Hibbard-Swanson Wins Essay Prize

Congratulations to Jared Hibbard-Swanson who won this year's Outstanding Graduate Student Essay Prize at the 2008 International Association of Environmental Philosophy society conference in Pittsburgh, PA.  This is an award given to the best graduate student paper presented at the conference.

Self-Realization or Self-Fashioning? Spinoza, Deep Ecology and the Problem of Ecological Subjectivity

In opposition to the "shallow" environmental movement, "deep" ecologists such as Arne Naess have sought not only to articulate new ecological norms, but also to found these norms upon a quasi-Spinozist philosophy of self-realization. While mainstream environmental ethicists attempt to settle upon an understanding of the relative moral worth of different natural beings in abstraction from our relationship to these beings, deep ecologists argue that these relationships, which constitute the ecological self, are ethically prior to a rational articulation of moral principles. If new ecological values are ever to take hold, we must first seek to unsettle the prevailing non-ecological sense of self.

Naess' strategy of turning ethical theory back upon the constitution of the human subject provides an interesting counterpoint to many of the prevailing concerns in the field of environmental ethics, forcing debates over abstract values to return to the ground of our lived experience of the world. However, Naess' static metaphysical vision of the fully-realized self, derived from his idiosyncratic interpretation of Spinoza's Ethics, may still prove insufficiently attentive to the contingent and situated nature of ecological experience. In this paper I argue that Naess does not unsettle our sense of self and world enough.

The principal aims of my paper, therefore, are twofold. First, I seek to critically examine the quasi-Spinozist theory of subjectivity that underlies the deep ecological ethic of self-realization, drawing attention to its static conception of ecological phenomena and selfhood. Second, relying on Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza, I attempt to unearth in Spinoza's text an alternate ethic of self-fashioning, rooted in a more dynamic, material understanding of ecological subjectivity that is hopefully more attentive to the shifting and uncertain nature of emerging ecological phenomena.