Happiness, circumstance, and the environment: Philosophy’s crucial voice in times of environmental crisis

Abstract

This article deploys an existential phenomenological perspective to examine the crucial contribution that philosophy can make for thinking through the contemporary environmental crisis. We argue for a generative and affirmative (re-)appreciation of the multifaceted connection between happiness, circumstance, and the natural. First, a relation is drawn between environmental destruction and contemporary consumer culture’s emphasis on happiness. The happiness sciences understand happiness in a limited anthropocentric way – it excludes unhappiness, and by implication thinking about nature’s destruction. There is a need to move beyond narrow and limiting psychological, spiritual, religious and even certain philosophical understandings of happiness and humanity that restrict “nature” to what is palatable for the happiness industry. A broader conceptualisation of happiness entails an increased awareness of the contextual to more constructively relate to the environment. This awareness, of always being rooted in the natural environment, is developed by Ortega y Gasset’s notion that “I am me plus my circumstances” to emphasize our continued interdependence with and reliance upon nature. We are irrevocably, primarily engaged with nature – an understanding that contrasts with a capitalist enframing of nature as a space to be held at a distance, and which can be endlessly monetised and extracted from for human happiness. Fundamentally the “nature” of the happiness industry, and the “nature” of capitalist enframing more broadly, cannot incorporate the reality of catastrophic climate change. However, through contextualised philosophical thinking in times of environmental crisis, we may embrace nature in all its complexity through awareness of existential circumstances to fully engage with nature not merely as tourists, conservationists, activists, lawyers, politicians, or consumers.