Ethical Humans

Ethical Humans questions how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving, learning and dying in new capitalism. It introduces sociology as an art of living and as a formative tradition of embodied radical eco post-humanism. Seeking to embody traditions of philosophy and social theory in everyday ethics, this book validates emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge and shows how the denigration of women has gone hand in hand with the denigration of nature. It queries post-structuralist traditions of anti-humanism that, for all their insights into the fragmentation of identities, often sustain a distinction between nature and culture. The author argues that in a crisis of global warming, we have to learn to listen to our bodies as part of nature and draws on Wittgenstein to shape embodied forms of philosophy and social theory that questions theologies that tacitly continue to shape philosophical traditions. In acknowledging our own vulnerabilities, we question the vision of the autonomous and independent rational self that often remains within the terms of dominant white masculinities. This book offers different modes of self-work, drawing on psychoanalysis and embodied post-analytic psychotherapies as part of a decolonising practice questioning Eurocentric colonising modernity. In doing so it challenges, with Simone Weil, Roman notions of power and greatness that have shaped visions of white supremacy and European colonial power and empire. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, environmental philosophy, social theory and sociology, ethics and philosophy, cultural studies, future studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophy and sociology as arts of living.

Victor Jeleniewski Seidler is Professor Emeritus in Social Theory at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He has worked and published across the boundaries of social theory and philosophy, including works such as Urban Fears and Global Terrors: Citizenship, Multiculture and Belongings after 7/7, Remembering Diana: Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority and, most recently, Remembering 9/11: Terror, Trauma and Social Theory and Making Sense of Brexit: Democracy, Europe and Uncertain Futures.

1. Histories, Memories and Truthfulness 2. Philosophy, Politics and Everyday Life 3. Modernities, Differences and Becoming Human 4. Generations, Genealogies and Authentic Subjects 5. New Capitalism, Masculinities, Work and Character 6. Neoliberalism, Work, Technologies and Ethics 7. Modernities, Masculinities, Science and Nature 8. Modernity, Bodies, Politics and Emotional Lives 9. Histories, Traumas, Truths and Decolonisings 10. Freedom, Politics, Theologies, Ecologies and Ethics