Page 198 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 191

wisdom seems to be the same as to be poor in philosophy if philosophy
is what its name says: love, search and care for wisdom.
This wisdom, I think, has to be something rather close to Husserl's
phenomenological reason but purified from its Eurocentric and absolutist
connotations. It will be something between arbitrary and idiosyncratic
world-views and a rigorous science and so come close to Naess'
conception of a total view. It will incorporate firstly an understanding as
comprehensive, as radical and as deep as possible of the character and
of the roots and causes of our present predicament, secondly a
metaphysics and anthropology, and thirdly, grounded in the foregoing, a
normative vision about the future course of human history. These
integrated disciplines of wisdom have to be developed in an open-minded,
non-dogmatic, self-critical and communicative inquiry beyond the narrow
bounds of positivistic science. This inquiry will be phenomenological in
two ways:
1. It will not be calculative and constructive, quantifying and modelling
but it will rather be intuitive, meditative and hermeneutical. It will ground
its knowledge-claims in intuitive evidence and reasoning.
2. It will not be objectivistic. Instead it will be fundamentally sub-
ject-oriented, engaged in a continuous process of self-examination,
self-interpretation and self-knowledge.
To raise the question of wisdom is equivalent to raising the question
of the subject. And if there is a point towards which the fragmentary
considerations in this article converge, it is the crucial importance of this
question. It may be, as Bahro remarks, that we need something like an
act of grace to help us. But grace is something like a field of spiritual
energy which needs to be charged from our side as well. "A society of
depressive junkies will not be met by grace."^ The avalanche has to be
stopped—miraculously—from the inside. As Ivan Illich said so succinctly:
"To face the future freely, one must give up both optimism and
pessimism and place all hope in human beings, not tools."^^

^ Rudolf Bahro, Die Logik der Rettung, 307.
*^ Ivan Illich, "The Shadow our Future Throws," interview in New Perspectives
Quarterly, 6 (Spring 1989), 23.