Abstract
This paper argues for positively revaluing the body, the feminine, and the Earth as integrally linked aspects of a healthy modus vivendi that have been dangerously damaged by modernity. Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology is presented as a promising way to avoid retaining its positionings of mind/spirit as comprising nothing but consciousness and sentience and the body as nothing but inert matter. For the feminine dimension of the project, I rely on Irigaray and Butler. The indispensability of animist agency is then maintained, with reference to Plumwood and Abram. From here, I argue for the centrality of places (as against space) and thence of the Earth, and an understanding of it that is not just ecological but fully ecocentric. Finally, the post-secular implications of the project are noted.
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Notes
- 1.
Proust (1997: 25–26).
- 2.
This relatively unified ‘bodymind’, or something very like it, can be found in much East Asian philosophy, but that is a thread which cannot be taken up here.
- 3.
Irigaray argues (and I agree) that an uncritical use of the sex/gender distinction reproduces an uncritical nature/culture distinction. See, e.g., Whitford (1991) and Irigaray (2004). But the relationship between ‘biological’ sex and ‘cultural’ gender remains difficult. It can be posed thus: the latter does not derive directly from the former; nor, however, is it related randomly or arbitarily…
- 4.
For its exemplary critical attention to all of these modes and dynamics, see the work of the late Val Plumwood.
- 5.
See Casey (1997).
- 6.
As Weber, after Nietzsche, rightly perceived (see Curry 2007). Note, however, that monotheism retains a place for ultimate mystery that the latter’s promise of ultimate mastery does not.
- 7.
See Plumwood (1993).
- 8.
There is also a degree of pluralism at work in environmental pragmatism; for a brief recent discussion, see Curry (2011: Chap. 10).
- 9.
It is significant that this statement occurs as part of a lucid summary of William James’s philosophy.
- 10.
See Kane (1998: 50).
- 11.
See Viveiros de Castro (2004), and note the resonance with later Wittgenstein. (Methodology itself, as Mary Midgley once observed, tends to morph into methodolatry.)
- 12.
- 13.
See Kontos (1994).
- 14.
See Curry (2010a) for a more extended discussion in which I also supplement Merleau-Ponty with, and relate his work to, that of Paul Ricoeur on metaphor.
- 15.
- 16.
See Olkowski (2006: 13).
- 17.
Although see too Latour (1993).
- 18.
Some of which I have taken from Johnson (1987: 206).
- 19.
As for how this link can best be understood, although there is no room to develop the idea here, I agree with Csordas (1994: 16) again that ‘the critical meeting ground between textuality and embodiment’ is metaphor (see my 2010). I also suspect that Michael Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowledge’ and consequent ‘post-critical’ philosophy might provide fruitful insights.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Note that vulgar relativism offers no real challenge, insofar as it simply denies that truthful or accurate representation is possible; the debate thus remains on the debilitating ground of epistemology.
- 24.
On this point, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s analysis in The Dialectic of Enlightenment remains hard to improve upon, even if it requires supplementing by, say, Latour (1993).
- 25.
‘Environment’ and ‘environmental’ are unhelpful terms, reducing as they do – in a manner closely parallel to ‘embodiment’ – a non-natural being merely surrounded by non-human nature. ‘Ecological’, while not without its problems too, is preferable.
- 26.
In terms of Latour’s sometime ‘Actor Network Theory’, agency is a property of networks rather than any particular item as such. And such networks are fully as material as they are ideational or imaginal.
- 27.
E.P. Thompson’s still-resonant phrase.
- 28.
- 29.
Here, as so often throughout this sort of discussion, Gregory Bateson comes to mind. More recently, Abram (2010: 108–109) has affirmed the important point that redefining intelligence as bodied falls far short, and courts not just inconsistency but an ugly speciesism, if it fails to recognise that bodied intelligence is not limited to human bodies. In short, it must be ecocentric.
- 30.
Taken from Harvey (2006: 33).
- 31.
The result is sometimes an experience of enchantment, with certain implications for re-enchantment. I intend to explore this in depth in a future book.
- 32.
See also Casey (2009). Casey’s work is itself influenced by Merleau-Ponty, among others.
- 33.
- 34.
This work was, of course, begun by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner.
- 35.
- 36.
See Ricoeur (2003).
- 37.
See Curry (2010b).
- 38.
Val Plumwood’s (1993) useful term.
- 39.
See Curry (2007).
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Curry, P. (2012). Revaluing Body and Earth. In: Brady, E., Phemister, P. (eds) Human-Environment Relations. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_4
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