| In the following work, I develop a sense of the person and the earth that is inspired by Husserl's phenomenology and its antecedents in "Romanticism." I claim that the agent's awareness is constituted through the perception of the environment, and that an account of the human agent that detaches the person from the earth is inadequate and incomplete.; The goal of this work is to establish a sense of the person that is founded on the earth: in phenomenology, the "I" and "the earth" arise together. However, in order to achieve this goal, I also make reference to the communal dimensions of the individual's awareness. The individual, after all, is not born in isolation from all other things: the individual is born into a world of appearances that is given to others; the individual is dependent on the care of others for her life, her language and her well-being. Thus, I attempt to interweave this description of the agent and the earth with a discussion of such concepts as "ethical memory" and "the imaginary": I speak to the possibilities that are founded by the entry of the agent into a community of people; I claim that ethical terms that are learned from others---terms like "cruel" and "harmful" and "destructive" and "wasteful"---can found a sense of dissatisfaction with an action or practice.; The account of the agent developed here grounds the agent's awareness in the earth and her community: one cannot speak of the agent in abstraction from all other things. As a consequence, the description offered here stands against the tendency to view the earth as material that can be appropriated by the agent with a project: by restoring a sense of the earth that transcends human projects and goals, I claim that phenomenology can add an important dimension to contemporary debates about an "environmental ethic."... |
