The Anthropocene conjecture and Wilfrid Sellars’ scientific image: (another) prolegomenon to rethinking the human?

ABSTRACT

Responding to ideas about ‘geologizing the social’ (Clark and Gunaratnam 2017. “Earthing the Anthropos? From ‘Socializing the Anthropocene’ to Geologizing the Social.” Journal of Social Theory 20 (1): 146–163. doi:10.1177/1368431016661337), this conceptual paper reflects on the requirements for reconsidering the idea of the human in the Anthropocene context. It does so by parsing the Anthropocene conjecture taken as a predication of the Earth System through the analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between manifest and scientific images of ‘man in the world [sic]’ (2007. In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, edited by Robert Brandom, and Kevin Scharp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 384). From this perspective, the Anthropocene conjecture is an explanatory-descriptive postulate that affords an integrated role to aggregated human activities. The upshot is shown to be the possibility of making ‘ourselves’ accountable for the state of the Earth System by inhabiting this integrated self-conception, which is dependent on our ability to enrich it with a manifest-image language of individual intentions. In conclusion, the paper suggests that questioning the conditions of projects that seek to rearticulate what humanity means in the Anthropocene is a propaedeutic exercise for doing just that. For in order to think about ourselves on Earth, there is an attendant need to discuss thinking about thinking about ourselves on Earth.

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• geophilosophy
• reason
• climate emergency
• geologic subjectivity
• geosocial thought

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).