Abstract
This article investigates the experience of beauty and eco-sorrow with the aim of depicting some painful truths, as well as existential responses to eco-sorrow. The article begins by portraying the attributes of the experience of beauty, relying on an emended version of Christopher Bollas’s notion of transformational objects and Buber’s I–Thou experience. This lays the foundation for explicating the attendant experience of eco-sorrow, which entails the painful recognition of (1) the degradation of the Earth and a loss of beauty, (2) the extinction of other species, (3) human-caused climate disaster, and (4) existential insignificance and impermanence. The latter is further understood in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ontological rift, which is produced and maintained by the Abrahamic religious traditions and Western political philosophies. Recognition of the ontological rift, which is a defense against existential insignificance and impermanence, is a key part of the experience of eco-sorrow. The last section explores responses to beauty and eco-sorrow, such as despair, nihilism, forced hope/optimism, flights of fantasy, and, ideally, a categorical demand for inoperative care.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I want to make clear that while human activity is responsible for the dramatic rise in temperatures, not all human beings are culpable. Even within imperialist nations like the United States and China, some people have, exceptionally low carbon footprints, and many of these are poor persons.
Bollas also recognizes that there are negative aesthetic experiences, though his focus is on the positive, which is also my focus.
Bollas holds the view, following Winnicott, that the infant possesses a nascent ego. Winnicott (1975) argued that “birth can easily be felt by the infant” and they participate through “personal effort” (p. 186). Here, we see the notion that the infant’s pre-representational “belief” that they participate in the birth, implying the presence of agency (an aspect of the ego). Similarly, the infant is engaged in the care process not simply in the act of surrendering to it but also by physically and vocally asserting their needs and desires.
Human beings often confuse their capacity to assign significance with ontological or existential significance. Worse, many religious human beings tend to believe in their ontological significance while denying ontological significance to Othered human beings and other species.
Ontological significance entails securing human significance in Being, and in Western theological traditions Being is linked to God. The Christian belief that animals do not have souls is an example of the idea that other-than-human species have existence but no hope for ontological permanence or ontological significance. That is reserved for human beings, though for some this permanence may, for many people, entail inhabiting one of the circles of hell.
Other scholars point to the ways Western human beings have socially constructed a rift between human beings and other species. Peter Singer (1975), Bruno Latour (2004), and Deleuze and Guattari (2003), for example, argue that the rift between human beings and other species has been profoundly destructive. Deleuze and Guattari (2003) carry this further, arguing that “we make no distinction between man and nature . . . man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other . . . rather they are one and the same essential reality” (pp. 4–5).
The concept of apparatus refers to “a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings” (Agamben, 2009, p.13). Agamben notes further that “in a disciplinary society, apparatuses aim to create—through a series of practices, discourses, and bodies of knowledge—docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their ‘freedom’ as subjects” (p. 19).
This ontological rift also applies to human beings who are constructed as absolutely Other and inferior, which we observe in varied forms of racism (and other types of oppression and marginalization such as sexism and classism) and attendant traumas (Mills, 1997, 2017; Patterson, 1982). My focus in this paper is on the gap as it pertains to other species and the Earth.
I would add that there is clearly a rift between Egyptians and Israelites and that the sufferings of the Egyptians were disavowed. This is a story where instrumental means were used to free the Israelites, though the well-being of the Egyptians (and those occupying the promised land) was ignored. The rift is also evident in the ethnic cleansing of the promised land, as commanded by God.
It is necessary to mention that psychoanalyst Howard Searles (1960) recognized decades ago that psychoanalytic developmental theories have excluded other-than-human animals from consideration and that in the future this needs to be corrected. Susan Kassouf (2017) has recently highlighted this rift and its implications for psychoanalysis and climate change. A similar point has been made by pastoral theologians (Graham, 1992; Miller-McLemore, 2020).
Horkheimer commented that “the future of humanity depends on the existence today of the critical attitude” (as cited in Wolin, 2016, p. 231). Dufour (2008), arguing from a different perspective, contends that with the rise of neoliberal capitalism there has been an increase in the formation of subjects or citizens who are acritical of the systems that contribute to their suffering and the suffering of others.
For Agamben, Western philosophical traditions have largely “subordinated potentiality to actuality: so, we begin with the actual, speaking humans and their political and artistic productions, and we see potentiality at present as a capacity or skill that is defined by the final action. We see potentiality as secondary or accidental” (Colebrook & Maxwell, 2016, p. 188). This is derived, in part, from Aristotle’s notion that “actuality is prior to potentiality” (as cited in Ugilt, 2014, p. 26), though this does not mean that Aristotle believed that “potentiality exists only in actuality” (Agamben, 1999, p. 180).
Ruby Sales: Where Does It Hurt?, On Being with Krista Tippett, January 16, 202, https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where-does-it-hurt/#transcript.
References
Agamben, G. (1999). Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2004). The open: Man and animal (K. Attell, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2009). What is an apparatus? Stanford University Press.
Baptist, E. (2014). The half has never been told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism. Basic Books.
Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object. Columbia University Press.
Bubeck, D. (1995). Care, gender, and justice. Clarendon Press.
Buber, M. (1958). I and thou. Charles Scribner.
Colebrook, C., & Maxwell, J. (2016). Agamben. Polity Press.
Comtesse, H., Ertl, V., Hengst, S., Rosner, R., & Smid, G. (2021). Ecological grief as a response to environmental change: A mental health risk or functional response? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18, Article 734.
Cupitt, D. (2016). Ethics in the last days of humanity. Polebridge Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2003). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee.
Dickinson, C. (2015). The absence of gender. In C. Dickinson & A. Kotsko (Eds.), Agamben’s coming philosophy: Finding a new use for theology (pp. 167–182). Rowman & Littlefield.
Dufour, D. (2008). The art of shrinking heads: On the new servitude of the liberated in the age of total capitalism. Polity Press.
Engster, D. (2007). The heart of justice: Care ethics and political theory. Oxford University Press.
Erdoes, R., & Ortiz, A. (1984). American Indian myths and legends. Pantheon.
Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal capitalism. Verso Books.
Freud, S. (1917). General theory of neuroses. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 16; pp. 243–463). Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Gay, V. (1992). Freud on sublimation. SUNY.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Graham, L. K. (1992). Care of persons, care of worlds: A psychosystems approach to pastoral care and counseling. Abingdon Press.
Grayling, A. (2019). The history of philosophy. Penguin Press.
Grouse, A. (2020). A guide to eco-anxiety: How to protect the planet and your mental health. Watkins.
Hamington, M. (2004). Embodied care. University of Illinois.
Helsel, P. (2015). Pastoral power beyond psychology’s imagination. Palgrave.
Kassouf, S. (2017). Psychoanalysis and climate change: Revisiting Searles’ the nonhuman environment. American Imago, 74(2), 141–171.
Kerven, R. (2018). Native American myths: Collected 1636–1919. Talking Stone.
Kompridis, N. (2020). Nonhuman agency and human normativity. In A. Bilgrami (Ed.), Nature and value (pp. 240–260). Columbia University Press.
Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. International Universities Press.
LaMothe, R. (2017). Care of souls, care of polis: Toward a political pastoral theology. Cascade Books.
LaMothe, R. (2021). A radical political theology for the Anthropocene Age. Cascade Books.
Latour, B. (2004). Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? Comments on the peace terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge, 10(3), 450–462.
Løgstrup, K. (1997). The ethical demand. Notre Dame University Press.
Miller-McLemore, B. J. (2020). Trees and the “unthought known”: The wisdom of the nonhuman (or do humans “have shit for brains”?). Pastoral Psychology, 69(4), 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00920-7
Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press.
Mills, C. (2017). Black rights/White wrongs. Oxford University Press.
Murdoch, I. (2001). The sovereignty of the good. Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. (2022). Justice for animals. Simon and Schuster.
Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and social death. Harvard University Press.
Pihkala, P. (2019). The cost of bearing witness to the environmental crisis: Vicarious traumatization and dealing with secondary traumatic stress among environmental researchers. Social Epistemology, 34, 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1681560
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st century. Belknap Press.
Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and ideology. Harvard University Press.
Prozorov, S. (2014). Agamben and politics. Edinburgh University Press.
Robinson, F. (1999). Globalizing care: Ethics, feminist theory, and international relations. Westview Press.
Robinson, F. (2011). The ethics of care: A feminist approach to human security. Temple University Press.
Rogers-Vaughn, B. (2016). Caring for souls in a neoliberal age. Palgrave.
Safron, J., & Muran, J. (1996). The resolution of ruptures in the therapeutic alliance. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 447–458.
Safron, J., & Muran, J. (2000). Negotiating the therapeutic alliance. Guilford Press.
Searles, H. (1960). The nonhuman environment in normal development and schizophrenia. International Universities Press.
Sevenhuijsen, S. (1998). Citizenship and the ethics of care. Routledge Press.
Singer, P. (1975). Animal liberation. Harper Collins.
Smith, A. (1982). The relational self: Ethics and therapy from a Black church perspective. Abingdon Press.
Stiglitz, J. (2012). The price of inequality. Norton.
Stiglitz, J. (2015). The great divide: Unequal societies and what we can do about them. Norton.
Tronick, E. & Gianino, A. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair: Challenges to the coping infant. Zero to Three Bulletin of the National Center Clinical Infant Program, 5, 1–6.
Tronick, E., & Cohn, J. (1989). Infant-mother face-to-face interaction: Age and gender differences in coordination and the occurrence of miscoordination. Child Development, 60, 85–92.
Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge Press.
Tronto, J. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.
Ugilt, R. (2014). Giorgi Agamben: Political philosophy. Humanities E-books.
Valencia, S. (2018). Gore capitalism. Semiotext(e).
Wagner, G., & Weitzman, M. (2015). Climate shock: The economic consequences of a hotter planet. Princeton University Press.
Wallace-Wells, D. (2020). The uninhabitable Earth: Life after warming. Duggan Books.
Wilson, E. O. (2005). The future of life. Abacus.
Winnicott, D. (1975). Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis. International Psychoanalytic Library, 100, 1–325. Hogarth Press.
Wolin, S. (2016). Fugitive democracy. Princeton University Press.
Woods, E. (2017). The origins of capitalism. Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of Interest
This article has no financial or non-financial conflicts of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
LaMothe, R. Experiences of Beauty and Eco-Sorrow: Truths of the Anthropocene and the Possibility of Inoperative Care. Pastoral Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-024-01127-w
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-024-01127-w