The Revival of Philosophical Anthropology in the Age of Extinction: Learning to Find Our Place Again, #6.

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 sixth and final one, contains section 5 and the REFERENCES.

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, #6

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

The many ways in which we bodily, emotively, and affectively respond become a new field of inquiry for a fully developed “experiential science” of PA. The raw material of experience—accessible through the embodied, embedded, and enactive forms by which human beings resonate with their inner and outer environments—becomes a new domain for sensemaking.

This perspective is not the reduction of anthropology to a kind of descriptive approach, but instead the emergence of an interdisciplinary, fully embodied, intersectional theory that fully includes and integrates perspectives of neurology, psychology, biology, ecology, sociology, as well as the many hybrid fields that may develop between them. The legacy of the classical thinkers of PA is exactly this openness and willingness to think synoptically, following empirical evidence without being imprisoned by it.

Filtered through immersive (often personal) experiences aided by the expressive apparatus of the anthropological imagination, we glimpse the outline of a newly expanding, experiential space the coordinates of which shift with changes in the world. If human beings are reciprocally determined by the world, any response must cause a counterresponse. As this inherently communicative and resonant process unfolds, accelerating and branching out in new directions, so, too, must an Erfahrungswissenschaft resonate with it and develop along. A new science of experience requires a newly conceived and carefully cultivated world-openness towards human and non-human experiences of all kinds, particularly those involving a new range of actors, some as large as a forest and others as small as a mushroom. In anthropologically broadening our experience, new forms of sensemaking suggest themselves from the periphery of cognition, where they remained dormant until a finely tuned ecological attitude reinvigorated them. The new experiential science of Philosophical Anthropology can thereby aid us in navigating and surviving the unknowns of the Age of Extinction.

So, what kind of “fieldwork” would a philosopher-anthropologist perform in order to comprehend the human condition in the Age of Extinction? First, it would be a kind of fieldwork that maps the degree to which human responses to the climate change and ecological destruction are rooted in our biological make-up, but also how our excentric positionality allows us to cope effectively with it. The “external viewpoint” inherent in the human being allows for reflection and, thus, for conceptualizing one’s predicament. Second, it would constitute the bridge between the subtle shades of experience and modes of (textual) expression. In the imaginative description of Philippe Descola:

[A]nthropology, (in the wider sense of the term) is not an endeavour that could be characterised by a clearly circumscribed domain of inquiry (…). It should be seen, rather, as a certain style of knowledge—that is, as a pattern of discovery and a mode of systematisation that are supported by a set of skills progressively acquired through practice, both a turn of mind and a tour de main, a particular knack picked up through experience and acknowledged among others who have gained the same proficiency in dealing with social facts in our own special way. (Descola, 2005: p. 72)

In that connection, science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin has even proposed anthropological approaches as a form of “speculative science” (Freedman, 2008: p. 102). Or, alternatively, an account of a world as it could be, or a novel human condition that could develop on a damaged planet. Put differently, it creates a form of critique that “nurtures the openings and possibilities already present in the world and its experience” (Pandian, 2019: p. 117). This critique can be framed as creative emergence (Pandian, 2019: p. 119). What emerges is a newfound, open, and profoundly ecosystemic theory of the human condition. This approach turns the potential risk of an “open theory,” or absence of any final theory of the human being, into an advantage. In the absence of a final theory, one can—and possibly even should—freely adjust one’s conception of the human condition and its place in the cosmos according to historical and natural context. Third, and most importantly, fieldwork in a new Philosophical Anthropology could be to regard the world once more as a Gegenfield or field of encounters. In the Age of Extinction, such encounters are often novel, as climate change and ecological destruction produce unfamiliar effects. However, these encounters can be systematically utilized to redefine and shape our self-image, improving individual and collective decision-making for the decades and centuries to come.

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