Process Studies Supplement Overcoming Anthropocentric ... - Here

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PROCESS STUDIES SUPPLEMENTS 12 (2008)
rarely come across anything more than minerals, the least frightening
of all existents.
I am going back to Bouville. The vegetation has only surrounded
three sides of it. (156)
In this passage, Roquentin’s existential anxiety in relation to the
impending doom of the city at the hands of “the vegetation and the
beasts,” represents a deeply held fear of the destructive powers of Nature.
Nature is here conceived of not only as conditioning human life, but as
determinate of the human condition. Nature is especially understood as
a chaotic entity which is responsible for the temporality of human life
and of human structures, namely, for the transience, finitude, decay, and
perishing of all human life and endeavor.
Since human beings can do nothing to preserve themselves and their
constructions against the ravages of Nature, Roquentin characterizes it
as something to be feared. Roquentin’s anxiety is, in part, the result of
contemplating the threats and challenges that the natural environment
poses to human survival, such as harsh climates, cold, heat, disease, hunger,
thirst, decay, predatory animals, pestilence, floods, droughts, earthquakes,
avalanches, hurricanes, tornadoes, and eruptions of volcanoes, which
human beings attempt to overcome using their reasoning faculties, in order
to preserve the conditions for survival. However, underlying this list of
natural challenges to human beings, Roquetin’s existential anxiety issues
from the recognition that the human condition is comprised by “having
to exist” as a “prisoner” tied into the finitude of his own existence. This
is the meaning of the existentialist notion that human beings are thrown
into a world not of their own choosing, but which is determinate of the
limits and the contours of human experience, life, and existence. One may
speculate that the facts that Nature continuously confronts human beings
with such challenges to its survival, that the natural world determines the
limits and contours of human life, and that the human response is such
that to control and transcend Nature is the only way to attain freedom,
constitute some of the major reasons for why humanity has attempted
to construct both physical and conceptual barriers between the itself and
the natural world. Similarly, these are reasons why the human species has
evolved chiefly through the advance of its technical-rational capacities
which enable it to increasingly control and “master” Nature. To be sure,
throughout its evolution, the human species has been engaged not only in