Although Levinas does not specifically articulate an environmental ethic, he certainly has a concept of nature working within his philosophy, a portrait of which can be drawn from the various texts that describe in detail what he believes to be the human, primordial relationship to the elemental. The following essay is an attempt to articulate how Levinas comes to define that relationship, and to imagine what kind of environmental ethic is implied by it. We will see that an important, dichotomous (...) distinction is made between two types of infinity, the “bad infinity” of the sacred and the “good infinity” of the holy. This distinction corresponds to the separated subject’srelationship to the natural world and to the human world. For Levinas, this distinction addresses not only the rationalist vs. empiricist question concerning the relationship between consciousness and the body, a guiding question for modern philosophy from Descartesthrough Husserl, but also the question concerning technology, especially as it is posed by Heidegger and other twentieth century continental philosophers. These two related questions can help guide us to an understanding of how Levinas imagines environmentalimperatives toward both the body’s exclusive relationship to nature, and to the interpersonal relationships between the self and other human beings. We will begin this analysis with Husserl’s answer to the question of consciousness. (shrink)

Gabriel Marcel spent most of his life developing a phenomenology of human intersubjectivity. While doing so he discovered the extent to which an authentic human community depends upon the relationship it has to nonhuman nature. By exploring Marcel’s critique of technology, as well as his religious phenomenology, I show the proximity to which Marcel’s philosophy approaches the currentegalitarian response of the radical ecology movement. Even though the bulk of Marcel’s work is concerned with human intersubjectivity, his writings advocate a transcendence (...) of anthropocentricism to what Marcel calls “cosmocentricism,” an existential attitude toward the world which submits to the sacredness of all beings, as well as to the bioregions within which all earthly creatures share the sacraments of life. (shrink)

Submitted by Danne W. Polk of the Philosophy Department, Villanova University, these reflections are the cumulative result of a thought experiment in which the 38 students in an Ecofeminism course were asked to imagine that if nonhuman beings could speak to us and we could understand their languages, what would they say?