Holobiontic Encounters (AI-generated image curated by author)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
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 fifth, contains sections 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4.
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, #5
4.2. Anthropology and Chronicling Sensibilities (Point II)
For an organism, being responsive implies that it integrates the cues it receives within the full bandwidth of its form of life. Responding thus surpasses acting on a stimulus or merely following a drive or instinct. To respond to environmental cues, emotions, bodily signals, behaviors, written information, myths, tacit beliefs, or intuitions, entails a fully embodied, embedded and enactive comportment (Ingold, 2000). For instance, changes in the environment cause serious and widespread psychological impacts. This ranges from emotions like grief, to specific forms of ecology-related or climate-related anxiety, to new emotional states like solastalgia, i.e., the emotional or existential distress caused by negative, unwelcome environmental changes to one’s natural environment Originating in the work on trauma processing by Joanna Macy and developed by—amongst others—Glenn Albrecht, a new vocabulary for thinking about emotions and other affective states relating to our ecological predicament comes into being (Macy, 1995; Albrecht, 2009). These words support sensemaking and allow for construing a new conceptual and ethical world that responds to the changing and metamorphosing present. Such words are not only responses, but they point towards a new pattern of responsivity—a gradually emerging, new attitude towards the world.
Across different cultures, and depending on the ecological emergency, the responses of individuals, groups or populations differ across a wide affective and cognitive spectrum. Feelings and experiences associated with a changing Earth range from anxiety to uncertainty and mental health issues, as well as the complete reversal of traditional lifestyles, the loss of specific crafts or ways of living (Sartore et al., 2008; Tschakert, 2016; Siqueiros-García et al., 2022; Hertzog et al., 2024). Responsivity should not be approached from an analytical point of view only, merely mapping out responses to events, but instead a new and invigorated PA could well assist in providing new and effective habits of dealing with climate change and ecological destruction.
Habits express a meaningful encounter between an agent and their world and involve a kind of “refined responsivity” to environmental conditions (Dreon, 2024: p. 138). When someone develops a habit, they “acquire a way of navigating a sector of the world” (McGuirk, 2023: p. 107. Again, PA cultivates new habits through fieldwork and immersion, but above all by integrating the experiential domain with an integrative, enveloping theoretical attitude. When engaging in a concrete activity such as gardening, rewilding, hiking, or agriculture, intelligent habits involve a fine-tuned sensitivity to the specific conditions that render such practices worthwhile. One can look at plants, landscapes, ecosystems or crops and understand whether they are healthy due to too much (or too little) climatic exposure, erosion, nutrition or soil conditions. These habits support active thinking by restricting the focus of attention and fixing boundaries, and by enlarging one’s range of possible actions, observations, imaginings, and opportunities (Dreon, 2023: p. 143). For instance, when engaged in mushroom picking, intelligent habits allow one to distinguish between those that are edible and those that aren’t, and to bracket out features associated with the blueberries that are present by resisting whatever pull they might have on one’s attention. There is a “thinning out of the perceptual space” (McGuirk, 2023: p. 110).
Similarly, if someone observes a landscape, they can represent certain specific things in it. They might focus on the interplay between mass and space, the water system formed by lakes and rivers, identifiable ecological gradients, etc. For each of these perspectives, (aesthetic) attunement, (artistic) sensibility, and “refined responsiveness” are required (Dreon, 2023: p. 138). What develops is a fine-grained, layered systemic responsivity that understands the system as a whole or its parts (for instance, when picking mushrooms and correctly identifying the growth conditions of their localities). One learns to “broaden” their thinking virtually to the point that one merges with the subject matter. In this connection, as I’ll discuss later, the eco-imagination and the anthropological imagination have decisive roles to play.
For a new and reinvigorated PA, mapping these cultural currents redraws the conceptual map of what it means to be human, viewed through the lens of affects and sensibilities. It contributes substantially to reconceptualizing the role of bodily involvement in dealing with changing environments. In particular, changes in seasonal habits and bodily responses offer a rich field for investigation. How do our bodily comportment towards the environment and our self-image change when the environment changes? As Kohn and Tsing have pointed out in various studies, the environment itself is a lively and dynamic social system, not a mute background to exclusively human activity. It follows that changes in the environment change the social structures interwoven with it (Kone and Tsing, 2013; Kone, 2005; Tsing, 2021; see also Gibson and Venkatesvar, 2015; Corvino, 2023). Their studies cast the environment as a relational partner or a system with social, existential, and ethical as well as natural properties with which we continuously tangle and become entangled. In this sense, PA allows the chance to include, invite, and integrate so-called “indigenous knowledge” as an integral part of its methodology, thereby moving beyond the Western mindset and the institutional boundaries of the professional academia. This exchange has scarcely begun, but it is a promising perspective to examine how human sensibility resonates with climate change across the globe.
4.3. Focus on Lived Experience on All Levels (Point III)
To respond entails also producing new conditions for responding. Cultures produce and stabilize such new conditions. They stabilize and nurture certain behavioral, affective, and emotional patterns and habits. Through the construction of narratives, repeated actions, annual rhythms, values, and norms, such patterns are passed on and developed, while others become obsolete and disappear. Confronted with the Gegenfield or the “field of surprises,” cultural structures mediate the raw impact of situations and problems that are encountered, prescribing structured responses or carefully calibrated attitudes.
For Scheler, this phenomenon manifested itself in the production of shared images—collective dreams, ambitions, convictions, or values—that influence how people choose and decide among multiple courses of action. In particular, it manifests itself in the maintenance of certain norms and practices that are held in high esteem. Examples might be discipline, fortitude, craftsmanship, a reverence for nature, or impulse control. The classical thinkers of PA focused their efforts on how individuals and the collective (cultural) structures in which they were embedded could be conceptualized from a comprehensive anthropological viewpoint.
The new synthesis in biology provides powerful themes for an anthropology tailored to the challenges of the Age of Extinction. Notably, the idea of the individual as the ontological unit of analysis has been subverted. Living individuals are holobionts—giant communities of cooperating organisms. For instance, cows cannot digest grass—the microbes in their guts can (Gilbert, 2017). The organism called “cow” is a conglomerate of different communities that cooperate. The approximately 160 different types of bacteria populate the human digestive tract. Without this community of microbes and fungi, the complex gut-brain axis cannot function at all, thereby curtailing cognitive capacities. Complex organisms are communities rather than individuals (Gilbert et al., 2012; McFall-Ngai, 2002, 2017; Wang and Kasper, 2014; Sawa et al., 2017).
This biological-ecological (and indeed communitarian) perspective entangles and embeds the non-human in the sphere of the human. Entangled in a broader planetary metabolism, the individual, as an isolated Kantian transcendental subject, becomes a myth. Plessner’s notions of assimilation and dissimilation point towards the multiple interactions between organism and environment, which serves to maintain the stable structure of the organism. Once we turn to environmental psychology and modern literature of eco-anxiety, we see how deeply outer and inner environments are linked, even to the point that the distinction seems to break down.
Looking outwards and inwards simultaneously, lived experience is not constrained to the lived body or the life of the mind. A robust discipline of ecopsychology has theorized the multiple links between perception, mood, and psychological life. If “Spirit” or the collective imagination in Scheler’s sense furnishes images of the world, what would it create nowadays, confronted with scenes of a damaged planet? In ecocriticism, the ecological imagination has created powerful images to deal with the Age of Extinction. The discipline of anthropology can accomplish a similar mind-broadening effect:
[A]nthropology has a crucial method to contribute: its fundamental mode of imagination, its approach to humanity as an open horizon of displacement rather than a fixed position in the world. (Corvino, 2023: p. 80).
As the boundary between outer and inner worlds breaks down, and the continuities and relations between human and non-human are properly viewed, a new imaginative horizon opens—one in which anthropology becomes more systemic, more entangled and less focused on fixity and definition. This requires an imaginative leap that philosophy or the natural sciences cannot accomplish on their own. Classical PA furnished the conceptual instruments to perform this leap, especially when combined with a rich literature in ecopsychology, ecocriticism, systems theory, and environmental philosophy.
4.4. Resituating the Subject-Object Relation (Point IV)
The reasoning of all classical thinkers in PA starts at the level of the life processes, processing to the organism, and extending outwards to the environment. This approach avails us of an option to recast the whole subject-object relation once more. This time not in the same way as the classical Philosophical Anthropologists had done (by making an “external viewpoint” an integral feature of an organism), but as a radicalized repositioning of the (human) organism in its environment.
This predicament entrenches human beings in a deeper and more dynamic environment, characterized by the ceaseless flow of information and the confrontation with climatic and ecological effects that supersede the scale of the individual. Even such global effects are experienced at an individual level. Every person who contributes to environmental pollution is both perpetrator and victim.
Considering the importance of experience, we see that the safe, distanced, and comfortably abstract “view from nowhere” is replaced by an involuntary immersion. Through our bodies, immune systems, and perceptual systems, we experience changes in the biosphere. Glenn Albrecht’s penetrating work, as well as case studies of the effects of climate change and ecological degradation, show how fine-grained and almost subterranean these experiences are. The idea that human beings have an “external viewpoint” built into their biological constitution also allows us to conceptualize our ecological predicament through a variety of sensible channels. It is this centrality of sense experience (in the broadest sense of the term) that furnishes a rich research field for PA. Immersive experiences, bodily sensed changes, new affects and emotions, as well as psychological states, can all accommodate a new PA that takes its own idea of the resituated subject-object relationship fully seriously. For the new Philosophical Anthropologist, experiences are concrete events to reconceptualize the human condition in terms of responsivity. The comfortable confines of armchair philosophy cannot compete with the richness of fieldwork:
One cannot become an anthropologist without a sense of the critical and transformative force of such implicatedness in the lives of others, because coming of age in the field depends on an exposure to these powers, in the texture of one’s own being and beyond.(Pandian, 2019: p. 112).
So framed, the term “fieldwork” acquires a new and deepened meaning. It connotes not just working in this or that environment or habitat, but a broadening and deepening of the “field of experience,” or the range of different experiences one is exposed to. By deliberately immersing oneself in the experiences that the Age of Extinction has to offer, a rich new register of responsive sensibility can be cultivated to resonate with the present. One must engage in “[f]orms of experience that put the field of the human into play” (Pandian, 2019: p. 79). Put like this, life processes itself become narratives; cultures become registers of accumulate experiences. In adopting such a field-like approach, PA can remain systematic, yet fully immersed (Gare, 2022).
Repositioning the subject-object relationship foregrounds the distributed yet ubiquitous presence of non-human actors, broadening our range of experience, but also what counts as a meaningful encounter or relationship. Engaging with the environment from this deepened viewpoint is the newest step in our self-shaping through anthropology.
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