Earthly Engagements brings together scholars who take up Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought as a critical and heuristic resource to think through the planetary socio-ecological crisis. The volume advances the ecological voice in Sartre studies and the Sartrean voice in environmental studies, from environmental philosophy to eco-criticism.

Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre’s existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthly locations include the Icelandic coast, the Minnesota woods, the Indiana Dunes, the Chinese Great Plain, the Venetian Lagoon, and more; worldly situations include that of the artist, the activist, the consumer, the tourist, and more. Through their diversity of methods and substantive concerns, the chapters reveal a wealth of critical and heuristic resources within Sartre’s thought for thinking through and engaging the planetary ecological crisis and its direct ties to global social, economic, and political crises. In full recognition of Sartre’s personal distaste for agrarian settings and wilderness, and some ostensibly anti-environmental philosophical and literary moments, the contributors take the proper Sartrean line that how we view nature and our relationship to nature is neither closed nor predetermined. Like life itself, our worldly relationship to earthly nature is rooted in the sufficiency and open-endedness of freedom.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction by Matthew C. Ally & Damon Boria

Part I. Sartre and Ecology

Chapter 1. “Sartre and Problems in the Philosophy of Ecology – with a Thirty-Year Update” by William L. McBride

Part II. Art and Phenomenology

Chapter 2. “Soundscape Ecology and a Sartrean Phenomenology of Listening” by Craig Matarrese

Chapter 3. “The Ecological Gaze: Re-Reading Sartre through Guido van Helten’s No Exit Murals” by Joe Balay

Part III. Ethics

Chapter 4. “Three Sartrean Motivations for Environmentalism” by Kiki Berk and Joshua Tepley

Chapter 5. “I Am What I Buy: Bad Faith and Consumer Culture” by Elizabeth Butterfield

Chapter 6. “Buying Green: A Trap for Fools, or, Sartre on Ethical Consumerism” by Michael Butler

Part IV. Dialectics and Politics

Chapter 7. "Heralding Kairos: The Depths of Seriality and Creating Earth as a Work of Art" by Austin Hayden Smidt

Chapter 8. “Counter-Finality and the Living World” by Paul Gyllenhammer

Chapter 9. “Hyperobjects and the Practico-Inert: Ecology and the Critique of Dialectical Reason” by Simon Gusman and Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Part V. Ontology and Metaphysics

Chapter 10. “Sartrean Ethics Meets Deloria’s Native American Metaphysics: A Spatialized Existentialist Ethic” by Kimberly Engels

Chapter 11. “Nothingness, Emptiness, and Ecology: A Reframing of Sartre’s Early Ontology through Buddhist Metaphysics” by Dane Sawyer

Part VI. Reimagining Past and Future

Chapter 12. “Toward Ecologically-Oriented Political Projects: Reimagining Existentialism at Algren’s Cabin” by Damon Boria

Chapter 13. “After the Holocene: Reimagining Sartre’s Venice” by Matthew C. Ally