Abstract
This essay reflects on the practice of philosophy in the ecological emergency, arguing that the latter asks philosophy to reconsider the ancient possibility that its array of practices would include the spiritual practices that help people evolve a way of life that critically engages with the challenges of their time and place. It retrieves three examples of this: Hadot’s reading of Greek philosophy as first and foremost a way of life, Thoreau’s experiments with attentive human living, and Nishitani’s Buddhist reading of Watsuji’s reclamation of fūdo. The essay concludes with a consideration of cultivating friendship with the earth as a contemporary philosophical way of life.
At the very time when my ears hear the voice as it is, everyone I talk with is my friend.—Eihei Dōgen (1200-1253), trans. S. Okumura
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Notes
- 1.
For a seminal study of this, see John Sallis’s forthcoming work, Ethicality and Imagination: On Luminous Abodes (Indiana University Press).
- 2.
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson and trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell Publishes, 1995).
- 3.
James D. Reid, Rick Anthony Furtak, and Jonathan Ellsworth, “Locating Thoreau, Reorienting Philosophy,” Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy, ed. Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1.
- 4.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 14. Henceforth W.
- 5.
For more on this, see my Mountains, Rivers and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017).
- 6.
Nishitani Keiji, On Buddhism, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Henceforth OB.
- 7.
See David W. Johnson’s excellent study of the problem of fūdo, Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019).
- 8.
For more on this, see the excellent discussion in Leah Kalmanson, “Pure Land Ecology: Taking the Supernatural Seriously in Environmental Philosophy,” Japanese Environmental Philosophy, ed. J. Baird Callicott and James McRae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 29–46.
- 9.
Robert Bringhurst, “The Mind of the Wild,” Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (Regina, Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2018), 17.
- 10.
Pope Francis [Jorge Mario Bergoglio], Encyclical Letter “Laudato Si’” of the Holy Father Francis: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2015), 158–159.
- 11.
Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann, “Reinhabiting California,” The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 36.
- 12.
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (New York and London: Verso, 2016), 390.
- 13.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 22.
- 14.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” The Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 237.
- 15.
See, for example, Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. Andrew Parker, co-trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).
References
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Wirth, J.M. (2023). Philosophy as Ecological Practice. In: Weir, L. (eds) Philosophy as Practice in the Ecological Emergency. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94391-2_6
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