The result of the 2024 U.S. presidential election signals the end of federal action to combat climate change and a bonanza for fossil fuel extraction and consumption. These are coming now as climate change impacts are escalating and affecting our day-to-day lives. This summer and fall there have been record high temperatures where I live, and a record drought is now in progress with mandatory water conservation plus wildfires breaking out, some threatening homes in a nearby city.
For the past year I have been engaged in trying to raise local climate consciousness and spur action with very little response even from people I expected to lead on the issue. I found that these were focused on their own very narrow projects, in neoliberal terms enterprises which exclude all other matters including climate change that directly threatens those enterprises. People identify with their work, a phenomenon the existentialists call “bad faith,” for according to these philosophers people’s Being is freedom, and to adopt some enterprise as one’s life is to betray that freedom.
Historically existentialism came about in response to a major cultural breakdown. Medieval society provided a total universe for those living in it: the Christian church defined people’s relationships with each other and nature, ritualized much of their activity, suffused earth with enchantment and filled up heaven with God, Christ, angels and souls of the departed. People’s lives had a clear purpose which was to obey the church in order to attain paradise upon death.
Following the medieval period Western culture became progressively materialistic, with the trend culminating in Nietzsche’s bold declaration “God is dead.” This demolished the whole traditional worldview, leaving in its place Nothingness and man in possession of boundless freedom.
Major existentialist philosophers came to their insights through confrontation with death which was a glimpse into Nothingness and their own non-Being. While with the loss of religion they took death to be the extinction of Being, we know death chiefly as the cessation of life, and this is what we are presently facing on the largest possible scale with unchecked climate change. We are therefore at a moment of insight of much greater magnitude than that of the existentialists, in confrontation with unimaginable destruction of life all over the world. Our revelation is neither of Nothingness nor God-like freedom, which we see as causing the ruin, but rather of Life Itself. This is only natural, for we have always known that you don’t miss your water until your well goes dry.
Having discovered Nothingness and existential freedom, our philosophers went on to describe how that works in practice. For our part we are now profoundly aware that the universe is alive, filled with innumerable living things that are themselves organic wholes and parts of countless other concentric and intersecting living wholes. In this universe we are living entities whose function, in fact our purpose, is to maintain our own lives as well as those of all the larger wholes of which we form organic parts. As with existentialism, to act under some other identity is bad faith and a betrayal of life – one’s own and others’. Some of our philosophers freely chose humanitarian values which, if they violated them, would constitute only betrayal of themselves or their own freedom. In contrast, bad faith within the philosophy of life is likely to harm, in addition to one’s own life, many more lives with which one is ultimately united as parts of larger organic wholes. Here there is unlimited potential for the banality of evil.
For our purpose the free authentic life is the ecological life, and we navigate through it with intuitions of the very lives of things or their essences. I have written extensively on my blog about such intuition which is basically that described by Aristotle. The Enlightenment, which set us on our self-destructive course, created a myth of progress, using it to dismiss and discount the Greek’s ideas as superstition. While no philosophy is without vulnerable points, Aristotle’s doctrine of intuition of essences has a solid foundation in fact. Enlightenment empiricists claimed that we have only sensory perceptions of things, but this is false. We obviously are immediately aware of what things are, and this is intuition of their essences. Knowing that we can and actually do intuit the essences, the very lives of individual things and larger wholes of which they form organic parts, we can turn to focusing our attention on them to practice authentic ecological knowing.
Our common way of experiencing things is not only primarily sensory but also instrumental, and this has certain value. I have no need to commune with the essences of the ingredients of my bread dough; I just make and bake it. The Greeks recognized technology as a distinct class of knowledge and action, and it has a large role in the material but not the moral dimension of human life. Giving proper consideration to the latter requires that we attend to the vital essential natures of things and apply technology to serve them.
Today we have an instrumental attitude and approach to nearly everything – natural objects, artifacts and people, especially in regard to their employment. To develop and make good use of our intuition we must understand how our consciousness operates in directing the focus of our attention to various aspects of things. José Ortega y Gasset said, “Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
A marvelous study of cognitive psychology is contained in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. We find that consciousness has a life of its own, as the narrator relates how his memories of Combray awakened by the taste of the tea-soaked madeleine streamed forth. Speaking of the two routes his family took on walks, he observed that all the separate things on the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way appeared as organic, indivisible parts of each landscape. Infatuated with Odette, Swann was conscious of her essence pervading places in which she was present such as her home and the Verdurin’s drawing room. He associated her appearance with Botticelli’s painting of Jethro’s daughter, seeing in some manner this painting in her face and body and these through the painting. While away from her he devoted his mind to imagining in elaborate detail what she might be doing during those times. When a serious break came he thought of their relationship that included all of his shared and private experience of her as his identity which was now threatened with annihilation.
Swann’s obsession with Odette illuminates how we normally experience things: the object of focus defines the objects around it, as it is also the target of some projected ideal or prototype image. In addition it is the nucleus around which associated ideas circle as their source. Our minds work in this manner when we have some enterprise or project and also when our attention is directed at the essences of things in intuition. In both cases we discover what we might do in regard to them, for consciousness always involves some intention to act.
Instrumental sense experience, our ordinary mode, has become enslaved to technology and neoliberal political economy, barring us from knowing life in the world and acting to serve it. By practicing vitalistic essentialist intuition we gain freedom as we make direct contact with the very lives of things unmediated by extraneous interests. Moreover, in contrast with common experience which has a static quality, intuition of life reveals its continuity into the indefinite future. Altogether it is a way of knowing that we practice specifically as living human beings to serve our own lives and the larger biosphere of which we are both in life and in death indivisible organic parts.
For too long we have counted on our leaders to save us from extreme climate change impacts, and now the U.S. cavalry that we expected to come to our rescue has positively turned against us. We must therefore save ourselves with citizen action whenever and wherever possible by individually keeping climate on our minds to conserve energy and water, plant trees, grow fruits and vegetables, reduce or eliminate meat consumption, walk or ride a bike, use gray water for plants, turn down the heat, turn the AC up or off, re-use, reduce and recycle stuff, incorporate climate action into our jobs, talk to people and perform endless other acts that occur to us when we give our attention to climate.
2024 continued the long trend in U.S. elections whereby, in their chronic dissatisfaction with the system people vote for “change” which, when it comes, is more of the same or worse. Although the majority of voters can’t imagine true system change, this is precisely what we need – movement toward the ecological civilization. For the existentialists to say No is a supreme act of freedom which has immense potential impact. More specifically Arundhati Roy said, “The system will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling…their ideas, their version of history, their wars…their notion of inevitability.” As we resist we must exercise the freedom of authentic living, taking inspiration from the rousing civil rights movement song Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.
