Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre's existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthly locations include the Icelandic coast, the Minnesota woods, the Indiana Dunes, the Chinese Great Plain, the Venetian Lagoon, and more; worldly situations include that of the artist, the activist, the consumer, the tourist, and more. Through their diversity of methods and substantive concerns, the chapters reveal a wealth of critical and heuristic resources within Sartre's thought for thinking through and engaging the planetary ecological crisis and its direct ties to global social, economic, and political crises. In full recognition of Sartre's personal distaste for agrarian settings and wilderness, and some ostensibly anti-environmental philosophical and literary moments, the contributors take the proper Sartrean line that how we view nature and our relationship to nature is neither closed nor predetermined. Like life itself, our worldly relationship to earthly nature is rooted in the sufficiency and open-endedness of freedom.
Matthew C. Ally is professor of philosophy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. Damon Boria is associate professor of philosophy at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University.
Contents Foreword Introduction by Matthew C. Ally & Damon Boria Part I. Sartre and Ecology Chapter 1. "Sartre and Problems in the Philosophy of Ecology - with a Thirty-Year Update" by William L. McBride Part II. Art and Phenomenology Chapter 2. "Soundscape Ecology and a Sartrean Phenomenology of Listening" by Craig Matarrese Chapter 3. "The Ecological Gaze: Re-Reading Sartre through Guido van Helten's No Exit Murals" by Joe Balay Part III. Ethics Chapter 4. "Three Sartrean Motivations for Environmentalism" by Kiki Berk and Joshua Tepley Chapter 5. "I Am What I Buy: Bad Faith and Consumer Culture" by Elizabeth Butterfield Chapter 6. "Buying Green: A Trap for Fools, or, Sartre on Ethical Consumerism" by Michael Butler Part IV. Dialectics and Politics Chapter 7. "Heralding Kairos: The Depths of Seriality and Creating Earth as a Work of Art" by Austin Hayden Smidt Chapter 8. "Counter-Finality and the Living World" by Paul Gyllenhammer Chapter 9. "Hyperobjects and the Practico-Inert: Ecology and the Critique of Dialectical Reason" by Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink Part V. Ontology and Metaphysics Chapter 10. "Sartrean Ethics Meets Deloria's Native American Metaphysics: A Spatialized Existentialist Ethic" by Kimberly Engels Chapter 11. "Nothingness, Emptiness, and Ecology: A Reframing of Sartre's Early Ontology through Buddhist Metaphysics" by Dane Sawyer Part VI. Reimagining Past and Future Chapter 12. "Toward Ecologically-Oriented Political Projects: Reimagining Existentialism at Algren's Cabin" by Damon Boria Chapter 13. "After the Holocene: Reimagining Sartre's Venice" by Matthew C. Ally
