Abstract
This paper examines the presuppositions that contribute to a general disavowal of the dire warnings of runaway global warming as a future of radical difference. I note the apparent consanguinity of the catastrophic predictions of science and the genre of apocalyptic literature, noting one fundamental difference as the absence of meaning and “justice” in the unfolding of temporality with the specter of mass glacial melting, mass starvation, and mass extinction in the coming century. Nostalgia for meaning, and inebriation with the modern vision of the future as endless growth and progress have contributed greatly to the disavowal of knowledge of impending catastrophe, but I locate the prime motivator in the egological foundations of modern knowledge beginning with Descartes. I offer Jean-Luc Marion’s radical transformation of phenomenology, in his theory of the “saturated phenomenon,” as a counter-force to the primacy of the intentional subject, who establishes the limit horizon for the possibility of the arising of phenomena. This reversal of transcendence, from subject to phenomena, in Marion’s thought offers an opening to the future as truly “other” in a way that may preserve the possibility of consciousness itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Seclections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Dan Breazeale (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1970), p. 79.
- 2.
Cf. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustrain The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), pp. 129–30.
- 3.
Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, “Snow, Water, Ice, Permafrost in the Arctic,” SWIPA 2011 Executive Summary, http://amap.no/swipa/SWIPA2011ExecutiveSummaryV2.pdf.
- 4.
Harvey, Fiona and Pickard, Jim, “Stern takes bleaker view on warming,” in Financial Times(London). Archived from the original on 28 April, 2011. Stern said in 2008, “We underestimated the risks […] we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases […] and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases.” Cf. also Stern, Nicholas, “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,” Executive Summary (London: HM Treasury, 2006).
- 5.
William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider “Expert credibility in climate change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 9, 2010. Cf. also “Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change,” signed by directors of the national science academies of G8 members.
- 6.
Peter Raven, past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, states in the foreword to their publication AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment, “We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the twenty first century,” http://atlas.aaas.org/index.php?sub=foreword.
- 7.
McGinn, Bernard, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions of the Middle Ages(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 10.
- 8.
Cf. Hansen, James, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity(London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009); Colborn, Theo, Dianne Dumanoski, and J. Petersen Meyers, Our Stolen Future(New York: Plume Press, 1996); Brown, Lester R. Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization(New York: Norton & Company, 2008).
- 9.
McGinn, Bernard, Visions of the End, pp. 57–59.
- 10.
Dumanoski, Dianne, End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Planet(New York: Crown Publishing, 2010), p. 48.
- 11.
Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, ed. David Farrell Krell and trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 285–86
- 12.
Cf. Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber: The Vocation Lectures, eds. David S. Owen, Tracy B. Strong, and Rodney Livingston (Indianapolis: Hacket, 2004), pp. 1–31, passim.
- 13.
Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 47.
- 14.
Glickson, Andrew, “CO2, Mass Extinction of Species, and Climate Change,” in Atlantic Free Press, Feb., 2010.
- 15.
Feinberg, Matthew and Robb Willer, “Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just-World Beliefs,” in Psychological Science, 2011 22:34.
- 16.
Cf. Husserl, Edmund, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of the Europen Sciences, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper, 1965) for Husserl’s most forceful critique of the naturalistic attitude, which he characterizes as a naive acceptance of the world, its objects and beings, as simply “there” in its empirical objecthood; against this Husserl offers his transcendental reduction, or epoché, wherein objective existence is “bracketed” in order to revert to the primacy of the intentional ego and so discover the processes of consciousness itself.
- 17.
Dupré, Louis, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in Hermeneutics and Culture(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 86.
- 18.
Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 322.
- 19.
Marion, Jean-Luc, “The Saturated Phenomenon” in Philosophy Today, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Vol. 40, 1996, p. 40.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 119.
- 21.
Cf. Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given, p. 227. Cf. also MackInlay, Shane, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), Chapter 4, for an analysis of the tensions between saturated phenomena as exemplary of all phenomena and as exceptional and excessive; MackInlay concludes that saturated phenomena may be taken as exemplary only insofar as a quasi-intentional (“middle-voiced”) hermeneutic space is opened for the intuition of phenomena.
- 22.
Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given, p. 187.
- 23.
Daseinnevertheless can be said to constitute the “world” as the scene for its projects and possibilities, particularly in its fundamental relationality with what Heidegger calls “equipment.” The “ready-to-handness” (Zuhandenheit) of the objects that comprise our world relieves “things” of their object status and shows them, instead, as the site of our wholly interactive, practical, and ontological being-in-the-world. A hammer is never just a hammer. But Zuhandenheitstill gives Daseina basic priority, if more modest, in relation to phenomena, despite its radical passivity in the face death. Of course Heidegger also elevates Dasein, beyond egology, onto-theology, and the humanisms that would preserve the sovereignty of the subject, to the noble status of the one who “destines” Being itself.
- 24.
Cf. Marion, Jean-Luc, “L’Interloqué” in Who Comes After the Subject, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Conner, and Jean-Luc Nancy, (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 236–45.
- 25.
For a critical analysis of the phenomenological indeterminacy of the call in Marion’s thought, see Thomas A. Carlson, Finitude and the Naming of God(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 214–34.
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Wiseman, W.A. (2012). Nothing Is Without Reason: Climate Change and the Global Future as Saturated Phenomena. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos. Analecta Husserliana. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4795-1_16
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