Jason Wirth

We endorse policymakers’ efforts to address the negative consequences of the attention economy’s technology but add that these approaches are often limited in their criticism of the systemic context of human attention. Starting from Buddhist philosophy, we advocate a broader approach: an ‘ecology of attending’ that centers on conceptualizing, designing, and using attention (1) in an embedded way and (2) focused on the alleviating of suffering. With ‘embedded’ we mean that attention is not a neutral, isolated mechanism but a meaning-engendering part of an ‘ecology’ of bodily, sociotechnical and moral frameworks. With ‘focused on the alleviation of suffering’ we mean that we explicitly move away from the (often implicit) conception of attention as a tool for gratifying desires. We analyze existing inquiries in these directions and urge them to be intensified and integrated. As to the design and function of our technological environment, we propose three questions for further research: How can technology help to acknowledge us as ‘ecological’ beings, rather than as self-sufficient individuals? How can technology help to raise awareness of our moral framework? And how can technology increase the conditions for ‘attending’ to the alleviation of suffering, by substituting our covert self-driven moral framework with an ecologically attending one? We believe in the urgency of transforming the inhumane attention economy sociotechnical system into a humane ecology of attending, and in our ability to contribute to it.

Translated here into English for the first time, F. W. J. Schelling's 1842 lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology are an early example of interdisciplinary thinking. In seeking to show the development of the concept of the divine Godhead in and through various mythological systems (particularly of ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East), Schelling develops the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions. In so doing, he brings together the essential relatedness of the development of philosophical systems, human language, history, ancient art forms, and religious thought. Along the way, he engages in analyses of modern philosophical views about the origins of philosophy's conceptual abstractions, as well as literary and philological analyses of ancient literature and poetry.

In light of the exigencies of the unfolding global ecological crisis, I explore what the great classical Daoist Zhuangzi called “the debate that is not spoken” by bringing together, however implausibly, two voices to hear a word that in the end rests “at the place where understanding no longer understands.” The word itself endeavors to say what in the end cannot be said but still somehow communicated. I locate the emergence of this strange word in a silent and silence inducing debate between two thinkers who I suspect could never have imagined communicating with each other: The German post-Kantian philosopher FWJ Schelling (1775–1854), whose thinking about the obfuscation of Naturphilosophie now seems in many ways prophetic, and an admittedly unusual and surprising interlocutor, the late Standing Rock Sioux thinker, Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933–2005). In this silent debate, I attempt to hearken to what I call, however tentatively, eco-anarchism. This debate also considers the claim, made by each of our interlocutors in their own way, that this is a religious problem, albeit one that demands that we radically examine what such a word can now mean.

In an age in which the distance between states, nations, and continents is often informally measured by the time that it takes to fly from one to another, I will begin with a mode of transit that now seems increasingly and hopelessly quaint, namely, walking. The first part of my essay will be comparative and intercultural in nature, bringing two thinkers from East Asia (the early Daoist Zhuangzi and the great Kamakura Period Zen master Eihei Dōgen) into dialogue with three western thinkers (Thoreau, Muir, and Nietzsche). After working out a complex but mutually illuminating description of walking as a practice of being and thinking, I will then attempt to bring my encomium on peripatetic practice to bear upon our contemporary age of flight. It is not my intent to be a reactionary Luddite. Rather I hope to show how walking illumines both the pitfalls and the ecstatic possibilities of our new “being in transit.”

This chapter calls attention to the absence of philosophic study on the subject of food and explores its implications. The essay frames this absence in terms of a “bi-fold non-appearance of food” (a widespread mindlessness and ignorance toward the essential component of life that is food). The consequences of food’s bi-fold non-appearance can be viewed clearly in our increasingly distanced relationship with food, our rapid loss of cultural food knowledge, and companies purposefully concealing knowledge about their practices. The essay warns that the dire state of our relationship with food is a symptom of a much larger “non-appearance of nature,” where mindlessness has led to massive man-made ecological disasters.The essay turns to the thirteenth century Zen master Eihei Dōgen for insight into how to remedy this situation. Dōgen was known for encouraging bottom-up philosophy—starting with small, often overlooked aspects of our environment, such as food, as the basis for philosophic study—as opposed to top-down philosophy, where theoretical discourse attempts to fit a philosophic model onto the world. The essay then discusses Dōgen’s writings on Zazen—a meditative practice that seeks to develop a state of Zen consciousness where the boundaries between subject and object are dissolved. Finding the Dao in food preparation can also attain this state of consciousness. The essay challenges us to reckon philosophically to see food, because, without it, one cannot see at all. We need to recognize our lack of seeing as the force by which our ecological destruction is propelled.

The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego's reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy's genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates.