Ecophenomenology

In this chapter, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, giving particular attention to his claim that perception involves a lived dynamic between perceptual body and world such that aspects of the world—for example, the heavy hardness of a granite block or the cool smoothness of a chrome railing—are known because they immediately evoke in the lived body their experienced qualities.

Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly in an environment can transform that environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I consider how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world.

Note: This chapter was written in 2014 for a proposed edited collection on Merleau-Ponty and architecture. Unfortunately, the editors did not find a publisher(though I was never officially informed of this fact). The chapter has been rewritten, revised, and updated; see the above entry: "Merleau-Ponty, Environmental Embodiment, and Place" (2022)
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""Environmental thinkers often suppose that the natural world (or some parts of it, at least) exists in its own right, independent of human concerns. The arguments developed in this paper suggest that it is possible to do justice to this thought without endorsing some form of metaphysical realism. Thus the early sections look to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception to develop an anti-realist account of the independent reality of the natural world, one, it is argued, that has certain advantages over the accounts proffered by ‘environmental realists’. The concluding sections draw upon certain of Merleau-Ponty’s later works to defend a rather bolder claim: that the conceptions of realism endorsed by environmental thinkers are not just ill equipped but, in fact, unable to acknowledge what may be provisionally referred to as the more-than-human dimension of reality.""

This exercise is based on a traditional form of Sufi meditation first brought to the west by Hazrat Inayat Khan. The current form has a strongly ecological component that serves to build a living sense of connection to the Earth via an embodied breathing practice.

There has been much recent debate about the nature of the omnivoyant image that introduces Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei. In this paper I argue that Cusa’s concept of contraction and his “radical perspectivism” lead us toward stretching the concept of omnivoyance beyond a simple dichotomy between a phenomenology of the image and a phenomenology of the icon. Instead of putting such emphasis on what is seen by the omnivoyant, we should think an omnivoyant optics starting from the material milieu from which it sees. To this end I define the concept of omnivoyance through the concept of the elemental. Using both the concept of an element derived from Presocratic Ionian philosophy and recent French and American continental philosophy, I put these discourses into conversation with Cusa in several ways: 1) the way omnivoyance functions as a substratum of contracted seeing rather than as a transcendence, 2) its operation as a pure frontality without objectifiable aspects, and 3) the way in which omnivoyance implies, not only a gaze that sees “all and each” (Cusa’s formula for omnivoyance), but also a plurality of modes of vision. To help us understand this enlarged concept of omnivoyance, I use the example of animal vision, particularly the gaze of the whale. With respect to cetacean vision, I deploy Melville's metaphysical speculations in Moby Dick as our primary guide.

Weather writing encourages a thicker understanding of the reciprocal implication of human subjects and climatic natures. While it can be a robust research methodology, weather writing is presented here as a teaching tool that simultaneously (a) introduces students to key concepts in the new materialisms in practice; and (b) draws links between new materialist theories, feminist ecological ethics, and ecologically oriented phenomenologies. Weather writing has two interleaved goals. First, it aims to invite an expanded meteorological imaginary, whereby the weather-and by extension, phenomena related to climate change-are experienced in and through our human bodies, as "always the very substance of ourselves" (Alaimo 2010). By cultivating a deep attunement to our human bodies' implication in the weather-world, we can better understand how humans and the weather are always collaborators, co-making a world in thick time and transcorporeal space. Second, weather writing offers a practical tool for developing posthuman and new materialist feminist methodologies. Skills honed include situated observation, thick new materialist description, and collaborative critical dialogue with other participants.

In different ways, Watsuji, Nishida, and Merleau-Ponty describe a self that extends
beyond the skin through a sort of dialectic of internal/external space of perception and
action, which has implications for understanding the relationship between art and
nature in artistic creation. Through an exposition of Watsuji’s conception of human
being in relation to a climatic milieu, Nishida’s theory of the expressive body as the site
of the world’s own self-transformations, and certain claims made by Merleau-Ponty in
his essays on painting, this article provides a way of understanding how material media
may become expressive when they are taken up by artists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJfpa9vv9pg

This presentation considers how the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) contributes to an understanding of architecture and place experience via his emphasis on the lived body. The focus is on architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen's " architectural archetypes " and architectural theorist Bill Hillier's " space syntax. " The presentation highlights three claims: First, that Thiis-Evensen provides a language for locating unself-conscious, visceral aspects of buildings & architectural meaning (Merleau-Ponty's perception and phenomenal field); second, that Hilllier illustrates how the spatiality of place—i.e., pathway configuration— supports or inhibits particular actions & routines of lived bodies as they come together or remain apart spatially (Merleau-Ponty's body-subject and intercorporeality); and, third, that both Thiis-Evensen & Hillier illustrate ways via architecture and place whereby pre-reflective bodily awareness and actions play an important role in the lifeworld (Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the lived body as intentional but pre-reflective agent).

This book,  A Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), focuses on a wide-ranging phenomenon labelled everyday environmental experience—the sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with the geographical world in which they live. By geographical world is meant the everyday places, spaces, and environments in which people find themselves. The source of experiential descriptions was environmental experience groups, small focus groups of students and other interested participants who were willing to meet weekly to examine in their own daily experience such themes as movement patterns, emotions relating to place, the nature of noticing and attention, the meaning of home and at-homeness, places for things, deciding where to go when, and so forth.

Through a phenomenological explication of the more than 1,500 personal observations offered in these environmental experience groups, the study identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on movement examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject. The section on rest explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s final section on encounter considers the multifaced ways in which people make attentive contact with their world. Group observations indicate that this range of awareness extends from obliviousness and minimal attentive contact with the world at hand through watching, noticing, and more intense kinds of encounter where the experiencer, at least metaphorically, feels a sense of “merging” with some aspect of world.

The last section of the book examines lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World convincingly demonstrates the contribution that phenomenology, especially the work DfMaurice Merleau-Ponty, can make to environmental theory. But Abram's account suffers from several limitations that are explored here. First, although Ahram intends to develop an "organic" account of thinking as grounded in the sensible world, his descriptions castigate reflection and reverse, rather than rethinking, the traditional hierarchy between mind and body. Second, Abram's emphasis on perceptual reciprocity as the basis for an environmental ethic underplays the importance of the symbolic level of DUf interaction with others. Merleau-Ponty's later work, in particular his account of the reversibility of flesh, offers a fruitful alternative to Abram's methodology.

Between the Body and the Breathing Earth: a Reply to Ted Toadvine -David Abram Toadvine's critique, several of which I will take up, albeit briefly, in this paper. I will first engage his contention that I disparage reflection on behalf of a pre-reflective position, and that I denigrate the alphabet in favor of an ostensibly pre-literate stance. Then I will take up the remarkable assertion, to which Toadvine returns again and again, that I "exclude the symbolic" from my account, and indeed that I seek to eliminate the symbolic from our interactions with others. [3] Finally I will address his claim that the eco-phenomenology of The Spell of the Sensuous leaves no room for resistance, contradiction, and incompossibility. My reply to this curious claim will lead me directly into a discussion of one of the most crucial concerns of

The world, as a unifying nexus of significance , is inherently precarious and constitutively destined toward its own unraveling. Our fascination with a future end of the world masks our realization that the world as common and unified totality is already disintegrating. What remains after the end of the world is also what precedes it, the geomaterial elements, which condition the world without being reducible to things within it. Through our participation in elemental materiality, we encounter the abyssal vertigo of deep time as an anachronistic rupture of lived and historical time. The geological memory of stone situates it at the threshold of world and non-world, while our liability to an immemorial prehistory situates us at the intersection of in-commensurable durations, those of the ancestral past as well as the apocalyptic future.

Resumen: El mundo, como un nexo de signi-ficado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra compren-sión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que con-dicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de dura-ciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico.

The historically rich and diverse tradition of phenomenology has contributed broadly to the emergence of environmental thought across the humanities and social sciences and is increasingly influential on environmental ethics and philosophy. Emphasizing the primacy of experience and inquiry into the epistemological and ontological assumptions that inform the historical and contemporary relationship with nature, phenomenology takes a critical distance from metaphysical naturalism and the instrumental framing of environmental problems in resourcist, technological, economic, and managerial terms. The tradition's distinctive contributions to environmental ethics include its focus on the epistemic and ontological revindication of experience, its critique of metaphysical and modernist assumptions, and its aim to articulate a post-metaphysical conception of the self-world relation and an alternative ethos appropriate to our experience of nature. Key concepts that inform current phenomenological research in environmental ethics include the lifeworld, the earth and elements, the chiasm, and poetic dwelling.

With chapters by Karen Barad, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Matthias Fritsch, Vicki Kirby, John Llewelyn, Philippe Lynes, Michael Marder, Dawne McCance, Michael Naas, Kelly Oliver, Michael Peterson, Ted Toadvine, Cary Wolfe, and David Wood.

Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy launches a new mode of philosophical and ethical reflection with respect to the challenges posed by the degradation of the natural environment, including habitat loss, species extinction, and climate change. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights in addressing and responding to the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together 15 scholars, many of which have achieved world renown, from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, vegetal philosophy, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art and aesthetics, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in a non-final, non-totalizable ecological context, both quasi-ontologically and quasi-normatively, with attention to diagnosing our times. Accordingly, the book is divided into four sections—Diagnosing the Present, which suggests that our times are marked by a facile, flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions; Ecologies, which mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for an originary environmentality, the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life; Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities, in which contributors reflect on the remains, by-products, and disintegrations of human culture, including nuclear waste, environmental destruction, and species extinctions; and Environmental Ethics, which seeks to uncover a demand for justice, including human responsibility for suffering beings, that emerges precisely as a response to original differentiation, and the mortality and unmasterable alterity it installs in living beings. As such, the book may resonate with readers not only in philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.

In his popular environmentalist novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn calls attention to the "creation myth" of our culture, according to which human beings are the telos of the evolutionary process. To illustrate this point, the character Ishmael, a telepathic gorilla, imagines an "anthropological" interview with a jellyfish undertaken a half billion years ago, prior to the evolution of land animals. In this imaginary dialogue, the jellyfish insists that it proceeds strictly on the basis of "observation, logic, and the scientific method," but comes to the conclusion that jellyfish themselves are the obvious pinnacle of the evolutionary process, the goal toward which this process has tended from its outset. The jellyfish's conclusions are intended to strike the reader as absurd, since the process of speciation has not stopped in the meantime; in retrospect, the jellyfish is only one species among many. But, according to Ishmael, humans are in no better a position to draw such a conclusion about their own place in the evolutionary process. Certainly, there is no scientific basis for such a claim, since the processes of speciation have continued unabated since our arrival on the scene, and there is consequently no reason to think our species is the last. Ultimately, the interpretation of the meaning or goal of the evolutionary process is not an empirical question but a philosophical one. The ubiquitous aggrandizement of humans as the "climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation" is therefore revealed to be nothing more than a cultural myth. Quinn's jellyfish story is intended to demonstrate the tenacity of our tendency toward "human exceptionalism," as well as to illustrate that the rejection of theistic worldviews is no guarantee of avoiding such dogma. But the message of the story is complicated by the fact that the imagined jellyfish is itself a "rational" creature with the capacity for language, as is Ishmael, the fictional gorilla who serves as mentor for the novel's human protagonist. The characters of the gorilla and jellyfish turn out to be humans in animal drag who can make their case against human exceptionalism only by ventriloquizing; they make use of the distinctively human capacities of language and reflection and thereby reinscribe the very difference they set out to deny. On the one hand, recent research suggests that the cognitive gap between humans and 39 C. Painter and C. Lotz (eds.), Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, 39-55.

"Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both we and our worlds have changed. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images have moved viewers over the last 120 years in ways that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe.
    This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe.
    Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media."
(If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at [email protected].)

NOTE: The ideas and examples in this article are now much more fully developed in David Seamon, LIFE TAKES PLACE: PHENOMENOLOGY, LIFEWORLDS, AND PLACEMAKING (London: Routledge, 2018). The most important shift is the author's realizing that genius loci is part of a broader phenomenon that he identifies as "common presence"--"the material and lived 'togetherness' of a place impelled by both its physical and experiential qualities" (Seamon 2018, p. 87). I would ask readers of thIs article to complement their understanding by studying LIFE TAKES PLACE.

ABSTRACT OF ORIGINAL ARTICLE: As recent phenomenological studies have demonstrated (Casey 1997, 2009; Malpas 1999, 2006; Mugerauer 2008; Stefanovic 2000), the phenomenon of place is a multivalent structure sophisticated and complex in its existential constitution. In this chapter, I offer one phenomenological vantage point from which to examine this lived complexity. I contend that, as an integral structure of human life, place can be understood in terms of three dimensions: first, the geographical ensemble—i.e., the material environment, including both its natural and human-made dimensions; second, people-in-place, including individual and group actions, intentions, and meanings; and, third, spirit of place, or genius loci.

Drawing on the conceptual approach of “systematics” developed by the British philosopher J. G. Bennett, I argue that these three dimensions can engage in six different ways, each of which relates to one particular lived mode whereby place contributes to human life. These six modes are: (1) place interaction; (2) place identity; (3) place creation; (4) place intensification; (5) place realization; and (6) place release.

I argue that place identity is important for understanding the nature of place but is complemented by other modes of relationship that together help clarify the complexity and richness of place and place experience.

In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to explore environmental embodiment-the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its prereflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of perception, which he understands as the immediate givenness of the world founded in bodily sensibility. Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject-pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly can transform an environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character-a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I examine how qualities of the physical and designable worldfor example, materiality, form, and spatiality-contribute to the lived body's engagement with and actions in the world. I end by arguing that Merleau-Ponty offers an essential perspective for understanding the importance of place and lived emplacement in human life, but this perspective must be extended by considering how places change over time via generative processes that enliven or undermine places and lived emplacement.

This thesis attempts to answer the question, -what is wilderness?‖ It argues that throughout history, wilderness and human habitation and modifications of it have coexisted, and wilderness has been thought of as both a place of danger and one of refuge, transformation and empowerment. This contradicts both the American so-called -Received Wilderness Idea‖ of wilderness as necessarily uninhabited and significantly unmodified by human beings, and critiques of the entire idea of wilderness as a mere cultural construct that does not reflect physical reality. The -Received Wilderness Idea‖ has been extremely influential for policy, and its application to wilderness preservation across the globe has caused the sometimes violent displacement of human populations with sometimes tragic consequence. Its implementation has also even in some cases damaged the biodiversity it sought to protect. Yet many contemporary definitions of wilderness in theory and practice acknowledge its histories of indigenous occupation. It is found that many of these definitions remain, however, arbitrary and equivocal. It is proposed that wilderness be defined as the kind of environment where nature is out of human control as the dominant shaping factor. In order to overcome the problem of confusion with and attachment to the Received Wilderness Idea, an enquiry is made into what we mean by -nature‖, and the ways in which nature is out of our control. This enquiry reveals the wildness not only of wilderness, but of the human world and human existence, a discovery that allows us to transform ourselves and our environments by letting go of the illusions of control that are destroying wilderness, biodiversity, and human potential.

This 1500-word entry reviews the phenomenological notion of place, which can be defined as any environmental locus in and through which individual or group actions, experiences, intentions, and meanings are drawn together spatially and temporally (Casey 2009; Malpas 2018). Place is relevant to research in aesthetics because an integral feature of specific places is their environmental atmosphere and "sense of place" marked by what the ancient Romans spoke of as genius loci--the specific character, ambience, and spirit of a place contributing to its effable and ineffable environmental uniqueness (Relph 1976).

Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and Architecture:
A Review

David Seamon
Editor, Environmental & Architectural  Phenomenology Newsletter

This review article introduces the reader to the nature of phenomenology and reviews phenomenological research dealing with environmental and architectural concerns. An extensive list of  references is provided at the end of the article.
      A much-abbreviated version of this review appears as “A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research,” published in S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H Minami (Eds.), Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157-78).  New York: Plenum, 2000. This shorter, published version is available here at academi.edu at the following link:

https://www.academia.edu/39758883/A_way_of_seeing_people_and_place_phenomenology_in_environment-behavior_research_2000_

It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. Consider the headlines from COP24, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Poland in December 2018. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres opened the proceedings by calling climate change "the most important issue we face" (PBS 2018). The Secretary-General's remarks paraphrase the opening line of the U.N.'s climate change web page, which announces that "[c]limate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment" (United Nations n.d.). Such statements about the singular significance of climate change-the most important, the defining issue-are often followed by proclamations about what hangs in the balance, and this was the case at COP24. There, the celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned that "collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons," amounting to, in his words, "disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years" (Jordans and Scislowska 2018).

This essay is a tribute to physicist, philosopher, and science educator Henri Bortoft (1938-2012). Bortoft’s best known work is the influential The Wholeness of Nature, published in 1996 (Bortoft 1996). His last book, released shortly before his death in 2012, is Taking Appearance Seriously (Bortoft 2012). In both works, Bortoft aimed to help readers see and understand the world and human experience in a more integrated, compelling way. Melding phenomenology, hermeneutics, and Goethean science into a remarkably fruitful coalescence, he developed a workable way to explore the confounding relationship between parts and whole: That to understand the whole, one must understand the parts, but to understand the parts, one must understand the whole (Bortoft 1971, 1985).

This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Specifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Information Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, opening out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits—axiology being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology—and the architectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in (and occasionally as) the world.

In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that structure is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indicates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semiotic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophenomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis."

While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian paradigm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it—though Deleuze is a threshold for such matters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle (as well as Patrick Wilson, Marcia Bates, and Jonathan Furner) to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the arguments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern described can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and images of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross.

Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take seriously various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, complex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial intelligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology.

A worldview if often understood as “a comprehensive model of reality” combining “beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, values, and ideas” (Schlitz, Vieten, & Miller, 2010, p. 19). We all hold basic – although often unconscious – assumptions about the very nature of reality, including our relationship with what is commonly called “nature” or “the environment.” As well, we have assimilated a variety of sensorial habits or filters that affect the way we perceive the world. Perhaps a more comprehensive, embodied definition of a worldview might therefore be “an organic integration of dispositions, habits, feelings, and assumptions that orient the way we perceive, understand, and live in the world” (Hathaway, 2018, p. 9).

Worldviews, then, are not simply a set of conceptual beliefs, but holistic, embodied frames built up through experience that orient both perception and action. This integration of habits, feelings, and assumptions may influence our ability to perceive the problems we face and also limit our imaginations, making it more difficult to conceive of a path toward ecological sustainability and social well-being. As Albert Einstein noted, “the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” We may need a new vision of reality, or even a new modality of consciousness – a more ecological worldview – in order to address our most urgent crises and to create a more just and sustainable human society.

ENV333 explores how worldviews – including those with roots in scientific, religious, philosophical, and economic perspectives – have contributed to environmental and related social problems and how changes in our worldview might contribute to the solution of these problems. To delve into these questions, the course will examine the understanding of nature and environment in western, eastern, and Indigenous traditions. As well, the course will explore a variety of ecological worldviews including deep ecology, ecofeminism, and social ecology as well as cosmogenic and liberatory perspectives. Finally, the course will explore the nature of ecological wisdom and how it might be cultivated in practice

The following points, which represent a path to a semiotics of being, are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture—semioethics and existential semiotics included. 1) Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit, wherever there are individuals, with emphasis on the living qua individuals (integrated biological individualism). 2) An Umwelt is the public aspect (cf. the Innenwelt, the private aspect) of a phenomenal/experienced world that is organism-specific (rather than species-specific) and ultimately refers to an existential realm. 3) Existential universals at work on Earth include seeking out the edible, dwelling in a medium, holding a phenomenal world (possibly an Umwelt) and being endowed with life, and consequently being mortal. 4) Human Umwelten include speechless Umwelten, spoken Umwelten and alphabetic Umwelten. 5) An Uexküllian phenomenology—stating that semiotic states represent the general class to which all mental/cognitive states belong—can draw on the works of the phenomenologists David Abram and Ted Toadvine (The notion of semiotic states is treated in Tønnessen 2009a: 62–63. For an introduction to eco-phenomenology, see Brown and Toadvine (eds.) 2003). 6) A task for such a phenomenology is to portray the natural history of the phenomenal world. 7) An imperative task in our contemporary world of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of ontological niches. 8) The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild. 9) The process of globalization is expressed by correlated trends of depletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic diversification. 10) Semiotic economy is a field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its semiotic relations are of an economic nature. All ten points will be commented (explicitly or implicitly) in due time.

In the opening pages of The Spell of the Sensuous , David Abram stands in the night outside his hut in Bali, the stars spread across the sky, mirrored from below in the water of the rice paddies, and countless fireflies dancing in between. This disorientating abundance of wonder is close to what many of his readers have felt on encountering Abram's words and his way of making sense of the world.

This essay analyzes a peculiar case of “storied matter”: Naples’ bodies. Examining the material-discursive entanglements of my “porous city” (as Walter Benjamin defined it), I discuss two examples of “narratives of matter”: the plaster casts created by archaeologists while excavating the ruins of the ancient Pompeii, and the way the “war on Naples’ bodies” is represented by Curzio Malaparte in his controversial novel The Skin (1945). The essay describes the place’s mind as the “emergent interplay” of narrative agencies, both natural and cultural. Considering the way the diffractive dynamics of nature and memory are embodied in Naples’ reality, the essay shows how a material-ecocritical interpretation can participate in in a differential becoming.,

Merleau-Ponty recognized that phenomenology’s methodological coherence required that it reject anthropocentricity and extend its scope beyond the human realm. But he also recognized that this does not change the central role played by human consciousness in phenomenology, which he thus construed as a practical, humanistic project based on ‘ontological faith’. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological contributions concerning animals, then, and in particular his notion of ‘interanimality’, need to be understood as ‘generative’ contributions toward the realization of a singular common world. While this does not address issues of interspecific justice directly, it does reveal the underlying ontology of interspecificity to be a normative projection of a de-centred humanism, an insight that has the potential to productively rethink the nature of our ethical relations with animals.

A common commitment amongst speculative realists holds that phenomenology is irredeemably hostile to nonhuman alterity because phenomenology is correlationist. Since phenomenologists deny unmediated access to the modality of the in-itself, their correlationism purportedly consists in subsuming the more-than-human world into one’s own (narrowly anthropocentric) intentional horizon, a move that promises correspondingly disastrous environmental implications. Merleau-Pontian phenomenology appears to be especially guilty in this regard since Merleau-Ponty argues that taking our situated embodiment sufficiently seriously entails that any other entity encountered must always take the form of an “in-itself-for-us.” In this paper, I argue that the charge of correlationism against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology can be disarmed because it is either false or insubstantial. In either case, I argue, if we are to remain sufficiently open to more-than-human alterity to evade the dangerous sort of anthropocentrism that anticorrelationists rightly speak against, we would do well to retain the very subject-object ambiguity that motivates the correlationist charge against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in the first place.

In the last several decades, there has arisen a growing interest in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s way of science as it contributes to a phenomenology of the natural world. Though must better known for his works in poetry, drama, and imaginative literature, Goethe (1749-1832) was profoundly interested in studying the natural world (Goethe 1988). His writings on plants, morphology, geology, weather, and color continue to draw supportive attention today, from scientists, artists, and philosophers (Bortoft 2012; Richards 2002; Schad 2019).

One of the most significant aspects of Goethe’s scientific efforts was his developing a method of study whereby the researcher might empathize with the thing studied and see it in a comprehensive, accurate way truthful to what the thing actually is, mostly via a method of engaged, qualitative encounter and description. Since the 1990s, this method of study has been associated broadly with a particular manner of phenomenology—more specifically, with a phenomenology of the natural world (Hennigfeld 2015; Seamon and Zajonc 1998; Simms 2005). A recent effort to draw on Goethe’s way of understanding the natural world is ecologist Craig Holdrege’s Seeing the Animal Whole and Why It Matters. In this book, Holdrege uses a Goethean approach to understand nine animals as they might be described “holistically,” by which the author means showing “how an animal’s many features are interconnected and are a revelation of the animal as a whole” (p. 12). The nine animals that Holdrege studies are the sloth, elephant, mole, bison, zebra, lion, giraffe, tadpole/frog, and dairy cow.

L'attuale epoca di crisi ecologica ci pone di fronte a seri interrogativi sul nostro modo di rapportarci all'ambiente. È ancora attuale, e filosoficamente percorribile, il modello tradizionale che considera essere umano e natura in opposizione? Qual è la posizione della specie umana all'interno del mondo naturale? Qual è il ruolo dell'ambiente nella definizione dell'identità del soggetto umano? Chi detiene lo statuto morale atto ad orientare le scelte etico-pratiche: gli esseri umani, o anche gli esseri nonumani, quali animali, piante, natura, ambiente? Come sviluppare un modo ecocompatibile di essere e pensare? Dalla risposta a queste questioni dipendono non solo la visione del mondo per gli anni a venire, ma anche la concezione di sè che gli esseri umani hanno in rapporto al tutto e, ancor più, le pratiche umane di relazione ad un ambiente rispetto a cui il legame di interdipendenza non è più negabile. Il presente volume percorre il ricco terreno del pensare ambientalista, che si è dato forma teorica e pratica in movimenti quali, tra gli altri, l'ecologia profonda, l'ecologia sociale, l'ecofemminismo, il bioregionalismo, nel suo confronto con questi interrogativi e nella sua elaborazione di varie proposte di soluzione.

In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity. Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future.

Since its introduction twenty-five years ago, the concept of biodiversity has become a central value of conservation biology and a plank of international environmental policy—despite the well-known contestations of the concept’s meaning, the de jure problems with its operationalization, and the lack of any empirical evidence correlating it with ecosystem function or other valued features of nature. Yet a deeper problem with biodiversity in the received sense—as a formula for aggregating incommensurable differences within and between life forms at all scales— is that it aims to maximize present differences without regard for historical configurations and evolutionary memory. I argue that current diversity is inseparable from its contingent history, and the memory of this history is embodied as the differential relations among populations, species, and their biotic and abiotic surroundings. This suggests, as an alternative to biodiversity, a biodiacritics modeled on the parallel between life and language, as networks of difference with synchronic and diachronic axes. The synchronic configurations of current life are the figured memory of its diachronic evolution. Such biodiacritical configurations, insofar as they embody the ontological memory of evolving life, are the source of what we value in threatened and rare ecosystems and species. The intuition that motivates biodiversity conservation, I argue, is better captured phenomenologically as an encounter with the biodiacritically embodied memory of life than as a formula for aggregating present difference.

When we envision who or what community is, how often do we think of those who are not human? And even when we consider those beyond the realm of human affairs (if there even exists such a realm), how often do we consider the outsider, the Other? The concept of community itself, it would seem, “already nullifies alterity,” as Emmanuel Levinas puts it. In the current discourse on ethics and the environment, I suggest, there is a wealth of thinking of community and a sufficient lack of thinking of alterity. In this paper, I read some of the major voices concerned with the health and historical degradation of the planet—specifically western environmental ethics and ecology, and Indigenous environmental ethics—and bring them into conversation with Levinas’s ethics of alterity. The aim of this paper is to open a dialogue with the Others of environmental ethics by posing a wholly Levinasian question for our contemporary epoch: What is the meaning of alterity in environmental thinking?

In this chapter, I consider architect Christopher Alexander's contribution to a phenomenology of wholeness, by which I mean finding conceptual and practical ways for understanding how things belong together so that they can indeed belong, whether one speaks of the parts of a well made building, the steps in an effective construction process, or the elements of a helpful theory. I discuss how, over his professional career, Alexander’s theory of wholeness has shifted progressively toward an intensifying interest in the creative process whereby wholeness unfolds. Drawing on a phenomenological critique, I identify several strengths and weaknesses of Alexander’s theory and argue that his work demonstrates how an engaged reciprocity between thinking and making can generate deeper understandings and more livable buildings and environments.

"To what extent can meaning be attributed to nature, and what is the relationship between such “natural sense” and the meaning of linguistic and artistic expressions? To shed light on such questions, this essay lays the groundwork for an “ontology of sense” drawing on the insights of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. We argue that the ontological continuity of organic life with the perceived world of nature requires situating sense at a level that is more fundamental than has traditionally been recognized. Accounting for the genesis of this primordial sense and the teleology of expressive
forms requires the development of an ontology of being as interrogation, as suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s later investigations."

Η παρούσα ανακοίνωση στοχεύει στην παρουσίαση ενός νέου ερευνητικού πεδίου των Ανθρωπιστικών Επιστημών, αυτού των Περιβαλλοντικών Ανθρωπιστικών Σπουδών (Environmental Humanities) στη Νέα Ελληνική Φιλολογία. Αρχικά, θα γίνει μια εκτεταμένη αναφορά του θεωρητικού πλαισίου που θεραπεύει το υπό αναφορά πεδίο (οικοκριτική θεωρία) και θα μελετηθεί θεωρητικά η βασική ορολογία του πεδίου λ.χ. η βιοσημειωτική (biosemiotics), η οικοσημειωτική (ecosemiotics), η οικοψυχολογία (ecopsychology), η οικοφαινομενολογία (ecophenomenology), η οικογλωσσολογία (ecolinguistics), η πρισματική οικολογία (prismatic ecology) και η Μεταβολική Ποιητική (Metabolic Poetics). Μέσα από την επιμέρους μελέτη των όρων θα γίνει η εφαρμογή αυτών σε επιλεγμένα κείμενα της νεοελληνικής ποίησης του 19ου και 20ού αιώνα αντίστοιχα, και θα οριστούν οι δείκτες που διαμορφώνουν νέες αναγνωστικές πρακτικές των κειμένων και λειτουργούν οργανικά ως μορφές πολιτισμικής οικολογίας (cultural ecology), χρησιμοποιώντας το γλωσσικό εργαλείο και την κριτική προκειμένου να δημιουργήσουν πολιτισμικά αφηγήματα που άπτονται της σχέσης του ανθρώπου με τη Φύση. Συνοψίζοντας, θα δοθεί έμφαση στη σημασία που έχουν οι Περιβαλλοντικές Ανθρωπιστικές Σπουδές στη μελέτη των νεοελληνικών κειμένων και ευρύτερα στη Νέα Ελληνική Φιλολογία σήμερα, ορίζοντας μια νέα προσέγγιση αυτής μέσα από την ανάγνωση των συμβιωτικών και βιώσιμων ζωτικών μηχανισμών που τη διέπουν.

Ecophenomenology has rekindled two of the oldest and most profound insights into nature. The first, following the famous aphorism of Heraclitus, is that “nature loves to hide.” Pierre Hadot has shown in The Veil of Isis how a series of interpretations (and, in his view, misinterpretations) of this aphorism has been decisive for Western philosophy’s approach to nature. Yet phenomenology has rediscovered nature’s self-concealment precisely through an attention to our everyday encounters with its autonomous resistance. We might think here of Heidegger’s descriptions, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” of the “essentially undisclosable” withdrawal of the earth, which grants to natural things their “independent and self-contained” character. Or again, we might point to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions, in Phenomenology of Perception, of the “non-human” that lies hidden in things and gives them a “hostile and foreign” otherness that our everyday perceptions cover over. Simon James draws on such descriptions to respond to the charge that phenomenology is incapable of describing nature on its own terms, real nature, since phenomenology necessarily takes its departure from nature as experienced. One of phenomenology’s “great virtues,” according to James, is its potential, in contrast with environmental realism, to show “what it means to perceive, in an immediate and visceral way, the independent reality of the natural world.” In other words, nature announces its autonomy precisely through its self-concealment, and phenomenology is in a privileged position to disclose this very resistance to disclosure.
The second ancient insight into nature rejuvenated by phenomenology would seem to be in tension with the first. This second insight is that nature is fundamentally musical, or even that it is music. If this idea seems less germane to us today, this is perhaps because we are so quick to equate music with patterned waves of air pressure, rather than appreciating what it could connote more broadly. Yet the link between nature and music is equally long and convoluted, and just as subject to reinterpretation in the light of changing conceptions of its terms. From the Pythagoreans—who, Aristotle reports, held “the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number” (Metaphysics I.5)—to Boethius and Kepler, the most influential versions of this thesis have been variants of Musica universalis, the positing of harmonious proportions in the movements of celestial bodies. Since these proportions paralleled musical intervals, celestial movements were considered “music” in their own right, even if they did not produce audible sounds. As the seventh-century encyclopedist St. Isidore of Seville summarized it, “Without Music, there could be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.” This characterization of the cosmos as musical goes beyond mere metaphor, since worldly, audible music is understood to be a derivative imitation of the cosmic harmony. For those unwilling to go this far, more modest proposals have also appeared, to the effect that the structures of music share certain parallels with the structures of nature—not only in terms of harmony, but also, for example, insofar as they are fundamentally relational and change over time. This view that music and nature are structurally isomorphic finds new champions today, as when Jeremy Leach and John Fitch, scholars of algorithmic composition, posit a common event structure of music and nature based on the fractal distributions of their temporal changes.
Just as phenomenology has rediscovered, on its own terms, a sense of the withdrawal of nature, so it has also given new meaning to the notion of Musica universalis, now inspired by ecological relationships, the “melodies” of organic behaviors in “counterpoint” with their environments, rather than the harmonies of celestial motions. Phenomenologists first uncovered the link between life and music through the contribution of Gestalt theorists such as Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, for whom melody serves as a privileged example of a temporal gestalt. Inspired by Köhler’s descriptions of chimpanzee behavior as “melodic,” for example, Merleau-Ponty relies on the figure of melody to describe the unity and form of organic life in The Structure of Behavior, often referring to the organism’s dialectical relation with its environment as a “melodic development” or a “kinetic melody.” Nowadays, the description of organic behavior as melodic is more frequently associated with the writings of Estonian ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, whose work was also influential on phenomenology and is currently attracting new interest from scholars of animal studies and posthumanism. For Uexküll, nature is fundamentally composed of meanings that emerge in the exchange between organisms and their Umwelten, their environments, and this process can be literally described as a kind of music-making in which contrapuntal meanings replace sonic harmonies. Uexküll’s version of Musica Universalis is therefore the intricately composed score of meanings constituting the interlocking environments of all living things—amounting, in Giorgio Agamben’s estimation, to a “radical dehumanization of the image of nature.”

a tension exists between these two ancient ideas about nature—first, that nature loves to hide, as manifest in its resistance to and withdrawal from reflection; and, second, that nature is a kind of all-encompassing symphony of ecological niches, perpetually singing itself into existence through the meaning-making activity of organic life. If both of these claims concern one and the same nature, and if both have a genuine foundation in experience as phenomenologically described, then what is their relation? More precisely, how can the music of nature, if this is more than a mere metaphor, be the event both of nature’s disclosure and of its withdrawal?