Ilan Safit

Do cinematic representations of the natural world only put us in further remove from nature? A phenomenological approach shows that nature screened can produce a richer understanding of human–nature relations as these unfold in visual contact. If vision accesses the world in a unique relationship of sight, in which our contact with the world is defined by vision prior to any other interaction, the cinema offers a special setting for a phenomenology that seeks to draw-out the significance of human relations with the world of nature that come before utility or action. A detailed analysis of the opening sequence of Terrence Malick’s The New World demonstrates how the act of viewing positions the viewer in relation to what she sees. This position, prior to action and with the impossibility to act is seen here as an ethical position, a position of responsibility in the Levinasian sense. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of vision is put here to use alongside the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger and the existential responsibility of Levinas, while subverting Levinas’ anthropocentrism and rejecting Heidegger’s limiting view of technology. The approach taken in this essay, of bringing phenomenology into productive and reflexive interaction with ecology and with film is dubbed an “eco-film-phenomenology.”

The primary concern of environmental ethics pushed to the limit is the question of survival. An ethic of survival would concern the possibility of morality in an environmental crisis that promises humanity immeasurable damage, suffering, and even the possibility of species extinction. A phenomenological analysis of the question of moral response to such future catastrophe reveals—in Heideggerian fashion contra-Heidegger—that the very question positions us in a relation of responsibility towards a world and a humanity that lies beyond one’s reach and extends into the future. Responsibility, then, arises as a constituting element that defines humanity and therefore cannot be bracketed away or suspended in a time of crisis. Through a reading of Hans Jonas’ notion of responsibility and a critique of some major notions of Environmental Ethics, this article argues that an ethic of survival is conditioned by the survival of humanity as a moral, responsible species. The main challenge of this responsibility is further suggested to be the clash between the autonomy and dignity of the individual and the vital needs of the larger community in the struggle for survival.

The signifier 'movement' is theorized here as the paradigm of the relation between concept and image. Traditionally set as an oppositional pair, concept and image, in fact, are bound in a relation of interchangeability which is achieved by a movement between the two. This "movement" is a signifier used throughout the history of philosophy to characterize the activity of thought and appears in different guises as logic's most productive instrument. Yet, 'movement' functions as an explanatory tool due to its reference to the phenomenon of motion; it is itself an explanatory image. Furthermore, movement itself cannot be pointed out in the world without the application of abstraction or generalization to a moving body. It is, then, a concept given in an image, even as it comes to explain the relation between the two. ;Heraclitus coined the river as an image of flux; Plato differentiated the world from the Forms by the movement that defines the former and is absent from the latter; Aristotle defined movement in logical terms yet employed it as an image in his natural science. Kant invented synthesis and Time as the activity and the category of understanding while defining both in terms of movement. Hegel and Bergson strived to think movement as such, providing the term with specific articulations and recognizing its existence in the activity of the mind. ;Uri Nissan Gnessin's prose provides an example of a poetics of movement in the form of dialectical composition that hides under the guise of static plot. Samuel Beckett demonstrates the irreducibility of movement in language, thought, and existence. Furthermore, through paradox and contradiction he shows how the rules of semantics and logic are kept in practice even as they are proven impossible. ;This incessant reappearance of these rules is precisely movement in the form that Bergson and Hegel thought it: an activity of the mind that finds its correlate in the physical world; an activity geared towards change, thus having the potential of producing the new as much as circulating in endless repetition; finally, an activity which is inexplicable, nonsensical for the mode of thought that regards concept as a fixed and final conclusion