Seeing Through God

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright Page

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Contents

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Preface

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pp. xiii-xiv

According to which of the several possible senses is given to the title of this book, a different answer has to be given to the question posed in the title of the book’s closing section. In the space between these titles these senses are exploited. The object of the experiment conducted there is to explore the technology of looking in response to the look of things...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xv-xviii

I thank the editors and publishers of Eco-Phenomenology: Back to Earth Itself , Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), Post-Structuralist Classics, Andrew Benjamin, ed. (London: Routledge, 1988),...

1. PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTUREPHENOMENOLOGICAL ECOLOGY

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pp. 1-19

Is phenomenology a help or a hindrance to a philosophical ecology or a philosophy of the environment? It might seem to go without saying that before this question can be answered definitively, the terms in which it is posed would have to be definitively defined...

2. GAIA SCIENZA

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pp. 20-35

How sinister is it to say, as Heidegger said to the interviewer of Der Spiegel, that only a God/god can save us—where the German convention for writing nouns leaves it ambiguous whether in translating Heidegger’s remark into English the initial should be in the lower or upper case?¹ In either case, he can be taken to have meant that there is nothing we can do except...

3. OCCIDENTAL ORIENTATION

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pp. 36-54

Perhaps at the very heart of what are generally considered to be paradigm cases of a methodology that dominates nature and puts her inquisitionally to the test, perhaps in the methodology of Bacon, Descartes, and Kant— whose first Critique cites in its epigraph Bacon’s declaration ‘‘I am labouring to lay the foundations . . . of human utility and power’’—may be discerned a pointer to a way of saving a chance for a geoethics...

4. ON THE SAYING THATPHILOSOPHY BEGINS IN WONDER

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pp. 55-69

‘‘Wonder is the only beginning of philosophy,’’ Plato has Socrates say at 155d of the Theaetetus. And at 982b of the Metaphysics Aristotle says, ‘‘it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise.’’...

5. BELONGINGS

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pp. 70-84

Although Hannah and Jack were obviously a devoted couple, zutraut to each other,¹ it was less obvious whether they were formally an Ehepaar or were joined by a mariage pr�-contractuel. ² For she went by her pen name and he by his brush name, and several years ago her wedding ring was lost...

6. A FOOTNOTE IN THE HISTORY OF PHUSIS

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pp. 85-105

Is nature a part of the environment, our surroundings, or is the environment a part of nature? Is neither a part of the other? The environment, the surroundings in which human beings live, contains things that human beings have made or made different. But things that human beings have made or altered are made from or are alterations of raw material...

7. TOUCHING EARTH

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pp. 106-126

On the far west coast of Scotland is Loch Hourn. On Loch Hourn is Camusfe�rna, the Bay of Alders. The Bay of Alders is also a bay of burial. Between a burn and the white sand of the islands clustered at its mouth an unhewn rock marks the position of the room where Gavin Maxwell wrote some of his books, until his house was destroyed by fire...

8. SEEING THROUGH GOD

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pp. 127-143

Let us return to an occasion reported at the beginning of our second chapter. If we say adieu to the God or god of whom Heidegger says to the interviewer for Der Spiegel in 1966, ‘‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,’’ will that be the last goodbye? Quite apart from whether that god might return and so be in a position to be bidden a second goodbye...

9. REGARDING REGARDING

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pp. 144-155

Gaston Bachelard’s words ‘‘tout ce que je regarde me regarde’’ point toward and beyond the ocularly phenomenological context to which he seems to have wanted to limit their import.¹ His words may be translated provisionally as ‘‘everything I regard regards me.’’...

10. SEEING THROUGH SEEING THROUGH

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pp. 156-172

What force does the schaft of the Landschaft acquire in the light of what has been written by the thinker-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins? Calling Hopkins a poet does not exclude the possibility that he is also a scientist, at least insofar as poetry, poieō, schaffen, is at the beginning of science—Wissenschaft—not only for the so-called pre-Socratic scientistpoets Heraclitus...

Notes

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pp. 173-188

Index

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pp. 189-193