Forrest Clingerman
Roundtable Title: Challenges and Tensions of the Narratives from the Affective Anthropocene
Participants: Forrest Clingerman, Magdalena Hoły-Łuczaj, Silviya Serafimova & Patryk Szaj
Title: Relating oneself and the other in the Anthropocene
Abstract: While the concept of the Anthropocene began with a narrow use focused solely on the Earth system and geology, interdisciplinary researchers quickly began to utilize this concept in broader ways. Now, it is used to narrate the shifts and ruptures in our interpretation of the human experience of a world now reflexively related to its humanness. As a hermeneutically-oriented concept, the Anthropocene is unavoidably temporal: for instance, it raises questions of the balance of human and natural scales, continuity and discontinuity, novelty and tradition. Do these temporal questions change our emotional stories about our ties to the world and each other? Grounded in Martin Buber’s understanding of I-Thou and I-It, as well as Paul Ricoeur’s sense of “oneself as another,” I will suggest that the Anthropocene represents a need to create new imaginative possibilities of the future at the crux of hope and fear. Imagination is required in different ways, depending on whether the Anthropocene represents a rupture or an evolution of the human-world entanglement.
Bio: Forrest Clingerman is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Ohio Northern University. His research focuses on philosophical hermeneutics and the notion of place.
