Peter Klapes

Hosting Earth is a timely and much-needed volume in the emerging literature of environmental philosophy, drawing upon art, science, and politics to explore alternatives to the traditional domination of nature by humans. Featuring a dialogue with Mary Robinson (former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland), which addresses the current climate emergency, this book engages the question of ecological hospitality: what does it mean to be guests of the earth as well as hosts? It includes chapters by cutting-edge scholars in the philosophy of nature, as well as artists, scientists, psychologists, and theologians. The contributors discuss proposals for a new "Poetics of the Earth," opening horizons beyond our perilous Anthropocene to a new Symbiocene of mutual collaboration between human and non-human species. Focusing on the central role that the human psyche plays in answering our current ecological emergency, Hosting Earth is for anybody invested in the future of our planet and how psychological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical thought can reorient the current conversation about ecology.

The artist-poet William Blake claims that “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists.” Blake committed his artistic career to religious writing, and gave rise to a new Christianity, which better encapsulated the realities of the existential human condition. In what follows, I will explore Blake’s philosophy of religion and of imagination. Through an explication of Blake’s meta-poetry, I aim to illuminate Blake’s depictions of the connection between the imagination and religion. In devising a Blakean philosophy of imagination, I consider the connection between metaphor and Blake’s imaginative poetics, as well as the poetry of Wallace Stevens, which further corroborates that the Blakean notion of the imagination are indispensable and eternally necessary.

In his Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche praises Heraclitus, the Greek pre-Socratic, for his “assertion that being is an empty fiction.” 1 The philosophical notion of being, which seems to refer to fixed entities or substances, is eclipsed (at least in the mind of Nietzsche [and perhaps other philosophers—Gilles Deleuze comes to mind]) by the notion of becoming. As a result of our innate nothingness—which I defend linguistically, via the structuralist concept of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign—it would seem that we do, in fact, lack a fixed internal essence. Rather, we are constantly redefining (and free to redefine) our being, which is never fixed. It would seem that “un-fixed” being is becoming. In my paper, I aim to track this notion of becoming, as directly opposed to being, through two literary instances: the biblical Christ, and the philosopher-author Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek.