Being-in-Creation

Human Responsibility in an Endangered World

Bruce Ellis Benson, Norman Wirzba, Brian Treanor, Brian Treanor

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823265015
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kosmologie

What is the proper relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world? This philosophical question, which underlies vast environmental crises, forces us to investigate the tension between our extraordinary powers, which seem to set us apart from nature, even above it, and our thoroughgoing ordinariness, as revealed by the evolutionary history we share with all life.The contributors to this volume ask us to consider whether the anxiety of unheimlichkeit, which in one form or another absorbed so much of twentieth-century philosophy, might reveal not our homelessness in the cosmos but a need for a fundamental belongingness and implacement in it.

Notes

Introduction: The Human Place in the Natural World

Brian Treanor

1. Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2000), 169.

2. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (New York: Penguin, 1971), 159.

3. St. Irenaeus, The Writings of Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Berkeley, Calif.: Apocraphyle Press, 2007).

4. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (London: Oxford, 1992); see books IV and VI.

5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, 93, 1–9.

6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1956–60).

7. Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 10 (March 1967): 1203–7.

8. White, “Historical Roots,” 1205.

9. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993) 97 (as only one representative example).

10. Plato, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 98, 100–2.

11. For more on this subject, see David Clough, On Animals, vol.1, Systematic Theology (London: T. and T. Clark, 2012).

12. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: Norton, 2004).

13. This turn of phrase is borrowed from Jack Caputo, who uses it while reflecting on Nietzsche: “Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die”; Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 79. Caputo reflects on the significance of this passage in John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 16–17.

14. Erzaim Kohák writes, “Both in principle and as a matter of historical fact, alienation sets in when humans lose their awareness of the presence of God and persuade themselves to view the cosmos no longer as a creation, endowed with value in the order of being, a purpose in the order of time and a moral sense in the order of eternity, but as a cosmic accident, meaningless and mechanical. Then nature comes to appear as absurd and we ourselves as futile within it”; Kohák, The Embers and the Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 183. For an extended philosophical treatment of the disappearance of creation in modern philosophy, see Louis Dupré’s Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

15. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 405.

16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1962). Heidegger also argues that humans have a “world” (welt), but animals are “poor in world,” that is, they do not have a world in the sense that humans do. Here again, the being of humans is sharply differentiated from the being of animals: while humans are creative and world-forming, animals are poor in world (and inert matter would be entirely worldless); see Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

17. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 2001).

18. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

19. Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 1990), 31.

20. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

21. Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 13. Casey goes so far as to make place co-primordial with God.

22. See, for example, Forrest Clingerman, “Interpreting Heaven and Earth: The Theological Construction of Nature, Place, and the Built Environment,” in Nature, Space, and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. S. Bergman, P. M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelson, and H. Bedford-Strohm (London: Ashgate, 2009).

23. Clingerman, “Interpreting Heaven and Earth,” 47.

24. Ben Okri, in an interview in the Independent, March 23, 1993.

25. See Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger and Homecoming: The Leitmotif in the Later Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); also see Richard Kearney, Anatheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 13.

26. Kohák, The Embers and the Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 84.

Creation, Creativity, and Creatureliness: The Wisdom of Finite Existence

Rowan Williams

1. Also translated as The Pillar and the Ground of Truth, trans. Boris Jackim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

2. See Athanasius, The Orations of Athanasius Against the Arians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

3. Sergei Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jackim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

4. Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans. Catherine Evtuhov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Rowan Williams and Ecological Rationality

Jarrod Longbons

1. Slavoj Žižek, “Joe Public v. the Volcano,” New Statesman, April 29, 2010, accessed June 1, 2011, http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2010/05/essay-nature-catastrophe. The time when humans are such geographical agents is called the “anthropocene” era.

2. Žižek, “Joe Public v. the Volcano.”

3. For Žižek’s account of “the environment as a series of catastrophes,” see his reflection on oil in “Censorship Today: Violence or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses,” accessed March 19, 2012, http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm.

4. Žižek, “Censorship Today: Violence or Ecology a New Opium for the Masses.”

5. Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011), 80.

6. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 224–25.

7. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 13.

8. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9. René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Miami: B. N. Publishing, 2007), 50.

10. See Gísli Pálsson, “Human–Environment Relations: Orientalism, Paternalism, and Communalism,” in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson (London: Routledge, 1996), 68.

11. Descola and Pálsson, Nature and Society, 3.

12. See Žižek’s portion of the documentary Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (2008; Canada: Sphinx Productions), DVD. True, humans are “natural” to earth’s biosphere, and with humanity comes human making. But this does not mean that all human making is harmonious with “nature.”

13. This is a classical distinction between nature and art. The nature of a tree is not to be a bed; only when acted upon, artistically, can a tree be made into a bed.

14. Human technology is most harmonious with nature when it is in accordance with the natural rhythms of the world; see Erazim Kohák, The Embers and Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Kohak discusses the way people light houses at night. The flick of an electrical switch completely eradicates the darkness. It gives the impression that it is not nighttime. Lanterns, on the other hand, light only a portion of a room. When lit, darkness falls around the power of its glow. It is still clear that it is the rhythm of nighttime. This small example is extended to larger issues. For Kohák, the issue is not that humans should shun technology, for even fire is technology, but rather that humans must ask if their technology goes harmoniously with nature or against it.

15. See Sergei Bulgakov, “Heroism and the Spiritual Struggle,” in Sergei Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology, ed. Rowan Williams (London: T. and T. Clark, 1999), 81–82.

16. To illustrate a parasitic view of humans and their work, consider Agent Smith’s speech to Morpheus in The Matrix: “I’d like to share a revelation I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure”; Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (1999; United States: Warner Bros. Pictures), DVD.

17. See Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, ed. Norman Wirzba (Berkeley, Calif.: Counter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editors and Board
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Human Place in the Natural World
• Creation, Creativity, and Creatureliness: The Wisdom of Finite Existence
• Rowan Williams and Ecological Rationality
• The Art of Creaturely Life: A Question of Human Propriety
• Face of Nature, Gift of Creation: Thoughts Toward a Phenomenology of Ktisis
• Creativity as Call to Care for Creation? John Zizioulas and Jean-Louis Chrétien
• Creature Discomforts: Levinas’s Interpretation of Creation Ex Nihilo
• Reflections from Thoreau’s Concord
• Creation and the Glory of Creatures
• Care of the Soil, Care of the Self: Creation and Creativity in the American Suburbs
• Dream Writing Beyond a Wounded World: Topographies of the Eco-Divine
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List