The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene

[ecosophia]

A while back, rather to my surprise, I fielded an invitation from philosophy professor (and retro technology aficionado) Richard Polt to submit an essay for an academic volume titled The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene. Some months thereafter, even more to my surprise, I heard that my essay, "The Coming of the Post-Axial Age," had been accepted for publication, alongside contributions by professors of philosophy in Europe and North America. To top it all off, my contributor's copy came in today's mail: a nicely produced and intellectually meaty volume. I'm sorry to say it's priced at current academic-press rates, which are absurdly high; if you work for a university library or have plenty of cash to spare, you can order a copy here. 

(No, this isn't the cover art, though it could very well have been. I couldn't find an online cover image in a format that Dreamwidth can handle.) 

The conventions of academic publishing (and the details of my contract) preclude my publishing the essay elsewhere for a while, but it was an interesting challenge to ask myself what I'd say to professional philosophers in the present day, when philosophy has lost the ample public interest it once had (as late as the 1950s, a new book by Sartre was a significant cultural event) and the institutional arrangements that support philosophy as an academic profession are cracking at the seams as western civilization settles deeper into decline. It was also interesting to take on Karl Jaspers' notion of the Axial Age and its consequences -- among the more widely accepted versions, among intellectuals these days, of the mythology of progress -- and to try to set the rise of philosophy itself into a historical framework that doesn't bow to progress and the stealth teleology that pervades it. 

I have no way of knowing if any similar opportunity will ever come my way again, but I hope it does -- and I hope this essay helps get philosophers thinking about what it means to pursue their craft in an age when faith in progress is canceling itself out. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Congratulations!

Country wise, where do you think the next round of philosophical ideas will come from?

[(Anonymous)]

Congratulations JMG! Much deserved if you ask me.

-Brigyn

[(Anonymous)]

That's great! I'll badger the library to get a copy. Did you perchance reference your notion of the 'anthropic moment' as opposed to the anthropocene? It was a point well made, and you were quite possibly the first to make it, so it'd be great to have an academic paper to footnote in that regard.

Jay Dee

[auntlili]

Congratulations! I sit on the Board of an organization that supports our local branch of the Free Library. I'll ask our librarian if she can recommend it for purchase. If not, we have reciprocal lending agreements with many local universities and I may be able to get hold of it that way.

Congrats

[(Anonymous)]

Any way that you could give us a abstract level overview of your article and how it differs from the rest of the articles.

I have never been all that fond of the idea of the "Axial Age". For that matter, I think that the "Renaissance" really wasn't that big a deal.

Most of this kind of thinking seems mostly intent on pointing out the historical basis for our current wonderfulness and infallibility.

[kayr]

Well the introduction was an interesting read. I have forwarded the link to a friend who works in the library at the local community college. Perhaps they can buy the book and I can then borrow it. We shall see.

[ecosophia]

That's like predicting exactly where a lightning bolt will strike. I'd be surprised to see them coming from Europe or North America, as they're still early in the process of digesting the results of the golden age of Western philosophy -- but that leaves a lot of territory where the creative interaction between Western philosophy and other cultural patterns could launch a burst of new philosophical ventures.

[ecosophia]

Thank you.

[ecosophia]

I referenced it in a footnote, as it isn't central to the theme of the paper; my essay in Dark Mountain 13, "Confronting the Cthulhucene," is on that subject.

[ecosophia]

Thank you.

Re: Congrats

[ecosophia]

Bingo. The very short form of my argument is that I take apart Jaspers' claim that the Axial Age was some kind of universal and irrevocable shift in human history, and demonstrate that the cultural and intellectual changes he discusses have a straightforward cause: the expansion of literacy outside the bounds of a scribal elite. That was the precondition for the refocusing of thinking from mythology to philosophy, the transformation of language from oral performance to sequence of analyzable abstractions, and all the cascade of changes that followed from that. It can be demonstrated easily enough by history that the same changes happen in reverse when a widespread loss of literacy returns oral language to a central position. Thus the "Axial Age" is much less important than Jaspers thought it was, and its emphasis on abstract thinking can be seen as an overemphasis, even an unbalancing, leading to the recognition that we're now potentially heading into a post-Axial age, in which human capacities other than the ability to think in ornate abstractions may deserve, and get, more attention.

There's more to it, but that's the central theme.

[(Anonymous)]

Just purchased the hardback. Definitely pricey, but I generally only ever spend money on books anyways, and I figured this will balance out all the hard cover books I have bought over the years for $1 at friends of the library book sales! I also figure that since you are so kind to put much of your writing out there for free, the least I can do is purchase your work when it becomes available in other formats. Looking forward to reading these essays.

-Dan Mollo

Splendid hustle

[(Anonymous)]

Well that's the fitting porch for you! :)
Neat to glimpse your happiness!

Anyway I have been contemplating the amount of output you're consistently producing and I am equally impressed and intimidated!! Dare to give tips to a mere putzing-around mortal?
Congratulations all around!

A.

Justin Smith

[(Anonymous)]

I strongly recommend the books & occasional blogging of Justin EH Smith at jehsmith dot com. One of the few who uses philosophy to discuss things other than philosophy.

Re: Congrats

[(Anonymous)]

Couple of things occurred to me. The beginning of the Axial Age seems to correllate with the rise of the currently dominant religious sensibility that you discussed in a series of blog posts a while back and which you believe is in the early stages of being displaced by a new sensibility.

The beginning of the Axial Age also coincides with the rise of what Spengler called the Magian Culture and Toynbee called the Syriac Culture. The Faustian Culture is in part an offshoot of the Magian/Syriac Culture, combined with elements from the Greco-Roman civilization and the pre-Christian cultures of Europe. So as the current sensibility and the Faustian Culture both die out, it would not be surprising that the Axial Age will come to a close as well.

[(Anonymous)]

I noticed with some amusement that one of the other chapters was titled "Between the Anthropocene and Hubriscene". Hubriscene fits pretty well in my estimation. Cthulhuscene fits pretty well too.

But on balance I think you called it right on the dot in your essay "The Myth of the Anthropocene", with the present age being the end of the Late Pleistocene, accompanied by the usual chaotic transition period and followed by the Neocene to come.

http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-myth-of-anthropocene.html?m=1

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of the Neocene, there is a really cool website from Russia inspired by the writings of authors like Dougal Dixon which tries to imagine what life might look like 25 million years from now. It has a lot of other fascinating articles about paleontology, natural history, future evolution and other related topics.

http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/englver.htm

[(Anonymous)]

In the days when there were correspondence courses in physical culture and occultism, were there also philosophy courses? I mean not just for academic interest but with the assumption that working through the course would substantially change your thought processes, behaviour and how you lived your life?

Regardless of the answer to that, have you ever considered doing a book in the style of LRM and CGD, but that teaches people your philosophy (stoicism and anything else it consists of)? That's something I'd be interested in.

[(Anonymous)]

Could you say a little more about 'digesting the results of the golden age of Western philosophy'? Do you mean Descartes through Nietzsche, etc? What exactly does the digesting consist of?

[(Anonymous)]

P.S. and I was wondering, if it's not too much to ask: how do you think the digestion of Western philosophy in the West might work out with respect to ancient and modern philosophy (and culture, etc)? In antiquity, the Greek-speaking part of Christianity ended up preserving the Greek cultural tradition (Euclid, Plato, Thucydides) and the Latin-speaking part of Christianity ended up preserving the Roman cultural tradition (Virgil, Tacitus, Cicero). Do you think the tradition might be parceled out by language in the same way? e.g. England preserves Shakespeare and Austria preserves Mozart, etc, to give simple examples. Will ancient philosophy and culture be thrown away because nobody speaks (ancient) Greek or Latin any longer? Or can we try to preserve the whole tradition, from Homer to Wittgenstein? – but that seems like a huge thing that somehow doesn't fit together entirely in a cohesive way...

[ecosophia]

I'd say Descartes through Sartre, myself; I've got a copy of Being and Nothingness waiting on the shelf to serve as my next big philosophical read. But yeah, basically -- the modern Western world spent about 350 years developing its own distinctive way of looking at the world, and that process is over with. What comes now is the turn toward praxis.

Think of the way that the Neoplatonists picked up Plato, or the Roman Stoics picked up Zeno's Stoicism, and turned them into ways of living in the world. That's the work of the next great age of Western philosophical writing. Sartre and the Existentialists generally were harbingers of that trend, but there's a lot more to come, and it will end in a synthesis -- late classical Neoplatonism or Chinese Neoconfucianism are good examples -- which will become one of the major intellectual legacies of our civilization, guide the efforts of thinking people during the dark age to come, and provide a springboard for new intellectual ventures of various kinds when that dark age gives way to a renaissance.

[ecosophia]

To judge by historical parallels, an enormous amount will be lost, but a great deal depends on what individuals do in the decades and centuries ahead of us. If enough people value the Latin authors, there's a decent chance that at least some of them will make it.

Re: Congrats

[ecosophia]

Well, actually, the Axial Age as Jaspers defines it predates the Magian Culture by a chunk; the rise of philosophy in Greece, India and China is his key marker, so that puts it around 650 BCE or so, while Spengler dates the start of the Magian culture at the beginning of the common era. The current religious sensibility is a closer fit, and I've been mulling over the possibility that that sensibility is, like the phenomena Jaspers attributed to the Axial Age, simply what happens when people get intoxicated by verbal abstractions and lose their sense of proportion for a while. ;-)

[ecosophia]

I hope so! Thank you for doing this.

[ecosophia]

Thank you kindly! I hope it gives you plenty to chew on.