Peace with the Earth: Animism and Contemplative Ways (original) (raw)
Related papers
American Academy of Religions, Contemplative Studies Unit, 2020
This paper discusses how the framework of view, meditation, and action is employed in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, how contemplative practice functions therein, and how this framework can be directed not only to soteriological ends but also to contemporary environmental issues. Contemplative practice is shown to function as a method to incorporate philosophical positions into one’s default perceptual mode and, as a result, as a way to reorient one’s ethical priorities and comportment to the world. This is done first with reference to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition before opening the discussion to contemplative practice in general. Moreover, using this framework, this paper argues for the utility of contemplative practice as a way to engage with the climate emergency not through a set of abstentions or obligations, but through a contemplative reorientation of one’s natural disposition to the more-than-human world. It thus works towards a moral phenomenological approach to environmental ethics.
From Worlds of Possibles to Possible Worlds: On Post-nihilism and Dwelling - DasQuestões, 2021
The goal of this paper is to challenge the objections raised by scholars in the Environmental Humanities to the use of “the spiritual” as a mediating resource between humankind and the beleaguered planet we live on. It does this in two ways. First by arguing that the incubi they want to exorcise by placing a “cordon sanitaire” around the spiritual can be withstood without resorting to anything as radical as its complete exclusion. Second, by showing that the interest of such an initiative has nothing to do with promoting theistic supernaturalism or the intention of belittling humankind. Its interest lies in its “instrumental value”. In other words, the point is to adopt a “consequentialist standpoint” to assess the worth of various ways to address our climate change emergency and consider what works and what does not. If after an unprejudiced assessment it is determined that applications of the spiritual can be engineered which help in fostering improved Man-Nature relations – and do so without being Trojan horse for “metaphysical hoaxes” and “totalising métarécits” –, it is the rejection of the spiritual that ceases to be valid. To prove there is nothing farfetched about the idea, this paper looks at the role given to the spiritual (to daimonion) in archaic Greece and the way it promoted an “entente cordiale” between humankind and humankind’s Other. I show that it was able to attain this result by submitting both humankind and its non-human Other to a “cosmodicy” which constrained both to (1) relate and interact with one other on an “I-Thou” basis and (2) to make seeking the felicity of one a function of seeking the felicity of the other.
Recently the concept of animism has been radically rethought at the crossover of postcolonial ethnography, environmental humanities and science studies. This reconceptualisation aims at decolonising western sciences, destabilising an anthropocentric world picture and articulating an environmental and animal ethics in the current context of human-induced climate change and practices such as factory farming. It decisively abandons the controversial colonial epistemology in which animism was first introduced as a primitive and regressive belief in the supernatural spirits. In this essay I would like to situate this current cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism into a genealogy of historical discourses, following scholarship that has theorised one aspect of Enlightenment secularisation processes as the internalisation of spirits and ghosts from non-human materiality on the outside into the space of the human mind. Building on this approach, I propose that the current, post-Enlightenment, posthumanist, cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism can be said to mark a certain historical reversal: an externalisation of what has been seen as within and of the human mind, which I will in this essay term ‘mindedness’, to the outside non-human materiality (again).
Animism, Civilization and the Struggle for a New Future
Might we understand these seemingly different ideas--so called primitive animist belief in a living, relational world versus more recent concepts like deep ecology, environmental ethics and nonhuman politics--as linked at a deeper epistemological level? What links these ideas, and what are the potential implications if we were to take these similarities seriously? This paper is an attempt to reengage with this question: Can the belief in a living, animate world gain a new political relevance for the twenty first century? My argument here is that taking these claims seriously does matter, and the political implications are quite deep and far reaching.
Theory, Culture & Society, 2021
Following upon Bruno Latour's famous injunction that 'we have never been modern', Graham Harvey has recently added that perhaps 'we have always been animists.' With the massive ecosystem destruction that is underway in the Anthropocene, this realization could represent a necessary paradigm shift to address anthropogenic climate change. If the expropriation and destruction intrinsic to the modern division between a world of cultural values attributed exclusively to humans and a world of inanimate matter devoid of value has become untenable, then showing the illusory nature of this divide should open the way for a transvaluation of values capable of developing an animistic relational ontology to replace the dualisms of the Western paradigm. Developing the four traits typical of animistic cultures-personhood, relationality, location and ontological boundary crossing-a postmodern 'machinic animism' is defended as a new ecological paradigm for the Anthropocene.
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2024
It is intuitive to think that divine transcendence is incompatible with the sacredness of nature, especially when transcendence is combined with the idea that God alone is valuable. Divine transcendence seems to demote this-worldly values in favor of union with God in a disembodied afterlife. Divine transcendence also seems to legitimize hierarchies, including male-female and human-nature hierarchies. Divine immanence seems a better alternative. This set of intuitions about transcendence appears regularly in the field of Religion and Ecology, sometimes as an implicit backdrop rather than an explicit position. This backdrop needs to be thematized and evaluated. For those with ecological concerns, divine transcendence and divine immanence need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, divine transcendence (understood non-contrastively) complements divine immanence and is compatible with both animist and polytheist cosmologies. The extent of this mutual compatibility and its importance for environmental concerns has yet to be fully articulated.
Moral Phenomenology in a More-Than-Human World: A New Approach to Buddhist Environmental Ethics
Queen's University at Kingston (Dissertation), 2022
This dissertation works to accomplish two goals. First, it defends Jay Garfield’s interpretation of Buddhist ethics as a moral phenomenology and develops this ethical system through the Tibetan framework of lta sgom spyod gsum. Second, it looks at how this interpretation of Buddhist ethics can be applied to the more-than-human world to create a novel Buddhist environmental ethic. The first half defends a moral phenomenological interpretation of Buddhist ethics and develops this theory through the framework of lta sgom spyod gsum. To do so, it surveys prior interpretations of Buddhist ethics to provide a foil for the discussion before turning to the arguments for a moral phenomenological interpretation. It then defends this interpretation in the context of the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions of Tibet and both raises and responds to possible issues in a Buddhist moral phenomenology. This dissertation then turns its attention to view, meditation, action as the framework for moral phenomenological praxis. It surveys the ways this framework has been employed in Tibetan contexts before applying this framework to moral phenomenology. It nuances this approach by asking what ‘view’ really means in this context and investigates how meditation and direct meditative experience function to bring a view into one’s default perceptual mode in order to inform one’s action. Part two applies this theory and framework to contemporary issues facing the more-than-human world. It first surveys prior Buddhist environmental ethics before looking at how phenomenology has been given attention in environmental philosophy. It then articulates what an applied moral phenomenology would look like and what specific problems a moral phenomenological approach to environmental ethics can address. Finally, this dissertation proposes a moral phenomenological approach to environmental ethics by searching for an ecological view, analyzing how meditation functions in this context, and considering what the resultant action looks like. In doing so, it shows how moral phenomenology and its implementation through view, meditation, action can be applied to contemporary issues outside the specifics of the Buddhist tradition and can provide novel approaches to solving issues like climate change and the degradation of the more-than-human world.
Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2014
What can happen when the “monkey mind” of habitual conceptual thought is awakened to the more-than-human through attention to subtle energies and artmaking? Drawing on autoethnographic methods, we demonstrate how one graduate student’s creative engagement with a tree brought animist theory to life. This paper illustrates how a combination of time-in-relation, the contemplative artmaking practice of Creative Nature Connection, and special attention to subtle energies—the dark matter being addressed in this paper—can enable experiencing a tree as a sentient autonomous being. We address implications for environmental education and introduce easily doable principles for shifting into connection and opening to the unseen energy that connects all life.