Process Studies Supplement Overcoming Anthropocentric ... - Here

Process Studies Supplement 

Issue 12 (2008) 

Overcoming Anthropocentric Humanism 

and Radical Anti-Humanism: Contours 

of the Constructive Postmodernist 

Environmental Epistemology 

Adam C. Scarfe, Ph.D., M.Ed. 

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, California State University, 

Bakersfield, Faculty Towers 101-D, 9001 Stockdale Hwy, Bakersfield, 

California, 93311 U.S.A. E-mail: . 

Abstract: Drawing on eco-psychology’s central problematic concerning the 

assumed conceptual bifurcation between the human self and the natural 

world, which is prevalent in contemporary modern culture, this paper explores 

the main contours of constructive postmodernist environmental epistemology, 

as exemplified by Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational thought. With 

reference to characterizations of the modern and deconstructive postmodern 

paradigms derived from Sartre’s existentialism and Derrida’s deconstructionism, 

it sets forth a novel demonstration of how Whitehead’s process-relational 

way of thinking, as representative of a critical, non-anthropocentric organicism, 

overcomes both the anthropocentric humanist assumptions of the 

modern paradigm, which are at the root of the ecological crisis, as well as the 

anti-humanism common to both deconstructive postmodernism and radical 

ecologism. I show how process-relational environmental epistemology can 

contribute to the cultivation of a heightened awareness of the prehensive 

character of human experience in our culture, by which the human self is, in 

part, constituted, with a concern to limit the rate and extent of the appropriation, 

consumption, and destruction of “the natural” belonging to many forms 

of human creativity, thereby tempering the “attack on the environment” via 

reasoned self-limitation. At the same time, I point out that process-relational 

environmental epistemology seeks to allow for sustainable levels of development, 

human creativity, life-satisfaction, and self-enjoyment.

2 

PROCESS STUDIES SUPPLEMENTS 12 (2008) 

Toward an outline of the contours of “process-relational” 

environmental epistemology 

In responding to the overwhelming scientific consensus that there is a 

causal connection between various human activities (e.g., the burning 

of fossil fuels) and environmental problems (e.g., climate change), the 

philosopher’s task is to reflect on, to identify, and to take issue with ways 

of thinking which are at the root of such environmentally destructive 

activities. This philosophical stream of inquiry may be called environmental 

epistemology, the results of which lead logically into the domain 

of ethics, precisely, into considerations of what sorts of behavior and 

ways of life are authentically constitutive of environmentally ethical 

praxis and how they contrast with those which contribute to the worsening 

of such ecological dysfunctions. One major issue in environmental 

epistemology, which it is the purpose of this paper to examine from a 

process-relational standpoint, is to identify what is problematic with 

present assumptions concerning the way human beings think about the 

relationship (or lack thereof) between themselves and the natural world, 

in order to then move toward considering how human beings ought to 

conceive of it. Therefore, environmental epistemology is both descriptive 

as well as prescriptive. 1 That said, environmental epistemology does not 

subjectively “cater the truth” to the specific circumstance of the ecological 

crisis. Rather, the very fact that there is an ecological crisis, to begin 

with, exemplifies the dominance of false and problematic assumptions 

regarding the relationship between the human self and the natural world 

in contemporary culture. 

Here, drawing on eco-psychology’s problematic concerning the 

relationship between the human self and the natural world, Sartre’s existentialism 

and Derrida’s deconstructionism, the present essay serves, more 

generally, to outline some of the main contours of the environmental epistemology 

which emerges out of Whiteheadian, process-relational modes of 

thought, the latter representative of an alternative form of postmodernism, 

namely, a “constructive” or more accurately, “re-constructive postmodernism” 

(Griffin, “Introduction” xii). Specifically, I intend to set forth a 

novel demonstration of how Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational 

way of thinking, characterized as a critical, non-anthropocentric organicism, 

overcomes both the anthropocentric humanist assumptions of the 

modern paradigm, which are at the root of the ecological crisis, as well as

Scarfe/Overcoming Anthropocentric Humanism 3 

the anti-humanism common to both deconstructive postmodernism and 

radical ecologism. In order to carry out this task, it will first be necessary to 

provide a brief analysis of some of the main themes of eco-psychology in 

raising the epistemological problem of the conceptual bifurcation between 

the human self and the natural world. Second, I shall demonstrate how 

Sartre’s characterization of the fundamental project of human-reality in 

Being and Nothingness illuminates the underlying meaning of substantialist 

conceptions of the human self and Nature, as well as of the anthropocentric 

humanism of the modern paradigm. Third, it will be imperative to 

provide a brief synopsis of Derrida’s deconstructionism, with reference 

to his critique of anthropocentric humanism in the essay, “The Ends of 

Man” as well as of his allegations concerning Sartre’s complicity with it. 

Fourth, it will be necessary to elaborate on some of the anti-humanist 

affinities between deconstructive postmodernism and radical ecologism. 

Fifth, I shall show how the Whiteheadian process-relational environmental 

epistemology presents a critical, non-anthropocentric organicism that 

overcomes the vicious dichotomy between the anthropocentric humanism 

of the “modern” paradigm and the extreme anti-humanism of both 

“deconstructive postmodernism” and radical ecologism. 

Eco-psychology’s critique of the conceptual bifurcation of 

the human self from the natural world 

Eco-psychology is one of several fairly recent ecological movements arising 

from within the social scientific discipline of psychology; although it is 

constituted by an attempt to critically reassess the latter’s basic assumptions. 

Other critical environmentally engaged forms of psychology include 

ecological psychology, conservation psychology, psycho-ecology, and terrapsychology. 

2 Coinciding with other environmental movements, such as 

deep ecology, ecozoicism, and eco-feminism, eco-psychology maintains 

that consciousness of the plight of the natural environment needs to be 

developed not solely on the basis of the notion that the ecological crisis is a 

threat to human survival, but in that the natural world has value-in-itself. Its 

main aim is to overcome the anthropocentrism which is at the root of the 

environmental crisis. Particularly, eco-psychologists, such as Andy Fisher, 

David Kidner, and Theodore Roszak, criticize the anthropocentric, “ego”- 

logical biases of modern culture as well as of modern psychology, which 

are allegedly complicit with the continuance of environmental problems. 

In this light, much of eco-psychology’s subject matter is closely analogous


to that of environmental epistemology, although the latter’s investigations 

are, of course, philosophical in character. 

Eco-psychologists hold that the citizenry of contemporary modern 

society does not contemplate the rhythms and patterns of Nature. They 

paint the picture that most persons are so focused on the immediate 

tasks of their “daily grind,” that Nature, if anything, is experienced as 

an irrelevant backdrop for everyday human dealings and business. Quite 

critically, eco-psychologists observe that in contemporary society, the 

human individual lives in a human- and self-centered illusory realm, 

entirely disconnected from the natural world. All too rarely do they stop 

to wonder what this (existence) all is and to think about their relationship 

with the natural world. According to eco-psychology, contemporary 

modern culture assumes that these questions are not relevant, resulting in 

an unreflective mindset that is simply not attuned to the natural world. 

In the everyday attitude, the natural, if anything, is considered to be a 

mere potentiality, a “stockpile” for fulfilling the instrumental ends of 

human beings. With the help of modern technology, the natural world 

is developed, appropriated, transformed, prepared, processed, placed into 

packaging, and consumed upon demand, all without recognition of the 

intrinsic value of “the natural” in this process. Nature is assumed to be 

something merely there for human purposes, regardless of the fact that 

the average person takes “the natural” for granted within the constitution 

of themselves qua “selves.” In the everyday mindset, there is an assumed 

metaphysical bifurcation between the self and the natural world, which 

is at the root of the ecological crisis. To be sure, eco-psychology suggests 

that “the violence we do to ourselves and to the natural world results 

from our [posited] psychological and spiritual separation from nature” 

(Fisher 21), namely, “a ‘dissociative split’ between spirit and nature . . . 

[in which] spirit is not only separated from nature, but incompatible and 

opposed [to it]” (Metzner 65). This conceptual bifurcation is assumed 

not only in everyday life in contemporary society, 3 but also reinforced by 

mainstream psychology. 

Eco-psychologists differentiate their discipline from mainstream psychology 

in that the latter postulates that the human self is constituted by 

an ego which stands statically apart from, and over against, the natural 

world. Particularly, they claim that mainstream psychology is reductionistic 

in that it focuses on the mental health, the feelings, and the desires 

of human beings, both in abstraction from, and to the neglect of any

Scarfe/Overcoming Anthropocentric Humanism 

 

consideration of the interrelation between the natural world and the mind. 

For instance, psychology focuses on alleviating the trials and illnesses of 

the human ego, such as depression, fear, grief, and anxiety, by way of 

therapy or by way of prescription drugs. Eco-psychologists charge that 

in its assumption of the existence of the human ego, and its exclusively 

anthropocentric focus on it, mainstream psychology fails to consider the 

impact of human thought and action on the natural world. Psychology 

presupposes that the natural world and the organic entities helping to 

compose it are merely in service to the desires of the human self, there 

to be appropriated, consumed, and used up without reference to them 

in the constitution of ourselves as “selves.” In traditional psychology, it 

is generally presupposed that while healthy persons largely confront the 

world and are able to control and appropriate the elements in their surroundings 

for themselves, an unhealthy person is one who cannot or does 

not, instead experiencing depression, fear, grief, and anxiety, for example, 

which need to be treated, as though they were the diseases and not the 

symptoms of a greater problem. In this way, eco-psychologists claim that 

psychology does not consider that the well-being of the individual egos 

experiencing, grasping, and appropriating the natural world are in any 

way connected to the health of that world and to the collective health of 

the organisms composing it. Conversely, the natural world is not considered 

to be a part of the human self, let alone connected with it in any 

fundamental way. As such, Kidner states: 

within experimental psychology, the separation of the person from the 

natural contexts is so complete that no recent theorist has argued for 

the necessity of this separation; rather the natural world is considered 

to be so far beyond the field of interest of experimental psychology 

that this issue is simply not addressed. (“Why” 365) 

For Fisher, Kidner, and Roszak, traditional psychology has postulated 

and reinforced the existence of a strict metaphysical barrier between the 

human ego and the natural world, where, in fact, there is none. Roszak 

claims that “psychologists concluded that if [the conception of] the self 

were to be expanded so as to include the natural world, then behavior 

leading to the destruction of it would be experienced as self-destruction” 

(“Nature” 3). And this standpoint would point directly to the necessity 

of limiting human appropriation and consumption of the things and 

resources of the natural world, namely, of repressing the ego, which would 

not only be conceived of as “anti-humanist,” but would be considered


unacceptable, especially in the deeply rooted Freudian tradition of psychology. 

Accordingly, for Kidner, 

Freud regarded the separation of the self from the external world as 

an essential part of both individual development and the progress 

of civilization, arguing that the way forward required ‘combining 

with the rest of the human community and taking up the attack on 

nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of 

science.’ (“Why” 366) 

“‘Nature,’ Freud dismally concluded, ‘is eternally remote. She destroys 

us—coldly, cruelly, relentlessly.’ Whatever else has been revised and 

rejected in Freud’s theories, this tragic sense of estrangement from nature 

continues to haunt psychology” (Roszak, “Nature” 2). Eco-psychologists 

further claim that the bifurcation of ego and natural world, common in 

mainstream psychology, is part and parcel of the continued dominance 

of Cartesian dualism. Precisely, Descartes postulated an anthropocentric, 

mechanistic-materialistic worldview in which reality was composed of 

two separate forms of substances: indivisible, thinking substances (res 

cogitans) and unthinking, extended, and divisible, material substances (res 

extensa), which propagates the conception that the ego is a substance that 

is disconnected from the material world. Eco-psychology seeks to heal 

the metaphysical split between “inner” and “outer,” as well as between 

consciousness and matter, these being the products of “the mature culmination 

of Cartesian dualism” (“Why” 367). As summed up by Kidner: 

anthropocentric assumptions are intrinsic to the current Western 

ideology. While a religious world view necessarily locates humankind 

within the context of a greater spiritual scheme, in a mechanistic 

world view individuals, by means of rationality, are seen as masters— 

or at least potential masters—of a world that is at their disposal. The 

conception of a universe in which God is ultimately the controlling 

power is replaced by a viewpoint in which technology can enable 

humankind to control and utilize the world. (“Why” 366) 

In contrast to mainstream psychology, eco-psychology is a holistic 

attempt to focus on the complete situation of the human self both within 

and compositional of the natural world. Avoiding the reductionism of 

the mainstream, it considers mental health from a collective and holistic 

perspective, rather than merely from a standpoint that is based on the 

assumptions that there exists an individual ego which stands over and 

against the world. For instance, eco-psychology considers that the mental 

health of one person is dependent upon the mental health of others as


 

well as the health of the natural environment. Furthermore, as defined 

by Fisher, eco-psychology has for its subject matter “neither the human 

nor the natural, but the lived experience of interrelationship between the 

two” (Radical 31) in a common identity. In other words, eco-psychology 

maintains that the diminishment of the human self and the natural world 

are reciprocal processes. 

On the one hand, eco-psychologists attempt to investigate and locate 

reasons for ecological degradation in the most intimate conceptions and 

deeply rooted structures of the human psyche and through analysis of 

individuals’ understanding of themselves. For them, it is the questionable, 

anthropocentric conceptions of the ego, as postulated in traditional 

psychology, that create and allow for a lack of reflection leading to the 

over-consumption of natural resources. They claim that questionable 

conceptions of the ego which are found in psychology contribute to the 

excessively instrumental thinking in relation to the natural world that is 

dominant in contemporary culture, treating it simply as a means to human 

ends. As a result, a central concern of eco-psychologists is to take issue 

with “ego”-logical conceptions of the human self. Furthermore, unlike 

economic, “reform,” and “management” approaches to environmentalism, 

they view “the ecological crisis in existential and spiritual terms, not 

merely in technocratic or managerial ones” (Fisher, “Toward” 20). 

On the other hand, eco-psychology concerns itself with the psychological 

effects of ecological degradation. It focuses on eco-therapy, namely, 

the treatment of mental ills occurring as a result of worsening environmental 

conditions. For example, eco-psychologists have also detected and 

investigated what they call environmental despair and “eco-anxiety,” as 

characterized by emotional stress, grief, intense worry, and panic attacks 

which are reactions against the increasing alienation of the modern 

individual from Nature, as well as rampant environmental destruction. 

Roszak and Fisher suggest that “no separation is more pervasive in this 

Age of Anxiety than our disconnection from the natural world” (“Nature” 

3) and that “any practice that works to release us from the sense of being 

a separate, isolated ego set over against the [natural] world, helps to free 

us from death anxiety, which some see as a deep source of the human 

drive to control and dominate other humans and nature” (“Toward” 25). 

Eco-psychologists also investigate “alcoholism, drug abuse, sex addiction, 

consumerism, eating disorders, codependence . . .war-making” (Glendinning 

54) as well as addictions to technology, rampant in Western society,


which, according to them, are unhealthy ways of coping with the cultural 

disassociation of the self from natural world. 

Despite providing a more holistic vision for psychology, one critic 

of eco-psychology claims that it has, thus far, tended to focus too much 

on the human side of the split between self and natural world, and has 

not truly “offered a deeper way to understand the psychic-collective 

undercurrents of how we came to be at such destructive odds with the 

rest of the ecosphere” (Chalquist 21). In this direction, eco-psychology 

can only benefit from a dialogue with phenomenology, existentialism, 

and process-relational modes of thought in attempting to confront “the 

arbitrary and increasingly destructive separation of human consciousness 

from its ground and source” (Chalquist 26), namely, the natural world. 

As will be shown in the next section of this paper, the general themes 

surrounding eco-psychology’s critique of the anthropocentrism of modern 

society and of traditional psychology correspond directly with some 

important aspects of Jean-Paul Sartre’s view of the self in his existentialist 

phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This analysis of Sartre’s philosophy 

will also serve to identify the underlying meaning of the anthropocentric 

humanism at the root of modernity. 

Sartre’s critique of husserl’s “ego”-logical theory and his 

articulations concerning the relationship between the 

human self and nature 

In the mid-twentieth century, the arrival of existentialism shocked the 

intellectual establishment in many profound ways. While Sartre’s slogan 

that described his own existentialist philosophy was “existentialism is a 

humanism,” other figures, like Heidegger and Camus, who were branded 

“existentialists,” repudiated the term expressly and distanced themselves 

from the notion of humanism. For Sartre, while existentialism was 

“humanist,” it was not representative of a naïve humanism. It was nothing 

other than the attempt to provide “a coherent atheistic position” 

(Existentialism 51). With no given human nature or “self” in the mind of 

God to live up to, Sartre’s existentialism consisted in a claim that human 

beings are thrown into a world not of their own choosing and that it is the 

responsibility of each individual human being, through their choices and 

actions, to “nobly” define themselves, and, at the same time, to help define 

humanity as a whole. In other words, there is no self but what we make 

and there is no essence of humanity prior to its existence. 4 In contrast to


 

previous humanistic philosophies, Sartre’s existentialism also pointed out 

the limits of reason as well as provided a more “authentic” assessment of 

the human condition, confronting it head on with anxiety and despair. 

Existentialism took many of the initial intellectual steps toward the antihumanism 

that is typically associated with the postmodernist thought 

that blossomed in the latter half of the twentieth century. 

In setting out the main tenets of his existentialist philosophy, Jean-Paul 

Sartre examined the underlying meanings behind the conceptual bifurcation 

of the human self and the natural world. Sartre was not involved with 

environmentalism of any kind. But, although he distinguishes between 

empirical psychoanalysis and existentialist psychoanalysis in that while 

the former, “aims at reconstituting the life of the subject from birth to 

the moment of the cure,” in order to “determine the complex,” and the 

latter “seeks to determine the original choice [of being] . . . operating in 

the face of the world” (Being 727-28), his phenomenological investigations 

lend themselves well to the aims of eco-psychology. 

In Nausea, Sartre discusses the existential anxiety and alienation modern 

man feels in relation to the natural world, as represented through the 

thoughts and feelings of his main character, Roquentin. Roquentin is a 

rare individual who contemplates his own existential situation as well as 

the place of “the human” in the natural world and he despairs, feeling 

that his life is meaninglessness and that existence is absurd. Over the 

course of the novel, Roquentin becomes increasingly neurotic and alienated 

from the humanistic aims of his vocation as a historian, largely as 

a result of his insights into the indifference of the natural world toward 

human aspirations and endeavors. In describing Roquentin’s thoughts 

and feelings concerning Nature, Sartre writes, 

I am afraid of cities. But you mustn’t leave them. If you go too far 

you come up against the vegetation belt. Vegetation has crawled 

for miles toward the cities. It is waiting. Once the city is dead, the 

vegetation will cover it, will climb over the stones, grip them, search 

them, make them burst with its long black pincers; it will blind the 

holes and let its green paws hang over everything. You must stay in 

the cities as long as they are alive, you must never penetrate alone 

this great mass of hair waiting at the gates: you must let it undulate 

and crack all by itself. In the cities, if you know how to take care of 

yourself, and choose the times when all the beasts are sleeping in 

their holes and digesting, behind the heaps of organic debris, you

10 


rarely come across anything more than minerals, the least frightening 

of all existents. 

I am going back to Bouville. The vegetation has only surrounded 

three sides of it. (156) 

In this passage, Roquentin’s existential anxiety in relation to the 

impending doom of the city at the hands of “the vegetation and the 

beasts,” represents a deeply held fear of the destructive powers of Nature. 

Nature is here conceived of not only as conditioning human life, but as 

determinate of the human condition. Nature is especially understood as 

a chaotic entity which is responsible for the temporality of human life 

and of human structures, namely, for the transience, finitude, decay, and 

perishing of all human life and endeavor. 

Since human beings can do nothing to preserve themselves and their 

constructions against the ravages of Nature, Roquentin characterizes it 

as something to be feared. Roquentin’s anxiety is, in part, the result of 

contemplating the threats and challenges that the natural environment 

poses to human survival, such as harsh climates, cold, heat, disease, hunger, 

thirst, decay, predatory animals, pestilence, floods, droughts, earthquakes, 

avalanches, hurricanes, tornadoes, and eruptions of volcanoes, which 

human beings attempt to overcome using their reasoning faculties, in order 

to preserve the conditions for survival. However, underlying this list of 

natural challenges to human beings, Roquetin’s existential anxiety issues 

from the recognition that the human condition is comprised by “having 

to exist” as a “prisoner” tied into the finitude of his own existence. This 

is the meaning of the existentialist notion that human beings are thrown 

into a world not of their own choosing, but which is determinate of the 

limits and the contours of human experience, life, and existence. One may 

speculate that the facts that Nature continuously confronts human beings 

with such challenges to its survival, that the natural world determines the 

limits and contours of human life, and that the human response is such 

that to control and transcend Nature is the only way to attain freedom, 

constitute some of the major reasons for why humanity has attempted 

to construct both physical and conceptual barriers between the itself and 

the natural world. Similarly, these are reasons why the human species has 

evolved chiefly through the advance of its technical-rational capacities 

which enable it to increasingly control and “master” Nature. To be sure, 

throughout its evolution, the human species has been engaged not only in


11 

a fight for survival against Nature, wherein reason, employed in the “technical-rational 

interest” (Habermas 191), is the main “battle weapon.” 

In a similar manner to some of the main tenets of eco-psychology’s 

investigation of the relationship between the human self and the natural 

world, although without a concern for the environment as the chief 

impetus, Sartre also took issue with metaphysical conceptions of the 

self, which describe it as entirely disconnected from the (natural) world. 

In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), a seminal work from which his 

existentialist philosophy was sprung, Sartre provides a critique of Husserl’s 

“ego”-logical transcendental idealism that was set out in the latter’s 

Cartesian Meditations and elsewhere. While Sartre’s own existentialist 

phenomenology is thoroughly indebted to Husserl’s phenomenological 

investigations and to its findings, he takes particular issue with Husserl’s 

positing of the existence of a transcendental ego at the root of consciousness, 

responsible for its unity as the “thing” which thinks. 

In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 

Husserl outlined some of the connections, as well as the distinctions, 

between psychology and phenomenology, which may, for the purposes 

of this paper, serve analogously to illuminate the relationship between 

eco-psychology and more philosophical modes of investigation. Husserl 

claimed that a purely descriptive psychology of consciousness parallels 

transcendental phenomenology, in that they may correspond in what they 

sought to describe. Husserl thought that psychology was “the truly decisive 

field” in bridging the gap between “subjectivism and objectivism” and 

that it paralleled phenomenology in that “its subject matter is universal 

subjectivity” (Crisis 208). But, he was critically adamant regarding the 

distinction between them. Husserl charges that psychology “like every 

objective science, is [naïvely] bound to the realm of what is prescientifically 

pregiven, i.e., bound to what can be named, asserted, described in 

common language” (209), and is fraught with dualistic and physicalistic 

assumptions. As such, for him, while psychology operated from “a different 

attitude and is under the guidance of a different task” (208) and 

holds that data belonging to the world are “presupposed as existing” and 

“taken as psychic components of a man,” in phenomenological investigation, 

the data “are not taken in this manner, because the whole world, 

when one is in the phenomenological attitude, is not accepted as actuality, 

but only as an actuality-phenomenon” (Cartesian 32). Husserl further 

pointed out that phenomenology avoids the anthropological tendencies

12 


of empirical psychology. He also sought to reorient psychology toward 

the transcendental phenomenological attitude. Interestingly enough, in 

a similar manner to eco-psychology’s criticism of mainstream psychology 

for not investigating the relationship of the human self and the natural 

world, Husserl asked “why has the experience of the bodily thing in the 

life-world, as the experience of something ‘merely subjective,’ not previously 

been included in the subject matter of psychology?” (Crisis 219). 

One of Husserl’s fundamental projects, in relation to his phenomenology, 

was to attempt to return to the type of meditation that is found in 

Descartes’ philosophy, in order to provide a renewed grounding for the 

sciences, while avoiding the latter’s dualistic presuppositions. Parallel 

with Descartes’ meditations, Husserl maintained that the findings of 

his transcendental phenomenology were universal, and he both clarified 

and deepened the meaning of Descartes’ methodic doubt. Consistent 

with Descartes’ postulation of the existence of an ego cogito, through his 

own transcendental meditations, Husserl “discovered” a transcendental 

ego, or “I,” at the core of subjectivity. The transcendental ego was a 

main object of investigation for his phenomenology. But, according to 

Sartre’s critique, regardless of questions pertaining to phenomenological 

methods, the postulation of the existence of a transcendental ego at 

the root of consciousness is an unfounded assumption that is left over 

from Descartes’ “discovery” of the ego cogito and the resulting bifurcation 

of thinking substances (res cogitans) from extended substances (res 

extensa). For Husserl, the transcendental ego was universally accessible 

to consciousness through the mental procedure of phenomenological 

reduction (epochē), or in other words, through the “bracketing-off” of the 

“naïve consciousness” of the objective world, and more precisely, of “all 

positions taken toward the already-given objective world” (Cartesian 20). 

With the employment of phenomenological reduction, which is also a 

major point of distinction between his phenomenology and psychology, 

Husserl attempted to show that the transcendental ego can be experienced 

as a solitary entity, which is responsible for maintaining the unity of consciousness. 

It was, for him, the “ego who comes to the fore only with the 

transcendental-phenomenological epochē” (25) or this meditative process 

of bracketing of the world. Through the phenomenological reduction 

to the transcendental ego, Husserl maintained that “the world is for me 

absolutely nothing else but the world existing for and accepted by me 

in such a conscious cogito” (21). And, for him, in the phenomenological


13 

attitude “natural being is a realm whose existential status is secondary; it 

continually presupposes the realm of transcendental being” (21). While 

Husserl himself recognized that his postulation of the transcendental ego 

led to the problem of solipsism, and in his fifth meditation, he attempted 

to resolve the resulting solipsism through a phenomenological analysis of 

the inter-subjectivity of transcendental egos within a common life-world, 

Sartre’s critique exploits this lacuna. 

Against Husserl’s postulation of the existence of the transcendental ego, 

Sartre argues that there is no ego “formally, nor materially in consciousness” 

(Transcendence 31) and that “consciousness . . . is never alone, is never 

isolated from the existing world” (24). In his criticism, Sartre agrees with 

Husserl’s notion of intentionality, a central concept which was first introduced 

by Brentano, and which enables the phenomenologist to provide a 

description of acts of consciousness. However, Sartre shows how, if taken 

to its logical conclusion in phenomenological analysis, it is inconsistent 

with the postulation of the existence of a transcendental ego at the root 

of consciousness. For Sartre, as for Husserl, the notion of intentionality 

means that “all consciousness is consciousness of something” (44), and 

suggests that there are two “sides” or “poles” to any intentional act. There 

is the “subjective” or the “noetic pole,” which is the “constituting” dimension 

of consciousness, and there is the objective or the “noematic pole,” 

which encompasses that which is “constituted” in consciousness. Sartre 

suggests that there is only intentionality working toward the synthesis that 

is consciousness, but there is no pure, essential “I,” or transcendental ego 

at its root. He charges that “the “I” of the (Cartesian) “I think” is an object 

grasped with neither apodictic nor adequate evidence” (51) and argues, in 

a parallel manner, that Descartes’ “I am” presupposes some understanding 

of the meaning of being, which he neglected to express or justify. 

Instead, Sartre claims that the ego is an illusory construct. He explains 

that it may appear to exist, but it is really just reflective consciousness, 

namely, it is consciousness intending consciousness and falsely taking it as 

an ego. Specifically, the “something” being intended is merely consciousness 

being taken as an object by consciousness; it is not a substantial ego. 

Furthermore, whereas Husserl argued that the transcendental ego is the 

continual “synthesizer” of its past and present experiences, Sartre makes 

the case that although “consciousness must be perpetual syntheses of past 

and present consciousness . . . it is consciousness which unifies itself, by a 

play of transversal intentionalities” (39). As such, for him, the ego is only

14 


the product of reflective consciousness’ false habit of taking consciousness 

as an object, and in turn, taking it as an “I,” a distinct transcendental 

subject, namely, a Cartesian substance existing independently from the 

world. In this way, Sartre makes the case that the postulation of a transcendental 

ego is inconsistent with the notion of intentionality and that 

Husserl’s phenomenological analysis is self-contradictory if it is “occupied 

with a consciousness shut off or separable from the world” (25). Rather, 

for Sartre, if there is a self, then “it is something that exists in the world” 

(31), namely, being comprised by a person’s facticity as a phenomenon 

for others. And, he writes that this 

conception of the ego [as in the world, rather than as transcendent or 

separate from it] seems to us the only possible refutation of solipsism. 

The refutation that Husserl presents in . . . Cartesian Meditations does 

not seem to us capable of unsettling a determined and intelligent 

solipsist. As long as the ‘I’ remains a structure of consciousness, it 

will always remain possible to oppose consciousness, with its ‘I’, to 

all other existents. (103, my addition) 

Since the strong counter-claims to Sartre’s criticisms stemming from 

a Husserlian transcendental phenomenological stance are not mentioned 

here, for example, his aims to “disclose the ‘worldliness’ of consciousness” 

(Zaner 387), to elaborate upon phenomenological descriptions of the 

embodiment of the human person as well as inter-subjectivity within the 

“life-world,” we must conclude that Husserl is certainly not the “straw 

man” that Sartre intends in this passage. Nevertheless, in the above passage, 

Sartre is alluding to some of the tendencies which are entailed by 

“ego”-logical theories. First, “ego”-logical theories may hold that the self 

is synonymous with consciousness and the mind, to the exclusion of the 

body, as in the Cartesian disconnection between thinking substances 

and material substances. Second, they may conceive that the ego is conceived 

of as a static, Cartesian thinking substance, defined as that which 

is dependent on itself for its own existence. Third, “ego-logical” theories 

may presuppose that the self is something that transcends the world, 

and/or stands apart and over and against other beings, and not to be a 

part of, or compositional of the world. Fourth, they may hold that selfidentity 

is to be defined on the basis of identifying what it is not (i.e., the 

world or other entities within it), and negating or differentiating itself 

from what it is not. 5 Regarding this last ramification, such “negations” 

might be interpreted by eco-psychology not only in logical terms, but


15 

also in environmental ones, precisely, in terms of human beings achieving 

some understanding of their own self-identity via the destruction of 

the natural world. 

While it must be reiterated that Sartre was not involved with environmentalism 

during his life, and while elsewhere, in “Existentialism 

is a Humanism,” Sartre explains that the Cartesian cogito and human 

subjectivity are the “starting point” of existentialism, his critique of “ego”- 

logical theories and his situating of the human self as in the world can 

be said to serve the aims of eco-psychology. Precisely, it serves to undo 

the fallacious notion that human self-identity can be defined by way of 

the conception that an ego exists as transcending or as standing over and 

against the natural world. Rather, the illusion of a substantial ego existing 

within or behind consciousness and transcending the natural world, may 

be part and parcel of the total situation of the lived tension of the human 

organism in relation to its conditioning by the environment. From an 

eco-psychological perspective, if a “self” does indeed exist, it may be said 

that it is to be found in the complex interrelationship between the human 

organism and the natural world, and not one-sidedly to be associated with 

human consciousness or mind. I turn now to an examination of Sartre’s 

notion of “the fundamental project of human reality” as descriptive of 

the anthropocentric humanism of modernity and an underlying reason 

for the human postulation of the existence of a substantial, static ego 

standing over and against the natural world. 

Sartre’s articulation of “the fundamental project of 

human reality” as descriptive of the meaning of the 

anthropocentric humanism of modernity 

Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of how the ego, conceived of as a 

substance entirely separate from the world, is an illusionary construct 

closely relates to his conceptualization of what he calls the “fundamental 

project of human reality” (Existentialism 63). In Existentialism and Human 

Emotions, Sartre writes, 

the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality 

is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God. Whatever 

may be the myths and rites of the religion considered, God is first 

‘sensible to the heart’ of man as the one who identifies and defines 

him in his ultimate and fundamental project. If man possesses a preontological 

comprehension of the being of God, it is not the great 

wonders of nature, nor the power of society which have conferred it

16 


upon him. God, value and supreme end of transcendence, represents 

the permanent limit in terms of which man makes known himself 

what he is. To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you 

prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God. (63) 

Sartre’s claim that the fundamental project of human-reality is 

the desire to be God can be interpreted as an underlying meaning of 

anthropocentric humanism of modernity, or of the human-centered 

attitude which many ethicists have pointed to as the chief cause of the 

ecological crisis. It must be pointed out that there are many different 

religious, cultural, theological, and philosophical conceptions of God, 

God’s power, God’s nature, and divine attributes and qualities, such that 

one may conclude that Sartre’s notion of the desire to be God is open to 

various interpretations. However, if “God” is here defined according to 

traditional philosophical definitions, for example as the Prime Mover, 

namely, as the ultimate cause of the world, an eminently rational Supreme 

Intelligence, an omniscient, self-caused (causa sui) substance, unaffected 

by anything else, then Sartre’s notion of the desire to be God is very 

much analogous to the assumption that the human self is a Cartesian 

substance, namely, an “I,” or ego, conceived as an unconditioned, static 

unity, self-caused, entirely self-sufficient, transcendent of the world, not 

subject to flux, and dependent only upon itself for its existence. To be 

sure, inspired by, and coinciding with his analysis of Hegelian dialectic 

and the phenomenological notion of intentionality, Sartre writes, “the 

human goal is ‘the in-itself-for-itself’, consciousness become substance, 

substance become the cause of itself” (Being 575). By the pursuit of the 

“in-itself-for-itself” he means that human individuals, lacking Being and 

hence desiring Being, are constantly engaged in the project of escaping 

contingency and determining themselves qua “selves,” or their own 

facticity as they would have it, ultimately in an attempt to becoming a 

self-caused (causa sui) substance, akin to traditional conceptions of God. 

And, Sartre claims that “what [ultimately] presides over this project . . 

. is the ideal of a consciousness which would be the foundation for its 

own being-in-itself by the pure consciousness which it would have of 

itself” (723-24, my addition). 

In further investigating what he means by the fundamental project 

of human reality, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre alludes to the notion 

that the “desire to be” is made manifest largely through the activity of 

appropriation. 6 Here, Sartre’s phenomenological analysis is of interest to


17 

eco-psychological investigations of desire and consumption. He claims 

that desire is comprised of a perceived or conceived “lack of being” and is 

“a relation with a contingent and concrete in-itself which it has the project 

of appropriating” (Being 725, 747-48). Desire is a drive to possess, to 

use, and further, to consume something out of a perceived lack of being, 

where “the word ‘consume’ holds the double meaning of an appropriative 

destruction and an alimentary enjoyment. To consume is to annihilate and 

it is to eat; it is to destroy by incorporating into oneself” (757). As such, 

for Sartre, to appropriate something in satisfying desire is, essentially, to 

destroy it. He argues that “destruction realizes appropriation” (756-57), 

by pointing out that one possesses something by taking over and assuming 

sole responsibility for what had, beforehand, existed on its own and was 

empirically observable to all. Destroying a thing exemplifies such a taking 

over of its being in-itself, negating its being in-itself, and negating the possibility 

of its being accessed by others. In appropriating a thing through 

destroying it, one “apprehend[s] that ideally I am the foundation of its 

being in so far as it is a part of myself and on the other hand to apprehend 

that empirically the appropriated object is never valid in itself alone nor 

for its [own] individual use” (760, my addition). 

According to Sartre, in relation specifically to the desire to be God, 

what we really desire to appropriate in an object is the totality of the entities 

within the world, so that we can posit ourselves as the foundation of 

the world. He writes, “to possess is to wish to possess the world across a 

particular object. And, as possession is defined as the effort to apprehend 

ourselves as the foundation of a being in so far as it is ourselves ideally” 

(Being 762). In expressing this desire, Sartre points to the analogy of 

smoking. He states that 

to smoke is an appropriative, destructive action. Tobacco is a symbol 

of ‘appropriated’ being, since it is destroyed in the rhythm of my 

breathing, in a mode of ‘continuous destruction’, since it passes 

into me and its change in myself is manifested symbolically by the 

transformation of the consumed solid into smoke. . . . The act of 

destructively appropriating the tobacco was the symbolic equivalent 

of destructively appropriating the entire world. (761) 

However, Sartre argues that the desire to be God involves the appropriation 

of the totality of entities in the world, in order to posit ourselves 

qua selves as the foundation of the world, the project “of being my own 

foundation for myself can never be satisfied through [such] appropriation”

18 


(Being 755), leading to a continuous sequence of desire, conceived of as 

a lack of being, which is never satisfied. 

While the psychological and phenomenological meanings of the 

myriad of human desires, appropriative activities, and actions are, for 

Sartre, comprised by the desire to be God, he does not provide a concrete 

list of examples which may be said to correspond to this fundamental 

project. He states, “while the meaning of the desire is ultimately the 

project of being God, the desire is never constituted by this meaning; 

on the contrary, it always represents a particular discovery of its ends” 

(Being 724). That is to say, Sartre is convinced that “all [human] acts, all 

[human] projects translate this choice [of desiring to become God] and 

reflect it in a thousand and one ways” (764, my additions), although 

they may not exhibit evidence of this desire explicitly, namely, as may be 

demonstrated via empirical psychological analysis. The desire to be God 

may also be characterized as the human mimicry of God so as to live up 

to the Judeo-Christian idea that humanity is made in the image of an 

all-powerful God. 

From these considerations, however, it may be hypothesized that the 

notion of the desire to be God coincides with many of the underlying 

human assumptions which are responsible for the environmental crisis. 

Particularly, Sartre’s notion of the fundamental project of human-reality as 

the desire to be God can be said to offer a grounding, unified description 

of humanity’s “manifest destiny” to limitlessly develop and transform the 

natural world, to attain economic self-maximization, to engage in excessive 

consumerism, to foster ever-increasing levels of economic growth, 

to aim at unlimited technological progress, and to master Nature by way 

of the instrumental-rational sciences. The notion of the pursuit of the 

in-itself-for-itself, as explained by Sartre, is the project to avoid contingency 

and to found one’s own Being, and can be said to underlie all of 

these endeavors. 

Humanity’s endeavor to become dependent only on itself for its 

existence, or to liberate itself from the “shackles” of its dependency on, 

and determination by the natural world is also part and parcel of the 

desire to be God. In this light, Sartre’s notion of the desire to be God 

is descriptive of the general sense of the anthropocentric humanism of 

modernity. Our arrogant, self-centred ways of thinking in everyday life, 

which lead to the systematic appropriation of the natural world, and the 

valuation of human goals, interests, inclinations, and preferences as over


19 

both non-human life and the natural world, is comprised by the desire 

to be God. Sartre writes that 

man makes himself man in order to be God, and selfness considered 

from this point of view can appear to be an egoism; but precisely 

because there is no common measure between human reality and the 

self-cause which it wants to be, one could just as well say that man 

loses himself in order that the self-cause may exist. (Being 796) 

That is to say, for Sartre, the “passion” of human beings qua “human” 

is to reject, to “nihilate their being,” or to “lose” themselves, attempting 

instead to fully transcend the finitude and contingency of their genuine 

humanity in order to posit themselves as fully “self-caused,” as in traditional 

conceptions of God. In ecological terms, one might speculate 

that this rejection involves the rejection of the reality that the natural 

world both sustains and supports human life, biologically, mentally, and 

spiritually. The desire to be God, rather than being the product of simple 

“faith,” may also be interpreted as a psychological attachment to God (or 

to the concept of God, conceived of as an infinite substance), in a similar 

manner as adolescents being attached to a celebrity, desiring not only to 

imitate them, but be them. 

For Sartre, however, the constitution of the human self is largely 

an existential choice, a desire to determine oneself qua “self” as this or 

that. Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence” involves the notion 

that we have been thrown into a world not of our own choosing and 

that we are radically responsible for who we are and what we become. 

The idea that existence precedes essence means that “there is no [given] 

human nature” (“Existentialism” 349), namely, there is no such thing 

as an essential, or substantial self that is somehow predetermined in the 

mind of God. Instead, for Sartre, it is only through the decisions that 

we make and the actions that we perform in our lives and experience, 

that our Being or essence is determined. It is for this reason that Sartre 

emphasizes humanity’s finite freedom in the face of its existential condition, 

and it is in this more “sober” sense that he makes the claim that 

“existentialism is a humanism.” Therefore, even though Sartre claims that 

the best way to conceive of human-reality is as the desire to be God, if 

this notion is to remain consistent with the rest of Sartre’s overall critique 

of essentialism, then the notion of the desire to be God should not be 

considered to provide a definition of the essence of humankind. Rather, 

for Sartre, our decisions as individuals in relation to the environment,

20 


for example, are choices which serve to define “the human” as a whole, 

such that the essence of humanity is not fixed in any particular way. 

Sartre himself realizes this as he states, “it appears here that the initial 

project of being God, which ‘defines’ man, comes close to be the same 

as a human ‘nature’ or an ‘essence’” (Being 724). However, the desire to 

be God is representative of an existential choice by which human beings 

attempt to define themselves chiefly by the mimicry of selected aspects 

of God’s nature, powers, attributes, and qualities, and since he labels the 

desire to be God here as an “initial choice,” one can speculate that Sartre 

himself would want to maintain that human beings are “nothing but 

what they make of themselves” (“Existentialism” 349), namely, they are 

the entities “by whom values exist” (Being 797) and thus, he would be 

open to the widest possibilities for freedom in relation to determinations 

of human reality. As will be described in the next sections of this paper, 

later in the twentieth century, deconstructive postmodernism provided 

an anti-humanist reaction against modern humanity’s desire to be God 

and sought to dismantle any conception of an enduring self. In turn, 

deconstructive postmodernism opened up a new possibility with which 

to define the character of “the human.” 

Derrida’s notion of deconstruction 

Jacques Derrida’s critique of modernity and of humanistic metaphysics 

was more radical than that of the existentialists. As Derrida describes, 

within the post-war French intellectual scene, the postmodernist paradigm 

that followed from Sartre’s existentialism was constituted by an 

“anti-humanist and anti-anthropologistic ebb” (“Ends” 134) that was 

largely a reaction against the latter’s left-over humanism and anthropologism. 

While, like Sartre, Derrida was not explicitly involved with 

environmentalism, a major theme within his critique was the influence 

of the use of language in the origination of anthropocentric selfhood. 

Advancing beyond Sartre’s critique of “ego”-logical theory, for Derrida, 

the postulation of the existence of an ego with similar qualities as traditional 

conceptions of God, stems from the metaphysical presuppositions 

inherent to language, for example, subject/substance and predicate/accident, 

which do violence to the way the world actually is. Derrida charges 

that the postulation of the existence of an essential “I” or a substantial, 

sovereign ego, conceived as entirely separate from the rest of the world 

is, in part, the unfortunate by-product of our reliance on the tool of


21 

conventional language to represent the world. For Derrida, it is through 

the habitual use of language that we start to essentialize the metaphysical 

abstractions inherent in it, for example, the Aristotelian assumptions of 

subject/substance and predicate/accident, wrongly attributing them to 

the way the natural world, and to the things in it, such as the self, actually 

are. To be sure, in “Eating Well,” Derrida suggests that “there has 

never been The Subject for anyone . . . The subject is a fable . . . but to 

concentrate on the elements of speech and conventional fiction that such 

a fable presupposes is not to stop taking it seriously” (Peters 313-14). 

However, Derrida aims at providing a “critique of consciousness, of the 

subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession” (314). 

As such, while Derrida himself rejected being labeled a “postmodernist,” 

as Jean-Françoise Lyotard would define it, namely, by the notion that 

“postmodernism is incredulity toward metanarratives” (“Postmodern” 

74), Derrida endeavors to employ the notion of deconstruction in order 

to subvert the metaphysical assumptions and false essentializations made 

through the use of language and employed in human reasoning, especially 

the notion of the subject or human self. As one commentator suggests, 

deconstructionism is characterized by an anti-humanist “repudiation 

of referentiality; the denial of the substantial self and the dissolution of 

evaluative discourse, both aesthetic and moral” (Freadmann 115). 

In coining the notion of deconstruction, Derrida appropriated 

Heidegger’s move to carry out a “Destruktion” (Zerstörung) of the history 

of ontology at the beginning of Being and Time, for the purpose 

of “loosen[ing] up and dissolv[ing] the concealments” (23) present in 

traditional ways of determining the nature of Being, in order to prepare 

the way for re-asking the question of the meaning of Being. As Derrida 

points out, Heidegger’s destruction was also “directed against humanism” 

(“Ends” 34) itself. Derrida fused Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion with 

the word, “Abbau,” meaning to “take apart an edifice in order to see how it 

is constituted” (Ear 87). With these two notions the term “deconstruction” 

was born. As Derrida explains, the intent of deconstruction is to proliferate 

diverse interpretations of texts on the basis of “the indeterminacy and 

undecideability of meanings” (“Ends” 120), as a result of the absence of 

a transcendental signified grounding it. 

For Derrida, not only does the human need for meaning-making 

through language do violence to the world, but all texts whatsoever, be 

they literary, philosophical, or scientific, are left “abandoned,” such that

22 


interpreters can make whatever they want of them. In other words, for 

him, language has no intrinsic, transcendent, authorized, or objective 

meaning that needs to be respected. In short, for Derrida, “there is nothing 

outside the text” (Grammatology 158), and readers have no duty to 

uphold an “intention” by an author, nor any final, univocal, privileged 

meaning or transcendental signified behind any text. Rather, all texts are to 

be deconstructed, and in fact, for him, all texts are always already deconstructed, 

deconstruction being the “active accomplice” (Freadman 117) 

of any articulation of meaning, either written or spoken. For Derrida, it 

can be demonstrated that any text is, of itself, internally self-reflexive and 

contradictory. It is by way of various deconstructive strategies, chief among 

them, différance, that Derrida seeks to uncover the inherent contradictions 

in any given textual narrative and to prove that it is “complicit . . . with 

what [it] denounces[s]” (Norris 48). Différance, meaning simultaneously 

to differ and to defer, marks the temporal juxtaposition of meanings in 

language, thereby undercutting the notion that a text has a fixed, essential 

meaning. For him, there is no discourse or proposition “which has not 

already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of 

precisely what it seeks to contest” (Wood 286). Even deconstructive texts 

may be subject to further deconstruction, resulting in the “whirlpool” by 

which language is rendered empty of meaning. 

By employing deconstructive techniques, such as différance, Derrida 

is not simply interested in discarding truth claims as in ordinary criticism. 

Rather, his deconstructive tactics work to undo the notion that 

“reason can dispense with [the tool of] language in its quest to arrive at 

a pure, self-authenticating truth or method” (Norris 21). Consequently, 

deconstruction is focused on the dismantling of reason, Derrida recognizing 

that “the scandal of Reason is that nothing seems more natural 

than [the] destruction of Nature” (Grammatology 151). For the ultimate 

aim of deconstruction is the use of the critical “tools” of philosophy 

against reason, and then to throw away those “tools,” leaving behind all 

metaphysics and ontology. Without language and reason holding sway, 

undoubtedly, human beings would not have a metaphysical, rational, or 

conceptual apparatus to cling to, and for that matter, they would not be 

able to make arbitrary separations between self and world. In this case, for 

Derrida, the possibility of defining “the human” as the animale rationale, 

would be brought to an end, thereby unshackling “the human” not only 

from the common notion that the rational faculties of human beings


23 

comprise their essence, but also from metaphysics itself. Corresponding 

with this deconstructive enterprise, Derrida quotes from Nietzsche’s Thus 

Spake Zarathustra, where the Overman completes the project of active 

forgetting, and “without turning back to what he leaves behind him . . . 

burns his text and erases the traces of his steps” (“Ends” 152). In the next 

section, I will provide an account of Derrida’s employment of deconstruction 

against Sartre’s apparent complicity with anthropocentric humanism 

in “The Ends of Man,” from which a paradigmatic characterization of 

deconstructionism will emerge. 

Derrida’s deconstruction of anthropocentric humanism 

Derrida’s “The Ends of Man” is a key essay which was heavily influenced 

by Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, in which the latter took issue with 

Sartre’s slogan, “existentialism is a humanism.” In it, Derrida attempts todecenter 

the notion of a transcendental subject, as well as the anthropocentric 

conception that the essence of “the human” is comprised by teleological 

purposes through which human projects, endeavors, and practices acquire 

their meaning and significance. Particularly, he attacks the common, essentialist 

determinations of “the human” as the animale rationale, which, in his 

view, perpetuate the notion that any definition of the nature of humankind 

must involve a recourse to the “unfolding of teleological reason” (138). 

Derrida’s specific focus in the essay, is to deconstruct the humanistic and 

“anthropologistic” (132) interpretations of the writings of Hegel, Husserl, 

and Heidegger which had held sway over the intellectual scene in postwar 

France, doing so on the basis that these philosophers understood their own 

projects to be critical of “anthropologism” and “metaphysical humanism” 

(122). While Derrida criticizes Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger for their own 

inabilities to overcome humanism, detecting in each of them “a humanism 

or an anthropocentrism which necessarily places them, too, among the 

last, great metaphysicians” (Zaner 385), he singles out Sartre, especially, as 

chiefly responsible for a “mistak[en]” (“Ends” 132) humanistic reading of 

the intent of their projects. Specifically, in advancing Heidegger’s critique of 

Sartre in the Letter on Humanism, which demonstrated that every humanism 

remains metaphysical, Derrida calls into question Sartre’s “humanistic 

anthropologism.” He claims that the latter’s slogan “existentialism is a 

humanism,” affirming the “nobility” of human life, choices, and action, 

as well as his central analysis of the human project of being-in-itself-foritself 

comprising the structure of human freedom constituted “nothing

24 


other than metaphysical unity of man and God, the project of becoming 

God as the project constituting human-reality” (“Ends” 131). Derrida 

charges that Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, while presenting humanism 

in a different, and perhaps more neutral light, did not challenge or overcome 

the desire to be God as the fundamental project of human-reality. 

Rather, according to Derrida, Sartre’s phenomenological descriptions of 

human-reality led him “all too quickly” to proclaim the essence of man, 

but also perpetuated and aligned existentialism with this project. To be 

sure, Sartre claimed that existentialist psychoanalysis would help to “reveal 

to man the real goal of his pursuit, which is being as a synthetic fusion 

of the in-itself with the for-itself” (Being 797), and in so doing, pointed 

in the direction of becoming self-caused (causa sui) as in the desire to be 

God. Therefore, for Derrida, Sartre’s phenomenology and existentialism 

are not only descriptively anthropological, but even more strongly, they 

are prescriptively anthropocentric. 

In challenging the “anthropological” reading of the German philosophers 

in postwar France, Derrida points to Sartre’s “monstrous” 

translation of Heidegger’s Dasein, namely, that being for whom Being is 

an issue for it, as “human-reality.” While he notes that in Sartre’s Nausea, 

Roquentin states, “I will not be fool enough to call myself ‘anti-humanist’ 

. . . I am not a humanist, that’s all there is to it” (“Ends” 153), Derrida 

writes that while 

certainly [Sartre’s] notion of ‘human-reality’ translated the project of 

thinking the meaning of man, the humanity of man, on a new basis, 

[but] . . . the unity of man [was] never examined in and of itself. Not 

only is existentialism a humanism, but the ground and horizon of 

what Sartre calls his ‘phenomenological ontology’ remains the unity 

of human-reality. To the extent that it describes the structures of 

human-reality, [his] phenomenological ontology is a philosophical 

anthropology. (“Ends” 130-31) 

In so doing, Derrida claims that by articulating that the fundamental 

project of human reality is the desire to be God, Sartre did not follow 

through with his own existentialist principle, namely, that existence 

precedes essence, and that he unwittingly affirmed a definition of the 

essence of humanity. But, Derrida works to deconstruct the essentialization 

of “the human” by philosophical anthropologies, including that of 

Sartre. He argues that if the desire to be God is indeed the essence of 

humanity in our contemporary epoch, then there is a need to overcome


25 

“the human” and its false metaphysical constructions, in a similar manner 

as the proclamation that “man is something to be overcome” (Portable 

124) in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Lastly, Derrida takes issue 

with Sartre’s atheism, charging that regardless of whether or not existentialism 

calls itself Christian or atheistic, it remains a metaphysical 

humanism. He states that Sartre’s atheism, while seemingly opposed to 

metaphysical humanism, “change[s] nothing in the fundamental structure” 

(“Ends” 131) of human-reality, conceived in terms of the project 

of becoming God. Rather, for Derrida, a deconstruction of the whole 

notion of the “sovereign” and “self-caused” subject is required in order 

to challenge it. 

Conclusively, then, for Derrida, every philosophical determination 

of the essence of “the human” chains persons to it and does violence to 

human reality. Hence, ultimately, from Derrida’s point of view, freedom 

from such determinations requires a complete disbanding of language and 

reason. However, in relation to Derrida’s notion of deconstruction and, in 

particular, his deconstruction of Sartre’s articulation of the fundamental 

project of human reality as the desire to be God, it can be argued that it 

opens up a new, competing possibility for defining the character of “the 

human.” In that it empties reason, language, metaphysics, ontology, and 

the notion of “the human” (notions which have traditionally served to 

distinguish man from Nature) of meaning, deconstruction can be characterized 

as the mimicry of Nature. Nature is here being characterized 

especially in the sense which Sartre elucidates in Nausea, as that which is 

responsible for the transience, temporality, finitude, decay, and perishing 

of all human structures. 

Analogously, deconstruction may be said to be constituted by a 

methodic anti-humanist desire to be Nature, dismantling any linguistic, 

metaphysical, and ontological barriers erected between humanity and 

Nature, be they past, present, or future. From this perspective, deconstruction 

is a method of divesting oneself of metaphysics, of “human 

selfness,” and of “human projects” in general, namely, of demonstrating 

them in their finitude and nullity, metaphorically mimicking the destructive 

forces of Nature. In this way, the methodic deconstruction of human 

constructions, as in the desire to be Nature, assumes that humanity is on 

the way to being Nature, and that the process of assimilating the human 

to Nature is one that is still ongoing; deconstruction here being a means 

to the end of becoming Nature.

26 


While Derrida would definitely repudiate the metaphysical presuppositions 

that underlie the concept of Nature, as a direct precursor to Derrida, 

Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, went so far as to say, “we speak of 

Nature, and in doing so, forget ourselves: we ourselves are Nature” (Stack 

82). Elsewhere, in Homer’s Contest, corresponding to his mantra of “being 

faithful to the earth,” Nietzsche similarly stated, 

when one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is 

something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In 

reality, however, there is no such separation: ‘natural’ qualities and 

those called truly ‘human’ are inseparably grown together. Man, in 

his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature, and embodies its 

uncanny dual character. (Portable 32, my emphasis) 

The difference between Nietzsche and Derrida here seems to consist 

in that for the former, there is an assumption that humanity is Nature, 

whereas for the latter, the deconstruction of human constructions is in the 

“teleological pursuit” of becoming Nature, respectively. The distinction is 

between Zarathustra fully “liberated” in the postmodern sense, namely, 

completely divested of human constructions and Zarathustra still in the 

processes of burning his text and of overcoming humanity. Essentially, it 

is a distinction between an “is” and an “ought” or a “desire to be,” where 

the basic end seems to be the same, deconstruction being an instrumental 

means to that end. In the next section, I will highlight some of the implicit 

affinities between radical ecologism and deconstructionism in their joint 

critique of anthropocentric humanism. 

The anti-humanist affinity between deconstructive 

postmodernism and radical ecologism 

There is a fundamental illusion in the world that somehow people are 

separate from Nature when the reality is that we are a part of Nature, 

in fact, we are Nature. And that is probably the most funadamental 

misunderstanding that is causing all of this havoc. 

~Kenny Ausuabel, Founder of the Bionner Movement. (Eleventh) 

Environmental thought in general, including the eco-psychological 

movement, has long been criticized and maligned as “anti-humanist” 

because of its tendency to put Nature before “the human,” and to limit 

human desires, aims, goals, endeavors, such as scientific and technological 

progress, development, industrialization, and economic growth in its 

attempt to overcome anthropocentrism. It is true that some strands of


27 

environmentalism ally themselves with deconstructionism in order to 

accomplish these tasks. For instance, in describing some of the commonalities 

and affinities between deconstructionism and environmentalism in 

respect to the critique of anthropocentric humanism, Arne Naess agreed 

with Michael Zimmerman to the effect that “deep ecologists agree with 

Derrida’s deconstruction of anthropocentrism, however, they resist [any] 

deconstruction of nature, wilderness and ecosphere” (“Heidegger” 1). For 

them, the deconstruction of human constructions would seem to be an 

ongoing method for ecological thought to close the gap between humanity 

and Nature, eliminating their metaphysical separation. Especially, as John 

Seed points out, for ecologism, “‘anthropocentrism’ or ‘homocentrism’ 

means human chauvinism [or egotism] . . . the idea that humans are the 

crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things [notions 

which are] deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness” (Devall, 

et al. 243, my additions). And, in so far as deconstruction deconstructs 

anthropocentric discourses, it is a “useful tool” of radical ecologism. In 

this way, deconstruction and radical ecologism are joined “at the hip.” 

Deconstruction, as the desire to be Nature, is a tool which radical 

ecologism employs in defending the notion that human beings are on 

the way to return to Nature or to a “non-modern” and/or a non-technological 

way of life, which are more aligned with “the natural.” While 

it may be charged that human beings never “left Nature in the first 

place” nor could they ever do so, radical ecologism entails a systematic 

deconstruction of all human structures and developments which are 

deemed to be “modern,” such as scientific and technological progress, 

the meta-narratives of modernity, as well as all philosophical reflection. 7 

Furthermore, in deconstruction, as the desire to be Nature, humanity is 

something to be overcome. It means that a person is a libidinal animal. 

In relation to the latter possibility, Derrida criticizes the residues of 

humanism in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, where the latter insists 

on maintaining the dignity of man through a distinction between 

human and animal. And, playing on the Cartesian proposition, ego 

cogito ergo sum, in his later essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 

Derrida refuses to recognize any human independence from animality, 

and flirts with deconstructing the distinction between the human self 

and the wild animal. The project to situate “the human” in “the wild 

animal” is also a common vein in radical anti-humanist ecologism, in 

part constituting the meaning of its anti-humanism.

28 


Deconstructionism and radical ecologism also couple themselves 

in that the notion that humanity is Nature ties in with Deep Ecology’s 

principles for intervening in, and counteracting, anthropocentric activities, 

such as slash-and-burning a rainforest so as to develop the land. 

Deep Ecologists employ the term “ecological resisting” in which one, 

for example, does what is necessary to protect the ecosystem. Ecological 

resisting implies that in protecting the rainforest, one is protecting oneself. 

There is an implicit identification of oneself with Nature, namely, an 

erasure of the metaphysical separation between Nature and the human. As 

Seed suggests, the idea that “I am protecting the rainforest . . . develops 

into ‘I am part of the rainforest protecting myself’” (Devall et al. 199). 

He continues, “what a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined 

separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature . . . the change 

is a spiritual one” (243). Certainly, an identification of oneself as a part 

of Nature is a positive step in defending the environment. However, it 

is a fallacious and dangerous idea to identify oneself with the collective 

totality of all organisms composing Nature, as though one’s own interests 

are completely at one with the single living and self-regulating system that 

is Nature. To think that one speaks for, or acts on behalf of the totality of 

the organisms which also help to compose Nature, or to want to do so, 

is the height of dogmatism. 

While Deep Ecologists emphasize non-violence in ecological resisting, 

it is easy to see how the principle of ecological resistance can be taken to 

a radical extreme, implying violence. For example, Derrida’s deconstruction, 

interpreted as the desire to be Nature, can be said to accompany 

the strict anti-humanism and biocentrism of a radical ecological standpoint. 

In light of the ecological crisis, some strands of radical ecologism 

postulate the very existence of human beings qua “human” as the central 

“problem” and therefore we ought to fully erase the human and become 

one with the destructive powers of Nature. As made infamous by the 

Earth Liberation Front (E.L.F.), some streams of radically anti-humanist 

ecologism attempt to mimic the destructive powers of Nature, as against 

human structures, engaging in acts of vandalism, arson, and terrorism. 

For example, the E.L.F. has allegedly spiked trees in order to prevent 

logging, sabotaged biotechnology industry buildings, and set fire to 

hotel and ski resort structures (Pierce 77-81). Radical anti-humanist 

ecologism would perhaps applaud the devastation that occurred in New 

Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina, holding that it serves the human


29 

species right for their ecologically destructive activities. Ironically, one 

is reminded here of the claims of some New Orleans citizens that Hurricane 

Katrina was God’s punishment for their sinful way of life. Also, 

for example, radical anti-humanist ecologism may treat human life as 

“parasitical” on the natural world. 

In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that radical ecological views 

essentially commit a “deep mistake of defining our relationship to the earth 

using the metaphor of disease” (216-17), precisely that the human species 

is an “evil,” unnatural alien species; an invading virus or plague that is 

parasitical on the health and equilibrium of an otherwise pristine, unique, 

noble, and integral planet, thereby perpetuating a new metaphysical split 

between “the human” and “the natural.” Radical ecologism’s anti-humanism 

may be characterized by an over-emphasis on the Nature-side of the 

human-Nature relationship, and a denigration of “the human.” But, by 

doing so, the biocentric mimicry of Nature via deconstruction and/or on 

the part of radical ecologism fails to recognize the generative and “creative” 

aspects of Nature. Instead, they emphasize its destructive side in relation 

to human beings and their endeavors. 

While it is the case that human beings are a part of Nature, it does not 

follow that human beings are Nature or could ever be Nature. Human 

beings exist entirely within Nature, help to compose it, and are dependent 

on it. They partake of, or have “natural” or “wild” aspects within themselves, 

ideas which most environmentally-oriented modes of thought, 

including eco-psychology, seek to promote. From this perspective, there 

is no strict ontological division that could be erected between man and 

the rest of the natural world. At the same time, this does not necessarily 

mean that humanity is Nature. 

In general, environmental thought, in general, tends to emphasize that 

human beings do not exist in a vacuum and that they are a part of Nature. 

Human beings are organisms who are physically, mentally, and spiritually 

dependent on Nature. Biologically, without the oxygen from plants 

and trees, water from lakes and rivers, and food from plants and animals, 

human beings cannot survive. Similarly, what we call “our” breath is the 

air around us that is inhaled, appropriated into our lungs and exhaled, or 

pumped out; it is not explicitly “ours.” The human body does not create 

the air that is “our” breath, nor does it contribute to creating the oxygen 

that the organism needs to survive. Mentally, human beings cannot 

survive in a vacuum, without the stimuli from the natural environment

30 


on the planet Earth. One can imagine that even the fittest cosmonauts 

traveling out in the empty nothingness of space for extended periods of 

time would experience feelings of existential anxiety and possible mental 

break-down. 8 It may be concluded, therefore, that Nature provides objective 

and aesthetic experience necessary for mental health. Our emotional, 

mental, and spiritual well-being is dependent on feeling the diversity of 

organisms and the surroundings provided by life on Earth. In consideration 

of our spiritual dependence on Nature, the etymological meaning of the 

word “Spirit” (Latin spiritus), is “breath.” As mentioned previously, what 

we call “our breath” is the air around us, namely, the product of the biosphere 

that is inhaled; it is not explicitly “ours.” This fact points viscerally 

to the connection between the human creature and Nature. Analogously, 

the content of Spirit is only what the human organism has experienced in 

the past, “inhaled” so to speak, or appropriated from the natural world, 

and “exhaled,” such that the meaning of the notion that human beings 

are Nature may reside in the notion that the Being of any human being is 

comprised by “the natural.” Similarly, “the natural” is not explicitly “ours.” 

In particular, the objects, organisms, events, and creatures that we experience 

are selectively appropriated and provide for the symbolic content 

of what we conventionally call “Spirit.” It is impossible to imagine any 

content that is not derived either explicitly from, or is a composite of the 

entities and occasions of the natural world. It is along these lines that the 

human self can be situated among the entities of the natural world, rather 

than completely transcendent of them, an observation coinciding with 

the findings of eco-psychology, and also somewhat similar to a Humean 

empiricist stance on the origins of “the spiritual.” Because human beings are 

dependent on the rest of the natural world in these many ways, to use earth, 

air, and sky essentially as “open sewers,” as we do, is to do severe damage to 

ourselves. Certainly, if the environmental crisis is to be addressed seriously, 

one of the most important notions to realize is that the human self, from 

its biological, mental, and spiritual dimensions, is a part of Nature, rather 

than opposed to it. However, logically speaking, to reduce Nature to being 

a predicate/accident of the subject/substance, “human beings,” as in the 

proposition, “human beings are Nature,” or to affirm a one-to-one correspondence 

between them, does real violence to both entities. Furthermore, 

human beings cannot legitimately presume to think themselves and their 

own interests are simply synonymous with the totality of organisms which 

help to compose Nature, as if to assume that they are it.


31 

What has been intimated through the preceding analysis is that a 

dialectic has emerged regarding the ultimate ends and essence of “the 

human,” which is descriptive of the current “crossroads” surrounding 

environmentalism. Particularly, this dialectic concerns the eco-psychological 

investigation of the assumed separation of the human self from 

the natural world, as well as issues of sustainability and development. I 

have highlighted the tension between the desire to be God which may 

be associated with the goals of modernism and its overall worldview, and 

the desire to be Nature, which may be associated with the ultimate ends 

of deconstructive postmodernism and radical ecologism. Certainly, in 

light of the environmental crisis, constituted by modern man’s desire for 

unlimited development, economic growth, and for technological mastery 

over the Earth, the anthropocentric desire to be God must be curtailed. 

And deconstruction may offer a means to detach oneself from God or 

from the concept of God. However, while a great deal of movement 

must be made in the direction of the criticism of the anthropocentric 

humanism of modernity, we ought not to revert to the opposite position 

of radical deconstructionism. There is need to recognize “the human” as a 

part of Nature, to situate the “human self” amidst the natural world, and 

to recognize “the natural” within the human self. However, deconstructive 

postmodernism’s and radical ecologism’s anti-humanist desire to be 

Nature, constituted by a methodic emptying of metaphysics, language, 

and reason, as well as any conception of an enduring self, which arguably 

have allowed the human species to survive, must also be curtailed. Both 

the desire to be God and the desire to be Nature, taken to their ultimate 

conclusions, lead inevitably to the extinction not only of the human species, 

but also of the majority of other life-forms and species on the planet. 

While one consists in the complete outstripping of the Earth’s life-support 

system through over-development, over-consumption, and the will 

to technological mastery, the other consists in the project to dismantle 

humanity’s rational capacities which have secured its survival. However, 

in overcoming these competing drives, it may be claimed that human 

beings contain what one may call “divine” and “natural” aspects within 

themselves, each distinct yet thoroughly interpenetrating, where neither 

can be said one-sidedly to offer a genuine definition of their essence. To 

be sure, near the end of his life, Sartre, even after emphasizing the nullity 

and absurdity of human existence throughout his life, when questioned by 

Simone de Beauvoir about the staunch atheism he had held throughout

32 


his life, admitted that “even if one does not believe in God, there are elements 

of the idea of God that remain in us and that cause us to see the 

world with some divine aspects” (de Beauvoir 436-43). In this light, in 

the last section of this paper, I will endeavor to express how the processrelational 

standpoint overcomes the anthropocentrism of modernism and 

the extreme anti-humanism of deconstructive postmodernism and radical 

ecologism, as characterized above. 

Overcoming the dichotomy between anthropocentric 

humanism and radical anti-humanism via the “critical, 

non-anthropocentric organicism” of “process-relational” 

environmental epistemology 

In the “Introduction to the SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern 

Thought,” David Ray Griffin contrasts what he calls “constructive” or 

“reconstructive” postmodernism, of which process-relational modes of 

thought are the chief example, with “deconstructive” or “eliminative” 

postmodernism. He claims that the latter 

overcomes the modern worldview through an anti-worldview, 

deconstructing or even entirely eliminating various concepts that 

have generally been thought necessary for a worldview, such as self, 

purpose, meaning, a real world, givenness, reason, truth as correspondence, 

universally valid norms, and divinity. . . . [However] the 

postmodernism [derived from process-relational modes of thought] 

can, by contrast, be called revisionary, constructive, or—perhaps 

best—reconstructive. It seeks to overcome the modern worldview 

not by eliminating the possibility of worldviews (or metanarratives) 

as such, but by constructing a postmodern worldview through a 

revision of modern premises and traditional concepts. . . . That is, 

it agrees with deconstructive postmodernists that a massive deconstruction 

of many received concepts is needed. But its deconstructive 

moment, carried out for the sake of the presuppositions of practice, 

does not result in self-referential inconsistency. It also is not so totalizing 

as to prevent reconstruction. . . . Going beyond the modern 

world will involve transcending its individualism, anthropocentrism, 

patriarchy, economism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. 

(xii-xiii, my additions) 

As a “constructive” or “reconstructive” form of postmodernism, the 

process-relational standpoint that is inspired by the philosophy of Alfred 

North Whitehead deviates from the postmodernism of the “deconstructionist” 

variety. It is highly critical of the anthropocentric humanism that


33 

is characteristic of modernity, the pretense to unlimited development, and 

the domination of the global marketplace and instrumental reason, yet, 

at the same time, it does not aim to provide a totalizing deconstruction 

of all that might be associated with “modernity” or with “the human.” 

Whitehead notes that one of the main differences between the human 

beings who lived in previous societies and those living in modern societies 

is that in the former “nature controlled them, while we now see our 

way to the control of nature” (ESP 25). And, recognizing the precarious 

ecological situation humanity finds itself in today, in its overemphasis 

on controlling Nature, Griffin asserts that constructive postmodernism 

is “based on the awareness that the continuation of modernity threatens the 

very survival of life on our planet” (Allan ix). However, process-relational 

thought, exemplifying the meaning of “constructive” postmodernism, 

neither gives in to despair, nor does it accept the jettisoning of reason by 

way of deconstructive postmodernism in favor of undecideability. Rather, 

in response to the ecological crisis, it remains critically committed to generating 

and exploring creative alternatives for human thought and action, 

rather than pursuing an anti-humanist course of relentless deconstruction 

which is not accompanied by any positive proposals for reconstruction. 

While exceptionally critical of the pretense to unlimited technological 

progress, of instrumental reason, and of the modernist assumption that 

the solution to the problem of climate change is to be found solely in the 

development of a “technological fix,” the process-relational perspective 

does not, for example, rule out innovations toward “green” technologies, 

such as wind and solar power. 

Whitehead’s epistemology and cosmology provides a description of 

how human beings are intrinsically connected with the natural world. He 

states that the “first principle of epistemology should be that the changeable, 

shifting aspects of our relations to nature are the primary topics for 

conscious observation” (MT 29). Epistemology, for him, should include 

an examination of “our whole experience [as] composed out of our relationships 

to the rest of things [including ‘intimate vague experiences’, 

not just of distinct sense-data], and of the formation of new relationships 

constitutive of things to come” (MT 31, my additions). Hence, in 

Whitehead’s epistemology, there is a consideration of the widest variety 

of occasions of experience, not just those of the conscious variety which 

most other philosophers privilege in their investigations. For him, the more 

obscure and “lower-level” forms of experience (e.g., physical feelings) tell

34 


us more about our condition as organisms and our connection to Nature 

than “high-level” conscious experience. In fact, Whitehead holds that the 

former are the basis for the latter. 

Whitehead defines Nature as a felt “complex of related entities 

[wherein] the ‘complex’ is fact as an entity for thought, to whose bare 

individuality is ascribed the property of embracing in its complexity the 

natural entities” (CN 13). From this perspective, the notion that human 

beings are a part of Nature means that they are one type of entity among 

“the many” natural entities which in their interconnection compose “the 

one” relational complex that is Nature. While human beings are a part of 

Nature, they are not themselves identical to the total complex of entities 

that is Nature. Whitehead’s cosmology is based in the notion that the 

natural “world is not made up of independent things, each determinate 

in abstraction from all the rest” (ESP 157). Rather, Nature is comprised 

by an extensive continuum which is conceptually “divisible, but not in 

fact divided” (PR 62). From a Whiteheadian perspective, the Cartesian 

postulation that the world is composed of thinking and material substances, 

dependent only upon themselves for their existence and entirely 

separate from the natural world, is a fallacious abstraction based on such 

a conceptual division. For Whitehead, Nature is an “organic extensive 

community” (PR 289) which is thoroughly in process and composed of 

living organisms, or what he calls “actual entities” or “actual occasions.” 

Actual entities are finite “creatures which become” (PR 35), each of which 

is engaged in its own creative life-process, and each partly constituted 

by its various relations with other actual entities. A person, at a given 

moment, is but one example of an actual entity and, as such, a person, 

as helping to compose Nature, is not a site where Nature may be said to 

“end.” According to Whitehead, “the demarcation [of the human body] 

from the rest of nature is vague in the extreme . . . There is no definite 

boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends” 

(MT 161). But, as a finite, yet enduring part of the relational complex of 

entities that is Nature (at least in the context of the present evolutionary 

epoch), “the human” cannot be said to have its identity in terms of the 

totality of Nature. 

In relation to its environmental epistemological standpoint, processrelational 

modes of thought overcome the vicious dichotomy between the 

anthropocentric humanism of modernity, which is exemplified by the Sartrean 

articulation that human reality is constituted by the desire to be God,


35 

and the extreme anti-humanism of deconstructive postmodernism and 

radical ecologism, which have been characterized in this paper as advancing 

the desire to be Nature by attempting to divorce humans from “the 

human,” that is, all past, present, and future modes of human being and 

experience as well as all determinations of the nature of “the human.” The 

process-relational stance may be termed a “critical, non-anthropocentric 

organicism,” pointing to the contrast between the extremes of the desire 

to be God and the desire to be Nature in relation to the ultimate ends 

of humanity, rejecting both of these extremes. From a process-relational 

perspective, human beings qua “human” are neither God, nor Nature; 

neither everything, nor nothing, in their “purified” senses, nor could they 

presume to be. Rather, process-relational modes of thought hold that 

human beings are finite parts of Nature, helping to compose its complex 

relationality, yet possessing “spiritual” qualities within themselves as well, 

Nature and mind being inseparably intertwined together. 

The process-relational standpoint, in part, agrees with Sartre’s existentialism 

in the sense that organisms determine their own character by 

way of the facticity of their own lives and experience, i.e. through their 

creative life-processes and the “objective immortality” of their pasts. 

However, process-relational philosophy adds that in the lives of organisms, 

the objectively immortal past also helps to determine the content 

and course at which subsequent creativity aims, and that determinations 

of the character of an organism must take into account the fact that the 

entity in question is partly, yet not wholly, constituted by its various 

relations to other entities. As such, going deeper than existentialism’s 

notion that “existence precedes essence,” the process-relational perspective 

asserts that neither existence nor essence can be said to “be prior 

to” the other, thus postulating that the enduring character of organisms, 

including that of human beings, is in the process of being determined 

through their lives and experience, even if momentary experience is 

perpetually perishing through time. In this sense, in its emphasis on flux 

and “process,” the Whiteheadian perspective agrees with the existentialist 

emphasis that temporality and finitude are what “finalize” the natures 

of entities. Furthermore, from a process-relational perspective, answers 

to the question of what the nature of humanity is, are to be considered 

speculative approximations and descriptions of an “enduring character,” 

rather than an essence or a necessary pre-given nature, which is dependent 

on the evolutionary epoch within which it arises as well as its concrete

36 


relations to other entities. Whitehead’s notion of an “enduring character” 

is meant to supplant the misplaced concreteness of determinations of the 

“essence” or the “nature” of things, or of humanity for instance. Against 

such essentialist tendencies, from the process-relational perspective, 

the enduring character of humanity is continually in flux, and without 

“privileged moments,” wherein any determination of it is never fixed and 

final, but rather open to revision, corresponding with the notion that 

human beings, like all other actual entities, are not static substances. 

However, in contrast to deconstructive postmodernism, with its massive 

critical attack on essentialism, from the process-relational standpoint, 

we can still entertain such discussions regarding the “enduring character 

of ‘the human’.” 

To a certain extent, Whitehead shares in the postmodernist criticism 

of language. He states that it is “hopelessly ambiguous” and inadequate 

to express actuality and he criticizes “the habit of thinking of words 

as fixed things with specific meanings . . . [because in actuality] the 

meanings of language are in violent fluctuation” (Dialogues 296-97). 

Whitehead further suggests that the abstractions of linguistic expression 

“lead . . . away from the realities of the immediate world” (MT 39). But, 

Whitehead does not take the deconstructionist turn. From the process 

philosophical stance, all characterizations of the enduring character of 

“the human” are to be interpreted as speculative approximations from 

within the confines of conventional language. In recognizing these limitations, 

philosophy may continue to express “the character of the human,” 

without the essentializations and/or the misplaced concretenesses which 

do violence to its actuality. 

If one insists on having “a determination of the nature of the human” 

from the process-relational standpoint, then it can be affirmed that, 

according to Whitehead, the enduring character of the human in our 

contemporary epoch involves recourse to the notion of creativity. Human 

beings are creative organisms, creativity, for Whitehead, being their “grandeur” 

and “dignity” (Dialogues 371). For him, human beings are finite 

“co-creators” in conjunction with God, Nature, and all other organisms 

in the natural world. In Whitehead’s cosmology, the notion of creativity 

is a holistic expression of the totality of organic experience, where each 

organism engages in its own particular creative processes and is constituted 

by it. Consequently, a determination of the character of “the human” 

from the aspect of creativity entails a focus on the human organism in


37 

its full complexity, including its concrete experience, its faculties, its aims 

and purposes, its feelings and emotions, its strengths, its weaknesses, its 

suffering, its finitude, its lived connections with the other actual entities 

which help to compose Nature, and so on— and not merely, for instance, 

by way of their “rational faculties.” In response to the imminent criticism 

that in suggesting that creativity pervades Nature, Whitehead is anthropocentrically 

ascribing human creativity and human qualities to other 

organisms, it should be pointed out that for him, “the human” has itself 

emerged both within and from Nature, and not vice-versa. 

One striking feature of Whitehead’s cosmology of organic interdependence 

is that in contrast to traditional Christian conceptions of God, God 

is neither conceived to be an asymmetrical causal force on the natural 

world, nor transcendentally apart from it. In Process and Reality, Whitehead 

provides a profound critique of the combination of both “the notion 

of God [interpreted] as the ‘unmoved mover’ [as] derived from Aristotle . . 

. [and] the notion of God as ‘eminently real’ [which] is a favorite doctrine 

of Christian theology,” which have been fused by Western culture into the 

idea of “an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat 

the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys” (PR 342). 

Unlike many traditional understandings of God’s qualities which dwell 

on the notion of God as a Prime Mover, or as an infinite, transcendent, 

or self-caused substance, an Almighty causal force from and by which 

the temporal world is generated and kept in motion, which have served 

to bifurcate God and the natural world, Whitehead’s own cosmology 

holds that God has a “finite or temporal side,” which is immanent in the 

world and not statically outside of it. For Whitehead, God is not to be 

conceived as a condescending Caesar, radically separated from and unaffected 

by the world, yet somehow directing the unfolding of all creatures. 

Thus, by providing an alternative conception of God which is not based 

in Cartesian substance ontology, and one which is far removed, as Jones 

writes in her introduction to Religion in the Making, from “a notion of 

divine immutable essence and eternal normative will” (xxxiii), Whitehead’s 

cosmological rubric does not lend itself to human mimicry of God, 

conceived as an infinite, self-caused substance, which, as has been characterized 

in this paper, is the underlying root of the anthropocentricism 

which is responsible for the environmental crisis. In this way, Whitehead’s 

critique of traditional understandings of the definition and the qualities 

of God and his own cosmological formulations regarding the character

38 


of God provide a “psychological inoculation” against the human desire 

to be God which is at the root of the ecological crisis. 

Whitehead’s cosmology presents to us the novel alternative of “panentheism,” 

meaning, as Griffin explains, that “the [natural] world is present 

in deity and deity is present in the [natural] world” (Spirituality 17, my 

addition), God and Nature being interconnected and intermingling poles 

of the creative process. In his scheme, God is with the natural world 

and is in turn receptively affected by it. In his perspective, God and the 

natural world are partners which are caught “in the grip of the ultimate 

metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty” (PR 349), each 

standing together in their mutual requirement. It is not that God and 

the natural world are two distinct aspects of identical substance, as in 

pantheistic standpoints such as that of Spinoza. Rather, for Whitehead, 

God and Nature are equal, reciprocal, symmetrical, contrasting, and codependent 

poles of the creative process, which is the ultimate foundation 

for the cosmological order of things. As such, for him, neither God nor 

the World can be conceived of as static substance entirely separate from 

the other. According to him, “in every respect God and the World move 

conversely to each other in respect to their process” (PR 349); 9 the traditional 

bifurcation of God and the World being bridged via the principle 

of creativity. In his cosmological scheme, both God and the World can 

be considered “interlocking poles” within the creative process, where the 

natural world is not considered merely as that which is responsible for the 

temporality, flux, finitude, destruction, and perishing of human creative 

endeavor, and as somehow “evil.” Rather, for Whitehead, temporality, flux, 

finitude, destruction, and perishing also belong to the Being of God. For 

him, perishing is in some ways a generating force in the creative process, 

which may not only finalize that particular process of self-creation, rendering 

it objectively immortal, or an unalterable stubborn fact belonging 

to the past, but also may be considered a moment in the fluency and/or 

refreshment of its creative life-process. 

As part of his speculative cosmology, Whitehead embraces pan-experientialism. 

For him, subjectivity and feeling pervade the natural world, 

and whether or not the entities in question are considered either animate 

or inanimate, they participate in the overall creative advance of the 

universe. For Whitehead, creativity is “universal throughout actuality” 

(PR 164), namely, all temporal creatures participate interdependently in 

the creative evolution of the universe, and they have importance to the


39 

whole cosmological scheme of things. He states that while “no entity 

can be considered in abstraction from the universe . . . no entity can 

be divested of its own [distinct] individuality” (MG 678, my addition), 

again pointing to the notion that human beings (and their interests) 

cannot be regarded as synonymous with (those of) the total complex of 

organisms that, together, compose Nature. Whitehead further suggests 

that while “no entity can be divorced from the notion of creativity,” 

each infuses “its own particularity into creativity” (PR 213). Elsewhere, 

he states that the creative principle is everywhere in Nature, namely, “in 

animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, [and 

in the] human” (Dialogues 370). As such, the statement that the notion 

of creativity provides an adequate description of the enduring character of 

humanity is not representative of a definition of “the human” which has 

its basis in a logical opposition to all other actual entities, for example, 

plants, animals, God, or Nature. That said, human creativity could be 

said to involve specific accidental qualities, characteristics, operations, and 

activities, such as “reasoning faculties,” consciousness, self-consciousness, 

language, negation, skepticism, criticism, valuation, selectivity, faith, 

teleology, and so on, which makes it distinct (in terms of degree) from 

other actual entities. But, each of these qualities, characteristics, operations, 

and activities can neither be interpreted in abstraction from other 

such characteristics so as to define the essence of “man,” nor do they make 

human creativity superior to the creativity of other actual entities. Hence, 

Whitehead’s stance is more accurately to be described as an “organicism,” 

rather than as a “humanism,” and it is especially critical of the anthropocentric 

humanisms of the modernist variety. Unlike anthropocentric 

humanisms which neglect the fact that a human being is an object for 

the creativity of others and for other organisms, for Whitehead, both a 

human being’s physical pole (i.e. body) and its mental pole (i.e. mind) 

are “objective data,” much like other entities are for it. For instance, a dog 

feels, recognizes, and grows with its human companion over the course 

of its life, a person who is fundamental to its own biological needs and to 

its identity. In short, in sharp contrast to anthropocentric thinking, from 

the process-relational perspective, neither the creative life-processes of 

human beings should be interpreted as standing condescendingly higher 

than Nature, 10 as in modernist humanism, nor should Nature be viewed 

as standing infinitely higher than human life, as in the biocentrism of 

radical anti-humanist ecologism.

40 


In Part III of Process and Reality, entitled, “The Theory of Prehensions,” 

Whitehead seeks to provide both a cosmological and epistemological 

account of the creative processes of organisms by which they may determine 

their character, which also serves the aims of eco-psychology. This 

account stands in sharp contrast to ego-logical conceptions of the self with 

their basis in Cartesian substance-ontology, with its “assumption of bodies 

and minds as independent individual substances, each existing in its own 

right and apart from any necessary reference to each other” (SMW 194). 

To reiterate, Descartes had conceived of the self as a thinking substance 

(res cogitans) entirely separate from extended things (res extensa) and the 

natural world, which was defined as something dependent only upon 

itself in order to exist. Whitehead criticizes Descartes for mistaking the 

“privacy of mental life . . . for its substantial independence as an existent 

fact” (RM liii). In contrast, in Whiteheadian philosophy, the self cannot 

be described in terms of Descartes’ substances, defined as dependent on 

nothing for their existence, self-sustaining, entirely private, self-sufficient, 

and self-encapsulated (but also, it is not nothing). As he writes, “there 

is no entity, not even God ‘which requires nothing but itself in order to 

exist’” (RM 108), for example, God requiring His creatures in order to 

complete His own Creative or “superjective nature.” Furthermore, the 

process-relational standpoint is highly critical of determinations of “the 

value” of a thing or a “self” on the basis of how well it matches up with 

the concept of a substance as attributable to traditional notions of God. 11 

Undoubtedly, this view led to the individualism of modernity and the 

underlying drive to be God. Instead, for Whitehead, as Jones writes, the 

character “of any entity arises according to the relationships that entity 

sustains with all other entities” (RM xxi), every entity being “social,” 

namely, requiring the organic society of actual entities in its immediate 

environment in order to exist. In relation to the human organism, it is in 

this sense that Whitehead states that “man is a social animal” (PR 204). 

According to Whitehead, there are two interrelated “phases” which 

comprise the creative process of any organism, and by which it determines 

its character, one of appropriation and one of self-realization. Whereas 

appropriation involves the feeling, grasping, taking-account of, or seizing 

of elements of the natural world (as in the acquisition of food) for the 

sake of its existence so as to develop purposes, self-realization is the creative 

unfolding of an organism’s life-process or self-development through 

the actualization of such purposes. Self-realization always presupposes a


41 

previous activity of appropriation of elements from the world, whereas 

appropriation is informed by prior self-realizations and subjective aims. 

That is to say, Whitehead’s cosmology is constituted by a fundamental 

recognition that creative self-realization is only possible on the basis of 

appropriating the elements of the natural world, a notion that the modern 

worldview, in respect to the desire to be God, largely takes for granted. 

Whitehead’s epistemological stance is that of a “provisional realism,” 

which holds that concrete experience and grasping of “the natural” provides 

the starting point of the creative process. By way of the notion of a 

“prehension,” central in his epistemology, Whitehead means to describe 

an organism’s selective “appropriat[ion,] for the foundation of its own 

existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises” (PR 

219). 12 Whitehead’s notion of a “prehension” (Latin prehendere) has a dual 

meaning. It designates an organism’s feeling, or “uncognitive apprehension,” 

i.e. meaning “apprehension which may or may not be cognitive” 

(SMW 69). Simultaneously, it means an “appropriation” of the elements 

in its environment for the foundation of its own existence, namely, a 

“taking account of,” a grasping, a seizing, a “taking something in and 

making it part of the thing it has joined,” as in a “reception of expressions 

. . . (or of) the data for feeling diffused in the environment” (MT 23). 

A prehension might be said to be the unity of the causal impact of the 

data of our environment on the organism and the reception of that data. 

Prehensions also involve a process of selection of data, one based in the 

organism’s aims and interests. What Whitehead calls “positive prehensions” 

are feelings whereby data are positively included into the organism’s 

internal constitution, while negative prehensions are exclusions of data 

from entering into the organism’s internal constitution. 

In terms of human creativity and self-realization, the natural objects 

which are prehended provide the contents of mentality, including eternal 

objects, subjective aims, and purposes. This notion stands opposed to the 

idea of a substantial ego at the root of consciousness. For Whitehead, the 

“self” of a living human being is something which is in process and interrelated 

with the natural world. All of the contents of the self-realizational 

phases of the creative process are derived from an appropriation of the 

data issuing from the world. But, this observation neither “cheapens” the 

creative process or notions of “spirituality,” nor does it commit Whitehead 

to an atheistic position, as theologians and idealistic philosophers might 

claim. At the same time, Whitehead’s emphasis on creative process is

42 


what distinguishes his standpoint from that of deconstructive postmodernism. 

In defending the notion that there are no subjective imaginings 

and purposes which contain contents that transcend the existents that we 

experience in the natural world, Whitehead’s notion of a prehension as a 

“process of appropriation” (PR 219) is of central importance. It implies 

that the self is largely the product of the prehensive process of feeling and 

appropriating the elements of the natural world. 13 Whitehead’s “provisionally 

realistic” stance, by which he maintains that the appropriations of past 

experience ground future self-realization, means that the self is not an ego, 

conceived as an independent substantial entity, transcendent of, and/or 

separated from the natural world. Since Whitehead’s cosmology alludes 

to the fact that in order to engage in the creative life-process, organisms 

must appropriate or prehend the elements of the natural world, both in 

terms of the physical resources that they need to live (e.g., food and water) 

as well as in terms of the mental resources via their past experience (with 

which they may develop and actualize fundamental purposes in the world), 

his epistemology and cosmology provide an implicit rationale for why 

human beings need to have reverence for the natural world. In this way, 

Whitehead’s theory of prehensions, as well as the interplay between the 

bodily and mental aspects (or “poles”) of organisms can be said to advance 

eco-psychology’s investigations and understanding of the relationship 

between the human self and the natural world. However, Whitehead’s 

“provisional realism” does not commit him to the point of view that 

human beings are Nature. They are not mere passive appropriators of “the 

natural” which thereby founds the totality of their Being. “The natural” as 

the content of Spirit is not simply read off via experience or through senseperception 

as it may be in Hume’s account. Not only are the conceptual 

operations of selection, re-enactment, valuation, and synthesis thoroughly 

involved in human creative processes, but “the natural,” as appropriated, is 

creatively transformed through such operations. While the contents of the 

human imagination and the human capacity for perception in the mode 

of symbolic reference are derived from past experience of the (natural) 

world, conceptual operations play a chief role in creativity. 

Admittedly, there are highly destructive or negative aspects at work 

in the particular creative processes attributable to human beings. In 

Whitehead’s theory of prehensions, negative prehensions are chiefly representative 

of the critical and destructive operations within the creative 

process. Negative prehensions are eliminations from feeling. In their


43 

fluctuating interplay with positive prehensions, negative prehensions 

are the ground of the operations of selective appropriation at the root of 

experience. In experience, while some data are felt to be relevant to human 

aims and positively prehended, other data are eliminated, negatively 

prehended, or dismissed from feeling. Human beings are perhaps the 

organisms who depend most highly upon an engagement with activities 

of negation and of negative prehension; negation, for Whitehead, being 

the peculiar, yet fundamental characteristic of consciousness. Negation 

is fundamental to human reasoning, yet, alluding to the deconstructive 

postmodernist stance, it is also its undoing. In this sense, for Whitehead, 

while every organism prehends both positively and negatively, an engagement 

in operations of negation and objectification factors highly into 

the particular character of “the human” in our contemporary epoch. In 

other words, of all organic species, human beings engage in operations 

of negation with the highest degree of intensity. This point may coincide 

with deconstructive postmodernist manners of thinking. At times, 

Derrida locates the context of deconstruction within creative play, but 

deconstruction also reveals an intent toward a totalizing destruction 

without further construction. Certainly, Sartre was fond of the term, 

“nihilation,” and as part of his phenomenological description of the initself-for-itself: 

“the only being that can be called free is the [one] that 

nihilates its being” (Existentialism 65). In other writings, I have pointed to 

the notion that Whitehead’s negative prehensions, in their contrast with 

positive prehensions, are the efficient cause of the creative process (Scarfe 

94). Whether an engagement with operations of negation belongs to the 

enduring character of humanity might be a topic for further discussion 

stemming from this paper. One might also inquire into the impact the 

human operations of negation, negative prehension, and selectivity (which 

enable the objectification and appropriation of “the natural”) have on 

the natural world as a whole. Nevertheless, from the process-relational 

standpoint, the distinction might be made that human beings are not 

merely libidinal animals, but also “appetitive” animals, pointing to their 

creative abilities. 

Against the imminent, deconstructionist counterclaim that Whitehead’s 

metaphysics of creativity is merely synonymous with Sartre’s notion 

of the pursuit of the in-itself-for-itself and the desire to be God, Whitehead’s 

emphasis on finitude and contingency of the creative processes of 

organisms points to the impossibility of the absolute correspondence of

44 


the in-itself and the for-itself. Without the hope of self-realization, or 

a satisfaction implying the correspondence between potentiality/eternal 

objects and actuality/actual occasions, there would be no creative 

process. However, such a satisfaction is never constituted by a perfect, 

exact, complete, mirror-like, infinite one-to-one correspondence between 

them. But, even with its imperfections and “symbolic vaguenesses,” the 

correspondences that are achieved are still enough to satisfy the human 

organism’s quest for meaning. Whitehead admits that all organisms 

attempt to found their own Being as in the notion of causa-sui, “shar[ing] 

with God this characteristic of self-causation” (PR 222) and can be successful 

in defining and determining themselves qua “selves,” thereby 

satisfying Spinoza’s notion of a substance as being a causa sui. However, 

from the process-relational perspective, they never determine themselves 

in a way akin to being fully self-caused (causa sui), interpreted, in the 

purely substantialist sense, without recourse to their feelings of, appropriations 

of, and relations with other entities. Every organism requires its 

environment, which provides the data for the derivation of possibilities 

for its own self-creation. As such, the process of self-creation does not 

occur in a vacuum, as implied by substantialist philosophies. Rather, an 

entity is “the product of the efficient past.” (PR 150). Furthermore, as 

Whitehead writes, creative “adventure rarely reaches its predetermined 

end” (AI 379), imagination being unable to fully encapsulate actuality. 

Even if the satisfaction exhibits a high degree of correspondence between 

potentiality and actuality, all organic self-realization is subject to the ravages 

of perpetual perishing. At the same time, Whitehead goes to great 

lengths to show that the urge toward creative self-realization is not “mere 

wreckage,” (PR 346), since the organism, even through perishing, remains 

“everlasting” or “objectively immortal,” not to mention fueling further 

creative advance in the world. 

While human creativity can take on the form of “development,” it is 

definitely not reducible to it. One only need to point to the difference 

in terms of aesthetic value of a truck stop in contrast to Michelangelo’s 

painting of the Last Judgment above the altar of the Sistine Chapel in 

order to convey this distinction. Regardless, “sustainable development,” 

interpreted from the perspective of Whitehead’s critical non-anthropocentric 

organicism, is not to be defined in purely economic terms, as is 

common today, namely, as the ability to keep up a certain rate of economic 

growth. Rather, from a Whiteheadian stance, sustainability is to


45 

be construed in environmental terms. Sustainable development means 

striking a balance between the needs and wants of human populations 

and the natural ecology which sustains and supports life. It involves a 

serious effort to maintain a balance between the “ego-logical” and the 

“eco-logical,” between human self-realization and its appropriation of 

“the natural,” between human aims and the creative life-processes of other 

organisms, and beyond the “drives” corresponding with the desire to be 

God and the desire to be Nature, respectively. 

A stipulative definition of sustainable development from a processrelational 

perspective is two-fold. Sustainable development means, first, 

that because the Earth is a finite ecological system, the appropriation and 

extraction of resources, pollution emissions, habitat disruption, and the 

transformation of “the natural,” which are implied by the term “development,” 

should not exceed the regenerative capacity of the biosphere, 

as a whole, to absorb their effects. Second, it means that human beings 

should appropriate or consume resources at a rate which corresponds 

with the pace of their natural restoration or replenishment, as well as 

with cognizance of the needs of future generations. Sustainable development 

is about human beings using their reasoning capacities to restrain 

and to limit their appropriation and consumption of resources as well 

as the development and transformation of “the natural.” This stands in 

sharp contrast to blindly following the “human interest” in attempting 

to overcome Nature via technology, by both destroying it and ourselves 

in the process. Perhaps the most important factor in arriving at genuine 

sustainability is the limiting of human population growth, which reduces 

the net need for development and resource consumption, and, in turn, 

reduces the net impact on the natural environment. 

In relation to the issue of sustainability, Whitehead pointed out that 

“the function of reason is the direction of the attack on the environment” 

in order to secure the conditions for human survival and the perpetuation 

of human life, but further, “to live, to live well, to live better,” (FR 8). It 

must be noted here that Whitehead’s “is” here, descriptive of the current 

state of affairs at the time that he was writing this statement, is by no means 

a prescriptive “ought to be,” for according to constructive postmodernist 

philosophy, humanity’s over-exertion of its technical-rational faculties, 

characterized in terms of the desire to be God, has led to the over-development 

and the transformation of “the natural” beyond the bounds of 

planetary sustainability. In light of the ecological crisis, the aim to “live

46 


better” must not be seen one-sidely to be synonymous with “attacking 

the environment” and pursuing development without novelty, but rather 

with adopting a way of life that takes the health of the biosphere into 

consideration; the health of the natural world being here associated with, 

but not reducible to, the well-being of human individuals. To illuminate 

this interrelationship, it stands to reason that if environmental conditions 

deteriorate, then human societies will become increasingly unable to 

guarantee the human rights and freedoms that we enjoy today. Hence, a 

defense of the environment is a long-term defense of human rights and 

the ability of human beings “to acquire an increase in [life] satisfaction” 

(FR 8). In applying Whitehead’s descriptions of the features of the creative 

process to the issue of sustainability, whereas the modern worldview aims 

to maximize human self-realization by way of maximizing the appropriation 

of “the natural” (largely taken for granted in the process), and 

whereas the extreme anti-humanism of radical ecologism aims to arrest 

both the appropriation of “the natural” as well as human self-realization, 

and, in turn, arresting human creativity in general, the process-relational 

environmental epistemology offers a sustainable “middle way” between the 

two. It points to the wisdom of tempering both contemporary society’s 

decadence, as well as each individual’s appropriation of “the natural” in 

terms of human self-actualization, while allowing for naturally sustainable 

levels of development, human creativity, life-satisfaction, and self-enjoyment. 

In Aristotelian language, Whitehead’s perspective is that of a return 

to the “golden mean” between extremes, for not only does immorality 

consist in a person’s thwarting of the ability, either in themselves or in 

another, to actualize their potential, as in the cases of alcoholism, anorexia, 

murder, theft, adultery, or withholding food or water from another, but 

conversely, it is also found in the vice of human self-maximization in 

relation to the actualization of one’s potentiality, beyond the bounds of 

planetary sustainability. 

Whitehead’s critical, non-anthropocentric organicism recognizes that 

it is in the highest interest of human beings to maintain the well-being 

of the natural world around them. “The natural,” for example, wild or 

undeveloped land not yet subordinate to human ends, ought not to be 

merely dismissed into irrelevance or negatively prehended in favor of 

development, for that which is wild or undeveloped is indeed relevant 

to human life. Process-relational philosophy holds that “the natural” has 

aesthetic value, which gives human beings pause to contemplate the deeper


47 

meaning of life. Whitehead stated that “our enjoyment of the values of 

human art, or of natural beauty, our horror at the obvious vulgarities and 

defacements which force themselves upon us [such as the destruction of 

“the natural”]—all these modes of experience . . . disclose the very meaning 

of things” (ESP 129, my addition). Whitehead’s epistemology depicts 

how feelings and emotions comprise the bedrock of experience and that 

our responses to objective states-of-affairs in the world, be they attracting 

or repulsing, are largely aesthetic valuations. Aesthetic judgments involve 

feelings of harmony or discordance, which arise from the causal efficacy 

of objects or events on us. As mentioned above, it is out of our experience 

of the natural world, namely, out of our feelings and our emotions, 

that we selectively develop subjective aims or fundamental purposes to 

be actualized in the world. Occasions which procure positive feelings are 

more apt to be selected than those which produce negative ones, in terms 

of how human beings develop such fundamental purposes. 

In Whitehead’s scheme, the aesthetic dimension of experience is the 

basis of consciousness, self-realization, as well as sound ethical intuitions. 

He goes to great lengths to discuss how aesthetic judgment involves the 

contrast of positive feelings (e.g., beauty, wonder, attraction, harmony, 

happiness) and negative feelings (e.g., repulsion, anxiety, horror, dislike, 

antagonism, suffering) in relation to the natural environment, thereby 

being cognizant of the fact that experiences of negative states-of-affairs 

have a fundamental role in giving meaning to human life. For instance, 

by experiencing environmental destruction first-hand, we become consciously 

aware that a correction of our behavior is necessary as part of 

our own self-development. But, Whitehead also holds that the domination 

of destructive discord, such as rampant destruction of the natural 

world, brings with it an “immediate feeling of evil, and the anticipation 

of destructive or weakened data for the future” (AI 263). Whitehead’s 

premise here is that since the aesthetic dimension of experience grounds 

our capacities for self-realization, the domination of aesthetic destruction 

(for example, in relation to huge tracts of rain-forest being clear-cut or 

burned down, or complete species being rendered extinct due to human 

negligence) also diminishes the human potentiality for self-realization, for 

richness of experience, and for novel modes of creativity, thus “robbing life 

of its zest for adventure” (AI 293). This diminishment can be conceived 

either in terms of the experience of present generations of human beings, 

or of future ones. For example, it is hard to imagine our children and

48 


grandchildren living in a world where they will not be able to experience 

a polar bear, due to the species being rendered extinct. It should be obvious 

here that Whitehead’s discussion of aesthetic experience in relation 

to “the natural” provides insights which may augment eco-psychology’s 

investigation and treatment of the negative mental effects and traumas 

arising from the experience of environmental destruction. 

Whitehead’s cosmology also involves the ethical stance that the natural 

world has intrinsic value or value in-itself and that natural entities have 

value for the sake of themselves. This standpoint is not to be confused 

with the notion that an entity has its value in terms of how well it reflects 

the Cartesian notion of a substance. In Science and the Modern World, 

Whitehead contrasts his philosophy of organism with Descartes’ dualistic 

substance ontology and its effect on the human psyche, in relation 

to how it conceives of the natural world. Whitehead describes that with 

the intellectual rise of Cartesian substance ontology in early modernity, 

“the emergent individual value of each entity (was) transformed into the 

independent substantial existence of each entity . . . leading to an ascription 

of value to what is in itself valueless” (195). In short, according to 

Whitehead, Descartes’ materialistic perspective leads to a view of Nature 

as without intrinsic value. He charges that the notion of the “bare valuelessness 

of mere matter [leads] to a lack of reverence in the treatment 

of natural beauty,” in terms of aesthetic value, but it also furthered “the 

habit of ignoring the intrinsic worth of the environment” (196). Hence, 

for Whitehead, it is largely because of the dominance of the Cartesian 

worldview holding that the natural world is composed of barren material 

substances, purely mechanistic, devoid of life, and dependent only 

upon themselves in order to exist, that Nature was understood as devoid 

of inherent value. For if Nature is conceived of as a mere collection of 

bits of matter, hurrying purposelessly through empty space, then there 

is no reason to have respect for or to have appreciation for it as it is in 

itself. But, because of his claim that all existents, including inanimate 

objects (like rocks and dust) and organisms (like plants, plankton, and 

coral) are to be considered a part of the web of organic life, Whitehead’s 

cosmology provides a re-enchanted view of the natural world, namely, one 

teeming with life and re-invigorated with value, instead of being simply 

considered to be a lifeless material substance. While Whitehead’s notion 

of the mutual interdependence of actual entities or occasions does imply 

that every organism has instrumental value for all others, for him, each


49 

actual entity, taken independently, can also be said to have an individual 

life-history and an enduring self-identity which is part of the creative 

unfolding of the organic whole. That is to say, the intrinsic value of an 

actual entity is not to be defined merely in terms of how well it reflects 

the Cartesian conception of a substance, but rather in respect to the fact 

of its existence as part of the web of organic life. 

In outlining some of the main contours of the process-relational environmental 

ethic, in The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality, and Nature 

in a Processive Cosmos, Brian Henning provides an analysis of Whitehead’s 

appeal to both the aesthetic and intrinsic value of “the natural,” although 

he emphasizes the former. Working on the premises that for Whitehead, 

“morality consists in the control of process, so as to maximize importance” 

(MT 13-14), and that “morality is always the aim at that union 

of harmony, intensity, and vividness which involves the perfection of 

importance for that occasion” (MT 13-14), Henning soundly argues 

toward a kalocentric ethic. A kalocentric ethic is one in which the most 

fundamental obligation human beings have is to act in such a way as to 

maximize beauty, value, and “greatness of experience” (MT 14) for the 

world as a whole, within the context of the specific situation and occasion. 

As Henning defines it, a kalocentric ethic is based in the notion that “an 

action is morally appropriate only if it would achieve the most beauty 

possible in the situation taken as a whole” (Ethics 192). 

This is not to suggest that the notions of “beauty” and “value” simply 

reside in mere subjective and anthropocentric judgments of taste, a 

perspective that comes as the result of not recognizing the holistic depth 

of Whitehead’s notion of “importance.” Henning is not here suggesting 

that the bulldozing of an ecologically vital swampland which appears 

to an individual as “an eyesore,” so as to build an aesthetically-pleasing 

cathedral, is justified. Rather, for Henning, value and importance here 

extend “not merely to the self but to others (the past actual occasions in 

an occasion’s actual world) and to the whole (the totality of achieved occasions)” 

(Ethics 133), although again, one cannot merely identify oneself 

as being that whole. Furthermore, while for Whitehead, “the generic aim 

of process is the attainment of importance” (MT 12, my emphasis), this 

is not to say that human creativity itself is implicitly “moral.” Rather, it is 

through realizing the aesthetic and the intrinsic value of “the natural,” and 

acting accordingly, namely, attaining a balance through controlling (e.g., 

via reasoned direction, restraint, and self-limitation) the appropriations

50 


and self-actualizations which constitute human creative processes, that 

the ethical path is to be found. In other words, since human creativity 

has been interpreted by many philosophers and theologians as a function 

of the desire to be God (e.g., living up to our human potential, having 

been made in “God’s image”) and/or the desire to be Nature, the ethical 

course of action is to avoid these extremes as well as the calamities that will 

befall us due to the vicious fluctuation between such extremes. Certainly, 

“sustainable development,” as has been re-defined above, is to be found in 

the control of the creative process (e.g., to limit the appropriation of “the 

natural”), and not simply in an appeal to the creative process itself. The 

point is that not all creativity is moral. Human creativity must be tempered 

by reasoned self-limitation, if it is to arrive at the requisite ecologically 

sustainable balance. To be sure, Henning notes, “the ‘maximization of 

importance’ aimed at in morality is made possible only by the ‘control 

of process’” (130). In any case, for our purposes here of setting out the 

contours of the process-relational environmental epistemology, I shall 

have to leave further considerations of a process-relational environmental 

ethic to a future work. 

From the “process-relational” environmental epistemology 

to the investigation of “constructive postmodern” 

environmental praxis 

The preceding analysis has elucidated some of the main contours of Whitehead’s 

process-relational environmental epistemology. In it, I have identified 

how it informs the various investigations of ecologically engaged psychology, 

such as those of eco-psychology, as well as offers novel proposals for environmentally 

ethical praxis. Specifically, with reference to characterizations of 

the modern and the deconstructive postmodern paradigms, as interpreted 

from the works of Sartre and Derrida, and involving the notions of “the 

desire to be God” and “the desire to be Nature,” respectively, this paper 

has demonstrated how Whitehead’s critical, non-anthropocentric organicism 

overcomes the vicious dichotomy between the ultimate aims of the 

anthropocentric humanism of modernity and the radical anti-humanism 

of deconstruction and radical ecologism. Parallel with the main problematic 

outlined by eco-psychology, the constructive postmodern paradigm is 

driven by an impetus to replace the dominant, ego-logical conceptions of 

the human self (for example, those advanced in mainstream psychology) 

which postulate it as a static ego, entirely separate from the natural world,


51 

devoid of process, and, in particular, as a Cartesian substance dependent 

only upon itself for its existence, with one conceived as thoroughly engaged 

in creative flux, organic, and thoroughly interconnected with the rest of the 

natural world, yet not simply definable by the latter. Environmentalist Bill 

McKibben’s statement in The End of Nature to the effect that the answer 

to the ecological crisis is not for humanity to simply disband our rational 

faculties, but to “exercise our reason to do what no other animal can do: we 

could limit ourselves voluntarily, choose to remain God’s creatures instead 

of making ourselves gods. . . . Such restraint . . . is the real challenge” (182- 

83) resonates, to a certain extent, with process-relational environmental 

epistemology. The “restraint” of which McKibben speaks may be achieved 

by recognizing human limitations as well as through “knowing ourselves,” 

namely, through a deeper understanding of the creative character of “the 

human” in this contemporary evolutionary epoch. Specifically, as has been 

alluded to in this paper, the process-relational environmental epistemology 

is largely constituted by the recognition of what the modern worldview takes 

for granted, namely, that “the natural” fuels all human creative processes, 

processes which constitute the self to begin with. In other words, it seeks 

to cultivate a heightened conscious awareness of the prehensive character 

of human life and experience in our culture, with a concern to limit the 

rate and extent of the appropriation, consumption, and destruction of “the 

natural” within human creative processes, thereby tempering the “attack 

on the environment” via reasoned self-limitation, while at the same time 

allowing for naturally sustainable levels of development, human creativity, 

life-satisfaction, and self-enjoyment. From the process-relational point of 

view, McKibben’s call for “restraint” will also entail an embracing of novel 

modes of human creativity which are not merely a function of instrumental 

reason, monetary gain, “development,” or “material appropriation,” but 

rather heighten the senses of both the aesthetic value and the intrinsic 

value of Nature. 

Notes 

1. In response to the possible charge that I am here committing Hume’s 

is/ought fallacy, one might hypothesize that if we confined our thought in 

the way that the unmitigated Hume would direct us, ethics would not even 

exist as a branch of philosophy. In matters pertaining to what human beings 

have control over, descriptions of what is can certainly lead to prescriptions 

for what should be, at the level of praxis.

52 


2. See Chalquist, C. “Mind and Environment: A Psychological Survey of 

Perspectives Literal, Wide, and Deep.”Retrieved July 3, 2007. 

3. In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore makes constant reference to the assumed 

separation of “the human” and “the natural” as the major issue for environmentalism. 

For example, see pp. 218-19, 230-31, 237, 249-50, 257, 

262, 366. 

4. According to Sartre, the historical existence of a human being or of 

humanity precedes the definition of the essence of the self or of humanity. 

He states that atheistic existentialism holds to the position that “if God does 

not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, 

a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this 

being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant here by 

saying that existence precedes existence? It means that, first of all, man exists, 

turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, 

as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is 

nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have 

made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no 

God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but 

he is also only what he wills himself to be after his thrust toward existence. 

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Existentialism 15). 

5. This is the case with German Idealism, especially, in Fichte’s die Tathandlung 

or Act of the “I’s” self-positing as absolute consciousness. 

6. It is to be mentioned here that Sartre’s phenomenological investigation 

of the meaning of desire as appropriation can be said to correspond closely 

with Heidegger’s notion of “the event of appropriation of Being” or “enowning” 

(Ereignis) as it relates to the essence of technology in Identity and 

Difference and The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics. According 

to Heidegger, the essence of technology is made manifest by “enframing” 

(Ge-Stellen) which may be conceived of as an instrumental “prelude to . . . 

the event of appropriation [of Being]” (Identity 14), by which human beings 

treat Nature as a “standing-reserve,” setting it up in advance, in order to 

reveal its secrets and to extract its resources. Certainly, while Heidegger was 

not himself an environmental philosopher, many scholars have pointed out 

that the later Heidegger’s holistic philosophizing as well as his critique of 

technology in The Question Concerning Technology lend themselves well to 

environmentalist discourses. For example, as Devall and Sessions point out 

in Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Heidegger “concluded that 

[the] anthropocentric development [of Western philosophy since Plato] 

paved the way for the technocratic mentality which espouses domination 

over Nature” (98).


53 

7. For some deconstructionists, modernity has, for example, allowed for 

the patriarchal domination and oppression of non-European cultures by 

European cultures. In this respect, in rejecting the dominating meta-narratives 

of modernity, deconstruction can be said to lead to the liberation of 

peoples oppressed by modernity and to return to their own cultural identities 

and ways of life which are more harmonious with Nature. Especially, 

some strands of “Post-Colonial” theory ally themselves with deconstructive 

postmodernism and tend in this direction. As Clare Palmer describes it, 

“Post-Colonial” theory aims “to expose and to criticize the power-relations 

embedded in colonial regimes and in the relationships between societies 

that economically and politically dominate and societies and cultures that 

are dominated . . . usually on the basis that such power relations cause suffering 

and other kinds of harm (Response 51). It should be noted, however, 

that with respect to its alliance with the French deconstructionists, Post- 

Colonial theory has been criticized for itself being “strongly influenced by 

Continental European” philosophy (Keller 21) as well as accused of being 

the mere defense of cultural relativism. 

8. For example, see the article by W. S. Weed, “Can We Go To Mars 

Without Going Crazy?” 

9. Some scholars have sought to interpret Whitehead’s cosmology agnostically 

or even atheistically, namely, without reference to God, and others have done 

so in order to maintain the primacy of Darwinian evolution over intelligent 

design theories. Whitehead’s cosmological scheme can be said to be an attempt 

to synthesize these seemingly antagonistic perspectives. Whitehead’s cosmology 

was inspired by Darwin, but it also involves a claim that all organisms 

participate in creative processes which drive evolution. Whitehead’s notion 

of the creative process is not to be simply lumped in with Creationism. From 

a process-relational perspective, while contemporary science demonstrates 

that random mutations drive the evolutionary process and that there is no 

evidence of an intelligent designer or a direction toward an ultimate goal, 

scientists who reduce the evolution of species to genetics tend to omit the 

central fact that natural selection requires some reference to the life-process 

and the experience of organisms in determining whether such mutations are 

biologically successful. Similarly, without recourse to the creative processes 

of organisms, there is little room for an account for the intrinsic value of 

Nature; Nature, conceived as mere static bits of matter, being left “valueless” 

and “lifeless.” However, whether or not Whitehead can withstand the types 

of criticisms that were leveled against Bergson, especially in relation to the 

charge that his scheme is Lamarckian, is a subject matter for debate. 

10. This is not to say, for example, that following from this notion, a parent 

needs to allow a mosquito to suck the blood of its infant child (see

54 


Henning 184). Rather, from the process-relational view, the parent ought 

to be selectively interested in the baby’s value as an intrinsically valuable 

organism, more so than a single mosquito, and therefore, she should protect 

it, for example, against the possibility of contracting the West Nile virus. 

However, at the same time, the parent does not need to carry out systematic 

acts of aggression against “the natural” as vengeance against the mosquito’s 

actions, fogging every corner of the planet in an attempt to destroy all 

mosquito species. Parents should understand that the mosquito’s selection 

of their particular baby as a food supply is a highly contingent event, that 

mosquitoes are an intrinsic part of the interconnected web of life, yet that 

there is, as part of human life, a need to deal with them (e.g., flick them 

off) when they are potentially in the process of causing harm to our loved 

ones. However, a reverential recognition of what Nature provides for us is 

important. At the very least, mosquitoes and their larvae provide food for 

fish that humans eat, and therefore parents ought to realize that reciprocal 

“trade-offs” between the aims of human beings and the maintenance of 

the wildness of the natural world are necessary in order to provide that 

balance necessary for a healthy planet as a whole. Especially important for 

parents, ethically speaking, should be a concern for the life-long health of 

their child, which will, in part, be a function of the maintenance of the 

health of the planet. 

11. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead quotes Descartes’ articulation 

in the Principles of Philosophy that “when we conceive of substance, we 

merely conceive an existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order 

to exist. To speak truth, nothing but God answers to this description as 

being that which is absolutely self-sustaining, for we perceive that there 

is no other created thing which can exist without being sustained by His 

power. . . . Created substances, however, whether corporeal or thinking, 

may be conceived under this common concept; for they are things which 

need only the concurrence of God in order to exist” (106). In the objections 

and replies to his Meditations, Descartes also states “the notion of a 

substance is just this—that it can exist by itself, that is without the aid of 

any other substance. And there is no one has ever perceived two substances 

by means of two different concepts without judging that they really are 

distinct” (Selected 146). 

12. A strong parallel can be drawn here between Sartre’s phenomenological 

investigation of the desire to be as an activity of appropriation and 

Whitehead’s notion of a prehension. However, the distinction to be made 

here is that it is apparent that Whitehead is using the word “foundation,” 

not in the sense of becoming self-caused, in the purely substantialist sense, 

but in the sense of any organism’s, human or nonhuman, maintenance of 

its own existence through a selective appropriation, in the organic sense.


55 

For Whitehead, the reality is that in the natural world, “life is robbery” 

(PR 105). 

13. Whitehead would here seem to agree with Heidegger in relation to the 

question of metaphysics that “Being grounds beings, and beings, as what 

is most of all, account for Being” (Identity 69). 

Works cited 

Ausubel, K. “Interview.” The Eleventh Hour. Warner Bros. Documentary, 

2007. 

Beauvoir, S. de, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Trans. P. O’Brian. London: 

Penguin, 1984. 

Chalquist, C. “Mind and Environment: A Psychological Survey of Perspectives 

Literal, Wide, and Deep.” 2006: 1-26. . 

Derrida, J. The Ear of the Other. New York: Schocken, 1985. 

___. “The Ends of Man.” After Philosophy: End or Transformation? Ed. K. 

Baynes, et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 125-58. 

___. Of Grammatology. Trans. C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 

1997. 

___. “The Animal That Therefore I am.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369-418. 

. 

Descartes, R. Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans.J. Cottingham, et al. New 

York: Cambridge UP, 1988. 

Devall, B. and G. Sessions, et al. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. 

Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1985. 

Felt, J.W. “Whitehead’s Misconception of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle.” Process 

Studies 14 (1985): 224-36. 

Fisher, A. “Toward a More Radical Ecopsychology: Therapy for a Dysfunctional 

Society.” Alternatives 22 (1996): 20-26. 

___. Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. Albany: State U 

of New York P, 2002. 

Freadman, R. et al. Re-thinking Theory: A Critique of Contemporary Literary 

Theory and an Alternative Account. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 

Glendinning, C. “Technology, Trauma, and the Wild.” Ecopsychology: Restoring 

the Earth, Healing the Mind. Ed. T. Roszak, et al. San Francisco: 

Sierra Club, 1995. 41-54. 

Gore, A. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. New York: 

Rodale, 1992. 

Griffin, D.R., et al. Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions. Albany: State 

U of New York P, 1988.

56 


___. “Introduction to the SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern 

Thought.” Higher Education in the Making. Ed. G. Allan. Albany: State 

U of New York P, 2004. xi-xv. 

Habermas, J. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. J. Shapiro. Boston: 

Beacon Press, 1971. 

Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New 

York: Harper San Francisco, 1962. 

___. Identity and Difference. Trans. and intro. J. Stambaugh. Chicago: U 

of Chicago P, 1969. 

Henning, B.G. The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality, and Nature in a 

Processive Cosmos. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2005. 

Husserl, E. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. 

Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970. 

___. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. D. Cairns. Boston: Kluwer, 1991. 

Keller, C. “Connections of Difference: Sexes and Ecologies,” Process Thought 

and East Asian Culture Conference Proceedings: Keynote Lectures, Seoul, 

Korea, 2004: Whitehead Society of Korea and the International Process 

Network, 21-27. 

Kidner, D.W. “Why Psychology is Mute About the Environmental Crisis.” 

Environmental Ethics 16 (1994): 359-75. 

___. Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity. 

Albany: State U of New York P, 2002. 

Lewandowski, J.D. “Modernity and Its Vicissitudes.” Cultural Critique 29 

(1994-95): 139-62. 

Lyotard, J-F. “The Postmodern Condition.” After Philosophy: End or Transformation? 

Ed. K Baynes, et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 

73-94. 

McKibben, B. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989. 

Metzner, R. “The Psychopathology of the Human-Nature Relationship.” 

Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Ed. T. Roszak, et 

al. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995. 55-67. 

Naess, A. “Heidegger, Postmodern Theory and Deep Ecology.” Trumpeter 

14 (1997): 1-7. . 

Nietzsche, F. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking 

Penguin, 1968. 

Norris, C. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 

1991. 

Palmer, C. “Response to Cobb and Menta.” Process Studies 33 (2004): 

46-70.


57 

Peters, M.A. “Derrida, Pedagogy and the Calculation of the Subject.” Educational 

Philosophy and Theory 35 (2003). 

Pierce, J. Morality Play: Case Studies in Ethics. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 

2005. 

Roszak, T. The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. Toronto: 

Simon and Schuster, 1992. 

___. “The Nature of Sanity.” Psychology Today, January-February 1996, 1- 

3, . 

Sartre, J.-P. Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. New York: Washington 

Square Press, 1956. 

___. “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre. 

Ed. and trans. W. Kaufman. New York: Penguin, 1975, 345-69. 

___. Existentialism and Human Emotions. Trans. B. Frechtman and H.E. 

Barnes. New York: Carol Publishing, 1985. 

___. Nausea. Trans. L. Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1964. 

___. The Transcendence of the Ego. Trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. 

New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. 

Scarfe, A. “Negative Prehensions and the Creative Process,” Process Studies 

32 (2003): 94-105. 

Stack, G. Nietzsche: Man, Knowledge, and Will to Power. New York: Aperture, 

1994. 

Weed, W.S. “Can We Go To Mars Without Going Crazy?” Discover Magazine, 

May 1, 2001.< http://discovermagazine.com/2001/may/cover>. 

Whitehead, A.N. Adventures of Ideas (AI). 1933. New York: Free Press, 

1967. 

___. The Concept of Nature (CN). 1920. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 

___. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (as recorded by Vincent Price). 

Boston: Little, Brown, 1954. 

___. Essays in Science and Philosophy (ESP). New York: Philosophical Library, 

1948. 

___. The Function of Reason (FR). 1929. Boston: Beacon, 1969. 

___. “Mathematics and the Good (MG).” The Library of Living Philosophers, 

Vol. 3: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Ed. P.A. Schilpp. New 

York: Tudor, 1951. 666-81. 

___. Modes of Thought (MT). 1938. New York: Free Press, 1968. 

___. Process and Reality (PR). 1929. Corrected Edition. Ed. D.R. Griffin 

and D.W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. 

___. Religion in the Making (RM). 1926. Intro. J.A. Jones. New York: 

Fordham UP, 1996.

58 


___. Science and the Modern World (SMW). 1925. New York: Free Press, 

1967. 

Wood, D. The Deconstruction of Time. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities 

Press International, 1989. 

Zaner, R.M. “Discussion of Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man.’” Philosophy 

and Phenomenological Research 32 (1972): 384-89.

Process Studies Supplement Overcoming Anthropocentric ... - Here

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?