The Emotions of the Late Anthropocene in Visual Arts

Abstract

This guest editors' introduction to the special issue provides a brief overview of ecological emotions, important philosophical accounts of emotion, the distinctive nature of visual arts and their interplay with affective experience, and the introductory summary of the special issue's articles.

Keywords:

• Climate Crisis
• Environmental Emotions
• Perception
• Visuality
• Visual Arts

Notes

1 See the representative discussion by Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

2 Lisa Kretz, “Climate Change: Bridging the Theory–Action Gap,” Ethics and the Environment 17 (2012): 9–27; Elisa Aaltola, “The Meat Paradox, Omnivore's Akrasia, and Animal Ethics,” Animals 9, no. 12 (2019), 1125. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9121125

3 See the classic by Phyllis Windle, “The Ecology of Grief,” BioScience 42 (1992): 363–6; or, more recently, Lesley Head and Theresa Harada, “Keeping the Heart a Long Way from the Brain: The Emotional Labour of Climate Scientists,” Emotion, Space and Society 24 (2017): 34–41.

4 Kriss A. Kevorkian, “Environmental Grief,” in Non-Death Loss and Grief, ed. Darcy L. Harris (New York: Routledge, 2019), 216–26.

5 Caroline Hickman et al., “Climate Anxiety in Children and Young People and Their Beliefs about Government Responses to Climate Change: A Global Survey,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5 (2021): E863–73.

6 Samantha K. Stanley et al., “From Anger to Action: Differential Impacts of Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Depression, and Eco-Anger on Climate Action and Wellbeing,” The Journal of Climate Change and Health 1 (2021), article 100003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100003

7 Renee Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia (New York: Routledge, 2016).

8 E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

9 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. And Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 [1949]), see 93ff.

10 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002 [1962]), see chap. 8.

11 Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia and the New Mourning,” in Mourning Nature. Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press), 292–315; see also a more systematic account in Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions. New Words for a New World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

12 Susan Wardell, “Naming and Framing Ecological Distress,” Medicine Anthropology Theory 7 (2020): 187–201.

13 As suggested for instance by a recent attempt (still one of the first few) at an exhaustive classification, by Panu Pihkala, “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions,” Frontiers in Climate 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154

14 See Julien A. Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012), chap. 1.

15 Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

16 See Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

17 See Jonathan Haidt,“The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” in Reasoning. Studies of Human Inference and Its Foundations, ed. Jonathan E. Adler and Lance J. Rips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1024–52.

18 Since what is being taken as constituting the ‘class’ of ‘emotions’ is itself the product of a complex development full of historical and cultural contingencies; see Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” The Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 139–61; or Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Enough Already with ‘Theories of the Emotions,’” in Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 269–78.

19 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

20 See the classic extrapolation of “under the description” into the context of perception by G.E.M. Anscombe, “The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature,” in Analytic Philosophy, ed. Ronald J. Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 158–80.

21 See Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt, eds., Eco-Media: Key Issues (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17.

22 John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 13.

23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 56, emphasis in the original.

24 Ibid., 48.

25 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), 147.

26 Here we quote the earlier edition and translation: Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 162. In the newer version the same sentence is translated as follows: ‘If mimetic comportment does not imitate something but rather makes itself like itself’. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), 145.

27 Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), vii–xi.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grant no. 22-15446S, ‘ECEGADMAT’, of the Czech Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Ondřej Beran

ONDŘEJ BERAN is one of the Heads of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, and an associate professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Pardubice. He has written about various topics, mainly in ethics and the philosophy of language, and primarily in the post-Wittgensteinian tradition; currently, he is the principal investigator of a research project (under the Czech Science Foundation) about environmental emotions. His recent publications include Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge 2021) and Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein (co-edited with S. Aldrin Salskov and N. Hämäläinen; Springer 2022).Email: [email protected]Personal website: https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/doc-ondrej-beran-phdhttps://upce.academia.edu/OndřejBeran

Antony Fredriksson

ANTONY FREDRIKSSON is an associate professor in environmental ethics and aesthetics at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice. His areas of interest include aesthetics, attention, ethics, film and philosophy, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, and Wittgenstein. He has taught philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, the University of Helsinki and the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His most recent work focuses on existential questions concerning the faculty of attention, including the book A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar: Encounters with the Unknown (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and the articles (with Silvia Panizza) ‘Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’ (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2020) and ‘The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog’ (Film-Philosophy, 22.1/2018).

Email: [email protected]Personal website: https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/antony-fredriksson-phdhttps://upce.academia.edu/AntonyFredriksson