Ethics Afield

I have a new paper, currently under review, which marks my return to a primary focus on environmental philosophy. This one comes from an odd angle, and it would take a while to explain how it all happened.

I may get back to that a bit later but, for now, I’ll post a serialized version of the manuscript: “On Sleeping through the Night: Ecology, Economy and Ethics of a Vital Human Project.”

I’ll post one section each Tuesday and Friday through the middle of October.

Introduction

A common bedtime prayer taught to children in many Christian households serves as a continual reminder of a risk which can be managed but never eliminated:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

If I should die before I wake. To fall asleep is to surrender to immobility and to disconnection from the world, which can all too easily become a surrender to that ultimate darkness, with whatever comfort may be derived from the hope of something better thereafter.

I fall asleep, surrendering for the most part awareness of my surroundings. But the affordances of those surroundings may change; the arrangements I put in place may fail; other people or other living things pursuing their own projects might cut across my project in various ways. It is at such points of contact among projects and the arrangements put in place to support them – whether conflict, coexistence, or cooperation – that the proper subject matter of ethics comes into view: what matters to me and to others as we make our various ways in the world.

What follows is consideration of sleeping through the night as a vital human project. This turns out to be an inquiry into some basic problems in ethics: What matters – what values are in play – as we pursue our many projects to their various ends? More precisely, what follows turns out to be a study in environmental ethics, in a broad sense of the term: What matters – what values are in play – as we pursue our various projects within environments shared with others, the settings in which our projects may converge or collide with one another?

As for its substance, the essay that follows concerns the ecology and the economy of sleeping through the night. It also concerns the phenomenology of sleeping through the night.

Ecology and economy examine the exterior relations between living things and their surroundings: what their surroundings afford organisms, to support or resist its various projects (ecology), and the resources organisms may marshal and the arrangements they put in place to raise the prospects of following through on their projects (economy).

Phenomenology seeks to bring to light the interiority of humans: the structures of perception and cognition through which we come to inhabit meaningful environments relative to our various projects. “The normal person’s projects polarize the world,” writes Merleau-Ponty (2012: 115), “causing a thousand signs to appear there, as if by magic, that guide action, as signs in a museum guide the visitor.”

Note, however, that the notion of a project might serve as a point of contact between exterior and interior, a practical notion which can draw from both the “outside track” of ecology and economy and the “inside track” of phenomenology (see Kirkman, 2007: 15; Kirkman, 2009: 219). A project is simply the activity of a living thing – a “doing-something” – directed toward some goal.

Projects vary widely by type: a project may be more or less vital, more or less intentional, more or less voluntary; a project may be simple or complex, widely shared or idiosyncratic, pursued alone or in cooperation with others; a project may be an ongoing, long-term activity, an activity that recurs periodically, or a one-time thing.

As a first approximation, then, sleep might then cast it as a vital, compulsory project which recurs periodically, a project which is widely shared among animals but also widely variable across that range.

References

Kirkman R (2007) Darwinian Humanism: A Proposal for Environmental Philosophy. Environmental Values 16: 3-21.

Kirkman R (2009) Darwinian Humanism and the End of Nature. Environmental Values 18: 217-236.

Merleau-Ponty M (2012) Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge.