In his essay ‘Sacraments of the New Society’ Rowan Williams describes Jesus in the

Last Supper as ‘passing over’ into the symbolic forms of bread and wine by his own

word and gesture, which is a ‘transition into the vulnerable and inactive forms of the

inanimate world’.1

By resigning himself into the signs of food and drink, putting himself into the

hands of other agents, he signifies his forthcoming helplessness and death.

He announces himself by ‘signing’ himself as a thing, to be handled and

consumed.2

In doing so Jesus anticipates his being ‘given over’, his betrayal by those at the feast.

Thus, by his surrender into the passive forms of bread and wine he ‘makes void and

powerless the impending betrayal, and, more, makes the betrayers his guests and

debtors’. This relinquishing of power in the face of betrayal, desertion and violence,

allows Jesus, paradoxically, to ‘shape and structure the situation’.3 In a particularly

fascinating passage Williams suggests that this renunciation and passing into the inert

forms of the bread and wine puts ‘some questions against an instrumentalist view of

material objects.4 He quotes Simone Weil’s notion, from her notebooks, about the world

of ‘dead’ matter as the active incarnation of God, as it represents the ‘supreme integrity

of divine self-effacement as the only way in which divine love can be received by use

1 Rowan William, On Christian Theology (Oxford, Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 219

2 Ibid

3 Ibid, 216

4 Ibid, 217

without idolatry and distortion’. God empties himself of his divinity by becoming man,

then of His humanity, by becoming a corpse, bread and wine, matter.5

To read Derrida against Derrida, and to say, with Richard Iveson that the trace

continues with the living and the non-living

Jean-Hugues Barthelemy on Gilbert Simondon

My thesis will be more precisely the following: humanity is that form of

psycho-social life which, by means of the non-living artefacts that support it

and found its historicity, extends bio-psychic animal life of which the non-

living condition is not yet the artefact but simple apoptosis (‘cellular suicide’),

and whose origin is a third form of ‘non-life’: the chemical non-living.

Simondon and Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead…

Bryant, Bogost, Harman

Harman radicalises the ideas of Martin Heidegger, as his starting point, and in particular

his development of ‘tool-analysis’ in Being and Time In Being and Time Heidegger

famously analysed our relation to tools (equipment, ‘zeug’) by distinguishing between

our normal experience most of the time, in which the tool is ‘ready-to-hand’

(zuhandenheit), and in which we merely use it, without being properly aware of it

conceptually as an object, and the times we do become aware of its ‘being-at-hand’

5 Ibid, 217 - 8

(vorhandenheit). Though Heidegger fails to capitalise on this, Harman see in this analysis

an acknowledgement of the autonomous life of objects beyond our apprehension of

them

In Vibrant Matter Bennett, discusses the active participation of nonhuman forces in

events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across

bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public

events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect

of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing

that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur

the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted

to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting

situations and events.

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through

extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem

cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material

formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3

fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood.

In his book The Democracy of Objects Levi Bryant develops what he calls ‘onticology’, a

flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being

reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal

essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects.

In his book the Ecological Thought. In the latter Morton argues that all forms of life are

connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all

dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the

ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does “Nature” exist as an entity

separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life.

In Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost develops an object-

oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being; a philosophy in which nothing

exists any more or less than anything else; in which humans are elements, but not the

sole or even primary elements, of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental

phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost's alien phenomenology takes

for granted that all beings interact with, perceive, and experience one another. This

experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and only becomes

accessible through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor.

Latour

n a recent paper, ‘Will Non-Humans be Saved: An Argument in Eco-Theology’, Latour

makes a strong case for the ecological relevance of the Eucharist, and its potential for a

better response to our current environmental crises.

Not only does religion demand a level of radical transformation compared to

which the ecological gospel looks like a timid appeal to buy new garbage cans,

but it also has – and this will be even more important for the future – a very

assured confidence in the artificial remaking of earthly goods. As the

Metropolitan John of Permagon points out (as a rule, Eastern orthodox theology is

very much at the forefront on these questions), the Eucharist is a presentation not

of grains and grapes but of the actively, artificially, technically (and I would add

scientifically) transformed grains in bread and grapes in wine (Zizioulas 2003).

Before the transubstantiation of bread and wine into flesh and blood, there is

another indisputable transubstantiation of grain into bread and of grapes into wine

that is no less mysterious than the other (and being a Catholic from a Burgundy

wine family who has in addition spent many years studying Louis Pasteur, you

may take my word for it ...). So, because of these two features (radical

transformation and full confidence in artificial transformations in this world, or in

other words, Incarnation), religion, in its Christian instantiation at least, presents

itself as a rather plausible alternative to an ecological consciousness whose ethical

and emotional drives do not seem to have enough petrol (or soybeans) to carry us

through the tasks it has burdened upon us. In this respect, nothing is less

conservative, and nothing is more down to earth, than religion. The sad histories

of the Christian churches should not mislead us here. Even if they were unable to

digest the shock of science in the seventeenth century, we should not forget that

the appeal to renewing everything, here and now, and in this world, is first of all a

religious passion – and a Passion it is ... Whereas ecological consciousness has

been unable to move us, the religious drive to renew the face of the earth just

might.

Whitehead first rose to prominence as a result of his collaboration with Bertrand Russell

in producing the Principia Mathematica, the monumental multi-volume attempt to lay the

foundations of mathematics, published in the early twentieth century. Later, in his early

sixties, he accepted Harvard University’s invitation to become a professor of philosophy

(despite having no formal training in philosophy as such). At Harvard he produced a

number of important works, including Science and the Modern World, Adventures of

Ideas, and, most important of all, Process and Reality. The last has a strong claim to be

the most important work of twentieth century philosophy, even though it languished in

comparative obscurity for many years. It remained in some kind of circulation owing to

the work of so-called process theologians, who found in it a new avenue for theology.

Outside the Anglophone world, in the 1960s, Gilles Deleuze cited it as a major work, and

important influence on his own thinking. More recently Whitehead’s work has become

more visible owing to the interest shown in it by, among others, Bruno Latour, Isabelle

Stengers, and Judith Butler, as well as thinkers connected with Speculative Realism, and

Object-Oriented Ontology, or Onticology.

What Whitehead offers is a complex conception of time in terms of creativity. In

Whitehead’s cosmos there are no things, just processes, or, rather, things are processes,

events. Whitehead described his thinking as a philosophy of organism. The difficulty of

Whitehead’s ideas is compounded by his language, which involves novel phrases and

neologisms. Put as simply as possible, Whitehead understands reality to be composed of

nothing but novel entities he first called ‘events’ or what he later termed as ‘actual

occasions’, or sometimes ‘actual entities’ or ‘occasions of experience’. Actual occasions

are the result of a process of coming to be, or what Whitehead calls ‘concrescence’. In

order to do so they take on previous actual occasions in the act of, in another of

Whitehead’s neologisms, ‘prehension’. Many different antecedent occasions can

contribute to the concrescence of an occasion, either immediately, or mediately,

inasmuch as they contributed to an occasion that, in its turn, contributed to another. This

is what is called ‘positive prehension’. Previous occasions can also be excluded from the

process of concrescence, thus being a process of ‘negative prehension’. Concrescence

involves ‘enjoyment’ and perishing. Once an occasion is realized it perishes, and in doing

so, becomes available to be prehended by future occasions. In effect every occasion is

related to every other occasion either immediately or mediately, meaning that the cosmos

is a vast web of interdependent relationality. This also allows Whitehead to make a claim

for a certain kind of immortality, in that every occasion in a sense survives in its being

taken up by successive occasions

Actual occasions are ‘dipolar’ inasmuch as the process of concrescence involves both a

physical and mental pole. The physical pole refers to the way in which previous

occasions are prehended.

Creativity

Proposition

In order to avoid the pitfall of nominalism, in which universals are just names, Whitehead

develops an idea of ‘eternal forms’, which differ from enduring occasions…

God…

What we perceive as material things, bodies, rocks and so on are the enduring result of

the ongoing aggregation of billions of actual occasions in what Whitehead names as

‘societies’ or ‘nexus’. Their social organization as emerging and perishing societies

allows for the endurance through time of things.

Whitehead and Simondon

One of Whitehead’s principle targets was modern thought’s reduction of all causality to

efficient, physical causality, without regard for final causes. Isabelle Stengers claims that

this diagnosis remains true, and demonstrates the degree to which it applies to neo-

darwinianism

Suffice it to think of the ineptitude of the propositions induced by the postulate

that Darwinian selection must suffice to explain the evolution of living beings

because it acts as a barrier against the irrationality of final causes. The

transmission of genes and their selection give meaning to the only way of

accommodating our own “finalized” enterprises to a world in which physical

causality reigns supreme. In the name of this “holy war” against final causes, all

human activities are summoned to affirm their submission to selective logic. As a

result, the intellectual and artistic capabilities of human beings, whose problem is

that appear to be somewhat excessive with regard to strict survival needs in these

mammals, have ben related by some contemporary spokespersons of Darwinism

to sexual selection. (126)

In Bruno Latour’s words what ‘occupied Whitehead for most of his career’ was what

called the ‘bifurcation of nature’, that emerged as a consequence of the scientific

revolution, in which a distinction is made between those ‘primary qualities’ belonging to

the things themselves, and those ‘secondary qualities’ which constitute our experience of

those things. As Latour defines it ‘Bifurcation is what happens whenever we think the

world is divided into two sets of things: one which is composed of the fundamental

constituents of the universe – invisible to the eyes, known to science, real and yet

valueless – and the other which is constituted of what the mind has to add to the basic

building blocks to make sense of them’. The latter are ‘unfortunately of no use to science,

since they have no reality, even though they are the stuff out of which dreams are made’.

Latour declares that ‘if nature really is bifurcated, no living organism would be possible,

since being an organism means being the sort of thing whose primary and secondary

qualities – if they did exist – are endlessly blurred’.

Latour engages with this, and with the problematic of the bifurcation of nature in the first

of ‘What is the Style of Matters of Concern’, his 2008 Spinoza Lectures, entitled ‘Nature

at the Cross-roads: The Bifurcation of Nature and its End’. At the beginning of the lecture

he quotes from a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

Why theology? Because the first must be first,

And first is the notion of truth

It’s poetry precisely

With its behavior of a bird thrashing against the transparency

Of a windowpane that testifies to the fact

That we don’t know how to live in a phantasmagoria.

Let reality return to our speech.

For Latour the problem is that we have difficulty associating truth and poetry, thinking

instead that poetry is about escaping from ‘the harsh truth conditions of referential

language’. And it is ‘a strange philosophy invented somewhere in the 17th century which

has made it impossible to “let reality return to our speech”’ (10). This philosophy is of

course the bifurcation of nature, in which…

…the bird will come thrashing against a transparent windowpane and there is not

the slightest chance for reality “to return to our speech”: the world is made of

primary qualities for which there is no ordinary language but that of science – a

language of pure thought that nobody in particular speaks and which utters law

from nowhere; as to ordinary language, it deals with secondary qualities which

have no reality. On the one hand there is nature which is real, but is a “dull and

meaningless affair, the hurrying of material endlessly”; on the other hand there is

the lived world of colours, sounds, values, meaning, which is a phantasmagoria of

our senses but with no other existence than in the circumvolution of our brain and

the illusions of our mind.

Tongue in cheek Latour suggests that poets should really be helping us say things like

O my temporal lobe how beautiful you are, and you my cochlear nucleus how

clever you are to make me hear the nightingale, and you my olfactory bulbs how

nice of you to invent the smell of the roses, and you my nicely moist striate

cortex, how elegant of you to let me feel the splendour of a sunset when there is

nothing more than the connections between my hypothalamus and my cerebellum

As Latour puts it ‘exit the poets, enter the neuroscientists’. But Whitehead and, following

him, Latour believe in the absolute necessity of letting reality return to our speech, and of

believing in the poets, even if the philosophers have, for the last three centuries,

condemned us to ‘live in phantasmagoria’.

For Whitehead, the principle meaning of the cosmos is aesthetic. Steven Shaviro,

following Whitehead’s declaration that ‘the basis of all experience is emotional’, declares

that ‘Whitehead’s affect theory places aesthetics – rather than ontology (Heidegger) or

ethics (Levinas) – at the center of philosophical inquiry. Aesthetics is the mark of what

Whitehead calls our concern for the world, and for entities in the world’.

Whiteheadian aesthetics

The aesthetic implications and possibilities of Whitehead’s thought have been developed

by a (small) number of thinkers and practitioners. In theoretical terms Donald

Sherburne’s PhD thesis at Yale was published in 1961 as A Whiteheadian Aesthetic…

Whitehead was also of great importance for the poet Charles Olson. This has implications

beyond the effects Whitehead might have had on Olson’s poetry. As a professor, and then

rector of Black Mountain College, Olson was deeply involved in one of the most

important centres of radical avant garde experimentation in the arts. He was there at the

same time as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg were visiting on

a regular basis and putting together some of the most important events in the history of

post war art. Given the importance of Whitehead’s thought for the whole Black Mountain

experiment, it can be claimed that it is also part of the DNA of the strand of avant garde

art that was nurtured there. Certainly the kind of practices that Cage’s work inspired can

be seen to exemplify some very whiteheadian virtues, including an emphasis on process,

and on relationality, and a concomitant desire to break the barriers that separate art from

life.

‘Culture of Spontaneity’

There is another, perhaps more unusual source of thinking about Whiteheadian aesthetics,

that also connects rather beautifully with Cage. Going back to Whitehead’s careful

engagement with Darwin, in Science and the Modern World, discussing the widespread

belief in the ‘Struggle for Existence’ over other aspects of evolution, he praises Darwin

for his refusal to ‘go beyond the direct evidence, and of careful retention of every

possible hypothesis’, and strongly criticizes his followers and camp-followers, in whom

those virtues are not so conspicuous. He suggests that the ‘imagination of European

sociologists and publicists was stained by exclusive attention to this aspect of conflicting

interests’, and also that the ‘idea prevailed that there was a peculiar strong-minded

realism in discarding ethical considerations in the determination of commercial and

national interests’. But this is to neglect ‘the other side of the evolutionary machinery’,

creativeness. He continues that

The organisms can create their own environment. For this purpose, the single

organism is almost helpless. The adequate forces require societies of cooperating

organisms. But with such cooperation and in proportion to the effort put forward,

the environment has a plasticity which alters the whole ethical aspect of

evolution.

Stengers discusses this passage, and suggests that, though ‘it did not make history in

biology’, it did ‘nourish the thought of one of its most remarkable scholars, the

embryologist Conrad Waddington’. Not only was Waddington a great biologist. He was

also a scientific thinker with an active and sophisticated interest in the visual arts. In 1969

he published Behind Appearance: A study of the relations between painting and the

natural sciences in this century. Like many works of about the same period, dealing with

the relations between art, science, and/or technology, for example Beyond Modern

Sculpture by Jack Burnham, this book has been condemned to the dustbin of art history,

and entirely forgotten. Though it may be a little old-fashioned this is an unjust fate for an

extremely interesting book. As Waddington writes in the introduction it is ‘not primarily

a book about aesthetics. I propose no new theories about the nature of aesthetic

experience, and make no suggestions how we can decide which painters are ‘better’ than

others… I discuss painters only in so far as their work seems relevant to my main theme

– the dialogue between painting and science about the nature of the external world’.

In 1972 Waddington had the considerable perspicacity to invite John Cage to speak at a

symposium in Mexico, entitled, "Biology and the History of the Future", sponsored by

the International Union of Biological Sciences in an attempt to "promote reciprocity

between the arts and sciences." Other invitees included Margaret Mead and Gunther

Stent. Among Cage’s contributions was the whiteheadian statement that ‘So I want to

give up the traditional view that art is a means of self-expression for the view that art is a

means of self-alteration, and what it alters is mind, and mind is in the world and is a

social fact...’

In invoking ecotheology Latour is of course referring to the broad movement extant since

the 1960s to try to develop a Christian theology that is more responsive to the needs of

the environment and to the various ecological crises that have emerged in the recent

period. Among those who might be named in this context are Rosemary Radford Ruether,

and Sallie McFague, as well as…

The problem with such work is that it often opposes a notion of some kind of pristine

‘nature’ to culture, society, technology and so on, an opposition that makes no sense from

a latourian perspective. His ecotheology is closer to the work of Jane Bennett in Vibrant

Matter, or Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature, or the work of young thinkers

corralled under the rubrice of speculative realism. Latour’s ecology contains not just

those things we might consider ‘natural’ but all the other actants as well, human and non-

human, organic and inorganic, ‘natural’ and unnatural’. Ecotheology is dangerously close

to the highly problematic area of ‘natural theology’. What is perhaps needed is an

unnatural theology, that refuses the normative, stable, sustainable concepts of the natural

for something more monstrous and difficult.

Latour – Rejoicing

Object Oriented Theology

The best image I can think of to capture what this might be like is the Zone is Tarkovski’s

film Stalker. This is an area which has received some kind of alien visitation, and there

are a large number of alien artefacts still there much like the detritus of a roadside picnic

(the name of the novel on which the film is based). There is nothing ‘natural’ in the usual

sense about this space, and certainly nothing pastoral and consolatory about it. Indeed it

is dangerous enough to be tightly guarded by the military, despite which the eponymous

stalker, a kind of Dostoyevskian Christ figure, can take those who wish into the Zone.

The Zone is not beautiful in the conventional sense, and yet, through Tarkovski’s

extraordinary visual attention it is utterly compelling and completely other. Though

entering the Zone takes him away from his family and puts him into great danger, the

stalker clearly finds something deeply wonderful about being there. In one of the most

extraordinary scenes in the film, having just arrived in the Zone with his guests, he breaks

away and rolls ecstatically in long, wild grass.

Another scene features a long, slow pan down a river full of objects, syringes, a pistol,

coins. Seen in this way these objects exhibit the kind of autonomy that thinkers such as

Latour, Harman, Bogost and Bryant ascribe to them…

As a number of commentators have pointed out the Zone in Stalker eerily anticipates the

‘Zone of Alienation’ which contains Chernobyl. Adding to the similarities Stalker was

filmed partly in a disused hydro plant in Estonia, which was downstream from a chemical

plant that was emitting toxic substances into the river. Tarkovsky and a number of other

people involved in the filming subsequently contracted and died of cancer of the

bronchial tube.

Yet the presumption that the Chernobyl explosion was an unmitigated disaster, or as

dangerous as people assumed it would be has been questioned. The number of deaths and

incidents of cancer that can be directly attributed to the event is also disputed, while the

effects of radiation on the animal population have been remarkably slight. Most peculiar

of all is the news that, having been largely abandoned by humans, has become an

unofficial nature reserve, with rare species proliferating. This is not to underestimate the

dangers of nuclear power, but rather to testify to the extraordinary resilience and

responsiveness of the environment, and also to its utter contingency.

There is no ‘nature’ as such to be seen. There is however a complex imbrication of

human and non-human, organic and inorganic, all of which is thoroughly contingent, and

could and indeed can be otherwise. Only an arrogant anthropocentrism would demand

that this particular configuration of phenomena must be sustained, or is even in any sense

sustainable. There is nothing there to be sustained. The view from Ingleborough is also

that of a Zone, being nothing but traces of the continuous incursion of the new and the

unexpected into a supposedly stable environment. Some sixty miles north west of

Ingleborough, just over the Lakeland hills visible from the summit, is Sellafield, one of

the main nuclear power reactors. It is as much part of the environment as those hills.

Ruskin should have greeted his storm-cloud as an ineluctable part of the ecology, even if

it turned out to be the plume of a nuclear meltdown.

Words sometimes circulate in academic circles in advance of their more general

circulation in culture as a whole. Recently the word ‘anthropocene’ has enjoyed such

visibility. Originally coined by Nobel prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002 to

denote the period just beginning in which human action is the main force in

environmental and geological change, it is under serious consideration by the

Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of

London as being declared the successor to previous

geological ages such as the Holocene, and the Pleistocene.

In a recent article for the New York Times blog Iraq vet and author Roy Scranton

described the need to learn how to die in the Anthropocene.

In 2013 Bruno Latour was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures on natural

theology at Edinburgh University. He took as his subject the need to extract ourselves

from our concept of nature as something inert and separate from our human history,

which we elevate to the status of a divinity. In the fourth lecture he discusses the

consideration of the Anthropocene as a successor to the Holocene by the international

Geological conference, and later, in the sixth and last lecture, invokes Whitehead’s

bifurcation of nature.

Incredibly enough, the question has become whether humans may retrieve a sense of history that has been ripped away from them by what they had taken until now to be a mere frame devoid of any agency. The Bifurcation of Nature, so criticized by Whitehead, has not come to a close: it has reversed itself in the most unexpected way, the ‘primary qualities’ being now marked by sensitivity, agency, reaction, uncertainty; the ‘secondary qualities’ by indifference, insensibility, numbness. To the point where I could invert Whitehead’s quote I used in the first lecture: ‘so that the course of [human history], [he had written nature] is conceived as being merely the fortunes of matter in its adventure through space.’

Also in the last lecture he declares that his intention throughout the lecture series has been that of

a sort of thought experiment in ‘demogenesis’: an attempt at creating artificially a people out of those who suffer under the universal bondage of naturalism. A people able to liberate themselves from a cult of Nature, not to reach the promised Land ‘of milk and honey,’ but, more prosaically, to settle on the Earth they had fled because they had mistaken It for some wholly imaginary pagan divinity.

But near the end he declares that

As for the rites and rituals which are necessary to render this people conscious of its vocations, it is to the artists that we would have to turn. My bet is that it is inside the scientific disciplines, especially because of the peculiar ways in which the models built by climatologists and Earth-system scientists assemble the various agencies of the planet, that we might find the best ways to visualize the new political assemblies summoned by Gaia. In their postepistemological ways, scientific disciplines are the most powerful collecting agents and offer the most far-reaching aesthetics. But this question of future rituals is another story that would be going way beyond the political theology of nature that I have attempted to sketch here. The task would require becoming a playwright, a curator or a composer.

I am sitting writing in my hut in the garden of the house I live in, in Cumbria. Outside the

hut I can see the trees of the woods that now fill the space that was once the drive to the

big house. I can see the trees move, and hear the wind that is moving them. I can also

hear the stream that runs through a culvert under the house. Just beyond the hut an

incinerator is burning up garden waste and papers, turning them into ash in minutes,

while nearby a composter turns kitchen waste into something entirely other in a process

that will take months. In the hut, even if everything appears stable, and static, I know that

electrons are continually passing through the light, the heater and my Apple laptop. The

bookshelves behind me, the desk I sit at, the walls, floor, and ceiling of the hut and even

my own body is continually changing. All is change, flux, a continual process of

perishing and renewal.

This is perhaps rather buddhistic. An insistence that everything is impermanent, ‘anicca’,

is, after all, one of the three central marks of existence of Buddhism, along with

‘dukkha’, unsatisfactoriness or suffering, and ‘anatta’, non-selfhood. Though scientists

and others may take issue with the concept of impermanence, and for many non-selfhood

may be too mystical, there can be little doubt about the unsatisfactoriness of life. A list of

what life has to offer to any human has to include suffering, loneliness, premature death,

disease, old age, failure, disappointment with oneself, with one’s family and friends, the

fading of relationships, and so on. Add to this the problems particular to our time,

including ecological catastrophe, permanent war, pollution, immiseration, exploitation,

poverty, consumerism, injustice, inequality, and the lot of the human being is not a very

happy one.

This is not to say that even with all this taken into consideration that life is without

possible consolations, and pleasures. Nor is it to fall into the trap of regarding our current

condition as particularly benighted and to yearn for some earlier more supposedly

beneficent age. But there is an obvious aspect to our contemporary existence that does

exacerbate our existential woes. Uniquely perhaps in the history of humanity the

dominant modes of thinking, the intellectual framework in which we operate, offers no

space for either meaning or hope, the two main salves for our condition.

Whitehead – everything is interconnected (expand)Comparison with BuddhismConsolation perhaps, but need for politics Responsibility in the anthropoceneButler