Changing Human Orientation to the Environment

Radical Philosophy Hour - September 19, 2022. Radical Philosophy Hour is a monthly event featuring two speakers and discussion on Facebook Live.
This event featured Marjolein Oele and Brian Treanor.
Marjolein Oele is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. Her research intertwines Ancient Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy and Philosophy of Medicine. She is the author of E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life's Material Interfaces (SUNY, 2020) and co-editor of Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations (Springer, 2017). She is currently working on a new book manuscript entitled Elemental Loss. Her articles have been published in a range of journals, including Ancient Philosophy, Configurations, Environmental Philosophy, Epochê, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Radical Philosophy Reviews and Research in Phenomenology. She is a member of the executive board of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT) and she joined the editorial board of the journal Environmental Philosophy in 2017 as its book review editor.
Title: "Earthquakes, elemental loss, and the search for a new center of gravity"
Abstract:
This presentation explores the question of elemental loss as viewed through the phenomenon of earthquakes. It frames earthquakes as shifts in the elemental that confront us with the broader question of loss, grief and mourning beyond that of the individualized life. Exploring our sense of balance and orientation is fruitful precisely now, since anthropogenic climate change is threatening to “wake up the slumbering giant,” i.e., the earth, as Bill McGuire puts it metaphorically. This prompts us to consider what possibilities we might have to deal with coming disorientations and to unpack how the hitherto silent structuring concept of orientation has played out in the background of our elemental realities and has been constructed at both a conceptual and affective level over time.
Similar to the fact that gluteal muscles and pelvic bone transformation allowed earlier hominids a biped traversal of the earth by changing their center of gravity, I argue in this presentation that there are benefits to thinking through the (complex) challenges lying ahead of us so that we can adjust our own affective, embodied apparatus to enable a recalibrated, effective, ethical and socially informed center of gravity. As we walk through a world that trembles, the challenge is to transform our embodied sense of (dis)orientation along with the changes in the landscape, not merely to mirror them, but to anticipate the challenges ahead and to make the post-human dispositionally adaptable to the changes ahead of us. Since our own orientation tracks elemental qualities, then the co-affective space that is earth-body and stability-orientation needs to stand front and center in our deliberations, following Michel Serres’s call to “caress and follow the fissure’s trembling” without losing all senses of orientation.
Brian Treanor is professor of philosophy and Charles S. Casassa SJ Chair at Loyola Marymount University. Like Les Murray, he is “only interested in everything.” Consequently, his scholarship is interdisciplinary in its method and wide-ranging in its foci. He is the author or editor of ten books, including: Melancholic Joy (Bloomsbury 2021), Philosophy in the American West (Routledge 2020), Carnal Hermeneutics (Fordham 2015), Emplotting Virtue (SUNY 2014), and Interpreting Nature (Fordham 2013). His journey to academia was long and atypical: dropping out of his undergraduate studies to move to Japan; a long stint living a car-a two-door Mazda 323 hatchback-and working as a climbing guide; and years of living frugally and working episodically on a ‘round the world’ ticket. Eventually, he earned his PhD at Boston College, working under Richard Kearney. His most recent book, Melancholic Joy, reflects on the human condition and the temptation to despair. Among a number of current projects, he is writing a monograph that draws on personal experience, philosophy, literature, poetry, myth, local history, and science to explore and reflect on wildness.
Title: "The Social Contract and the Natural Contract"
Abstract: Michel Serres remains a woefully underappreciated in anglophone philosophy, and this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in environmental philosophy. This paper takes up The Natural Contract to demonstrate that the social contract has long remained blind to the environment or place in which society forms. This failure has become acute now that, for the first time in history, humanity-taken-as-a-whole is interacting with the earth-taken-as-a-whole. Consequently, we must “re-draft” the social contract to both include more-than-human nature and to treat more justly the different humans that the traditional social contract failed.