WORKS IN PREPARATION
Below is a list of the works I am preparing for publication. I have been researching questions of ‘Being and Place’ extensively since 2006, gathering materials from a wide range of subject disciplines (see the "Being and Place" tab). I have been thinking and writing continuously in an attempt to develop a moral ecology and eco-phenomenology since 2014. My main concern has been to reconcile a morality of the senses with the affirmation of transcendent standards, avoiding the errors and limitations of both naturalism and conventionalism. My concern is to see human beings as creative co-agents in a ceaselessly creative, valuable, purposeful, participatory universe, thus reconciling issues of disclosure and imposure. I now have a substantial body of text that needs to be copy edited, proof read and rewritten with a view to its presentation in readable and publishable form.
Here are the titles with a word count, headings and themes:
Being and Place: The Dialectics of Catastrophe and Hope:
Restoration and Restorying
(241 pages, 88,800 words)
[The environmental crisis; civilisation collapse; crisis and action; blueprint for survival; limits to growth; managing the commons; ecological crisis and solution; ecological catastrophe; sustainable development; environmental crisis as opportunity; environmental action; active hope; sustainability; turning point – the need for leadership and vision; biosphere and ecosystem; biospheric living; unprecedented uncertainty; ecology vs economics; the emergence of problems; climate change; facing alternative futures; addressing climate change; a Gaean worldview; Gaea; denial – climate science; psychic and institutional inertia; vision and new thinking – psychic prisons; relations and planetary boundaries; response; the cost of climate catastrophe;
environmental response; the green economy; green politics; ecological way of life; creating environmental tools – possibilities; the renewable world; the social-ecological revolution; the need to learn to live in harmony; the perception of place and space; crisis and the need for transformation; the slow apocalypse; depression of the future; transition strategies; environmental crisis and the alternative; environmental crisis and beyond; the need for a new ecological society; alternative futures; responsibility and democratisation – associative democracy; ecology, anarchism and utopias – futures; a vision of the future; prefiguration as active democratisation – creative agency; agency and constraints; biological limits and being human; getting there – transition;
Ecological knowing; science – reductionism and holism; green science – networks and integration; living off nature’s interest/income; nature and culture; monocultural relation to nature; changing nature; scientific materialism;
Sociology and ecological crisis; social control; rapid and slow change; environmental crisis as a consequence of social disorder; cultural lag – technical and moral capacities; a society of power out of control; social theory; civilization; vision – perception; a new image for life – a prescription for behaviour; environmental action - The things we can do; prefiguration – planting the seeds of hope; the relationship between environment and society; the myriad ways to study the environment-society nexus; sociology and social problems; understanding structures; structures and social theory; social relations; worldviews 18C 19C science – industrialism;
Crisis, knowledge, and perceptions; new world; the gap between theory and practice; eco-praxis; praxis and self-knowledge; eco-praxis and principles; new thinking; need for principles as well as practice; culture – our view of the world; new ethic; creative agency; the integral approach; models – shaping the future; the need for new modalities and mentalities; environment and learning – education for comprehensivity; eco-praxis – active hope = be-ing as an active condition; green politics and strategies; integrated thinking; synthesis; conceptual framework; transformations; integral thinking, practical reality and environmental performance; linking themes; interconnections; dwelling; ecological living – designing strategies for the future; reflexive behaviour; green knowledge – making the connections across disciplines and social roles; changes in culture and personality; integral knowledge and practice;
Environmental politics and strategies; conceptual tools; cultural participation and redefinition; participation and networks; transformations – participation – new social and cultural forms; subpolitics; organisation of the argument; modernism and materialism; the new ecological paradigm; worldview; environmental sociology – society and nature; critical social realism; connection to nature; themes and approaches;
Ecology and ethics; what is ecology; deep ecology; alternative lines of development – the high road of modernity; paradigms and perceptions; renewable world; ethics and politics – individual and collective responsibility; functional representation - the democratic economy; ethics – ecological virtue; responsibility and ethics – ethics and political order; rational freedom – place and belonging - a new Sittlichkeit; mobility and locality; global politics - universal planetary ethic; global politics – universal planetary ethic; politics – alliances and cooperation; the planetary environmental problematic; values and agreements; new universal politics; planetary politics; moral ecology; ethics and economics; fear and hope – a moral ecology of hope; giving hope; morality matters; the interwovenness of the moral and the political; Judaeo-Christian ethics; ethos as a way of life; Kant; postmodernism; the natural basis of morality; morality – the link between the natural and the human; a common and shared framework; biology – Aristotle – flourishing; moral capacities; Love as the essential condition of human flourishing, pertaining to healthy growth; ethics and biology;
Being and place; organic place; environmental security and stability – eco-community; environmental security and stability – eco-community; the significance of place in human life; interrelationships; place – where responsibility lies; environmental responsibility; the local and the global – thinking appropriately – postmodernism; globalisation; organic thinking – order, balance and harmony; renewable world – networks as sinews;
The green polity; government, politics and the environment; environmental problems and solutions; The power of example; citizenship and democracy; environmental justice movement – new politics; the need for practical solutions and alternatives; biosphere politics - new political and economic arrangements; political arguments over climate change; creative psychological, ethical and spiritual transformation; the green economy; green political economy; production for need; renewable energy; low carbon economy; eco-feminism and the issue of gender; evolution; the relationship between ecology, biology and social theory; rationale; beyond demarcation
The Age of (Moral) Ecology
(108 pages, 46,245 words)
[global values revolution - replacing money values and violence with life values and nonviolence; dependent rational animals; sharing common ground; climate destabilization; making hope possible, not despair plausible; environmental ethics – the commonwealth of life – global ethic; the environmental movement; the ecology of communication; the multidimensional approach; global and local solutions; collective action, practical reasoning and moral equipment; practical reasoning and motivations – oikophilia; ecological crisis; collective action - green polity – the good city; between fact and value; the great work – making a home; Earth as a sacred home; creative universe; oneness; participants in the creative universe; theory and practice – transitions; the search for place – unity of you and I; framework – environmental ethics; imagining the future; reasons for unease; end of progress through instrumental rationality; the loss of faith in growth; reasons for hope; ecological crisis; the external challenges and internal capacity for response; energy; environmental crisis - external challenges.]
The Ecology of Good
(423 pages, 153,000 words)
[Under the shadow of Nihilism; the shadow of Weber; Justice/balance/symmetry = a grammar of harmony; Being and Place, Being in Place; nihilism as the deepest problem; Technological Order; the Cartesian disembodied mind cut off from the sensuous world; against the conceptual extensionism of philosophy; ecology of communication; bridging the essential (realist) and existential (the eco-phenomenological) ‘grounds’ in a doubly-foundational ‘ontoecology’; the creative disclosure of value thus takes the place of the willful, subjective imposure of ‘value’; ontic ecology; Being in the World; Active Be-ing in the participatory universe; rational choice and the co-operators problem; to be pieces of the solution; How Individualist Economics Are Causing Planetary Eco-Collapse; Who acts for the Common Good?; place and value – where does value lie?; Universal Planetary Ethic; Rational action and good government; Philosophical Foundations (objective value) and Creative Evolution (creative universe); Living in the Objectively Valuable World; Fact and Value, the world of science and the everyday lifeworld; bringing philosophy back to its true purpose – Camus and the question of whether life is worth living; the doomed existentialist search for meaning; Sisyphus as the ‘proletarian of the Gods’; human subjectivity and intersubjectivity; Culture, Reason, and ‘the Death of God’; the soul of the world; the case for religious values in a secular world; What is the Good Life?; The Sublime Science of Simple Souls: Rousseau’s Philosophy of Truth; simplicity, autonomy and solidarity, and utility in pursuit of the general good; Kant - Virtue and happiness as forming two halves of the highest good; Nietzsche and the ‘death of God’; the ecology of Values, Virtues and Visions; the source of moral values; Thomas Hobbes and the objectively valueless and purposeless world; mutual self-cancellation in a competitive market society; price displaces value; A society that has lost the grounding in the good can no longer see anything of value at stake in a moral terrain reduced to competing value positions and perspectives; the importance of universal moral values; Walter Ong - the affirmation of katholikos in contradistinction to universalis (‘throughout-the-whole’ without implication of a circle or boundary); kata-holic: the whole all around us - uni-verse: the earth "turned" as whole; infinite extent as beyond rational comprehension; anarchic excess as evading the enclosure of reason; the case against universal values; the case for universal values; lists of universal values; The Declaration of a Global Ethic; why truth matters; Derrida and deconstruction; Heidegger’s call for the destruction (Destruktion) of the metaphysics of being; Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences; against logocentrism; critique of the identitarian concerns of ‘first philosophy’; undecidability’; Foucaultian ‘power-knowledge’; postmodernism; critical realism; essentialism as a creative unfolding; the split between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world; the virtues; First Law of Metaphysics: Everything that was, is, and will be, already exists; Character and character construction; essentialism and the virtue tradition; The Community of Morality; Radical Realism: Performance v. Ideology; Elizabeth Anscombe and ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’; Rorty’s An Ethics for Today; Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion; MacIntyre, ‘On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture’; Virtues and the motivational economy; Per Espen Stoknes and eco-psychology: Joining the inner and outer aspects that go to make an integral life; Psychology of Identity; Social Psychology; Evolutionary psychology; Creative Evolution; to be active participants in the endlessly creative universe; Eudaimonics; The Natural and the Artefactual the work of Keekok Lee; the disconnect between the biosphere and the technosphere; the philosophy of praxis and eco-praxis; the definition of praxis; Nature via nurture; The Ecological Frame; Anthropology of Utopia; the green polity; a place for us; the green economy; the alienation of power and the need for Social Control; Virtue and Economic Life; commonality and subsidiarity; futures; building Paradise out of Hell; true originality as the return to the origin; Wittgenstein, the mystical and the religious; the work of reconnection as more fundamental than any technological ‘repair’; avoiding the swerve into Apollonian transcendence; finding God; affirming Wittgenstein’s Unsayable; Wearing other people's faces, not their masks; Joining self and service; the Comedy of Survival; literary ecology and a play ethic; comedy versus tragedy.]
The Quest for Meaning in the Universe:
Physics, Purpose, and Seeing God in the Face of the Other
(260 pages, 99,263 words)
[the loss of the transcendent; nothing new under the sun; wondering at the existence of the world; the cosmic longing for meaning; our true native land; seeing with more than eyes; the human search for spiritual treasure; Job’s Discourse on Wisdom; purpose and meaning against purposeless and meaningless materialism; the fullness of joy; the rationality and intelligibility of the world; the connection of God and physics; Russell’s ‘unyielding despair’ and religious hope; Einstein’s impersonal and indifferent god; the non-existence of God; explanatory frameworks; the fabric of the universe and the possibility of life; the purpose-built universe; life's value as the ultimate question; Other ways of knowing; the cosmic view and the longing for meaning and fulfilment; the ‘true reality’ beyond sense experience; the purposeful universe; nature’s destiny and life’s solution; the teleological view of the world; the limits to science and the areas of forbidden knowledge; the machine stops; the fitness of the universe for life’s becoming and life’s being; an all-pervasive biocentric and anthropocentric design and purpose; at home in the universe; beyond reductionism; contingency as part of God’s plan; De Duve and life evolving; the future of religion; faith and reason; the ontological argument; the cosmological argument; Aquinas’ five ways; ultimate reality; Spinoza’s intellectual love of God; the two concepts of God, Elohim and Hashem; I-Thou and I-It relationships; Pascal and the personal encounter with God; Pascal's Night of Fire; mathematics; the insufficiency of reason; the reintegration of reason with all our faculties; beyond faculties; Pascal and the reasons of the heart; the whole person; Descartes and the principle of division; Pascal and the paradox of man; the human condition: the fear of death, the fear of life; the death instinct; rebellion against the mortal flesh; hope in a seemingly hopeless condition; Pascal’s wager; bringing reason and emotion, head and heart, together so that knowledge is effective and affective; St Augustine and the longing beyond nature; St Anselm and the seeking heart; the deep longing for God; the presence of God; Ayer and the verification principle; Wittgenstein’s silence; living life; Finding the Best Explanatory Framework to See The Big Picture; Aquinas’ five ways; Hume and the morality of sense experience; Kant and causality as the way that mind organizes the world; living under the aspect of time and under the aspect of eternity; On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself; the big picture; the common good and the common home; human ecology and the common good; seeking signs in the universe; disclosure and imposure; The Love of Truth, the Quest for Wisdom; Pythagoras and the rational universe; ‘objective’ truth and values; the natural virtues;being turned by affective knowledge; being drawn and turned by something greater than we are; The Grand Narrative of Our End; design and purpose in the universe; the anthropic principle; the religious faith in the unity of nature; Einstein: The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility; Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other; the human mind as capax Dei; the search for God; Kant: putting ethics and science together: the structure and order of the universe; the ethical stream: life as fluid and adaptable; Plato on the mind; God, Psychology and Physics; the questions beyond reason; on philosophy; the species that asks ‘why?’; the God of love and personal relationships; grounding physics; Nietzsche and the Antichrist; all creatures great and small; the phenomenology of religious experience.
Philosophy as Projection: Sensible Transcendence
(344 pages, 118,481 words)
[This covers some controversial topics, and involves material I am inclined to cut completely. But maybe I should hold my nerve and keep it in, as an essential part of the inner dialogue. This is me challenging my views on 'rational freedom' by way of feminist critique. As I write, I have this nagging fear that I am engaged in some typically masculine projection, imposing form of what is perceived as chaos. I was interested to check my central themes and concerns against their critics. The material is something of a departure for me, and I am less sure footed here than in other areas. And maybe that is why I shouldn't cut anything, but have the debate out in the open.]
[examining the p’s of philosophy: possession, penetration, projection, proving; Simone de Beauvoir and possession; Cixous; feminine creativity as an anti-Logos value; Kristeva, language and culture; the sphere of biological equipment and species imperatives; Viola Klein; Catherine Blackledge; power the source of fear and taboo; Fear is the mother of violence; vampirism; civilization; the division between public and private spheres, between reason and emotion; natural magic and the use of intellect; the mechanarchy of loveless circumstance; Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism; retrieving the idea of the human essence as relation to Being; Kate Millett: sexual relations as political relations; a society beyond sexual dualism and division; the relation between feminism and philosophy and reason, politics and public life; deconstructing the truth; logocentrism; the critique of reason; transcendence, objectivity, the unitary conception, idealism; Irigaray’s This Sex; Rationality and the imaginary; philosophy as homelessness; The symbolism of male and female; Masculine/Feminine Themes; the imaginary morphology of western rationality; the origin of the body; Irigaray and the realization or failure of love; objectifying, hypostatizing, and essentializing; The imaginary; unconscious phantasy; Freud's 'imaginary economy'; Irigaray’s call for a return to the elemental; the formless, "amorphous" origin of all morphology; anarchic excess; a disruptive excess; w/holeness; The politics of male—female symbolism; the irreducible social dimension; the paradoxes of the refusal of representation; the biases of rationality; Identity and violence; the deconstruction of ontology and the constitution of a new, rationally founded identity; philosophy as homesickness; Philosophy in the Feminine; the ethics of Eros; An Ethics of Sexual Difference; The divine, identity and the death drives; dyads and complexes; triadic relationships; symbolic order; proof and logic; abundance in body and language; the mechanisation of the organic and the death of nature; rationalising nature; mirroring; symbolic expression and silencing voices; anchoring rhetoric in the organism, in the body; to articulate the body as the final goal of writing; the corporality of language; Women and/in the social contract; patriarchy and Oedipus; a Lacanian reading of the social contract in which the state of nature becomes the imaginary and civil society becomes the symbolic; the patriarchal contract as instinctual renunciation, sacrifice, and common unhappiness; Metaphor and metonymy: the symbolic division; the founding sacrifice; Social/symbolic exchange – the economy of abundance; the character of institutions and the origins of taboo; the anarchy of the natural world and origin of sacrifice; taboo as curtailing productive nature; the exchange of objects; Irigaray’s blending of poetry and philosophy, theory and fiction; an economy of abundance based on fertility rather than sacrifice; a utopian world organised around fertility and enjoyment; the relations between love/sex, mind/body spirit/matter, inner/outer; transcendence - a spiritual realm raised above material immanence; immanence and transcendence; the search for salvation through transcendence as a mystification of true origins and ends; the myth of Ouranos; the retour; search for meaning, the quest for home, the desire to return to origins; The transcendental subject; Irigaray is concerned to target the transcendental male subject and its unitary concerns with closure and replace it with something fluid, plural and infinite; re-establishing the link between epistemology and ethics; to be unhoused and in exile; the meeting of the divine and the mortal; establishing the ground of love; The house of language; overcoming the aggressive separation from originary nature; Millet on knowing; using nature to build; residing in a sepulchre; The amorous exchange against the exchange of commodities; cultural fertility; reason, a concept with masculine connotations; Rationality and gender blindness in the sciences; Is science founded on aggressive masculinity?; The criticism of Western Logos; Is the subject shaped by instrumental reason?; Detached emotions.]
The Fabric of the Purposive Universe
(125 pages, 46,985 words)
[Towards a Philosophy of Environment; eco-philosophy – meaning not definition – paradigms and perceptions; reason and intuition; the disenchantment of the world; re-enchantment; the origin of values; conceptualization; the reality outside of reason; the world beyond the measurable, detectable, and describable; farewell to reality; the rational self and the idea of the world ‘out there’; the real world; concerning the self; paradigms – Descartes and subjectivism; against scientific transcendence; installing Reason in the place of God; Pascal and Wittgenstein; Beyond the mechanistic; the conflict between planetary managers and planetary fetishers; conceptualizing the world in order to capture it; the ‘ersatz’ communities of modernity; the environment as a form of life; the reification of concepts; Language and silence; reason and freedom; Kant and the scandal of reason in raising questions that mind cannot answer; Wittgenstein and the truth that can only be lived; Wittgenstein’s (Misunderstood) Religious Thought; Wittgenstein’s silence; Wittgenstein’s advocacy of mysticism; disenchantment and the re-enchantment of the world; Re-Inheriting the ‘Disinherited Mind’, re-inhabiting the disinhabited world; Of limited wholeness; Of spirit, emptiness and environment; Heisenberg, potentia, and the quantum universe; the rational creature's participation in the eternal law; environmental politics?; Weber, abstraction and bureaucracy; rationalistic desolidarisation; Wittgenstein, ethics, aesthetics and religion; the interwovenness of utterances and actions within a form of life; family resemblances; ethics as the practice of practices; reclaiming ethics and politics as the field of practical reason; environmental action as living right rather than as the imposition and inculcation of an abstract moral code; the poetry of the Earth; words and the world; art and aesthetics, the poetic and the mytho-poetic; the poetic possibility of philosophical language; the miracle that the world exists; aesthetic contemplation; ethics and aesthetics are one (Wittgenstein); aesthetics beyond language; the essential unity of will and idea; ethics as a condition of the world.]
Ecological Humanism
(110 pages, 40,630 words)
[The relation of thinking to experience; Great truths are felt before they are expressed; Inhumanism in Medieval Thought; the universal ideal; critique of rational idealism; harmonising the inner principle between individuals; Organic principles for the universal state; estrangement and reconciliation; defining the conditions of the personal life; a moral ecology; rational freedom; the thinker today; the participatory revolution and the integral personality; the habits of the heart; Reason and the Personal Life; the integral standpoint; free riders and enclosure of the global commons; The Conception of Ecological Humanism; The shift from the rational, autonomous Self; bringing thinking back to reality; reinterpreting destiny; The Conception of Moral Ecology; A Moral Ecology teaches the principle of the whole; the life-force; Human ecology is a discipline focused on action; against libertarianism; the expansion of technology; self-made man and his undoing; Progress in the Light of Ecological Humanism; denaturalisation and dehumanisation in industrial society; Out of the Garden and into the City; symbiosis; eudaimonics; a greater commonality rooted in the interimbrication of smaller communities and constituted by inter-communal organisations and arrangements; establishing the principle of biospheric politics inter-communally and globally; The Need for Moral Change; Life must be guided by reason; recovering the relation between means and ends; Principles for the Future; Acting in Terms of Ecological Humanism; the invitation to awaken to who you are and where you have landed; the connection between responsibility, as personal and collective, and responsiveness; Responsibility as co-responsibility, a co-respondence; Jean-Luc Nancy and the concept of an open community of sharing that is irreducible to political appropriation;
Cultivating Wholeness (The Morality of the Senses)
(128 pages, 51,000 words)
[the call of the wild; for embodiment and embeddedness against axiological abstraction and empty universalism; Jung and the isolation of human beings in the cosmos; re-enchantment; a place in space and time; the interdependence of human and planetary flourishing; earth spirits; Enchantment as an experience, the awareness of the aliveness of life; Weber and the rationalisation of the world; perception as a dynamic inerrelationism; an embodied, embedded, interrelational conception of rationality; nature is more than just life; beyond conceptual distinctions between animate and inanimate matter; animate Earth; beyond Weber’s rationalization thesis; the poetry of earth; abstraction from the senses and the sensuous world; the animistic understanding of sensory experience; the sea of energies; animistic experience; Whereas the old understanding of animism invoked the life in the world around us and drew is into a deep and actively sensuous reciprocity with it, the animism of the alienated world renders us passive objects of our externalised, ossified powers; to be active members in an earthly commonwealth that is a co-creation; to communicate with the environing natural field, consult with the non-human animals and the earthly elements in their uniqueness; the bond between our sensing bodies and the sensuous world; With our reason confined within our minds, we suffer from sensory deprivation; human evolution as a co-evolution with and within the sensuous world; affirmations of the free and rational society constituted by human intersubjectivity need to be firmly embedded in an ecological context so that the relational conception of freedom takes the form of an ecological interrelationism; to expand our relational ethics beyond our human partners, creations and things to immerse ourselves in the richer relationships that exist in the larger, and more-than-human, world; biophilia as a condition of our survival; to rekindle the wild within and without as the Eros between our sensing bodies and the sensuous, living, animate world that enfolds us; right relationship with the surrounding earth; a disembodied existence subject to the tyranny of abstraction; All Knowledge is Carnal Knowledge; entering into dialogue with non-human voices so as to be part of a general conversation; Looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way for foundations: it’s Earth all the way up; an embodied rationality; Wild Ethics Rationale; an attentive, interactive attunement with the earthly community; a biospheric human culture; A Relational Environmental Ethic; the ethical stream: the relational understanding of ethics; re-thinking animism; Merleau-Ponty: perception as a reciprocal encounter between the perceiver and the thing perceived; the whole of nature as the setting of our life, and our interlocutor in a dialogue; the interrelational character of perceptual experience; perception as a sensory experience; immersion in the world’s fields; an alignment and attunement that joins human and natural communities; a common ethic appropriate to a world we share in common takes root in a direct, participatory engagement with the earthly locales in which we dwell; ecological relationalism; the community of oneness is also a community of otherness; recognizing our inherence in the world around us; beyond the transcendental subject to an embodied intersubjectivity; the participatory mode of discourse between ourselves and the earth; cultivating a respectful relation to other beings and bodies; establishing an ecological phenomenology; the rootedness of reason in the essential creativity of the biosphere; the embodiedness and embeddedness of reason as an alternative to the disembodied mind; Heidegger and returning reason to the Earth; man in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the open region; The psyche or the soul is the thing that arises from the encounter between our sensing bodies and Gaia; our most intimate participation in the world around us; recovering the sense of the world as alive and sentient; the ceaselessly creative universe as a field of materialist immanence in which all phenomena are pregnant with future life; developing a respect and reverence for the Earth; Educating for Gaia; restoring and restorying; sensorial attunement as an interchange; the inherent meaningfulness of the community of life; the connection between sensing bodies and the sensuous earth Life and Depth; The Perceptual Implications of Gaia; Perception as a direct exchange between the organism and its world; Merleu-Ponty and the reciprocity of perception; the Phenomenology of Perception; the ecology of the senses and the communion of subjects; the deep communion and communication that bonds all beings and bodies together in a single, self-subsistent whole; towards an eco-phenomenology; Our sensing bodies integrate thinking, sensing, feeling and intuiting. These faculties have coevolved in communion, communication and cooperation with other organisms within the biosphere as a living entity; the sensuous against the tyranny and violence of abstraction.
The Economics of Happiness
(24 pages, 8,134 words)
[New Ideas and Stories; The Concept of Genuine Wealth; Income and Happiness; happiness and the virtues; genuine happiness and genuine wealth; restoring the ethical dimensions of economics; a common life of genuine happiness, wealth and freedom; a constructive model for personal, social and economic well-being that embodies and articulates values; an economics of well-being, quality of life, sustainability and flourishing; household stewardship or management; a society of moderation or moderately well-off citizens; the quality of our interconnections and interrelationships; alternative ways of creating money; interrelationships and interconnections; Eco-Eudaimonics as an economics of flourishing; a tripartite structure of civil society/community, business/corporate structure/cooperative economy, and government; Creating flourishing Communities of Well-being; The eudaimonic approach to an integrated ethics, economics and ecology is a values-centred, praxis-based, approach; the happy habitus.
The following work is foundational to the work above, setting it within the problematic of a disenchanted modernity. This work needs to be properly edited, cutting out longueurs and repetitions. But the issues raised by Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber with respect to alienation, rationalization, the death of God, disenchantment and mechanized petrification remain the key issues that confront us. We live under the shadow of modernity.
Morality and Modernity
(548 pages, 196,000 words)
[This is a profound and searching critique of the status of ethics in the modern world. I try hard to avoid the nostalgic frame of reference, and acknowledge the extent to which modernity has been a liberation for many. I acknowledge, too, the dangers of reaction. But I still find cogent the critique of modernity as a cutting off of the individual from a sense of community and connections to others, of a sense of belonging, of a sense of identity and meaning. The text I have written draws heavily on German writers, particularly Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber. It's a powerful argument. But I intend to add another dimension through the French connection. Tocqueville claimed to have read Rousseau every day. He did so not because he agreed with him, but because Rousseau covered the most important issues and concerns, and did so with unparalleled moral-psychological depth. I'm particularly interested in Rousseau's work on customs, culture and the mores, the patrie, and how he combined this with an affirmation of transcendent truths as against conventionalism. I like this idea very much. I also agree very much with Tocqueville's emphasis on intermediary associations bringing otherwise isolated individuals together and integrating them within the social fabric. I would also emphasise Tocqueville's emphasis on "the habits of the heart," cultivating the character traits that knit communities together and keep them together. I also intend to have at least a section on the Utopian Socialists, starting with Saint Simon, examining Charles Fourier and his notion of universal harmony at length, taking in Proudhon and the notion of self-governing, self-managing societies, and ending with Comte. Comte is an interesting case. He is known best for his Positivism, but his work involves much more than that. Long before Nietzsche's "death of God," Comte saw the implications of the loss of an authoritative moral framework in modern society, and sought to fill the gap. If he was not successful in this endeavour - and no-one to date has been - then his attempts to address this central problem of modernity has great merit. To see the problem clearly is a condition of any effective resolution. From here I would include a substantial chapter on Emile Durkheim and anomie. The core themes I am addressing in this work were all central to Durkheim's work, and he offers a dimension not found in Marx and Weber. I would also look to say something on Frederic Le Play and the emphasis on the character-forming culture of discipline through work, family, and place/community. To some, that will sound conservative, to others, it will sound socialist. All I can say here is that I examine the issues and draw conclusions to the best of my knowledge and understanding.]
Contents with page numbers
1 Rationale 4
1 Re-enchanting the world 4
2 Approaches 7
morality and modernity 9
the problematic of morality and modernity 11
3 Moral and metaphysical reconstruction 12
2 Community, Individualism, and Modern Society 23
1 Community and Modern Society 23
the search for community 23
2 Modernity and the Quest for Community and Personality 34
Community and Personality – the loss and recovery of form 38
The constitution of communities of identity, meaning and belonging 40
The New Communitarian Vision 47
Recovering personality and community 47
Fostering the politics of self-government 49
3 The Unit Ideas of Sociology and their Antitheses 53
The revolt against individualism 55
Liberalism, Radicalism, Conservatism 57
The critical view of liberal society, abstraction, and alienation 67
The unity of ethics and aesthetics 75
Conservatism, modernism, and nostalgia 82
4 The Loss of Community 103
Rationalisation/Modernism – the loss of community 103
Nietzsche, subjectivism, nihilism 106
Social theory and rationalistic desolidarisation 107
Modernity and its prophecies of doom and disaster 112
God and the moral framework 115
3 Capitalist Modernity and the Rationalization of the World 125
The non-academic philosophy of life against the tyranny and violence abstraction – against the rationalizations of social theory 125
The dialectics of hope and despair 131
The sociological critiques of modernity 131
Modernity and the future 133
Marx, Nietzsche and Weber 134
Marx and Weber on capitalist modernity 136
Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber – convergences and generational differences 137
Weber - rationalisation beyond capitalism – Fleurs du mal 144
Nietzsche and Weber and the fear of ersatz communities 148
Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber as key thinkers 160
Virtuous Communities fostering Habits of the Heart 172
Rehabilitating the ethical life as key to reinhabiting place 183
The tyranny and violence of abstraction 196
Prospects for Re-enchantment 202
4 The Moral Sociology of Nostalgia 207
The Problem of Nostalgia 207
Nostalgia – the story of loss 209
The Sociological Tradition 210
Sociology and the Nostalgic Frame 214
Nostalgia and German Social Thought 220
Nietzsche and nostalgia 222
Nietzsche’s concern with an authentic morality 223
Tonnies 225
Simmel 226
Weber in the context of social theory 228
Critical Theory 230
Martin Heidegger 232
Michel Foucault and Modernism 235
The Religo-moral Problem and the Post-modernist Crisis 237
The relation between society and religion 237
Conclusion on social theory 241
5 Nietzsche, the Death of God; or Nihilism and the Death of Liberalism 241
Why Nietzsche? 241
Nietzsche and the end of the moral and metaphysical standpoint 242
Statement of the problematic – why Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber – Nietzsche’s influence throughout social theory 243
An Overview 256
The universal-transcendent essentialist ethic incarnated in time and place 257
Liberalism, Nihilism and the Loss of Community 258
Ideology, Morality and Values 263
The nostalgic frame – the loss of unity and its recovery 263
Nietzsche against the nostalgic frame 265
Nietzsche and the practical truth of being and knowing 266
Nietzsche and the machine 269
Nietzsche’s life philosophy – Nietzsche’s cultural politics 272
Practical truth against abstract blueprints 273
Morality after god 274
Nietzsche's provocations 278
Organicism as a life philosophy 283
The ethic of embodiment 289
Nietzsche as a critic of modernity 290
The criticism of liberalism and the liberal ontology – the abstract individual and the abstraction of society 292
Personality and the autonomous individual 295
The Doctrine of the Little Things 298
6 God, reason, values, and grounds 301
Modernity and the loss of an authoritative moral and metaphysical standpoint 301
7 Under the Shadow of Modernity 350
Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics 350
Weber’s political sociology and ethics 352
Modernity, Politics, and Max Weber 362
Weber’s methodological individualism 363
The division between fact and value 364
Capitalism 373
Maturity and Politics 378
Politics, means, and force 387
Habermas, Reason and Faith 423
Habermas and authoritative standards 423
Anti-Prophetic Prophecy, Pessimism and Hope 437
8 Philosophical Anthropology and Hope for an Ethical Polity 438
Weber as the perfect interlocutor. 438
The Appropriate Human Regimen - Philosophical Anthropology 439
Weber’s concern with the appropriate human regimen 451
The New Dark Age 453
Refusing complicity with the Beast 455
Alasdair MacIntyre 456
Freedom that Enslaves 478
Transformative Practice and the Good of Human Beings 480
Eudaimonics – the appropriate regimen for the human good - MacIntyre in criticism of Weber and the modern moral condition 480
The Politics of Local Community 490
MacIntyre, ethical polity, the politics of local community 490
Engaging MacIntyre Critically: Flourishing, Modernity and Political Struggle 493
MacIntyre – critique of MacIntyre’s politics of local community 493
Closing Reflections: Politics and Strategy in the Present 495
Politics and community in the aftermath of Weber 495
Key themes 498
Reaffirming transcendent norms, truths and values vs conventionalism and sophism 499
Reaffirming transcendent standards against conventionalism 499
Essentialist politics – responding to criticisms 500
The problematic dualism of local community and public community 510
A work I intend to see through to publication in hard copy (hopefully by summer) is this on Gerrard Winstanley:
Spirit Reason, Nature, and Freedom: The True Commonwealth of Gerrard Winstanley
(550 pages, 160,000 words)
Introduction
I Speaking Truth to Power
2 Liberation Theology: God/Reason/Nature
3 The Psychological Fall
4 The Social Fall
5 Rebirth as Personal Transformation
6 Rebirth as Social Transformation
7 Constituting Legitimate Public Community and Authority
8 (Re)building the Household
9 Winstanley’s later life – Complicity with the Beast?
10 Winstanley’s importance and legacy
A detailed description and discussion of my forthcoming work on the seventeenth century Christian communist Gerrard Winstanley can be found here:
And last, but not least (actually, the first to finish, edit, and publish) is this on the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri:
Dante: The Sweet Symphony of Paradise (600, 202, 987)
My Dante book is largely written, I just need to take the time to edit and finish. I have long sections on Beckett, on Oscar Wilde's relation to Dante, and a chapter I am particularly proud of on the great Russian poet and Dantista Osip Mandelstam. "Word, return to music." And while I love Victor Hugo, I also challenge very strongly his view of the Comedy (Hugo considered the Inferno more interesting than the Paradiso - that, I say, is the failure of the moral imagination).
I should have issued it ages ago. The book covers climate change, too, writing on Dante and the climate accord. I cover Dante and Marx, too. And there is a long discussion on the impersonal and indifferent god of Spinoza and Einstein. And I explain at length why Dante's line about being "turned" by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars is the greatest line ever written. Dante identifies that affective quality we need, if knowledge and know-how are to be turned to the good - setting all that we know and that we can do within the motivational aims that get human beings moving and acting.
I return always to Dante. Why? Despite disagreeing with lots of things, the man has guts, he isn't timid, doesn't shirk the big questions, and in disagreeing with him you often end up agreeing in the end, even if you don't quite realize it. And Dante's sweet symphony of Paradise gives us the musical model we need, or helps us to appreciate they we already have that for which we are searching.
Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise
[I have been working on this since February 2017. It started as an article on Dante and music as I embarked on my rehabilitation classes after a spell in hospital. Dante has always been an unfailing guide for me, so I read and wrote for pleasure. And as I continued, Dante's music started to suggest other things. I started to develop the theme a little further. There is a point and a purpose to the inner music in Dante's 'sacred poem.'
Contents:
The Internal Music of The Comedy and of All Things
Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise The Internal Music of The Comedy and of All Things
Introduction: the right order of things 1 ((Introduction)) 3 ((Dante and music)) 6 ((Music measures the relation to God)) 8 ((Objective reality and objective morality)) 10 ((The musical structure of the Comedy)) 18 ((The well-tempered harmony 19 ((The influence of music in soulcare 24 ((Commercial Music and Soul Music)) 26 ((familiarity and vision – beyond realism)) 34 ((Philosophical and religious influences)) 37 ((Plato)) 38 ((Aristotle)) 39 ((St. Augustine)) 42 ((Boethius)) 45 ((Ancient and religious theories of music - discussion)) 47 ((Dante’s love of music)) 58 ((The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy)) 59 ((The musical anthropology)) 60 ((The centrality of music to the universe)) 61
Dante and Numbers 61
((numbers – ratio and proportion)) 62 ((numbers – Pythagoras)) 64 ((numbers – Plato)) 65 ((numbers - the Pythagorean tradition)) 66 ((numbers – numerology – St Augustine)) 68 ((numbers – Boethius)) 70 ((numbers – the virtue of numbers)) 71 ((numbers – Bonaventure)) 73 ((numbers – numerology in Dante)) 76 ((numbers – numerological thinking)) 78 ((numbers – physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim against Platonism)) 80 ((numbers – Dante beyond numerology – innate love)) 88
THE COMEDY
((The Inferno – the world of anti-music)) 105 ((Purgatory)) 108 ((The limits of words)) 109 ((Casella’s song)) 112 ((hymns)) 117 ((The mystic procession)) 123 ((the challenge of the Paradiso)) 125 ((possibility of vision transcending senses)) 129 ((The sweet symphony of Paradise)) 131 ((Song and dance)) 133 ((The music that is beyond rational comprehension)) 137 ((Beyond the limits of speech)) 140 ((Conclusion – the musical journey)) 158 ((Music as liquid light)) 160 ((the end of the poem – into the light – the failure of geometry)) 167 ((the spiritual centre of the universe – the end of Paradise)) 172
PARADISE AND LOVE 186
((heartleap - love as the unifying force)) 186 ((conclusion on love as the answer)) 196 ((if love is the answer – then what is love?)) 197 ((conclusion – love is the answer – what is love?)) 198
THE SACRED POEM – THE REAL AND THE RATIONAL 200
((a sacred poem beyond fiction – real and rational)) 200 ((sacred poem – the real over the fictional)) 205 ((the impossibilities of Paradise)) 210 ((the impossibilities of Paradiso – Wilde vs Beckett)) 223 ((the impossibilities of Paradise – Dante’s invention)) 225 ((the impossibilities of Paradise – Dante’s devotion to impossibility)) 227
((Paradise beyond reason)) 229 ((Danteum – Medievalism, the Hierarchical order and Fascism)) 231 ((The Danteum)) 236 ((The Danteum – the petrification of Paradise)) 241 ((the Danteum – the freezing of the music)) 244 ((frozen music as immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum)) 246 ((the two concepts of God)) 247 ((putting the realms of fact and value together)) 248
Creator God or Natural Creativity? 267
((the secret – against reinventing the sacred)) 287 ((fulfilment of the soul’s desire – eccentricity beyond control)) 347 ((the illusions of being in control and of being in charge – letting go of neurosis)) 360 ((Be still and know)) 383 ((the dancer and the dance – getting in tune)) 385
UNITY AND DIVERSITY 394
((Unity and diversity)) 395 ((P.B. Shelley – unity and diversity)) 397 ((unity through diversity)) 402 ((unity in diversity – the politics of the common good)) 404 ((functional order – differentiated power)) 408 ((functional order – the just society and love divine)) 416 ((Personal and collective responsibility)) 419
RATIONAL FREEDOM 430
((Dante and Marx)) 430 ((Rational Freedom, Right Relationships, alienation and idolatry)) 467 ((Reason, Culture and Transcendent Truths)) 479 ((Culture, Power, and Truth)) 486
FREEDOM RATIONALIZED AND MECHANIZED 503
((Dante and the disenchanted world of Max Weber)) 503 ((fire and ice – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity)) 507 ((Dante in the disenchanted world)) 529 ((Dante and Climate Accord)) 543 ((Beyond the empire of fact)) 555
HAPPY ENDING 571
((the human comedy – existential crisis)) 571 ((happy ending – the choices we make, the ends we serve)) 574
((Appendix – evidence of Dante’s internal music)) 575 References to Music 575 ((musical instruments)) 576 ((musical terms)) 577 ((hymns and psalms)) 577
((appendix on numerology)) 579 ((appendix on music and poetry)) 580 ((appendix – Dante websites)) 584
And these chapters below are among another couple of hundred pages to be added to the above, the edited and integrated:
Peace on Earth Law, the State and the International Community Peace and government Osip Mandelstam on Dante and authority Dante on One Government
Blake and Dante Dante and Averroes – the uncanonical Dante Dante and Mahler – the internal music
And about a hundred other odds and sods I have hanging around on Dante.
I have recently taken extensive notes from Francesco Ciabattoni's erudite Dante's Journey to Polyphony. (2010). Whilst I was somewhat disappointed to come across this book after I had largely written my Dante book, I remain very encouraged by the fact that I had made many of the key points made in this learned and critically acclaimed book, and a lot more besides. I haven't missed much at all. Given that I started my Dante book merely to entertain and amuse myself, lift my spirits through cardiac rehabilitation, I think I am entitled to be a little pleased with my efforts. Dante, of course, is both an awkward read and an unfailing guide. I'll leave others to decide whether it is testimony to the truth of Dante's faith or to his genius as a poet that he has us believing his impossibilities by the end. I need to piece the Dante sections and chapters together, edit, and integrate key notes from the very fine Ciabattoni book.
Dante is an interesting character, though. I was unfriended on Facebook after posting on Dante, with the words that “I have a problem with certain kinds of Christian fundamentalist elitists.” I think he meant me. Dante is actually very subversive, radical, and not an elitist. Petrarch dismissed Dante for soliciting “the windy applause of the masses,” which made the point that Dante wrote with political and ethical intent, to move people, all people. The notion that he is part of a 'Western' canon also needs to be sharply qualified. I write of the uncanonical Dante, the Dante who weaves themes drawn from Averroes in his texts. I bring out these points and more in my book.
I like Dante, though. He's not for the timorous. He gets to the messy heart of the human world, and then takes us to true realities. Dante believes his impossibilities. And he lights the way. Always challenging, gives no easy options, he brings things to a head. He's not for the oafish who stick to the obvious - the people enchained to empirical necessity and immediate inclination. I'm hopeless on the numbers, though. Dante's numerology drives me mad. I did the best I could. Dante and multiples of three, anyone? My poor brain can't get the numbers. But I do get the internal music.
All told, that amounts to 1,220,000 words in total, which is not only a lot of hard work done, but an awful lot of hard work to come in editing. And then there's the material on the French connection in the Morality and Modernity text. Oh, and did I mention the Rousseau book I made a promise to myself to write in 2001? I wrote on Rousseau in my PhD researches, and it was read and examined by Kantian philosopher Gary Banham. He liked what I wrote and considered it to show great insight into Rousseau. He advised me write further on Rousseau, saying that he is an important but neglected and misunderstood thinker, and that I show an affinity with what Rousseau was about. I never did write that book. I did write on Autonomy, Authenticity, and Authority in Rousseau (check the "Books" tab). But that book did not cover education, psychology and religion, all of which are key to understanding Rousseau. The research has been done, and it's ready to be written.
I have quite a work programme, then. I know. The world is ending and everyone wants to write a book. But to write is to be for me. And writing is thinking is doing. It's called culture, and if civilization collapses, it will not be for want of hard technology or economic power, it will be for want of culture with a moral component in place.
As for Being and Place, it will have to be written in the form of aphorisms. It's too vast to be written as anything else. People will have to work it out for themselves. Think it through. Think. It will do them good. The notes are all in place.
Here is my past work deposited with the Humanities Commons
For relaxation, you can find me at Entirely Elvis - I'm an Elvis expert/fanatic/obsessive/addict. I'd seek therapy if it didn't make me so damned happy. He was a very good singer was Elvis. I don't need to be told about his flaws. Whatever you tell me here, I can tell you twice as much more. I used to complain endlessly about all that Elvis could have done but failed to do. Now I give thanks for and enjoy all that he did do, which was a lot, and which explains why he always was, still is, and forever will remain my most favourite singer of all the many singers I love. And they are many.