Environmentální úzkost a naděje optikou existenciální fenomenologie

Abstract

The study looks at environmental anxiety and hope from the perspective of existential philosophy, as two different forms of existential attunement. In the first part of the text, the current state of research in the field of environmental emotions and moods is sketched out. The concept of environmental anxiety is then briefly delineated, drawing on current taxonomies of environmental emotions as well as on philosophical definitions of anxiety promulgated by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Tillich and contemporary existential phenomenologists. The existential relevance of environmental anxiety is subsequently defined with the help of an analysis of the experience of the loss of meaningfulness that accompanies environmental anxiety, and then also an analysis of the change in how the natural world reveals itself to the anxious individual. The second part of the study focuses on the mood of hope. The hope for a solution to the ecological crisis is often presented in both public discussion and in the professional literature in the form of new technologies, political will or Providence. This hope is made immediately available and without making any great demands on the hopeful individual. However, by means of Kierkegaard the study shows that this kind of hope is a kind of illusion that leaves a person in a state of inaction, and even becomes an obstacle to a more radical form of hope, one that is capable of inspiring the individual to act, for example, toward “an active solution to the ecological crisis.”

Keywords

• anxiety
• hope
• climate crisis
• existential philosophy
• phenomenology
• søren kierkegaard
• martin heidegger
• paul tillich