You are invited to join us on the 1st of November to a talk by Graham Parks on Managing Humanity's Insanity: Becoming Truly Human within Planetary Boundaries. The event is sponsored by the Feral Ecologies Lab and DIT (Design, Impact, and Transitions platform).
Becoming Truly Human within Planetary Boundaries
Why the extreme term ‘insanity’? Well, the way that we in the
developed countries are currently living is beginning to render the planet
uninhabitable, through the impact of our lifestyle on the climate and the
biosphere. This presentation examines the roots of this insanity and
proposes some ways of treating it.
We know how risky global situation is thanks to the idea of ‘planetary
boundaries’, elaborated by some of the world’s top climate and Earth
System scientists. For nine of Earth’s subsystems they have identified a
range of thresholds beyond which human pressure could trigger abrupt
changes that would tip the entire system into a state that’s distinctly
inhospitable for human existence.
Part of the problem is a prevalent idea of who we are as human
beings. A right-wing libertarian (neoliberal) ideology has convinced
many people that we are basically autonomous individuals at liberty to
extract from the natural world whatever we need to satisfy our desires for
material comfort, as assured by continued economic growth.
A major factor behind our blindness to the severe risks of climate
breakdown and the destruction of biosphere integrity is ‘the posthuman
spectacle’. Our enthusiastic immersion in information technologies and
social media tends to reinforce Cartesian ‘indivi-dualism’, keeping us
narcotised in a virtual world of ‘representations’ and ignorant of the
dangers of our physical situation.
A more plausible and less destructive understanding of who we are
regards us not as individuals but as relatives—related to other humans
and myriad other beings on which we depend. Indigenous philosophies
from numerous cultures share this kind of understanding, but for
pragmatic reasons we do well to draw from the ancient Chinese
philosophical tradition to heal our indivi-dualist derangement.
While revising our self-understanding to a saner mode, we can be
making major changes in our social, political, and economic institutions,
which would allow us to avoid the worst and live more fully human lives.
After the talk, there will be a panel discussion led by:
Dr. Carolina Sánchez De Jaegher (ICON/UCLouvain)
Dr. Katharina Bauer (ESPhil)
Dr. Yogi Hendlin (ESPhil)
Biography
A native of Glasgow, Graham Parkes has taught philosophy at universities in
the United States, Europe, and East Asia, and is now Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. His main interests are in Continental European, Chinese, and Japanese philosophies, aesthetics and philosophy of art, and environmental philosophies.
Among his books and translations are Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987),
The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji (1990), Nietzsche and Asian
Thought (1991), Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (1994), Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work by Reinhard May, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden by François Berthier (2000), Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (2005), and How to Think about the Climate Crisis: A Philosophical Guide to Saner Ways of Living (2021). He has also published over 120 chapters in books and journal articles on his topics of interest.
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You are invited to join us for a drink afterwards.
