Reversals and Transformations

Abstract

This chapter assesses the significance of such challenging experiences of reversal, transformation, displacement, and frame-shifting—how they are possible, what they suggest for the practice of philosophy, and how they bear on the shape of humanity's earthly dwelling. It discusses a broad range of experiences, with a view to drawing from them some sort of productive schematization. Taken together, the specific relevance of these examples to bringing about “the change we need” on the environmental front becomes clear. The example of the broken hammer is a reminder of how much people take a fallible technology for granted. Meanwhile, Heidegger suggests that the instrumental understanding of language is allied with technological mastery of the earth. Musing on mortality is equally open to a range of dramatic transformations. Awareness of one's mortality, and the ultimate price being paid for humanity being alive by other species, can give urgency and intensity to the search for sustainable existence. Love, empathy, engagement with nonhuman animals, and the experience of art all take people out of themselves, or mean and narrow versions of themselves, and allow them to imagine other, less defensive, more generous, guiding dispositions. Finally, coming to see the earth as itself vulnerable and fragile can shake people out of their infantile disregard for its own requirements. Ultimately, these various experiential reversals make possible a concerted change in how people live, move, and have their being.