through the mantle that he lays at our feet. If it is true that our entire socio-economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability, we must investigate not only what to do, but what the conditions are that hamstring us in our habitual (i.e. serial) anti-dialectical inaction. Then, and only then, can we adequately comprehend the sources of our mystification, the sources of the ideological control mechanisms that sate our desires by inducing complicity and affective investment into the very conditions that are causing the crises that we know to be dire. This is what CDR enables us to begin to investigate. It opens us up to the structural and historical conditions of the (in)human predicament that bind us in our repetitive and mimetic serial tendencies. It heightens that predicament and calls us to a sense of awareness that it is always the opportune moment, that now is kairos, and it pricks our senses so that thought might be, perhaps for the first time (a first time that repeats with every new iteration), sparked. SARTREAN (RE)FORMULATIONS The Logic of the Practico-Inert: InteriorizationExteriorization and Totalization To understand Sartre’s conceptual elaboration of “seriality” it is paramount to first grasp the material mediations that induce serial reason. Althusser once (critically) remarked that Sartre was “the philosopher of mediation par excellence.”18 This may be so. How Sartre develops his ultimate theory of mediation takes a decidedly materialist turn by the time he pens CDR. This is because he takes his relational phenomenological ontology and grounds it in a dialectical theory of ternary relations. That is, thirds become the supplement to his earlier pessimistic investigations into inter-subjective relations. We might say, without simplifying too much for rhetorical effect, that from Being and Nothingness (BN) to CDR, Sartre shifts from pessimistic concerns regarding the phenomenological experience (le vécu) of inter-subjective relations, to optimistic renderings of the conditions for intra-subjective relations. However, in order to understand these ternary intra-subjective relations, Sartre explores the logic of the material exigencies that impose the limits and demands that constitute subjective formation in serial terms. This logic is the logic of the practico-inert.19

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There is a real sense in which matter, as objectified praxis, takes from individuals their “temperature” (la chaud).20 This temperature could also be called their impetus, their vitality. And as such, it pacifies bodies by making them inert in relation to external inertia, as the former exteriorizes itself as an inert object to couple itself with the instrument. In this sense, there is a “transubstantiation” between matter and praxis, a chassé-croisé where praxis takes on the inhuman inertia of matter at the same time that matter takes on the vitality of praxis. This cross contamination results in the construction of the practico-inert field when other transubstantiated praxis-inertias are synthesized into a networked totality. Therefore, the practico-inert field is replete with indefinite amounts, intensities, and variations of la chaud. As Elizabeth Butterfield states, “[Unlike] being-in-itself, the practico-inert is not separate from free human praxis—just the opposite: the practico-inert bears the marks of praxis through and through, as it is invested with human meanings.”21 It is paramount, therefore, that we understand that and how the practico-inert field becomes the fundamental realm of sociality for Sartre.22 Inhuman actors, in milieux of scarcity, are “united” through mediatory relations conditioned by the practico-inert field. At the same time, matter is mediated by the praxical relations of inhuman actors as they seek to overtake (dépassement) their present statut in aiming toward future possibilities. In this future-oriented activity, praxis interiorizes the practico-inert situation, appropriates it, makes it oneʼs own (“freely”), and then re-exteriorizes it through objectification. This new objectification becomes the new practico-inert statut that will in turn be re-interiorized by praxis and subsequently re-exteriorized. This division between interiorization and exteriorization must be understood as an abstract delineation, for in practice, the activity takes place simultaneously at varying velocities of appropriation and flight. As such, to speak of it as though it were a temporal, sequential process is a metaphorical device to establish the internal logic of totalization. There is another element, however, that we need to grasp at this point: the resuscitating power of the interiorization of totalization. That is, not only does worked matter have the power to mineralize the vitality of praxis and then synthesize it into the practico-inert field, but praxis, in the same totalizing movement, breathes life into the stored praxis in the practico-inert field. The reason we can speak of it as coming to life is because the reader of a book, for example, appropriates the mineralized praxis of the author as a moment of her praxis (which itself is life), thus resuscitating the inert praxis in a new mode, a mode that now belongs to the praxis (i.e. life) of the reader—this is why Sartre refers to it as practico-inert. When this is done, counter-finality has been introduced, for even if the author’s intended goal was to have the piece written and read, one’s specific interiorization of the written piece as a moment of totalization is unique to her project, and as such, is counter-final to the ends of the original praxis-project. Thus, there is

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both life and death, both human and inhuman in totalization at every step. It is only in the abstract that we can separate these “moments” of the dialectic and speak of them as moments of totalization; in reality, they occur simultaneously as shifting variations of intensity. Thus, once the practico-inert is understood as both practico and inert, its logic as the basic mediator of social relations becomes useful. Next, we explore the two ways the practico-inert functions as a mediator: 1) in exigency and 2) in seriality. The former creates the conditions for the latter; the practico-inert is the logic that grounds both and reveals their intelligibility; and the entire logical chain is what threatens social existence with perpetual alienation. The Logic of the Practico-Inert: Need and Exigency Sartre acknowledges the layers of complexity that spiral around and through his unfolding investigation when he notes in the early pages of CDR that his deployment of the basic notion of “need” is “ignoring for the moment the collective constraints” that define concrete need in its historical, material reality.23 The reason he finds this approach valid is that it first establishes the fundamental logic that governs his understanding of need. And this logic is that of ethical motivation. That is, need is the basic cry of an organic subject that acts and moves in a milieu of scarcity, overcoming its present situation in seeking to satisfy a perceived lack. This is the basic (organic) motivation of praxis: to transcend the present statut, in aiming toward a future-not yetrealized, in order to satisfy a need. It is this organic tendency that transfigures his earlier phenomenological understanding of intentionality. Quoting Butterfield, “[The] experience of needs leads us to constitute the world as a place in which something must be done—or, morally speaking, in which something ought to be done . . . ʻtrue moralityʼ arises from the most fundamental human needs, and makes progress toward an ideal future of ʻintegral humanity.ʼ”24 Therefore, what is most useful in Sartreʼs formal investigation into organic subjectivity produced from a basic conception of need is that there is an indomitable ethical spirit at the core of the (in) human condition. That said, this so-called ethical spirit is rendered effectively impotent. It is buried under layers of alienation. The reason this ethical spirit is impotent is because of the mediatory particularities of the practico-inert field. If history werenʼt lived under conditions of scarcity, and if relations between humans werenʼt mediated by the practico-inert field, it would be possible to speak more fruitfully about a free ethical spirit in which human actors could seek ethical ends. However, because of the de facto state of affairs,25 there are demands that are placed upon (in) humanity that determine the conditions of their actions. This is what is meant by exigency.

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There are two ways the practico-inert functions as a mediator. The first of these ways is exigency. For Sartre, we must understand how praxis is subordinated to the field of exigencies. This field presents the demands placed upon praxis that predestine the possibilities for the (in) human in any given situation. As he states, [In] so far as [one] is dominated by matter, his activity is no longer directly derived from need, although this remains its fundamental basis: it is occasioned in him, from the outside, by worked matter, the practical exigency of the inanimate object. In other words, the object designates its man as one who is expected to behave in a certain way [emphasis added].26

Let us especially reflect on the clauses “occasioned in him” and “expected to behave.” In a very simple sense, these can be understood in terms of pure functionality. An object has a limited array of options for its use. These options are imposed on a potential user and ultimately dictate the way(s) in which the user can operate with the object. Of course, the user can always create new ways of using the object—this is the freedom of praxis. However, there is an inscribed set of parameters that impinge upon the freedom of the user. Objects, of course, impose varying strengths of varying demands. These options are the result of manifold possibilities: size, quantity, legal parameters, cultural expectations, habits of personal pleasure, etc. But the important point, for Sartre, is that these exigencies exist 1) as a limit, 2) as a demand and that 3) these limits and demands are themselves interiorized by praxis in totalization. This is how scarcity is interiorized through the mediatory role of the practico-inert. The human fact of scarcity, introduced through the limits and demands of counter-final significatory exigencies, is taken up as part of one’s praxis-project in totalization. With every act of interiorization exteriorization, new exigencies are inscribed into the object as the limits and demands it enforces are perpetually modified. In Sartre’s words, individuals “interiorise the exigency of matter and re exteriorise it as the exigency of man.”27 This must not be taken as dire hopelessness. According to Thomas Flynn, although it is true that exigency “restricts the effective choices which lie open to . . . praxis,” it is also the case that exigencies “generate solidarity as they convey responsibility”28—again, an appeal to the ethical spirit. With this, Flynn introduces both a foreclosure and a disclosure of freedom within the logic of exigency. It has a bivalent nature. It both limits freedom by placing demands upon praxis, and also calls forth to praxis, beckoning it to come—to transcend oneʼs present statut in solidarity with those who are experiencing the common demands of the practico-inert field. Thus, without jumping too far ahead, but also hinting at the future of this unfolding investigation, it might be accurate to say that there are serial exigencies and free exigencies.

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However, in order to firmly ground these two modes of exigency, it will be crucial to develop respective logics based on a solid understanding of the depths of seriality and the conditions of freedom in response to seriality. To that end, it is first necessary to investigate the formal nature of exigency itself. That is, why is it that exigency demands? The Logic of the Practico-Inert: The Return of Stolen Praxis In an insightful article, Christopher Turner expounds this very problematic. Illuminating a fact that is rarely discussed in the literature, Turner states that it is the return of stolen praxis itself that confronts praxis in a new situation of exigence. He poignantly notes, [If] the matter that acts against the praxis of the human being is matter that has been acted upon by the human being and transformed, and if in this praxis matter has been invested with its efficaciousness by being stamped by human aims, then what really opposes human praxis is not so much matter itself, not even ʻprocessed matter,ʼ but rather human praxis itself through matter.29

Although a simple enough observation, the implications are vast and foundational for understanding the logic of exigency (and subsequently seriality) which is summed up by Sartre in this pithy quote: “Man is mediated by things to the extent that things are mediated by man.”30 For Sartre, as for Turner as well, inscribed in the matter that mediates “man” is the multiplicity of humanity. This is not an eisegetical imposition. Rather, as has been argued elsewhere,31 Sartre rejects the notion of the individual subject in CDR. In his efforts to construct a dialectical theory of “practical ensembles,” we must understand l’homme here as referring to humanity. This does not mean that there is no room for any discussion of individual praxis. Rather, what it implies is that all individual praxis is simultaneously singular and multiple. Singular in its concrete particularity as a contracted moment of totalization, and multiple in its interiorization-exteriorization of the molecular dispersal through the practico-inert field. Therefore, worked matter becomes an alienating mediatory concept (i.e. the practico-inert) because of the presence-absence of the multiplicity of others embedded in it. In this sense, we can speak of the practico-inert as a Sartrean “image.”32 It is a presentabsence of the multiplicity of others. And like the image, it is impoverished as a totality. It is only when awakened by praxis that it becomes excessive, as free praxis appropriates the totality, brings to life the inert-praxis, and tends toward future possibles.

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Seeking to shore up our explanation of the logic of exigency as the return of stolen praxis, let us remark that as the past praxis of others is turned against new praxes in the process of totalization through the limits and demands imposed by the practico-inert field, the exigent demands become, at once, more clearly intelligible and simultaneously shadowed. The demands become clear in that their source has been identified: humanity. But this clarity is muddied by sheer complexity. For, this is more than a simple understanding of counter-finality. Yes, in one sense, the return of stolen praxis is understood as being counter-final. However, this haunting by past praxis means that the multiplicity that confronts praxis in the practico-inert field that conditions and mediates social life is an infinite molecular dispersal of the praxis of others. Therefore, what confronts praxis in each moment of totalization is the indefinite scope of past praxis itself. As Christina Howells succinctly states, “Human alienation and lack of individual control over history arise not because man is not making history but because he is not making it alone.”33 Therefore, the logic of the practico-inert as conditioned by exigency has been made intelligible: it is precisely the return of stolen praxis that confronts praxis as a multiplicity, setting infinite limits and making infinite demands as praxis both interiorizes and overcomes the molecular dispersal of mineralized praxis saturated in a milieu of scarcity. That said, the now intelligible logic of the practico-inert only highlights the penultimate step in our articulation of the broader synthetic logic of serial alienation. The final step is to excavate a concept that has not received its due treatment in CDR scholarship—seriality.34 Seriality is the formal, synthetic notion that encapsulates scarcity, need, worked-matter, the practico-inert, and exigency in one. The Logic of Seriality There is a Trinitarian logic at work in Sartreʼs notion of seriality. Although the qualifiers explored here are not Sartre’s, we find their value in articulating the interpenetrating logics of the variegating experiences within mediated social life under the conditions framed by the practico-inert field. These qualifiers are “diachronic,” “synchronic,” and “Kairotic.” Diachronic and synchronic seriality describe the variations within the alienating social force that Sartre singularly refers to as “seriality.” Kairotic Seriality refers to Sartre’s analysis of this history, our history, as an age of seriality and declares the impossibility of living under serial conditions any further. It both describes the Impossible and heralds the opportune moment to overcome our predicament(s). The perichoretic relationship between the diachronic, synchronic, and Kairotic ensure that violent abstraction does not deter the investigation into the formal conditions of concrete, material existence. Of course, Sartre is still wont to utilize abstraction for the purpose of building his dialectical

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argument. However, it bears to be repeated until it becomes a mainstay in Sartre studies: CDR’s concern with abstraction is insofar as it brings the reader from the simple to the complex, with the concepts themselves becoming more complex as the investigation unfolds. Thus, it is crucial that we examine seriality in each of its levels of conceptual abstraction, enfolding them into one another, as each stage of the investigation progresses. In the end, the logic of seriality will reveal a robust theory of alienated social existence that will give insight into the depths of the (in)human predicament more broadly and of our ecological predicament more specifically. The use of “predicament” follows William Connollyʼs prompting in A World of Becoming. As he states, “A predicament is a situation lived and felt from the inside. It is also something you seek strategies to ameliorate or rise above.”35 Our use of this term is deliberate in that it provides a clear definition of the experience of living life in Kairotic Seriality as we seek to ameliorate the serial symptoms by addressing the fundamental logic that self-perpetuates our predicament. This section will be a brief flyover of notions that themselves are quite complex. Thus, we are exchanging depth of analysis for simplicity for the sake of grounding a foray into a Sartrean political ecology, where seriality illuminates the logic of our ecological predicament in a way that 1) heightens our awareness of our situation (“from the inside”) and that 2) signals to paths of amelioration and transcending. Diachronic seriality is the most basic form of the logic of seriality. It is understood as sequential and horizontal. And it produces the model of the inhuman gathering that Sartre calls the collective. According to Nik Farrell Fox, “[Collectives] are not substances but a set of ongoing practical relations between individuals.”36 They are understood as fleeting unities that emerge through temporal succession depending on the collective object around which a particular group of persons is united. So collectives form and reform based on the external object that unites them as a series. However, this object is understood as an “index of separation.”37 In other words, it imposes serial exigency upon the members of the collective. In this way, Sartre insists that the collective is “anti-dialectical.”38 Diachronic seriality is best articulated with an example. Sartre is at his best when he mixes concrete example with narrative, all for the purpose of elaborating conceptual abstractions. Thus, let us look to the “bus queue.” In the bus queue, individuals are united by the collective object: the bus. Each has a place in the queue, a particular number that defines this person by a quantity in relation to every Other. Each person, therefore, is an Other to every other Other. Because there are a limited number of seats (scarcity), there is a conflictual relation between the members of the collective. And because each person is a mere quantity, each is replaceable by another number. Therefore, in relation to the collective object, as united in flight under these particular

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sequential conditions, the individuals are impotent. Their actions are constrained by the limits and demands established by the logic of the series. According to Flynn, collective objects “keep serial individuals apart under the pretext of unifying them [in a horizontal inhuman relationship called] ʻrecurrence.ʼ”39 This recurrence infects the individuals across the collective and creates a false sense of solidarity. They feel as though they are “in this together.” This false unity is what Sartre calls their “unit-being” or their “identity.”40 Identity, therefore, is ultimately an alienating self-imposition whereby members of a collective are united in alterity by an external object that limits their freedom by imposing exigency upon them. They, in turn, interiorize this exigency and become cogs in the diachronic serial wheel of recurrence. What is more, it bears noting that the logic of the series is produced in advance of any particular individuals arriving to enter into it in a given moment (as the aggregate of past praxis turned practico-inert). One then “freely” enters into the series by “queueing” (in the bus example) and as such self-serializes oneself as one “actualises his being-outside-himself as a reality shared by several people and which already exists, and awaits him, by means of an inert practice, denoted by instrumentality, whose meaning is that it integrates him into an ordered multiplicity by assigning him a place in a prefabricated reality.”41 Therefore, the logic of diachronic seriality should start to become apparent. Individuals are united externally by practico-inert objects. A collective is formed. The members of the collective are marked by competition, alterity, and inessentiality. Individuals enter in and out of various prefabricated series in temporal succession; some of which are more basic than others. These serial conditions are interiorized and exteriorized in a process of micrototalization. And the result of all this is that the passive activity of the series (both the individual members of the series and the series in its fleeting unity) is driven by destiny. That is, the basic logic of diachronic seriality reveals the foundational fact that life under serial conditions is not free—but predestined. In Sartre’s words, “[Destiny] is an irresistible movement [that] draws or impels the ensemble toward a prefigurative future which realizes itself through it.”42 Again, we see the logic of the practico-inert and its exigency as foundational in the formation of the collective. The latter is formed as a fleeting unity, through the compulsion imposed by the collective object, that establishes limits and demands on the collective, and then introduces the basic social experiences of competition, alterity, and inessentiality. Synchronic seriality is related but has unique characteristics that deserve quick attention. Let us return to the bus queue. The members of the bus queue are not only directly gathered in relation to the collective object in their diachronic experience, but they are also united (fleetingly) to others within the broader public transportation system. Thus, diachronic seriality takes place

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both directly (in relation to presence) and indirectly (in relation to varying degrees of absence). In this sense, not only are the individuals within a given collective serialized, but the collective itself is serialized, as it is part of a larger diachronic serial process. Oneʼs place in a particular queue is further dependent on the other individuals in other collectives that are united by the collective object—the bus on this particular route. Therefore, scarcity is magnified in a broader milieu. This scarce bus-milieu becomes a field of indeterminacy. There is no way of knowing how busy it is, or how busy it will be, at various points along the route. Competition becomes intensified as quantity increases across temporal zones. Interchangeability magnifies as the route is enlarged to include greater density of the population. And inessentiality becomes more embedded as the number of potential replacements is increased. All of this leads to a system of alterity writ large. Synchronically, oneʼs place in the bus queue is part of a massive economic, civic, political, and cultural machine. Not only are individuals and collectives in a particular queue united with others in a large lateral relation by collective objects, but each individual, each collective, and the aggregate of them all, along a particular route, throughout a particular day, and over the course of the life of the public transport system, also share a deeper “identity” as members of a systemic institutional logic. The collective object (ex. the bus) is itself a particular appendage of a large complex body of socio-economic relations. Other appendages include (but are by no means limited to): the other buses on the same route; other buses on the various intersecting and parallel routes; the management team who draws the routes; the city planners and legislators who approve the routes and determine the areas that are best suited for service; the commercial lenders who provide the business loans for the transport company; the banks who support the lenders; the civic authorities who determine subsidies for the transport company providing a public service; the insurance company that covers the corporation in case of accident and injury—examining the tangled web of structural relations continues ad infinitum. The point is this: there is a synchronic—i.e., structural—component that needs to be understood under conditions of seriality as integral to the experience of social life. This component is the synchronic logic of seriality. The Kairotic logic of seriality is not a term that appears in CDR, but fits well with our desire to expose the depths of our predicament and to signal ways beyond it. Our use of “kairos” derives from various theological, political, and philosophical sources.43 In short, it designates the opportune moment to act. As Janet Atwill writes, “Kairos signifies, on the one hand, the exact or critical time, season, opportunity, but it can also mean advantage, profit.” She continues, “In mythic accounts . . . the opportune moment may be a matter of waiting for a god to fall asleep or turn his back.”44 It is this notion of the opportune moment when a god falls asleep or turns his back that serves us

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quite well in thinking about our journey to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil. Although, it is not enough to simply set out toward “the” crossroads. After all, which crossroads do we attend? Which devil offers the best deal? And further, how can we find the way? Sartre calls the total field of seriality “Earth.” It is the “Elsewhere of all Elsewheres,” or even better “the series of all series of series,” which he says will “either crush me or ensnare me.”45 There is a hint of irony in referring to the total field of seriality as “Earth,” but only in the sense that it recalls feelings of absurdity. Sartreʼs point is that life on Earth is lived in paralysis, practical impotence. In his words, “[All] men are slaves in so far as their life unfolds in the practico-inert.”46 Freedom, then, in this context, is a pipe dream. It has nothing to do with any possibility of “freedom of choice.” Rather, freedom under Kairotic Serial conditions is only “the necessity of living these constraints in the form of exigencies which must be fulfilled by a praxis.”47 Therefore, Kairotic Seriality is the name we give to the situation in which we make our world, as “Earth,” that is “the series of all series of series.” As predestined serialized inhumans, our activities of world-making are absurd insofar as they are induced by the logic of seriality. The result is an age of seriality—Kairotic Seriality. The extent of our predicament precludes romanticized gestures toward liberation without wrestling with the pervasive contamination of our own self-inflicted complicity in seriality’s reproduction. As we live in and according to the logic of Kairotic Seriality, we become constituted as inhuman agents, infected by serial rationality—which means serial thoughts, feelings, and actions. Thus, all our striving to escape alienation only further entrenches us within its sticky webs, insofar as we live according to this serial logic. This is not the promised optimistic take on intra-subjective relations that moves away from the pessimism of Sartre’s early inter-subjective conflictual writings. But in order to understand the conditions of freedom, it becomes necessary to truly understand the extent of limits and demands imposed by the practico-inert field(s) upon us that induce serial rationality and which we become complicit participants in reproducing. This is the first moment of the logic of Kairotic Seriality. The next beat in this symphonic abstraction is to understand how Kairotic Seriality signals that it is always the opportune moment to act. That is, it is always kairos. There is always a god falling asleep or turning his back. Perhaps, we might even follow Nietzsche and declare the death of god, only to ensure we don’t ignore the cast shadow of this fallen deity that haunts us and dictates how much of life is lived as though his watchful eye were still judging and charting our courses. Regardless if he is asleep, distracted, or dead, the point is that it is always opportune; we mustn’t wait for the moment of crisis to show itself as though it might reveal to us the Real of

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the predicament. For, as serial inhumans complicit in our world-making and self constitution as anti-praxical subjects, we are never not churning out situations of exigence that demand responses. We are in the perpetual condition of Babel, constructing towers to reach the heights of the heavens so that we might escape our situations, only to find that the higher we build, the more resources we accumulate, and the more bodies we employ toward this collective goal, the more extensively fragile our predicament becomes. It is always the age of seriality; and we are creating it. OUR ECOLOGICAL PREDICAMENT When we speak of Kairotic Seriality in the context of epochal transition, betwixt as we are between the Holocene, late-Holocene, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene et al, the point is not to hunker down in our terminological silo of choice regarding which moniker most accurately and analytically describes the predicament. If we are to learn from Sartre’s dialectical investigation, then we must not become bogged down in analytical debates relating externally related variables to one another as though we are formulating an algorithm to solve the problem of the object that we are seeking to manage. Such an approach would only reproduce an analytical rationality, which—despite scientistic claims to the contrary—can only further enclose itself within the serial Babelian tendency noted at the close of the previous section. A dialectical orientation posits no subject-object distinction; nor does it presume that there is a criteriological or methodological approach immune from seriality’s contaminating inducements; and certainly there is no sense in which dialectical reason views the (in)human as separate from the worlds of which it is an essential constructor. This is why we must posit our situation as our ecological predicament and emphasize how this differs from the more abstracted notion of “the” ecological predicament. We must own up to the integral role we have in both constituting and facing our predicament(s). It is a product of our hands. We are complicit in its construction. We cannot outsource the blame to capitalists or to capitalism or to the rich or elites as though these bogeyman immune us via a friend/enemy distinction. We are all complicit. Granted, some to more efficient and material effect than others.48 But far too often the discourse on the value of the signifier “Capitalocene” (to take one example) is used as a way to abstract in two ways: the first is by making capitalism itself an aberration (that ubiquitous tendency of the left in general); and the second issues from it by then making the ecological predicament an object that is distinct from our subjectivity. It is “the” ecological predicament that does not belong

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to us. It exists “there” in Reality. It is the fault of them. But we are the pure. We desire sustainability, green investment, localism, organicism, steady state, de-growth, de-carbonization, de-colonization, etc. We are the true believers of liberation who never really believed the dogma of the status quo but were forced exogenously via top down mechanisms to participate in its liturgy. And now “the Earth” groans. Instead of this immunizing Schmittianism, a Sartrean take would never allow us to escape the scope of serializing complicity. We have made and continue to make our predicament(s). And to own up to it is to face our responsibility in the choices we make—and to attune ourselves to those we don’t—both sins of commission and omission matter here. This is our ecological predicament. Despite the varying degrees of intensity of the material and efficient causes that are externalized into the practico-inert field that set the path-dependencies that condition our serial complicity, we must assume our place as creators of worlds that we don’t always think we desire. For the logic of Anthropocenic Kairotic Seriality49 perpetuates like the Holy Spirit. It hovers over the face of the dark and undifferentiated in order to constitute loci where it can actualize the logic of the master signifier it represents. Once actualized, this power breathes a type of anti-dialectical “vitality” into the earth, creating networks of serialized relations between what we call human and non-human. For those like Jeremy Davies, naming the Anthropocene has a poetic value, one that provides a way of seeing the predicament.50 He favorably quotes Don McKay who exclaims: “All poets take naming seriously” . . . the term Anthropocene creates “an entry point into deep time.”51 This entry into deep time is Davies’ political solution to the problem. He presumes an analytical orientation to an ecological predicament, one that can understand “the crisis” by becoming aware of our deep connection to geological time. Once so attuned, we “gain the gift of de-familiarization, becoming other to ourselves, one expression of the ever-evolving planet. Inhabiting deep time imaginatively, we give up mastery and gain mutuality.”52 But this Heideggarian connection to the elemental bears the marks of a type of ontological nostalgia, one that seeks to re-connect with the lost past of Being (or with the Reality of our place in time). There is something romantically appealing about the experience of the uncanniness of becoming aware of our place in a world that is excessively more than what we tend to allow ourselves to imagine. But why would such an attunement lead to productive results rather than the nauseating absurdity that Sartre details in his most famous of novels? Or, in Deleuzian-Guattarian terms, how can we be sure that deterritorialization will not be easily reterritorialized by the ideological control mechanisms of serial machines? And maybe even more problematically, what if this desire for deep ecological rootedness is mediated by a practico-inert image of “Earth” that is

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in reality an “Elsewhere of all Elsewheres” that itself sets limits and demands through serializing thoughts, feelings, and actions? As Moore insightfully reminds us, “[It] is instructive to recall the geocultural history of ‘the environment’ as a real abstraction, and as a hegemonic imaginary.”53 Again, how can we be sure that our comprehension of our ecological predicament is translucid if our reason is mediated by the return of stolen praxis in the form of practico-inert images? Matthew Ally claims that “we have made aliens of ourselves.”54 Our manner of inhabitation as serial inhumans is a narcissistic and mimetic habit of anti-world creation whereby we self-alienate (in both the Sartrean sense of seriality and in Ally’s sense of being alien). We create ourselves and our worlds with alien hands. We are alienated aliens alienating ourselves and our worlds. The result is that our ecological predicament attests to an Impossible situation, one that exiles us and re-exiles us as a type of diasporic collective (remember Sartre’s distinct use of “collective”). We are perpetually displaced from ourselves, from the world we wish we inhabited and from the images of ourselves that we tout with empty words. As much as we are inhuman, so too are we un-inhabitants. In a way, we are perpetually homeless; or perhaps better, we are constructing conditions that are precisely unhomely. The logic of Kairotic Seriality reveals that our inhumanity produces serial reason that induces anti-dialectical anti-world building, the result of which is that we self-serialize and self-displace through the construction of worlds that are never “ours”; not ours in a possessive sense, as though we might own these worlds, but “ours” in the sense of belonging. Kairotic Seriality illuminates how we are all an alienated and diasporic people. We claim we are human. We define ourselves as earth-dwellers. But we lie to ourselves and others, and to the earth itself; for, we are not yet human nor earth dwellers. But perhaps one day we will be. CONCLUSION: THE GROUP AND GOING BEYOND SARTRE However, so as to not leave you, precious readers, with a sense that a Sartrean political ecology is thoroughly pessimistic, as his detractors no doubt gleefully pronounce, the final speculative hint of any investigation into the logic of Kairotic Seriality is to signal to something which is always excessive of seriality’s powers of enclosure. This excessive beyond is articulated in Sartre’s logic of the group. If “bad faith” characterized the inter-individual Sartrean stopgap, then seriality is the intra-individual expansion of bad faith as ubiquitous and de facto as a constitutive power. And as the early Sartre heralded the unwavering freedom of the for-itself despite the phenomenological

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tendency toward bad faith in the social realm, so too does his commitment to actual freedom (not merely possible) have a central role despite the serializing reproduction of predicaments in his later Marxian turn. Much has been written about the group. Thinkers as diverse as Deleuze & Guattari and Badiou55 both draw inspiration for their evental logics inspired by Sartre’s musings on the apocalypse and group-in-fusion. But rather than suggest ways to actualize the logic of the group in our unfolding lives, we leave you with a pricked chord that will hopefully reverberate into an incitation of thought to expand this present investigation into our ecological predicament; thus, we must always be thinking beyond Sartre. This is what he would have wanted; not to be wedded to a hero for inspiration, for this would only reproduce the being of “Jean-Paul Sartre” as a practico-inert image that would induce a serial Sartreanism. But to carry on the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter, so to speak. In his own words, he details his hope for CDR as a project: “[To] define the problem, by means of provisional remarks which are there to be challenged and modified, and if they give rise to a discussion and if, as would be best, this discussion is carried on collectively in working groups, then I shall be satisfied.”56 So to leave us with a final provocation and to wrap things around to where we started, to herald the Kairotic Seriality of our ecological predicament is a way to demand the end of Earth as the Other-Elsewhere. It is a call for the creation of new earths. Not new frontiers for colonization and as sites of diasporic inhumanity, but a call for new images, ones released from the serial tendencies of Earth. But to prescribe paths toward that end under the conditions of Kairotic Seriality is no guarantee that we will reach the desired ends. We must be vigilant pertaining to our own complicity with the inhuman world-making that constitutes our ecological predicament. And further, we must be aware of the mystifying serial forms of rationality that infect even our most noble of intentions. This is why we must go down to the crossroads. We must seek adversaries with whom we can ally in contestation to the serial gods of Earth. We must inventively imagine ways to bind humans-in-becoming and other earthen voices together beyond the fleeting unities induced by serial rationality. As Donna Haraway offers: “In passion and action, detachment and attachment, this is what I call cultivating response-ability; that is also collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices.”57 An “ecology of practices” with passion and action, detachment and attachment as we cultivate response . . . ability. Yes, how do we become able to respond under Kairotic Seriality when all Life is always a potential convert for assetization, capitalization, commodification, and the like? How can we cultivate myriad practices that de-serialize Earth in the construction of new earths, new humans, new more-than humans, and other-than-humans? In what would consist a project of creating earths as works of art?

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This is what we must ponder as we come to grips with our ecological predicament. Ally shines his perspicuous light on the source of our failure and reveals the well from which novel springs might flow: “[Our] real folly is rooted in the cumulative effect of many small failures of imagination, the aggregate result of the geoextractivist ethos spread across the spectrum of daily conducts and historical practices.”58 This is another way of synthesizing the argument of the above: our ecological predicament is a cumulative and cumulating product of our folly. Our imaginations our seared by the fires of Kairotic Seriality. The stories we tell, the strategies we map, the formulas we compose—they lack dialectical imagination. This does not mean we fail to “dream big” or that we ought to bathe in Utopian fancy. For this still assumes too much; it is an assessment derived from a practico-inert field that induces reasoning about what imagining might be. Instead, we need to imagine what imagining can do. We need to feel our complicity in constructing Earth as the Elsewhere of all Elsewheres and then lose ourselves in order to gain ourselves. We must make deals with devils in order to gain worlds. Let us venture to the crossroads! BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington (2017). Althusser, Louis et al. Lire le capital. 2 vols. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Atwill, Janet. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005. Badiou, Alain. Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009. Butterfield, Elizabeth. Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012. Connolly, William. A World of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1988.

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Flynn, Thomas. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Fox, Nik Farrell. The New Sartre: Explorations in Postmodernism. London: Continuum, 2003. Haraway, Donna. “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Edited by Jason W. Moore. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. Howells, Christina. Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Crisis.” Translated by Michaela Richter. Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 67, Number 2 (April, 2006): 357–400. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Moore, Jason W. “Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Edited by Jason W. Moore. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. Moore, Jason W. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Edited by Jason W. Moore. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. Moore, Jason W. “Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis.” In Political Economy of the World-System (Pews News). By American Sociological Association. Spring 2006. Power, Nina. “From Theoretical Antihumanism to Practical Humanism: The Political Subject in Sartre, Althusser and Badiou.” PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. Princen, Thomas. Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated and Edited by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One. Edited by Jonathan Ree. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith London: Verso, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge, 2004. Smidt, Austin Hayden. Sartre, Imagination, and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019. Srnicek, Nick, and Williams, Alex. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso, 2015. Turner, Christopher. “The Return of Stolen Praxis: Counter-finality in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.” Sartre Studies International, Vol. 20, Number 1 (2014): 36–44.

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NOTES 1. Donna Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, PM Press, 2016), 40. 2. Jason Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, PM Press, 2016), 1. 3. The Guardian, “Icelandic Memorial Warns Future: ‘Only you lnow if we saved glaciers’” July 22, 2019.  https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/environment​/2019​/jul​/22​/ memorial​-to​-mark​-icelandic​-glacier​-lost​-to​-climate​-crisis, accessed 7/15/22. 4. “[A] mining economy creates waste, unlike nature’s economy where, in ecological communities, one organism’s excretion is another’s nutrient,” quoted from Thomas Princen, Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2010), 92. 5. Arguing for both a micro- and macro-political outlook within leftist politics, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams suggest that, “[Progress] must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiments into a historical force that brings the future into existence,” from Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London, Verso, 2015), 50. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, ed, Jonathan Ree, trans, Alan Sheridan-Smith (London, Verso, 2004), 270–76. 7. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 295. 8. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 267. 9. See, for instance, Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (New York, Routledge, 1989) and Haraway “Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others,” in Beyond the Cyborg, ed Margaret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 2013). 10. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 78. 11. Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland, University of California Press, 2016), 194. 12. Matthew Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge, (Lanham, Maryland, Lexington, 2017), 269. 13. Ally, Ecology and Existence, 266. 14. Austin Hayden Smidt, Sartre, Imagination, and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art (London, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019), 76–78. 15. For readers interested in the debates pertaining to stratigraphic periodization, see Davies. 16. For an extended investigation into Critique of Dialectical Reason interpretation, see Smidt, ch. 2. 17. Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” 2. 18. Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar and Roger Establet, Lire le capitale, 2 vols. (Paris François Maspero, 1965), II: 98.

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19. Most of this section is reproduced from chapters 3 and 4 of Smidt, 2019 with generous permissions from Rowman & Littlefield International. 20. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 169. 21. Elizabeth Butterfield, Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 2012), 28. 22. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 318. 23. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 80. 24. Butterfield, Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism, 34. 25. It is crucial to note that this state of affairs is contingently necessary. He is not making a de jure argument or an argument from metaphysical necessity. Rather, the ontological character Sartre deploys is one of becoming and necessity. Thus, it could have been otherwise, and it may be otherwise; however, it is not. Living in and with that contingently necessary relational field is our facticity. 26. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 186. 27. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 190–91. 28. Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), 82–83. 29. Christopher Turner, “The Return of Stolen Praxis: Counter-finality in Sartreʼs Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Sartre Studies International, Vol. 20, Number 1 (2014): 39. 30. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 88. 31. Smidt, Sartre, Imagination, and Dialectical Reason, chapter 2. 32. See Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans., Jonathan Webber, (London, Routledge, 2004) and Smidt, chapter 6. 33. Christina Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102. 34. For a deep elaboration of “seriality,” see Smidt, chapter 4. 35. William Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011), 97. 36. Nik Farrell Fox, The New Sartre: Explorations in Postmodernism, (London, Continuum, 2003), 72. 37. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 288. 38. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 713. 39. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 98. 40. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 259. 41. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 265. 42. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 551. 43. Janet Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998); Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007); Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” trans. Michaela Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol 67, no. 2 Apr (2006); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Mark 1:14. 44. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed, 57.

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45. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 324. 46. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 331. 47. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 326. 48. To be fair, there are minority outliers who ought not feel the guilt of our collective ecological debt. I’m thinking particularly of peasant and indigenous communities whose very way of living may actually provide us with modes of living that exist beyond the mimetic serial reproduction of Kairotic Seriality. 49. Insert whatever predicating term you find more to your taste instead of “Anthropocenic.” 50. Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 193. 51. Davies, 11, quoted from Don McKay, “Edicaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a reader of deep time,” in Making the Geologic Now, ed. Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (New York, Punctum, 2013), 46–54 (53). 52. Davies, 11, quoted from Don McKay, “Edicaran and Anthropocene.” 53. Jason W. Moore, “Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Political Economy of the World-System (Pews News), by American Sociological Association, Spring (2006), 2. 54. Ally, Ecology and Existence, 289. 55. See Smidt, Sartre, Imagination, and Dialectical Reason, chapter 5 and Nina Power, “From Theoretical Antihumanism to Practical Humanism The Political Subject in Sartre, Althusser and Badiou.” PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2007,” in which she quotes an interview where Badiou states, “I must say that in effect [my] notion of event finds its genesis . . . in the descriptions of the group-in-fusion, and particularly all the episodes of the French Revolution interpreted by Sartre in this way.” 56. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 41. 57. Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” 38. 58. Ally, Ecology and Existence, 323.

Chapter Eight

Counter Finality and the Living World Paul Gyllenhammer‌‌

Sartre’s account of counter finality anticipates our current ecological dilemmas. Counter finality means not only that there are unintended negative consequences to our projects. It signifies the way a group of people, through their own collective action, establishes a destiny for themselves, which doubles back on them like “a trap” set by an enemy.1 Even more troubling, counter finality indicates that our collective praxis creates a destiny that comes back to humanity as such in the form of a “sadistic will.”2 This problem for humanity as such can be seen not only in the way our global system is based on the oppression of marginalized individuals and groups. The problem for humanity as such results from the degradation of ecological systems that threatens the basis of human life itself. Counter finality in both the humanitarian and ecological senses is made possible by the fact that from out of a pluralist sense of history, where meaningful differences set groups apart, we are facing a global history or, as Sartre says, “One World History.”3 This encroaching global history may be hard to define exactly but it is partly comprehended through the spread of a broadly capitalist-consumerist economy, where class struggle takes place on the background of the ideal of constant economic growth. No matter how unfair or violent a social landscape may be, a society is deemed healthy so long as it keeps investing, producing, and consuming. This economic way of being spreads like a quasi-organism over the expanse of the globe. From an ecological standpoint, the problem with such a system is that it is unsustainable. Natural resources simply cannot keep pace with the growing obsession with growth and consumption. André Gorz refers to this dilemma as “ecological realism.”4 171

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Alongside this dilemma, there is the moral bankruptcy of a system that places profit over human well-being, even if an ecological crisis were not immanent. Part of the “sadistic will” Sartre describes is the way our reality is shaped by interest/conflict between consumers of seemingly scarce resources.5 The struggle to acquire these resources makes our world affectively Hobbesian (a war of all against all), and this violence takes our collective attention away from the ecological damages being done through this fight for, and stock piling of, necessities. Obviously, we would do well to place the value of human lives before profit. But is this enough to counter the counter finality of the encroaching “One World History” we face? Certainly not. What we need to develop is a respectful relationality not only with our fellow humans but with the living world in general. What we need is a radical break from the anthropomorphic reality we have invented through our own scientific-technological praxis. Surely, the world we are creating is streamlined and “glamourous,”6 but we are also sacrificing our attunement to our Earthly being. The problem is that this fabricated reality or hyper-reality7 not only exists at the radical expense of the natural world; it also does not provide enough nourishment for the living beings that we are. Life begets life—to alienate ourselves from the environment has proven to wreak havoc on our own way of being. Through manufactured abundance, the case can be made that we are sicker than we have ever been. Our disconnection from the Earth has ushered in a spiritual crisis that makes our current way of life an actual threat to the basis of a meaningful life.8 Gorz calls this the “poverty of affluence.”9 To pursue this line of thinking in Sartre’s own philosophy, I will be drawing mostly from his master works: Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason. But how can we even suggest that Sartre expresses ecological concerns? Is he not inherently a dualist, where the power of a constituting mind imposes meanings and values on inert matter? As I show next, attempts at charging Sartre with dualism are non-starters. Sartre’s phenomenology is robustly concerned with describing the human encounter with the world in all its manifestations. THE BODY, BEING-FOR-OTHERS, AND A PATH TO THE LIVING WORLD Admittedly, Sartre creates the appearance of a dualist metaphysics at the beginning of Being and Nothingness when he speculates about the dichotomy between Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself. Being-for-itself is the realm of freedom and Being-in-itself is the realm of brute facticity. We even get a sense that the realm of facticity is molded into what it is through conscious

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intervention, as if the external world were raw clay. But these abstract ideas are neutralized as Sartre’s analyses become more and more concrete throughout the text. Yet even at the start of Being and Nothingness, Sartre directly attacks dualism when he explicitly refutes idealism. Here, he offers a simple “proof” of the external world.10 Consciousness, Sartre explains, is fundamentally dependent on beings in the world. In other words, consciousness is not an independent substance, as it is for Descartes; rather, consciousness is a presence to objects in the world. Consciousness is fundamentally a relation to the world; outside that relationship human awareness is nothing.11 Following up this move against dualism, Sartre explains consciousness as an embodied awareness, which puts him into dialogue with classic hylomorphism. Although the body can be analytically distinguished from our awareness of the body, the fact is that I am the hand that is waving as much as I am the emotion that is expressed when greeting a person at the airport. The body establishes a pre-reflective comprehension of everything that is knowable about things in the world, while it also harbors meanings that cannot be explicitly stated. The body is, in other words, the transcendental horizon for all possible experience. Sartre captures this in his favorite metaphor: the taste of Being. Now, to the degree I am a thing in the world via my body, Sartre turns to my Being-for-Others as a means to explain how self-enlightenment occurs. This is a decisive move against dualism, especially its solipsistic implications. Being-for-Others is intimately woven into the fabric of reality, such that there is no in-itself without the presence of other people. By extension, there is no me without others as witnesses to my being. As we will see below, Being-for-Others can open us to the significance of the other-than-human world in its rich diversity. Before I discuss Being-for-Others directly, let us consider another variant of dualism. Perhaps the chasm that governs Sartre’s view could be described as the dichotomy between nature and culture. Surely, there is a clear friction here for Sartre. As early as Nausea, we see a possible metaphysical divide between the realms of necessity and freedom. In a compelling passage near the end of the novel, Roquentin declares: I am afraid of cities. But you mustn’t leave them. If you go too far you come up against the vegetation belt. Vegetation has crawled for miles toward the cities. It is waiting. Once the city is dead, the vegetation will cover it, will climb over the stones, grip them, search them, make them burst with its long black pincers. . . . You must stay in the cities as long as they are alive. . . . In the cities, if you know how to take care of yourself, and choose the times when all the beasts are sleeping in their holes and digesting, behind the heaps of organic debris,

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you rarely come across anything more than minerals, the least frightening of all existants.12

Although expressed fictionally, this hostility between nature and culture is a constant theme throughout Sartre’s philosophical career.13 We find, in other words, no sense of ecological holism that leads us away from the city to a life closer to nature, as we see in someone like Epicurus. One can even say that an anti-physis sentiment guides Sartre’s interest in wresting freedom from the bonds of necessity.14 Culture represents a struggle beyond determinism, leading us into an artificial world that celebrates human freedom. Sartre’s love of literature could be used as proof of this. But what kind of distance is actually created between nature and a world of freedom according to Sartre? Is Sartre’s anti-essentialism an assault on nature or is it an assault on culture? I maintain it is a combination of both. Even in the passage above, Roquentin begins by saying that he is “afraid of cities.” Why? One reason is that so-called civilization is based on deception. This deception is arguably the whole point of the novel: Roquentin suffers from encounters with the cultural illusions of stability, knowledge, logic, reason. Roquentin says: I was there, living in the midst of these books full of knowledge describing the immutable forms of the animal species, explaining that the right quantity of energy is kept integral in the universe; I was there, standing in front of a window whose panes had a definite refraction index. But what feeble barriers! I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then, anything, anything could happen.15

Again, we see Sartre attacking classic dualism. Being is not an inert positivity like Descartes’s res extensa—whose quantitative attributes dictate the nature of reality. Such a view is the product of the abstract sciences, which reduce the reality of Being to exact terms. Being, for Sartre, is qualitatively rich (oozy, repugnant, etc.)—a point he develops in detail near the end of Being and Nothingness.16 Being invades us and reveals to us our stupidity and hubris. No matter how much we try to become independent from nature, life will always be a struggle for survival as much as it is for meaning in an otherwise heartless universe. And just because Sartre does not support a beautiful, holistic cosmos does not mean he supports a dualist ontology.17 It is not like humans are aliens on the Earth. All beings suffer from contingency. The human difference lies in our being open to this contingency through temporal awareness and the awareness of the transcendence of Being itself. We are the beings who know that our knowledge is incomplete—that Being

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is always greater and more mysterious than what we can grasp explicitly. In this way, we are closer to reality than other beings. But let us try something more constructive; let us see how Being-for-Others can open us to something more than just an obscure and invasive lifeworld. The main force of Sartre’s discussion of Being-for-Others operates around his account of the look of the Other. As is well known, the look of the Other is alienating because the other person knows me in a way I do not know myself. What Sartre means is that the Other knows my embodied being, which is never an object I can understand as the other does. In this way, the Other gives me a nature and, thereby, robs me of my freedom. The Other is my “original fall.”18 But is this all that is to be said on this topic? Is my relationship to other humans strictly duel-istic? Absolutely not. As I have argued elsewhere,19 the ultimate point of Sartre’s analysis of Being-for-Others is not simply to describe an inherent conflict between people. The point to show is that to the degree that we desire concrete freedom, we must be able to negotiate with other people about the being that we are. This is at the heart of Sartre’s notion of existential psychoanalysis. The other person is the medium through whom I can know myself, thereby offering a route to concrete freedom. Without the mediation of the other, I live without explicit self-awareness and, so, lack a significant degree of freedom of choice. Since I am my embodied being, and since that embodied being is partly constituted for me through the other, I cannot be without the mediation of the other’s perspective. I am not just dependent on the world or the in-itself to be; I am also inherently intersubjective, dependent upon others who constitute me as part of the world. Now, as Stuart Zane Charmé has shown in vivid detail, the Others that matter most to Sartre are marginalized people who exist within an alienating social landscape. Marginalized others bring out the fact that normality harbors a dangerous belief in naturalism, which sets up a difference not merely between vulgarity and naturalness, but between people who are deemed to be morally obscene vs. those who are pure and good. We get a better sense, then, of Sartre’s use of the term anti-physis. Particularly in his study of Genet, the anti-physis Sartre celebrates is the way marginalized individuals struggle against a false sense of natural superiority. To raise awareness to the absurdity of the equation of normality with natural law, Genet, for example, constructs the being of a pervert. It is for this reason that vulgarity and obscenity become operative sites of authenticity for Sartre. It is for the sake of fairness that Sartre becomes the champion of anti-essentialism. Since Others are the medium through whom authenticity may be gained, could non-human-others also be such a medium for Sartre? Charmé does not pursue this line of thinking. A quick negative response may fall in line with Socrates from the Phaedrus, when he says that things in nature have nothing

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to teach, only people in the city have that ability. If negotiation or dialectic is key to the other as medium of enlightenment, since we apparently cannot negotiate with non-human-others, there seems to be no positive outcome with such an interaction. Is Sartre’s theory of Other-induced enlightenment cut off from the non-human world? I do not think so. AFFINITY WITH THE LIVING WORLD Although I will highlight a key insight about animate beings, from Being and Nothingness, in just a moment, I begin with a reference Sartre makes to animals in his essay, Truth and Existence. Sartre describes a situation where a so-called distinguished person is eating Chateaubriand at a restaurant. Sartre says of this meal, “(A) strange object which bears the name of a writer and is sculpted out of an undefinable matter.”20 Sartre’s goal is to expose the distinguished diner’s bad faith insofar as he “refuses to visit the slaughterhouses.”21 Sartre says: If he goes there, the slaughterhouse surges up in the bourgeois world in full light: it exists, the chateaubriand is dead animal meat. But it is preferable to let the slaughterhouses remain outside of society . . . the killers of livestock are “brutes,” obscure consciousnesses who do not master phenomena; the slaughterhouse is at the edge of night, let it remain there. The gentleman-carnivore would be an accomplice if, through his knowledge, the chateaubriand transformed itself into dead flesh before the eyes of his guests.22

Most obvious in this passage is the tension of class division. A socially inscribed hierarchy between vulgar and civil society governs the separation between truth and illusion. Because certain social classes can remain at a distance from the way slaughterhouses function, those members of the upper class can pretend to be ignorant of the horrid conditions that make possible the pleasant delicacy available to them. And this is key: the refined socialite is pretending to be ignorant, i.e., he is willfully ignorant, a central theme in Truth and Existence. Sartre describes this in Husserlian terms: the socialite may have heard about the horrible conditions of the slaughterhouse, but as long as he does not fulfill that empty intention with seeing it in-itself, then it remains unconfirmed. So long as the reality is avoided, the socialite can pretend to be innocent of being an accomplice to the horrid situation. But what piques my interest is Sartre’s concern not only with class division but with the treatment of animals in a consumerist world.23 If we derive a historical sense from this example,24 we could see that the literal taste for a being is more significant than the being of that being. Humans, in other

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words, collectively place the value of an arbitrary desire over the value of the life of a being without explicitly making such a choice.25 Is this the kind of world we want to endorse? Do we actually support the current treatment of animals in the factory farming industry? Perhaps we could employ Sartre’s value of existence precedes essence to the existence of animals? If we could, a change in attitude toward our treatment of animals would not be a mere decisionist act.26 Indeed, something from the thing itself would dictate a re-orientation or adaptation of our actions and values. The following discussion from Being and Nothingness may provide the necessary insight to make the case for this view. In Being and Nothingness, very little is said directly about non-human, living beings. In the section on Temporality, Sartre seems to set human consciousness apart from all other things.27 But later, in the section on The Body, interesting points are brought up about life itself and how the life of others informs my own. Sartre refers to three modalities of the body; it is the second that interests us here. Although he describes this second modality as “my body as utilized and known by the Other,” his nearly exclusive focus is on the other’s body for me.28 Sartre opens the discussion with instruments of use. Things that I use are already part of a world wherein others use them as well. My situation is always already a public world. And the other’s body is itself a possible instrument of use, although it presents itself within the tension of either a “coefficient of utility [or] of adversity.”29 Indeed, “adversity” is the result if we try to reduce the other person to a tool. So, Sartre directly challenges the instrumental attitude toward others because this attitude “by no means gives us [the other person’s] being-there in ‘flesh and blood.’”30 When I perceive the other, I am presented not with a material body that can be possessed like a tool, but with his or her unique “coenesthesia” or “taste of being.”31 What Sartre is describing is the way the world is given dimension through the Other’s center of attention as a situation inhabited differently. “What for the other is his taste of himself becomes for me the Other’s flesh. . . . The Other’s body as flesh is immediately given as the center of reference in a situation which is synthetically organized around it, and is inseparable from this situation.”32 After some refinement of these claims, Sartre draws two essential points: First, the other’s body indicates the world which it gathers around itself. And this means that the world that I perceive for the other’s body is an offer to me to discover the world differently. This is how I interpret Sartre’s point: “To perceive the Other is to make known to oneself what he is by means of the World.”33 Second, the Other’s life does not appear to me through a judgment, explicit analogy, or proof of a hidden consciousness. “The body,” Sartre says, “is the psychic object par excellence.”34 Here, Sartre is channeling Husserl’s

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famous point that empathy is an original attunement between human beings. When I am in the presence of others, their perspectival lives are already comprehended. I already share their views, to some degree, as when an ice cream truck enters a park and all the children run toward it. Their excitement is my excitement. But can we also say the same about other living things? Certainly, I comprehend that there are other living things, even if sometimes I mistake an artificial plant for a real one. But can I empathize with a plant? Maybe we should not begin with such a difficult example, since I do empathize with my dog when she needs to go out for some exercise. And would there be any reason to deny a degree of empathy with a wolf that is starving in the wilderness, even if we may not want to get close enough to help? There are animals that are familiar enough to us that questioning the reality of empathy would require a defense, not the other way around.35 Sartre’s reference above to the body as a “psychic object” is a direct appeal to the human body; yet, we can easily extend the reference to living beings as such. Let us recall that the term psychic is derived from the Greek psūché, which is, at least for Aristotle, the animating principle within a body. So, the word animate refers not only to animals but to all living things. The fact that the human body is the psychic object “par excellence” indicates that Sartre grants a kind of hierarchy among living things, similar, perhaps, to what we see in Aristotle’s hierarchy of souls in De Anima. And we need not worry about falsely attributing consciousness to beings substantially different from humans (such as bees, ants, bacteria, plants etc.). Indeed, this is the point Sartre makes when he says that the perception of life “cannot by nature be of the same type as that of inanimate objects.”36 Our lifeworld is constituted by the basic descriptive divide between the animate, the inanimate (whether naturally occurring or created by humans) and the once living or dead. Again, I realize that Sartre is speaking of human others in this section but this issue of life being perceptually different from inanimate things offers a way into an appreciation of non-human life in its meaningful diversity. Organisms may never be fully known (this goes for humans as it does for bees), but they are comprehended and degrees of my understanding of those living others can enrich my human world. How? Well, if we recall Sartre’s all-important distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, we can highlight how the world I inhabit pre-reflectively is discursively oriented. I enter a room that is too hot, so I cross the room to open the window. The window means relief in this situation. In the same way, while it may seem absurd from an analytically abstract perspective to say that “the plant feels good today,” from a pre-reflective attitude, plants certainly speak to us about their being. How would I know to water them if they did not disclose themselves in some sense? Of course, this may not legitimate the notion of empathy with plants, but there must be some basic affinity with living beings

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for there to be a comprehension of their needs. Reciprocally, humans can feel wilted when low on water and nutrients. The metaphor here has ontological ramifications insofar as it grounds us within the living world.37 I cannot know myself independently of other animate beings, just as we know that “Muhammad Ali floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.” One last point before I turn to the relationship between Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason on this issue. Near the end of his discussion of this second mode of the body, Sartre explicitly speaks of the reductionist tendencies of the sciences. Here, he says something crucially important: “Even the study of the life of protoplasm, even embryology or the study of the egg cannot rediscover life; the organ which is observed is living but it is not established in the synthetic unity of a particular life; it is understood in terms of anatomy—i.e., in terms of death.”38 To study a “particular life,” on the other hand, is to witness a perpetual “birth”—a continual “surpassing toward”39 that cannot be reduced to external relations between discreet things as happens in the sciences. Life, in other words, lives from out of itself in relation to its environment; it operates through a hidden something that cannot be reduced to a simple sequence of causes. Although only some animate beings may be empathized with due to a deep familiarity with our own perceptive life, all living beings share this inner principle of existence itself, making it something other than a being that can be possessed. Again, possession is linked to instruments because, for instruments, “the possessor is the raison d’ȇtre of the possessed object.”40 But this can only pertain to a tool. No living being can be possessed like a tool. A proper relationship to a living being requires an attention to its needs, which are often hard, perhaps impossible, to discern entirely. Sartre takes up this concern with an organism’s needs directly in the Critique. MECHANISTIC ALIENATION We can now move into the Critique, where Sartre’s interest in surpassing toward, from above, is directly related to need—the basis for understanding organic life itself. Of course, and like Being and Nothingness, Sartre is mainly concerned with human relationships with the world. So, even if need is biologically driven around the survival of the organism, Sartre is careful to craft his discussion not around instinct but around a future oriented project that unites the environment around an end.41 Humans are not like other natural beings because we are transcending beings, whose cultural-historical background influences not only how we go about fulfilling needs but what we take as needs in the first place. Nevertheless, at its most basic level, the fight for survival is common to all organisms, even if phenomena such as praxis

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and labor are distinctively human. It is this material ground that becomes, for Sartre, the basis of ethics. Since need is an exigency, an unfair distribution of necessary resources is unjust. By extension, need can also be understood as an exigency that unites us to other living beings as well, even if the human need to live depends on extinguishing the needs of other living things. The need to end a life does not justify treating other living beings in totally arbitrary ways. But I want to move in a different direction here. I want to look at the place where human praxis and labor, which is directed to the environment for survival, turns back onto the agent as an anti-praxis, i.e., counter finality. This happens, according to Sartre, most dramatically through the creation of not just tools and institutions, where human agency finds itself directed by practico-inert structures. The real game changer is automation or the machine. Sartre says: The process is then inverted: the semi-automatic machine defines its environment and constructs its man, so that the inorganic comes to be characterized by a false but effective interiority, and the organic by exteriority. Man become the machine’s machine; and to himself he is his own exteriority.42

There is a lot to explore in this description of mechanical alienation. We can focus on the way workers are objects to an object due to the demands the machine makes on the worker. It has to be maintained. It has to be improved. It is more significant than a living person because it does the work. The machine is the source of profit, and workers are easily replaced. The machine has a kind of ever expanding—quasi-organic—existence in that profits are both an end and means.43 Profits are reaped, but they are also used to expand the machine’s mastery of its field, developing into new markets, and taking over weaker ones.44 The machine thrives by eating its prey. We can also discuss the alienation of the worker’s interior or imaginative life while working with the machine. Since the machine works in a particular way, only those thoughts and feelings that do not interrupt the flow of the process can be had while working. Sartre uses the example of a woman daydreaming at the Dop Shampoo factory. Her inner life is passive and ruled by the mechanical environment. “The machine demands and creates in the worker an inverted semi-automatism which complements it.”45 Of course, this alienation is not just about a worker’s internal life. Her being itself has a prescribed destiny due to the ensemble of expectations that are demanded in the space of labor. Again, Sartre refers to the woman at the shampoo factory:

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(W)hen the woman . . . has an abortion in order to avoid having a child she would be unable to feed, she makes a free decision in order to escape a destiny that is made for her; but this decision is itself completely manipulated by the objective situation: she realizes through herself what she is already; she carries out the sentence, which has already been passed on her, which deprives her of free motherhood.46

Personal alienation is a key counter finality in the context of mechanization. But Sartre’s account of personal alienation entails alienation for all of humanity as machines spread globally. “Eventually, the specialized machine replaces human specialization . . . and at a further level of technical improvement—with automation, ‘electric brains’ and the control of processes by cybernetics—human labor consists in building the machine. But it is the machine itself which assumes the whole activity of production.”47 This is what Sartre calls the “paradox of our actions”: (Actions) can all be . . . reducible to a succession of inert processes. The great shock of the nineteenth century—which has been intensified in the twentieth, with specialized machines—was, through de-skilling of the worker, the more general de-skilling of all human activity.48

Here, a link to Albert Borgmann is easy enough to make. The “de-skilling” Sartre describes above is refined by Borgmann in his account of the hyper-reality that is spreading globally due to the advancements of science and technology within a consumerist economy.49 The apparent logic that guides this process is the establishment of not just a reliable world that ensures human survival. The logic is geared toward a glamorous reality, which Borgmann details as follows. First, such a reality is brilliant in that it engulfs our sensibilities with pleasant images, sounds, smells, and feelings. All unwanted data is excluded. Second, such a reality is rich in that it offers more depth of information than reality itself can offer at any given moment. Computers, smart-phones, and TVs offer us a seeming infinite variability, which is available at the touch of a button or at the prompting of a voice. Finally, such a reality is pliable in that it is subject to the operator’s desire.50 Linking this to Sartre, we are (or seem to be) the drivers of this instrumental complex, where egotistical desire dominates a world of readily accessible objects of consumption. In such a world, possession is the key virtue. Paradoxically, and the very focus of Borgmann’s analysis, such a glamorous world destroys us in a spiritual sense. Boredom, anxiety, and melancholy are by-products of the hyper-activity that accompanies a world that is geared to infinite pliability and speed of access. Tied to Sartre’s concerns above, hyper-reality simply does not challenge us in ways that lead to a virtuous

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life.51 Borgmann accounts for this loss through an absence of focal practices, which develop our capabilities and which bring us into respectful relationships with things that demand our attention in their own right. Focal practices deal with autonomous presences that challenge us to figure out paths of engagement, unlike hyper-real systems that have a logic built into them by us and for us. Distinct from hyper-reality, success within a focal practice cannot be measured by possession of the object, as it is with a video game master. Success in a focal practice is more like a dialogue, even a compromise, as when a dog has a temperament that just does not fit the desired goals of the trainer. Of course, the cost of human alienation in this regard comes at the price of the alienation of nature. Here, we go back to the problem of consumption. Consumption is not evil in-itself since we need to consume to live. But the kind of mass consumption we are involved with today is a blight on the global stage. Let me use Sartre’s continued interest in anti-physis to explain this. It is true that human praxis is always working through the environment for the sake of survival, but with the machine, nature becomes something to overcome entirely. With the power of mechanization, humans begin to become increasingly anti-physical.52 Of course, only those classes who can afford such luxuries become delusional about this glamourous life, like the gentleman-carnivore discussed above. Sartre criticizes at length the political malaise of bourgeois “respectability,” which seeks to remove itself from the basic needs of life.53 While this type of respectability reinforces the illegitimate social divide between the cultured elite and the vulgar masses, Sartre realizes that this anti-physical attitude also produces ecological counter finalities such as deforestation and mass air pollution.54 Indeed, anti-physis (perhaps Sartre’s term for hyper-reality?) affects all humans on the globe since ecosystems are pushed to the limit. Here, ecological distresses scream back at us. If nothing more, living systems force us to reckon with the absurdity of our quest for “omnipotence.”55 CONCLUSION: BEING TOLERATES US Sartre’s philosophy is robustly anthropocentric, which means that it is through human action that values and meanings enter the world. But this does not entail that humans are free to create meanings in any way they wish.56 Indeed, the current way that meaning is attributed to beings shows that we are involved with a misguided anthropomorphism. As Sartre says, “All of us spend our lives engraving our maleficent image on things, and it fascinates and bewilders us if we try to understand ourselves through it.”57 If we could

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find a way to undue the formation of the world through our mechanized techniques, and look back to the inherent mystery of living things, we would find a world that is presented to us as a source of proper renewal. We need to develop, in other words, a respectful relationality with beings that defy the mechanized process and present us with the struggles of birth, life, and death. Sartre offers some compelling insights in this direction. Sartre surely appreciates that life operates by “its own laws of interiority,”58 which are never open to human knowledge. No matter how technologically advanced we become, “life is a precondition which . . . must be given.”59 With a nod to evolution, Sartre says: On the basis of the Universe, a certain sector is singularized by the apparition of life; and this life produces in this sector (on Earth, for example)—through a first interiorization—natural but improbable modifications of the milieu . . . which condition an evolution in interiority whose profile is itself unique and, in its interior limit, improbable. It is on the basis of universal exteriority—in an ensemble of worlds in which all living kingdoms and histories are distributed in such and such a way, and which determines each of these adventures in relation to all the others.60

Human achievement is, therefore, always “entrusted” to something beyond it.61 “(T)riumph over things . . . presupposes that it is tolerated by the Universe.”62 Bluntly stated, we are never in a position of mastery. And as we have seen since Nausea, Sartre is not appealing to ecosystems that evoke feelings of cosmic harmony or holism—how could he? Nature itself is unpredictable and out of our control. But what is in our control is a recognition of the absurdity of our disastrous attempts at domination through anti-physis. Here, Sartre’s reflection on death as the transcendental condition of history raises a particularly contemporary concern. Humans are indeed the mortal beings whose awareness of mortality drives their attempts to survive. In this sense, death is not a product of history but “produces history.”63 But now, under that threat of global-mechanized alienation, death reveals itself as an interplay between the human and the environment in that Being cannot tolerate our way of being any longer. The challenge, then, is to re-adapt our attitudes toward nature, even in the face of terrible economic uncertainties. Our dignity depends on our ability to carry this burden. Yet this burden is not so heavy when we see that nature freely provides some aspects of a good life and that human praxis can find a way to resonate with nature’s provisions. In other words, there is a place for a dialogue with nature rather than an all-out feud with its unpredictability.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bailey, Christiane. “Kinds of Life: On the Phenomenological Basis of the Distinction between ‘Higher’ and ‘Lower’ Animals.” Environmental Philosophy 8, vol. 2 (2011): 47–68. Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Borgmann, Albert. “The Moral Complexion of Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 26, vol. 4 (2000): 418–22. Charmé, Stuart Zane. Vulgarity and Authenticity: Dimensions of Otherness in the World of Jean-Paul Sartre. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Gorz, André. Ecology as Politics. Trans. Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud. Boston: South Bend Press, 1980. Gyllenhammer, Paul. “Shame and Virtue.” In Emotional Experience: Ethical and Social Significance. Ed. John Drummond and Sonja Rinofer-Kreidl. London/New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017. Gyllenhammer, Paul. “Sartre and Heidegger on Social Deformation and the Anthropocene.” Sartre Studies International 24, vol. 2 (2018): 25–44. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire. Trans. Martin Turnell. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1950. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Truth and Existence. Trans. Adrian van den Hoven. Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. London/New York: Verso, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London/ New York: Verso, 2006.

NOTES 1. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London/New York: Verso, 2004), 237. 2. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 233. 3. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, Trans. Quintin Hoare (London/ New York: Verso, 2006), 299. 4. Gorz, Ecology as Politics, Trans. Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South Bend Press, 1980), 11ff. 5. I say “seemingly” scarce resources since basic needs can be met on a global scale through our advanced technologies. The promise of an integral humanism is not a foolish Sartrian hope.

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6. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 88ff. 7. See Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide. 8. See Gyllenhammer, “Sartre and Heidegger on Social Deformation and the Anthropocene,” Sartre Studies International 24, vol. 2 (2018): 25–44. 9. Gorz, Ecology as Politics, 64ff.; cf. Borgmann, “The Moral Complexion of Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research 26, vol. 4 (2000): 418–22. 10. The word proof is in quotation marks because the being of things does not require an actual proof for Sartre. This sharply distinguishes his view from Descartes and ties him to Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. 11. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 23. 12. Sartre, Nausea, Trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964), 156. 13. See Charmé, Vulgarity and Authenticity (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). 14. The term anti-physis appears as early as Sartre’s essay on Baudelaire (Baudelaire, Trans. Martin Turnell (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1950), 103). Although Sartre attributes the term to Baudelaire’s lifestyle, there are significant overlaps with Sartre’s own philosophical concerns and way of life (see Charmé, Vulgarity and Authenticity). The interpretive problem, however, is the obvious assault Sartre is making on Baudelaire’s bad faith. Is the imaginative personality Baudelaire attempts to construct—against nature—a futile attempt to escape embodiment? Sartre moves in this direction in the Critique, which is discussed briefly at the end of the essay as the problem of bourgeois respectability. 15. Sartre, Nausea, 77. 16. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 765ff. 17. I do not have the room to develop the point here, but I am drawing from the well-known fact that dualism, as we see in Descartes, arises from the breakdown of the Scholastic view of the harmony of the universe. A mechanistic ontology takes the place of cosmic teleology, placing the body and mind in opposition. But Sartre does not endorse a mechanistic ontology of nature, even if he denies cosmic final ends. 18. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 384. 19. See Gyllenhammer, “Shame and Virtue,” in Emotional Experience: Ethical and Social Significance, eds. John Drummond and Sonja Rinofer-Kreidl (London/New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017). 20. Sartre, Truth and Existence, Trans. Adrian van den Hoven (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 34. 21. Sartre, Truth and Existence, 34. 22. Sartre, Truth and Existence, 34. 23. Later in Truth and Existence, Sartre raises this concern again when the “bourgeois decides to ignore . . . the origin of steak” (55). 24. In the second volume of the Critique, Sartre uses boxing as a metaphor for the historical-global plight we face (17ff.).

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25. In the Critique, Sartre discusses the practico-inert structures that partly determine the choices people make in society. We are nonetheless responsible for our maintenance of these institutions through our actions. 26. A common argument against Sartre’s ethics is his so-called decisionism. Values exists only because people choose them, leaving open the problem that people can value anything they choose to value. Metaphysically, the link between choice and values is accurate. Only through human action do values enter the world. Sartre is anthropocentric in this case. But the claim that there are no compelling reasons to value certain things holds no weight in an argument against Sartre. Let me emphasize that no one can authentically choose to be an anti-Semite according to Sartre. There are reasons, facts, and sound arguments to support this claim—not just Sartre’s own personal decision. 27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 113–14. 28. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 445. 29. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 447. 30. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 448. 31. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 450. 32. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 451. 33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 454. 34. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 455. 35. Cf. Bailey, “Kinds of Life: On the Phenomenological Basis of the Distinction between ‘Higher’ and ‘Lower’ Animals.” Environmental Philosophy 8, vol. 2 (2011): 47–68. 36. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 455. 37. As I stated above, near the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre discusses “quality as the revelation of Being” (765ff.). Although his discussion has been attacked for supporting a misogynist view, what he is attempting is, in general, to disclose the way qualities cannot be seen as mere projections of a subject. In his opening account of melting snow, he explains how deeply the symbolism of melting works throughout our relationship to things and people (766). 38. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 457. 39. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 457. 40. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 589. 41. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 736. 42. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 91. 43. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 202. 44. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 202. 45. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 233. 46. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 235. 47. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 353. 48. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 354. 49. Borgmann, “The Moral Complexion of Consumption.” 50. Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 84ff. 51. On virtue in Sartre, see Gyllenhammer, “Shame and Virtue.” 52. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 178.

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53. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 770ff. 54. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 207. 55. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 380. 56. Sartre says, “(T)he world is both human and inhuman. It is human in the sense that what is, surges up in a world that is born through the upsurge of man. But this never meant that it was adapted to man. It is freedom that is the perpetual project of adapting itself to the world. The world is human, but not anthropomorphic” (Truth and Existence, 43). 57. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, 227. 58. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 336. 59. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 336. 60. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 318. 61. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 336. 62. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 308. 63. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, 311.

Chapter Nine

Hyperobjects and the Practico-Inert Ecology and the Critique of Dialectal Reason Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink‌‌

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason contains a well-developed theory about the practical relationship between human beings and their environments. Part of what this can do is increase our understanding of our relations with fragile ecosystems—as Sartre’s own references to processes of deforestation and erosion already demonstrate. The Critique, however, distinguishes domains of nature that are affected by our actions from domains that remain unaffected by us. As such, the Critique remains an artifact of the Holocene, an era in which the impact of humanity on the environment was more limited than it is today. With the arrival of the Anthropocene, many scholars now argue that the boundaries between humanized nature and nature in so far as it eludes our grasp have faded. The prominent ecophilosopher Timothy Morton, for example, has developed a theory that abolishes the very notion of ‘Nature,’ replacing it by a reality comprised of ‘hyperobjects’: entities that are massively distributed in space and time (such as weather patterns and global warming), but which human beings nevertheless co-constitute in processes of mutual permeation. Morton tends to be critical of Sartre’s work, but we will argue that the former’s theory of hyperobjects is in fact the necessary result of taking Sartre’s theory of worked matter and the practico-inert to its logical conclusion within the context of the Anthropocene. As such, we will demonstrate that the Critique is a valuable precursor to Morton’s so-called object-oriented 189

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ecological philosophy. Most object-oriented philosophers tend to be critical toward Sartre’s philosophy, and his role in this relatively new strain of philosophy has been minor to say the least.1 Yet we agree with Matthew Ally in Ecology and Existence that Sartre and object-oriented thinkers are fellow travelers in interesting respects.2 Here, we will argue that Sartre’s theory of group formation from the second part of the Critique is a useful tool to understand how collective agency is still possible in the world as seen from the perspective of Morton’s object-oriented philosophy: a world comprised of overwhelming and elusive ecological forces that are in no way reducible to how we experience, register, or manipulate them. This is a much-needed extension of Morton’s ecological philosophy, which tends to focus on the question of what remains of individual agency in the Anthropocene (and most notably on how individuals can properly think or attune themselves to our ecological condition). This may neglect that, as Sartre has shown, only groups are capable to match the force of entities that hold individual human beings in thrall. In the first section of this chapter, we delve into the details of Sartre’s theory of the practico-inert and the ecological examples he uses to describe this theory of materiality. In the second section, we turn to Morton’s theory of hyperobjects. In the third section, we demonstrate the many similarities between Sartre’s and Morton’s respective theories, and show how Morton’s notion of hyperobjects updates Sartre’s initially somewhat overly anthropocentric views whereas Sartre’s philosophy can enrich Morton’s views on agency. THE PRACTICO-INERT Sartre’s notion of the practico-inert is key in bringing his philosophy to the realm of ecology. We will here show how Sartre develops this notion in the first part of the Critique of Dialectical Reason and how he uses many examples that involve ecology. As we will see, the theme of viscosity is the part of Sartre’s philosophy to which Morton mostly refers. As such, it can serve as a thematic bridge between their respective philosophies. Sartre’s starting point is that of individual praxis, an abstract situation that never occurs in real life, as human beings are always part of various collectives and groups.3 Yet, although abstract, Sartre considers this the most intimate relation of human beings to materiality. Praxis is goal-oriented behavior aimed at the survival of whoever performs it. Its being goal-oriented is precisely what distinguishes praxis from other activities required for our survival. Breathing, for example, is in most cases automated behavior that does not occur as a result of consciously setting a goal. However, one could

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imagine someone who is trapped after a cave-in and needs to consciously control their breathing while trying to dig themselves out. Breathing then becomes a conscious project aimed at survival, making it praxis. Due to this context dependence, a definitive list of what counts as praxis is difficult to give. Such contexts also give us the next step in Sartre’s description of praxis. Humans are “led by praxis itself to define zones, systems and privileged objects” in their environment.4 When positing a goal, we always divide the world around us into different zones. For example: a zone where there is plenty of food versus a zone where food is scarce. In the example of the cave-in, there is a zone where air is scarce and which therefore needs to be altered physically, connected to a zone in which there is air. One could also think of fertile land versus barren land, which allows for more long-term praxis in the form of agriculture. Such zones can also be used systematically, for example when a certain zone of land is exploited until it is exhausted and operations need to move to a new fertile zone of land. A system of agriculture then emerges. A privileged object can be any object which is more important for survival than other objects. One could think of a sharp stone that can be used as a tool as opposed to blunt rocks. We can now give a more precise definition of praxis: [P]raxis [is] an organising project which transcends material conditions toward an end and inscribes itself through labour, in inorganic matter as a rearrangement of the practical field and a reunification of means in the light of the end.5

The thing is of course, as we have mentioned, that there is never a single individual exerting praxis on its surroundings. There are always many, and all are born into a world already rearranged by their ancestors. Through praxis the actions of human beings are inscribed into matter. Matter is inert and as such retains the changes we make to it.6 Once we change the landscape around us, material changes are retained even when we are no longer there. Matter absorbs praxis or praxis is crystallized in it.7 This process of crystallisation may have consequences that reach beyond the initial project of the praxis in question.8 Take the ecological example of deforestation.9 Deforestation is primarily a result of praxis. In order to grow food needed for survival, forests are reorganized into zones of farmland by chopping down trees. However, the forest also has another function: retaining sediment from the mountains. If the forest is taken away and the sediment gets into rivers, the latter will eventually flood. The floods may in turn damage the crops that are planted in deforested areas. The initial project of increasing our chances of survival by growing more crops thereby confronts us with unforeseen consequences that

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remained unknown or underestimated because of the scale and complexity of the involved systems. Thus, “man has to struggle not only against nature . . . but also against his own action as it becomes other.”10 Sartre calls such unforeseen consequences counter-finalities.11 In individual praxis, human beings demanded something from the world around them. Now, the world demands something from human beings, namely that they protect themselves from the flood. Praxis, once crystallized, bestows matter with agency. Another example Sartre gives of this is that of a house that requires maintenance.12 We build houses to protect ourselves from environmental hazards, but the house requires upkeep as soon as it has been built. A house does not literally compel us to maintain it, but we all know that giving in to the exigencies it exerts on us is the easiest way to retain its protective functions. In this sense, it acts upon us and makes us maintain it. This agency of matter that is created through praxis is not merely physical, as matter can also retain meaning. A striking example of this is any form of currency. Because we assign value to precious metals, they are able to assert power over us. Sartre gives an example, similar to that of deforestation, about mining and trading gold in the sixteenth century: The discovery of the Peruvian mines seemed at the time to be an increase of wealth and, in the middle of the sixteenth century, it caused a new technique of metallic amalgamation to be perfected. The continual increase in stocks of precious metals in Spain, however, eventually resulted in an increased cost of living on the whole of the Mediterranean seaboard, worsening poverty for the exploited classes, the paralysis of business and the ruin of many merchants and industrialists.13

Another important aspect of the inverted praxis of matter is also revealed in this example. Not only is matter able to act on human beings, material objects are also able to act upon each other. The practice of mining causes a new technique of amalgamation. The increase in overseas travel demands bigger ships. In another example, Sartre also writes that “steam [power] initiated the tendency toward larger factories.”14 It may be objected that such actions require human activity, and this is of course a fact: bigger ships and larger factories need to be designed and built by humans. However, according to Sartre, the persons performing these actions do not act according to their own goals, but rather goals that are put to them by material objects. This is precisely why we can often understand a process without literally taking the humanity of those who are part of it into account: “this intelligibility requires precisely that the action of man should be constituted as inessential.”15 The actions performed by those involved can be conceived as being performed by fully automated

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systems, merely following demands.16 Thus, “it is by and through men that these exigencies arise, and they would disappear if men did. But still . . . the exigency of matter ends up by being extended to matter itself through men.”17 As Sartre will write: [T]he very praxis of individuals or groups is altered in so far as it ceases to be the free organisation of the practical field and becomes the re-organisation of one sector of inert materiality in accordance with the exigencies of another sector of materiality.18

As a result of individual praxis, the world of material objects thus gains a life of its own. This is what Sartre calls the practico-inert: “the practico-inert field is the field of material exigencies, of counter-finalities and of inert meanings.”19 It is the part of reality in which the praxis of human beings has crystalized and consist of different zones of materiality acting upon each other, governing the actions of human beings that these zones use as tools. It is important to note that all human beings live in this practico-inert field. We never encounter untouched Nature, but only come into contact with matter that is already endowed with past praxis and meaning. Thus even environmental disasters are also part of the practico-inert, precisely because they carry the meaning of being disastrous: At any moment of History things are human precisely to the extent that men are things. A volcanic eruption destroys Herculaneum; in a way, this is man destroying himself by the volcano. It is the social and material unity of the town and its inhabitants which, within the human world, confers the unit of an event on something which without men would perhaps dissolve into an indefinite process without meaning.20

In building a town on fertile volcanic ground, we make the volcano part of our world and thereby allow it to act upon other sectors of the practico-inert field, in this case the town. This example can easily be expanded upon in the Anthropocene, when the entire Earth has become part of the practico-inert field. The counter-finalities of our own actions have created environmental hazards acting upon us and other parts of the world, precisely in the way Sartre described, albeit on a much bigger scale. However, although Sartre does bestow matter with agency, it can still only act by using human beings as tools. As we will see, it is this limited anthropocentric account of interobjective agency that object-oriented ontology expands upon.

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HYPEROBJECTS As stated in the introduction, striking similarities exist between Sartre’s theory of the practico-inert and Morton’s theory of hyperobjects. In fact, hyperobjects are arguably what one gets when taking Sartre’s theory of worked matter and the practico-inert to its logical conclusion in an ecological context, which is to say when giving proper due to the reality and agency of nonhuman entities. Nevertheless, the two concepts are not strictly identical. As we will see, the theory of hyperobjects shows us how to properly attune Sartre’s theory to an age in which ecological awareness is key. Conversely, how Sartre theorizes human agency in the Critique allows us to fill in some important gaps in Morton’s account of agency. Much like Sartre, Morton denies the existence of ‘Nature’ (along with the world or the environment). There is no standing reserve of “unformed matter” awaiting reification by humans, nor is there a “comforting background” of natural entities that would form a smoothly operating and seamless totality were it not for our disruptive presence.21 We must bear in mind that individual praxis as described by Sartre is an abstract notion, and that we only encounter the world in so far it is practico-inert. Nature is not a single thing or totality that exists ‘out there.’ Rather, Nature is “the reduction of nonhuman beings to their aesthetic appearance for humans” or otherwise put “just a Romantic landscape, an anthropocentric view of reality.”22 This denial is rooted in Morton’s adherence to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO).23 OOO holds that no entity is ontologically reducible to its constituent parts, to how it affects other human or nonhuman entities, or even to a combination of both.24 As Morton writes, “a being is not simply reducible to smaller, or more fundamental, realities, or to the History or mind that is measuring, seeing, or assessing that being.”25 Instead, all entities have a private, interior reality that “withdraws” from their manifest presence to others.26 This ‘withdrawal’ is best understood as follows: when interacting with another person, we know that their words and gestures are not literally their character, even if the latter styles the former. The ways in which people present themselves are also not literal parts of their character. Rather, they are indirect signs of a character that lurks behind the scenes, of something that shines forth in its expressions while simultaneously withdrawing into its own ontological excess. Key to OOO and Morton’s philosophy is that this condition is ‘ontologized’ in two ways. First, all objects do this, not just humans. A cup, for example, “transcends its appearance for me, who is handling it, looking at it, drinking out of it.”27 Second and more importantly, objects also do this to each other when nobody is looking: “it is common to relations

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between cups and saucers, raindrops and windows, bacon and eggs, black holes and Hawkins radiation, gamma rays and crystal lattices.”28 As Morton puts it, given any object whatsoever, “no other objects, no ginger, photon, or supercomputer, can possibly experience every single aspect of the object.”29 Reality, then, is not the totality once called Nature. Reality is a vast, shifting conglomerate of entities that exist at an immense variety of scales and speeds, of entities that constantly produce, affect, mobilize, alter, regenerate, and destroy one another while simultaneously maintaining an ontological excess over and above such engagements. For Morton, it is the Anthropocene and especially global warming that makes us realize that there is no “reliable world” that would be “neatly correlated to how human beings (try to) access and represent it.”30 Instead, there are just duels between objects, and human beings—through the use of “engines, factories, cows, and computers”—are implicated in those duels “more directly than ever before.”31 This brings us to hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are “gigantic nonhuman beings” that are “massively distributed in space and time relative to humans.”32 As per OOO, hyperobjects “are real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans,” such that we only ever apprehend partial and distorted signs of their full Lovecraftian reality.33 Recurring examples of hyperobjects in Morton’s work are global warming, the biosphere, and (the sum total of) materials like plutonium, uranium, plastic, or Styrofoam—each of which will outlast current society by hundreds or even thousands of years. Strictly speaking, however, these are just examples to help us realize that every object is in a sense a hyperobject, because every object is ‘hyper’ or ‘massive’ in relation to a host of other entities.34 Unusual heat that burns our skins and freak weather that ravages our houses are indirect signs of gigantic ecosystems whose full scale and scope we never fully grasp, but neither does a worm have any full comprehension of the picnic table across which it crawls.35 The category of hyperobjects thus also includes countless entities that we often do not immediately associate with ecological thinking, including musical genres, global protest movements, financial systems, and elections. We return to this later in the chapter. For now, we must first grasp how hyperobjects imply a decidedly “weird” twist to that cliché mantra of ecological thinking according to which things are deeply interconnected.36 This requires reconstructing the five main features of hyperobjects: phasing, nonlocality, temporal undulation, viscosity, and interobjectivity. Phasing results from the fact that the withdrawn interior of objects—their ‘real being’—as such can never become present to other entities. By analogy, think of how a round object like an apple would manifest if it were to enter a purely two-dimensional world. People would first see “some dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, then a rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing

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to a tiny circle, possibly a point, and disappearing.”37 This illustrates how every possible apprehension of an object is always-already a distortion or translation of its reality. This is not due to any shortcomings in whatever entities register it, but due to the ontological excess that each object is.38 That objects ‘phase’ means that manifestations to others are only ever an “indexical sign of an object that is massively distributed in a phase space that is higher dimensional than the equipment . . . used to detect it.”39 We thus only ever see partial distortions of objects. Hurricanes and droughts are indirect signs of global warming, much like how offices, websites, employees, and products accommodate the indirect manifestations of companies whose full reality lurks behind the entities in which they express themselves. Moreover, parched throats and withered crops are but indexical signs of a drought that surpasses them, and a conversation with a sales representative is but a distorted sliver of a corporation’s sales division. That objects phase rather than present themselves for what they are is the “reason” for their nonlocality and temporal undulation.40 As objects never coincide with any given manifestation, they can simultaneously express themselves in separate locations.41 This is nonlocality. Global warming can manifest as heavy rain in one city while simultaneously manifesting as intense heat in another one.42 A nuclear catastrophe can simultaneously make itself felt in living creatures, diplomatic negotiations, oceans, and news broadcasts, just like a corporation can lobby for untethered freedom in the United States while simultaneously exploiting workers in Bangladesh. Likewise, a classical symphony can simultaneously be expressed in a plethora of concerts, musical scores, MP3s, hummed tunes, and vinyl records, while never fully coinciding with any of these local manifestations. The reason is that global warming, nuclear catastrophes, corporations, and symphonies are ultimately ‘forms’ that can never be fully accommodated or absorbed into their recipient entities. This also implies that objects are “temporally foreshortened.”43 Objects have their own temporality, speed, or rate of change at which they operate,44 one that is necessarily distorted when they are apprehended by other entities with a temporality of their own. Climates, oil, and plutonium are produced and altered at speeds so vastly different from the quotidian pace of human existence that the former can even strike us as static rather than dynamic entities.45 We are directly involved in the constitution of hyperobjects such as global warming. Yet because of global warming’s vast time scale, our actions will affect beings that will exist hundreds if not thousands of years from now. Properly accommodating this realization is hard, precisely because the temporality of ecosystems never accords with the ‘pace’ of our psyches and social existence. Temporal undulation, then, means that hyperobjects appear at the temporal scale of their observers, but do not function at that scale.

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Instead, they stubbornly operate at their own speeds, largely irresponsive to our attempts to align them with our own agendas (anyone who has ever tried to get a permit for anything has experienced this in the context of bureaucracies, the quintessential human-made hyperobjects). Phasing, nonlocality, and temporal undulation notwithstanding, hyperobjects are viscous, viscosity being the fact that we (as well as all nonhuman entities) are by definition “contaminated” by indefinitely many objects in the most intimate sense possible.46 Morton explicitly borrows this term from Sartre, who describes viscosity in terms of honey sliding off a spoon and wasps drowning in a jar of jam.47 Hyperobjects are viscous in that we can never get away from them. Rather, we constantly “find ourselves caught in them” as they “stick” to our social and experiential space and even to our very being.48 The food industry is a hyperobject, but that does not prevent it from having determinate effects on the flesh that we become by eating. Likewise, social media platforms are hyperobjects that seep into how we ‘do’ love, work, and friendship, even when we are offline (just like the bearing of veteran soldiers still carries traces of wars once fought). Or to use one of Morton’s examples, the radiation emitted by the Hiroshima bomb tinges the lives of those who survived it down to the most minute details.49 According to Morton, our being ‘stuck’ to hyperobjects is “Sartre’s nightmare,” presumably reading Sartre as defending a kind of full human autonomy that viscous objects would threaten with dissolution.50 Opposed to this would be Morton’s own view, according to which objects are always already “inside our skin.”51 In what cannot but evoke comparisons to Sartre’s Nausea, Morton does hold that ecological awareness is “nauseating”52: “part of our growing ecological awareness is a feeling of disgust that we are literally covered in and penetrated by nonhuman beings, not just by accident but in an irreducible way, a way that is crucial to our very existence.”53 We will return to the topic if viscosity in the next section. Finally, interobjectivity is Morton’s term to emphasize that intersubjectivity, the “shared space in which human meaning resonates—is a small region of a much larger interobjective configuration space.”54 Just like humans, objects become marked by other entities that leave their traces on them.55 And just like humans, objects interpret or translate each other on their own terms. When wind howls through a bamboo forest, for example, the resulting sound is how the bamboo translates currents of air.56 Interobjectivity means that a city like London does not just manifest itself in its full glory as a result of human labor, but also as something equally affected by traffic systems, weather patterns, soil conditions, animal behavior, financial markets, political systems, and so on.

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ECOLOGY AND AGENCY There is much common ground between Sartre and Morton, starting with how both thinkers deny the existence of Nature understood as some seamless totality of unwrought matter. Moreover, practico-inert being, too, is obviously characterized by phasing, nonlocality, temporal undulation, and viscosity. As for the first three features, Sartre states that a practico-inert being transcends both “the individual as an isolated agent and inorganic matter as an inert and sealed totality.”57 A city, for example, is an inert entity that confronts others with its own exigencies. As with hyperobjects, the city is expressed in the comportment of its inhabitants and the arrangement of its roads and buildings, but these are signs of a separate entity—the city—rather than the entity itself (phasing). Likewise, practico-inert beings tend to simultaneously express themselves in different entities in different ways (nonlocality). A city, for example, will make itself felt in its respective poor and rich inhabitants in vastly different ways. As for temporal undulation, it is evident that practico-inert beings such as cities, traffic systems, governments, and legal systems function at their own rate and with their own logic, such that their temporality vastly exceeds our ordinary human ‘pace.’ Despite Morton’s remark that it would constitute ‘Sartre’s nightmare,’ viscosity is also clearly a core feature of practico-inert being.58 Although we will not go into the full details of the discussion of viscosity in Being and Nothingness here, it suffices to say that a lot of the reasoning Sartre employs in this work with regard to individual existence is also used in the Critique of Dialectical Reason on the level of humanity as a whole. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre discussed viscosity in the context of what he calls the “psychoanalysis of things.”59 If we want to find out who a person is, we have to find out how and why the world appears to that person in a certain way. As with the practico-inert, this concerns meaning: ‘What ontology can in fact teach psychoanalysis is first of all the true origin of the meanings of things and their true relation to human-reality.’60 Viscosity is an example of this: by showing why some people like to touch something sticky and some people do not, we can reveal something about who they are. It is however also something more, namely a metaphor for how consciousness relates to things in general: the world appears to us within the boundaries of the meaning we attach to it, but it also eludes us. Like viscous matter is mendable but also sticks to our fingers, we can never fully mend the world to our disposition. Hence, ‘the viscous is . . . the symbol of a being in which the for-itself is drunk up by the in-itself.’61 Although praxis and matter do not fully match the notions of the for-itself and the in-itself, the same symbolism applies to

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the practico-inert. Our actions stick to matter and gain a life of their own that largely eludes us. The practico-inert field is also a being in its own right, one that exists in between praxis and matter: a being in which praxis is drunk up by materiality. The real novelty of Morton’s theory, then, seems to be that it properly acknowledges the agency of nonhuman entities (interobjectivity), and that it accounts for the operation of entities across vast time scales. Yet we would argue that both features are already part of the logic of practico-inert being. Starting with the second point, take Sartre’s example of how practico-inert being took shape around Spain’s gold imports from Peru in the sixteenth century, as discussed above. There is clearly just a difference of degree, not kind, between how gold “crystallises in materiality” across the centuries and Morton’s meditations on how what we do with plutonium and uranium will have major and unforeseeable effects across the millennia.62 As such, Morton’s theory merely shows us the full, intimidating scope of what Sartre calls counter-finalities. As for interobjectivity, it is certainly true that Sartre’s writing often tends toward an anthropocentric rendering of reality that denies the agency of non-human entities. Take the aforementioned example of a volcano that might ‘dissolve’ into pure process if not for human beings: Sartre clearly confuses the meaning that the volcano and the eruption have (for us) with their existence. Yet crucially, the logic of practico-inert being remains intact if such anthropocentrism is abandoned. Recall Sartre’s statement that steam initiated the tendency toward larger factories. This shows that nonhuman entities such as steam engines already have real agency in Sartre’s original account (to deny this by claiming that steam engines nevertheless need humans to build bigger factories is a category mistake not unlike claiming that humans need eyes to appreciate paintings, and that it would therefore be eyes rather than humans who enjoy art). Here, too, Morton’s theory shows us the full scope of a reality consisting of inert beings that are constructed and maintained by humans and nonhumans alike, even if Sartre might have shied away from fully acknowledging the radically decentering implications of his theory. To think ecologically, then, is to embrace practico-inert being as hyperobjects. It is to see reality as a vast amalgam of interlocked entities that exist at a baffling variety of levels and scales, with each such entity having its own logic, its own speed, and its own signature effects on others caught in its wake. Morton’s keen sense for massive spatiotemporal scale and for the agency of nonhuman beings such as solar rays, nuclear radiation, and oil allows us to uncouple Sartre’s theory of inert being from its lingering anthropocentrism. This means accepting that the inert entities comprising our world do not just exist because there are humans, but simply because there are other

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such entities—climates and ecosystems, after all, existed long before we came along to implicate ourselves in them. Conversely, Sartre reminds us that true ecological thinking does not just concern global warming, weather patterns, and fossil fuels. Ontologically speaking, there is no real difference between the ozone layer and farming land or between the Baltic Sea and New York. The fact that we feel more confident about our ability to pinpoint the consequences of our own actions when it comes to farms and cities does not make them different in kind from so-called ‘natural’ entities. The resulting view of the world, then, lacks a sharp distinction between nature and culture. What exist, rather, is ecologies of vastly different entities—ranging from human beings to weather patterns and from cityscapes to soil bacteria—interlocked in endless duels. Incidentally, to reorient one’s reading of the Critique in this way would accord with how Morton argues that the only consistent materialist or even Marxist theory would be one that includes nonhuman beings in its account of the world, so as to prevent us from relapsing into the ecologically harmful thought that the world is just a blank screen that passively awaits reification through human economic activity.63 Yet this raises pressing questions about agency. If the world does not answer to our anthropocentric fantasies and if we are but one entity in an immense imbroglio of hyperobjects, then how is the Anthropocene—i.e., humanity becoming “a geophysical force on a planetary scale”64—even possible? Morton’s own writings illustrate this conundrum. For example, by simply turning the ignition of your car, you become a “member of a massively distributed thing” called global warming.65 You thereby contribute to something that will have immense effects on the world thousands of years from now.66 Yet at the same time, your actions are demonstrably statistically insignificant, as nothing will change if you decide to work from home rather than drive to the office.67 How to explain this ambiguity? The question here is how agency scales. How does the agency of individual humans (or nonhumans, for that matter) coalesce into the immensity of hyperobjects? Conversely, in what sense can individuals or groups even have agency in the first place? Here, too, Morton’s position is ambiguous. On the one hand, Morton holds that the notion of free will is “overrated.”68 We would mostly act according to the directives of objects in whose ‘zones’ we exist: “a human ethical or political decision is made caught in the force fields of intermeshed zones.”69 The whole point, after all, of hyperobjects or practico-inert being is that they are “far more threateningly autonomous” than human beings.70 Yet on the other hand, Morton repeatedly argues that human action is responsible for our current prospects of ecological catastrophe: “what makes humans the most dreadful is their ecological power. The

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uncanniness of human being is that it stirs up the oceans, divides the rocks, and ploughs up the soil.”71 Morton does indicate that we exercise this power through agriculture and industry,72 he also argues that (human) entities are never fully dissolved in or reduced to whatever hyperobjects they are engaged in, such that there is always “wiggle room that allows for stuff to happen.”73 Yet neither claim is followed by a logical explanation of how agency works in a world consisting of hyperobjects.74 Nevertheless, Morton’s work contains several criteria for an account of agency among hyperobjects. First, it cannot follow the logic of “commandcontrol.”75 Given the characteristics of hyperobjects (or practico-inert beings, for that matter), to have agency can never mean having full control over an object rendered fully transparent. Any account of agency must embrace that hyperobjects are inert realities that will always produce unintended consequences. Second, it cannot be rooted in any notion of “community” that would suggest that humans are collectively confronted with a nonhuman world.76 We must instead acknowledge that humans always-already exist in different objective attachments to specific objects, attachments that can unite as well as divide us. Finally, any account of human agency must not erase the causal efficacy of nonhuman entities. For as Morton writes: “a glass has [also] been designed by glass blowers and cutters. A black hole has been designed by gravitational forces in a gigantic star. And in particular, things are definitely not unformatted surfaces that can only be formatted by human shaping or desire projection.”77 In our view, Sartre’s theory of group formation is the key to closing the agential gap between statistically insignificant individual actors and massive inert entities. Moreover, the theory of group formation can meet the criteria just given, up to and including reserving ample space for the agency of nonhuman beings. Group formation is the central idea of the second book of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Through the formation of groups, human beings can regain their agency in the practico-inert field. This is because even though a single person may be powerless, a group may have significant effect on the practico-inert field. Yet in turn, groups themselves are also prone to inertia. From the perspective of Morton’s theory, the various kinds of groups that Sartre describes would all equally be hyperobjects. Sartre’s account, however, is more nuanced. We cannot go into the full details of how groups are formed, but it suffices to recall Sartre’s two major conceptual divisions in this context: the distinction between collectives and groups on the one hand and the distinction between the four kinds of groups on the other. Let us begin with collectives. As we have discussed at the beginning of this chapter, in praxis, human beings divide the world around them into zones.

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In the practico-inert field, practico-inert objects in turn divide human beings into different zones, which Sartre calls collectives. These seem to match how Morton uses the term zone. Once steam power leads to large-scale factories, it divides a population into a group of workers and a group of owners through their relations with factories.78 Another example is that of deforestation discussed above, which may divide people into those whose houses are in danger of being flooded from those whose houses are not. These collectives are inert and act according to the goals set by other practico-inert objects. In a collective, every member performs his or her function individually from each other. People defending their own houses from the flood, just like their neighbors do, are all acting in light of the same exigency of the practico-inert, yet they do so in isolation. Once a collective gains a shared purpose, a goal of which they are aware that they are working toward together, it can become a group. In other words, in the collective the members carry out the actions of the practico-inert in isolation, while in the group they perform their own shared praxis. As said, there are four kinds of groups: the fused group or “group-in-fusion,” the pledged group, the organization and the institution.79 All kinds of groups have in common that their members work together in light of a shared goal, but it is the way in which individual members work toward this goal that sets different kinds of groups apart. The fused group is the most basic in this regard. It is a collective of people which spontaneously takes up a goal. The best example of this is a riot. For example, a group of workers is fed up with low wages and decides to storm an office building to show their discontent. There is no division of tasks, no different functions for different individuals, but just a group of people who share a goal and experience that they share that goal.80 They know they are rioting, and they know that this suddenly gives them a level of agency which the members do not have individually. One person storming an office building can and will easily be stopped, but as a group, the workers have the power to do such.81 Although fused groups are always spontaneous, there are levels of this spontaneity. One could also think of an ecological protest spontaneously being organized on social media, while the actual protest requires some degree of planning. Fused groups can only exist as long as their goal is clear, and they are at risk of falling apart once this goal is achieved.82 In order to prevent this, a fused group may introduce a pledge, turning it into the second category, the pledged group. In a pledged group, some ritual is introduced to separate members from non-members. One could think of an oath, a badge, or any symbol that signals membership. By doing this, the group gains a certain level of identity and it is able to persist over time.83 A very good contemporary example of this is the “yellow vests movement,” in which members take

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the pledge by wearing a yellow vest to protest. These vests give them a name and an identity that gives the group the ability to persist over time, and turns every protest into a new incarnation of the same yellow vest protest, instead of a new and less related one. The most important aspect of the change from a fused to a pledged group is that a level of inertia is introduced. Although this makes the group able to exist for a longer period of time and may make the organization of the group more efficient, the range of agency is diminished. Because members need to be pledged in order to work toward the goal together, static rules are introduced which limits the group’s possibilities. The same logic is applicable to the next two stages of group formation: in order for the group to persist through time even longer and to work toward its goals more efficiently, the level of inertia needs to be increased. At the third level, that of an organization, every member is assigned a specific function that matches the capabilities of this person.84 The shared goal is still there, but the way in which an individual member toward this goal is subject to more limitations and hence diminishes the level of agency of that member. In the fourth level of group formation, the institution, the functions precede the actual members.85 A largely inert structure of the group is formed by leaders, who search for members who are capable of performing the actions required. Although Sartre explicitly states that even an institution is never fully inert, its level of inertia comes close to that of the practico-inert itself.86 A more organized protest movement or a small company can be an organization, while a larger company or a government would classify as an institution. Most hyperobjects that mainly consist of people would fall into this last category, for example governments and (larger) companies. However, as we have said before, the question with regard to Morton’s theory is how our agency scales, and it is exactly this question which Sartre answers in his theory of group formation. Although Sartre distinguishes the four forms of group formation, he clearly draws the first two and the second two together.87 The reason for this is rooted in the idea of functions: in fused and pledged groups, everyone performs the same (kinds of) actions, while in organizations and institutions every member has an assigned function. One could also argue however, that in terms of responsibility, it makes much more sense to focus on the middle two groups. In a fused group, the members are caught in the moment and can and will disassociate with the group in the near future. In the pledged group however, one has to pledge and thereby make the willing decision to join the group. This makes one associate with the group more and this could strengthen the feelings of responsibility for the group’s actions. The same goes for organizations, in which the members get functions based on their own capabilities. This can potentially make one feel more appreciated and part of the group

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than one would in an institution, in which every member is in principle much more replaceable. It is in these two stages that a rethinking of ecological group-agency can be found. Fused groups are spontaneous and cannot be planned and are thereby not suited for long-term ecological goals. Institutions however already exist in a world and are much more difficult to change because of their inert structures. In other words, in the pledged group and the organization, the levels in which the agency and inertia of groups are more balanced. This inertia however also has the upside of making the members associate more with the group and could thereby make them feel more responsible. This account of group agency does not give us an easy answer as to how to act in light of ecological problems, but it does show us that there are other approaches toward agency that exceed the level of the insignificant individual on the one hand and demanding sudden change from largely inert institutions on the other. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we aimed to demonstrate that the views on materiality found in the Critique of Dialectical Reason can be considered a valuable precursor to recent object-oriented ecological philosophy. As shown, Sartre’s theory of the practico-inert is in many respects similar to Morton’s theory of hyperobjects. Sartre’s theory of the practico-inert boils down to the idea that the crystalized praxis of human beings endows sectors of materiality with agency. These practico-inert objects in turn exert their agency on human beings and as such can act upon other sectors of the material world. In Morton, we get an ontology of mutually irreducible hyperobjects, with the prefix ‘hyper’ stressing that each such object is itself an unpredictable force that, despite its intimate relations to hosts of other entities, can never be fully controlled by anything else. As said, of the five characteristics of hyperobjects, phasing, nonlocality, temporal undulation, viscosity and interobjectivity, the practico-inert only falls short on the last one. Although Sartre stresses that objects can act upon one another, he holds that they will always use human beings as their tools in doing so. Furthermore, their significance and meaning always comes from the praxis of human beings. The limited account of interobjectivity in The Critique of Dialectical Reason shows that Sartre’s theory perhaps is still too anthropocentric. However, in general, it can be considered very much in line with current object-oriented ecological philosophy. Furthermore, what Sartre lacks in sensitivity toward interobjectivity, it makes up for with regard to theorizing agency. Where Morton only sees

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agency on the level of individual humans and inert hyperobjects, Sartre’s theory of group formation shows that there are levels of agency in between the individual and the fully inert. Especially the kinds of groups with a relatively low level of inertia such as the pledged group and the organization may prove to be fruitful grounds to rethink agency in the Anthropocene. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. London: Lexington Books. 2017. Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books, 2018. Kleinherenbrink, Arjen, and Gusman, Simon. “The Ontology of Social Objects: Harman’s Immaterialism and Sartre’s Practico-Inert.” Open Philosophy 1(1) (2018): 79–93. Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. London: Penguin Books, 2018. Morton, Timothy. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London: Verso, 2017. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Morton, Timothy. “X-Ray.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome, 311–27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles. New York: New Left Books, 1976. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge, 2018. Sparrow, Tom. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

NOTES 1. Cf. Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 70. 2. Matthew C. Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. (London: Lexington Books, 2017), 11. Also see Arjen Kleinherenbrink and Simon Gusman, “The Ontology of Social Objects: Harman’s Immaterialism and Sartre’s Practico-Inert,” Open Philosophy 1(1) (2018): 79–93.

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3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles (New York: New Left Books, 1976), 197, 454. 4. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 89. 5. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 734. 6. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 161. 7. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 161, 164. 8. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 164. 9. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 162. 10. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 124. 11. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 123. 12. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 169. 13. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 166. 14. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 191. 15. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 189. 16. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 191. 17. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 191. 18. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 191. 19. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 399. 20. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 180. 21. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 119. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 99. Timothy Morton, “X-Ray.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome, 311–27 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 24, 311. Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 87. 22. Morton, “X-Ray,” 311. Morton, Being Ecological, xxxiii. 23. Morton, Being Ecological, xl. 24. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican Books, 2018). 25. Morton, “X-Ray,” 316. Cf. Morton, Hyperobjects, 2. 26. Morton, “X-Ray,” 312–15. 27. Morton, “X-Ray,” 319. 28. Morton, “X-Ray,” 318. 29. Morton, Hyperobjects, 150. 30. Morton, Hyperobjects, 102, 9. 31. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 20–21. Morton, “X-Ray,” 313. 32. Morton, “X-Ray,” 325–26. Cf. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 19. Cf. Morton, Hyperobjects, 1. 33. Morton, Hyperobjects, 15. 34. Morton, Hyperobjects, 1, 129, 201. 35. Cf. Morton, Hyperobjects, 2. 36. Morton, Being Ecological, 28. 37. Morton, Hyperobjects, 70. 38. Morton, Hyperobjects, 70, 77.

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39. Morton, Hyperobjects, 77. 40. Morton, Hyperobjects, 70. 41. Morton, Hyperobjects, 1. 42. Cf. Morton, Hyperobjects, 38, 47–49. 43. Morton, Hyperobjects, 70. 44. Morton, Being Ecological, 23. 45. Morton, Dark Ecology, 25. Morton, Being Ecological, 23. 46. Morton, Being Ecological, 77. 47. Morton, Hyperobjects, 30–32. 48. Morton, Hyperobjects, 32, 1. Cf. 27. 49. Morton, Hyperobjects, 51. 50. Morton, Hyperobjects, 180. 51. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 130. Cf. Morton, Hyperobjects, 130. 52. Morton, Dark Ecology, 126. 53. Morton, Being Ecological, 32. 54. Morton, Hyperobjects, 81. 55. Morton, Hyperobjects, 87. 56. Morton, Hyperobjects, 81. 57. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 191. 58. Sartre describes himself as ‘someone who, unlike others, likes the viscous,’ but this could just be a figure of speech (Sartre 2018, 795). 59. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 2018), 777. 60. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 781. 61. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 795. 62. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 169. 63. Morton, Dark Ecology, 26. Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London: Verso, 2017), 60. 64. Morton, Dark Ecology, 9. 65. Morton, Dark Ecology, 8. 66. Morton, Humankind, 131. 67. Morton, Dark Ecology, 8. Morton, Being Ecological, xxvi. 68. Morton, Hyperobjects, 141. Morton, Being Ecological, 66. 69. Morton, Hyperobjects, 143. 70. Morton, Hyperobjects, 142. 71. Morton, Hyperobjects, 200. 72. Morton, Hyperobjects, 107, 140. Morton, Dark Ecology, 23, 39. 73. Morton, Humankind, 176. 74. Instead, Morton is more interested in exploring various affects—including compassion, curiosity, humility, sadness, and tenderness—that might help us become intimately attuned to our ecological condition (2010: 125, cf. 2017: 179; 2018: 57). 75. Cf. Morton, Humankind, 25. 76. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 127. 77. Morton, Being Ecological, 88. 78. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 253.

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79. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 686. 80. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 377–79. 81. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 393. 82. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 419. 83. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 435. 84. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 446. 85. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 600. 86. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 603. 87. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 686.

PART V

Ontology and Metaphysics

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Chapter Ten

Sartrean Ethics Meets Deloria’s Native American Metaphysics A Spatialized Existentialist Ethic Kimberly Engels‌‌

Sartre’s later (post 1955) ethics is characterized by a clear commitment to the integral human needs of all people and emphasizes the importance of courageous moral invention for facilitating that goal. In works such as Morality and History and “The Roots of Ethics” he emphasizes that true morality must strive to fulfill the integrally human, or those common human needs that we all share. This requires opposing oppressive systems and practices that keep individuals at the level of the “sub-human.”1 In Morality and History, he argues that ethical action requires moral invention, and the courage to look beyond our existing social structures and autonomously “invent” a new future that does not repeat oppressive structures and norms.2 How does Sartre’s ethical vision frame our present, in our epoch of human caused climatic events and ongoing damage to Earth’s ecosystems? It is increasingly clear that human well-being is dependent upon and interwoven with the well-being of the planet and other natural entities that live here. Considering the environmental challenges we face today, the average person likely thinks of carbon emissions, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. Viewing the problem through this lens can make the crisis appear distant, out of our hands, and not immediately affecting us. Less often do we consider the local ecological destruction taking place right around us in our immediate physical space. Often we neglect to attend to our local space until there is an urgent crisis, such as flooding, undrinkable water, or forest fires. Additionally, we often do not reflect deeply about the effects of our actions—whether individual, corporate, or governmental—in our local place. 211

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In a time when repeating the same habits, patterns and ideologies has only further aggravated ecological destruction, the need for a truly inventive ethic that transcends the mainstream emphasis on consumption, greed, and historical destiny could not be more dire. Sartre was a European thinker and ultimately influenced by a common Western assumption about nature and the relationship of humans to it. Native American theologian and philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. argued that a core Euro-influenced concept is a focus on the importance of time or history rather than a focus on natural space or place. While there is certainly no singular Western European view just as there is no singular Native American view, Deloria makes the case that most Western values and philosophies put a high value on history or time, tending to see a progression of historical events holding the greatest societal value. In contrast, the Indigenous people of what is now North America considered spaces—lands—to hold the highest possible value. Deloria’s position is seconded by Native American philosopher VF Cordova, who argues that not only do Indigenous people value their lands, they see themselves as in a good relationship of care and concern with their distinct, local portion of the Earth, where they feel at home. I will argue that the focus on time at the expense of space is a deeply engrained cultural value that no longer rises to the level of conscious reflection, but is in dire need of reconsideration. By incorporating a focus on space as understood by Deloria, we could develop a truly inventive existentialist ethic rooted in integral human needs and respect for our natural environment. I am not necessarily suggesting that Sartre himself would endorse all of Deloria’s viewpoints. Indeed, it is possible and arguably likely that the focus on time and history was so deeply engrained in his assumptions that a focus on natural space would seem counterintuitive to him. I am arguing, rather, that Sartre calls on us to look beyond our existing social structures and values and invent, and that by appealing to a cultural context significantly different from his own we might find an inventive morality like he sought. Further, I argue that Deloria’s focus on space is ultimately compatible with Sartre’s moral vision. SARTRE’S LATER ETHICS To understand Sartre’s later ethics, it is important to clarify his key terms praxis and practico-inert. Praxis refers to free, purposeful, conscious activity that interacts with the material environment as well as with other praxis. Praxis is goal-oriented, that is to say, it is organized around a future objective or end to be achieved, and consciousness organizes the environment in order to facilitate that goal. Practico-inert refers to the traces of past praxis

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that became alienated from their initiators and solidify into the social and material world. Examples of the practico-inert include human made artifacts, social institutions, language, deeply engrained, unquestioned ideas, and societally specific moral values. The practico-inert is distinct from praxis, as practico-inert ideas and values do not rise to the level of conscious, reflective praxis.3 Each person’s existential project is a constantly developing totalization, as praxis interacts with the practico-inert. Often the results of what we do are not exactly what we intend because our praxis is countered by the practico-inert. Thus, Sartre’s later ethics reflect that our social and material world is incorporated into our existential project and the construction of our essences, sometimes at the expense of our original intentions. We are inseparable from our social and material world, though not strictly defined by it. As Sartre was interested in how the material environment affects each person’s project, he does not completely ignore the importance of our existence in a physical space. However, as I will show, his attention to space is often overshadowed by a focus on the importance of history or time. Additionally, he tends to view the human relationship with space as one of struggle and scarcity rather than a good relationship of reciprocal care. In Morality and History, Sartre explores the individual experience of ethics in a historical context. All of our moral behavior is shaped in relation to moral norms, which present the possibility for us to live up to them or not. He argues that we are able to abide by moral norms easily when the practico-inert structures and social conditions align with their outcomes. But there arise more difficult circumstances in which our “moral comfort” is challenged. Sartre uses the example of a husband and wife in a Puritanical society. The wife has been diagnosed with cancer and will be dead within a year. The husband alone knows the truth about her condition and is morally conflicted about whether or not to tell her. If the couple both knew that her death would happen within a year, he would have to take care of her in her final months, changing the current relationship of deference between them. The man would be forced to “invent” a new relationship with his wife, in which he cared for her in her final months the way she had cared for him their entire marriage. This is too much for him to bear, so the man chooses to hide his wife’s condition from her, avoiding “the difficult task of self-invention.”4 This failure to courageously invent a new relationship with his wife makes him a “man of repetition.”5 He chooses a comfortable, repetitive praxis that confirms the status quo rather than an inventive praxis of new possibilities. This example is to show what ethical invention is not: it is not the repetition of existing social structures if they no longer meet the needs of those involved just because it makes us uncomfortable to change. In stark contrast, Sartre introduces an “ethical radicalism.” In ethical radicalism, a historically situated moral agent integrates the entirety of their

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praxis into the means to achieve the moral objective. Sartre uses the example of Pierre Brossolette, a member of the French socialist party who committed suicide by jumping out of a window after one session of being tortured. Sartre says that after one session of torture Brossolette feared he would give away information, and so sought death in order to achieve the certainty of his silence. In contrast to the man who chose to lie to his wife, Brossolette instead uses the power of his praxis to invent: At this level, the true meaning of unconditionality is revealed: it is the possibility in me of producing myself as an autonomy which affirms itself by dominating external circumstances instead of being dominated by them; or, if you prefer, it is the possibility of producing myself as a pure subject of interiority.6

A pure subject of interiority is one who, at all costs, does not allow external circumstances to control them. Ethics envisaged as a determination of activity appears at first as an essential but provisional moment of all praxis: indeed praxis tears itself away from the given—that is, from the present conditions—by transcending it toward a nonbeing from which praxis returns to the given in order to invent its own conditions of possibility. In this moment of invention, praxis posits its goal as unconditional.7

Through choosing ourselves in accordance with a norm considered unconditionally possible, for example, being one who does not lie or one who does not speak under torture, the fundamental inventive moment has the same structure. Praxis posits a future end in which it distinguishes itself from that which is given, and strives to create itself in spite of, or in direct opposition to, existing practico-inert structures. This ethical radicalism is a stark contrast to repetitive praxis, which just reaffirms past patterns because it is comfortable and convenient to do so. Sartre emphasizes that all people possess the autonomous power to invent and integrate our praxis into a moral goal. But in order to introduce criteria for judging an objective as moral, we must explore Sartre’s ethical ideal in “The Roots of Ethics.” In “The Roots of Ethics” Sartre emphasizes that the moral rules of a particular society are practico-inert, that is to say, they are results of past human praxis that became alienated from their original intentions due to scarcity and human culture. Sartre explores the infanticide of thalidomide babies in the 1950s in the Belgian town of Liege, an example with both historical and geographical specificity. Thalidomide was a sleeping pill that resulted in severe deformities in infants, especially very short, flipper-like limbs. Sartre acknowledges these women suffered moral conflict and anguish over what to do, as multiple values were in conflict. There is the general value placed on

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human life, but also the bourgeoisie value focused on the quality of life. The women ultimately resolved the conflict of values through infanticide. Sartre sees the infanticide as a condemnation of the situation that the drug-produced life had forced up on them, and a conviction of the current society as unacceptable. “[T]he infanticide of Liege is an act which denounces through a particular case, our society as unlivable, in the name of our unconditional future.”8 Sartre neither endorses nor condemns the act, but sees it as a process of historical praxis attempting to produce itself autonomously and contest the system that had forced the intolerable situation upon them, “the result of a battle of praxis against the practico-inert. It is history bursting mores.”9 The “true ethic,” then, must transcend the moral rules of any particular society. “The true ethic establishes and dissolves the alienated moralities, in that it is the sense of history, i.e., the refusal of all repetition in the name of the unconditional possibility of making man.”10 The true ethic cannot be repetitive social systems which codify the prejudice of one’s day into laws and rules. At the same time, an existentialist ethic cannot be grounded in an external absolute and must, instead, refer back to human beings and what we all have in common. He writes, “Still it is necessary to find at the most profound depth of human reality, that is, in its very animality, in its biological character, the roots of its ethico-historical condition.”11 The commonality found in the depth of human reality is “integral humanity” and Sartre says that it is rooted in human needs. “The root of morality is in need, that is, in the animality of man. Need posits man as his own end. . . . ”12 Sartre argues that in our most basic interaction with our environment the possibilities for praxis are interpreted and organized around meeting our needs. When these needs are not met, our conscious activity is always directed at fulfilling them.13 Sartre says that fulfillment of need, as the “true ethic,” is actually at the heart of all alienated moralities. Individual systems of morality become alienated because of the practico-inert. In other words, societally specific moralities, or the moral rules of individual societies, all begin with a basic intention of fulfilling integral human needs. But the institutions, material artifacts, altered nature, and ideologies that comprise the practico-inert and mediate the social interactions of human beings often lead to moral maxims being alienated from their original intentions, and serving the needs of the most powerful class. In the example of the Liege infanticide, the women were rejecting the alienated system that had forced them into an intolerable choice, and the infanticide is part of a desire for a society in which life is not made intolerable by bourgeois norms. According to Sartre, historical agents should work together to build a society in which as many people have their needs met as possible, which enables the possibility of creative praxis. This supports the achievement of a second moral ideal: the mutual recognition of freedom. Sartre says that when basic

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needs are fulfilled, human beings can maximally utilize their own freedom and direct it at ends other than fulfilling needs. But the mutual freedom ideal is only actualized through cooperation with others: There will be no integral man as long as the practico-inert alienates man, that is, as long as men, instead of being their product, are only the products of their products, as long as they do not unite into an autonomous praxis which will submit the world to the satisfaction of their needs without being enslaved and divided by their practical objectification. There will be no integral man as long as each man is not totally a man for all men.14

In order to avoid alienation of the practico-inert, it is imperative that we join together to work to satisfy physical and social needs to enhance the possibilities for everyone. Sartre says that the ethical individual must recognize our common integral humanity in others. When we do this, we are able to relate to each other through communal goals and shared praxis. We also recognize and enable each other’s freedom to pursue creative praxis. We understand that our individual projects are susceptible to interpretation by others. If we want our free praxis to have the meaning we want it to have, these meanings are dependent on others for its recognition.15 Sartre argues that we should establish an unconditioned norm which is not alienated by the practico-inert. He suggests that this morality is found in solidarity with impoverished and exploited people because they seek a future that transcends the current system.16 Because they are those most negatively affected by our current economic and political systems, they are most likely to reject existing practico-inert systems in favor of a society with less inequality. Sartre calls for “subhuman” agents, that is to say, those who live in a society with alienated morality, to overthrow systems in order to become fully human and produce a future that will enable autonomous, integral, and whole humanity. He describes such a society as one in which individuals would unite in communal praxis to dissolve the practico-inert as soon as it is formed. In this society humans use cooperative action to produce themselves autonomously rather than being produced by the oppressive economic systems and alienated moral norms of the practico-inert.17 In integral humanity, humans are not reduced to being defined by their labor. Integral human needs are those basic biological and social needs that all humans in all places have in common: food, water, shelter, care, friendship, comradery, and love to name a few. While these needs may be met differently depending on the society in which one lives, these needs are fundamental to what it means to be human. Having these needs met is also a precondition for an exercise of true existential freedom, in which one autonomously distinguishes themselves from what is given and builds a meaningful project in the world.

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In our modern epoch, Sartre’s moral vision rooted in meeting integral human needs requires utmost attention to ecological concerns. Vulnerable and impoverished people worldwide are affected by climatic events alongside other local ecological problems affecting food and water supplies, living conditions, and overall health and welfare. If we are to apply Sartre’s moral commitment to integral humanity today, we cannot overlook the importance of environmental and ecological concerns. DELORIA: THINKING IN TIME AND SPACE In the present, we are daily faced not only with the effects of climate change and climatic events, but the everyday ways that human activity alters and damages our local ecosystems. In addition to more commonly emphasized melting ice caps and rising sea levels, we also encounter local, geographically specific ecological problems related to flooding, pollutants, food supplies, forest fires, invasive species, and deforestation. The moral crises we face are ultimately rooted in our relationship to the natural environment we occupy. Native American philosopher VF Cordova argues that in most dominant Western philosophies, humans are seen as separate from and superior to our environment and consider nature only a resource to be subjugated to our goals.18 Sartre’s moral vision in Morality and History and “The Roots of Ethics” gives us a starting point, but I argue that the true ethic requires situating human needs within our relationship to the natural world. Deloria argues that the Indigenous people of North America take a very different approach to the relationship with our physical environment. Native American views vary between tribes, so it is incorrect to speak of a singular Native American viewpoint. However, as noted in the outset, thinkers such as Deloria and VF Cordova have argued that a concept common to most Indigenous North American tribes is a collective valuing of natural space. In his book God is Red, Deloria argues that one of the fundamental distinctions between traditional mainstream Western values and those of Indigenous people is a metaphysical one: much of the dominant Western European ideology revolves around the assumption that time proceeds linearly, and that “in the unraveling of this sequence, Western people become guardians of the world.”19 Western Europeans see an unfolding of historical progress in which they play an integral role. They tend to put emphasis on the time that things happened, celebrating anniversaries of events. They focus on sequential order, and take pride in being the “first.” Deloria uses the example of two US presidents refusing to surrender in Vietnam out of fear of being the “first” US president to lose a war. Both presidents were willing to risk the annihilation of an entire group of people and the space they occupied in order to preserve

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a temporal ideal.20 This decision shows a valuing of the temporal over the spatial, and the privileging of historical destiny over a natural space and its inhabitants. Deloria states that according to the most common Western religion, Christianity, God reveals events at certain points in the history of humankind’s development. When humans reach a historical point of enlightenment or sinfulness, God intervenes in the destiny of humankind. God floods the world, liberates his people from Egypt, sends (or resends) Jesus. According to Deloria, defining religious events in terms of time rather than space allows events that happen in very specific locations and contexts to be proclaimed as universal revelations of religious truth that should be applicable to everyone everywhere at all times. Christianity and its tenets are proclaimed to be universal principles to be spread around the globe to all people in all places, seen in both missionary work as well as forced conversion of Indigenous people.21 This belief, in Deloria’s view, is fueled by a privileging of the temporal over the spatial, and a failure to see that religious revelation as well as standards for behavior are tied to spaces. According to Deloria, for the Indigenous people of North America, you have an ethical relationship with your immediate environment that cannot be extracted and considered universal for everyone everywhere. Rather, ethics was a matter of developing an intimate knowledge of how all plants, animals, and natural entities in their space were related to each other and depended on each other to flourish. Specifically, most tribes had an understanding of “place” which meant understanding each natural entity’s place in relation to others. Plant, animal, and human life all related to each other in a delicate balance, and knowing one’s own place meant understanding how one’s actions and well-being were connected with the well-being of plants and animals on their tribal land. Deloria writes, “Familiarity with the personality of objects and entities of the natural world enabled Indians to discern immediately where each living being had its proper place and what kinds of experiences that place allowed, encouraged, and suggested.”22 Deloria introduces the concept of “appropriateness,” which he believes was common to most Indigenous North American tribes: the idea that there was an appropriate and respectful way to interact with natural entities. Deloria writes, Appropriateness includes the moral dimension of respect for the part of nature that will be used or affected in our action. Thus, killing an animal or catching a fish involved paying respect to the species and the individual animal or fish that such action had disturbed. Harvesting plants also involved paying respect to the plants. These actions were necessary because of the recognition that the universe was built upon constructive and cooperative relationships that had to be maintained.23

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Thus, ethics involved respect and care for the connections between all natural entities, and could not be removed from the geographical space where the tribe lived. Appropriateness was particular to the beings in one’s tribal land, and one could not assume knowledge of the relationships in the spaces of other tribes. Deloria gives the example of the Senecas, who considered corn, squash and beans to be the Three Sisters of the Earth, and believed they must be planted together because they had compatible spirits. While laboratory research has confirmed that these plants make a natural nitrogen cycle that keeps land fertile, the Senecas discovered this truth through their close observation and personal connection with their tribal land.24 The Mescalaro Apache list the bear as a highly respected animal that tribal members are not allowed to interact with. Mescalaro Apaches call the bear “my uncle” or “my grandfather,” showing a personal, familial connection they feel with this highly respected animal. Not only are tribal members not allowed to interact with the bear, they are also not allowed to touch its footprints, bedding, or walk where the bear walks.25 Their deeply personal relationship with the bear, which commands respect of its power and role in the ecosystem on their tribal land, necessitates that understanding the appropriate interaction with bears is to avoid all contact and respect the land where the bear walks. This personal approach to knowing bears has contributed to the safety of tribal members from bear attacks and enables a peaceful coexistence with the bears themselves. While Western religions celebrate religious holidays based around when events happened, Deloria explains that Native Americans see places as sacred. While the three major monotheistic religious traditions certainly have sacred places like the Holy Land, these places are considered sacred because of the events that happened there, not because of the natural entities that reside there. For Native Americans, sacred spaces and lands are pristinely preserved and considered places to connect with the spirits and receive divine wisdom. Revelation is a process of adjusting to natural surroundings and respecting the natural relationships in the ecosystem, rather than trying to dominate or change them. The majority of Indigenous tribes have sacred centers like forests, rivers, mountains or valleys which anchor their tribal traditions. The Navajo lands, for example, are marked by the four sacred mountains, and the Canyon de Chelly is considered one of the tribe’s most sacred places, where tribal members go to receive the strength and power of their ancestors.26 The Sierra Blanca Peak is sacred to the Mescalaro Apache, and tribal members still hold traditional blessing ceremonies and feasts on the peak.27 Importantly, argues Deloria, when reality is conceived of spatially rather than temporally, ethics flows from the ongoing life of a community rooted to a particular place.28 He states, “Spatial thinking requires that

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ethics be related directly to the physical world and real human situations, not abstract principles.”29 Deloria argues that beginning with a foundation rooted in a natural place will organically generate a relationship with time. If we begin with a tie to a geographical space, our observance and interaction with the place naturally leads to considerations of time. For example, observance of the life cycles of plants, the changing colors of leaves, the time to plant and harvest crops, the passing of the seasons, etc., automatically immerses us in a relationship with time.30 Deloria argues that the inverse is not necessarily true. If your starting point is the progression of time without being tied to a space, it is possible to remain in the abstract and never arrive at our concrete relationship with a space. Viewing history as a linear progression of events, and our lives as tied up in a historical plan or narrative that culminates in a traversing of spaces and often an eternity in Heaven does not automatically generate a relationship with a space. We often learn about events without much consideration for the natural entities in the spaces they took place. Thus, time does not automatically immerse you in spatial considerations. He writes, “If time becomes our primary consideration, we never seem to arrive at the reality of our existence in places but instead are always directed to experiential and abstract interpretations rather than the experiences themselves.”31 Deloria argues that a preoccupation with human affairs without rooting them in the places they occur often becomes associated with abstract ethical maxims that are supposed to apply to everyone everywhere. The failure of many in the United States and Canada to understand the true harm of denigrating Native American sacred sites stems from their failure to understand the importance of space to Indigenous people. A general lack of concern for natural space also contributes to the modern disregard for the natural environment. There is too much focus on historical destiny and human creations that persevere through time, without preserving and protecting the spaces where these projects take place. Further, a common belief in Christianity that our current physical occupation of the planet is merely a transitory stage that all will be reconciled at a future point in our historical destiny has powered an ethos of disregard for the spaces in which we live. This lack of connection leads to denial about the amount of harm we cause every day—whether in our individual actions, corporate policies, or the laws passed by public officials. SARTRE AND SPACE As I’ve shown, Sartre’s metaphysical and ethical discussions reflect an emphasis on time and events, although he does not completely ignore

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concerns of space. Throughout his major work A Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, he explores the experiences of individuals, collectives, and groups within history. His exploration of historical events, as well as his ethical writings which yearn for a new epoch rooted in the integrally human at some future point of human enlightenment, show a focus on progress and using future desired events to shape the direction of our praxis, whether collective or individual. Sartre would have wholeheartedly agreed with Deloria that ethics was about real people and real situations. His repeated discussion of the historical specificity of ethics, such as his examples of the bourgeois couple, Brossolette, or the thalidomide babies, shows that he thought ethical concerns were always interwoven with historical specificity, including what events were occurring and what future events were desired. For example, Brossolette’s actions only make sense in the context of the war (event) and political movement he was immersed in. Brossolette considered the events that were happening and how his particular action could contribute to future events. He also considered his actions in relation to the overall political cause. Ethical action could not be divorced from social and political causes, and these causes were usually unique to your geographical space. For example, Sartre analyzed anti-Semitism in France in particular, describing forms of anti-Semitism specific to post-war France: the challenges for Jews living in France at this time from both open, explicit anti-Semites and weak humanist defenders.32 It is clear Sartre does care about the geographical specificity of ethics alongside the historical. Sartre’s entire concept of praxis is that it is always time-based and forward-looking. We structure our immediate behavior in light of a future desired goal. However, discussion of space and nature is never completely absent. Throughout the first volume of the Critique, nature is discussed primarily in terms of scarcity and how it hinders and alienates the results of free praxis. Sartre argues that the individual’s initial interaction with nature is one of need, and praxis is always originally directed at fulfilling a need. He locates our initial relationship between our bodies and nature as one of danger and conflict. “The living body is therefore in danger in the universe, and the universe harbors the possibility of the non-being of the organism.”33 Sartre often describes efforts to work with nature that result in the opposite of the intended praxis. One notable discussion of space and nature in the first volume of the Critique is Sartre’s discussion of deforestation in China. He appeals to the example of Chinese peasants who deforested in order to plant more crops, only to have those crops flooded due to an absence of trees. Chinese peasants cleared the land of trees in order to farm the land and meet their needs.

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Eventually the land flooded due to lack of trees and the land was no longer suitable for farming. “In this particular place, and for this particular man cultivating his land, all that existed was an organic connection between the negative (removal of an obstacle) and the positive (enlargement of the arable sector).”34 In this example, the cultivation of crops was the goal of praxis in order to meet the needs of the group. Sartre suggests that the flooding could not even have been avoided simply by not deforesting, but that some reforestation, or planting of more trees would have been necessary to prevent it as well.35 Sartre uses the example to show that the natural environment often thwarts our best laid plans and turns our own praxis against us. The praxis of the peasants was to alter nature in order to grow their crops, and what eventually happened was the exact opposite result: the land became unusable for farming. “Thus Nature, though transcended, reappears within society, as the totalizing relation of all materiality to itself and of all workers to one another. It is at this level that matter can be studied as an inverted praxis.” While we could potentially interpret this example as an indication that Sartre thinks nature will always act as a hindrance to our praxis, there is perhaps another implicit message, even if Sartre himself doesn’t develop it: with a better understanding of the natural ecosystem, a stronger connection to their physical place and the relationships of the plants that grew there, perhaps there would have been better care of the land and prevention of flooding. That is to say, it is not necessarily the case that Sartre’s example is in conflict with Deloria’s overarching point, but rather, supports the idea that the true ethic must pay more attention to concerns of space. Actualizing the integral humanity ideal requires a connection to and respect for our natural surroundings. An ethics rooted in need cannot dissociate our needs from the natural environment. We must understand the relationships between natural entities, the life cycles of plants, and the optimal conditions for their growth and flourishing in order to adequately meet our needs. Existentialist philosophy and ethics seem ripe for a more robust focus on space. A SPATIAL EXISTENTIALIST ETHIC While Sartre cares about locations, he was still primarily interested in the events and social phenomena that were specific to those areas: including the cultural and social norms, political movements, and the lives of human beings. The specificity of his ethics was not concerned with the plant and animal life, ecosystems, and land itself. Nature is only discussed when it becomes relevant for human affairs and events. Thus, while Sartrean ethics does not ignore material specificity and concerns of space, it ultimately still

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prioritizes the temporal over the spatial. What shifts must be introduced in order to conceive of a spatialized existentialist ethic? The first shift or alteration involves the structure or direction of our praxis. Sartre argues that praxis is fundamentally future-oriented and forward-looking. We establish a goal or an end, and organize our surrounding environment as a field of possibilities for achieving that future end. The overarching objective, the image of self and world we strive for, shapes our present actions.37 Thus Sartre sees our initial conscious experience as immediately immersed in temporal concerns. What would it mean for praxis to become more spatially oriented? This would entail the realization that temporal goals are rooted in spaces, and that our existence in a space is the foundation of our existential projects. All human praxis has its origin in the Earth itself, as we developed as one species among others. Existential projects, such as Sartre’s own project as a writer, Brossolette’s project as a member of the socialist party, or my own project as a philosophy professor are only possible because the Earth provides a material foundation for human conscious experience. Humans become conscious of ourselves as selves by differentiating ourselves from the natural, physical world. A spatial ethic requires not viewing the Earth as only instrumentally valuable for our praxis, but as its necessary foundation that we must respect and care for. Meeting integral human needs requires a reciprocal relationship of concern with the earth, respect of natural life cycles, replenishing what we use, and understanding the interconnectedness of all natural things. Understanding the Earth as the ultimate source of our praxis means that our temporal, forward-looking praxis must simultaneously recognize it is intertwined with spatial concerns. From a purely Sartrean standpoint, plant and animal species are not morally relevant unless they are affecting the lives of human beings, in other words, they have only instrumental value. A shift to thinking more spatially encourages an existentialist ethic to consider the interests of plant and animal species. When we consider our praxis as grounded in a space, we understand the plant and animal species as fellow inhabitants whose well-being is interwoven with ours. While Sartre generally has little to say about animals, it is a reasonable assumption that he thinks we are morally distinct from animals because of our consciousness and praxis. While animals do not have robust conscious praxis in the way that humans do, an ethic of space allows us to see this does not entail we are superior to them. While we may have an ability to plan for the future and consciously shape ourselves in light of a goal, we are connected with other species because we are all dependent on the Earth for our ongoing sustenance. It is interesting that in “The Roots of Ethics,” Sartre stated that the root of the ethical is in the animality of humans, that which we share with other species.38 Although our needs may conflict with the needs of other species, incorporating an Indigenous sense of appropriateness means

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paying respect to them in the process, not taking more than we need, and not causing gratuitous suffering. Sartre argued that human freedom was interdependent—we must recognize that we cannot actualize our own freedom without simultaneously willing the freedom of the other and creating conditions that will maximize the freedom of all. If that foundation is rooted in our animality, then we share a common condition with other species. Reconceiving our praxis to have a spatial foundation helps further show that our integral human needs, and therefore our freedom, are interdependent with the general well-being of other plant and animal species. In Sartre’s example of ethical radicalism, Brossolette becomes a “pure subject of interiority” who dominates rather than being dominated and who integrates his entire existence into his valued goal. In this spirit of Sartrean moral invention, we can refuse to lie to our wives and repeat the status quo. At the same time, rather than an ethical radicalism of pure autonomy that dominates our circumstances, we can seek an ethical radicalism of interdependence with praxes, not just on the praxis of others, but with our natural, material environment. This ethical radicalism would not be solely focused on integrating our existence into social/political causes (time-based ends), but establishing our own praxis (our goals, beliefs, etc.) as founded in and emerging from a natural space. Any degree of autonomy that we have is preceded by and dependent on our existence in the natural world. Most of the Indigenous tribes of North America consider the Earth a literal mother, who births all natural entities, including humans, and cares for us if we care for her.39 While a Sartrean view would necessarily reject a personification of the Earth into a caring parent, it isn’t incompatible to reconceive of the Earth as the source or foundation of our praxis. Without it we have nothing with which to construct our goals or meet integral human needs. Rather than a domination of our circumstances, it involves a re-establishing of ourselves as natural, material beings in a natural, material world. The third shift that a spatial ethic introduces is reframing ecological concerns to focus primarily on the local, even though this will have global effects. The groundbreaking Paris agreement aims to offset emissions globally, with the temporal goal of a climate-neutral world by 2050, with steps that each country agrees to take in five-year cycles.40 The importance of such initiatives cannot be understated, as carbon emissions are having devastating effects across the globe and aggravate local environmental problems. However, the time-based framing of these initiatives begs us to consider future generations, what the world will look like in thirty years, and how a failure to alter our collective behavior in the present will hamper our future goals. I am not suggesting that we dismiss concerns about our collective future. I do suggest that framing ecological concerns only this way has the effect of making them seem removed from us. For example, no one wants to

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imagine a portion of New York City being underwater in twenty-five years, but it is hard for that to motivate individual or collective action when it seems like a distant rather than an immediate problem. Further, it frames climate problems as an issue for governments to solve that do not immediately concern our own praxis. Right next to New York City, from where I write these words, on Long Island’s ocean coasts, septic tanks are causing a crisis for the local ecosystem. Lacking a sewer system on Long Island, housing developments rely on septic tanks that leak nitrogen into the soil, which makes it into the local water supplies, harming Long Island’s rivers, marshes, and ocean coasts as well as the plant and animal species that call the island home. Rather than installing expensive sewer systems, local officials instead try to convince local homeowners to replace their antiquated septic tanks. However, without a robust understanding of their connection to their local space, homeowners are unlikely to make the change if it is inconvenient.41 A spatial ethic, in contrast, requires we understand the effects of our daily actions (whether individual or collective) on our local environment and the spaces we occupy and interact with every day. The “big picture” is still important, of course, but a focus on taking care of our local space will in turn have global effects. If we direct our attention toward restoring and respecting local ecosystems, making them conducive to sustain plant and animal life, and valuing the needs of other species who share our space, this will, in turn, reduce our overall carbon footprint. Additionally, a focus on the local entails more respect for the needs of the local community as well as respect for the lives and rights of Indigenous groups, who constantly have to defend their ways of life against pipelines, deforestation, and new projects for “economic development.” To help us apply a model of a spatialized existentialist ethic, we can turn to the example of the “durian boom” and its effects on the local habitat and socio-economic norms of Malaysia. Although durians have long been a locally sourced, small-scale food commodity, there is a growing global demand, mostly from China, causing a shift from small-scale to large-scale plantations in the area. What were once small acre farms are now large plantations of hundreds of acres.42 In a region already challenged by logging and palm oil production, accommodating this shift is leading to increased deforestation. Even though local environmental organizations caution about the ongoing effects of deforestation in the region, the economic benefits of the “durian boom” are being prioritized over local sustainability. The Malaysian government intends to meet the growing demand from China, expecting to increase exports to China from 236 tons in 2018 to 22,000 tons by 2030, nearly doubling the total durian exports of the nation.43 When there is a shift from small farms to large scale plantations, there is less care and concern taken for the natural space.

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The pressure to meet the industry demand through deforestation is negatively affecting the natural habitat and native inhabitants of Malaysia. In addition to the threat large-scale plantations pose to already existing small-scale farmers, deforestation is negatively impacting the land rights of Indigenous groups and the survival of the Bornean orangutan. There are numerous injustices Indigenous peoples suffer, including dispossession of their tribal lands and territories, destruction of their natural resources and spiritual sites, forced relocation and removal, economic and political marginalization, and forced assimilation. Despite several court battles resulting in favorable judgments for Indigenous land rights, there is little indication the government intends to halt industry expansion. It is expected that in the name of “economic development,” more and more land will be forcibly taken, deforested, and incorporated into market gains.44 The increased demand for durian in Malaysia introduces the possibility of economic growth and financial benefit for the region. A temporal goal is introduced: increase durian exports to twenty-two thousand tons by 2030. A strictly temporal thinking that does not incorporate concerns of space sees the economic benefit as a worthy end, and the deforestation is seen as an instrumental necessity for achieving it. But this lack of prioritization of the local space and the relationships of the beings that depend on each other there is having devastating effects on the amount of trees, the rights of Indigenous groups there, and the very existence of the Bornean orangutan. In the modern world economic opportunities cannot be ignored, especially when the welfare of vulnerable and oppressed people are at stake. But economic goals that focus on the benefits of future wealth cannot ignore the foundation of our praxis, the Earth itself, and the delicately balanced ecosystems that make temporal projects possible. The goal of increasing exports to twenty-two thousand tons overlooks the spatial effects: in this time, 75 percent of the existing forest will be eliminated, and orangutans may only exist in zoos. A Sartrean approach to this problem would approach it in its historical and geographical specificity, with careful consideration of the context and the needs of vulnerable groups. Sartre would not be in favor of a group praxis aimed at economic growth that would benefit those with the most power and control at the expense of the vulnerable, small-scale farmers, as well as the Indigenous groups. His integral humanity ideal mandates seeing the basic human needs that everyone has in common, and not sacrificing the needs of many to serve the wants of the few. The mutual recognition of freedom entails seeing that the freedom of Indigenous groups and the local farmers are interwoven with the freedom of those with the means to run large scale plantations. His inventive ethic urges us to look beyond existing economic systems and use the power of our consciousness to invent, to reject the alienated morality that sees exports and commodification as more valuable than

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local human lives and the integral needs of all people. We can measure durian yields and tons of export. We can track land usage, temperature changes, and the declining numbers of orangutans. What is less perceptible, however, is the labor of human and non-human animal suffering. There are no tools to measure the laborious toll of destroying cultures through land grabs and forced assimilation, nor is there a way to quantify the loss of species extinction. Capitalist, economic pursuits too often come at the expense of the most vulnerable populations due to a lack of consideration for the lasting effects of habitat commodification. A spatialized existentialist ethics takes into account the praxis and integral needs of the Indigenous people as well as the local residents. But the spatialized ethic also considers the forests and species that live there as fellow beings with their own needs, with whom we share a common foundational source for our praxis. The needs of the forest, orangutan and other natural entities matter alongside our own. The dominant mindset from Malaysian government officials is that it must be a choice between economic benefits and respect for the local environment and community. Fueled by a privileging of the temporal without an anchor in space, the default choice is to pursue economic benefits. Groups have been advocating for a national spatial plan based on informed land-use that does not set up temporal and spatial concerns as an either/or. A focus on water provision, flood control, carbon sequestration, and the livelihoods of the local rural residents must be pursued alongside economic gains.45 This does not completely ignore temporal concerns, in fact, the sustaining of the ecosystem and economy over time is the whole objective. This is reflective of Deloria’s point that being concerned with space inevitably immerses you in concerns of time—preservation of and respect for the local community and ecosystem ensures continued existence and the ongoing possibility of economic development. But pursuing future financial goals alone does not automatically immerse you in concerns of space. Thus, it is of utmost importance that the existentialist ethic incorporate space as the necessary foundation of our temporal goals. CONCLUSION As countries work together to meet climate goals and offset damage done by human activity, Sartre’s discussion of ethics in Morality and History and “The Roots of Ethics” are more relevant than ever. Existing values based on consumption, greed, and privileging the wants of a few over the needs of the many have led to a historical moment of unprecedented ecological crisis. Sartre saw the ethical as interwoven with the human ability to structure a field of possibilities in light of ends we choose, and to use this power

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to reject ideologies or historical norms that are alienated from meeting human needs and recognizing mutual freedom. The integrally human must start with a sense of solidarity and seeing an interconnectedness with other people, and using the means we have in our historical and material context to reject social systems that oppress and exploit the most vulnerable among us. Embracing our existential freedom means willing the freedom of the other, and acting within our context to remove barriers to self-actualization. Incorporating an Indigenous sense of concern for natural space alongside Sartrean historical and geographical specificity helps us see a new dimension of our interconnectedness: our interconnectedness with plant and animal life and the ecosystem itself. Making concern for our space a key component of the existentialist ethic motivates a concern for the local in our individual and collective actions. A concern for the local entails seeing the Earth itself as the source or foundation of our praxis, and that we should care for our local natural space. It calls us to see the local as our small piece of the Earth that we belong to, and that we should respect the relationships between all entities—human, animal, plant and other—there. As humans with the conscious power to restructure a field of possibilities in light of our own values, we hold the possibility to incorporate concerns of space into our hierarchies of values. The pursuit of the integrally human and the mutual recognition of freedom can be aided by the individual and collective valuing of space. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aiken, Robert and Colin Leigh “Seeking Redress in the Courts: Indigenous Land Rights and Judicial Decisions in Malaysia.” Modern Asian Studies 45, no 4 (July 2011): 873–74. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0026749X10000272. Cordova, V. F. How It Is. University of Arizona Press, 2007. Deloria, Vine Jr. “American Indian Metaphysics.” In Power and Place: Indian Education in America, by V. Deloria Jr. and D. Wildcat (Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), 13. Deloria, Vine Jr. God is Red. Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003. Deloria, Vine Jr. “Power and Place Equals Personality.” In Power and Place: Indian Education in America, by V. Deloria Jr. and D. Wildcat (Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), 24. Foderaro, Lisa. “Dead Rivers, Closed Beaches: A Water Crisis on Long Island.” The New York Times. May 8, 2017. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/05​/08​/nyregion​/ dead​-rivers​-closed beaches-an-acute-water-crisis-on-long-island.html. The Guardian. “Best-smeller: Malaysia Cashes in on Chinese Demand for Durian Fruit.” November 26, 2018. Accessed March 25, 2021. https:​//​www​.theguardian​ .com​/food​/2018​/nov​/26​/durian​-malaysia​-chinese​-demand​-stinky​-fruit.

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Lakshana, Meena. “China’s Appetite for Durian Puts Malaysia’s Forests Under Pressure.” China Dialogue.net. August 28, 2019. https:​//​chinadialogue​.net​/en​/food​ /11471​-china​-s​-appetite​-for durian-puts-malaysia-s-forests under-pressure-2/. Mescaleroapachetribe.com. “Blessing Feast.” Accessed March 25, 2021. https:​ //​ mescaleroapachetribe​.com​/12912​/blessing​-feast​/. Mescalaroapachetribe.com. “Understanding Our Culture.” Accessed March 25, 2021. https:​//​mescaleroapachetribe​.com​/our​-culture​/. PBS.org. “Navajo Culture: The Land.” Accessed March 25, 2021. https:​//​www​.pbs​.org​/independentlens​ /missnavajo​/land​.html​#:​​~:​text​=Within​%20the​%20Navajo​%20lands​%20are​,the​ %20Nation's​%20most​%20sacred​%20places. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. translated by George Becker. Schocken Books, 1995. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Notebooks for An Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Le Racine de l’éthique: Conference à l’Institut Gramsci 1964. Etudes sartrinnes 19 (2015) Translation from Elisabeth Bowman and Robert Stone. Stone, Robert and Elizabeth Bowman, Sartre’s Morality and History: A First Look at the Notes for the Unpublished 1965 Cornell Lecture. in Sartre Alive, edited by Ron Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven, 53–82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. United Nations. “The Paris Agreement.” Accessed March 25, 2021. https:​//​unfccc​.int​ /process​-and​-meetings​/the​-paris​-agreement​/the​-paris​-agreement. Wich, Serge, David Gaveau, Nicola Abram, Marc Ancrenaz, Alessandro Baccini, Stephen Brend, Lisa Curran, et al. “Understanding the Impacts of Land-Use Policies on a Threatened Species: Is There a Future for the Bornean Orangutan?” PLOS ONE 7, no 11 (November 7, 2012):  https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1371​/journal​.pone​ .0049142.

NOTES 1. Jean Paul Sartre, “La raciness de l’ethique: Conference à l’Institut Gramsci 1964,” Etudes sartrinnes 19 (2015): 11–118. Translation from Elizabeth Bowman and Robert Stone. 2. This lecture Morality and History was prepared for students at Cornell University in 1965, but Sartre canceled the lecture at the last minute out of protest of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Excerpts can be found in Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman, “Sartre’s Morality and History: A First Look at the Notes for the Unpublished 1965 Cornell Lecture,” in Sartre Alive, edited by Ron Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 53–82. For a comprehensive study of Sartre’s ethical writings of the mid-1960s, see Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert V. Stone, edited with a Foreward by Matthew C. Ally, Inventing

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Humanity: A Critical and Reconstructive Reading of Satre’s Second Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021). 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Verso, 2004), 65–69. 4. Stone and Bowman, “Sartre’s Morality and History,” 67. 5. Sartre, Morality and History, found in Stone and Bowman, “Sartre’s Morality and History,” 67. 6. Sartre, Morality and History, found in Stone and Bowman “Sartre’s Morality and History,” 70. Emphasis added. 7.Sartre,” Morality and History, found in Stone and Bowman “Sartre’s Morality and History,” 71. Emphasis added. 8. “l’infanticide de Liège est un acte qui dénonce à travers un cas particulier notre société comme invivable, au nom de notre avenir inconditionné” (“Les racines de l’ethique,” 44). 9. “[I]l est le résultat d’une lutte de la praxis contre le pratico-inerte. C’est l’histoire faisant éclater les moeurs” (“Les racines de l’ethique,” 44). 10. “La véritable éthique fonde et dissout les morales aliénées qu’elle est le sens de V histoire c’est-à-dire le refus de toute répétition au nom de la possibilité inconditionnée de faire l’homme" (“Les racines de l’ethique," 49). 11. “Encore faut-il trouver au plus profond de la réalité humaine, c’est- à-dire dans son animalité même, dans son caractère biologique, les racines de sa condition éthico-historique” (“Les raciness de l’ethique," 54). 12. “La racine de la morale est dans le besoin, c’ est-à-dire dans l’animalité de l’homme. C’est le besoin qui pose l’homme ccomme sa proper fin . . . ” (“Les racines de l’ethique,” 72). 13. Sartre, “Les racines de l’ethique,” 72. 14. [I]l n’y aura pas d’homme intégral tant que le pratico-inerte aliénera les hommes, c’est-à-dire tant que les hommes, au lieu d’être leurs produits, ne seront que les produits de leurs produits, tant qu’ils ne s’uniront pas dans une praxis autonome qui soumettra le monde à l’assouvissement des besoins sans être asservis et divisés par leur objectivation pratique. Il n’y aura pas d’homme intégral tant que chaque homme ne sera pas tout l’homme pour tous les hommes” (“Les racines de l’ethique,” 98). Translation from Elizabeth Bowman and Robert Stone. 15. Sartre emphasizes this point in his posthumously published Notebooks for An Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 280–82. 16. Sartre. “Les racines de l’ethique,” 97–98. 17. Sartre, “Les racines de l’ethique,” 97–98. 18. Cordova makes this point in How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of VF Cordova, (Arizona University Press, 2007), 115–16, 164–65. For example, highly influential Western philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Kant, all viewed human beings as separate from and superior to the natural world. 19.Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), 62. 20. Deloria, God Is Red, 62. 21. Deloria, God Is Red, 65.

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22. Deloria, “American Indian Metaphysics,” found in Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Wheat Ridge: Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), 13. 23. Deloria, “Power and Place Equals Personality,” found in Power and Place, 24. 24. Deloria, “Power and Place Equals Personality,” 24. 25.Mescalaro Apache Tribe, “Understanding Our Culture,” https:​ //​ mescaleroapachetribe​.com​/our​-culture​/, accessed 3/25/2021. 26. PBS.org Independent Culture, “Navajo Culture: The Land,” https:​//​www​.pbs​.org​ /independentlens​/missnavajo​/land​.html​#:​​~:​text​=Within​%20the​%20Navajo​%20lands​ %20are​,the​%20Nation's​%20most​%20sacred​%20places, accessed 3/25/2021. 27. Mescalero Apache, “Blessing Feast,” https:​//​mescaleroapachetribe​.com​/12912​/ blessing​-feast​/, accessed 3/25/2021. 28. Deloria, God Is Red, 67. 29. Deloria, God Is Red, 72. 30. Deloria, “Power and Place Equals Personality,” 24. 31. Deloria, “Power and Place Equals Personality,” 24. 32. See Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, translated by George Becker (Schocken Books, 1995). 33. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 81–82. 34. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 162. 35. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 163. 36. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 162. 37. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 65–69. 38. Sartre, “Les racines de l’ethique,” 54. 39. Cordova, How It Is, 113–16. 40. United Nations, “The Paris Agreement,” https:​//​unfccc​.int​/process​-and​ -meetings​/the​-paris​-agreement​/the​-paris​-agreement, accessed 3/25/21. 41. Lisa Foderaro, “Dead Rivers, Closed Beaches: A Water Crisis on Long Island” New York Times, May 8, 2017, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/05​/08​/nyregion​/dead​ -rivers​-closed​-beaches​-an​-acute​-water​-crisis​-on​-long​-island​.html, accessed 3/25/21. 42.The Guardian, “Best-smeller: Malaysia cashes in on Chinese demand for durian fruit,” November 26, 2018. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/food​/2018​/nov​/26​/durian​ -malaysia​-chinese​-demand​-stinky​-fruit, accessed 3/25/21. 43. Meena Lakshana, “China’s appetite for durian puts Malaysia’s forests under pressure,” China Dialogue, August 28, 2019. https:​//​chinadialogue​.net​/en​/food​/11471​ -china​-s​-appetite​-for​-durian​-puts​-malaysia​-s​-forests​-under​-pressure​-2​/, accessed 3/25/21. 44. Robert Aiken and Colin Leigh, “Seeking Redress in the Courts: Indigenous Land Rights and Judicial Decisions in Malaysia,” Modern Asian Studies 45.4 (2011) 873–74. 45. Serge Wich, David Gaveau, Nicola Abram, Marc Ancrenaz, Alessandro Baccini, Stephen Brend, Lisa Curran, Roberto A. Delgado, Andi Erman, Gabriella M. Fredriksson, Benoit Goossens, Simon Husson, Isabelle Lackman, Andrew Marshall, Anita Naomi, Elis Molidena, Nardiyono,Anton Nurcahyo, Kisar Odom, Adventus Panda, Purnomo, Andjar Rafiastanto, Dessy Ratnasari, Adi Santana, Imam Sapari,

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Carel van Schaik, Jamartin Sihite, Stephanie Spehar, Eddy Santoso, Amat Suyoko, Albertus Tiju, Graham Usher, Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, Erik Willems, Erik Meijaard, “Understanding the Impacts of Land-Use Policies on a Threatened Species: Is There a Future for the Bornean Orangutan?” PLOS ONE (2012), https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1371​/ journal​.pone​.0049142.

Chapter Eleven

Nothingness, Emptiness, and Ecology A Reframing of Sartre’s Early Ontology through Buddhist Metaphysics Dane Sawyer‌‌

The world Sartre wrote and thought in is rather different than ours (at least, in some ways), so Sartre scholars are called to critically engage with Sartre’s various writings in order to maintain a sense of Sartrean spirit within our own current social, political, and ecological contexts. We must continue to adapt, mold, and transform what is valuable within a Sartrean framework but within a contemporary setting, branching Sartre’s original insights and ideas within a more globally conscious, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, postmodern, postcolonial, and ecological context. With this spirit in mind, I would like to initiate a meeting of West and East by reconsidering Sartre’s early ontology through the lens of Buddhist ontology and metaphysics. As some scholars have already noted (such as Steven W. Laycock, Phra Medhidhammaporn, and even Sam Harris), Sartre articulates ideas that sit comfortably within a language that is Eastern, illustrating a sense of shared horizons and mutual intelligibility.1 Yet, Sartre is also distant enough from Buddhism that each has something to learn from the other. For instance, Sartre often depicts being in its ominous nature as it confronts us, stifles us, blocks us, or restricts us. Also, he tends to highlight being’s absurdness, its lack of inherent meaning, its de trop nature. Part of this confrontation with being is a product of how Sartre constructs his ontology with a stark contrast between being and nothingness. Phenomenologically and

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existentially, Sartre’s ontology insightfully captures human experience, at least some of the time. Sartre’s ontology is also somewhat hostile in its depictions of the interaction between being and nothingness. Utilizing Sartre’s ontology in dialogue with a Buddhist framework, I argue, can sustain Sartre’s overall insights and emphasis on freedom and responsibility, and also emphasize an organic and interconnected ontology that requires us to face the inseparability of being and nothingness, the self and other(s), nature and civilization, Earth and world, phenomenology and ontology, and epistemology and ethics. In particular, Buddhists endorse a set of interrelated concepts that they call the “three marks of existence” (impermanence, suffering, and no-self), which have their analog in Sartre’s philosophy (contingency, facticity, alienation, and the transcendence of the ego), but more easily lend themselves to a compassionate comportment with the environment, others, and the Earth. The aim in this paper is to create an existentialist ontology that combines the recognition of interconnection on an everyday level (what Buddhists call “conventional truth”) and on the actual atomic and biological level. I will argue Sartre’s ontology can be modified in order to incorporate gaping cracks and fissures in being so that nothingness and being embody a cozier, friendlier and more intimate relationship than they are typically depicted as having in Sartre’s philosophy. In other words, I will support the view that everything “inter-exists” and cannot exist without others and everything else (the rain, clouds, soil, sun, air, and so on are all a part of a flower and make a flower what it is—there is no separate thing called a “flower” that can be conceived of apart from all things). In short, this paper will rearticulate the early Sartre more comfortably within an ontology that embodies “inter-being” and the social and ecological consequences such rethinking requires of us today. After initially setting up this point of view, I will then consider its implications concerning eco-philosophy, environmental ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Here, I will claim that Buddhist ethics uniquely captures the enmeshed relationship between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics (and environmental ethics by extension); indeed, perception and intentionality link our metaphysical commitments to ethical judgments and our hedonic appropriations of and engagements with the planet, others, and ourselves. This view, I suggest, is also found in Sartre’s early ontology and thus serves as a bridge between Buddhist ethics and metaphysics, as well as Sartre’s existentialism. Three quick notes to the reader, I feel, should be set in place before proceeding: first, to arrive at the intersection of Sartrean and Buddhist environmental ethics that I’m arguing for and aiming to communicate, a significant amount of groundwork will need to be laid, and, thus, it will be a bit of a walk to get to the eco-environmental components of my thesis; rest assured, it’s always there, even if often implicitly; second, the themes

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of Sartre’s early writings most clearly and directly engage with concepts of Buddhism, so I will put my focus on the writings before and a little after Being and Nothingness, but I will, on occasion, make connections to Sartre’s later writings when appropriate and to supplement the discussion along the way; third, while there have been and are many Buddhisms, there is a core of enduring and influential strands; in this chapter the term Buddhism refers most directly to the Theravāda and Mahāyāna strands of Buddhism. SARTRE’S ONTOLOGY AND THE BUDDHIST’S THREE MARKS OF EXISTENCE Let’s begin by examining the three marks of existence in Buddhism and how they parallel and contrast with Sartre’s early philosophy. The doctrine of the three marks affirms a particular ontology, though one could also say it is a statement of Buddhist metaphysics, depending on how one defines the terms. As Joseph Catalano points out in his commentary on Being and Nothingness, metaphysics can be understood as a study of being itself, but Sartre and Heidegger both designate such a description as ontology instead of metaphysics.2 In addition, “being” can take at least two different meanings: 1) whatever is; 2) what is most basic to any reality, that is, “the quality that distinguishes any kind of reality from complete non-existence” (for instance, the “being of consciousness,” or the “being of phenomenon”).3 Sartre distinguishes metaphysics from ontology by claiming that metaphysics is primarily concerned with why there is anything rather than nothing. In short, Sartre does not speculate about the origins of being but focuses on phenomenological descriptions of it. Sartre meant his own work to contribute to ontology, which he claims deals with the “structures of existence,” and not metaphysics (which deals with existence itself); in fact, Sartre’s attitude toward metaphysics was, at best, ambivalent, and, at worst, hostile. Sartre’s starting point serves as a solid ground to compare and contrast his ontology and the Buddhist’s, since Buddhism also does not speculate on the origins of being but rather focuses on empirical and phenomenological experiences of it, and what those experiences and descriptions can tell us about the nature of being or entities. The spirit of Buddhism is embodied by the Pali term ehipassiko, that is, “come and see” (for yourself)—meaning, rather than taking the Buddha’s concepts as doctrine or dogma, test them out in your own experience and practice, then see how they resonate or do not with what you find to be true about your experience and the nature of the Earth. In short, Sartre and the Buddhist both utilize persuasive phenomenological descriptions and the evidence of experience as a way to capture pragmatic and existential truth.

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In Buddhism, the three marks of existence are meant to explain avijja, or our ignorance about the nature of the Earth and ourselves. To the Buddhist, we tend to impose wrong views onto the world and Earth and also fail to apprehend them correctly, that is, we mis-know reality as a result of our ignorance or ignoring of the truth. The three marks of existence express three truths that we have a tendency to ignore, fully comprehend, or assimilate into our lives, and thus become ideas that if not accepted and adopted will cause us to misapprehend the Earth and ourselves, as well as increase the suffering of ourselves and others. These three characteristics of existence are (1) the avoidance and misunderstanding of the nature of suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), (2) not recognizing the fundamental reality of impermanence (anicca), and (3) the false view that we have a permanent, enduring self or identity (anatta). Put more formulaically: all created beings experience and undergo suffering; all created things are transitory; and, all states or dhammas are without self.4 Later, I will consider the relationship between what Sartre claims about ignorance in Truth and Existence and the Buddhist view that we have a tendency to ignore the three characteristics, but for now I will consider the three characteristics themselves in detail. If Sartre and Buddhists agree on anything, it is in their common commitment to a non-egological view of consciousness. In other words, they both reach the conclusion, albeit by profoundly different means and to importantly different ends, that there is no permanent ego or self that is within or behind conscious experience. Consciousness is egoless or without self (anatta).5 For Sartre, arguing for a non-egological view of consciousness establishes his phenomenological ontology. His ontology stands once one rejects the transcendental ego, thereby placing all of being on the side of the object and making consciousness a nothingness. Buddhists, on the other hand, find a practical reason for rejecting the self: they see it as one of the cornerstones of wrong views that contribute to the amplification of suffering in our lives and on the planet. In the Samyutta Níkāya, the Buddha states, “What is impermanent is suffering. What is suffering is nonself. What is nonself should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom . . . [and then] the mind becomes dispassionate and is liberated from the taints by non-clinging.”6 The self is basically a construction (made up of what Buddhists call the five aggregates or skandas—matter, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness) and is largely a product of unwise attention (ayoniso-manasikāra). In other words, Buddhists recognize the existence of an empirical self, but not a metaphysical one, as Sartre does, and the Buddhist notion of unwise attention finds its parallel in Sartre’s notion of impure reflection, which posits the ego as a thing that is affirmed largely out of bad faith and the attempt to escape the spontaneity and freedom of consciousness. As Sartre suggests, “Impure

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reflection . . . is the apprehension of the reflected-on as such only in a circuit of selfness in which reflection stands in immediate relation with an in-itself which it has to be.”7 In other words, impure reflection is tied to the adopting of or a clinging to a “self” that a human being could never actually embody. This basic agreement, however, naturally leads us to a source of conflict between Sartre and the Buddhist if we consider the next mark of existence: impermanence (anicca). In the Buddhist worldview, it is not just that humans are without self but that all of life is also not-self. Buddhists frame this by saying “all things [dhammas] are not-self.”8 The human “self” is made up of the five aggregates, and composite or conditional things are typically labeled as sankhārās. The five aggregates are examples of sankhārās, but the term dhamma also includes not just composite or conditional things, but also non-conditional things, not least, nirvana (enlightenment). In short, in Buddhist metaphysics, there is nothing outside or inside the universe that would not be construed as dhamma. Therefore, as Phra Medhidhammaporn in Sartre’s Existentialism and Early Buddhism states, “‘All dhammas are not self,’ means that there is no self or substance, not only in the five aggregates, but also everywhere outside them or apart from them.”9 There are two obvious logical consequences of such a view. First, to say all is not self is to say that all things are impermanent and subject to constant change. Like Sartre’s concept of nothingness, which implies the commitment to a view that consciousness and its nature cannot be pinned down or fixed, the Buddhist notion of no-self suggests that what makes it impossible to establish a self is the constantly changing nature of every aspect of ourselves (both in mind and body). Second, in advocating no-self and impermanence, the Buddhist has also fundamentally rejected the substance view of the Earth. For the Buddhist, not just I but all of reality is empty of self-identity and reality (sunyata); nothing exists in-itself. In short, for the Buddhist, everything is in a state of perpetual becoming and flux. In Buddhism, everything co-arises with everything else, or is dependently arisen. This second conclusion brings us into conflict with Sartre’s early philosophy, for all of the similarities between the Buddhist and Sartre notwithstanding, it seems undeniable that Sartre (at least early in his career) maintains an affinity for substance thinking, in line with Heidegger’s ontology, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Descartes’ philosophy. In fact, I have often considered Sartre’s early ontology as an awkward attempt to squish or mesh these three philosophies together. On the one hand, Sartre was immersed in the Cartesian tradition but, on the other hand, had studied and was convinced by Heidegger’s existential ontology that transformed human beings (daseins) into beings-in-the-world, and Husserl’s phenomenological method and its understanding of consciousness and intentionality. Philosophically, it takes some creative logical qualification

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and phenomenological description to meld these three outlooks and starting points together, for they do not obviously or smoothly entail each other. In effect, Sartre’s early ontology stops short of the Buddhist extension of no-self to all things by reducing the world and Earth into two kinds or modes of being: being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Sartre aligns brute existents or things as being-in-itself, and conceives being-in-itself as plenitude, fullness, impersonal, and dense, so much so that it is not subject to change or becoming: “Transition, becoming, anything which permits us to say that being is not yet what it will be and that it is already what it is not—all that is forbidden on principle.”10 In addition, being-in-itself is uncreated, undifferentiated, and not subject to temporality. It is fundamentally contingent. As Sartre writes, “Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.”11 Being-for-itself, by contrast, is entangled with consciousness and human reality. It is defined as “being what it is not, and not being what it is.”12 Being-for-itself is a negation of being-in-itself, and if being-in-itself is fullness, being-for-itself is a lack or total emptiness. It is thus an absence of being, “a hole in being at the heart of being.”13 Sartre professes a kind of monism concerning being-for-itself and being-in-itself; these are not two substances, even if they are not exactly one in a strictly numeric sense. In fact, Sartre opens Being and Nothingness by recognizing philosophy’s considerable progress in “reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it . . . to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy and to replace them by the monism of the phenomenon.”14 This monism implies that the for-itself and in-itself, body and consciousness, are inseparable. As Sartre notes, “consciousness exists the body,” or as Catalano aptly suggests, “the fleshly conscious body.” In short, the “two” are coalescent, rather than a true dualism. While sympathetic to Sartre’s project, and largely in agreement with his emphasis on the importance of nothingness, I also think Sartre’s ontology is too dichotomously phrased and so risks being ensconced in a substance-oriented worldview that has limitations in that it does not fully incentivize conservation, interconnection, globalization, or environmentalism. As Stephen Laycock, the author of Nothingness and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre, argues, “the being of the being-in-itself exhibits the sort of necessity which is imposed by the system. Its truth is practically definitional.”15 He continues, “Beingin-itself is a deeply troubled notion, afflicted by massive incoherence.”16 In other words, Laycock claims that Sartre’s concept has phenomenological validity in terms of experiential description, but it lacks as an ontological or conceptual category; in particular, according to Laycock, Sartre’s dualistic thinking in dividing being into its two types creates an unnecessarily hostile relationship between being and nothingness, consciousness and the Earth, the self and others. Sartre’s view, unsurprisingly, leads to a sense of isolation

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in terms of one’s relationships to the world and others. Hence, it is not a surprise that Sartre alters Heidegger’s “being-with-others”—which admittedly has a “cozy ring to it” and suggests a perhaps questionable sense of cooperation and solidarity with others—to being-for-others, which suggests a slightly paranoid tone—not always completely wrong, of course—of being used, objectified, and manipulated by others. In addition, our fundamental relationship between the planet and others is primarily described in terms of conflict and strife (sadism/masochism, love/hate/indifference), all of which are doomed projects. The gloomy and grim side of existentialism, however, has always, in my view, been wrongly generalized to mean that existentialism is fundamentally a philosophy of despair. I frankly disagree. I think the more one investigates and studies the existentialists the more one comes away feeling that they are encouraging and optimistic, pushing one to make something of oneself, of accepting responsibility, and throwing oneself with passion into life and its vicissitudes, no matter the consequences. Still, one often does not come away from Sartre’s ontology feeling that way. Yet, not all Sartre scholars agree on exactly how to interpret and understand Sartre’s “dualistic” formulation of his ontology, and I am inclined to adopt Matthew Eshleman’s view, which suggests that being and nothingness be understood as two different modes (or ways) of one kind of being.17 This view would better align with the thesis and aims of this paper, but as Eshleman also admits, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness does not by itself directly and explicitly adopt such a view; instead, given the theoretical options, this one perhaps contains the most logical and ontological coherence. In short, Sartre’s ontology certainly suffers from the dualistic tension between being and nothingness, and his analysis of key concepts, such as freedom, bad faith, impure reflection, temporality, facticity, and transcendence all presume such a strained relationship. These observations can provide a segue into introducing the third mark of existence: suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha). Buddhism also has its fair share of critics as being a philosophy of pessimism, and as I suggested of Sartre, I think this view is mistaken. Yet, Buddhism begins with the first noble truth that suffering or discontent are ubiquitous throughout the planet. Suffering is the problem that Buddhists aim to solve through the concept of nirvana and the noble-eightfold path, and it also grounds the ideal relationship to others as embodying compassion and care—since we all suffer regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Nevertheless, the Buddhist does have something to supplement and complement Sartre’s philosophy. If we presume impermanence and no-self as actually objective features of the Earth, and not merely products of the for-itself, then we naturally come face-to-face with the fact that suffering often results as a product of the way we perceive and engage with the planet. In short, our philosophical worldviews contribute to how we navigate the landscape of our lives.

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Buddhists claim that because we do not recognize the truth of no-self and impermanence, we often add unnecessary suffering to our lives (a second arrow of suffering to add to the first arrow of pain that has already struck us). Sartre’s philosophy, in a sense, adds unnecessary suffering by positing the permanent and static nature of being-in-itself, and it is the inability to coordinate being-for-itself and being-in-itself that makes human beings a “useless passion.” As a counter, I would like to suggest that nothingness and being not be so diametrically opposed; rather, from the beginning, being-in-itself is always already porous, imbued with emptiness and inter-dependence. As Laycock argues, “from a Buddhist perspective, the ‘in-itself’ (suchness) is always already saturated with emptiness, infinitely porous, insubstantial.”18 In other words, rather than isolation, the Buddhist concept of emptiness, as well as impermanence, highlights the interconnected, and non-self-nature of all of existence. For the Buddhist, the world is in a state of constant flux and becoming, and not being. Everything is linked to, dependent on, and coarisen with everything else (embodied in and influenced by the law of karma). Buddhists communicate this feature of the world and Earth through the doctrine of “dependent origination” (paticca-samuppāda), which suggests there is no self-subsisting “thing” in the world, but rather everything influences everything else and is dependent on previous conditions in order to “exist.” In the Pali canonical texts, dependent origination is depicted numerous times in the following manner, “when this arises, that arises; when this does not occur, that does not occur.” What this tweak to Sartre’s philosophy accomplishes is a more serious consideration of the responsibility and inter-being of all of us to all others and the planet, and not the anthropocentric way in which Sartre sets up his ontology. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, puts the doctrine of emptiness well by noting that everything inter-exists: “[W]e can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. . . . We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.”19 In Sartre’s later writings, notably in the Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason, he comes close to the Buddhist formulation of emptiness in his often-repeated phrase, “everything is there.”20 As Sartre says, “The individual schema contains within itself everything that comes to man through man,” and “praxis is everywhere plenary[;] . . . it is everything it can be everywhere and . . . ultimately, reciprocal conditioning manifests itself through the object and through objectification.”21 Matthew Ally captures this point well in his Ecology and Existence, “[We see] in this pond’s still waters the inevasible bonds between nature and culture, fact and value, reality and

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imagination, Earth and world. For the two are in each case also one, as are they all together. . . . Everything is in this pond, all the worlds and the whole Earth, together.”22 The doctrine of impermanence and emptiness are anti-essentialist in orientation. As Robert Wright states, “The idea of emptiness is that, while things we perceive out there in the world do in some sense exist, they lack this thing called ‘essence.’”23 One way to conceptualize this point is to note that Sartre’s view of the self is similar to Heraclitus’ that “you can’t step into the same river twice,” where it is clear that there is a “you” and a “river,” but that “you” is constantly changing as a result of the transcending nature of consciousness and the for-itself. Early Buddhism also often conceptualizes the doctrine of no-self in a similar fashion, but once one adds the idea of emptiness as an extension of the marks of existence of no-self and impermanence, then we get this reformulation of Heraclitus’ aphorism: “you can’t step into the same river once,” because there is no “you” separate from all of reality and no “river” separate from all of reality either. “You” and the “river” on this view are not opposed but inter-dependent, enmeshed, and co-arisen, that is, in order to have a “you,” there must be “non-you” components that are sustaining and contributing to your existence and vice versa. The upshot of such a reformulation of Sartre’s ontology is one that I think is more friendly to the current metaphysical claims being made in science, that we are, for instance, all fundamentally made up of stardust, and, second, that responsibility is not grounded in an uncaused consciousness and its relationship to brute existents but rather in recognizing our inescapability from others and nature. One of the five remembrances in Buddhism states, “My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequence of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.”24 Sartre would agree with this sentiment. Of course, the Buddhist is framing this point in terms of karma, but its intention is to simply remind us that all of our actions have an effect on ourselves, others, and the planet. Remembering that fact can help me realize we are all interconnected, the flower and the garbage, my food and excrement, the good and bad of the world, the wealthy and poor. As Hanh states, “No one among us has clean hands. No one of us can claim that it is not our responsibility. . . . Each thing helps to create the other. . . . Looking deeply into ourselves, we see [a young girl suffering], and we will share her pain and the pain of the whole world. Then we can begin to be of real help.”25 Again, I think Sartre would agree. The basic fact is that we are all in this together; not recognizing that fact can have devastating and harmful consequences, for each other and the planet.

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SARTRE, BUDDHISM, AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS At this point, I would like to shift the discussion to more deliberately consider Sartre’s early philosophy and Buddhism in terms of ethics by carrying over the discussion from the first section in order to consider, first, its implications, and, second, to highlight some philosophical grounds for ethics and environmental ethics. I will do so by elaborating a few insights that I think Buddhism and Sartre share. Since Hume and Moore, there has been a general suspicion of blurring any “is” with an “ought,” that is, it has been a philosophical puzzle how one can derive an ethical framework out of the facts pertaining to the world and Earth. Sartre and existentialism grew out of this Humean and Moorean philosophical context, and, as a result, often found itself struggling to justify ethics. For instance, Heidegger was known to mock ethics, saying that ethicists were “fishing in the muddy sea of values”; Kierkegaard offered three modes of existence (the aesthetic, ethical, and religious) but never decisively accounted for any of them (for ethics was a matter of commitment and choice, suggested Kierkegaard, and not a given fact of existence), and Sartre himself never published an ethics (having never been satisfied with his Notebooks for an Ethics, nor with his “second ethics,” the ethical writings of the mid-1960s). Of the early existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir was the only one to publish an ethics, titled Ethics of Ambiguity. One of the reasons for existentialism’s difficulty in founding an ethics is that many of the existentialists claim that nature and life are ultimately without meaning or value. How does one support an ethics if life is meaningless, it is thought? This fact also explains some of Sartre’s grim and ominous depictions of nature, as de trop, and absurd. Yet, would not Buddhism have a similar problem as Sartre in establishing ethics, particularly, one aiming to support ecology and environmentalism? It is widely acknowledged by Buddhist scholars that the modern Western ecological view of the planet sits well within a Buddhist framework.26 Specifically, it is noted that Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna strands of Buddhism are all naturalistic, that is, all things are regarded as natural. They are generally considered holistic, a byproduct of the central teachings of no-self and “dependent origination,” that is, some “thing” is because of the co-incidence of certain conditions, and not as a result of possessing some intrinsic “self” or nature. Finally, Buddhism embodies a worldview that is “dynamic”: flux, not stasis, is the way of the planet (a result of the impermanence of existence). Still, none of these facts, by themselves, “prove” that Buddhism is ecologically friendly. As Simon P. James points out,

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[O]ne can endorse an ecological view of nature—one can even insist on the unity or “oneness” of humans and nature—and yet at the same time consistently regard nature as devoid of value. One could fully appreciate the intimate ecological connections between all things in nature, humans included, and yet not care at all about habitat depletion, over-hunting and global climate change.27

Thus, it appears on first glance that Buddhism also cannot seem to find an answer to the dilemma of deriving an ought from an is. While I sympathize with Hume and Moore’s philosophical dilemma, I also think it is a product of the way the West has traditionally and classically formulated the relationship between facts and values. In other words, Buddhism, in my view, does not suffer from the paradox surrounding the relationship between facts and values, and once we engage Buddhism’s unique way of formulating the question of ethics, I think we will find a bridge between the East and West, between Sartre’s existentialism and Buddhist ethics. In this section, I will be arguing that Buddhist philosophy and Sartre’s existentialism challenge the is/ought distinction by making it fundamentally impossible to separate them in theory and practice, that is, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics are inter-dependent and inter-exist. The existential condition and values entail each other and are not radically exclusive. Morality, I will argue, is a product of how we see the Earth and world, ourselves, and each other, and moral cultivation is the development of an appropriate engagement with the Earth.28 This fact, I argue, grounds both an existentialist and Buddhist environmental ethics. Central to an account of Buddhist ethics is an understanding of perception that is not unlike that of Sartre’s. Perception, in the early Buddhist Abhidamma psychology, involves intentionality, that is, perception is always a perception-as: “citta [consciousness] is fundamentally an activity or process of cognizing or knowing an object. It is not an agent or instrument possessing actual being in itself apart from the activity of cognizing.”29 This perception-as entails an affective valence of the object as pleasant or unpleasant, wholesome or unwholesome, to be avoided or approached, to be grasped or ignored, for instance. Moreover, cognitive determination ascertains what the object in fact is (a pencil, cup of coffee, an annoying person on the freeway, for example). In other words, perception embodies an amalgamation of the interactions among the five aggregates (matter, feelings, perception, mental formations, and consciousness). Thus, I do not merely perceive a cup of coffee without value; instead, I smell its pleasing aroma, notice my drowsiness, and yearn for the warmth of the cup in my hands on this cold morning, as well as the warm and tasty beverage as it slides down my throat. The important conclusion to draw from this particular psychological model is that once one brings together these various facets of human perception one

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is readied for action in relation to a particular object, that is, intentionality, perception, and action are inter-related. At first glance, it might not be obvious why this psychological set-up necessitates ethics, but as Buddhist philosophy scholar Jay L. Garfield notes, it actually makes all the difference: “Each of our perceptual encounters, whether with other people or with the animate and inanimate objects around us, involves hedonic or affective tones.”30 And these affective or hedonic tones typically involve morally charged interactions that all begin with a perceptual encounter. Put slightly differently, perception is imbued and colored by values and morality. We do not simply see the world and Earth without interest, without values; rather, intentionality plays a crucial role in the kind of moral planet we embody. As Garfield argues, “The way we direct our attention, the categories in terms of which we perceive, that which grabs our attention are all matters of moral concern, but are all matters not of what we do after perception, but condition and direct our perception of the world.”31 We cannot help valuing as we perceive most, if not all, of what we encounter. In addition, the conditions in which we perceive the world and Earth ethically are not entirely given or internalized socially, as the sociologist Peter Berger has argued; instead, moral education and the socialization process is an ongoing project. But what is important is to recognize that moral cultivation is intertwined with the development of perceptual abilities and skills. Morality is not only visceral but conceptual. For instance, when we perceive, we categorize others and the planet in various moral ways (as adversaries, friends, strangers, or colleagues), and many of these categorizations contain subtle evaluations and judgments, of which we are not always readily aware. The crucial step, suggests Berger, is when we internalize the over-arching values, beliefs, and codes of society to such a degree that we end up perceiving ourselves and the planet in precisely the terms that society has passed down to us. Internalized metaphysical and ethical frameworks thereby come to constitute how we perceive ourselves and the planet, and we come to embody these worldviews as simply the “way things are” and “how things are done,” and not as a product of our own socialization. Borrowing from Sartre’s philosophy, Berger calls this total identification with one’s social roles and identity “bad faith.”32 As a result, the categories we apply to ourselves and others are not morally neutral, and yet perception requires such categorizations in order to ascertain social and environmental facts, as well as ready one for action. In fact, as Berger notes, one of society’s roles is to encourage people to see social facts not as merely social, and thus alterable, but as facts about the very nature and structure of the cosmos (called a nomos). On the Buddhist view, the socialization process has certainly contributed to wrong and unskillful views about the planet and to the harmful ways in which we treat others and ourselves, but socialization is also not a wholly

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autonomous force over which we have no control whatsoever, but is, at least to some degree, under our control. As Garfield notes, “Ethical engagement . . . has its foundation in perceptual engagement, and perceptual engagement on this view is far from passive, far from fixed.”33 Moreover, intentionality and perception have the power to move us in either harmful or beneficial directions. The problem, Buddhists argue, is not with intentionality itself, since that is simply what consciousness does, but with our mistaken perceptions of the world and Earth, which often contribute to ours and others’ suffering, and is a byproduct of three unwholesome modes that consciousness adopts toward the planet: greed, hatred, and delusion. Whether by socialization or by design, these mistaken attitudes poison the mind and are an instrument for suffering. Thus, Buddhism grounds its worldview on the first noble truth that suffering (dukkha) or discontent is ubiquitous in the world—a starting point that acknowledges the blurring of perception and ethics. Thus, as Garfield suggests, “The project of leading a life that is a solution to, rather than a reinforcement of, the problem of universal suffering is at least in large part a project of reordering our perceptual engagement with the world.”34 Suffering is a fact of the human-animal condition but is also a moral problem to be dealt with and skillfully managed. This Buddhist orientation to ethics is quite different from the Western focus on duty, action, consequences, or virtue; though, it does not entirely negate them either. Rather, Buddhists offer a complementary approach that I think sits comfortably within Sartre’s existentialism. Thus, for the rest of this paper, I would like to draw out these connections in more detail and clarify how I think they embody an environmental ethic. First, Sartre’s notion of freedom, like the Buddhist’s, is also entangled with intentionality and desire (understood as a lack of being). In fact, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre more or less equates freedom and desire: “The for-itself can not sustain nihilation without determining itself as a lack of being,”35 “[desire] must by nature be an escape from itself toward the desired object. In other words, [desire] must be a lack . . . a lack of being.”36 Moreover, desire, for Sartre, can be either a desire to be, to do, or to have: “To possess is to be united with the object possessed in the form of appropriation; to which to possess is to wish to be united to an object in this relation.”37 The project of desire and value is to unite the for-itself and in-itself into a for-itself-in-itself, which Sartre argues is ontologically impossible, and would signal the disappearance of consciousness and freedom. Thus, for Sartre, desire gives rise to suffering, which, in turn, is a constant cause of frustration and suffering. Notice that in principle the Buddhist agrees with Sartre that desire (through clinging and aversion) and appropriation (greed) lead to discontent and suffering, but the Buddhist would disagree with Sartre that such a condition is utterly unsurpassable; for the Buddhist, consciousness will be free from

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suffering if desire and greed are eliminated, whereas Sartre sees frustration and suffering as a simple and unavoidable fact of existence. The point to be taken from this discussion is that both Sartre and Buddhists conceive of desire as a natural tendency of the mind and a cause of frustration, discontent, and suffering. Thus, so far Sartre and the Buddhist agree that greed (clinging) and hatred (or aversion) are commonplace in the way we engage the planet, its inhabitants, and ourselves. The missing piece in our discussion is the third unwholesome mode of mind that Buddhists claim aggravates and increases suffering: delusion. This final concept links, in my view, the Sartrean and Buddhist perspective more concretely and grounds ethics as a reordering of our perceptual engagement with the Earth. What Buddhists have in mind when they claim that the roots of suffering and discontent are found in greed, hatred, and delusion is that it is because we mis-know reality as it is that we then engage with the Earth in a way that guarantees to aggravate more suffering and discontent, both for myself and others. Sometimes we do this mis-knowing purposefully, and at other times we may mask such ignorance. The main point, however, is to see how our epistemological commitments and metaphysical views are entangled and enmeshed with our tendencies to suffer; they are like intentional and perceptual “anchors” that sink into our mind, then directly cause harm and suffering, a fact that has often been born out in contemporary research in psychology. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has found, our preconceived notions and expectations can easily sink as “anchors” in the subconscious, thereby influencing our subsequent perceptions and speculations about the world and Earth.38 For instance, just by arbitrarily fixing a wheel of fortune to fall on the numbers 10 and 65, then asking people to guess the percentage of African nations in the United Nations, people’s answers will be influenced by what number surfaced on the wheel. It’s no large leap from such experiments to our daily lives that we contribute on a regular basis to the suffering of ourselves and others based on the way our perceptions are enmeshed with beliefs about ourselves and the planet. Buddhists call such anchors that routinely cause suffering samkhara-dukkha, or suffering due to conditioned states. Suffering, claim Buddhists, can even surface in the midst of pleasure if that pleasure is based on an illusion about the nature of the object or ourselves. As Mark Siderits notes, “Buddhists do not deny that people sometimes experience pleasure and happiness. They claim, though, that pleasure and happiness are deceptive in nature.”39 Thus, the way we comport ourselves immensely influences the way we treat and encounter the Earth, and the way we do that is based on beliefs that ready us for actions and reactions. In short, we are guaranteed to suffer if we expect or believe the planet to be different than it really is; being able to accept reality as it is, not wishing for it to be radically different, will certainly diminish our suffering, particularly if our suffering is

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correlated with our desires, wants, or delusions. Thus, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology are not radically separate domains for Buddhists—tweak one, and it will have consequences for the others. Furthermore, Buddhists are claiming that suffering is a universal problem and fact, and not simply a projection of one’s own conceptions onto the world and Earth. Therefore, if we want to diminish suffering, we must learn the varieties of ways that we contribute to the suffering of others and ourselves, through both our ethical behavior and mistaken beliefs. And these beliefs, by extension, will impact positively or negatively our ecological and environmental conditions and resources. As a result, the link between ethical behavior and mistaken notions becomes a matter of our comportment on the Earth, in the way we take up the planet, engage with it, and understand it. As Garfield rightfully claims, “the Buddhist diagnosis of the existential problem of suffering generally, that suffering and the egocentric tendencies it generates and which in turn perpetuate it, are grounded in a fundamental confusion about the nature of reality—taking what is in fact interdependent, impermanent and essenceless, on both the subjective and objective side to be independent, enduring and substantial.”40 Thus, for the Buddhist, one cannot separate ethics or environmental ethics from metaphysics or ontology; they are enmeshed and inter-exist. As a result, we are back to where we began in section one: the three marks of existence must be taken up and internalized for us to skillfully and effectively engage with the planet and the suffering that inhabits it. Therefore, ethics and metaphysics, and environmentalism and eco-philosophy, cannot be separated from intentionality or care (to adopt a term familiar to existentialists from Heidegger). The Buddhist term for “care” is karuna, which is often translated as “compassion,” but the root of karuna is kr, meaning “to act.” As a result, I follow the translation by Jay L. Garfield, who suggests that karuna “connotes not just an emotive response to another, but a commitment to act on behalf of others to relieve their suffering.”41 In this sense, care (karuna) is presented as embodying the heart of morality. Moreover, to “adopt a caring attitude is more than an act of recognition; it is also to adopt a mode of comportment to the world, a mode in which the welfare and suffering of others is that which is ascertained in perception, in which sentient beings are perceived intentionally as suffering.”42 In other words, care is inextricably entangled with the phenomenology of perception; one recognizes the immensity of suffering and our interconnectedness, that one cannot solve one’s own suffering without caring about the suffering of others and the harmful effects certain actions have on the planet. For our purposes, the important point is to highlight that these values are fundamentally grounded in the facts of the world and the Earth and their embeddedness in intentionality. As Garfield notes, they are “perceptual sets,

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ways of experiencing and taking up with the world” that allow “us not only to see the world more accurately, but more ethically as well.”43 In drawing this connection, Buddhists are suggesting that ethics is bound to metaphysics and the ways that we anchor our reality, that is, “our metaphysics and epistemology are central to our moral lives.”44 In other words, existential suffering results not simply as a natural fact of the human condition, but also as a product of our confusions about reality, namely, when we impose on the planet categories that do not align with the way it actually is. Therefore, an awakened life, an authentic life, one built on good faith would be one that takes upon itself the task of transforming our experience in order that “reflective thought can become a spontaneous cognitive set, a way of being in the world, rather than a way of thinking about the world, in which we experience ourselves and all around us as we are, interdependent, impermanent, and insubstantial.”45 Such a sentiment and perspective, I argue, is also endorsed by Sartre, albeit in a somewhat less obvious way, for Sartre claims when writing Being and Nothingness that he is doing ontology, and not metaphysics or ethics, but such a position, on closer analysis, simply cannot hold up. It is philosophically impossible, or at least very difficult, to read Being and Nothingness and other texts by Sartre without recognizing the profound values that permeate the texts. How else could Sartre include such concepts as bad faith, impure reflection, and their more positive counterparts good faith, authenticity, radical conversion, and purifying reflection without the reader coming away with the sense that bad faith and impure reflection ought to be avoided, and good faith and authenticity should be sought after? Moreover, what good faith and authenticity ultimately amount to are a recognition of one’s true being, that is, an understanding, acceptance, and embracing of the way the world and Earth actually are. Sartre writes, “ . . . I find myself . . . engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for a minute.”46 In addition, Sartre describes bad faith as a form of self-deception about oneself and one’s responsibilities. Once again, we find epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics coordinating and operating together in intentionality and perception. Sartre supports more directly this position in his posthumously published manuscript Truth and Existence, in which he describes a variety of ways people avoid, negate, or distort the truth for the sake of self-preservation or self-interest, or simply as a way to avoid coming to grips with the way the world and Earth indeed are, or to evade responsibility for one’s choices. Willful ignorance and ignoring the truth highlight the active and passive ways in which we delude ourselves about the Earth and our place in it. Sartre’s play on the French verb ignorer (which can mean “not knowing” or “avoiding knowledge”) highlights this fact: ignorance and ignoring the truth, while

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separate in deed, are communicated through a single verb. As Sartre argues, “[S]ince the truth is illumination through an act and the act is choice, I must decide the truth and want it; therefore I am able to not want it. The condition of there being truth is the perpetual possibility of refusing it.”47 Moreover, Sartre continues by arguing that to love the truth is to enjoy Being, “To affirm is . . . to assume the world as if we had created it, to take our place in it, to take the side of Being (to side with things), to make ourselves responsible for the world as if it were our creation.”48 It is difficult to comprehend such statements without noticing the ethical values embedded in it, but that is exactly the point for both Buddhism and Sartre: an awakened or authentic life results from a transformation of our experience, and morality, from this perspective, becomes tied to how we perceive the Earth, each other, and ourselves. As a result, moral cultivation comes to be understood in terms of an appropriate engagement with reality, and a proper engagement with reality would be one that takes seriously and profoundly our deeply interconnected, impermanent, and unsatisfactory existence and conditions, by respecting and valuing what makes the conditions of existence possible, namely, what Buddhists call “dependent origination.”49 Such a view entails embodying the realization that one cannot act alone or merely as a human being, but that all of life, organic and inorganic, depends on each other to exist. Thus, Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us, Look into the self and discover that it is made only of non-self elements. A human being is made up of only non-human elements. To protect humans, we have to protect the non-human elements—the air, the water, the forest, the river, the mountains, and the animals. . . . We have to remove the notion of human as something that can survive by itself alone. Humans can survive only with the survival of other species. . . . So-called inanimate things are alive also. Our notions about living beings and inanimate things should be removed for us to touch reality.50

Ethical and ecological cultivation, in this view, is composed of the ways in which we comport ourselves on the planet, embodied by an awareness of one’s place on the Earth alongside and in connection with all that exists. Buddhist environmental ethics and Sartre’s eco-existentialism endorse a kind of moral phenomenology that respects and cares for sentient and non-sentient parts of the Earth. As Simon P. James claims, “the Buddhist ethicist will be disinclined, in practice, to make a sharp distinction between the sentient and non-sentient parts of the world; she will not wish to etch the moral circle too deeply. Recognizing the interdependence of all things, she will realize that such sharp lines cannot be drawn.”51 Insofar as we continue to hide such facts from ourselves, we will continue to contribute to the suffering and harming

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of all of life, as well as the planet, and will continue to be misguided and live in bad faith. Buddhists are right in suggesting that suffering and discontent are perpetuated by greed, hatred, and delusion, so we must learn to shift and anchor our metaphysical and epistemological views to include environmental ethical cultivation. Once I recognize that suffering and harm are bad, that’s enough to move me toward their alleviation, no matter whose it is, and once I understand the co-dependence of sentience and non-sentience, the Earth must be cared for. Garfield summarizes this point well: “Care, grounded in the awareness of our individually ephemeral joint participation in global life . . . is hence the wellspring of the motivation for the development of all perfections, and the most reliable motivation for morally decent actions.”52 Similarly, Sartre argues for what he calls “purifying reflection,” whereby a person avoids the pitfalls of bad faith by recognizing what one truly is, embodied by an acceptance of the way the planet is and one’s place in it. Phra Medhibdhammaporn puts this formulation in ecological terms: “He lets the earth support him, but does not succumb to the illusion that he can acquire its permanence,” and thus one drops the motive and desire to be the being-in-itself-for-itself.53 The person of good faith resembles, in this sense, the Buddhist Arahant (the liberated person): “Seeing the true nature of things, the Arahant has a new attitude toward life,” one that treads lightly upon the Earth, aiming to alleviate suffering and harm done to creatures and the planet, and recognizes the interdependence of sentience and non-sentience alike. Thich Nhat Hanh summarizes this perspective in what he calls the “fourteen mindfulness trainings,” which include such values and practices as openness, simple and healthy living, awareness of suffering, community and communication, reverence for life, right livelihood, and generosity. Again, we find metaphysics, epistemology, and (environmental) ethics embedded within one another. As Hanh states: Studying and practicing the mindfulness trainings can help us understand the true nature of interbeing—we cannot just be by ourselves alone; we can only inter-be with everyone and everything else. To practice these trainings is to become aware of what is going on in our bodies, our minds, and the world. With awareness, we can live our lives happily, fully present in each moment we are alive, intelligently seeking solutions to the problems we face, and working for peace in small and large ways.54

Such a practice could only be adopted under the precept of good faith and authenticity, Sartre would add.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. Bhikku Bodhi, ed. A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidamma. Translated by Bhikku Bodhi. Onalaska, WA: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 1999. Bikkhu Bodhi. Samyutta Níkāya (The Connected Discourses of the Buddha). Translated by Bikkhu Bodhi. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000. Catalano, Joseph. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. Eshelman, Matthew. “Is Sartre a Dualist?” Unpublished manuscript, June 15, 2019. Fronsdal, Gil. The Dhammapada. Translated by Gil Fronsdal. Boulder, Colorado: Shambala, 2006. Garfield, Jay L. Engaging. Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Hanh, Thich Nhat. Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices. Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2009. Hanh, Thich Nhat. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. Edited by Arnold Kotler. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Harris, Sam. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. James, Simon P. “Buddhism and Environmental Ethics.” In A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy. Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel. MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Laycock, Steven W. Nothingness and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of  Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. Medhidhammaporn, Phra. (Prayoon Mererk). Sartre’s Existentialism and Early Buddhism: A  Comparative Study of Selflessness Theories. Bangkok, Thailand: Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1998. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, Theory of Practical Ensembles. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Truth and Existence. Translated by Adrian van den Hoven. Edited with an introduction by Ronald Aronson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

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Siderits, Mark. Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007. Wright, Robert. Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017.

NOTES 1. Steven W. Laycock, Nothingness and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), Phra Medhidhammaporn (Prayoon Mererk), Sartre’s Existentialism and Early Buddhism: A Comparative Study of Selflessness Theories (Bangkok, Thailand: Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1998), Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 2. Joseph Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 15. 3. Catalano, A Commentary, 14. 4. See The Dhammapada, ch. 20, v. 277–79, or Phra Medhidhammaporn (Prayoon Mererk), Sartre’s Existentialism and Early Buddhism, 111. 5. There are some differences here that vary, depending on the point in Sartre’s philosophical career, as well as on the differing schools of thought in Buddhism. For instance, early Buddhism generally rejects the idea that consciousness can be self-conscious in the way that Sartre states in both Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness, namely, that consciousness is always simultaneously thetically aware of objects and non-thetically aware of itself. I side with Sartre in this debate. Interestingly, this disagreement, however, breaks down once Vijñānavādin school of Buddhism emerges, which does claim that consciousness is also selfconscious. See Phra Medhidhammaporn, Sartre’s Early Existentialism and Early Buddhism, 178. 6. Samyutta Níkāya (The Connected Discourses of the Buddha), trans. Bikkhu Bodhi (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), ch. 22, v. 45, 884. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 224. 8. The Dhammapada, trans. Gil Fronsdal (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 2006), ch. 20, 72. 9. Phra Medhidhammaporn, Sartre’s Early Existentialism and Early Buddhism, 108. 10. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 29. 11. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 29. 12. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 28 13. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 786. 14. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 3. Emphasis added. 15. Laycock, Nothingness and Emptiness, 69. 16. Laycock, 84. 17. Matthew Eshelman, “Is Sartre a Dualist?” (unpublished manuscript, June 15, 2019).

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18. Laycock, Nothingness and Emptiness, 100. 19. Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, ed. Arnold Kotler (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), 95–96. 20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 46. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 563, 445. 22. Matthew C. Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (Lanhan: Lexington Books, 2017), 498. 23. Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017), 154. 24. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 124. 25. Hanh, Peace Is Every Step, 98. 26. See Simon P. James, “Buddhism and Environmental Ethics,” in A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel (MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). 27. Simon P. James, “Buddhism and Environmental Ethics,” in A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, 602–03. 28. See Jay L. Garfield, Engaging. Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 316. 29. A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidamma, ed. Bhikku Bodhi, trans. Bikkhu Bodi (Onalaska, WA: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 1999), s. 3, p. 27. 30. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 287. 31. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 288. 32. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). 33. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 288. 34. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 288. Emphasis mine. 35. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 134. 36. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 137. 37. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 751. 38. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 39. Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007), 21. 40. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 308–09. 41. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 289. 42. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 289. 43. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 291. 44. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 309. 45. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 309. 46. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 710. 47. Jean-Paul Sartre, Truth and Existence, trans. Adrian van den Hoven, ed. with intro. Ronald Aronson (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27.

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48. Sartre, Truth and Existence, 30. 49. See Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 316. 50. Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 126. 51. James, “Buddhism and Environmental Ethics,” 611. 52. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, 313. 53. Phra Medhimmaporn, Sartre’s Existentialism and Early Buddhism, 195. 54. Thich Nhat Hanh, Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices (Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2009), 121.

PART VI

Reimagining Past and Future

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Chapter Twelve

Toward Ecologically Oriented Political Projects Reimagining Existentialism at Algren’s Cabin Damon Boria‌‌

IMAGINATION AND POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY Existentialist political theory can be more than what it has been. Certainly it has a history of methods, concerns, and commitments—much of which deserves to inform future developments of the theory—but this history does not, or should not, foreclose the possibility of new methods, new concerns, and new commitments. By analogy, an apt observation about existentialist literature made by Hazel Barnes is instructive. According to her, existentialist literature is distinct, but we should not fail to be imaginatively open to what this literature might be in the future. Sartre, she says, betrayed his own literary project when he tried to limit it to a literature of situations. Given that part of the distinctness of existentialist literature is its central concern for human freedom, Barnes argues that this literature is properly one of “possibility.”1 Likewise, since existentialist political theory shares the distinct central concern for human freedom, such theory can be viewed as a politics of possibility. While continuing to be animated by both its core theoretical commitments and its history, existentialist political theory has an open future. We can chart this open future without rendering Sartre’s existentialist political theory unrecognizable. William McBride’s Sartre’s Political Theory (1991) continues to be the leading light for scholarship in this area of Sartre’s thought. McBride argues that Sartre’s political theory has two values at its 257

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core—namely, freedom and socialism—noting that the conjunction of these values comprised the title of a Resistance writing group Sartre led during the Occupation (“Socialisme et Liberté”).2 These values guided Sartre’s well known and much discussed engagements in many of the twentieth century’s most consequential social and political events. As McBride puts it, “These twin notions [are] probably the two most important keys to the entire range of Sartre’s political thought.”3 McBride fairly observes that scholars’ interpretations of both “individual (political/practical) freedom” and “socialism” are extraordinarily diverse. While there is no need to take a position here on either the interpretive issues or Sartre’s case for the complementariness of the two values, the unwavering centrality of freedom underscores the openness of his existentialist political theory to a refashioning. Much like Sartrean humanism asserts that we can make ourselves out of what we have been made,4 we can refashion existentialist thought out of what it has been made to be so far. That said, Sartre’s political theory has not needed much refashioning to persist in relevance in the more than four decades since Sartre’s death. While history has, of course, continued to be made, many of Sartre’s social and political concerns are still current. For example, though Jim Crow segregation in the American South no longer exists in the way that Sartre witnessed it, The Respectful Prostitute continues to be a critical mirror in Louisiana (where this author lives and teaches) and elsewhere. Sartre’s concern over and thinking on racism is certainly not the only example. Similar comments can also be made about his concerns over and thinking on colonialism, capitalism, totalitarianism, and much else. Little wonder, then, that scholars continue to engage Sartre’s thought on such matters.5 Reflecting on these engagements, we can see that among the upshots of claiming freedom both descriptively and normatively is that we can and should refashion our theoretical framework to meet our circumstances, in both its facts and its possibilities. In pursuing our interest in the possible, we can do some imagining, one of the acts of consciousness explored in some of Sartre’s early works. As the act most explicitly connected to our freedom, imagining is particularly fitting for the task of exploring possible future shapes of existentialist thought, including how its political theory might be better integrated with ecological thought. Our imagination is put to work in the next section via a short exercise in historical fiction, which sees Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir invited to the environmentally unique place where the writer Nelson Algren owned a cabin. The edifying value of historical fiction is familiar to many of Sartre’s readers. His existential biographies—which have proven immensely helpful for understanding his existentialist psychology, politics, and more (though not reliable for understanding Charles Baudelaire or his other subjects)— are partially exercises in historical fiction. Recall Sartre’s labeling of The Family Idiot, his biography of Gustave Flaubert, as a “true novel.” Sartre’s

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theorizing on literature makes a strong case for being confident that, in its better moments, literature presents us with a critical mirror, capable of revealing the world as it is, as it could be, and as it should be (in all cases always incompletely, of course). As a form of literature, historical fiction has this promise. The historical fiction offered in the next section may also be viewed as an opportunity for cognitive play of an edifying kind. In a recent work on imagination, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei argues that the cognitive play inherent in the experience of fiction is “a natural counterbalance to epistemic conservatism.”6 She adds, “It may be that the interest we take in fiction and art is not primarily their representation of known and familiar worlds, or their presentation of possibilities, but their shifting our perspective on the habitual and familiar.” With particular relevance here, Gosetti-Ferencei then notes that this is analogous to the break from the natural attitude in phenomenology. The view of Sartrean existentialism as anti-environmentalist or, at best, ecologically tone-deaf relies on an epistemic conservatism that should be questioned, especially by those working within the epistemically open-ended philosophy of Sartrean existentialism. In other words, we need to hermeneutically liberate ourselves from the familiar and habitual view that Sartrean existentialism cannot be coherently integrated with ecological thinking. Such liberation might shift the perspective of philosophers like Gosetti-Ferencei who, while deserving credit for including the ecologically engaged chapter titled “Earth” in another book, On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life, still writes of Sartre: While a beautiful landscape may provoke in many of us a feeling of awe or reverence for the natural world, for Sartre such beauty is but an occasion to celebrate human exceptionalism. Sartre’s thinking goes further, disparaging nature, especially living nature, as repulsive or hostile. . . . We must look beyond Sartre to other existentialist thinkers, then, to understand the scope of more generous relations to nature in an existentialist light.7

With some imagination and cognitive play, we can see that Sartre’s existentialist philosophy (including his political theory) can and should be read in a more ecologically attuned and generous way. While additional ecological and philosophical sources are certain to prove essential for developing an ecologically refashioned existentialism, Sartre should not be ignored. Sartre’s oeuvre has always been animated by a dialectic between the real, the possible, and the imaginary. The historical fiction that follows participates in that dialectic both to disrupt the familiar and open possibilities for a refashioned theory and newly oriented praxes. That is, it invites us to consider a Sartrean theory that more deliberately and explicitly integrates history, existentialism, and ecology, revealing a theory that promises to be fruitful when confronting the

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eco-existential choices we face today and will face with intensifying urgency for the foreseeable future. AN EXERCISE IN HISTORICAL FICTION Sometime in the early 1950s . . . Sartre chose to stay behind. But for how long? He had not yet had enough of Chicago. Maybe he could not have too much of the metropolis. A journalist from The New Yorker recently called Chicago the United States’ “second city” and the nickname seemed on track to stick. Sartre liked it better than the city’s long-established nickname—the “windy city.” The human dimension is more overt in the new one, and hence more fitting for a human creation like a city with its skyscrapers and houses, restaurants and bars, streets and elevated railways, and so on. Sartre also liked the value judgment and the mood carried by the nickname. It is critical. Spoken by outsiders (notably, New Yorkers), Chicago is judged as inferior—at best, the second city; at worst, a second city. Spoken by locals, the nickname has an existential mood of self-conscious angst. Being second resonates with being secondhand, that is, with inauthenticity. Windiness describes. Being second questions. Sartre wallowed in the thought and yearned to spend more time with this questioned and self-questioning city. Beauvoir and Algren were on their way to the latter’s cabin in the Miller Beach neighborhood of Gary, Indiana. Algren felt most at home in Chicago, especially in the part of the city comprised largely of Polish immigrants. As a writer, he was a voice for what Beauvoir called the “lower depths” of the city.8 As a native to those lower depths, Algren felt the weight of the noise, the light, and—generally—the (often futile) struggle for a livelihood or respect or meaning. Worst of all, he keenly felt the unbearable loneliness of the struggle. He could get too much of the city. He had the means to seek refuge. He owned and frequented a cabin nestled in an oak forest part of the Indiana Dunes. Located approximately thirty-five miles from the heart of Chicago, the trip goes straight through the vastness of greater Chicagoland—a continuous run of industrial and residential development shaped by economic and racial division. The cabin is a base for hiding from that urban world or reaching into a different one. A lagoon is nearby. The sandy beaches of this southern shore of Lake Michigan are a short hike away. Algren came here because it was not the city. It lacked the city’s oversaturation of human reality. Beauvoir chose to visit Algren’s refuge, though with motives markedly different from his. She was not looking for a respite from city life. She was yearning to be closer with a different kind of sovereignty altogether. While in Chicago, Beauvoir wrote the following about riding the elevated railway:

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I took the El, and for miles and miles I glided above areas the color of mud, which were filled with these dreary houses planted in the hard earth. From time to time I could see a few tufts of grass in a vacant lot, a tree against a wooden fence. I’ve never been so moved by trees as by the ones in this dark city. They sprout up humbly among the garbage, the trash cans, the railway tracks, in backyards, or at the corner of dead-end streets, but they’re not tainted by the neighborhood; instead, the green of their leaves is intensified. No Alpine pastures or tropical forests could produce so green a green. Older than the houses that they stand beside, they are the survivors of a major clearing, and they silently recall the existence of a nonhuman sovereignty. In an organized world in which contingency is always the reverse side of human will, in which all disorder takes on the face of misfortune, they have the nonchalance of natural things, and the sight of them soothes the heart.9

Beauvoir was not fleeing the city and its pervasive human sovereignty. She was going toward a place where the sovereignty of trees is more pervasive, where the trees are a plenitude rather than a remnant, where the colors are given not in a startling contrast but in their depth and breadth for anyone attentive enough to see. Striving for such attentive presence, she walked: in the forest to see the oaks and hear the birds, to the lagoon to see the lily pads and hear the frogs, among the dunes to feel the sand and smell the flowers, and to the beach to get warmed by the sun and cooled by the lake. Immersed in and surrounded by such plenitude of nonchalance, Beauvoir’s heart was soothed all the more. This existential reconciliation, she soon realized, was not only about some vague impression of nonchalance. It was also about the diversity and complexity that comprised this plenitude of nonhuman sovereignty, the relations of cooperation and conflict, the interdependence that blurs identity, and the contingency without chaos. Being nonchalant recalls being static. There is not even a pretense of being static here. The dunes are visibly unstable and moving. The marram grass is visibly resisting the shifting sands. The oaks are building resilience. Beauvoir thought back to her ride on the elevated railway. She recalled the tufts of grass and sporadic trees that survived the clearing or emerged despite the landscape that was ordered indifferent to or against them. There is still a nonchalance about them. Maybe it is a lack of anxiety, or perhaps a lack of shame—or, more generally, a lack of self-consciousness. There is also more, she now notes. There is, like the grasses and oaks of the dunes, resistance and resilience—manifestations of a sovereignty that is not human, but a sovereignty nonetheless. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, the phone rang. It was Beauvoir hoping to encourage Sartre to catch up and see the dunes for himself. On rests during her walks she had been reading some of Henry Chandler Cowles’s ecological studies of the area. She recited a couple sentences for Sartre: “The struggle for existence always interests, because our life is such a struggle. Nowhere

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perhaps in the entire world of plants does the struggle for life take on such dramatic and spectacular phases as in the dunes.” Cringing at the thought of struggling up a dune, and of removing sand from between his toes, he demurred. Plus, he scoffed at the analogy between his struggle and that of plants! Unsurprised but disappointed, Beauvoir hung up. She was not going to let him hold her back from further experiencing what Cowles called “a marvelous cosmopolitan preserve.”10 Sartre remained uncertain of his choice. Shortly after, he stumbled upon Beauvoir’s written entry about the tufts of grass and trees soothing her heart while riding the elevated railway. He deliberated over whether to read it, ultimately choosing to become a voyeur. With a change of heart, he then headed out toward the train station. A surprisingly forceful and chilled wind chased him on the way, like flies chasing Orestes. Maybe, he wondered, windiness conveys both a weather event and an existential mood. That mood can be despair, like an October wind portending winter in Chicago. It can also be hope, like a summer wind lifting a kite. Both nicknames—the Windy City and the Second City—are significantly revealing, he then noted, as he boarded the train and started looking for tufts of grass among the tracks, on the way to a date with a dune that Cowles described as “a body of sand which under the influence of wind moves indifferently over swamp or town or forest.”11 Following a brief stay at Algren’s cabin, Sartre made his way to the dunes unaccompanied. His shoes, fit more for café floors than forest floors, increasingly failed as he approached the dunes and greater depths of sand. By the time Sartre began his ascent up an unexpectedly tall dune, sand was between his toes both inside and outside his socks. He kept his shoes on anyway. Hardly halfway up, Sartre crawled like a bear to a side of the slope and sat under the shade of a tree. The dune was neither an opportunity for challenging the limits of his physical endurance nor a hindrance to get anywhere in particular. His project was to be generous: to Beauvoir, whose encouragement and unbound thoughts led him to this dune, and to all that may be given by it. With sweat dripping onto his glasses and sand scratching his toes, he struggled to think. He struggled to see. Eventually he composed himself and looked up, following the human footprints of those who already went up and over this dune. They were small—children’s footprints. Their steps were short, but took no diversions, no breaks for rest in the shade. Sartre imagined their steps getting longer and more varied—looking less like steps and more like little explosions—on the other side, on the downslope, as they excitedly hurtled toward the beach. They must have been here recently, Sartre thought, or else those traces would have been blown away by wind or washed away by rain. Then, a question, not about where they have gone, but where they came from. Whose children frequent these dunes? With all the economic and racial division visible between Chicago and here, he had his suspicions. Next

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to him in the shade, he then noticed traces of some different visitors: first, a clawed one, perhaps a squirrel or a raccoon; second, the unmistakable thin and winding trace of a snake. Sartre quickly stood, recommitted to the ascent. Upon reaching the top of the dune, he noticed both a small pile of empty plastic water bottles a few feet away and, clearly visible but off in the distance, belching steel mills jutting penetratingly into the lake. As was his wont, Sartre began to think about work, production, and distribution. Atypically, though, his thinking was animated by a focus on pollution and its effects on the steelworkers, the local residents and visitors and, to his surprise, the nonhuman animals and the abiotic parts of this environment. Taking Beauvoir’s lead of making room for unbound thoughts, he proceeded to ruminate about her image of nonhuman sovereignty. Can we value, he asked himself, natural states as sovereign? He continued: If Beauvoir has good reason to see tufts of grass and trees as sovereign, does he have good reason to see the dune he is standing on and the lake he is gazing upon as sovereign too, where the plastic bottles and the mills are affronts? Surely, Sartre chuckled, the sovereignty of natural states is a more reasonable idea than the sovereignty of bureaucratic institutions. With a hunch that these varied thoughts may point toward ecologically generous political projects, Sartre removed his sandy shoes and socks and began his journey back to Algren’s cabin and a cool cocktail. A SANDY TRAIL FOR ECO-EXISTENTIALIST THINKING Simone de Beauvoir offers us both elegant articulations of existentialism and promising pathways for new directions. She extensively developed some of these pathways, as seen in The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, for example. Additional pathways await restlessly in her texts. One such pathway is found in America Day by Day, the collection of Beauvoir’s writings from when she traveled across the United States in 1947, which was cited in the historical fiction exercise. On April 15th, between visits to Smith College and Wellesley College, her tour of the area approaches Walden Pond. Shortly after noting that the background “is a very blue spring day, flowering with yellow forsythias and pink and purple fruit trees” against which “bursts the glory of red maples with their syrupy sap,”12 she recalls reading Thoreau’s Walden “at the age when reading is magic.”13 Excited about being at the place she formerly tried “in vain” to imagine, she quotes Thoreau’s description of the place at length. She proceeds to identify Thoreau as “a great American historical figure” who helped make Concord “one of the intellectual cradles of America.”14 The possibilities for refashioning existentialism rooted in this appreciation for Thoreau, itself couched in her (quite prevalent) Thoreauvian

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vision of flowering backgrounds and syrupy foregrounds, is a pathway that will be fleshed out a bit more by examining another wellspring of American ecological thought and environmental activism, namely, the Indiana Dunes area that was imaginatively visited in the previous section. The Indiana Dunes are part of an extensive and unique ecological site off the southern shores of Lake Michigan. One of the residential developments built within the Dunes is the Gary, Indiana neighborhood of Miller Beach. As noted in the historical fiction exercise above, a cabin in this neighborhood was owned by Nelson Algren, the Chicago-based writer who was awarded the first National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm. Beauvoir first met Algren during her 1947 travels across the United States and continued a relationship with him that lasted until 1964. During at least one of her subsequent visits to Algren, which included a three month stretch in 1950, she stayed at Algren’s cabin. So, while her wish to see Thoreau’s cabin went unfulfilled due to it not having been preserved,15 she did inhabit a cabin at a site historically important for American ecology and environmentalism. This importance is partially due to the ecological discoveries of a botanist from the University of Chicago, Henry Chandler Cowles, and the generations of environmental activists who have preserved and conserved a site that Cowles—with good reason—put on par with Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Instead of waving off this encounter between the existentialist philosopher and this important ecological site as merely incidental and meaningless, let us embrace Beauvoir’s Thoreau-centered cues and use our unbound imaginations to see what ecological and existentialist thinking—that is, eco-existentialist thinking—might emerge. A useful way to pump our imaginations a bit more for such thinking is reading Cowles’s 1916 testimony in favor of a proposal to recognize the Dunes as a national park. He observes: The botanical features of the dunes may be considered under two heads: first, the dunes as a common meeting ground of trees and wild flowers from all directions; and second, the dunes as a picturesque battle ground between plant life and the elements. Botanically, the Indiana dunes are a marvelous cosmopolitan preserve, a veritable floral melting pot. Within a stone’s throw of almost any spot one may find plants of the desert and plants of rich woodlands, plants of the pine woods, and plants of swamps, plants of oak woods and plants of the prairies. . . . Here one may find the prickly pear cactus of the southwestern desert hobnobbing with the bearberry of the arctic and alpine regions.16

The next paragraphs from Cowles are particularly eye-catching for existentialists:

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The struggle for existence always interests, because our life is such a struggle. Nowhere perhaps in the entire world of plants does the struggle for life take on such dramatic and spectacular phases as in the dunes. A dune in the early days of its career is a moving landscape, a place that is never twice alike; it is a body of sand which under the influence of wind moves indifferently over swamp or town or forest. Perhaps nothing in all nature except a volcano with its lava flow is to be compared with such a moving dune as it is to be seen . . . in the Indiana Dunes. I have many times watched the destruction of forests by sand burial. But the plants do not yield supinely. Many species . . . give up very quickly, but others . . . display an astonishing resistance, growing up and up as the sand advances over them, and often succeeding in keeping pace with the advance of the sand. The power to respond in such a way depends upon the possession of a capacity for the rapid extension of stems and roots; in such plants new roots develop freely from the buried stems. No other dunes than ours show such bewildering displays of dune movement and struggle for existence, such labyrinths of motion, form, and life. So just because its uniqueness preserved the Yellowstone—there are no such geysers elsewhere, so should their uniqueness preserve our dunes, for they are without parallel.17

We can bring to the foreground of our minds several notions in these passages that may be of interest to ecologists, environmentalists, and existentialists alike. First, there is the view that we can recognize our struggle for existence in the plant’s struggle for existence. While we may not see our struggle for, say, meaning in the plant’s, we can see our most basic struggle. This is possible because material scarcity is a shared fact. As Sartre notes early in Critique of Dialectical Reason, we—as embodied beings—have basic material needs and sometimes there is not enough for everyone—which is, rather than a so-called fact of nature, a contingent social fact often reflecting our poor choices.18 In at least this way, we are vulnerable like other living beings and together we share this basic struggle. A resonance here is Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s (often underappreciated) inheritance of Nietzsche’s naturalistic move to “translate man back into nature,” which entails a rejection of the “you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin” evaluative creed at the heart of many—or all—anthropocentric philosophies.19 Second, there is the environment as the site for both battles and (generous or benign) meetings. A decidedly anti-existentialist theoretical move is to essentialize, as philosophers like Thoreau seem to do, the meaning of the natural environment. Neither Beauvoirian nor Sartrean thought is committed to a given essence of the environment. In other words, the environment— comprised of biotic and abiotic elements—is given to us as, for example, possessing neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad value. Regardless

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of the biographical facts about their contrasting attitudes toward the natural environment, Beauvoir and Sartre do not essentialize our relations to the environment any more than they essentialize social relations, which is to say “not at all”—though some readers also make this mistake in the latter case due to overzealous interpretations of texts like No Exit. A theoretically more coherent move is for existentialists to think of the environment like they think of the body, a site to which we are so relationally bound that we have no existence independent from it. As Sartre reminds us, we are our bodies. When thinking about this fact, we should acknowledge that our bodies— which, again, we are—are relationally bound to the broader environment in such ways that we can and should say that we are our environment. As with our bodies, we may live this relation in conflict or in peace. Most likely, we will live this relation in both ways given the dynamic interplay over time between material contingencies and our freely chosen values or projects. One further takeaway is that existentialists, even when employing a conceptual distinction between the human and the natural environment, are not necessarily—and should not be—making a sharp ontological distinction, certainly not one bearing intrinsic value judgments. To better distance themselves from such a sharp and false distinction, existentialists can, and should, get in the habit of speaking more like ecologists, using terms like “relations,” “interdependence,” “dynamics,” “patterns,” and “processes.” More may be said about other notions in Cowles’s testimony. Cowles’s image of the whole as a labyrinth is not an inapt metaphor for the existentialist.20 His appreciation for uniqueness—of a sole cactus, a dune, or the community of dunes, to cite a few examples—has some echoes in the existentialists’ view of the human individual as a “singular universal.”21 His recognition of the diverse “cosmopolitan” population with their varied backgrounds, connections, and practices recalls Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s global social and political orientations. But what is most salient at this point is the ultimate purpose of Cowles’s 1916 testimony, namely, the effort to conserve and preserve significant parts of the Indiana Dunes by getting the area designated as a national park—an effort that finally succeeded a century later—in 2019. Cowles’s testimony, which was taking place in Chicago about one month after the establishment of the National Park Service, was one of many delivered in favor of the designation. The Dunes were facing numerous threats, including from steel mills, power plants, glass companies, golf courses, agriculture, and other economically driven initiatives such as the construction of a port.22 The National Park Service provides a brief but representative example of the threat: “Hoosier Slide . . . 200 feet in height, was the largest sand dune on Indiana’s lakeshore. During the first twenty years of the battle to save the dunes, the Ball Brothers of Muncie, Indiana, manufacturers of glass fruit jars, and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company of Kokomo

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carried Hoosier Slide away in railroad boxcars.”23 Such encounters between two interests—economically motivated resource extraction and ecologically motivated landscape preservation—point toward the need for the kind of dialectical thinking that increasingly animated Sartre’s post-World War II works. That said, the dialectical thinking that is needed may move us beyond an either/or caught between instrumentalist resource extraction and environmental protection (of both the preservationist and conservationist variety, though particularly the latter). Such is the case with Andre Gorz’s political ecology, which is contrasted with an “expertocracy” that endorses environmental conservation in ways that “in no sense tend toward a pacification of the relations with nature or ‘reconciliation’ with it.”24 Expertocracy aims to functionally preserve “the self-generative capacities of the ecosphere” in the interest of continual resource extraction, thereby being an approach that “does not break fundamentally with industrialism and its hegemony of instrumental reason.”25 Critique of Dialectical Reason is the major fruit of the dialectical turn in Sartre’s thinking. It is also the textual heart of his political theory. While Sartre’s thinking remained phenomenological in the realm of first-person experience, his thinking in the Critique adds a “dialectical” dimension in the sense that there is an attempt to understand experience and history together by understanding the parts themselves, the parts in relation to other parts, and the parts in relation to the whole. The Critique’s achievements are considerable, offering a theoretical framework for understanding our social and political history via its material dimensions, dyadic antagonisms, and triadic movements—though in Sartre’s case our history is always without end and always without guarantees of, for example, progress (however conceived). Matthew Ally describes Sartrean dialectical (or, more fully, phenomenological-dialectical) thought as follows: “The task [is] to show how everything is everywhere always at stake (a descriptive moment), in order to understand just what is at stake (an eductive moment), and how it came to be (a regressive moment) and how it comes to be (a progressive moment), and all of this so that we might get a better grip on a way forward (a normative moment).” Ally observes that Sartre all but invited an encounter between such dialectical thinking with ecological issues in a footnote in the Critique on the possibility of a “dialectic of Nature.”26 Sartre’s hunch was foreshadowed years earlier when, in a 1943 letter to Gabriel Marcel, Sartre said of his phenomenological work that resulted in Being and Nothingness: “the problem of life isn’t tackled, but that is precisely because only the study of nihilating structures can lead to a phenomenological description of biological being. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I now intend to study these questions, only that it would now be possible for me to do it.”27 Ally also observes that this encounter between dialectics and ecology has emerged in the ensuing years in other contexts, often proving to be an integrative and fruitful one. Aside from his

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own work, he cites as an example Richard Lewontin’s and Richard Levins’s The Dialectical Biologist.28 This book was reviewed in the London Review of Books in 1986 by the influential evolutionary biologist and ex-Marxist John Maynard Smith.29 Crediting the authors despite not going far enough in acknowledging the dangers—represented by the problematic history of Lysenkoism—for integrating (Marxist) dialectics and the biological sciences, he claims that Levins’s (more so than Lewontin’s) scientific work was permeated by his philosophical commitment to Marxism and, partly because of the complexities of reality that ecology tries to describe, was better for it—a revealing admission from a skeptic. He says of Levins’s increasing interest in applications of ecological theory, “The essays in [The Dialectical Biologist] on pesticides, on Latin community health, and on applied biology in the Third World reflect these interests. They illustrate the power of Marxism in the right hands. I have long thought of Levins as a rare example of a scientist whose work has been strengthened by adherence to a philosophy—Marxism or any other—and this book has confirmed that view.” As Smith attests, Levins is a laudable example showing that the path for thinking both dialectically and ecologically is open. So too is the path open for those whose dialectical thinking, like Sartre’s, emerges from within a broader existentialist philosophy. The integration of dialectical and ecological thought has proved essential for understanding the actual history of the city hosting the above exercise in historical fiction, namely, Gary, Indiana. Andrew Hurley’s 1995 book Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 is in many ways a model study for socially oriented Sartrean existentialists who recognize the ever-increasing importance of ecological issues and ecological projects. When Beauvoir was staying at Algren’s cabin in 1950, local industry—notably US Steel—was near the height of its local environmental hegemony and approaching the height of its environmental devastation.30 Meanwhile, the people of Gary were on the cusp of transcending a decades-long complacency toward local industrial pollution. As Hurley documents, on land that until the 1830s had been inhabited by indigenous communities such as the Potawatomi until they were forced westward by white settlers heading toward Chicago,31 Gary was built as a company town. Pittsburgh-based US Steel chose this part of the southern shores of Lake Michigan for its expansion in 1906—ten years prior to Cowles’s testimony.32 As the population of Gary and the economic success of US Steel soared, so too did local pollution and environmental destruction. For the first four decades the local population largely accepted the ideological message that pollution and environmental destruction—both startlingly conspicuous—were the necessary and acceptable costs of economic prosperity. But this changed in the decades following World War II. A 1947 dispute occurred when US Steel threatened industrial expansion into the lakeshore of Algren’s

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Miller Beach neighborhood, which by then had established itself as a community of mostly affluent whites trying to live an eco-suburban ideal, the values of which Hurley identifies as including consumerism, leisure and recreation, health and fitness, and aesthetic appreciation of nature (e.g. the dunes and lakeshore).33 This dispute is an example of what became a larger confrontation with industrial manufacturing in Gary that he calls “middle-class environmentalism.” The middle-class, though, was what C. Wright Mills called “the new middle class,” which was comprised of salaried (as opposed to wage-laboring), white-collar workers and their families.34 According to Hurley, Gary’s middle-class environmentalist movement was “a women’s movement,” which could be described as at least implicitly feminist.35 Many of the women who led it had ties to the local chapter of The League of Women Voters. Hurley says their political activity, including their environmentalist projects, was approved despite the patriarchal social milieu because it was viewed as “a natural extension of women’s familial obligations” in a suburban context, and adds that some of the activists’ individual motivations grew out of the “resentment and discontent” of the sort identified by Betty Friedan in the Beauvoir-influenced book The Feminist Mystique.36 However, reminiscent of Sartre’s insights into serial thinking and the lack of solidarity that results, Hurley notes that the projects of Gary’s (white) middle-class environmentalists were often rife with anti-Black racism. Their successes were sometimes achieved through political alliances with groups who thought slowing industrial development was necessary for slowing (or preventing) racial integration.37 This was particularly true in the neighborhood of Miller Beach, with its high concentration of (new) middleclass whites during their fight for environmental preservation through park designations. While Hurley says it would be a mistake to reduce the foundations of Gary’s middle-class environmentalism to racism,38 it would also be a mistake to dismiss how racism animated its motivations and partnerships. In the opening chapter Hurley acknowledges that the (new) middle-class composition and the accompanying racial blind spots (and animosity) have long been a source of criticism of not just local but also large-scale, mainstream environmentalist groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Foundation—problems that the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Foundation are both working to rectify today.39 Besides the chapter on middle-class environmentalism, Hurley’s book also has chapters on what he calls “working-class environmentalism” and “African American environmentalism.” He leads into these chapters noting that the majority of Gary’s residents were limited in their support for environmental projects due to “economic vulnerability” and, while whites and Blacks sometimes had common economic circumstances, their differing social experiences resulted in “distinct sets of environmental priorities.”40 For

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the working-class, regardless of race, a major impetus for environmental consciousness was exposure to workplace pollution and other hazards, a problem that was compounded by their common struggle to escape these hazards outside the workplace.41 The eco-projects that emerged on the grassroots level of the working-class were often in tension with several other social entities. There was tension with industrial management, of course, who did not want to accept the costs to capital accumulation that pollution abatement would require. There was also tension with the unions when their leadership showed tepid support, indifference, or outright hostility to pollution abatement movements, as they often did and which included union leadership collaborating with management to fight environmentally motivated wildcat strikes.42 Finally, there was tension with middle-class environmentalists when their projects, such as the efforts to save the Miller Beach lakeshore and parts of the Dunes, were viewed by some in the working-class as threatening job loss or preventing job gains. All three tensions are ripe for a thorough phenomenological and dialectical investigation—of the kind we find in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason—which foreseeably would utilize the concepts of seriality, fraternity-terror, counterfinality, and related notions. As Hurley documents, between 1945 and 1980 Blacks became the majority of Gary’s population and, while counted among both the (new) middle-class and the working-class, “pervasive racism so thoroughly influenced their relationship to their surroundings that they developed a unique perspective on issues of work-place hazards, pollution, and shoreline protection.”43 Hurley continues, “African Americans had always understood their environmental dilemma in terms of broader structural inequalities,”44 proceeding to document discrimination in employment, housing, and recreation. The latter included a long struggle to access Gary’s beaches, particularly Marquette Park in the Miller Beach area, without being terrorized by white violence. Consequently, Gary’s Black residents generally had a different, and broader, understanding of “ecology” than Gary’s predominantly white middle-class residents. For the former, environmental projects were part of a larger project—connected to the civil rights movement—in pursuit of social justice that required “reclaiming control over the urban environment.”45 As Hurley puts it, Black environmentalism in this era of Gary’s history embeds “the environmental question in a broader critique of industrial capitalism.”46 In other words, Black environmentalism in this place and time understood “ecology” in a way that tied it integrally with dialectical thought. This was a socioecological understanding insofar as social and ecological phenomena were so experientially intertwined that it was incoherent to think the ecological apart from the social. Hurley’s ecological history of Gary during this era culminates in a central claim, namely, that “it was no coincidence that the age of ecology

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corresponded with the rise of environmental inequality.”47 This major insight, which recognizes that the distribution of environmental privileges and environmental burdens cannot be understood separate from divisions of class and race, would almost certainly have found agreement in Sartre. While Gary’s history is, of course, ongoing, Hurley concludes with the following: “Gary’s history crystallizes an important truth: the domination of nature involves and necessitates the control of human beings.” He then cites C. S. Lewis’s 1946 remark that “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”48 This overview of Hurley’s study of Gary’s postwar ecological history is an opportunity for showing how Sartre can be read in ways that help us imagine the possibility of an existentialist phenomenology and dialectics of the dunes. The former, an existentialist phenomenology of the dunes, will rigorously describe the first-person experience of the dunes in relation to one’s “situation”—in Sartre’s technical sense of the term, that is, as the interaction between one’s facticity and one’s ontologically free consciousness. Recalling Gary’s history and drawing inspiration from Sartre’s phenomenology of the hike,49 we can reveal the varied ways individuals may experience it. Examples of how the dunes may be revealed include a site for scientific investigation, a site for economic development, a site for recreation and leisure (e.g. aesthetic appreciation), a site of exclusion on either classist or racist bases and hence a site for struggle against dehumanization, or a site for no human project at all. This last possibility raises the question of whether an existentialist phenomenology can make sense of, and value, parts of nature where there are traces of neither Pierre nor any other human. The answer in both cases is yes. Sartre acknowledges the former in the aforementioned letter to Marcel through the encouraging claim about the feasibility of a phenomenology of biological being. As for valuing nature independent from human projects, recall the aforementioned point that existentialists have principled reasons for not essentializing our relations to the environment, which leaves open the option for such value commitments. Recognizing Lewis’s insight cited by Hurley but adding cases where nature—both biotic as with fish and abiotic as with sand—is insufficiently valued, we should revise the above quote from Lewis, which is indefensibly anthropocentric. An existentialistphenomenological rewrite, which is defensibly anthropometric and in the phenomenological order in which the tripartite power dynamic often dialectically unfolds,50 is: what we call humanity’s power over nature turns out to be the instrumentalization of nature to exercise power over (a) other people, (b) other biotic beings besides humans, and (c) abiotic parts of nature. An existentialist dialectics of the dunes, meanwhile, will attempt to make progress on the ambitious task of weaving the many threads together to reveal both where we are and where, depending on our choices, we can and

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should go. One emphasis Sartreans ought to make from histories such as Hurley’s is that ecological projects, if they are to be animated by the value of freedom, must be expansive and inclusive. Regarding inclusivity, to blindly pursue the conservation of the dunes risks a classist indifference to economic vulnerabilities and a racist indifference to how such conservation might concentrate greater environmental burdens on racial minorities. The point here is certainly not to deemphasize conservationist and preservationist projects, but rather, to emphasize the importance of sufficiently addressing class and race-based concerns when pursuing conservationist projects. Failure to do so risks employing means that denature the (originally liberating) ends, to borrow an articulation from Sartre’s lectures on ethics in the 1960s. While Sartre opposes naive insistences on actions that avoid all dehumanizing or destructive fallout, responsibility entails doing our due diligence in making sure that our means are moving us toward our inclusive liberatory ends. Regarding expansiveness, projects such as workplace safety, economic security, and racial justice ought to be welcomed as values that help give shape to ecological projects. After all, these values were, as part of Sartre’s broader commitments to freedom and socialism, at play in a lot of his writings and political acts. In pursuit of an existentialist dialectics of the dunes, Hurley’s history is also an opportunity for Sartreans to see promise in intellectually cross-fertilizing ecological projects and Sartre’s theory of collective action. The latter has potential relevance both descriptively and normatively beyond the historical circumstances in which Sartre articulated it. The increasing and expanding importance of ecological projects today and in the foreseeable future are test cases for this potential. Some scholars have recognized that we can begin with the nascent ecological thinking in Sartre’s texts, giving due attention to two examples of ecological calamities, namely, deforestation-linked flooding in China and thalidomide-linked birth defects in Europe. But to this point there has been insufficient recognition that some of Sartre’s examples of collective action—the storming of the Bastille, worker strikes, anti-colonial revolutions—normatively point the way forward for eco-existentialist political projects. If we heed the above recommendation by imagining ecological projects more expansively, we recast in a new light, for example, Sartre’s long advocacy for the working class, racial minorities, and the colonized. Thus refocused, we can fairly imagine Sartre normatively promoting several examples of collective action in Hurley’s eco-history of Gary that also provide an opportunity to enrich and update Sartre’s theory of collective action, specifically, and his theory of history, generally. One such example is those workers who, against both corporate management and the union, came together for wildcat strikes against ecological hazards in the workplace.51 Another such example is Workers for Democracy,

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who came together to agitate for workplace health and safety improvements legally mandated through OSHA, the Clean Air Act, or the Environmental Protection Agency, that the union leaders were not pursuing aggressively or effectively enough.52 A third, different example is Young Citizens for Beachhead Democracy, a multiracial and multiclass group that came together to “seize” the beach at Marquette Park with the aim of breaking the racist exclusionary practices of white beachgoers and complicit law enforcement.53 All three examples can be more comprehensively understood in Sartrean terms. A group-in-fusion erupts out of serial separation in response to a threatening (ecological) catalyst. The serial thinking habits of individuals— often characterized by powerlessness, hopelessness, resentment, suspicion, bigotry, and hierarchy—is transcended by a mode of thought—and action— characterized by cooperation, equality, trust, and hope.54 Direct democratic action (e.g. wildcat strikes, beach seizures) takes priority over indirect democratic action (e.g. voting for government or union leaders).55 What Sartre calls “primitive,” “popular,” or “wild” justice shapes the group’s aspirations rather than “bureaucratic” or “state” justice: the former aims at liberation and freedom—defined as “sovereignty and responsibility”56—whereas the latter aims at the maintenance of exploitation.57 While not discounting the successes of the eco-groups in Gary’s history, Hurley records the various ways they failed and fell apart. This is hardly surprising for readers of Sartre’s Critique, which theorizes collective action such that the real prospects for any success are, at best, sobering and those for enduring long-term success are even more so. Here we can recall problems of re-serialization—through either a return to social separation or increasing bureaucratization following oaths, fraternity-terror, and the like—which can happen via both concerted efforts of antagonists and simple social drift as time elapses and the dynamics of the circumstances change. The Sartrean lesson here is that ecological projects, like all projects involving collective action, will require regular renewal. Given the lengthy timeline for many ecological projects, especially related to issues like climate change, this lesson is a bitter pill to swallow, for it poses a heavy challenge to the preservation of hope. CONCLUSION, PART ONE: CONGRUENCES In another book by the duo of Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, they write: “Nothing is more central to a dialectical understanding of nature than the realization that the conditions necessary for the coming into being of some state of the world may be destroyed by the very state of nature to which they gave rise.”58 Incidentally, this quote succinctly captures what has proved to be Cowles’s enduring contribution to ecology, namely,

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his theory of plant succession. In both primary and secondary succession, for example, the conditions necessary for the rise of one plant community are ultimately destroyed by that same plant community. Such theoretical congruence is suggestive of a broader truth about dialectical and ecological thought: an existentialist mind animated by one but not the other is not well equipped to see all the facts, including—and perhaps especially—those facts of the imagination attempting to see possibilities for the future. Cowles’s theory of plant succession has considerable congruence with a particular part of Sartre’s dialectical revelations in the Critique, namely, his theory of collective action alluded to above in several ways. The former theory helped birth the science of ecology (especially plant ecology) while the latter helped birth existentialist political theory. Philosophizing about this congruence is worthwhile, partly because it offers an opportunity to emphasize both coherent and incoherent ways of developing eco-existentialist thinking. Cowles’s theory, which in broad terms remains axiomatic for scientific ecology, was presented in the 1899 article “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan.” Briefly, the theory states that an original community of plants will over time produce new conditions in the substrate that will result in that community being overtaken—succeeded—by a different plant community better suited to the new conditions. Cowles, for example, observed a plant community take root just out of the waves’ reach. This “pioneer” community stabilizes the sandy substrate and produces humus, which will eventually result in succession to a new plant community. The dunes, meanwhile, begin as stationary beach dunes—distinguishing themselves from the “normal primitive formation” (i.e. the beach)—and then mature into wandering dunes, then transitional dunes, and then finally established dunes.59 Plant communities contribute to and struggle against dune maturation. Combined with other elements (e.g. temperature, wind, water), a pattern of succession of plant communities occurs. Driven by what contemporary ecologists call “facilitation” (or perhaps “inhibition,” or some combination of the two), this pattern continues until a so-called climax community emerges, which on established dunes in this area is an oak forest. According to Cowles, the climax community remains until a major disturbance (e.g. a fire) changes the conditions once again, typically back to conditions conducive to a plant community that had thrived during an earlier stage of that environment’s pattern of succession. While modern ecologists view climax communities as much less internally stable than Cowles had imagined, ecological communities are still measured in terms of both their resistance—which measures their ability to resist changes following disturbances—and resilience—which measures their ability to return following changes caused by a disturbance.

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This ecological theory has a striking congruence with Sartre’s theory of collective action. In both cases we find the dialectical feature of a communal state creating conditions that will exert pressures challenging the continuation of that particular communal state. Sartre’s major notion in the Critique of “counter-finality,” so ably demonstrated in the oft discussed example of deforestation and flooding in China’s Great Plain, testifies to the congruence of the dialectic of community. Broadly speaking, then, we can say that in both cases—that is, in the community of plants and in the community of people— we find community being made, unmade, and made again. We can recall Sartre’s accounts of movements from serial collectives to groups-in-fusion and then either a return to serial separation or a continuation into increasing bureaucratization. Both the group-in-fusion and the ossifying group (in its various forms) could, in principle at least, be measured in their own ways with the same notions ecologists measure ecological communities, namely, resistance and resilience. Such measurements have the potential to enrich Sartre’s political theory by helping us better understand groups enacting ecological projects and the paths they took or could take. The measurements could and should follow Sartre’s lead, as demonstrated (often incompletely) in several accounts in the Critique, by giving due consideration to the material conditions and broader ecological circumstances. The congruence between Cowles’s and Sartre’s respective theories shows that existentialists, like ecologists, can theorize about the relations between all the parts of a particular ecological community and the whole system. Doing so in a more fully integrated way is the work of the eco-existentialist. But eco-existentialists, if they are to be coherent, must avoid doing too much with congruences between the reality of humans and the reality of, for example, plants (as discussed here), animals, or the heavens. Notably, reflections on congruence cannot lead to, as mentioned above, naturalizing—in the sense of essentializing or setting as determined (in terms of either causation or meaning)—features of human reality that existentialists are committed to not naturalizing lest they cease to be existentialists. Reflections on congruence can, however, lead to ecologizing features of human reality in terms of both causation and meaning. Additionally, eco-existentialists ought not lose sight of method. While existentialist approaches to revealing reality dialectically are varied and often quite open-ended, engaging reality in ecological terms does not require, or even tolerate, abandoning the phenomenological inheritance of first-person descriptions from the only perspective to which we have direct access, namely, our own.

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CONCLUSION, PART TWO: THE LITERATURE OF ECO-EXISTENTIALISM By way of final remarks, we should make explicit three vitally important points related to the task of growing eco-existentialism. One point is about reading, another is about writing, and the third is about engagement. Echoing the above remarks about inclusivity and expansiveness, the cultivation of an eco-existentialist mind is properly fed through an inclusive and expansive literature. An incomplete list of our reading project will include existentialist philosophy, empirical/scientific studies, history, and studies of, for example, environmental racism, environmental decolonization, feminist environmentalism, Marxist environmentalism, nature writing, and fiction. The writing of eco-existentialism will grow through the intellectual integration of existentialist philosophy and at least some of the aforementioned literary areas. Finally, eco-existentialism would be fatally lacking if it did not prioritize engagement with the ecological issues of our times and joining with others to form or support groups—which are, for Sartre, the primary agents of (hopeful) historical change that can be local, regional, national, international, or global in membership and scope of action. For, if Sartre is right, it is primarily the collective action of such groups that helps liberate us (humans) from our anti-ecological imaginations and helps liberate us and other earthlings from the existential absurdity of ecological destruction. I thank Eric Boria for a very helpful reference and Matthew Ally for tremendous encouragement and insightful comments on several drafts of this paper. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. Ally, Matthew C. “Ecologizing Sartre’s Ontology: Nature, Science, and Dialectics.” Environmental Philosophy 9(2) (2012): 95–122. Argon, Ben. The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Abrams Comicarts, 2020. Barnes, Hazel E. Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. Translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Cowles, Henry Chandler. “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan.” In Henry Chandler Cowles: Pioneer Ecologist, edited and authored by Victor M. Cassidy. Chicago: Kedzie Sigel Press, 2007.

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Cowles, Henry Chandler. “Testimony of Henry Chandler Cowles.” In Henry Chandler Cowles: Pioneer Ecologist, edited and authored by Victor M. Cassidy. Chicago: Kedzie Sigel Press, 2007. Di-Capua, Yoav. No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Flynn, Thomas. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Gordon, Lewis. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995. Gordon, Lewis. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Gorz, André. Ecologica. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Seagull Books, 2010. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1956–1980. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007. McBride, William L. Sartre’s Political Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. National Park Service. “Cowles Bog Restoration Project.” Last updated February 27, 2020, https:​//​www​.nps​.gov​/indu​/learn​/nature​/great​-marsh​-restoration​.htm. National Park Service. “History of Indiana Dunes National Park.” Last updated March 19, 2020. https:​//​www​.nps​.gov​/indu​/learn​/historyculture​/index​.htm. National Wildlife Federation. “People.” Accessed October 7, 2021. https:​//​www​.nwf​ .org​/Our​-Work​/People. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, Theory of Practical Ensembles. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso Books, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Elections: A Trap for Fools.” In Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken. Translated by. Paul Auster and Lydia Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Justice and the State.” In Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken. Translated by Paul Auster and Lydia Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre. “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal” In Between Existentialism and Marxism. Translated by John Matthews. New York: Verso Books, 2008. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Lettre de Jean-Paul Sartre à Gabriel Marcel.” Bibliothèque nationale de France (2014). ISSN 1254–7700. ISBN 9782717725988.

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Sierra Club. “Equity, Inclusion, and Justice.” Accessed October 7, 2021. https:​//​www​ .sierraclub​.org​/equity. Smith, John Maynard. “Molecules Are Not Enough.” London Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 2. February 6, 1986. https:​//​www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/the​-paper​/v08​/n02​/john​-maynard​ -smith​/molecules​-are​-not​-enough.

NOTES 1. Hazel E. Barnes, Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 387. 2. William L. McBride, Sartre’s Political Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 8. 3. McBride, Sartre’s Political Theory, 8. 4. Thomas Flynn calls this the “touchstone” of Sartre’s humanism. Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. 5. Among the many scholars who could be mentioned here are Lewis Gordon (Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism; Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought) and Yoav Di-Capua (No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization). 6. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 236. 7. Gosetti-Ferencei, On Being and Becoming, 168–70. 8. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 97. 9. Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 360–61. 10. Henry Chandler Cowles, “Testimony of Henry Chandler Cowles,” in Henry Chandler Cowles: Pioneer Ecologist, edited and authored by Victor M. Cassidy (Chicago: Kedzie Sigel Press, 2007), 262. 11. Cowles, “Testimony of Henry Chandler Cowles,” 263. 12. Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 283. 13. Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 283. 14. Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 285. 15. Beauvoir, America Day by Day, 285. 16. Cowles, “Testimony of Henry Chandler Cowles,” 262. 17. Cowles, “Testimony of Henry Chandler Cowles,” 263–64. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso Books, 1991), 80–84. 19. Friedrich NIetzsche Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 162. 20. Ben Argon, The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Abrams Comicarts, 2020). 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews (New York: Verso Books, 2008).

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22. “History of Indiana Dunes National Park,” National Park Service, last updated March 19, 2020, https:​//​www​.nps​.gov​/indu​/learn​/historyculture​/index​.htm. “Cowles Bog Restoration Project,” National Park Service, last updated February 27, 2020, https:​//​www​.nps​.gov​/indu​/learn​/nature​/great​-marsh​-restoration​.htm. 23. “History of Indiana Dunes National Park.” 24. André Gorz, Ecologica, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Seagull Books, 2010), 46. 25. Gorz, Ecologica, 45. 26. Matthew C. Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (New York: Lexington Books, 2017), 123. See also: Matthew C. Ally, “Ecologizing Sartre’s Ontology: Nature, Science, and Dialectics,” Environmental Philosophy 9(2) (2012): 95–122. 27. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Lettre de Jean-Paul Sartre à Gabriel Marcel,” Bibliothèque nationale de France (2014), ISSN 1254–7700. ISBN 9782717725988. I thank Rachel Fox and Nik Farrell Fox for their translation of the letter. 28. Ally, Ecology and Existence, 189. 29. John Maynard Smith, “Molecules Are Not Enough,” London Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 2, February 6, 1986, https:​//​www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/the​-paper​/v08​/n02​/john​ -maynard​-smith​/molecules​-are​-not​-enough. 30. Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1956–1980 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 16. For an account of the environmental devastation, see the second chapter of Hurley’s book. 31. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 16. 32. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 16. 33. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 37. 34. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 48. 35. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 57. 36. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 56–57. 37. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 48. 38. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 71. 39. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 75. “Equity, Inclusion, and Justice,” Sierra Club, accessed October 7, 2021, https:​//​www​.sierraclub​.org​/equity. “People,” The National Wildlife Federation, accessed October 7, 2021, https:​//​www​.nwf​.org​/Our​ -Work​/People. 40. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 76. 41. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 78, 91. 42. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 80–83. 43. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 110. 44. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 112. 45. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 118–19. 46. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 112. 47. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 172. 48. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 182.

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49. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 584–87. 50. Ally, Ecology and Existence, 362. 51. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 80–83. 52. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 100–01. 53. Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 120. 54. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” in Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 202. 55. Sartre, “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” 198–99. 56. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Justice and the State,” in Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 179. 57. Sartre, “Justice and the State,” 175. 58. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 31. 59. Henry Chandler Cowles, “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan,” in Henry Chandler Cowles: Pioneer Ecologist, edited and authored by Victor M. Cassidy (Chicago: Kedzie Sigel Press, 2007), 100–70.

Chapter Thirteen

After the Holocene Reimagining Sartre’s Venice Matthew C. Ally‌‌

In the high mountains and harsh woods I find some peace; and every habitable place is for my eyes a mortal enemy. - Petrarch1

There are authors whose end is to tell what has happened. Mine, if I could attain it, would be to talk about what can happen. - Montaigne2

WORLD ~ HEURISTICS The present is what I touch; it is the tool I can handle; it is what affects me or what I can change. These lovely chimeras are not my present. Between them and me there is no simultaneity. All it takes is a little sun to turn them into promises; perhaps they are coming to me from the depths of the future.3

This chapter is a try, an essai in the Montaignesque sense of the term, broadly conceived in a spirit of Petrarchan lyricism. It is an attempt to make some new sense of Sartre’s Venice, at once meandering and measured, if not quite metered and rhymed, for reasons other and more than Sartre’s reasons. The invocation of the two figures, Petrarch and Montaigne, is not gratuitous. Both held a certain salience for Sartre, Montaigne for obvious reasons, Petrarch for reasons nowhere considered, so far as I can tell, but still worth considering. 281

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There is, of course, much that separates the three. The Father of Humanism, Petrarch, and the Father of the Essay, Montaigne, were separated from each other both by the zenith of the Renaissance, which Petrarch helped to foment, and by the advent of the Reformation, which Montaigne quietly inveighed. Both were separated from Sartre, the Doyen of French Existentialism, by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Romantic movement, and High Modernism, each of which in varying degrees inflected Sartre’s thought and manner of thinking. Though their lifetimes were separated by all this and more, still, the three had much in common in life. As celebrated thinkers and celebrity writers while still living, all three had, and witnessed, their distinctive impact on the intellectual and literary mood of their times; and their respective influences persist to this day. All three were voracious and eclectic readers and original and often idiosyncratic interpreters. All three worked freelance, so to speak, willfully unaffiliated with institutions of higher learning and other forms of collective learning. All three wrote powerfully in the vernacular, Petrarch and Montaigne being among the avant-garde of this then still iconoclastic choice, Sartre, the committed writer, being among the iconic exponents of the democratizing, transformative, and potentially liberative impetus of the vernacular project. All three spent significant portions of their lives in proximity, intellectual if not always physical, to wars and other political means that they did not quite abide. Fully cognizant of collective realities, all three were individualists of one stripe or another. All three were humanists of one stripe or another. All three were moralists and universalists of one stripe or another. And each wrote much about his own life in the conviction that there is something of universal moral value in the singularities of lived human experience. If what they left us is any indication, whatever else they each may have been wrong about, they were all right about this. More immediately pertinent here, all three loved Italy, each for different reasons, and all three spent noteworthy time in Venice—Petrarch the better part of seven years, Montaigne just seven days, and Sartre many visits of varying length from several days to several weeks. Though the earlier two were tight-lipped about their time there, Sartre had much to say about his. And incidentally, or perhaps not, his scattered writings on Venice are decidedly exploratory and extrapolatory (merci M. de Montaigne), and are often poetic and sometimes even rhapsodic (grazie Sig. Petrarca). Before we proceed, a clarification and two caveats. First, I have named the subsections of this essay with pairs of terms connected by a tilde (~). This familiar mark has two common uses: in ordinary language it means “roughly”; logicians use it to indicate negation. Here the use is different. Here, the tilde is meant to indicate constitutive and generative interrelations and reciprocities between what otherwise appear to be opposed or divergent

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concepts. In short, rather than a mark of approximation or negation, it is an index of differential complementarity. I borrow this usage from J. Scott Kelso and David Engstrøm, two theorists of self-organizing complex adaptive systems (about which a bit more in the next section).4 Second, it is not my aim here to discover new Sartrean tools and motifs for environmental philosophy or eco-criticism or Anthropocene Studies or any other related fields. The contributors to this volume have done a worthy job of that, and I have made my own contributions to this shared project elsewhere.5 And more important, my goal here is less critical than it is heuristic. I use the term in Sartre’s technical sense. In Search for a Method, he writes not far from the end, “Our method is heuristic; it teaches us something new because it is at once regressive and progressive.” This builds on something he says at the outset, to wit, that “methods are modified because they are applied to new objects.” And vice versa. As he notes midway through the text: method “indeed, reveals new relations and it demands that they be attached to new conditions.”6 Novelty, it seems, is emergent on both sides of the methodological threshold that lies between the regressive and progressive moments; novelty happens on the “line without thickness which is the interior limit of all exteriority” and, as we will see, the exterior limit of all interiority.7 “Something new” emerges from the reciprocity between the manner of seeking and the matter sought. Looking backward and then forward, we learn something new about where we are. Knowing better where we are teaches us something new about where we have been and where we might go. Along the way both our thoughts and manner of thinking are renewed as we are enabled to see ever more clearly the reality of our present situation. The challenge here, then, is to do something like Petrarch and Montaigne and Sartre taught us to do, each in his way: to look back, to look forward, to look beneath and above and beyond, to learn something that was once unimaginable so that we might better face into the real. The most proximate task is to make some new sense of Sartre’s Venice, to see Venice through Sartre’s eyes, both the fixed one and especially the wandering one; to think with Sartre about his Venice, which was Venice in the late Holocene. The penultimate task is to think above and beneath and beyond Sartre’s Venice, to see whether and how his Venice reconceived and reimagined might help us think with and through our Venice, which is Venice after the Holocene. As for the ultimate task, like all ultimate things, it lies on the far side of the horizon. Our task here is immediate: to see how the Venice of one of the last great Holocene thinkers of the possible might help us to think the impossible thought of the Anthropocene. It is as good a place as any to start. For today’s Venice, in its singularly universal way, is perhaps the most earthly city in the world and the most worldly city on Earth.

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EARTH ~ SYSTEM I have flown more than two hundred times now, though I never get used to it. I am too used to crawling about on Earth to find flying normal, and the fear resurfaces from time to time—most particularly when my flying companions are as ugly as I am.8

Before we explore the worldliness of the Floating City, we do well to consider its earthly ground. Earth foremost, and first. This should be the guiding principle of the future. It is certainly the first principle of any world worth wanting on this planet. What do we know of this place we call home? What do we know of planet Earth? A tree offers an apt analogy. And given the work forests do to keep things well here on Earth, and, as we will see, the work forests have done to carry Venice along its world-historical path, a tree is a good place to begin. Think of the largest tree you have ever seen, whether in person or in a picture. Strictly speaking, only a little of the tree is alive, just the roots, and a thin layer between the bark and heartwood, and the leaves or needles. The rest of the tree—the bark, the heartwood, and nearly all of the sapwood, all of which in terms of sheer mass amount to nearly the whole tree—is not alive. Or, to put a finer point on it, a living tree is mostly dead. And yet none of us laments that the biggest tree we have ever seen is only a little alive, or opines that since it is mostly dead we only kill little of it when we chop it down for fuel or lumber or toilet paper. The tree is alive, leaves, bark, phloem, cambium, sapwood, heartwood, roots, and all. It is the whole tree as an integral being that either lives or dies. The living Earth has at least this much in common with a living tree: The vast majority of earthly matter is dead. Only a thin apron of life wraps around its surface. True, that thin layer extends some thousands of feet both upward and downward; a few thousand feet toward the hot mantle, and tens of thousands of feet toward the cold diffusion of space. If life is sparse at these hadean depths and heavenly heights, still, it is there. As with a tree, the vast majority of life on Earth is concentrated close to the surface. Ecologists call this vital region the “critical zone.” This is the part of the planet we are most familiar with. This is where the vast majority of lifeforms, ourselves included, do most of their living. Indeed, it is the only place where most of us earthlings can make a living. Which is what makes the zone so critical. Systems theory distinguishes two basic types of system: simple and complex.9 A living tree is a complex system—or more precisely, a complex system of complex systems. Like all such integrated heterogenous systems, the tree can be analyzed into its several subsystems or parts: the foliage system, the bark system, the root system, the capillary system, and so on, all the way

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“down” to tissues, cells, molecules, atoms. The parts are specifiable; they are not isolable. None of these subsystems, nor any of their constituent parts, can be rendered fully intelligible apart from the intelligibility of the complex of interrelations and interactions that comprise the whole system. And so it is with our home planet. Earth is a complex system of complex systems, all the way down.10 We call the subsystems spheres, and we usually learn about them separately—if we learn about them at all. The four most familiar are the lithosphere, all the mineral matter; the hydrosphere, all the aqueous matter; the atmosphere, all the gaseous matter; and the biosphere, all the living matter. There are many other lesser but also crucial spheres, such as the cryosphere, all the frozen matter; the stratosphere, a sub-sphere of the atmosphere and home to the precious ozone layer without which complex life could not have evolved nor survive; the magnetosphere, the field of magnetism in nearby space generated by the convective electrical dynamo in the molten mantle, without which the “solar wind” would “blow” the atmosphere away, and along with it the prospects for all possible worlds. Some speak of a relatively new sphere, too, the technosphere, home to all the widgets and doodads we humans have added to the earthly medley, all of them now integrally linked into the whole system. Not least and far from last, right beneath our feet is the pedosphere, home to the sand and silt and clay and countless myriads of living beings who make up the soil; the underappreciated locus of “dirt,” where the richest interrelations and interactions between lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere occur; the medium without which neither trees nor civilizations nor Venice would exist. (Unlikely though it may seem, a bit later we will see Sartre direct our attention to the pedosphere, albeit briefly and obliquely.) Each of the spheres is tightly bound to all of the others; together the whole system is greater than the sum of its parts. This point cannot be overemphasized. Just as with a living tree, these subsystems of the living Earth are specifiable. They are not isolable. Another way to put this is that the living Earth is a system of nested systems, what ecologists call a nested hierarchy. Smaller ecosystems are nested in larger ecosystems; ecosystems of shorter duration are nested in ecosystems of longer duration. The beaver’s gut flora is nested in the beaver, the beaver in the beaver pond, the beaver pond in the woodland, the woodland in the regional water catchment, and so on upward and outward in scale to ever larger and longer-lived systems like the mixed deciduous forests of the middle latitudes and the boreal forests of the high North. If it needs to be said, it is no different with Venice. Its islands and canals, all of its tourists and every one of its few remaining residents, are nested in the Venetian urban ecosystem. (The term is not metaphoric; urban ecology is a well established subfield of ecological science.11) The urban ecosystem of Venice is nested in the Venice Lagoon ecosystem, which is nested in the Adriatic Basin ecosystem,

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which is nested in the broader ecology of the Mediterranean Basin, and so on up in spatiotemporal scale. All ecosystems and each of their resident organisms, down to the very smallest (even the beaver’s gut flora have gut flora), are nested together in the largest and oldest level of the hierarchy, the Earth System. Just like a living tree, the living Earth is a tightly yet delicately coupled system of systems; complex, dynamical, adaptive; interlinked, interpenetrating, interwoven; nexus of reciprocal nonlinear influences and forces, some symmetrical, some asymmetrical; matrix of feedbacks, some positive and conducing to change, some negative and conducing to keeping things the same. The living Earth emerges from this oscillation between a worldly isotonics and an earthly isometrics, as it were, an integrative and open-ended gathering of creaturely ways and elemental powers, and the telos of this system—yes, the goal of it—is to maintain itself, to repair itself, to make more of itself, in a word, to persist. (Lest the reader balk, telos is here used not in some mysterious or magical or extra-natural sense of conscious intention or divine purpose, but in a strict and rigorous systems-theoretical sense. Every system has a telos, a goal, a toward-which. The Earth System is no exception. Indeed, there can be no exceptions to this rule. A system without a goal is no system at all. This need not involve striving in the conative sense, though of course it can. There is much striving on Earth, individual and collective, to say nothing of Sartre’s fusing groups.) From this great dancing terran whole emerge relations and patterns and processes that are utterly unpredictable from even perfect knowledge of the parts. Even a great Laplacian ecological demon who knew everything there is to know about the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, and all the other spheres, too, could not predict that the living Earth system would emerge from their intermingling. Indeed, the very idea of knowing everything there is to know about any of these system parts is, strictly speaking, incoherent. For no part is wholly what it is apart from the effects of all the others on it and the ways it affects all the others. This is not theory, neither mere or sheer. It is an empirical fact. “All complex systems defy purely mechanistic analysis,” say the Earth System scientists. “Classical analytical science in which individual variables are isolated and their separate effects determined individually cannot cope with the challenges posed by Earth System science.”12 (Here we are reminded of Sartre’s abiding mereological sensibilities, and of the critical limits of analytical reason as specified in the heuristic apparatus of his mature dialectics.13) No parts without the whole, no whole without the parts. Ecology is mereology all the way down to the molecules of life, and all the way up to the living Earth system. Like the tight coupling of the subsystems, the integrative functioning and open-ended telic unity of the Earth System cannot be overemphasized.

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On this functional unity the scientists are emphatic. The Earth system is self-organizing, self-regulating, and, within dynamical limits set largely by the system itself, it is resilient and responsive, at once self-repairing and adaptive.14 And at the base of this ecospheric unity lies the active role of life in the system. Life, too, must not be underestimated. “The Earth is a system that life itself helps to modulate. Biological processes interact with physical processes to create the planetary environment, but biology plays a much stronger role than previously thought in the functioning of the Earth system.” Much stronger, indeed. Not long ago life was thought to be only a passive recipient of nonliving influences, like so much smoke around a smoldering log. “There is now clear evidence that biota [living organisms and the ecosystems they sustain] are a critical component of the Earth System and that they respond to and influence the geochemistry and physics of the System in many ways.” Life is no mere epiphenomenon. It is critical, crucial, necessary to the integrity of the whole system. “Biological/ecological processes are an integral part of the functioning of the Earth System, and not just recipients of changes in the dynamics of a physico-chemical system. Living organisms are active participants, not simply passive respondents.”15 Life is not just a passenger on spaceship Earth. Life shares the helm, so to speak. On this once controversial point there is no longer any controversy. The science is unequivocal. Like a tree or a regional forest or the boreal biome, the living Earth System is a music of the spheres, a melody in which each earthly element and every earthling’s world is wholly enmeshed, a medley to which all contribute and to which everyone belongs and upon which each depends, utterly. Perhaps I wax too lyrical. Blame it on Petrarch. We will see him a bit later, surveying the landscape from a mountaintop, and at the same time surveying his own interior landscape, gazing at once into the vastness of his inner lifeworld and across the vastness of the living Earth. This Petrarchan diastolicqua-systolic vision is as apt as a tree. Petrarch would have been drawn to these new ancient ideas about a living Earth, and I daresay he could have been persuaded that Earth is alive. At least his poetic pagan side would have been secretly willing to think it, even if his prosaic Christian side would have been obligated to publicly refuse the thought. Montaigne, of course, would have been intrigued, if only because there would be so much to say. We can imagine him defending the living Earth all day in ten different ways, and then denying it all night in ten more, only to jump off the fence in the dark and leave us to wonder at dawn which side he had chosen or whether he had chosen at all. Sartre, surprising though it may seem, was open to persuasion. He said as much. All he required is that the empirical evidence and theoretical argument be phenomenologically and dialectically rigorous. We will see that

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he, himself, posed the question from each angle, and that he thought it worth the wait for an answer. WORLD ~ COSMOPOLIS That’s how it is here: air, water, fire and stone are continually mingling or changing places, trading their natures or their natural locations, playing four corners or tag: old-fashioned games with nothing innocent about them; aiding in the training of an illusionist. To inexpert tourists, this unstable compound holds many surprises: while you are putting your nose in the air to see what the weather will be like, the whole of the heavens with its meteors and skies may well be lying at your feet distilled into a silvery ribbon.16

Sartre had a great soft spot for Italy, it seems, some uncanny fondness for the Apennine Peninsula, an enduring fascination with the place and its people and history. This much we know. And he was not alone. Like Petrarch, his fourteenth-century confederate in history, humanism, and hesitant hope, who spent his early years in France only to make it his mission to spend the remainder of them in the Italia he so loved, though it had not yet even become a unified political entity with a unitary language (which is not necessarily to say that it ever fully succeeded in doing so); and like Montaigne, Sartre’s sixteenth-century freethinking patrician compatriot in land and letters, who made Italy the focal point of his longest journey and travel journal; like both of these Renaissance forebears, each almost Modern before modernity, Sartre, the 20th-century bourgeois socialist champion of existential freedom spent a great deal of time in Italy. He wrote a lot about it, and handwritten notes, anecdotal evidence, and a posthumously published unfinished book suggest that he planned to write much more than he did, about Naples, Capri, and Rome, and especially about Venice. Despite his aspirations, however, Sartre did not get very far in his Italian project, at least not by his own standards of productivity.17 It is noteworthy for our purposes that in the posthumously published “fragments” the lion’s share is devoted to Venice. We know how Sartre felt about Rome, and not only because he spent so much time there. “Sartre loved Rome with all the greed and passion of a romantic,” writes Annie Cohen-Solal. “Starting in 1946, he visited every year for several weeks.”18 But there was more to it than passion or greed. Rome somehow mollified him. “In Rome, I was lighter. Less culpable,” he says, “Rome can be delicious, and [is] never disheartening.”19 Sartre would have agreed with Montaigne, who spent more than five months of his sixteen-month self-imposed exile in Rome. He wrote in his essay “On Vanity” (not in the travel journal), “this very Rome that we behold deserves our love.”

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As for Montaigne’s assertion that Rome “is the only common and universal city,” Sartre would likely demur.20 He saw something else, something singular and uncommon in Rome. “In the rain all the great cities resemble each other,” Sartre muses, naming London, and even Paris, which both somehow manage to lose their identities to foul weather. But not Rome. “Rome remains Rome,” he declares without further explanation, come what may.21 Petrarch’s expectations of Rome were high too, and they were exceeded. After his long-anticipated first visit there he wrote, “Rome was, in truth, even greater than I had thought, and the ruins even greater still.”22 A vaguely tragicomic irony. The greater parts of the Eternal City are its ruins. Which, incidentally, will outlast Venice by many millennia. In a way, they already have. But Rome could only carry Sartre so far. What use has such a timebound and worldly philosopher for an eternal city? Greater than his love for Rome, we know that Sartre reserved a special place in his heart for Venice, holding this singularly ephemeral city second only to his beloved Paris. Which, incidentally, he loved as much as Montaigne did. “I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am a Frenchman only by this great city.” If I told you Sartre wrote these words, at least that the youthful Sartre had, you would probably believe it. He did not. It was Montaigne. If the entirety of the essayist’s paean to Paris would hardly trouble Sartre,23 Montaigne did not share Sartre’s enthusiasm for Venice. In fact, his reaction was quite tepid, if we believe his secretary. On his only visit he apparently found Venice not just “different from what he had imagined,” but “a little less wonderful.” The secretary also noted, for conviction’s sake, that his maître had “reconnoitered [Venice] and all its particulars with extreme diligence.” (This touristic discipline is another proclivity Montaigne and Sartre share with each other, and with Petrarch, too.) Again in “On Vanity,” one of the longer and more wonderful of the essays, Montaigne reveals a bit more of how he feels about the place. “I should be prone to recommend Venice to myself for retirement in such a feeble condition of life. Decrepitude is a solitary quality.” It is no more than a place where he might “withdraw [his] troublesome self from the sight of the world and brood on it.”24 Venice, a place to spend one’s final days in solitary brooding decrepitude? It is difficult to imagine how he came to this conclusion. But there we are. Sartre could not have felt more differently. He found Venice irresistible, a source of endless wonder and energy and inspiration. And even more self-consistent than Rome: “No matter: Venice is everywhere Venice; I know no other city that remains so obstinately similar to itself.”25 In a parallel obstinacy, Sartre kept going back for more, and seems to have found Venice a little more wonderful each time he went there, trying again and again to make sense of the “impossible city.”26 By his own estimation he never quite succeeded. The self-described city spirit writes, almost wistfully: “One never

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fully gets a handle on the whole of a city, past or present.”27 To say nothing of how a city might give us a grip on the whole of the future, both near and deep. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, if not quite wistful—yet. Gazing across a canal from his hotel window Sartre is right to remind us that we do well to tend to the present. The present is palpable, available, a constraint or an aid, challenge or opportunity, depending on the tenor of the moment. The present is not just the best place to begin, nor the only or obvious place. It is the space in time of all possibility. And for Sartre, still and always, “the possible is a structure of the real.”28 The present provides the only access we have to the possible, and so to the real. Nor is this merely a matter of chronology. The present is no mere temporal instant. It is the temporalizing locus of all beginnings, the ontological starting line, as it were. And not without a hint of irony, sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, like the terrestrial ruins of Rome or the aquatic ruin Venice will one day be, the present is also the ontological finish line, the temporalizing locus of all endings. These simple points about beginnings and possibilities and endings are not trivial. They hold at every scale, from the lived experience of instantaneity and immediacy, to the greater spatiotemporal scales of biological and ecological development, to the vast scales of evolutionary transformations and tectonic shifts across the eons. In fact, we are living in the thicket of a planetary epochal shift right now, a beginning and ending at once biological, ecological, and geological—and, as it turns out, anthropological. But this, too, is to skip ahead. We should begin with what has ended. EARTH ~ HOLOCENE I ended up thinking I was in interstellar space, a satellite whirling around an inaccessible Earth. You don’t feel the same anxiety in Venice, and yet Humanity moves away from you, sliding off across a calm lake. The human race—or, who knows, the historical Process—retracts, to become a little seething ferment, limited in space and time. I see it whole, from some point outside time and space, and very gently, very treacherously, sense my abandonment.29

The Holocene Epoch is the name given by geologists to roughly the past 11,700 years on Earth. To get a sense of it, think first of ice melting. It was about eleven millennia ago that the most recent batch of glaciers made their final retreat. The ice had covered vast swathes of land and sea in the higher latitudes of both hemispheres, especially the Northern. It reached its peak some 21,000 years ago. The Holocene Epoch began as the sheets of ice and glaciers ended. To be precise, the Holocene names an interglacial, the time between the last glaciation and the one to come. (While the details

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are complicated, the glacial-interglacial cycle is simple in outline, and its patterned and predictable transitions—the advance and retreat of major ice sheets in the high latitudes of the North American and Eurasian continents and the waxing and waning of sea ice in the waters surrounding Antarctica— happen for well understood reasons.) An epoch is the shortest length of time named in the nomenclature of geochronology. The Holocene Epoch is (or rather was) a geologically brief time between glaciations in the eons-long movement of the glacial-interglacial cycle. Ice changes everything on Earth, as does the lack of it, as we will see soon enough. Though the Holocene Epoch is bound in signification to the comings and goings of ice, “Holocene,” itself, is a rather prosaic signifier. It means “wholly recent.” Geologically, the Holocene Epoch means as recent as recent gets, nothing more. Noteworthy, too, is that the Holocene is (or rather was) exceedingly short in geochronological terms. Every other named epoch lasted millions of years. Not so, the Holocene. A mere eleven millennia. Hardly a hairline on the chronostratigraphic chart. This point cannot be overemphasized, given the nature of the epoch that has replaced it, which, as we will see in a later meander, has come about by unexpected means and in a very short time and seems likely to last much longer. At least two things stand out about the short Holocene Epoch. The first is that it has been characterized by relative stability in the Earth System. And we cannot overemphasize the relativity here. The Holocene has been a time of relative biological stability, relative climatological stability, relative ecological stability. Each of these stabilities is relative to the relative instabilities of many, though not all, epochs and periods before it—and, ceteris paribus, relative to the dynamics of things to come, which look likely to be rather more raucous than serene. There has been plenty of change in the Earth System at every spatiotemporal scale, from the most local, to the regional and hemispheric, and on up to the planetary. There always has been. Which is why ecologists and Earth System scientists are easily miffed by a too-facile invocation of the mythical “balance” or “harmony” of nature. There is a balance, to be sure, but it is a dynamic balance, a harmony forever in motion. Still, overall, during the short snapshot of the Holocene, local and regional ecologies and climates have been unusually stable given what we know about previous ecologies and climates, as have the climate and ecology of the whole planet. The second thing that stands out about this epoch is us. (Yes, we should risk this slippery third-person plural, even as we must resist its equalizing pretense, about which more later.) It was during the early part of the Holocene that the vast majority of humans left behind their roaming, foraging, hunting ways and took up the digging stick and planted seeds, domesticated animals for work and food, and learned how to live together in ever larger groups.

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It is all too easy to tell a just-so story of human cultural evolution. There is nothing simple about it, as paleoanthropologists will tell you. Still, though the historical details are many and debated, one thing is clear: The relative ecological predictability and climatological conviviality of the Holocene have provided the necessary earthly ambiance for the emergence of increasingly complicated ways of life, and ultimately for what we are want to call complex civilizations. Other social conditions were surely necessary, but without these Goldilocks ecological conditions it seems unlikely that any combination of others would have been sufficient. The relative calm of the Holocene has made it possible for the human project to become what it is, warts and all. WORLD ~ WINDOWS Imagine you were to go up to a mirror; an image forms in it: your nose, your eyes, your mouth, your suit. It is you, it should be you. And yet there’s something in the reflection—something that is neither the green of your eyes, nor the shape of your lips, nor the cut of your suit—that makes you suddenly say they have put someone else in the mirror, in place of my reflection.30

For Sartre, 1933 was a year of beginnings and possibilities—and not because it was the year of Hitler’s rise to power, which seems not to have impressed him much either way. It was the year of Sartre’s “Berlin vacation” and Husserlian initiation, the single most significant event in his philosophical development. It was also the year of his first trip to Venice.31 Like phenomenology in his manner of thinking, Venice would have a permanent place in Sartre’s way of life. If he was unambiguously enthusiastic about phenomenology, he felt more than a little ambivalence about the Floating City, as any mindful visitor should feel. Perhaps it was the obstinate elusiveness that would draw him back time and again to the City of Bridges. Perhaps it was just the sheer ambiguity of the City of Masks that captured his imagination. It is difficult to say. Masks and bridges in a city adrift. So much contingency amidst so much necessity. Ambiguity and ambivalence certainly played their part one way or another. They almost always do. They are of a piece. Felt ambivalence almost always finds its roots in lived ambiguity, possible, real, or imagined. Lived ambiguity almost always begets felt ambivalence, warranted or not. But is this enough to explain Sartre’s fascination? No. Perhaps that special heart-space had to do with something else than the City of Doges, something other than the City of Canals, something more than the City of Water. What was that something else? What was that something other-and-more? It does seem fair to wonder.

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Sartre published two significant writings on Venice in his lifetime. The first was a literary reflection, the diary-like “Venise, de ma fenêtre,” which appeared in Verve in early 1953. (This is the source of all but two of the section epigraphs in the present essay.) The second was the more targeted and more formal essay, “Le séquestré de Venise,” a historical, biographical, and critical investigation of Tintoretto, published in 1957. A look at each of these will help to move our wondering along. Nestled amidst images by or after the likes of Braque, Matisse, Giacometti, and Chagall, “Venice from my window” is short by Sartrean standards. And yet it speaks volumes as to his rich and layered experience of Venice, of his patient attempt to come to terms with the impossible city, to reach it, to touch it with words. In the company of these several visual artists all still toiling in their studios (Matisse, the eldest, would be gone within a year; Braque and Giacometti each had a decade or so ahead of them; Chagall would outlive them all, and Sartre too, by several years), the vacationing wordsmith paints a picture of Venice as he sees it from his hotel window. We should take the possessive prepositional phrase, de ma fenêtre, with a grain of Venetian salt. (Salt production there began as early as the 6th century; by the 14th century Venice was a dominant force in Mediterranean saltworks and salt trade, just one mineral among many other facets its mercantile dominion.) The hotel window is Sartre’s but not Sartre’s. It is a window he owns only in part and temporarily and transactionally, and yet which seems to possess him wholly and outside of time, free from the burdens of exchange. We can begin a few lines from the end. “In Venice, silence is visible,” Sartre writes, “it is the taciturn defiance of the Other Bank.”32 Not the other bank, but the Other Bank (l’Autre Rive). There is something else across the canal, something more than mere difference. The image is vivid, palpable, arresting, and yet almost maddeningly vague. If Sartre shows us anything, it is that the City of Canals is itself a perpetual digression, the City of Water is a ceaseless flow of contradictions, now rebellious, now recalcitrant, ever reckless in its way; one is always elsewhere in the City of Bridges. “I have long been resigned to this: Venice is wherever I am not.”33 Venice is paradox all the way down, and all the way up. There is is no saving us from digression, neither there nor here, neither then nor now. So we digress. In the opening paragraphs of his remarkable essay on Tintoretto (we will return to the hotel window when we can), Sartre writes, “Venice speaks to us; this false witness’ voice, shrill at times, whispering at others, broken by silence, is its voice.”34 So the city of visible silences speaks too, though it seems we cannot quite trust it. And not many lines later, now with a whiff of the dialectic, he gives the table another quarter turn: “The Voice of Venice never lies, provided one knows how to hear it; we shall listen to it when we have learnt better how to do so.”35 So, the City of Masks can be trusted after all? Or can it? “Venice,

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as is its wont, is saying nothing or lying.”36 It comes down to a question of method, of how to see and hear. “The Captive of Venice” appeared in Les Temps Modernes in 1957. This was the same year that Questions de méthode appeared, first in the Polish journal Twórczość, and later that year, slightly revised, in Les Temps Modernes. A few years later it would become the introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre’s second major philosophical treatise, and the work he somewhere hoped would be most remembered. It is not so much what we see and hear that matters, but how to listen and how to look. In a gesture informed as much by Husserl as by Hegel and Marx (Heidegger has no place in Sartre’s Venice), he adds: “We shall see the whole of [Venice], in its somber nakedness, if we sweep aside for the moment the undergrowth of tittle-tattle that blocks our access.”37 Dialectics without phenomenology is deaf; phenomenology without dialectics is blind. We have seen this already. The integrative and open-ended totalization in motion is what we need to understand, not the particulate chatter of the bits and pieces, the cluster of totalities rubbing and bumping against each other like so many gondolas tied to a piling on a windy day awaiting the aqua alta. The phenomenological parts count, but only to the extent that they contribute to a rendering of the dialectical intelligibility of the whole. Again, Sartre’s ambivalence toward Venice is unsurprising. Given its endless and all too evident ambiguities, who would not be? “But there you are: in Venice, nothing is simple.”38 Whatever the secret truth, however little or poorly we see or hear, the facts of Venice are almost unimaginable. It is the impossible city not least because, as Sartre observes, “[Venice] is not a city, no: it is an archipelago. How could we forget this?”39 How could we forget that this is a place where city streets are made of water and the city blocks are islands? That it is a “disorder of diverse distancings,”40 to bend Sartre’s description of the “archipelago” that is Tintoretto’s studio, the home ground of il furioso’s creativity? How could we forget this? Because forgetting is simpler than remembering, at least for the tourist, who “wanders in bewilderment through this cabinet fantastique in which water is the central illusion.” The visitor arrives like a newborn, able to see and hear, but neither far nor well. Not so the visited. Venice does not forget. “Venice is content to remember itself.”41 The tourist needs Venice more than Venice needs the tourist. A hush that can be seen, a false witness that never lies, a truth obscured by facts, a person who is a place, if not a place that is a person. Fata Morgana or ignis fatuus? Cause for despair or reason for hope? Contradiction or paradox? Something else or some excess? Again, what is this something other-and-more? La Serenissima, the most serene, indeed. From its inception to the present day, the real Venice has been the shifting shadow of a dream, a penumbra cast by “that slim shaft of light, the possible. Or, rather, nothing

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is possible: there is the end and the means, the prescribed task.”42 It is high time we learned to listen to this ancient witness to the task ahead. The City of Canals speaks not just of the path from the past to the present, the City of Water shows us the future toward which we are drifting. We must cultivate something like a synesthetics of intelligibility. For “at the bottom of a rio, there is a bubble stuck to the clay,”43 like a crystal ball of Venetian glass foretelling all, if only we can learn how to see what we hear and hear what we see. EARTH ~ ANTHROPOCENE Venice’s water lends the whole city a mildly nightmarish coloration: it is in nightmares that tools let us down, that the revolver levelled at the mad killer doesn’t go off; it is in nightmares that we are running with a deadly enemy at our heels when suddenly the road starts to melt as we try to cross it. The tourist, still shrouded in mystery, leaves the scene.44

Though we see and hear the term Anthropocene bandied about loosely, like the Holocene Epoch the Anthropocene Epoch has a precise scientific meaning. The Anthropocene is the name proposed to mark a new geological epoch; it is the next epoch, the one that comes after the Holocene in the geochronology of Earth. (A growing consensus is converging on the mid-twentieth century as the moment when that precious terran lull came finally to an end, about which more in a later section.45) Once again, the details are many but the gist is clear. Ecologically, the Anthropocene is a matter of cumulative human impacts on the Earth System (the whole ecosphere); geologically, it is a matter of the marks these impacts will leave in the rock strata of Earth (the lithosphere). Whatever we may think of geological meanings in the deep future, ecologically the stakes could hardly be higher. Environmental historians John McNeill and Peter Engelke offer a pointed summation. They define the Anthropocene as “a new moment in the history of the Earth . . . in which humankind [has] emerged as the most powerful influence on global ecology.” And they add, with a scalar inflection, “The crux of the Anthropocene concept” is the emergence of “a new period (whether an epoch, period, or era in geologists’ parlance) in which human actions overshadow the quiet persistence of microbes and the endless wobbles and eccentricities in the Earth’s orbit, affecting the governing systems of the Earth, and [in which human actions] therefore define the age.”46 Of all the drivers of Earth system functioning—physical, chemical, biological—humans are now primary, and the most powerful. But perhaps in this case we should not be asking historians and other humanists—pace Petrarch, Montaigne, and Sartre—though they have much

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of value to say on the matter. It is natural scientists, after all, ecologists, Earth System scientists, and geologists, who have proposed the hypothesis and the name. We do well to take these hardworking experts seriously, and to take them at their word. Consider the stark conclusions of the eleven co-authors of the most comprehensive book-length overview of human-driven impacts on the Earth System to date. Their summary statement warrants quotation in full: The planet is now dominated by human activities. Human changes to the Earth System are multiple, complex, interacting, often exponential in rate and globally significant in magnitude. They affect every Earth System component—land, coastal zone, atmosphere and oceans. The human driving forces for these changes—both proximate and ultimate—are equally complex, interactive and frequently teleconnected across the globe. The magnitude, spatial scale, and pace of human-induced-change are unprecedented. Today, humankind has begun to match and even exceed some of the great forces of nature in changing the biosphere and impacting other facets of Earth System functioning. In terms of fundamental element cycles and some climatic parameters, human-driven changes are pushing the Earth System well outside of its normal operating range. In addition, the structures of the terrestrial and marine biospheres have been significantly altered directly by human activities. There is no evidence that the Earth System has previously experienced these types, scales, and rates of change; the Earth System is now in a no-analogue situation, best referred to as a new era in the geological history of Earth, the Anthropocene.47

They do not mince words. Nothing quite like this rapid and dramatic shift in the Earth system has happened in at least the past few million years. And no such species-driven shift has happened arguably for billions of years. There is nothing to compare it to. The Anthropocene is all difference. It is differential all the way down, and all the way up.48 To the ecologists’ emphasis on impacts geologists add their emphasis on durable material traces. The advent and eventual denouement of the Anthropocene Epoch will be readable in future rock strata, millions of years from now. Yes, millions. Some scientists think, and others fear, that the Anthropocene may turn out to be a Period, a far longer geological timespan than an Epoch. However long or short, the signatures will be written in strange fossil rocks (concrete, brick, ceramics, etc.), strange fossil creatures (selectively bred and genetically engineered plants, animals, and fungi), strange “techno-fossils” (ball-point pens, ring-pulls from cans, myriads of plastics, etc.), and strange chemical fossils (hyperabundance of nitrogen and phosphorous from industrial agriculture, metals like copper, lead, and zinc, etc.).49 Though there is much to be said for acquiring the deep-time sensitivities of geologists, for our purposes, present impacts matter more than the rocks that will register them in the future. Here, at least, the signing matters

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more than the signature. Whatever the paper, whatever the ink, the signatory will be one in the same: Homo sapiens sapiens. So the Anthropocene is a new stage in the history of Earth, the next stage, which, as it turns out, has just recently been brought into existence by the aggregate impact of collective human conducts on the living Earth System. From the empirical perspectives of ecology and Earth System science, the human part of the ecosphere is now impactful enough to alter the functioning of the whole Earth system, to shift it toward a new ecospheric regime that is critically different from the one in which all the things we gather under the imbricated rubrics of human history, culture, and civilization have thus far evolved. And we must be clear. The Anthropocene is not simply about impacts and change. It is about massive impacts and perilous change. It is about a planetary scale impact that will affect and inflect and challenge human experience and evolution for millennia to come—to say nothing of other-andmore-than-human experience and evolution. Doubly wise humans, indeed. These are not just intriguing facts, like so many morsels of scientific trivia, worthy of theoretical fascination and practical forgetting. This is the story of Earth today and for any foreseeable future. It is the unimaginable become real, supported by overwhelming empirical evidence patiently gathered by thousands of scientists over half a century. And the more they look the more they find. Before you read any further, take a moment to reflect on their claims, even if they are not new to you. We are already living in a new and difficult epoch, an epoch that we ourselves have wrought. Take a moment to think this impossible thought. One caveat and one further point. This new epoch is real, whether or not it is formally ratified by the geological and Earth System science communities—and it seems likely to be. But it is not human beings in some abstract species sense who have caused it. It is some of us, a portion of the human community living a particular form of complex, energy intensive, high materials throughput human co-habitation who have brought all of us to this conjuncture.50 This matters. We must be circumspect when invoking the Anthropocene. Indeed, the choice of the name is problematic for many, and some argue vehemently against it. (I am still ambivalent.) But call it what you will. Call it the Capitalocene, as Jason Moore, among others, reasonably recommends, given late capitalism’s pivotal role in bringing about the epochal change. Call it the Manocene, as many feminists have fairly suggested, given the patriarchal roots of ecological disruption and planetary degradation, to say nothing of the gender composition of the committees of scientists who will decide whether to add the name to the geological timescale. Call it the Chthulucene, as Donna Haraway offers, highlighting the open-textured dialectic of destruction and creation. Call it the Plastocene, as others have suggested on more prosaic grounds, given the almost inconceivable quantities

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of plastic now circulating through terrestrial, marine, and even subterranean and aeolian ecosystems. (To get a sense of the scale, try to imagine a garbage truck full of plastic dumped into the ocean every minute of every day.) Whatever name we prefer, the observational and experimental data show beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that a planetary change worthy of naming is afoot. The scientific reasoning is impeccable. There is something to be named. From a biological, ecological, evolutionary, geological, and anthropological perspective, Earth history and human history have coalesced, utterly and irrevocably. What we will make of this great coalescence remains to be seen. WORLD ~ SANCTUARY It is that cities developed to protect man from Nature and in those places where Nature makes itself most discreet, instead of here, where they built one right in the fullness of Nature and to protect man from men. Nature remained . . . And yet this Nature, by corrupting the stones of this impossible city, has corrupted itself; it has ceased to be Nature.51

Sartre can help us to think this through. Consider his abandoned Italy project—or, must we say, yet another abandoned project—to which he gave the working title, La regina Albemarla o il ultimo turisto. The title, written in Italian in Sartre’s hand at the head of the manuscript, was transliterated for the posthumous French publication. “Fragments” of the text were published as La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste. We might forgive Sartre’s grammatical error in the original Italian title (il ultimo turisto should be l’ultimo turista52), if it was an error. We can only speculate on the significance, if it was not, of his shift from feminine to masculine. In any case, Queen Albemarle or the Last Tourist (the gender shift is lost in English) is an odd title, or at least an unlikely one. What was Sartre thinking? It does seem fair to wonder. As it turns out, this unlikely two-part title conveys an unlikely triple salience. The first is social, the second ecological, and, in an underappreciated ternary movement that is philosophically de rigueur in Sartre’s thought, the two together elicit a socioecological Third.53 First in order of prima facie importance, we have the oblique reference to Francesco Petrarca, with whom we have been traveling. Petrarch claimed to travel solely for pleasure, and, famously, to have climbed Mont Ventoux for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of the ascent and view. He climbed a mountain just to enjoy a vision of Earth, if we dare to say it this way. Vision or not, Petrarch has ever since held the honorific title of the “first tourist.” Everywhere a wanderer, self-described peregrinus ubique, and ever wistful too, Petrarch confesses

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to having taken the easier path up the mountain, unlike his brother who took the harder, more direct one; only to discover at the peak, with Augustine’s Confessions in hand, that the hardest path still lay ahead, that he should rather follow the path of spirit, the inward way, the path into himself. We might bend a few terms of art from across the landscape of Sartre’s thought and say that through a purifying reflection and radical conversion Petrarch realized that there is no authentic path of exteriority apart from the path of interiority; integral humanity requires one to travel both paths at once.54 Perhaps I go too far. But there we are. In any case, things are much the same for us as we face into the Holocene-Anthropocene conjuncture. Purified or not, the great vernacular poet and Latinist was certainly not the first person to travel for pleasure, or to climb for it, nor was he the first to journey inward. He was hardly the first tourist, and Sartre was far from the last. Who will be il ultimo turisto [sic]? We cannot know. What we do know is that someone will be. We also know that Petrarch lived in France for most of his early life, thanks to the Papacy having been moved to Avignon; that he called himself a “Florentine,” thanks to his father; that he lived in Venice during the years 1361–1367; and that he was not a tourist there, but a refugee, having fled the plague in Milan.55 Venice in the Trecento remained the refuge it had always been, albeit for new reasons. Relevant to our purposes here, in notes for the unfinished second volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre highlights this beneficial function of the lagoon throughout the city’s history: “The lagoon is defined as a lagoon through the intermediary of the mainland . . . Transformation of the exterior. 1. the lagoon becomes a refuge, a sanctuary.”56 In this dialectical-phenomenological context refuge, and by implication refugee, are social categories, in keeping with the broadly social-ontological orientation of the Critique. There is, however, another meaning of the term, an ecological meaning. Which brings us to the second of the above-mentioned saliences. In ecosystems ecology, refuge is a pivotal concept. It has to do with the ways organisms and communities under duress or threat find security by unexpected means and in unexpected places. Ecologists like to use the Latin plural refugia, which would have pleased the Latinist in Petrarch, though they often use the same term as if it were singular, too, which would have miffed him. Think of the downhill side of a boulder after a volcanic eruption, for example, or under a random crisscross of trees blown down by a microburst, or under the marly lip of a pond’s edge during a wildfire. Think of fleeing a pestilence, as Petrarch did. There is also a more historical notion of an ecological refuge, which has to do with spaces of long-term security in circumstances of long-term slow change (for this ecologists use refugium, the proper Latin singular). Think of the cool of mountaintops as the continental climate

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heats up in the coming decades and centuries. Think of Petrarch’s Avignon at 75 feet above the sea and his Mont Ventoux at 6,236. When things get to roiling, where would you rather be? Whatever the details of Petrarch’s Venetian experience, the refuge Venice provided meant so much to him that he promised to leave his substantial library in thanks for the city’s extended hospitality. This would be a gesture of profound symbolic value, and significant exchange value too, in the period before moveable type. It did not happen in the end. He took his books with him to nearby Arquà on the mainland, where he lived in solitude for the rest of his life.57 Still, the thought counts. Petrarch’s temporary residency in Venice has been celebrated by Venetians ever since. Little wonder. To have provided a sanctuary against such an unnatural threat [sic] for the man who would come to be called the Father of Humanism, and even the Father of the Renaissance itself; what greater honor could there be for a city that sometimes called itself La Serennisima, the Most Serene, and other times La Dominante, the Most Dominant? Sartre certainly knew all of this, diligent tourist that he was, and almost certainly visited the Palazzo Molina where Petrarch had lived. The locals call it, simply, Casa di Petrarca. (Some things in Venice are simple.) We might even imagine the efficient cause of French existentialism studying the façade, musing on his unlikely kinship, philosophical if not quite spiritual, with the prime mover of Italian humanism. The image is not gratuitous. Petrarch scholar Teodolinda Barolinia offers a compelling reading of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (“fragments of ordinary things”), more commonly known as Canzoniere, a philosophical reading which highlights the kinship between early Renaissance and late Modern humanism, distant though it may seem. Barolinia lays out a sort of corollary proto-existential corrective to conventional readings that pit Petrarch against not just scholastic metaphysics but against all metaphysics, metaphysics as such. “While not without elements of truth,” Barolinia writes, “this commonplace requires considerable nuancing.” Her corrective is worth quoting at length, for reasons both Petrarchan and Sartrean. Metaphysical concerns, defined as first principles and ultimate grounds, such as being and time, are Petrarch’s abiding concerns. The problems that tugged at him ceaselessly—in particular, the nature of time and the existence of the self in time—are metaphysical in nature, and these are the problems that he dramatized in his work. 58

More pointedly, Barolinia writes, Time and its passing are the hinges between Petrarch’s moral and metaphysical meditations: his exploration of the self’s interiority in its multiple fragmented

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incarnations unable to resolve and to convert into a single stable and full being reflects his understanding of time as a medium that literally cuts the ground out from under us, destabilizing and deracinating us.59 Petrarch’s obsessive focus on the self within the labyrinth of fragmentation, multiplicity, desire, and time and his long meditation on the one and the many, the fragments and the whole, is reflected in his life: in ways that are not equally true of other authors, the multiplicity of Petrarch’s many writings refract one set of issues and concerns; they ring changes on the same set of bells.60

It would not be at all surprising to find similar things, and especially the last of Barolinia’s sentences, written about Sartre in a nuanced work of Sartre scholarship, rather than about Petrarch in a nuanced work of Petrarch scholarship. Sartre also worked his whole life on “one set of issues and concerns,” almost kaleidoscopically. More importantly, like Petrarch, Sartre resisted the “scholastic” metaphysics of his own day in his own way. This, too, is a matter of nuance. While the terms ontology and metaphysics are often used more or less interchangeably, for Sartre the two are critically different, albeit heuristically related. In Being and Nothingness Sartre draws an unambiguous distinction, which stays with him. Metaphysics has to do with “the existence of the existent”; ontology has to do with “the specification of the structures of being of the existent taken as a totality.”61 Existence on the one hand, structures on the other: it is the latter concern that dominates Sartre’s oeuvre, such that the terms “metaphysics” and “metaphysical” are at best problematic in the avowedly, if not always consistently, ontological frame within which Sartre did (nearly) all of his thinking. Even in his most mature dialectical work, Sartre retained this orientation to ontological structures. Ever the phenomenologist, he was not (much) interested publicly in “first principles and ultimate grounds,” the medieval meaning of metaphysics inherited by Petrarch and carried through the Renaissance and beyond. None the less, Sartre shares with his Renaissance humanist progenitor an abiding interest in time and the self in time, both underlain by largely unspoken metaphysical commitments (to resist the metaphysical is not to lack a metaphysics, after all); and both of which provide the bridge between his moral and ontological interests, even as he refuses exploration of the philosophical-qua-theological interest in the existence of existents that motivated Petrarch. Petrarch was no phenomenologist, but if he was anything he was a lifelong student of le vécu, of lived experience, to invoke the term anachronistically. In this sense at least, he shared Sartre’s ontological orientation, even if not his anti-metaphysical bent. Think of temporality and temporalization in the early Sartre. Think of totality and totalization in the later. Petrarch, too, struggled to disentangle secular time and historical time from eternity or heavenly time, as it were,

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always within the oscillating context of interiority-exteriority, and always with reference to the lived immediacy of le vécu. For both thinkers this also meant grappling with dramatic historical changes outside themselves, albeit changes lived at different tempos. And what better place to grapple than Venice? Petrarch was born in a time when workaday experience was more or less recognizably the same across generations. Even during the busy foment of the Renaissance, history—“or, who knows, the historical Process”—still moved slowly. Sartre was born into a time when each new generation felt it had entered a wholly new world. And in some respects each had. Late Modernity would culminate in the fastest moving century the world has ever known, and, as it turns out, among the fastest moving centuries in the history of Earth. If Petrarch lived his whole life in the relative stability and predictability of the Holocene, Sartre lived his life at the leading edge of the Holocene-Anthropocene conjuncture. Venice, of course, preceded both of them, and, at the present pace of change, will outlast us all. Though perhaps not by much, as we will see. EARTH ~ HASTENING Wherever I go today, I am sure to arrive five minutes too late and to meet only with the impersonal memory of the disaster, sky and water merging again, recalling for a moment a drowned city, before breaking up and scattering into a pure spray of space. How superfluous I am going to feel, as the only presence amidst universal obsolescence, and at great risk of exploding, like one of those deep-sea fish when they are brought to the surface, because we are used to living under infinite pressure and such rarefactions are no good to us.62

Perhaps more unbelievable than what has already been said about the Anthropocene is the most recent pace of change. In another subtle irony, though Holocene means “wholly recent,” most of what has brought on the new epoch in ecological and geological history has happened wholly recently, in the the last half century or so—since about 1950. Like the new epoch, this several decades of steadily increasing anthropogenic disruption of the Earth System also has a name. Earth scientists, ecologists, and environmental historians call it the Great Acceleration. The most prominent and accessible illustration is a visual depiction, twenty-four graphs produced by the Stockholm Resilience Center of Stockholm University in 2004 (updated in 2010).63 Though a trip to the website is highly advisable (and I daresay mandatory for those who would consider themselves informed), the graphs are easy enough to imagine. Even without seeing them, we can hear what they say.

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Picture two dozen area charts. Each chart depicts change over time. The category tracked is named in the upper right-hand corner (population growth, methane emissions, and so on). The x-axis marks the years from left to right, from earlier to later; the y-axis shows the degree of change, from less to more, from bottom to top. Change across time. The phenomena depicted include twelve “socio-economic trends” and twelve “Earth System trends.” It is worth naming them all. The socio-economic categories: world population growth, real GDP growth, foreign direct investment, urban population growth, primary energy usage, fertilizer consumption, large dam construction, water use, paper production, transportation, tele-communications, international tourism. The Earth System categories: carbon dioxide emissions, nitrous oxide emissions, methane emissions, stratospheric ozone, average surface temperature, ocean acidification, marine fish capture, shrimp aquaculture (a single proxy for aquaculture), coastal nitrogen release (from industrial ammonia production), tropical forest loss, domestication of land, terrestrial biosphere degradation. Now imagine each line on each graph shooting up as the years advance, nearly all of them to near-vertical; and imagine that in each case this rapid acceleration starts around 1950. Each is a so-called hockey stick graph. And it is enough sticks to equip two teams (the World team and the Earth team, perhaps?), if only we could keep the ice from melting. Snapshots of just some of the facts, the Great Acceleration graphs seem implausible in the extreme, even impossible—much like the facts of the Anthropocene, and the facts of Venice too, as we will soon see. Before you read on, take a moment to think about it. Or better, go to the website and look.64 Petrarch and Montaigne knew nothing of all this. Sartre may have had a hunch, at least of some of it. In any case, most people today do, and many have much more than a hunch. But hardly anybody wants to talk about it. Whatever Sartre was thinking in the first years of the Great Acceleration, as he stood outside Casa di Petrarca mulling next steps for La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste, we can see Petrarch’s critical “first” nestled in Sartre’s heuristic “last.” It is almost eschatological: the primordial and eternal sojourner anticipating the temporal and terminal; the worldly beginning in the heavenly end, like some lost gnostic mystery hiding a forgotten pagan truth. “Who could be more bereft of mystery than a tourist?,” Sartre asks.65 Is his tongue in his cheek? Is he rolling his good eye? Which tourist does he have in mind? The first? The last? All those in between, himself included? It is hard to say. One thing is clear enough, if we keep the Great Acceleration in view. First and last hint together at three worldly futures that will be one in earthly time: a future without Venetians, a future without tourists, and a future without Venice. This ternary future is fast approaching. Whatever the ultimate future, the first two, the absence of Venetians and absence of tourists, are intimately linked to their Third, the absence of Venice itself. Already long in the

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offing, this final absence is approaching faster and faster, like everything else in this world. Thankfully, the acceleration cannot last forever. The world can only take so much. Or, to say the same thing from the nearside, the Earth can only give so much. If the framing depends on one’s angle of vision, what is there to see is one in the same. Like the passing of Venice, like the whole of the Holocene, this worldly rush will have been the blink of an eye in earthly time. Even less. WORLD ~ SALIENCES Earth: the only thing we never see. Near the Academy Bridge, there are trees protruding from the warped stone surface, growing from the stone; the soil is hidden. This is the only mystery of Venice—mysterious though it has been—this rare and black earth (so I imagine it) that is hidden from us.66

La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste was to be a book about Italy. We must take the workaday preposition in the characteristically Sartrean sense. Sartre wrote “about” many things, and often about things other than what he claimed to be writing about. Think of his “biographies,” Baudelaire (1946), St. Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), Mallarmé: The Poet of Nothingness (1952), alternately celebrated as great works of penetrating insight and castigated as ostentatious self-indulgences that are really about Sartre. Or better still, think of The Family Idiot, purportedly a work about the life of Flaubert, Sartre’s adopted anti-doppelganger, comprising three thick volumes, with a projected perihelial fourth on Madame Bovary (abandoned, again). This “biography,” which Sartre happily described as a “novel that is true,” was in truth a million-word essay about pretty much everything Sartre had ever thought about. So perhaps we should not be surprised that Sartre’s book ostensibly about Italy would turn out to be a book about many other things too. He said as much, apparently telling Carlo Levi that La reine Albemarle was to be a “totalizing” work.67 This is not a word Sartre would use lightly. Given the totalizing logic of lived historical experience that orients his mature thought, we must take him seriously. He had, as already mentioned, identified Venice as an ideal trope though which to explore the historical possibility of the “totalization-of-envelopment,” at once the underlying and overarching theme of the Critique (again, abandoned). (As also noted above, in the published “fragments” of La reine Albemarle the lion’s share is devoted to Venice followed by Rome, Capri, and Naples.) So we should not be too surprised, either, that he had high literary hopes for La reine Albemarle, confiding to de Beauvoir that it was to be “the Nausea of his maturity,” another thing he would not say lightly. The book was to be a literary work, too, his final

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literary masterpiece, and, like Nausea (and The Wall), an unconventional one infused with moral implication and philosophical ambition. Clearly it was to be an unusual work. Michel Contat’s description captures the offbeat intention well: “Neither novel, nor travelogue, nor diary, nor historical study, but all of this demolishing itself at once for the sake of a new genre, here is the impossible book and all the more desirable for that, in the manner of the Mallarmean book with which Sartre was obsessed in this period.”68 In the end, Sartre also confided to de Beauvoir that he had only himself to blame. The project “was very ambitious. I gave it up because I couldn’t hit upon just the right point of view.”69 Very ambitious may be an understatement. The fragments carry more questions than answers about just what the book was “about.” Montaigne meets Petrarch meets Montaigne again. Que sais je? at the outset? Peregrinus ubique in the end? At least this. So be it. It never happened. At least he “had great fun” writing it.70 What matters here is that Sartre chose Venice over all other cities as his literary locus and totalizing nexus. He saw in Venice an ideal opportunity to creatively illustrate the meaning of totalization—or more precisely, the ternary movement of totality/totalization/totalization-of-envelopment that orients the whole of his mature philosophy and ethics. Queen Albemarle, at least as Sartre imagined it, would cut across the longue durée-qua-histoire événementielle with a totalizing salience he seems to have found only in the Queen of the Adriatic. Speaking of queens, what are we to make of the queen in the working title of Sartre’s Italy project? Beyond the Petrarchan connection already noted, what of Sartre’s choice of a name for his monarch, Queen Albemarle? It is tempting to attribute it to randomness. Perhaps Sartre just picked the name from the map. There is a commune in the northwest of France, Aumale, formerly known as Albemarle. There is also a complicated history of aristocratic titles, both a dukedom and an earldom of Albemarle. Perhaps there is some connection there. It is possible. But it seems too arbitrary. Given Sartre’s penchant for phenomenological specificities and dialectical synergies, there must be more to it. Of all the nobles and names on the map, why Albemarle? There is another angle of salience, in this case a matter of Earth. Or, more precisely, a matter of earth, lowercase. In addition to his soft spot for Venice, Sartre seems also to have had one for dirt. The suggestion is not gratuitous. Despite his consummate urbanism and avowed distaste for things agrarian, Sartre seems to have understood, albeit inchoately, how much soil matters on Earth, how much earth matters to the world.71 And this unlikely nod to earth crops up in the equally unlikely working title of his projected book on Italy: in the word albamarla. His queen’s name derives from the Latin, alba marla, which means “white marl.” Marl is

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a type of mudstone, a compressed clay often high in calcium carbonate, and hence white, or nearly so. Like Hegel, who in the Philosophy of Right wrote that soil “involves us in an infinite multitude of dependencies,” binding us irrevocably to the finitude of the land, here as elsewhere Sartre displays a certain pedological sensibility, pedology being the scientific study of soil. Like Marx who in Capital wrote that the price of complex civilizations was an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” a rift between humankind and Earth that is mediated by earth, Sartre seems to have an almost edaphological sensitivity, edaphology being the scientific study of relations between the living and nonliving elements of soil. We might even think (loosely) of pedology and edaphology as the phenomenology and dialectics of earth [sic] respectively. Had Sartre been a soil scientist, he would no doubt have tried to contribute to both fields at once. Or so I like to think. This is all well and good, but still, what was Sartre thinking? Of all the names for any queen, why the name of any soil, let alone a soil so clear and distinct? Why “Queen White Marl”? One cannot help but wonder. Perhaps there was a bit of randomness after all. Perhaps not. We will never know. In any case, we will see presently that in the substrate of Venice there is much of the same calcitic whiteness that characterizes white marl. Indeed, the Queen of the Adriatic rests in part on a distant cousin of La regina Albamarla. EARTH ~ FOUNDATIONS Those princely houses opposite are rising out of the water, are they not? It is impossible for them to be floating—houses do not float—or for them to be resting on the lagoon: it would sink under their weight. Or for them to be weightless: you can see they are built of brick, stone and wood. What, then? You cannot but feel them emerging.72

“In the absence of facts,” Mary McCarthy writes, “poetry and rumour surround Venetian events.”73 She has it half right. There is no shortage of rumor or poetry—in either or both of which Petrarch had some share. There are also plenty of facts. “For the time being,” Sartre writes, “whatever may be the deeper truth, we must stress the implausibility of the facts.”74 True, he is in this passage referring to the farfetched facts of Tintoretto’s life. But to speak of the Venetian-born virtuoso is to speak of Venice itself. In his farewell conversation with Beauvoir Sartre said just this: “Tintoretto is Venice.”75 We should take him at his word. No less than with Tintoretto, to speak of Venice is to speak of a medley of uncanny facts, not merely implausible but well nigh impossible.

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Consider the following incomplete catalogue. With more than 400 bridges spanning more than 150 canals which together separate and connect more than 100 underwater islands, the Floating City does not float at all. There may be cities that do one day, if the enthusiasts have their way, but this is not one of them. Venice sits on trees. There are more than ten million trunks in all, mostly Dalmatian Alder, each hand-cut and shipped across the Adriatic from Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro; each sunk into the oxygen-starved lagoon bottom, passing down and down and down through coarse sand and powdery silt to rest in the firmer and finest grained truth of clay. As it turned out, the near absence of oxygen in the lagoon bottom muck left the now rare alder peculiarly resistant to the corrosive wiles of sea water. Thanks to an auspicious osmosis the pilings have petrified, nearly all of them transformed from wood posts almost to pillars of stone. Sprinkled amidst them are countless tons of crushed rock, put there to keep the sand and silt and clay from washing away. Atop the trunks sit two horizontal layers of wood, sometimes three or four, and on top of these wood podiums sit thick blocks of stone, again millions of them, each hand-cut from the Istrian peninsula, shipped across the Adriatic, and stacked according to need. This almost marble-hard rock, even more carbonaceous and calcitic than Sartre’s regal marl, is composed of millions of billions of trillions of shells—yes, at least that many. Mostly microscopic when they were alive eons ago, each tiny planktonic being was pressed together with all the others under the patient weight of geological time. So all the onus of the Floating City sits on all these myriads of pilings and pads and stones. The very foundation of the Venetian archipelago is made completely of fallen trees and crushed seashells; all of it made of and by life. And what is life, however implausible it may seem in an otherwise seemingly lifeless universe, if not the impossible made real. Just like the City of Water. And there is more. There is always something more in Venice. The city is sinking as the lagoon is rising. All of the millions of pilings are slowly digging themselves further into the mud, sinking and leaning slightly to the east, tilting toward sunrise and descending deeper and deeper into the Earth, surrounded by waters rising in large part due to the most recent manner of human worldmaking. Like the great changes to the Earth, as we have seen, even the sinking has a little help from us, not least due to longtime and excessive pumping of local aquifers. This conduces to subsidence, as the geohydrologists say. Taking water from the ground makes the things above sink. Another likely aggravator of sinking is methane extraction from the Adriatic sea.76 A vicious cycle if ever there was one. Burning the methane helps on both sides of the disequilibrated equation, sinking pilings and rising waters alike. Both the lay and the cant measurably and inexorably quickening, hastened by the two most needful things, water and energy. Local sea level in the city has “risen” substantially in recent centuries due only to the sinking. Due to

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anthropogenic climate disruption global sea level is slated to rise several feet in the coming decades, and some worry more and sooner than that. All of this is especially worrisome for Venice. The eastern Mediterranean seems to be especially susceptible to this anthropogenic rising.77 These are just some of the facts. And we have only scratched the surface. “Implausible” hardly touches it. Seen from any vantage point the local and regional social ecology of the Venice Lagoon and its historic city is sui generis, at least for the past sixteen centuries.78 There are other “floating” cities in the world, of course, and they too may be sui generis. Every city is singular and universal in its way. But none I daresay carries the historical and cultural freight, nor quite the same symbolic weight as Venice. WORLD ~ ENDINGS All the more so as it sometimes happens that the whole city vanishes. One evening, when I was coming back from Murano, my boat was alone as far as the eye could see. There was no Venice any longer. Where the disaster had occurred, the water was covered in dust beneath the gold of the sky. For the moment, everything was clear and precise.79

Perhaps not Montaigne’s Rome but Sartre’s Venice is the only, or at least the most, “common and universal city” today. For Venice is a prescient, if painfully apt, planetary metaphor. This is not a new idea.80 Some of the contours of it, however, are new. Venice is at once a singularly worldly city that tells the universal story of Earth after the Holocene, and a singularly earthly city that tells the story of the world as it passes into the Anthropocene. “In this sense,” writes Piero Bevilacqua, “even more than of the immediate present, Venice speaks of our near future.”81 We might as well be forthright on just what the near, or at least not-so-distant, future of Venice is. Literary figurations notwithstanding, we are speaking of the death of Venice. What does this mean? It means that there is no saving Venice. The authors of a major UNESCO study are unequivocal: . . . there should be no doubt that the sea level will eventually rise to a value that will not be sustainable for the lagoon and its historical city. The planned mobile barriers (MOSE) might be able to avoid flooding for the next few decades, but the sea will eventually rise to a level where even continuous closures will not be able to protect the city from flooding. The question is not if this will happen, but only when it will happen.82

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This is neither alarmism nor catastrophism. These, too, are among the “implausible” facts. Reality in plain dress. The prognosis for Venice is terminal. Some metaphor. . . . What is to be done, then? Some decades of palliation? Some few more years in hospice? A funeral? And how far can we take the planetary metaphor? How far ought we to take it? How far must we take it? (Yes, there is an imperative here.) Do we face an analogous existential threat? Just how much like the plight of Venice is the plight of Earth and us earthlings? How much like Venice is this world of ours? Certainly much. One hopes not too much. This, too, remains to be seen. We might say the history and currency and future of Venice are hyperbolic, taking the word in its deepest etymological sense—hupér, ‘above, beyond’ and bállō, ‘throw’; Venice seems always to throw itself above the world and beyond the Earth. At least it has always tried to, and it seems it always will. Here we come up against the familiar limits of human presumption, and the explicit limits of Sartre’s progressive humanism. For we can no longer think just in terms of the social totality and the whole social system as totalization. We must at the same time think of the ecological totality and in terms of the whole ecological totalization, that is to say, the whole Earth system. Why? Because it is not possible to think about anything that matters socially without thinking ecologically. Not anymore. It is not possible to understand anything worth understanding about the world today without taking into account the living Earth that makes all worlds possible, as it has always done and, if we are lucky, always will do. To understand anything about the world after the Holocene, we must think these two thoughts together: the social and the ecological. For the two are also one. Whether of the whole of Venice or the whole world, Sartre’s totalization-of-envelopment, if such a thing there is or could be, is socioecological to its core. Strictly speaking, this has always been so. The social and the ecological have always been inseparable. Specifiable, not isolable. But today the two are one in a way that they never have been before.83 How the drama of this new epoch will unfold is still an open question. This much we know: it will not be a comedy. Too many have died needlessly already, and too many more will. Whether it will be a tragedy or tragicomic depends on who the heroes turn out to be, of course, and whether and how they live or die. Either way, if we want to make more and better sense of the meaning of being human today, and of the human prospect and promise going forward; if we want to work out worthy social ecologies for this century and the coming centuries and beyond (why stop so soon?); if we want not just a habitable planet but livable worlds, we must come to terms with the meaning of this historic transit-qua-epochal conjuncture. We must face into the moment and momentum of living with and in the living Earth after the Holocene, somehow.

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EARTH ~ BEGINNINGS This morning, the precious architecture opposite, which I never took entirely seriously before, seems fearfully austere: these are the smooth walls of a human world moving away; a little world, so limited, closed in on itself, rising up definitively like a thought in the middle of a desert. I am not in it. The floating island is the whole earth, round and overloaded with human beings; it is moving away and I am left on the quayside. In Venice and a few other places, you have the time to view the destiny of man from outside, with the eyes of an angel or an ape. Sadly, we weren’t there for Noah’s Ark.84

Today’s Venice, like yesterday’s Venice, and in a way that is not quite true of any other historical city, is always already everybody’s tomorrow. Today, in a way that has never been quite true before, we earthlings—and, again, I invoke this slippery third-person plural advisedly—we earthlings, human and other-and-more, share this one planet equally, even as we do not enjoy equal share in its diminishing bounty, nor equal onus in its diminishment. Venice is the quintessence of fragility, a most worldly fragility in its most earthly frame. “And what is fragility,” Sartre asks in Being and Nothingness, “if not a certain probability of non-being for a given being under determined circumstances?” And then he adds, predictably, and this time at least, rightly: “But once again it is through man that fragility comes into being.”85 Sartre knew more than he knew he knew, as he often did, even if not always for all the right reasons. At one point he writes of the uncanny opacity of the famous Venetian light, a strange and shifting mix of dark and dim and bright, almost unearthly. “No sun today, then. It is playing at being Louis XVI in Paris or Charles I in London.” But this is Venice, the harbinger. “By disappearing, the great golden orb has disturbed the equilibrium; what remains are shafts of light, with no top or bottom to them.”86 In Venice Sartre seems to suffer as his anti-hero did in Nausea. “I end up feeling seasick: the emptiness is unbearable.”87 As it was for the imaginary protagonist, so it seems to be for the real one. Countless glassy pathways, endless alleys and streets and boulevards all made of water, only water, all rising and ebbing and flowing between walls of brick and crisscrossed by bridges of stone, a strange brew of recumbent freedom and perpendicular constraint under a vaporous sky. The story of Earth and world, indeed. Whether you look up or down or around in Venice, all the reflected reflection and refracted refraction elicits a sort of soft vertigo, a mild and giddy wooziness. It never made me nauseous, nor would I call it quite nightmarish as Sartre once does. But there you are. Nothing is simple in Venice. Or almost nothing. If you have been there, you know this. If you have not, look to your

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dreams. At face value Venice is unthreateningly disorienting, like a vaguely pleasant dream with a constant hint of danger or foreboding. Upon waking it makes little sense, if it makes any sense at all, but it does not trouble us long. The comfort quickly fades, and along with it the fear. We forget about it. We get on with our day. Call it what you will, the Floating City, City of Water, the City of Canals or Bridges or Masks, depending on your angle of vision, if not on a preference for motility over fixity, or buoyancy over gravity, or fluidity over solidity, to say nothing of a preference for truth over falsity. On all counts Venice is an apt allegory for our times, albeit a difficult one. An earthly lesson in worldly folly, a case study in the impossible become possible become impossible again, Venice distills in its long history and foreshortening future what it means to say that the Holocene has ended and the Anthropocene has begun. Perhaps it is time to flee. A few think it is, and are even trying to figure out how to do so. Even Petrarch had a vague sense that it might be, though it was the mountains and forests that would be his refugia, not some desolate Other Earth. Looking heavenward and earthward, Petrarch’s retreat was at once an inward recognition of the tribulations of an all too earthly and unrequited love and an outward refusal of the all too worldly sickness of an unrepentant civilization. Perhaps it would be enough to heed Montaigne’s sage advice: “We must judge with more reverence the infinite power of nature, and with more consciousness of our ignorance and weakness.”88 Shouldn’t this be enough? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Sartre looks out his hotel window and senses something of the tangle of Montainesque meanings. Looking down at the canal he suffers something of the lovelorn Petrarchan sickness. In each case for his own later historical reasons, of course. No matter. Noah’s Ark isn’t coming. Not this time. The chips are down. If Tintoretto, Sartre’s great Holocene master, were here to paint the meaning of the Anthropocene, he would still find an apt model in Venice. We, too, are its captives, each in our way. Or, to say the same thing from the nearside of the canal, we are all Venetians today. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ally, Matthew C. “Sartre’s Integrative Method: Description, Dialectics, and Praxis.” Sartre Studies International 16, no.2 (2010): 48–74. Ally, Matthew C. “Glimpses of Earth: Sustainability in the Crucible of Experience.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 64, nos. 1&2 (2011): 164–79. Ally, Matthew C. “Ecologizing Sartre’s Ontology: Nature, Science, and Totalization.” Environmental Philosophy 9, no. 2 (2012): 95–121.

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Ally, Matthew C. “Intimations of a New Socioecological Imaginary: Sartre, Taylor, and the Planetary Crisis,” in Revolutionary Hope: Essays in Honor of William L. McBride. Nathan Jun and Shane Wahl, eds. Lanham, PA: Lexington Books, 2013. Ally, Matthew C. Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge. Lanham, PA: Lexington Books, 2017. Ally, Matthew C. “The Logics of the Critique,” in The Sartrean Mind. Matthew C. Eshleman and Constance L. Mui, eds. New York: Routledge, 2020. Angus, Ian. Facing the Anthropocene: Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016. Archer, David. The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2009). Barolinia, Teodolinda. “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in Kirkham and Maggi, eds. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009: 33–62. Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Translated by Patrick O’Brien. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Bevilacqua, Piero. Venezia e le acque: Una metafora planetaria (third edition). Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2000. Bevilacqua, Piero. Tra natura e storia: ambiente, economie, risorse in Italia. Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2000. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of The Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso Books, 2016. Celenza, Christopher S. Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre: A Life. Translated by Anna Cancogni. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. Gaffney, Owen and Steffen, Will. “The Anthropocene Equation.” The Anthropocene Review, 1–9, 2017. Gerassi, John. Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Keahey, John. Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Kelso, J. A. and Engstrøm, D. The Complementary Nature, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Kirkham, Victoria and Maggi, Armando eds. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Knoll, Andrew H. A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. New York: Custom House, 2021.

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Lasserre, P. and A. Marzollo eds. The Venice Lagoon Ecosystem: Inputs and Interactions Between Land and Sea. Paris: UNESCO and The Parthenon Publishing Group, 2000. Lewis, Simon L. & Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. McCarthy, Mary, Venice Observed. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1963. McNeil, John R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. McNeil, John R. and Engelke, Peter. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003. Niemelä, Jari. Urban Ecology: Patterns, Processes, and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Petrarch. Canzoniere. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Plant, Margaret. Venice: Fragile City, 1797 – 1997. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal.” In Between Existentialism and Marxism: Sartre on Philosophy, Politics, Psychology and the Arts, Jean Paul Sartre, 141–169. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, Theory of Practical Ensembles. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso Books, 1991a. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume Two (unfinished), The Intelligibility of History. Translated by Quintin Hoare. London: Verso Books, 1991b. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Imaginary. Translated by Jonathan Webber. New York: Routledge, 2004. Sartre, Jean-Paul. La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste: fragments. Arlette Elkaim-Sartre ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Portraits. London: Seagull Books, 2017. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Lettre de Jean-Paul Sartre à Gabriel Marcel.” Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2014. ISSN 1254–7700. ISBN 9782717725988. Schwägerl, Christian. The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes our Planet. Translated by Lucy Renner Jones. Santa Fe/London: Synergetic Press, 2014. Sfriso, Adriano, Alessandro Buosi, Michele Mistri, Cristina Munari, Piero Franzoi, Andrea Augusto Sfriso, “Long-term changes of the trophic status in transitional ecosystems of the northern Adriatic Sea, key parameters and future expectations: The lagoon of Venice as a study case.” Nature Conservation, 34: 193–215 (2019).

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Skyttner, Lars. General Systems Theory: Problems, Perspectives, Practice (Second Edition). London: World Scientific, 2005. Standish, Dominic. Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and Reality. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012. Steffen, Will et al. Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2005. Steffen, Will et al. “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” The Anthropocene Review, (2)1, 2015. Turner, B.L. et al. eds. The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. UNESCO, The Future of Venice: Workshop I. 2010. Wills, Gary. Venice: Lion City, The Religion of Empire. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, and Colin P. Summerhayes eds. The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2019).

NOTES 1. An early version of this chapter was presented at the 2018 conference of the North American Sartre Society. I thank Ron Aronson, Bill McBride, Austin Smidt, and especially Damon Boria for helpful comments on various drafts. The epigraph is from Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. Mark Musa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, 211. 2. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame, New York, Everyman’s Library, 2003, p. 91. 3. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Venice from my window,” in Portraits (London: Seagull Books, 2017), 670 (translation modified); originally published in Verve: Revue artistique et litteraire, Volume VII, Numbers 27 & 28 as “Venise, de ma fenêtre”; reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, La reine Albemarle ou Le dernier touriste: Fragments (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 186–200. 4. See Kelso and Engstrøm, The Complementary Nature (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006). For a further application in a Sartrean context, see my “The Logics of the Critique,” in Matthew Eshleman and Constance Mui eds., The Sartrean Mind (New York, Routledge, 2020). 5. See Matthew C. Ally, Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017); and “Ecologizing Sartre’s Ontology: Nature, Science, and Totalization,” Environmental Philosophy 9, no. 2 (2012): 95–121. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, Trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 133, 7, 74 (translations modified, emphases added). On Sartre’s method, see my “Sartre’s Integrative Method: Description, Dialectics, and Praxis,” Sartre Studies International 16, no. 2 (2010), 48–74.

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7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume Two (unfinished), The Intelligibility of History, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1991), 329. 8. Sartre, Portraits, 510 (translation modified). 9. Criteriologies vary. For several examples, see Lars Skyttner, General Systems Theory: Problems, Perspectives, Practice (Second Edition) (London: World Scientific, 2005), e.g., 105–06. 10. For an excellent (short) survey of the current state of Earth science, see Andrew H. Knoll, A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters (New York: Custom House, 2021); for a detailed (long) overview of the Earth and life as complex adaptive systems, see Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker, How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 11. So much so that it has dedicated textbooks. See Jari Niemelä, Urban Ecology: Patterns, Processes, and Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2005), 2 (emphases added). 13. For further discussion, see Ally, Ecology and Existence, 157–161, 189–91, 230–31. 14. See e.g., the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, which was endorsed by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the international biodiversity programme DIVERSITAS, representing thousands of geologists, ecologists, and Earth Systems scientists. “Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change,” http:​//​www​.igbp​.net​/about​/history​ /2001amsterdamdeclarationonearthsystemscience​.4​.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001312​ .html (last accessed 7 June 2022). 15. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System, 24, 256, 7 (emphases added). 16. Sartre, Portraits, 656 (translation modified). 17. Though Sartre told Beauvoir the the unfinished manuscript was “perhaps a hundred pages,” Annie Cohen-Solal notes a scholarly consensus that the text was quite a bit longer, on the order of 500 pages. This view is well supported by the length of the published selections. See Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 181; cf. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 322. 18. Cohen Solal, Sartre, 391. 19. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 91. All translations from this volume are my own. 20. Montaigne, The Complete Works (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 2003) 928. On Montaigne’s Italian travels, see Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life, translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 401–07. 21. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, p. 63. 22. Christopher S. Celenza, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 63. 23. See Montaigne, The Complete Works, 903.

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24. Montaigne, The Complete Works, 912, 1122. 25. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 84 (emphasis added). 26. Jean-Paul Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 80. 27. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 66. In a 1971 interview with John Gerassi Sartre describes himself as a lifelong “city spirit.” See John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 48. 28. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume One, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso Books, 1991), 45 (emphasis added). 29. Sartre, Portraits, 669–70 (translation modified). 30. Sartre, Portraits, 663. 31. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 97. 32. Sartre, Portraits, 676. 33. Sartre, Portraits, 660. 34. Sartre, Portraits, 431. 35. Sartre, Portraits, 433 (emphasis added). 36. Sartre, Portraits, 452–53. 37. Sartre, Portraits, 432. 38. Sartre, Portraits, 660. 39. Sartre, Portraits, 660 (translation modified). 40. Sartre, Portraits, 518. 41. Sartre, Portraits, 673 (translation modified). 42. Sartre, Portraits, 460. 43. Sartre, Portraits, 560. 44. Sartre, Portraits, 667. 45. See Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), Chapter 5, esp. 188–92. 46. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–2 (emphases added). See also Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 9, 19; Simon L. Lewis & Mark A. Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2018, 399. 47. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System, 81. See also B. L. Turner et al. eds., The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 48. See also Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, and Colin P. Summerhayes eds., The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 285. For a look further back, see Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson, Revolutions That Made the Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 183–208. Looking forward, the Earth System has likely been pushed into an extended “super-interglacial.”

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See David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 49. For detailed overviews and discussion of potential stratigraphic markers of the Anthropocene, see Zalasiewicz et al. eds., The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 50. The best source for a first introduction to this is unquestionably Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). See also Chakrabarty’s earlier article, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 197–222. 51. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 80. 52. I thank Luigi Boria for pointing out Sartre’s presumably inadvertent grammatical slip. 53. See Ally, “The Logics of the Critique,” 2020, esp. 365. 54. Cf. Kirkham and Maggi eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, 207. 55. Garry Wills, Venice: Lion City, The Religion of Empire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 307; Kirkham, Victoria and Maggi, Armando, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), xxi; Christopher S. Celenza, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 173. 56. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume Two (unfinished): The Intelligibility of History, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso Books, 1991), 444. 57. Celenza, Petrarch, 220. 58. Teodolinda Barolinia, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in Kirkham and Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, 33. 59. Barolinia, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” 39. 60. Barolinia, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” 56. On the conventional reading Barolinia challenges, see p. 361, note 3. 61. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 297 (emphases added). 62. Sartre, Portraits, 673. 63. https:​//​www​.stockholmresilience​.org​/publications​/publications​/2016​-02​-12​ -twenty​-four​-charts​-every​-leader​-should​-see​.html (last accessed 9 May 2022). 64. Use the web address in the previous note, or search “Twenty-four Charts Every Leader Should See.” 65. Sartre, Portraits, 665. 66. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 119. 67. Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 12. 68. See Michel Contat, “Autopsie d’un livre inexistant: La Reine Albemarle ou le Dernier touriste” (my translation). Available at: http:​//​www​.item​.ens​.fr​/articles​-en​ -ligne​/autopsie​-dun​-livre​-inexistant​-la​-reine​-albemarle​-ou​-le​-derni​/​#bodyftn6 (last

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accessed 21 August 2020). See also Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, “Presentation,” in Sartre, La reine Albemarle, 12. 69. de Beauvoir, Adieux, p. 181. 70. de Beauvoir, Adieux, p. 181. 71. For a detailed discussion and reflection, see Ally, Ecology and Existence, 404ff. 72. Sartre, Portraits, 661. 73. Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed, 41. 74. Sartre, Portraits, 433. 75. De Beauvoir, Adieux 1984. 76. Dominic Standish, Venice in Environmental Peril? Myth and Reality (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2012), xi—xii, 6, 31. 77. John Keahey, Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 8. 78. P. Lasserre and A. Marzollo eds., The Venice Lagoon Ecosystem: Inputs and Interactions Between Land and Sea (Paris: UNESCO and The Parthenon Publishing Group, 2000). 79. Sartre, Portraits, 662. 80. None of the literature on this theme that I am familiar with takes any helpful account of Sartre’s writings on Venice. Piero Bevilacqua, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Rome, offers a book-length socioecological investigation of Venice as una metafora planetaria (a planetary metaphor). Piero Bevilacqua, Venezia e le acque: Una metafora planetaria, third edition, (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2000). See also his Tra natura e storia: ambiente, economie, risorse in Italia, second edition (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2000). 81. Bevilacqua, Venezia e le acque, 21 (my translation) 82. UNESCO, The Future of Venice: Workshop I (2010), 18 (emphasis added). The acronym MOSE refers to the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (Experimental Electromechanical Module). This is a series of movable mechanical barricades installed at each of the three inlets to the Venice lagoon. The barricades can be raised to mitigate the impact of storm and tidal surges. As of the time of writing, they have been tested several times. While they cannot wholly prevent the more and more frequent and deepening flooding, they have in each test successfully prevented what would otherwise have been major flooding. 83. See Ally, Ecology and Existence, chapter 5, esp. 338–46; and also my “Intimations of a New Socioecological Imaginary: Sartre, Taylor, and the Planetary Crisis,” in Nathan Jun and Shane Wahl, eds., Revolutionary Hope: Essays in Honor of William L. McBride (Lanham, PA: Lexington Books, 2013). 84. Sartre, Portraits, 669 (translation modified). 85. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 8 (emphasis added). For a heuristic appreciation of Sartre’s dialectical-phenomenological notion of fragility in an ecological context, see Ally, Ecology and Existence, 439–41. 86. Sartre, Portraits, 660. 87. Sartre, Portraits, 660. 88. Montaigne, The Complete Works, 162.

Index

Abhidamma, 255 Abram, David, 9 absurd, 3, 66n23, 83, 160, 162, 175, 178,182–83, 233, 242, 276 acoustic niche hypothesis, 31, 33, 38 Adorno, Theodor, 101 Adriatic, 285, 305–07, 313 advertising, 96–97, 99–101, 111 aesthetic, 6, 48, 194, 242, 269, 271 agency, 7, 124, 180, 190, 192–94, 198–205, 273 airplanes, 36, 44n13 alarmism, 308 Algerian War, xi Algren, Nelson, 8, 258, 260, 262–64, 268, alienation, 57, 60–63, 97–99, 132–3, 153, 156–57, 160, 163, 179–83, 213, 216, 234 Ally, Matthew, 2, 9, 15, 139n7, 146, 163, 190, 240, 267 Althusser, Louis, 151 ambiguity, 103–07, 110–11, 113, 115– 16, 118, 200, 242, 263, 292 ambivalence, 55, 292, 294 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, 315n14 analytical reason, 145, 286 anatta, 236

anicca, 236–37 animal(s), 6–7, 9, 31–34, 38–39, 41, 50–51, 65n11, 66n20, 66n23, 71, 75, 88, 91n12, 174, 176–78, 197, 218–19, 222–25, 227–28, 245, 249, 263, 275, 291, 296 orchestra, 38, 41 Antarctica, 291 anthrophony, 30–31 Anthropocene, viii, x, 7–9, 14, 30, 82, 105, 115, 146, 149–50, 161–62, 189– 90, 193, 195, 200, 205, 283, 295–97, 299, 302–03, 308, 311 anthropocentrism, 3, 8, 48, 50, 53, 76, 91n12, 182, 186n26, 190, 193–94, 199–200, 204, 240, 265, 271 anthropogenic, 8, 30, 32, 34, 36–37, 302, 307 anthropometric, 271 anthropomorphism, 182 anti-essentialism, 174–175 anti-physis, 21, 25, 174–75, 182–83, 185n14 anti-praxis. See praxis anti-Semitism, x, 60, 67n42, 67n54, 68, 186n26, 221 anxiety, 94–96, 103–04, 109–11, 117– 18, 181, 261, 290 appropriateness, 218, 223 319

320

Index

Arahant, 8, 250 Aristotle, 73, 178 artwork, 48–49, 58, 62 atheist, 106 atmosphere, 285–86, 296 atomization, 137 attention, x, 1, 3, 5, 7–9, 17, 29, 34, 39–40, 58, 85, 96, 99, 101, 104–06, 143, 158, 172, 177, 179, 182, 213, 217, 222, 225, 236, 244, 261, 272, 285 attitude-behavior gap, 130, 133, 135, 139n17 Atwill, Janet, 159 auditory turn, 29–30 Augustine, 298 authenticity, x, 6, 16, 24, 57, 73, 83–84, 90, 94, 103, 118, 144, 175, 248, 250 automation, 180–81 autonomy, 73, 135, 197, 214, 224 Avignon, 299 avijja, 236 ayoniso-manasikāra, 236 Bacon, Francis, 15 bad faith, 6–7, 52, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 74, 80, 84–85, 88–90, 94, 102–10, 112–15, 118, 144, 163–64, 176, 185n14, 236, 239, 244, 248, 250, 260 Badiou, Alain, 164, 169n55 Ball Brothers, 266 Barnes, Hazel, 20, 257 Barolinia, Teodolinda, 300–01 Baudelaire, Charles, 185n14, 258 Beauvoir, Simone de, 3–4, 7–8, 19, 64n1, 65n9, 94, 98, 103–07, 110, 113, 242, 258, 260–66, 268–69, 304–06, 315n17 being-for-itself, 51, 55, 58, 77–78, 172, 238, 240 being-for-others 7, 55–6, 66, 77–83, 91, 172–75, 239 being-in-itself 18, 55–58, 77–78, 152, 172, 238–40, 250 Ben-Shahar, Tal, 95

Berger, Peter, 244 Berlin, Germany, 14, 292 Bevilacqua, Piero, 308, 318n79 biography, viii–xi, 258, 304 biology, 56, 65n11, 67n46, 268, 287 biophony, 30–31 biosphere, 195, 285–86, 296, 303 Black(s), ix–xi, 60, 269–70 Bolshevik Revolution, xii boredom, 66n23, 181 Borgmann, Albert, 181–82 Boria, Damon, 9 Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA), 36–37 bourgeois, 15, 176, 182, 185n14, 185n23, 215, 221, 288 Bowman, Elizabeth, 25 boxing, 185n24 Braque, Georges, 293 breakdown, 34 Brossolette, Pierre, 214, 221, 223–24 Buddha, 235–36 Buddhism, 8, 233–50, 252n5 Butterfield, Elizabeth, 152–53 buying green. See green consumerism Camus, Albert, ix–xi, 3, 5, 6, 98 Canada, 220 capitalism, ix, xi, 1, 8, 96, 100, 102, 161, 258, 270, 297 Capitalocene, 149, 161, 297 carbon, 86, 123–25, 134, 138n1, 162, 211, 224–25, 227, 303 Cartesian, 18–19, 50, 237 Catalano, Joseph, 55, 66n24, 235, 238 catastrophism, 308 Catholic, 3 Chagall, Marc, 293 Charles I, 310 Charmé, Stuart Zane, 175 Chicago, Illinois, 8, 260–62, 264, 266, 268 China, 5, 14, 17, 21–22, 35, 87, 221, 225, 272, 275 choice architecture, 135

Index

Christianity, 106, 147, 218, 220, 287 Chthulucene, 161, 297 civil rights movement, 270 class, xi, 25, 36, 99, 126, 171, 176, 182, 192, 215, 239, 269–73 Clean Air Act, 273 climate change, 6–7, 71–73, 74–77, 79–90, 91n5, 105–06, 113, 123–25, 129, 134, 137, 146, 217, 243, 273 coefficient(s) of adversity, 18, 21, 59, 177 cognitive play, 259 Cohen-Solal, Annie, xi, 288, 315n17 Cold War, ix, 17 collective action, 3–4, 7, 171, 225, 228, 272–76 colonialism, x–xi, 1, 4, 8, 60, 62, 67n40, 164, 258, 272 comic, 290 communism, ix, xi compassion, 113, 116, 207n74, 234, 239, 247 complementarity, 283 complicity, xi, 148, 151, 160, 162, 164–65 Connolly, William, 157 consciousness, 14, 17, 49, 51–61, 63, 65n11, 66nn23–24, 74, 77–79, 94, 100, 103–04, 126, 137, 172–73, 176–78, 190–91, 198, 212–13, 215, 223, 226, 228, 233, 235–38, 241, 243, 245–46, 252n5, 258, 260–61, 270–71, 286, 311 consequentialism, 73, 76 conservation, 29, 238, 267, 272 consumerism, 7, 93–94, 96, 100–02, 109, 111–12, 123–25, 128–30, 133–36, 139n17, 140n29, 171–72, 176, 181, 269 Contat, Michel, 305 contingency, 15, 174, 234, 261, 292 contradiction, 293–94 Cooper, David, xi Cordova, VF, 7, 212, 217, 230n18 cosmopolis, 288

321

counter-finality, 7, 35, 37–38, 125, 128–29, 134, 152, 156, 171–72, 180–81, 270, 275 COVID-19, 6, 33 Cowles, Henry Chandler, 261–62, 264, 266, 268, 273–75 critical zone, 284 Croatia, 307 Crutzen, Paul, 8 cryosphere, 285 culture, xi, 3–4, 7, 9, 16, 32–33, 35, 37, 40, 56, 59–60, 68n54, 85, 93–96, 98, 100–03, 105, 107, 109–15, 117–18, 145, 154, 159, 163, 173–74, 179, 182, 200–01, 212, 214, 222, 227, 233, 240, 291, 297, 308 curiosity, 207n74 Dakota, 37 Dasein, 237 Davies, Jeremy, 146, 162 death, viii, x, 50, 55, 59, 62, 78–80, 82–83, 90, 95, 130, 148, 153, 160, 173, 176, 178–79, 183, 213–14, 258, 284, 295, 308–09 deception, 84, 101, 174, 248 decisionism, 186n26 decolonial theory, 2 decolonization, 276 deep ecology, 2–3, 108, 116 deforestation, 5, 14, 17, 21–22, 35, 37, 72, 128, 182, 189, 191–92, 202, 217, 221, 225–26, 272, 275 Deloria Jr., Vine, 7, 212, 217–22, 227 Deleuze, Gilles, 164 delusion, 182, 245–47, 250 democracy, 272–73 deontology, 73, 91n8 Derrida, Jacques, 51, 66n20 Descartes, Rene, 50, 173–74, 185n10, 185n17, 230n18, 237 desire, 51–52, 93, 96, 136, 147, 151, 159, 162, 175, 177, 181, 201, 215, 221, 245–247, 250, 301

322

Index

destiny, 25, 158, 171, 180–81, 212, 218, 220, 310 determinism, 103, 105, 174 Detmer, David, 72, 74 Deutscher, Isaac, xii dialectic(al): logic, 150; master-slave, 53; materialism, 18; reason, 108, 114, 116, 118, 145, 149–150, 161 dignity, 183 dishonesty, 103–04, 106, 108, 110–15 disturbance (ecological), 274 dog, 66n23, 178, 182 domination, xi, 4, 26, 41, 63, 102, 183, 224, 271 Drwiega, Mark, 57 dualism, 66n21, 172–74, 185n17, 238–39 dukkha, 236, 239, 245–46 dunes. See Indiana Dunes Earthlings, 276, 284, 287, 309–10 eco-centrism, 108, 116 eco-feminism, 2 economy, 2, 4, 15, 23, 67n46, 74, 93, 96–99, 101–02, 107, 135, 144, 151, 159, 167n4, 171, 181, 183, 200, 216, 225–27, 260, 262, 266–69, 271–72, 303 eco-pragmatism, 2 eco-socialism, 2 ecosystem(s), 15, 21–22, 26, 30, 38, 41, 109, 116, 182–83, 189, 195–96, 200, 211, 217, 219, 222, 225–28, 285–87, 297, 299 edaphology, 306 ehipassiko, 235 embodiment, 6–7, 56–63, 127, 129, 173, 175, 185n14, 234–35, 240, 242–43, 249–50, 265 emissions, 87–88, 123, 134, 138n1, 211, 224, 303

empirical, 5, 86, 144, 147, 235–36, 276, 286–87, 297 engagement, 3–5, 9, 29–30, 48, 52, 76, 85, 106, 111, 113, 126, 128–30, 132, 136, 149–50, 182, 195, 201, 233–35, 239, 243, 245–49, 258, 276 Engelke, Peter, 295 Engels, Friedrich, 19 Engstrøm, David, 283 enlightenment, 173, 176, 218, 221, 237 the Enlightenment, 282 ensemble. See collective entrainment, 39–41 Environmental Protection Agency, 273 environmentalism, 1, 3, 9, 29, 71–72, 76–81, 83, 88–89, 111, 113, 238, 242, 247, 259, 264–65, 269–70, 276 Epicurus, 174 epistemology, 234, 243, 246– 48, 250, 259 epoch, viii, 8, 18, 24, 148, 150, 161, 211, 217, 221, 290–91, 295– 97, 302, 309 essence, 54, 65n9, 174–75, 177, 213, 241, 247, 265 essentialize, 4–5, 265–66, 271, 275 ethics: Buddhist, 234, 243; ecological, 6, 19; environmental, 6, 71, 76, 94, 234, 242–243, 247, 249; existentialist, 227 Evernden, Neil, 2 evolution, 38, 183, 268, 290–91, 297–98 exceptionalism, 3, 259 exigency, 153–158, 180, 193, 202 existentialism, x, 3, 17, 48–49, 66n23, 121n43, 234, 239, 242–43, 245, 249, 259, 263, 276, 282, 300 expertocracy, 267 exploitation, 4, 15, 273 exteriority, xii, 56, 65n11, 132, 151–152, 154–155, 158, 180, 183, 283, 299, 301 extinction, 75, 106, 113, 118, 147, 227

Index

extraction, 267, 307 facilitation, 274 facticity, 18, 55–56, 66n24, 74, 102–03, 105–07, 109, 113–14, 168n25, 172, 234, 239, 271 fascist, 3 fatalism, 3 feminist, 269, 276, 297 fiction, xi, 5–6, 8, 24, 105, 136, 167n5, 174, 258–59, 260, 263–64, 268, 276 fire(s), ix, 37–38, 40, 75, 77, 83, 211, 217, 274, 288, 299 Flaubert, Gustave, xi, 258, 304 flooding, 5, 21, 33, 35, 75, 124, 128, 144, 191–92, 202, 211, 217–18, 221– 22, 227, 272, 275, 308, 318n81 Flynn, Thomas, ix, xii, 56, 121n43, 154, 158, 278n4 Forest, 31–73, 75–77, 128, 147, 191, 197, 211, 217, 219, 226–27, 249, 260–65, 274, 284–87, 303, 311 forgetting, 82, 294, 297, 311 fossils, 91n5, 123, 200, 296 Foucault, Michel, viii–ix, xii, 50 Fox, Nik Farrell, 2, 157 fragility, 310, 318n84 France, x, 17, 221, 288, 299, 305 Frankfurt, Harry, 121n37 fraternity-terror, 270, 273 freedom: existential, 216, 228, 288; mutual, 216, 228; and necessity, 173; nihilating, 52; ontological, 74, 77; of the other, 224; practical, 74–75, 77, 175; and responsibility, 93, 105, 111– 12, 114, 234; in situation, 61, 102–04, 118; and socialism, 258, 272; transcendent, 59, 61 French Revolution, 169n55, 282 Freud, Sigmund, xi

323

Freudian, 104 Friedan, Betty, 269 future generations, 6, 14, 20, 76–77, 79–81, 86, 88, 90, 107–09, 224 futility, 113 Garfield, Jay L., 244–45, 247, 250 Gary, Indiana, 8, 260, 264, 268–73 gaze. See the Look generosity, 2–3, 250, 259, 262–63, 265 gender, xi, 239, 297–98 Genet, Jean, 175 geochronology, 291, 295 geology, 8, 82, 148, 162, 290–91, 295– 98, 302, 307 geophony, 30 Giacometti, Alberto, 293 glacier, 37, 143–45, 290 glamour, 172, 182 global warming, 33, 75, 86, 123, 129–30, 134, 136–37, 146, 189, 195–96, 200 God(s), 22, 65n9, 106, 148, 160, 164, 218 Gordon, Lewis, 56 Gorz, André, 23, 171–72, 267 Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna, 2–3, 259 government(s), 13, 17, 87–88, 125, 135, 198, 203, 211, 225–27, 273 Grand Canyon, 264 Great Acceleration, 302–03 green consumerism, 124–25, 130, 133–34 Green New Deal, 7, 125, 134, 136–37 Gríman Theater, 64n2 groove, 30, 39–41 group: in-fusion, 164, 169n55, 202–04, 273, 275, 286; pledged, 202–05 Guatarri, Felix, 162, 164 guilt, 114, 144, 169n48 habitable, 281, 309

324

Index

Hanh, Thich Nhat, 240–41, 249–50 happiness, 89, 95–97, 101, 109, 113, 246 Haraway, Donna, 164, 297 Harman, Graham, 194 Harris, Sam, 233 health, 95, 112, 171, 217, 250, 268–69, 273 healthcare, 74, 96 Hegel, G. W. F., 18–19, 294, 305 Hegelian, 18–19, 53 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 16, 23, 50–51, 77–78, 109, 235, 237, 239, 242, 247, 294 Helten, Guido van, 6, 47–49, 54, 58, 61–62, 65n5, 68n61 Heraclitus, 241 heuristic, 1–2, 150, 281, 283, 286, 301, 303, 318n84 high altitude thought, 66n16 historical fiction, 8, 258–59, 260, 263–64, 268 Hitler, Adolf, 292 Hobbesian, 172 holism (ecological), 174 Holocene, 8–9, 32, 146, 161, 189, 284, 290–92, 295, 299, 302, 304, 308–09, 311 honesty, 4, 8, 57, 94, 103, 114–15 hope, viii, xii, 86, 106, 115–18, 148, 164, 184n5, 262, 273, 276, 288, 294, 309 Horkheimer, Max, 101 Howells, Christina, 156 humanity, 26, 41, 62, 124, 133, 153–56, 171, 181, 189, 192, 198, 200, 215– 17, 222, 226, 271, 290, 299 humanism, 3, 9, 48–49, 61–62, 65n9, 66n23, 184n5, 258, 278n4, 282, 288, 300, 309 Hume, David, 242–43 humility, 207n74 Hurley, Andrew, 268–73 Husserl, Edmund, 61, 177, 237, 294 Husseralian, 185n10, 292

hydrosphere, 285–86 hylomorphism, 173 hyperobject(s), 7, 189–90, 194– 201, 203–05 hyper-reality, 172, 181–82 hyperstitional, 144, 150, 167n5 Hyppolyte, Jean, 18–19 Iceland, 6, 47–49, 54, 58, 62, 64n1, 68n61, 143–45 idealism, 24, 173 identity, 52, 101, 110–11, 132–33, 158– 59, 202–03, 236–37, 244, 261 ideology, 101, 107–08, 111, 115, 120n10, 217 ignorance, 4, 41, 85, 105, 107–11, 113, 115, 176, 236, 246, 248, 311 Ihde, Don, 29 imagination, 7, 9, 74, 109, 125, 136, 144–46, 151, 162, 165, 180, 185n14, 241, 257–59, 264, 272, 274, 276, 292 inauthenticity. See bad faith Indiana Dunes, 8, 260, 264–66, 269–72, 274 indigenous, 169n48, 212, 217–20, 223–28 individualism, 20, 23, 139, 282 industry, 25, 47, 96, 100–02, 108, 117, 177, 192, 197, 201, 226, 260, 267– 70, 296, 303 inequality, 99, 101, 216, 270–71 inertia, 127, 132, 144, 152, 201, 203–05 infanticide, 25, 60, 214–15, 230n8 inhuman, 150, 152–53, 157–58, 160–61, 163–64, 187n56 insect(s), 31 International Union of Geological Sciences, 8 institution, xii, 159, 180, 186n25, 202– 04, 213, 215 263, 282 instrumentalism, 2–3, 6–7, 51, 53, 59, 63, 68n60, 72, 83–84, 131, 158, 177, 181, 223, 226, 267, 271 integral humanity, 215–17, 222, 226, 299

Index

intelligibility, 233 intentionality, 22, 56, 153, 234, 237, 243–48 interdependence 8, 224, 249– 50, 261, 266 interference 34–35, 39, 41 interiority, xii, 151–52, 154–56, 158, 180, 183, 195, 214, 224, 283, 287, 299–301 interobjectivity, 195, 197, 199, 204 intersubjectivity 57, 61, 139n11, 197 isometric, 286 isotonic, 286 Italy, 8, 282, 288, 298, 304–05 James, Simon P., 242, 249 jazz, 4, 39 Jew(s), ix–xi, 14, 60, 67n54, 81, 221 Johnson, Robert, 147 Jonas, Hans, 50 justice, 8, 74, 88, 96–97, 106, 226, 270, 272–73 Kahneman, Daniel, 246 kairos, 150–51, 159–60 Kant, Immanuel, 73, 230n18 Kantian, 26, 87 karma, 240–41 karuna, 247 Kelso, J. Scott, 283 Kierkegaard, Soren, 242 Kohák, Erazim, 2 Kraus, Bernie, 30–31, 38 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 112 labor, xii, 98, 102, 126, 180–81, 197, 216, 227, 269 Laing, R. D., xi Lake Michigan, 260, 264, 268, 274 land ethic, 6, 38, 41 Langer, Monica, 67n53 Laycock, Steven W., 233, 238, 240 League of Women Voters, 269 Lebow, Victor, 96 legacy, 6, 53, 78–83, 90

325

leisure, 97, 99, 269, 271 Leonard, Annie, 96–97, 99, 108 Leopold, Aldo, 6, 29–30, 36–38, 41 Levi, Carlo, 304 Levins, Richard, 268, 273 Levy, Benny, viii Lewis, C. S., 271 Lewontin, Richard, 268, 273 liberalism, 15, 20, 150 liberation, 4, 100, 102, 160, 162, 218, 236, 250, 259, 272–73, 276, 282 the Liberation, xi Liege, Belgium, 25, 214–15, 230n8 lifeworld 175, 178, 287 listening, 29–32, 34–36, 38–41 listening point, 29, 36 literature, 14, 174, 257, 259, 276 lithosphere, 285–86, 295 Llewelyn, John, 2 London, England, 197, 288, 310 the Look, 6, 47–63, 65n6, 65n11, 66n20, 175 Louis XVI, 310 Lysenkoism, 268 machine(s), 22, 40, 88, 98, 126, 180–82 magnetosphere, 285 Malaysia, 225–27 Manocene, 297 Marcel, Gabriel, 3, 267, 271 Marcuse, Herbert, 7, 94, 97, 100–02, 109 Markey, Ed, 134 Martin, Jay, 50, 53 Marx, Karl, xi, 7, 15–16, 20, 97–101, 115, 294, 306 Marxism, ix, xi, 15, 17, 97, 108, 114, 116–17, 120n10, 164, 200, 268, 276 materialism, 18–21 Matisse, Henri, 293 McBride, William, 2, 257–258 McCarthy, Mary, 306 McKay, Don, 162 McNeill, John, 295

326

Index

Merleau–Ponty, Maurice, 3, 50–51, 66n16 meaning, 13, 51, 55, 61, 65n9, 68n60, 94, 97–101, 104, 111, 113–14, 118, 126, 143–44, 148, 152, 158, 172–74, 182, 192–93, 197–99, 204, 214, 216–17. 233, 242, 260, 264–65, 275, 295, 299, 309, 311 mechanical, 31, 180, 318n81 mechanization, 181–82 Medhidhammaporn, Phra, 233, 237 Mediterranean, 192, 286, 293, 307 melancholy, 181 mereology, 286 Mescalaro Apache, 219 metaphysics, 3, 7, 8, 168n25, 172–73, 209–37, 241–50, 300–01 method, 1, 5, 95, 97, 114, 116, 139n17, 148, 161, 237, 257, 275, 283, 293 Mill, John Stuart, 15–16, 118 Miller Beach, 260, 264, 269, 270 Mills, C. Wright, 269 mining, 107, 144, 167n4, 192 Minnesota, 29, 36–38 Modernism (High), 282 monism, 22, 238, Mont Ventoux, 298, 300 Montaigne, Michel de, 8, 281–83, 287– 89, 295, 303, 305, 308, 311 misogyny, 4 Montenegro, 307 Moore, G. E., 242–43 Moore, Jason, 146, 150, 163, 297 moral 6, 19, 20, 25–26, 41, 57, 71–79, 83, 88–91, 104–07, 110–16, 172, 211–18, 223–27, 243–50, 282, 298–304 Morton, Timothy, 7, 189–90, 194–95, 197–204, 207n74 music, viii, 30–31, 37–41, 147, 195–96, 287 musician, 30–32, 39–41, 147 National Park Service, 266 National Wildlife Foundation, 269

Native American(s), 7, 212, 217, 219–220. See also Dakota; See also Mescalaro Apache; See also Navajo; See also Ojibwe; See also Potawatomi; See also Senecas natural attitude, 259 naturalism, 175, 242, 265 nausea, 5, 162, 197 Navajo, 219 Nazism, 14, 16, 81 necessity, 18, 21, 32, 100, 146, 160, 168n25, 173–74, 226, 238, 292 need, 226 neoliberalism, 150 nested hierarchy, 285–86 New York City, 200, 225 The New Yorker, 260 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 20, 160, 265 nihilation, 51–53, 245, 267 nihilism, 105, 113, nirvana, 237, 239, Noah’s Ark, 310 Nobel Prize, ix Noble-Eightfold Path, 239 nonlocality, 195–98, 204 North American Sartre Society, 1 nothingness, ix–xi, 13, 49–59, 71–72, 78, 81, 84, 103–05, 126, 151, 172– 79, 198, 233–49, 267, 301–04, 310 Nudge Agenda 7, 134–36 oath. See pledge Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 134 the Occupation, x, 258 ocularcentrism, 53 Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), 273 Ojibwe, 37 Okjökull, 143 Olson, Sigurd, 29–30, 36–38 ontology, 1, 7–8, 51, 53–56, 61–62, 66n21, 71–72, 74, 77–78, 81, 84,

Index

150–51, 162, 168n25, 174, 179, 185n17, 189–90, 193–96, 198, 200, 204, 233–41, 245, 247–48, 266, 271, 290, 299, 301 opportunity cost, 74–75 oppression, x–xii, 4, 8, 95, 100–02, 117, 130, 171, 211, 216, 226, 228 optimism, 15, 25–26, 106–07, 115, 151, 160, 239 Orestes, 262 organizations, 85, 123, 131, 140n29, 202–05, 225 the other, 48, 50, 53, 55–56, 130–33, 164, 175–77, 224, 241, 293 outsider, 113 overwhelm, 99, 118, 119n7, 190 pagan, 287, 303 pandemic, ix, 6, 33–35, 96 paradox, x, 84, 95–96, 98, 114, 116, 181, 243, 293–94 Paris, ix, 17, 60, 288–89, 310 Paris Agreement, 224 paticca-samuppāda, 240 patriarchy, 60, 269, 297 pedosphere, 285 perception, 24, 30, 78, 126, 178, 234, 236, 243–48 pessimism, 22. 160, 239 Petrarch, 8, 281–83, 287–89, 295, 298– 303, 305–06, 311 phasing, 195, 197–98, 204 phenomenology, 2, 5–9, 18, 27–41, 48–52, 65n11, 66–67, 104, 151–53, 163, 172, 234–38, 247–49, 259, 267, 270–71, 275, 287, 292–94, 299, 306 Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, 266 plague, 6, 299 plant(s), 38–39, 50–51, 65, 71, 75, 100, 123, 178, 218–58, 262–66, 274– 75, 291, 296 Plastocene, 297 Plato, 50, 230n18 pledge, 202–05, 273

327

poetry, ix, 63, 68n60, 144–45, 162, 282, 287, 306 policy, 83, 125, 134–36, 140n29 political, viii–xiiii, 1–4, 7, 8, 16–17, 68n60, 99–102, 110–11, 126, 141, 144, 148–50, 157–59, 162–63, 167n5, 182, 197, 200, 216, 221–26, 233, 257–76, 282, 288 Pollan, Michael, 108 pollution, 76–77, 108, 182, 263, 268, 270 possession, 96, 98, 179, 181– 82, 226, 265 possibility, ix, 2–8, 13–15, 18–19, 23–26, 30–33, 36, 40–41, 52, 56, 59, 63, 65n12, 71–75, 79–83, 86, 94–105, 113–14, 117–18, 123–24, 128–36, 149, 152–56, 160–64, 171– 76, 190, 195–203, 212–20, 220–28, 249, 257–59, 263–65, 271–74, 283– 85, 289–94, 304, 309–11 Potawatomi, 268 poverty of affluence, 172 practico–inert, xii, 7, 117, 125–36, 149– 65, 180, 186, 189–205, 212–16, praxis: anti, 36, 145, 180; collective, 125, 127–29, 171; creative, 215–16; free, 156, 216, 221; group, 226; historical, 215; inverted, 35, 128, 192, 222; objectified, 152; past, 127, 156, 158, 193, 212; process, xii; serialized, 125; shared, 130–31, 202, 216; stolen, 155–56, 163; totalizing, 126, 154, 156 preservation, 37, 227, 248, 267, 269, 272–3 Princen, Thomas, 167n4 progressive, 15, 61, 309

328

Index

progressive-regressive method, 33, 36, 267, 283 project(s), xii, 4–6, 24, 32–41, 55, 59, 128–32, 136, 149, 153–54, 164, 171, 179, 191, 213, 216, 220–26, 238–39, 244–47, 257–76, 282–86, 288, 292, 298, 305 proof, 173–74, 177, 185n10 prose, 68n60, 144 Proust, Marcel, 18 psychoanalysis, 59, 61, 175, 198 psychology, xi, 95, 136, 243– 44, 246, 258 purifying reflection, 248, 250, 299 race, xi, 2, 67n40, 239, 270–72 racial, 62, 260, 262, 269, 272–73 racism, 1, 4, 8, 60, 88, 258, 269–70, 276 radio broadcast, 40, 145 realism (ecological), 171 reciprocity, 6, 39–41, 131, 283 recognition, 48, 53, 56, 99, 130, 215– 16, 226, 228, 247–48 recreation, 17, 269–71 reductionism, 60, 179, 194 the Reformation, 282 refuge, 299–300 refugee, 299 relationality, 7, 48, 151, 168n25, 172, 183, 266 reluctant conformist, 112–13 the Renaissance, 282, 288, 300–02 resentment, 269, 273 resilience, 261, 274–75, 302 resistance, xi, 110, 126–27, 261, 265, 274–75 the Resistance, 258 respect, 7, 26, 99, 106, 127, 172, 182– 83, 185n14, 212, 218–19, 222–25, 227–28, 249, 260 responsibility, x, 3, 82, 87, 93–94, 102– 07, 109–18, 124–25, 146, 154, 162, 186n25, 200, 203–04, 234, 239–41, 248–49, 272–73 retail therapy, 109–10

Reykjavik, Iceland, 6, 47, 49, 54, 58, 62 Reykjavik Photography Museum, 64, 68 romantic, 49, 54, 61, 160, 162, 194, 282, 288 Rome, Italy, 17, 25, 288–90, 304, 308 Rubin, Gretchen, 114 sadness, 110, 115, 144, 207n74 Salatin, Joel, 108 salt, 293 Samyutta Níkāya, 236 sanctuary, 298 sankhārās, 237 Sartre, works by: Anti-Semite and Jew, 60, 67n46, 68n54; Baudelaire, 185n14, 304; Being and Nothingness, ix–xi, 6, 13, 49, 51, 55, 59, 71–72, 78, 84, 103, 105, 126, 151, 172–74, 177, 179, 186n37, 235, 238–39, 245, 248, 252n5, 267, 301, 310; Black Orpheus, 60, 62, 68n60; Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR), viii–ix, 4, 7, 14, 33, 35, 124, 126, 135, 148–51, 153, 155–57, 159, 164, 179, 189–90, 198, 204, 265, 267, 299; Existentialism Is a Humanism, 59, 65n9, 66n23, 72–73, 112; The Family Idiot, 66n23, 258, 304; It Is Right to Rebel, viii; Mallarmé: The Poet of Nothingness, 304; Morality and History, 211, 213, 217, 227, 229n2; Nausea, ix, x, 173, 183, 197, 304, 310; No Exit, ix, 6, 47–67, 266; Notebooks for an Ethics, ix, 72, 91n3;

Index

Queen Albemarle, or, the Last Tourist (La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste: fragments), 298, 303–05; The Respectful Prostitute, 258; “The Roots of Ethics,” 211, 214, 223, 227; Search for a Method (Questions de méthode), 20, 240, 283, 293; “The Captive of Venice” (“Le séquestré de Venise”), 293; Situations, ix; St. Genet: Actor and Martyr, 304; The Transcendence of the Ego, 234; Truth and Existence, ix, 176, 236, 248; Typhus, 5, 6, 10n3; “Venice from my window” (“Venise, de ma fenêtre”), 293, 314n3; The Wall, 304; What Is Literature?, 68 scarcity, xii, 14, 21, 30, 33–34, 39, 117, 132, 148, 152–54, 156–57, 159, 213–14, 221, 265 Schindler, Oskar, 81 scholastic, 185n17, 300–01 science, 8, 15, 24, 85–86, 95, 106, 174, 179, 181, 241, 268, 274, 285–87, 297 Scientific Revolution, 282 sea level rise, 307–08 Senecas, 219 seriality, 4, 7, 36, 40–41, 98, 124–25, 130–37, 145–46, 148–53, 155–65, 169n48, 269–70, 273, 275 series, 131, 133, 140n22, 157– 58, 160, 238 seriousness, 110–12, 115 sexism, 4 shame, 55–62, 116, 261 shopping, 7, 89, 94, 97, 99, 110, 125, 127, 129–36 Siderits, Mark, 246

329

silence, 34–35, 55, 214, 293 Simont, Juliette, 139n11 Singer, Peter, 88 situatedness (sonic), 6, 29–30, 32, 35–36, 38, 41 skanda(s), 236 slaughterhouse(s), 176 Slovenia, 307 Smith, John Maynard, 268 social media, 40, 89, 97, 145, 197, 202 socialism, ix, xii, 2, 214, 223, 258, 272, 288 socioecological, 1, 270, 298, 309 Socrates, 175 soil, 1, 21, 24, 51, 65n11, 68n54, 128, 147, 197, 200–01, 225, 234, 240, 285, 304–06 sound (anthropogenic), 32, 34, 36 soundscape ecology, 6, 30–33, 38 sovereignty, 260–63, 273 Soviet Union, ix, xii, 13, 24 Spanish Civil War, xi Srnicek, Nick, 167n5 Stalin, Joseph, xii Stevens, Joshua, 143 Stockholm Resilience Center of Stockholm University, 302 Stone, Robert, 25 Stormer, Eugene, 8 strike(s), 74–75, 196, 270–73 subjectivism, 72–73 suburban, 127, 269 succession (plant), 14, 157–58, 181, 195, 274 Sunstein, Cass, 125, 134–35, 140n34 sunyata, 237 system two thinking, 140n34 technology, 19, 23–26, 30–32, 36, 86, 99–100, 102, 106, 125, 136, 172, 181, 183, 184n5, 285, 296 teleology, 185n17 telos, 286 temporal undulation, 195–98, 204 temporality, 39, 196, 198, 238–39, 301

330

Les Temps Modernes, xii, 293 tenderness, 207n74 terrorism, x–xi, 270 Thaler, Richard, 125, 134–35, 140n34 thalidomide, 25, 214, 221, 272 Thoreau, Henry David, 37, 263–65 three marks of existence, 234– 36, 241, 247 Thunberg, Greta, 79 Tintoretto, 293–94, 306, 311 Tjarnarbíó theater, 48 Toadvine, Ted, 2 totalitarianism, xii, 8, 102, 258 totalization, 24, 33, 36, 40, 66n25, 126, 128, 149, 151–56, 158, 213, 222, 294, 301, 304–05, 309 tourism, 303 tourist, 8, 285, 288–89, 294–95, 298–300, 303 tragic, 50, 290 tragicomic, 289, 309 tranquilization, 110, 115, 118 transcendence, 51, 56–57, 59, 102–03, 105–07, 109, 113–14, 174, 234, 239 tree, 21, 35, 37, 78, 123, 128, 191, 221–22, 226, 261–64, 284–87, 299, 304, 307 Trotsky, Leon, xii Turner, Christopher, 155 Twórczość, 17, 294 UNESCO, 308, 318n81 union(s), 74, 126, 270, 272–73 uniqueness, 132, 265–66 United Nations, 79, 123, 246 United States of America, 13, 134, 136, 196, 220, 229n2, 260, 263–64 United States Steel Corporation, 268 universal, 26, 36, 127, 183, 218, 245, 247, 282–83, 288, 302, 308; singular, 266 University of Łødz, 6, 13

Index

utilitarian, 20 value, xii, 2–5, 9, 19–20, 25, 41, 72–73, 76, 83, 90, 94, 98, 101–04, 109–12, 114–17, 130, 132, 146, 149–50, 156, 161–62, 172, 177, 182, 186n26, 192, 212–15, 217, 223–24, 227–28, 240, 242–45, 247–50, 257–58, 260, 263, 266, 269, 271–72, 282, 295, 300, 308, 310 vampire objects, 40 vegetarianism, 117 Venice, Italy, 8, 281–85, 288–90, 292–95, 299–300, 302–11, 318n79, 318n81 Verve, 292 Vijñānavādin, 252n5 violence, x–xi, 60, 100–01, 117, 172 white, 270 virtue, 18, 73, 79, 81–83, 181, 245 virtue ethics, 116 viscosity, 190, 195, 197–98, 204 visible, 57, 66n16, 262–63, 293 Vonnegut, Mark, 121n36 Walden Pond, 263 Wark, McKenzie, 2 way(s) of life, xi, 93, 96, 102, 111, 128–29, 172, 185n14, 225, 292 Webber, Jonathan, 5–6 wilderness 29–30, 32, 36–37, 178 Wilderness Act of 1964, 32, 37 Williams, Alex, 167n5 Workers for Democracy, 272 Wright, Robert, 241 worker(s), ix–xi, 13, 74–75, 98–99, 107, 129, 136, 180–81, 196, 202, 222, 263, 269, 272 workplace, 270, 272–73 World War II, ix, 5, 14, 16, 81, 267–68 World Wildlife Fund, 123

Index

Yellowstone, 264–65 Young Citizens for Beachhead Democracy, 273

Yosemite, 264 Zizek, Slavoj, 50, 66n17

331

Contributors

Matthew C. Ally is professor of philosophy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. He has published articles on Sartre’s thought, philosophical ecology, and sustainability, and is the author of Ecology and Existence: Bringing Sartre to the Water’s Edge (Lexington, 2017). Ronald Aronson is distinguished professor emeritus at Wayne State University. His books include Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, Sartre’s Second Critique, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, and We: Reviving Social Hope. Joe Balay earned his PhD in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University. He is associate professor of philosophy at Christopher Newport University. His research focuses on continental philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of art, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetic experience and environmental awareness. Kiki Berk is associate professor of philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. She received her PhD in philosophy from the VU University Amsterdam in 2010. Her research focuses on Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophies of death and meaning in life. Damon Boria is associate professor of philosophy at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has published articles on existentialist and environmental philosophy and philosophy of literature. He is a past president of the North American Sartre Society. Michael Butler is lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research uses the tools of existential 333

334

Contributors

phenomenology to interrogate the social dimensions of our lived environments. He is the co-founder of the Digital Worlds Workshop. Elizabeth Butterfield is associate professor of philosophy at Georgia Southern University, where she regularly teaches courses in existentialism, ethics, philosophy of religion, and happiness and the meaning of life. She is a past president of the North American Sartre Society and author of Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism. Kimberly S. Engels is assistant professor of philosophy at Molloy University and current president of the North American Sartre Society. Her research interests include existentialism, ethics, philosophy and pop culture, and philosophy of the paranormal. Simon Gusman is assistant professor of liberal arts and sciences at Utrecht University, Netherlands. His research focuses on implementing insights from existentialism into socio-cultural debates. He published two monographs on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Diep van buiten: De mens volgens Sartre (Boom, 2022), and Sartre on Subjectivity and Selfhood: The Self as a Thing Among Things (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He is also coauthor (with Arjen Kleinherenbrink) of Avonturen bestaan niet (Boom, 2018) on the notion of adventure in contemporary society and media. Paul Gyllenhammer is ‌‌‌an associate professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, Queens, NY. He has an active research interest in the correlation between existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, and virtue ethics. He is co-editor of Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics (Bloomsbury) and the author of numerous essays on key figures in the Continental tradition, including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Ricoeur. Arjen Kleinherenbrink is assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies of the Radboud University in the Netherlands. His main research interests are metaphysics and philosophical anthropology, with a focus on the continental tradition. His recent books include Against Continuity—Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism (2019) and the Dutch monographs De constructie van de wereld: De filosofie van Bruno Latour (2022), Avonturen bestaan niet (2018, with Simon Gusman), and Alles is een machine (2017). Craig Matarrese is professor of philosophy at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he also teaches for the music department and is director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Program. He is the author of

Contributors

335

the book Starting With Hegel (Continuum, 2010), and is currently working on a book that connects Sartrean and Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology to improvisation on the electric bass, particularly in the context of how improvisation is taught and learned. He has also worked on a number of documentary films that consider music, philosophy, and culture: Tuning the Pulse (2013), I Know You Well (2014), and Rez Metal (2020). William L. McBride is the Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. Among his published books is Sartre’s Political Theory. He was co-founder of the North American Sartre Society and is a past president of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP). Dane Sawyer is senior adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at the University of La Verne and adjunct professor of philosophy at Pitzer College. His research focuses on the interconnections among existentialism, philosophy of mind, Buddhism, and meditation, with a focus on what these philosophical perspectives reveal about the nature of consciousness. He has published articles on mindfulness meditation, the ontology of truth, and Buddhist philosophy, including “Who Are Chidi and Eleanor in a Past‐(After) Life? The Buddhist Notion of No‐Self,” in The Good Place and Philosophy. Austin Hayden Smidt is a political philosopher, producer, writer, podcaster, performer, and honorary research fellow at the University of Sydney. He produced the cinematic adaptation of the best-selling book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, and is a co-host of the “Owls at Dawn” and “CineMythology” podcasts. His book Sartre, Imagination and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art (2019) was published by Rowman & Littlefield International. Joshua Tepley is associate professor of philosophy at Saint Anselm College. He has a BA in philosophy from Bucknell University and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the intersection between twentieth-century continental philosophy (especially Heidegger and Sartre) and analytic metaphysics. He is particularly interested in engaging these two traditions on the topics of free will, ontology, and personal identity.