The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence by Thomas M. Alexander (review)

The Human Eros is an outstanding accomplishment, a work of genuine wisdom. It combines meticulous scholarship with an enviable mastery of cultural and philosophical history to address pressing concerns of human beings, nature, and philosophy itself. While comprised of essays spanning over two decades, the book presents a powerfully coherent philosophical vision which Alexander names, alternately, “eco-ontology,” “humanistic naturalism,” and “ecological humanism.” Whatever the name, the approach is humane and intellectually compelling, offering insight and direction to pragmatism, aesthetics, existentialism, environmental philosophy, and anyone in search of wisdom. It is an immensely readable book, too, leavening argument with down-home illustrations and providing the historico-cultural background necessary to transport readers into the alternative “spiritual ecologies” where important aesthetic stakes are at play. While much here is of direct interest to academic philosophers, this book nourishes anyone concerned to “care for their soul,” as Socrates might put it. The Human Eros speaks not just to individuals, but to any global citizen wishing to care for the planetary ecosystem and create “the basis for mutual understanding between diverse peoples in a world verging toward over-population” (53).

The book is comprised of an introduction, sixteen chapters organized into four major parts, and a brief but helpful bibliographic essay about incorporating Native American myth and philosophy into contemporary philosophical work. Part I, “Nature and Experience,” advances Alexander’s views on eco-ontology by contrasting John Dewey’s conception of nature (and more generally, being) with Mādhyamika Buddhism and with Justus Buchler. It also delves into two pivotal claims by Dewey: (1) that knowing can only be understood as emerging from a larger, existential, domain of living, and (2) that his “method” of experience (the “denotative empirical method”) is not identical with the scientific method. (I expand on Alexander’s discussion of these claims below.) The essays which comprise Part II, “Eros and Imagination,” investigate the nature of imagination and education to correct neopragmatist misreadings by Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, while championing imagination as both embodied and a precondition of reason (drawing upon the recent work of Mark Johnson). Understanding the work imagination does for meaning-seeking beings (“human eros”) clarifies why it is central to both ethics (in contrast to standard pragmatist and non-pragmatist ethics) and to the creation of a genuinely democratic culture (via the humanities). Part III, “Aesthetics of Existence,” examines various proposals for constructing meaning in life, including those by Dewey, George Santayana, and R. W. Emerson, along with examples from Chinese philosophy and Native American thought. Alexander does a superlative job analyzing and connecting the imaginative ways these different “wisdoms” can bind cultures together. Finally, Part IV, “Spirit and Philosophy,” examines the “general orientation of human existence to nature” (23) and contrasts the different approaches of Dewey and Santayana. In a powerful rejoinder to the prevailing consensus, Alexander offers an innovative argument for a renewed appreciation of the central place that “spirituality” and A Common Faith deserve in Dewey’s corpus.

While the book is long (429 pp.), chapters stand profitably on their own; the book’s larger vision is present in microcosm throughout. Separately and together, the chapters articulate what Alexander calls an “aesthetics of human existence,” one which carefully selects ideas from movements (“pragmatism,” “naturalism”), figures (Peirce, James Dewey, Emerson, Buchler, Santayana, Royce, Mead) and diverse traditions (especially Native American and Buddhist) to create a “philosophy of experience” where “experience” connotes something more akin to culture: a “shared, embodied, symbolic life, the meaningful ways we inhabit the world, and not as sensations, nerve stimulations, or brain events” (4). When philosophy self-consciously seeks to understand the nature and conditions capable of producing experience of this richer kind, it returns to its original quest for wisdom, a way of satisfying our “human eros” or drive to live meaningfully and purposefully.

The philosophy offered here, then, is akin to “aesthetics” in an older and sager sense. More comprehensive...