This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between
humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a
complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns
out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul
Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite
his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism.
Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the
author examines contemporary experience in the light of several
familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value,
reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology,
Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the
critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of
ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications
of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and
ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study
draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity
science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and
environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre's
oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist
writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical
writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical
philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre's distinctive
inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories
of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first
time Sartre's incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with
Sartre's lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study
concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of
pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the
burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We
learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water's edge: surprising
lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where
we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and
the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons
about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which
life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory
path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a
livable world for all earthlings.
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