Editor's Note

We must emphasize that the Anthropocene does not belong to the life world.
Here I borrowed the term life world from Edmund Husserl, who defined it as
"a horizontal backdrop for our experiences." We experience things not in empty
space or in abstraction, but in the concrete life world familiar to us. Life world
is the world whose certainty we take for granted, without asking for proof. If
there were no such life world, we would not live even a single day. How do we
know that we buy and eat hamburgers in McDonald without testing whether it
is poisoned or not? How do we know that the sky does not crumble down?
Merleau-Ponty said that our "perception is entirely sustained by the certainty
of the world." Here the curtain is not something to be proven or demonstrated.
We believe. Because others believe. What I am saying here is that the
Anthropocene deprives us of such certainty of the world. It takes us from
ordinary life and throws us into a strange and unfamiliar world, into a
geological earth, forcing us to think from the depth of the Earth's strata. Yes,
indeed, earth scientists dig deeply into sedimented layers of the Earth to
discover the timing and relationships of event. The Jurassic, for example,
indicates the fact that once the Earth was populated by dinosaurs, whose fossils
we can see in the museum. It is ironic that dinosaurs prove their existence
through their fossilized remains.
The fact that we lie in the age of the Anthropocene means that we are forced to
think in two incompatible time scales. Suppose one scale concerns our life span,
the other, the geological time. The one is to the life world and the other to the
fossil earth (indicating once there had been life). Protagoras' maxim that man
is the measure of things is valid only for the life world. When we turn to the
geological time scale, we find ourselves confronted with non-human life forms
that once had been there long before the arrival of homo sapiens on the Earth.
If contrasted with this geological time scale reaching back to 4.5 billion years
ago, our time span appears almost nil. In terms of human time, we are
everything, but we are nothing if we are put into the matrix of the geological
time scale. The lesson that the Anthropocene teaches us is that we have to learn
how to be everything and nothing at the same time.
Alexander Pope, in Essay on Man, warned us against human hubris, advising
that "The proper study of mankind is man." He was one of the happy men who
were satisfied with his ontological middle station in the chain of beings. He did
not complain about not having omnipresent knowledge, believing that his
knowledge, though small, was sufficient for a happy life. To want
omnipresence and omnipotence is arrogance, the shortest road to fall. I think
Pope is right. Only if the universe is in order and all goes well. Hamlet
complained that "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born
to set it right." But from hindsight it seems that Hamlet's problem was not as
frustrating as ours; the object he had to fix was kingship, not the Earth like us.
The king's palace is manageable, but the Earth is too big even to look at, not to
mention to manage it.
Here arises the problem of proper perspective. If we want to see things clear
and distinctly, we need a perspective, not too near nor too far away. Otherwise,
we lose sight of them. One may think we should approach the object as near as
possible to see it better. But if so, we see only a tiny part of the object. The
other extreme posting is not desirable, either. If we take too much distance from
the thing, it begins to disappear. It means that the loss of perspective equals the
failure of the object. And such a loss of perspective is what this age of the
Anthropocene imposes on us.
· Perspective pertains not only to space but to time as well. Pascal said
in Pensee that "When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing."
The Anthropocene is the case. Compared to a mayfly's life, our human life is
almost infinite. But it is short if compared with trees which live thousands of
years. How about the speed of time? Isn't it that one hour of mayflies equals
one year of humans? Isn't the rock whose immobility and inertness we take for
granted active as animals? Daniel Dennett introduced the term time chauvinism
to refer to the human inability to understand time as too slow or too fast or too
long or too short. If we record the rock with a video camera and play it as
quickly as 1 million times, we will discover that it moves and changes its body
shape. We can do the same to the life of humans; we are born, grow old, and
die within one hour. Ephemeral. If we take a non-human time scale, we will
discover that the boundary between organic and inorganic disappears. Our
lifeworld is not sustainable if we shift our time scale.
· What will happen to the concept of homo sapiens if we take a non-human
perspective? We experience things from the vantage point of human
subjectivity, that is, thinking of ourselves as the center of the world. It is "I"
that sees a cat and knows it as a cat. This simple act of cognition would not be
possible if there were no certainty of the life world, which allows us to
distinguish a cat from other animals. However, sometimes we intuit that the cat
also sees and knows us in its canine way. Its way of experiencing us is not as
predominantly visual as our humans. Then there happens the reversal of subject
and object position: the cat sees us, and we are seen. The cat does not see us as
homo sapience, nor see us in a way as we want it to see us. Think about how
Xray sees us. It exposes only skulls and bones; flesh does not exist. Then how
about our undergoing a gastroscopy? We are the stomach wall and its tissue
and cells. Are they any trace of subject ‘I’ in those cells? We lose our bodily
integrity if there is any.
It is paradoxical that the Anthropocene, though indicating the human epoch,
announces the end of humanism, inviting us into the non-human world and
non-human perspectives. Now we are experiencing the effects of the
unintended consequences; humans intended to recreate the raw earth into more
safe and affluent dwelling place but ended up with destructing the very
foundation of our life. Such a disjunction was due to the human exceptionalism
that did not take non-humans as coevolutionary partners of humans, exploiting
them as resources for satisfying human needs and desires. We are earthlings,
along with many non-human members of the earth, all with equal rights for
survival. Our old habit of experiencing the world exclusively from our human
perspectives proves to be fatal. We have to learn how to think things from non-
human perspectives, and how to replace anthropocentrism with ecocentrism.
There is an old Chinese story about a man who cannot sleep at night, afraid
that heaven might fall. How unreasonable is such a worry about events that will
never happen. It is a form of madness, compulsive anxiety to say the least.
However, we, living the crisis of climate changes, cannot laugh him away. The
destruction of the ozone layer is a reality. Nothing can be more reasonable than
our worry about the increased UV radiation due to ozone depletion threatening
life on Earth. The certainty of the life world, which Husserl took for granted,
is not with us anymore.
It is becoming more and more apparent that everything, both human
and non-human, is related to and depends on each other for their
survival. Life on Earth is the symbiotic choreography of world-making.
No individual entity, mind, or matter exists without and before such
earthly relations and intraactions. All beings seek to sustain their
existence as mindfully and intelligently as humans, though in different
ways. We know that Thomas Nagel asked if it is possible to feel “like
to be a bat,” with the ready-made answer that it is impossible. But I am
sure that we know what it is like to be a bat. Humans are like the bat as
much as the bat is like humans. The poet Aldo Leopold asked us to
learn to think like a mountain. We take his aphorism literally, not as a
metaphor. “We are mountain as well as a bat” - this is geologically
true.

Editor-in-Chief Jonggab Kim
International Journal of Body, Nature, and Culture
Director of Institute of Body & Culture; Professor for English Dept. at
Konkuk University, South K