Matthias Fritsch

This essay proposes a reinterpretation of Marcel Mauss's famous The Gift with a focus on the question as to why gifts obligate recipients. Mauss argues that for the archaic cultures he studies, a donor is not separable from the thing given, so that the recipient also receives some of the donor's ‘spirit’ that wishes to return to its origin. In my reconstruction, I stress that the donor is not separable from her gift because it is understood to come from her tribe, its tradition and ancestors, as well as from its ‘native soil’ and natural elements, which are taken to be inassimilable by the recipient. I then examine Derrida's reading of Mauss in view of this unpossessable and the role of natural elements in it. In the face of Derrida's rejection of Mauss's foundationalist use of a cyclical nature, I conclude that for both authors nature may name not only a desire for the origin, but also a differential and open-ended force that turns and re-turns in all gifts.

Demonstrates the fertility of the phenomenological tradition of philosophy for intergenerational justice and climate ethics.--In the face of the current environmental crisis, relations with future people—overlapping generations and more distant ones—have moved to the top of political and scholarly agendas. The anthology proposed here seeks to demonstrate the enormous fertility of philosophical phenomenology in accounting for relations among different generations. This is due to phenomenology’s rich reflections on the role of time in the constitution of the social-historical world and its relation to the environment. The volume will boast 11 chapters from different authors across the spectrum of phenomenological currents and subfields, from Husserl and Heidegger to Jonas, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. A connecting thread will be the relations among mortality, natality, and generativity in connecting as well as separating generations. Authors will reflect on the social-ontological and normative significance of these connections, paying particular attention to political and environmental obligations to people living in the future.

In diesem Vortrag möchte ich einen Vorschlag anbieten, wie man Heideggers Verwendung des Begriffs des Bösartigen—der „Ingrimm des Aufruhrs“—heute verstehen könnte. Demnach benennt der Begriff den Aufstand einer neuzeitlichen Subjektivität, die sich in ihren Weltbezügen der vorgängigen und konstitutiven Beziehung auf Welt und Erde zu entsagen versucht. Damit steht diese Aufruhr und die damit einhergehende „Verwüstung der Erde“ in der Nähe dessen, was Heidegger auch als die Technik bezeichnet, die man des Öfteren mit dem Raubbau an der Natur in Verbindung gebracht hat. Heideggers Kritik an der Technik als neuzeitliche Schickung des Seins beruft sich auf einen Ursprung des Normativen im Geheiß oder Versprechen des Seins, den ich (hier über Heidegger hinausgehend) als Turnus (d.h. das abwechselnde An-der-Reihe-Sein) unter Generationen entwickeln möchte. Demnach wäre das Böse heute die wissentliche (obgleich unwillkürliche und alltägliche) Bedrohung der Lebensgrundlagen von zukünftigen Generationen, denen damit ein gerechter Turnus versagt wird.

This article offers a response to massive environmental destabilization by linking the promising accounts of intergenerational justice as turn-taking with the proposals for a geokinetic view of earth and the idea of a second Copernican revolution. The argument will proceed in four steps. First, I suggest that recent proposals calling on us to respond to the Anthropocene by ‘being geologically human’, that is, by situating lived human time in geological time, should be supplemented by generational time, and thus, by the ethics of human generations following one another. To conceptualize intergenerational justice, I review the proposals for human generations taking turns with the earth. I then suggest that, however, the earth is not an external, exchangeable object of turn-taking (as e.g. a bicycle would be). Rather than being an object that we may choose to use or not, earth is constitutive of generations being able to come about and take turns in the first place. In this constitutive sense, earth also takes turns with us. To further specify this idea, I discuss the so-called ‘second Copernican revolution’, according to which the earth not only moves around the sun, but is internally on the move, its geokinetic processes co-constituting human generations. If the argument goes through, the environmental crises in our very midst should be understood as demanding a reconceptualization of time as always already intergenerational and space as counter-Copernican.

Time has often been understood as either linear or cyclical, sometimes in Eurocentric ways that enclose Indigenous peoples in natural cycles with little or no historical development. This article explores an alternative to the line and the circle. In the context of environmental destruction, Indigenous scholars have suggested that traditional Indigenous accounts of spiraling time, from the Anishinaabe and Māori to the Aztecs and Muskoke, better connect nature with human history as well as more appropriately link human generations, including ancestors and descendants. Exploring its connection with the hermeneutic circle and other notions, I will propose the spiral as indeed a promising way to grasp these important connections. In conclusion, I will discuss the question of whether Indigenous spiral ontologies can be proposed for all of humanity beyond knowledge extractivism.

The present paper aims to view three ways of thinking time by Emmanuel Levinas. We distinguish existential, historical, and eschatological time demonstrating how they are connected with his central notion of responsibility toward the Other. The following analysis reorders and interprets what Levinas has said in response of Martin Heidegger’s and Hegel’s position. The text does not make any other claims but aims to offer a possible reading and exegesis of Levinas’s philosophy and open a further discussion on these topics.

The primary objective of this anthology is to make intergenerational justice an issue for intercultural philosophy, and, conversely, to allow the latter to enrich the former. In times of large-scale environmental destabilization, fair- ness between generations is an urgent issue of justice across time, but it is also a global issue of justice across geographical and nation-state borders. This means that the future generations envisioned by the currently living also cross these borders. Thus, different philosophical cultures and traditions of thought should converse to re ect on what is fair to future people. In the remainder of this introduction, we will detail these claims and give an overview of the volume’s chapters.

This chapter offers an overview of the serious challenges with which democracies must contend in the face of increasing climate destabilization and menacing environmental breakdown. After a brief introduction, the second section will discuss various accounts of what democracyDemocracy is or should be, from liberal and republican to deliberative and radical, and briefly indicate which difficulties these accounts face. The third section diagnoses democracy’s climate-related weaknesses. As a global and long-term intergenerational problem that is connected to deeply entrenched economic fossil fuel infrastructure, climate change challenges national and usually short-termist democratic governments to consider noncitizens (especially the global poor, nonhuman beings, and future generations) as well as safeguard the basic safety of the populace and secure constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens. The fourth and fifth sections provide an overview of the many remedies found in the literature, including eco-authoritarian proposals for less democracy, which some authors either recommend or predict and fear. Section “More Democracy” discusses a host of proposals for more democracy, from expansion to previous noncitizens and deeper citizen participation, including climate disobedience, to institutional reforms, especially regarding future people. The chapter ends with suggestions for how climate change might force democracies to adapt, including the alternative between eco-fascism and eco-socialism that some see as a likely prospect.

This paper proposes a concept of justice for future people that is mindful of Indigenous critiques of the so-called »Anthropocene«. I first review these critiques, which suggest that motivating pro-futural care by dreading an impending climate crisis tends to betray a privileged, often settler-colonial perspective. The beneficiaries of colonialism now have the »luxury« of viewing the environmental crisis as one that lies mostly in the future, while many Indigenous communities have been living with such a crisis for a long time. I then review various Indigenous accounts of intergenerational relations, in which I find the wide-spread claim that present generations owe to descendants because they received gifts from ancestors as well as the land. I elaborate this view as what I call asymmetrical reciprocity among generations. The final section argues that this view can help to demarginalize the future: above all, by disallowing a linear view of time according to which a focus on the future permits the neglect of the past. Hence, climate ethics and intergenerational justice must face the history of colonialism.

The notions of sustainability that are most widely accepted, domestically and internationally, are underwritten not only by duties to contemporaries, but also, and crucially, by responsibilities to non-overlapping generations. The point of this chapter is to argue that intergenerational dependence suggests that such responsibility is grounded in a form of reciprocity that is often called indirect: A gives to B but B gives ‘back’ to C. On this view, a current generation takes responsibility for the well-being of future generations because it is indebted to previous generations. In conversation with economic and philosophical literature, including so-called care ethics, I develop the basic idea further toward a concept I call asymmetrical intergenerational reciprocity. This concept connects reciprocity with altruistic concerns and with asymmetrical responsibility for the next generation. The basic point is that, as opposed to construing reciprocity as mutual advantage, asymmetrical reciprocity demands the return of benefits to a previously uninvolved third party, and thus invites the combination with an other-regarding concern for the well-being of this third party, future people in this case.

In the context of current environmental crises, which threaten to seriously harm living conditions for future generations, liberal-capitalist democracies have been accused of inherent short-termism, that is, of favouring the currently living at the expense of mid- to long-term sustainability. I will review some of the reasons for this short-termism as well as proposals as to how best to represent future people in today’s democratic decision-making. I will then present some ideas of my own as to how to reconceive the idea of democracy and the responsibilities of citizenship in the face of increasing obligations to sustain both the environment and democratic institutions for future people. I argue that taking turns between governing and governed is a key dimension of democracy, and that it implies in-principle consent to others governing after my turn, including future generations. Thus, future people must be better represented than they generally are today, in particular when democratic institutions find themselves squeezed between an overburdened environment in which they are embedded, and a fast-paced and short-termist globalizing economy.

Whether deconstruction is relevant to environmental philosophy, and if so, in what ways and with what transformations, has been subject to considerable debate in recent years. I will begin by discussing some reservations regarding deconstruction’s relevance to environmental thought, and argue that they stem from an older misreading of Derrida’s work in particular as hostile to the natural sciences, and as a cultural textualism of relevance only to the interiority of a traditional canon, but unable to reach the materiality of the outside environment. This attempt at refutation will permit a better understanding of the deconstructive argument for what has been called an ‘originary environmentality’ of life. On this basis, I seek to argue that deconstruction tends to be most promising to environmental questions when it shows responses to the call, not primarily for a new ethics, but for far-ranging analyses of our conception of politics. The reason for this lies in the overall deconstructive goal of exposing political and legal sovereignty, including its modern democratic understanding, to what I will elaborate as contextual or environmental finitude.

Joseph Heath's Communicative Action and Rational Choice may be read as a critical commentary upon Habermas's critical social theory, but it may also be read as merely using the latter as “scaffolding” for the presentation of Heath's own version of critical theory. In what follows, I will focus on the second option and thus largely ignore the exegetical question to what extent Heath provides a fair reading of Habermas. This does not mean, however, that I will not make comparative judgements. On the contrary, my overall claim will be that Heath's new critical theory is more functionalist, and. partly as a result, less critical than Habermas's. Since lack of space does not permit me to argue this in accordance with the standards of detail that Heath's own book generally observes, my procedure may be justified by the attempt to provoke a clarificatory response from Heath.

This chapter looks at Daoism from Heidegger’s perspective, seeing what use he makes of “way” and “dao” in reference to the critical understanding of what he calls technology. As I am not a scholar of Daoism, my goal is not to contribute to our understanding of Daoism; nor am I doing what I think is standard work in “comparative philosophy.” My goal is more focused: I am interested in the conceptual work carried out for Heidegger by the notion of dao, of way in the sense of the non-enduring “mother of heaven and earth” in accounting for the normative source of his critique of technological modernity.

This book explores the contributions of East Asian traditions, particularly Buddhism and (Euro)Daoism, to environmental philosophy. It critically examines the conceptions of human responsibility toward nature and across time presented within these traditions as well as in European philosophy. The volume rethinks human relationships to the natural world by focusing on three main themes: Daoist and Eurodaoist perspectives on nature, human responsibility toward nature, and Buddhist perspectives on life and nature. By way of discussing East Asian traditions and European thinkers, this collection reveals that the impact of humanity on the environment is shaped not only by distinctive modes of economic production, but also by cultural beliefs and practices. Representing a unique constellation of environmental and intercultural philosophy, the contributions present systematic approaches to the global need for cultivating environmental responsibility across cultures and generations to address the political, ethical, and aesthetic challenges arising from humanity’s transformative impact on the natural world.

Seeking to contribute to the recent emergence of critical phenomenology by clarifying the relation between ontology and ethics, this article offers a new account of the sources of normativity in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technological enframing (Gestell) and Derrida’s political philosophy. I distinguish three levels of normativity in Heidegger and show how moving between the levels permits the critical deployment of the affirmation (Zusage) in response to being’s address. On this view, not only are humans constitutively claimed by being, but the claim calls for its express hearing and critical elaboration. I then show how Derrida reconceives Heidegger’s normativity by developing a notion of double affirmation that communicates with key concepts from his moral-political work, such as the gift, the advance, and friendship. I conclude by indicating what double affirmation entails for critique today.

This paper draws out what Derrida’s work—in particular as concerns law, democracy, and intergenerational justice in the context of the European heritage—can contribute to constitutionalism and the legal relation to future people, at the national level and the supranational one of the European Union. The first section outlines some of Derrida’s contributions to legal scholarship and European identity, and then, in the following two sections, argue for two main points. First, Derrida can help us understand the much-discussed double bind of the constitutional relation to future people as merely an instance of a more general aporia. The double bind consists in the fact that the constitutional promise to safeguard future freedom also limits and binds future people. I will show how this aporia results from the temporal structure of the constitutional founding of law. Accordingly, the double bind cannot be resolved, either conceptually or in constitutional practice, but only be negotiated with greater awareness. Second, the same aporia of time entails that future generations are already implicated in the founding and re-founding of law here and now. Because the present moment is constitutively related to the past and the future, the meaning of a constitutional founding can become legible only from the future. Hence, the present generation, whose unity is never given, cannot but draw an advance credit on the future whose cooperation it anticipates. As a result, the political promise of Europe depends on its relation to its geographical, but also to its temporal others.

This paper addresses the question of what discourse ethics might have to contribute to increasingly urgent issues in intergenerational justice. Discourse ethics and deliberative democracy are often accused of neglecting the issue, or, even worse, of an inherently presentist bias that disregards future generations. The few forays into the topic mostly seek to extend to future people the “all affected principle” according to which only those norms are just to which all affected can rationally consent. However, this strategy conflicts with core commitments of discursive ethics, as it renders agreement hypothetical and discursive participation virtual. I will attempt a supplementary route toward a connection between discourse ethics and intergenerational justice. Discourse ethics must be concerned, in what Habermas calls the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld, with the emergence of rational minds capable of assessing reasons for proposed norms and policies, and such emergence is an intrinsically intergenerational affair. Symbolic reproduction links overlapping and non-overlapping generations in what has been elaborated as a chain-of-concern model, which I show to be linked to forms of indirect reciprocity among more than two parties. I conclude by discussing some consequences of this model for the all affected principle when viewed as specifically applied to future generations.

This paper responds to five critics (Eva Buddeberg, Scott Marratto, Michael Naas, Janna Thompson, and Jason Wirth) and their commentaries on my Taking Turns with the Earth. Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford University Press, 2018). In relation to the book’s argument, my response seeks to clarify and elaborate the role of indigenous philosophies; the meaning and value of the concept of earth; the ontology-ethics interface and the emergence of normativity with birth and death; the practical feasibility and motivational force of the book’s proposals for conceptualizing justice for future generations, namely asymmetrical reciprocity and taking turns; and the role of democratic institutions for justice between generations in view of the global capitalist economy.