Description
Book SynopsisPhilosophical, critical, often personal, Fromm's sweeping, interdisciplinary, and sometimes combative essays will change the way you think about your place in the environment.
Trade ReviewFromm's contrarian view is explored beautifully in 'Ecology and Ecstasy on Interstate 80,' declaring that 'everything human is technological' while driving through the Sierras. The closing essays examine more esoteric issues of free will and social evolution. Fans of nature writing will find Fromm's travels witty and engaging, and his analysis unblemished by typical academic pretension or abstraction. Publishers Weekly 2009 Perfect for classroom discussion and debate. Midwest Book Review 2009 Fromm, an erudite, prolific author of numerous works ranging from ecocritical commentary to self-reflective discourses, presents a compilation of essays that illuminate his views regarding why most Americans seem oblivious to the destruction of their environment. Choice 2009 Fromm's journey from victim, to campaigner, to pioneer of eco-criticism (that is, the study of literature from an ecological viewpoint) is documented here, alongside challenging analyses of man's place in nature, free will, our relationship with technology and more. Scholarly but engaging, Fromm is an environmentalist, but also a realist. Organic Gardener 2010 The Nature of Being Human is a lively, opinionated, impressively learned and always readable contribution to the current debate on the human and natural costs of the dogma of 'progress'. British Society for Literature and Science 2010 Fromm is most truly a literary scholar rather than a philosopher or scientist. Nonetheless, the journey that this book represents traverses all three realms of inquiry as well as showing an engaging and provocative intellectual trajectory, and it would be churlish to deny that it represents a real and enduring effort by an important thinker to grapple with a range of vital human and ecological issues. Organization & Environment 2010
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: From Environmentalism to Consciousness
Part I: Ecology
1. Awakening to the "Environment"
2. On Being Polluted
3. From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map
4. Air and Being: The Psychedelics of Pollution
5. Ecocriticism's Genesis
6. Ecology and Ideology
7. Aldo Leopold: Esthetic "Anthropocentrist"
8. Postmodern Ecologizing: Circumference without a Center
9. The "Environment" Is Us
10. Ecology and Ecstasy on Interstate 80
11. Full Stomach Wilderness and the Suburban Esthetic
12. Coetzee's Postmodern Animals
Part Two: "Nature" and Evolution
13. My Science Wars
14. O, Paglia Mia!
15. A Crucifix for Dracula: Wendell Berry Meets Edward O. Wilson
16. The New Darwinism in the Humanities
17. Ecocriticism's Big Bang
18. Overcoming the Oversoul: Emerson's Evolutionary Existentialism
19. Back to Bacteria: Richard Dawkins' Fabulous Bestiary
Part Three: Consciousness
20. Muses, Spooks, Neurons, and the Rhetoric of "Freedom"
21. John Searle and His Ghosts
22. Daniel Dennett and the Brick Wall of Consciousness
23. The Crumbling Mortar of Social Construction
Conclusion: My Life as a Robot
Notes
Index
