From Past to Present - Philosophy of the Anthropocene - Section 5

      This week we turn our focus to a new text, The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene: Axial Echoes In Global Space, edited by Richard Polt and Jon Wittrock. In the Introduction, Polt and Wittrock explain that this book aims to rethink the responsibilities of philosophy in this new era – the Anthropocene. They state:

Anthropocene: the word has quickly become a byword for what many sense is a turning point in human and planetary history, an urgent new condition. It is surrounded not only by dread but also by curiosity: if we are truly entering an unprecedented and unpredictable epoch, new ways of understanding and dealing with ourselves and our world are bound to emerge in the coming decades and centuries. (p.ix)

     They then explain that the Anthropocene has exposed unique problems in many fields: science, technology, politics, history, literature, art, and, yes, philosophy. The authors state:

What do philosophers –  these often ignored, quarreling theorizers –  have to contribute to these issues? Are they irrelevant? In fact, it can be argued that they have a special responsibility to participate in the discussion. Like every major phenomenon, the Anthropocene demands to be understood philosophically; furthermore, modern philosophy was itself a major contributor to the rise of modern technology and thus to the dramatic transformation of the earth. The methods and distinctions of thinkers such as Descartes can be credited, but also blamed, for humanity's accelerated ability to analyze and alter its environment. More broadly, the philosophical aspiration to transcend the particular by rationally investigating essences eventually led to the universalizing theories of nature and humanity that have, in the modern age, dissolved former ecosystems and traditions. Thus, beyond the task of understanding the Anthropocene and its roots, philosophers may have a responsibility to ask whether there is anything that they, as philosophers, can do. Can we affect the future for the better? (p.x)

These are the questions that the writings in this text seek to grapple with.

     The authors next discuss their methods and some distinctive features of the writings in this text. Firstly, they have challenged the contributors to think on a scale as grand as the issues of the Anthropocene itself: “...a perspective that takes into account the entire history of philosophy and the history of the Earth itself.” (p.x) Secondly, they “...have focused less on concrete, short-term recommendations than on exploratory ideas that may stimulate new directions.” (p.x) Lastly, in one of my favorite excerpts from this text, they claim that they “…except the full and daunting scope of the task that philosophy has traditionally been assigned:

[T]o offer holistic views of history and the contemporary world, to critically scrutinize fundamental assumptions of other disciplines and within society at large, to venture into new areas of questioning (which may later develop into more precise sciences or areas of concrete inventions), and to offer new and arresting concepts, investigating their implications and visualizing unexpected connections. (p.x-xi)

To me, this sounds like it could be part of ‘the philosopher’s code’.

     However, to affect the future in positive ways, philosophy may have to acknowledge some of its potential missteps. One of these missteps, as the title of the text alludes to, is the idea of the “Axial Age” proposed by Karl Jaspers and the ideas of progress that accompanied it. The authors explain that Jaspers’s proposed Axial Age arose out of a whole host of “axial traditions” that carry with them their own issues. (p.xi) “Axial traditions conceptualized divisions between an imminent domain, or a world of the senses, and a transcendent domain, which provides an ultimate orientation for the former, and the promise of salvation or liberation from its woes.” (p.xii) However, as is discussed later by another contributor, this also helped divide man from the natural world and see themselves as superior to the world they rely on for survival. The authors write:

What we must not do is simply assume that our established conceptual systems are up to the task of thinking through the Anthropocene, as if they were not laden with a history that is entangled with the rise of modern science, technology, and industry. It has not been possible for this volume to address all the major axial traditions nor do all our chapters focus on exploring them, but all our contributors agree that it is against the backdrop of millennia of cultural history that humanity is now facing the planet-wide effects of its growth and activities. Axial echoes resound through global space. Indeed, one of the major points of bringing up Jasper's contested notion is that it immediately emphasizes that the Anthropocene is becoming the new “axis” on which the entire globe turns…

Furthermore, while science and technology can make clearly defined progress in some regards, it may well be that philosophy is challenged to return perpetually to its beginnings and to the most basic issues –  and the ideal of progress may be one of the presuppositions of modernity that philosophy must call into question. An unthinking insistence on progress may block the arrival of genuinely new ideas, phenomena, and ways of life. (p.xii-xiv) 

     The authors then proceed to give a brief description of each of the contributions to the texts, which we will skip here. Instead, we will examine one of those works in detail. 

    The work we will examine is The Coming of the Post-Axial Age by John Michael Greer. He begins by pointing out the reduction in popularity experienced by philosophy since the 1950s. He explains:

Though philosophy was never really part of the cultural mainstream at that time, it had the same kind of widespread following as jazz or science fiction. Attendees at any reasonably large cocktail party had a reasonable chance of meeting someone who was into philosophy, and those who knew where to look in any big city or college town with pretensions to culture could find at least one bar, bookstore, or all-night coffee shop where philosophy geeks talked earnestly into the small hours about Kant or Kierkegaard. (p.23) 

     However, today philosophy’s continuation, even within the collegiate atmosphere, is up for debate. The author points out that, though those of us who still engage in this ancient practice may be disheartened by this fact, we would be remiss to ignore the facts and not try to get ahead of it. Greer points out that “...philosophy has died at least once in the history of Western philosophy itself, during the dark ages that followed the fall of Roman civilization.” (p.24) And, he states:

The idea that an era of intellectual sophistication and subtlety can give way to an era of superstition and crude empirical generalization is unthinkable to many educated people today, even though history shows no shortage of examples… Behind that reaction lies the metanarrative of progress, the modern world's most widely accepted way of interpreting history.

At the heart of the metanarrative of progress is a rhetorical strategy that assigns certain arbitrarily chosen events of past and present the status of irreversible forward steps in the grand march of humanity, and tacitly assigns a less significant status to events that failed to further movement in whatever direction the grand march of humanity is held to follow. (p.24)

Greer thinks this is a dangerous metanarrative and questions its validity. He begins his next section by attacking Karl Jaspers’s theory of the Axial Age as “...the most important turning point in history.” (p.24)

     Greer explains that Jaspers’s theory “...built on the foundations laid by Hegel’s philosophy of history, but – like most twentieth-century European historiography –  it also reacted against the ideas of a more controversial figure in German intellectual life, the historian Oswald Spengler.” (p.25) To help understand these two competing ideas of history, the author writes:

Hegel famously argued for a theory of history in which the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, and the modern civilizations of Europe formed the three stages of a single narrative of human progress, to which the historical experiences of all other societies were mere addenda…

[Whereas,]...Spengler argued that each great culture traces out its own historical trajectory, subject to common laws of development and decline, and this history unfolds in a predictable series of stages from birth to death. The intellectual life of a great culture is thus as distinct as its history: “Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others.” 

From Spengler’s standpoint, as a result, the metanarrative of progress is a twofold falsification. To begin with, our civilization has risen but not yet fallen, and therefore judges its own history as well as that of other civilizations through the distorting lens of an incomplete experience of the historical process. On a deeper level, to Spengler, our idea of progress is simply a reflection of our own civilization's necessarily ethnocentric sense of values… 

Jaspers sought to prove that the rise of modern industrial civilization marked a permanent change in human affairs and not, as Spengler argued, the prelude to the Western world's decline and fall. The concept of the Axial Age was born out of that search.

Jaspers argued that the period between 800 and 200 BC represented an irrevocable turning point in human thought, a hinge of history dividing a lower from a higher realm of cultural and intellectual phenomenon. Before the Axial Age, mythic thought, primitive superstition, the timeless repetition of archaic irrationalities; after it, philosophy, reason, revealed religion, humanity set free to pursue its truly human capacities –  this, at least, according to Jaspers. (p.25-26)

But, was this hubris? In America, at this moment, one has to wonder if philosophy and reason will prevail. And, throughout the world, as we face the ecological issues resulting from the age of men, we have to ask if our intellect is enough to save us. 

     This author asks several questions that must be addressed, even if we accept Jaspers’s claim of “the irrevocable nature of progress.” (p.26) “What exactly was it that appeared with the Axial Age? Can anything be said about the cause of this apparent break with the past? And is Jaspers correct that the change heralded by the coming of the axial age is an irreversible event in human history?” (p.26) These questions remain unanswered by Jaspers or any other modern philosopher. There is one aspect of Jaspers’s argument that Greer does not dispute, however, and that is that the rise of philosophy did occur in the time and places that Jaspers claims. In the next section of his work, Greer proposes to answer some of his own questions. 

     Greer states that Jaspers admitted that there must be a cause for the coming about of the Axial Age. “He concluded, however, that it is impossible to identify any historical cause for the coming of the Axial Age, while pleading gamely that he was not trying to suggest a supernatural cause for the phenomenon. Whether or not this surrender to the unknowable was an attempt to create an opening for a Christian apologetics of history, along the lines of the famous “God of the gaps” argument…it is by no means required by the evidence.” (p.27-28) For Greer, the spread of “...literacy beyond a scribal class” is one feature that was evident in this time and these places. (p.28) And, he alludes to the fact that Jaspers may have intentionally ignored this fact because it would have detracted from the romanticism and supposed preordained nature of the Axial Age. 

     However, Greer points out, referring to the work of William V. Harris, that there are several important occurrences when a society transitions from scribal literacy to craftsman’s literacy. Scribal literacy is Harris’s term “for the possession of literacy solely by a scribal elite associated with palaces and temples, who use writing solely for record-keeping and other practical tasks…In contrast, [c]raftsman's literacy is Harris's term for the possession of literacy by a significant minority of the male population, including skilled craftspeople, landowners, public officials, and the like, while unskilled male laborers, farmers, the poor, and women generally remain illiterate.” (p.28) And, when a society transitions from a primarily oral society, with only scribal literacy, to one where a large minority can read, the changes are profound. Greer writes:

When literacy is no longer limited to a professional class but spreads through a significant minority of the population, writing and reading are no longer bound to the context of public performance, and the individual reader, pondering a document in solitude, becomes a recognized phenomenon. One crucial consequence is that for the first time, language can be detached from the other elements of oral communication and experienced in isolation. The meaning of words, rather than the character and intentions of speakers, accordingly becomes central to learned discourse.

The impact of this change can best be understood by observing the difference between mythology, the standard intellectual discourse of oral and scribal societies, and philosophy the standard intellectual discourse of societies that have achieved craftsman's literacy. Every mythology is a description of the actions and intentions of persons; every philosophy, by contrast, is a description of the properties and relations of abstractions. Mythology thus comes naturally in a society in which every linguistic act is part of a personal performance. Philosophy, in turn, comes naturally in a society in which words have become separated from the other, nonverbal elements of personal communication can therefore be experienced and understood on their own as impersonal markers for abstract ideas. (p.29)

     What does this mean for a society in which literacy rates are plummeting? Greer provides one stirring answer to this question from history. “In post-Roman Europe, to cite only one of the many examples, literacy once again became the preserve of a very small body of religious scribes, and mythology promptly replaced philosophy as the common mode of intellectual discourse.” (p.29) Could this still happen in today’s age? Has it already begun in some places?

     Greer continues by adding that, if an increase in literacy were what caused the coming of the Axial Age, it would help explain the “triumph of the logos.” (p.30) He explains this curious development as “...the conviction that the truth about the world consists of ideas that can be expressed in verbal formulae, and that the rest of reality is merely an expression of the truth known in words. Put perhaps too bluntly, it is the belief that words are more real than the experiences they describe.” (p.30) He provides some examples of this phenomenon:

When Parmenides placed in the mouth of a goddess that the world known by reason is the true world, and the world experienced by the senses was purely illusory, he sounded the keynote of the Axial Age…Plato's concept of the Ideas and Aristotle's application of verbal logic to the nonverbal phenomena of nature can usefully be seen as adaptations of the Parmenidean principle in the service of more thoroughly developed accounts of the world. (p.30)

Greer adds that this phenomenon was even more pervasive throughout India and in Chinese philosophical debates. 

     However, Greer explains that this phenomenon is best observed in the religions of these times. He states that the ancient religions, often polytheistic and pagan, focused on “...rituals and customs central to religious life, and either had no sacred writings or assigned them a secondary importance.” (p.31) However, with the rise of the logos, the newly formed religions of the Axial Ages “...makes belief in doctrines taught in a sacred scripture central to religious life and gives to traditional rituals and customs a secondary importance.” (p.31) Additionally, Greer points out that, just as the decline in literacy increases the belief in mythology, it also leads to a rise in ritual and a decline in the focus on scripture. 

     After discussing the emergence of craftsman’s literacy as a potential cause for the ‘triumph of the logos’ and the beginning of the so-called Axial Age, Greer then addresses the idea of progress proposed by Hegel, Jaspers, and others. He points out that throughout the nineteenth-century contentions within the philosophical community “...had the unexpected result of demonstrating that it was impossible to prove the exclusive validity of any one account of the world to the satisfaction of open-minded individuals who had accepted some other account of the world. Among the many consequences of this demonstration was the undermining of any attempt to apply the metanarrative of progress to the history of philosophy.” (p.32) Calling on the work of E.F. Schumacher, Greer states that the central problems of philosophy have divergent qualities. He continues:

Thus, the old dream of an explicit philosophical account of the entirety of the world, the final expression of the old faith in the truth of verbal formulae, falls at last. Along with it falls the hope of a final philosophy to which all lines will eventually converge…

No final philosophy, no all-encompassing and wholly explicit synthesis embracing the fundamentals of human thought will ever exist, and attempts to justify philosophy in terms of its movement toward some such synthesis, along the lines of the metanarrative of progress discussed earlier, and misguided at best. (p.33-34)

     Importantly, however, Greer points out that this does not mean that philosophy has no value. It simply means that we need to reevaluate “...what exactly philosophy is for.” (p.34) And, in the next section of his work, Greer sets out to discuss a new “meaning of philosophy” by comparing the development of philosophical thought with the development of growing grains. (p.34) He explains that cultivating grain crops, as opposed to less durable crops, was what allowed civilization to develop and thrive. The ability of grains to “be transported and stored for long periods without spoilage…allowed modes of economic centralization no earlier form of human subsistence had made possible.” (p.35) However, though the cultivation of grain was also heralded as an “irreversible forward step in the grand upward march of humanity,” there are many places on earth where grain cultivation faltered and civilizations then failed. 

     Greer argues that there is something to be gained, even through the losses. He writes: 

The failures as well as the successes deserve attention in any meaningful understanding of the consequences of growing grains.

I suggest that the same approach might usefully be applied to the consequences of expanded literacy, philosophy among them. Like the practice of growing grain, the practice of diffusing literacy beyond a scribal elite opened up possibilities no one imagined in advance and set in motion a cascade of consequences that laid the groundwork for a great deal of modern culture. In both cases, those possibilities and consequences emerged promptly whenever the underlying practice became sufficiently widespread.

Neither the practices nor their results were irreversible…Neither the practices nor their results, for that matter, were inevitable…A strong case can be made that, barring some event drastic enough to abolish either practice and put their recovery out of reach, both grain agriculture and more-than-scribal literacy, with all their consequences, represent enduring additions to the range of possibilities open to human societies and individuals…

If philosophy and the other products of the Axial Age are understood as possibilities rather than destinies, then human history presents no single line of progress. Instead, it offers a smorgasbord of options from which individuals and societies are within their rights to pick and choose, without that act of choice somehow making them less than…human. (p.36)

     In light of these findings, Greer suggests we work to retool philosophy into a practice more appropriate for the Anthropocene. He expounds:

Another lesson that can be drawn from the history of grain agriculture, though, has much to offer philosophers as our species moves deeper into a challenging future…As current stocks of fossil fuels, groundwater, topsoil, and other necessities are exhausted, the areas suited for agriculture can be expected to shrink considerably, forcing human societies in those areas to choose between retooling their subsistence strategies and going extinct…

A similar project on a more abstract plane presents itself as an essential project for today's philosophers, and those of tomorrow, should philosophy as a living tradition survive the troubles of the near future…Some part of the responsibility for the rising spiral of crises now besetting the industrial world, in fact, might reasonably be assigned to habits of thought that fixate on such abstractions as the metanarrative of progress, and ignore gritty realities such as the dependence of changes arbitrarily singled out as “progressive” on the rapid depletion of nonrenewable resources and the wholesale dumping of poisonous waste into the biosphere. At the same time, the extraordinary development of abstract reflection and philosophical thought set in motion by the Axial Age has yielded much that may turn out to be of value to the human societies of the far future. (p.36-37)

     Therefore, Greer suggests three projects, or tasks, for philosophers to focus their engagement on in the near future. He writes:

[O]ne of the most significant tasks toward which philosophers might choose to devote their time and effort just now is the act of reassessing the heritage of philosophy from the Axial Age to the present, sorting out those ventures that proved to be productive from those that turned out sterile, those that taught useful ways of thinking from those that encouraged people to lose themselves in dysfunctional habits of mind, and so on…The reassessment I am proposing thus does not aim at a final synthesis of philosophy, but a diverse set of explorations from which the future will make its own choices…

Another worthwhile project relevant to the future of philosophy is the presentation of core philosophical ideas in forms suited to the ordinary literate public…It was largely in the form of summaries, encyclopedias, and popularizations written in late Roman times that philosophical thinking survived in the West after the fall of Rome, and it was from the sources that philosophy was rekindled as scribal literacy gave way to craftsman's literacy in the Muslim world and medieval Europe.

The same thing might be worth aiming for as industrial civilization moves deeper into crisis, with an eye toward the rekindling of philosophy as a living tradition after the deindustrial dark ages ahead. The same principle that led botanists to establish a seed bank on the Arctic island of Svalbard might inspire philosophers to create an idea bank; ideas, fortunately for such a project, can be stored in much more compact forms than seeds and do not require refrigeration to stay viable for the long term. 

A third project, more challenging in some ways than the ones already mentioned, would involve sustained reflection on the incongruity between the mass literacy, universal education, and claims to intellectual superiority of contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable futility of attempts to turn contemporary industrial civilization from a self-destructive course by rational means. The failure of environmental activism to gain more than lip service from political institutions, even when the evidence of imminent crisis was overwhelming and the cost of inaction catastrophic, is a sobering lesson in the limits of reason. (p.37-39)

     Greer concludes by stating:

The impetus of the Axial Age has thus taken the project of human civilization as far as it can…I suggest that the age before us might be best understood simply as a post-Axial Age, a period not yet amenable to any more substantive definition, in which attempts to make sense of the intellectual legacies of the Axial Age will have to grapple with the failure of our time to make good on the apparent promise of abstract reasoning.

     Though we were not able to fully examine more of the works in this text, I highly recommend it to any philosopher who is engaging with the issues of the Anthropocene. There are eleven individual works compiled in this text, each examining a different way that philosophy could be used to aid in the crises brought on by the age of man. A couple more of my favorites include: On Nature and Liberation by Timothy Sean Quinn and The Voices of Nature: Toward a Polyphonic Conception of Philosophy by Thomas M. Alexander. I hope you will check it out for yourself.

Our next, and final, section will explore the text Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction.