Lovelessness and Love: The Promethean and the Orphic in Henri Bergson and Simone Weil

Abstract

16 years ago – when I was nine years old – I remember watching on television the Hon Kevin Rudd (the 26th Prime Minister of Australia) speak at the National Climate Summit at Parliament House, in Canberra. There, he famously declared climate change to be “the great moral challenge of our generation”. The term moral is all encompassing; and this is especially the case given the age we live in. As I argue, the ‘Anthropocene’ (as a both a time and phenomenon) invites us to consider a wide range of philosophical questions in an interconnected and holistic manner. Some philosophers have started to engage with the Anthropocene. One of them, Timothy Morton, argues in his Hyperobjects that within the Anthropocene, everything is interconnected. Proponents of ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ (hereafter OOO) see humanity as one object among many. They as a movement (including Graham Harman) offer both a diagnosis and prescription to our predicament. However, some commentators have suggested that the movement is plagued with anti-humanistic overtones. Throughout the dissertation, I shall be challenging OOO by enlisting Henri Bergson (1859- 1941) and Simone Weil (1909-1943) as intellectual guides. I shall be reading them as “way of life” thinkers (in Pierre Hadot’s sense). The aim of this is to offer an alternative reframing of the problem of living within the Anthropocene by addressing OOO’s framing of our predicament. In doing so, I also draw upon Hadot’s heuristic distinction between the ‘Promethean’ and the ‘Orphic’ in his last work, the Veil of Isis. As I argue, both show us how we might live and gain a cosmic consciousness within the Anthropocene through their respective forms of mysticism. Indeed, Bergson and Weil offer Orphic philosophies which seek to better live within reality as opposed to manipulate it in a Promethean manner. Indeed, questions such as, “how can we love?”, are prime within the Anthropocene and are questions which Bergson and Weil provide answers to.