Survey of Current Philosophy

While Deep Ecology (earth.org) itself is often associated with radical theory and/or with radical politics, Deep Ecology, the Substack publication, generally concerns brilliant observations loosely coupled with conjectures concerning our inter-relatedness as/with beings in nature.

Indeed, the overarching theme for Deep Ecology (Wikipedia) is environmentalism or environmental philosophy.

Deep Ecology holds a general thesis that we are evolutionary beings, and as such, we may have abilities that beings in our evolutionary path also have. We have, in other words, shared capacity with nature. And we have, so the argument goes, not so much lost this capacity as suppressed/ignored/forgotten it. The imperative: We need to look to nature to find this capacity again. Hence, the brilliant observations.

How well this thesis works is one matter, but the purpose of citing Deep Ecology is not to criticize its argument so much as exploit a few aspects of it.

The argument Deep Ecology makes in this post (Feeling It) posits a conception of feeling as pre-linguistic. It also asserts how we are trained, so to speak, to ignore feelings that so arise, feelings that arise without the supplement of a near immediate interpretation, an interpretation which requires language.

More so, we are also wont to avoid unfounded conjecture. Indeed, as presented in this post (Feeling It), we might be inclined to link an ill feeling in the morning, a premonition, to a friend found injured in the afternoon, but we force ourselves to forgo this unwarranted reasoning.

And, of course, being so trained, we do not ask ourselves why such a feeling might have come to be at all. We ignore it as superstition/coincidence. Deep Ecology, meanwhile, conjectures that such feeling might be a hidden capacity.

And otherwise being mindful of the beauty of the poetics, we take this argument to imply that thought happens without language.

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