The Revival of Philosophical Anthropology in the Age of Extinction: Learning to Find Our Place Again, #4.

Holobiontic Encounters (AI-generated image curated by author)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

1.1 Structure of the Essay

1.2 The Core of Philosophical Anthropology Listed as Four Basic Points

2. Theorizing the Tension of Being

3. Responsivity as an Anthropological Concept

4. Philosophical Anthropology for Shifting Times

4.1 Centralizing Relations (Point I)

4.2 Anthropology and Chronicling Sensibilities (Point II)

4.3 Focus on Lived Experience on All Levels (Point III)

4.4 Resituating the Subject-Object Relation (Point IV)

5. Conclusion: Fieldwork, or Cultivating a Mode of Experience

REFERENCES

The essay that follows will be published in six installments; this, the fourth, contains sections 4 and 4.1.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

An earlier version of this essay appeared under the title “Reviving Philosophical Anthropology for the Age of Extinction” in Nature & Anthropology 4, 1 (2026): 10003, available online at URL = <https://www.sciepublish.com/article/pii/909>.

The Revival of Philosophical Anthropology in the Age of Extinction: Learning to Find Our Place Again, #4

4. Philosophical Anthropology for Shifting Times

A new, reinvigorated form of PA would internalize this insight, carefully recording how human beings respond to changes in their environment. By way of providing examples and working out several thematic research fields, I revisit basic points I–IV from Section 1.2, showing how a new PA provides practical concepts and methods for dealing with our current ecological predicament. Each subsection is devoted to a single basic point. In particular, the goal of this section is to extend the conceptual underpinnings of PA in order to address the burning issues of climate change, extinction, and ecological destruction. As such, it provides a wide range of conceptual angles and possible points of encounter to re-envision the “human place in the cosmos”, as PA had originally done.

4.1. Centralizing Relations (Point I)

Classical PA inquired about the “human place in the cosmos.” This question already assumes human beings as being positioned, (i) as directly interacting with physical environments, (ii) as embodied beings, and (iii) as being able to understand themselves self-consciously as being positioned. Differently put, human beings are able to understand themselves as not only mediating between themselves and their environment, but also as being positioned at the interface between them (Plessner, 2019: p. 302). This realization had already been grappled with in Existentialism. But now, with the advent of ecocriticism, our predicament as the authors of the climate crisis and experiencing subjects of “a damaged planet,” this question returns once again and even more forcefully.

Responsivity blurs the boundaries between individual and environment, highlighting the relations that obtain between them. Such blurring implies the foregrounding of convergencies, symbiogenesis, collaborative entanglement, and co-evolution. This rich relationality extends in multiple directions. It creates a new, level playing field connecting human and non-human agency. Recently, anthropology and philosophy alike have embraced the non-human world, consisting of natural materials, processes, and phenomena. The non-human is increasingly viewed as a crucial component of a new non-anthropocentric anthropology. The human-all-too-human encounter with the non-human is an essential ingredient of what it means to be human.

A robust paradigm of philosophical thinking has sought recently to overthrow the privileged idea of humanity dominating the biosphere. The emergence of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, weird realism, Jane Bennett’s accounts of vibrant matter and onto-sympathy, and Anne Tsing’s studies on the material dimension of exploitative processes, all highlight human dependency on non-human agency:

[t]he non-human project has questioned the category of the “human” and “this has involved considering how the human functions in relation to social justice agendas and in the context of debates about the role of the human in environmental futures.” (Colombino and Childs, 2022: p. 356)

The human/non-human coupling “horizontalizes” the relationship between humanity and the rest of the world. This is because humans and non-humans share their materiality (Bennett, 2004, 2010, 2017). They are subject to many of the same natural laws. This entails that non-human actors are accorded an agency that PA must analyze if it wishes to assert something about the human place in the cosmos. The non-human turn imposes the imperative to engage with various agents in the world that we former did not think of as agents, ranging from chemicals, mRNA sequences, and fungi, to plastic soup and microplastics. This viewpoint recognizes that humans are always already radically entangled, and that competition and control are just two ways of looking at the natural and cultural worlds. It can be critically questioned whether these ossified ways of looking will serve us for the challenges of the 21st century:

Approaches attuned to “multispecies becoming-with” better sustain us in dealing with the trouble on Terra. An emerging extended synthesis in transdisciplinary biologies and arts proposes to string figures tying together human and non-human ecologies, evolution, development, history, affects, performances, technologies, and more. (Haraway, 2017: p. 28)

Haraway suggests considering an essentially richer field of investigation in which the newest insights from biology inform a richer, interconnected, and humbler picture of the human place in the cosmos. Just as the classical thinkers of PA utilized the latest findings in biology and zoology to formulate elaborate, anti-reductionist theories of humanity and the human condition, so too could a revived PA fully embrace the “extended synthesis” emerging now from biology, ecology, and systems thinking alike.

Second, the focus on relations decenters the human being once more. But this decentering need not lead to alarmism or nihilism. It shows that the “web of meaning” in which humanity is implicated and entangled offers multiple ways for beneficial entanglements and multi-species collaboration. As Svenning has pointed out, there is a very real chance here for a “wilder Anthropocene” that we need to imagine (Svenning, 2017: pp. 67–70; see also Harper, 1995).

In other words, we need to conceptualize our position in a new world, even a world that exists after our own world has ended (Paans 2020). What does not help is the so-called “shifting baseline syndrome,” by which we can only imagine environments that we remember. The powerful imaginative and experiential tools of PA—particularly its emphasis on displacement—provide such instruments for envisioning. So, PA could become a truly creative anthropology, engaging in conceptualizing future scenarios in which human and non-human agency are related in fundamentally different ways than they are now. Here, immersive fieldwork, and the practices of reading as well as writing, play productive roles. The anthropological imagination is not a mere recorder of our encounters with the natural world—it is a personal account of such encounters. Pursued systematically, it is an instrument for communicating a universal predicament. Likewise, this immersion capitalizes on our self-shaping capacities—through fieldwork, anthropologists transform the collective experiential field, and their narratives—like Scheler’s Spirit—shape the thoughts of others.

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