Covering 70% of the globe's surface, to an average depth of 3,400 m, the global ocean is 99% 0f the planet's habitable space. We live on the habitable parts of the earth's surface that are but 1% of what remains, the planet's atmosphere above us and its seas around us. If one thinks about this, it is quite astonishing! 

 

However, that we are living in times of mounting disaster, disaster in individuals' lives, disasters in society and for nations, environmental disaster, disaster on a global scale is alarming. For, as but .01% of the mass of Life on Earth, it is humanity that has brought this state of affairs to pass.

 

We don't have a reason for causing this trouble. Like it is not that we want to destroy Life. It is just that the demands of the standard of life some of us have and that most others wish to achieve are not sustainable for Planet Earth. Where what is going on all around us is apocalyptic, what has come about through us has set wheels in motion that are beyond us to still. We have stepped out of line, as it were, and everything is wrong. As far as Life is concerned, however, nothing is wrong for, belonging to the Life-System that brought us forth, in-so-far as we are not fulfilling our part within it, the rest of Life simply reacts, initiating trains of events to balance/correct/counter/undo the consequences of our errant conduct, as a matter of course. So, for all that has come to pass, with nothing being wrong, all we would have to do is to step back in line!  

 

The situation has got to where the multiple crises human activity has brought about have created a perfect storm, as they compound one another.

 

I say, “would have to step back in line”, because it is a bit more complicated than that. We do not want to give our way of life up. Not only do we like it and not want to change it, we want to pursue it to an ever greater extent, for more of the same and better, too! The order of life we have inherited and which each of us endorses by living the way we do is on the way to its prescribed end, that journey and end, as opposed to some other. The situation has got to where the multiple crises human activity has brought about have created a perfect storm, as they compound one another. 

 

As natural creatures which a great life-system has produced from within itself, the crisis we face is an existential one. The crux of the matter is actually of a philosophical nature. In a world that is failing, where human affairs are spiralling out of order and Nature´s kickback is an expression of Life´s reaction at the human onslaught, we sorely need a philosophy whose underpinnings would help us to think intelligently and live with integrity, to live Life, as Life is. I would like to devote these presentations to an attempt at that, for, in these times when crises are piling up on one another, each of us can transform what is incoherent and arbitrary about the life in which we are caught up into an ordered and intelligible form for ourselves. 

 

The significance of this is that, if we find a philosophical approach that allows us to fully embrace our humanity, that´s it! Nothing else matters. You see, one way or another, we are going to die, whether that is in our sleep, from old age, infirmity, in an unexpected accident, at the hands of unforeseen circumstances in everyday life, in the upheaval of some national, geo-political or environmental catastrophe or in the enormity of an extinction event. The world is the way it is right now. Each of us belongs to that. We are on that train to wherever it is going. So, really, it is all about making the life we have and the way we lead it count, in the moment, no matter what the circumstances we find ourselves in or the condition of those there with us.

 

 

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