Existentialism and the Anthropocene: An Appraisal of Two Humanisms

This paper reframes environmental problems, moving from a crisis of habitability to a problem of ethics, and thus suggests the possibility of creating grounded, subjective politics within the seemingly intractable Anthropocene. To this end, the paper juxtaposes Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity in order to critically examine Scranton’s “philosophical humanism” as a distorted mirror of existentialist “ethical humanism”. Focusing on death and existentialism as central themes, the paper offers a comparison of their conceptions of humanist meaningfulness – conceived as an affect of transcendental capacities in the case of Scranton, and as everyday acts of freedom in de Beauvoir’s philosophy.