I arrived in Shanghai in July 2019 to deliver a series of lectures in the Sino-British Summer School of Philosophy, a venerable annual event that began in the 1980s and is organized jointly by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK. In 2019 the Summer School was held in the East China Normal University and its topic was Environmental Philosophy. I had agreed to participate on the understanding that my lectures would present strands of thinking about ecological civilization that I had been developing in a series of papers over many years. I was keen to try these ideas out with a group of Chinese students before condensing them into book form. Those lectures, duly written up, enlarged and updated, are the ones I offer here.

The stint at the Summer School was not my first trip to China. I had visited many times over the previous 15 years, attending conferences and workshops in environmental ethics as well as studying the traditional Daoist arts of taiji and neidan (internal alchemy) with various teachers on mountains and in temples. I seemed to have some ‘business’ in China. Invitations, often from unrelated parties, tended to arrive out of the blue. Overseas travel generally is not my forte; I have neither the constitution for it nor the keen professionalism that thrusts academics onto the international conference circuit – or at least did so until the Covid pandemic changed all that. I actually have no desire to leave Australia, or even the precincts of my own little stone mountain in my home state of Victoria. Like a good Daoist, I relish my seclusion. But China kept tugging at me, in a way that so touched my heart that I could not help but answer its call, though this forced me back into the punishing scenarios of vast airports and transport hubs – into states of alienation from all that I hold dear.

There is no mystical denouement to this story. My three weeks spent walking from the staff hotel to our classrooms on the modern, spacious campus of the East China Normal University did not change my life, any more than my earlier, more picturesque sojourns in the Wudang and Emei Mountains or my pilgrimage to the utterly numinous Queen of all Chinese mountains, Tai Shan, had done.

How Can We ‘Walk the Land’ in the Twenty-First Century? Pre-agrarian versus Post-agrarian Forms of Praxis

We have thus far considered the argument that in order to open ourselves up to the kind of holistic consciousness that divulges Law, we have not merely to devise new theories, such as animism or panpsychism, but adopt a different epistemic orientation – a strategic as opposed to a theoretic one. The strategic orientation arises out of specific forms of embodied, communicative and inter-conative practice, forms of practice indicated in Lecture 3 under the trope of ‘walking the land’.

Walking the land, as understood in the Kimberley context, is not of course merely a recreational or sporting exercise, like modern-day hiking, orienteering or mountaineering, nor is it of purely therapeutic significance, as perhaps are the various martial and temple arts of Daoism. Land-based recreations and Daoist arts may indeed call, at their best, for a wuwei approach to one’s environment, but walking the land, in the Kimberley sense, is closer to a form of praxis. I am using ‘praxis’ here in a basically Marxist sense to mean our core economic practices – the practices whereby particular societies, or groups within society, obtain their livelihood from their environment. (For Marx the concept of praxis was closely tied to that of production, where productive activity was understood by him as the kind of activity whereby we intentionally transform our environment to serve our own material purposes. Here however I shall define it in terms of provisioning: praxis consists in the forms of activity whereby we intentionally act on or with our environment to provide for ourselves.) In speaking of ‘walking the land’, I take Senior Lawmen such as Mowaljarlai and Roe to mean, in other words, that one is walking it with a view, at least in part, to one’s material sustenance, tending it that so it may in turn sustain oneself and one’s people.

The pre-agrarian praxis of First Nations peoples such as Aboriginal Australians has often in the past been described as foraging or hunter-gathering, but this fails to convey the great variety of pre-agrarian societies around the world (Graeber and Windrow 2021). Traditional Australians were proactive in taking care of their country.

Why Has the Dissective Tendency Been So Persistent in the West?

In Lecture 2, I proposed living cosmos panpsychism as a holistic alternative to the dissective outlook of modern science with its dissociating implications for our relationship with nature. But in fact, holistic versions of panpsychism have figured significantly in the Western tradition; Spinoza is a prominent case in point. Yet such theories have always remained outriders to the main intellectual traditions, both in philosophy itself and in the cultural mainstream. In the modern period – by which I mean from the time of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century – the West has, as we have seen, adhered very strongly to its dissective presupposition, a presupposition that rules out the possibility of intrinsic normativity, or Law, in nature. In consequence, our attitude of dominate-and-control with respect to the natural world has only continued to gain strength.

So perhaps merely coming up with a theory that conforms to holism and thereby seeks to supersede our old dissective or atomizing habits of thinking will not enable us to check this stubborn tendency. It might in addition be necessary to scrutinize why these dissective or atomizing habits of thought have become so entrenched. Is there something not just in what we think but about the way we think that disposes us to see the world in these divide-and-rule terms?

I shall suggest that there is and that to understand this disposition we need to dig down beneath the explicit content of theories and examine the underlying thought processes that are involved in the mental production of theory itself. We need, in other words, to examine the phenomenology of theorizing – to ask ourselves what it feel like, subjectively, when we are theorizing. When the phenomenology of theorizing is examined in this way, we shall discover that the theoretical mode of cognition, which had its origins in the philosophy of ancient Greece, in fact enacts an inner disjunction between subject and object that then endlessly plays itself out as a divisive tendency in the theories it spawns, a tendency that ultimately cancels out the possibility of a holistic worldview.

What Might a Holistic Account of Reality Look Like?

Let us return then to the issue of worldview – of what is wrong with the Western worldview – again in light of our new hypothesis that the universe is not so much built up out of basic constituents – as classical physics supposed – but is primordially an indivisible whole. Let us see where this new metaphysical presupposition leads us in terms of understanding our place in the world.

When we contemplate the universe not as a contingent composite of components but as a seamless whole we may be tempted to ask, why is this universe, which stretches away from us in every direction in such breath-taking inter-galactic splendour, a universe, a unity: why does it cohere in the way that it apparently does? In asking this question we are however implicitly reverting to our default assumption that reality is compound, that it consists, as the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume put it, of logically ‘distinct existences’, where it is this assumption that raises the question, why do these distinct existences hang together. If we set aside this assumption and assume instead that reality is not composed of distinct existences that are somehow held together by the (always contingent) laws of physics but that it is already a single indivisible unity, then different aspects of the universe may come to the fore as salient.

What we are likely to be struck by, when looking through this lens of unity, is not so much the various bodies that present – the stars, planets, rocks, grains of sand, cells, and so forth – as what lies between these bodies. In other words, we are likely to be struck by the fact that this universe is spatial, that all observable bodies are held, so to speak, in space, and that space itself is an indivisible continuum. Matter, by contrast, seems plainly divisible: we can cut it, and cut it again, all the way down to the level of subatomic particles. But we cannot cut space. We can differentiate different regions of space by reference to the bodies that appear to occupy them, but we cannot separate one ‘part’ of space from another, since this is an operation which itself could only take place in space.

Dear President Xi Jinping,

I write to you in deep sorrow at the tension that presently clouds the relationship between our two nations. I write as a private Australian citizen, one with no connection to government or political life, but also as a philosopher who has for many years cherished and championed Chinese tradition as a potential source of moral guidance for the modern world, particularly for the West.

my search for clues as to how modern civilization might reshape itself in response to the unprecedented environmental dangers that now in the twenty-first century threaten our world, I have consistently drawn on the indigenous philosophy of China, Daoism. It is thus in the spirit of all those obscure, mountain-dwelling Daoist recluses to whom Chinese emperors of old occasionally resorted, and whom I hold in such fond regard, that I venture to write to you today.

Your nation, already spectacularly resurgent, makes no secret of the fact that it is striving to become not merely a great superpower, which it manifestly already is, but the greatest, economically overtaking the United States and resuming its historical status as the Middle Kingdom, centre of world civilization.

What might this mean for a small country like Australia? It depends, I think, on the intended meaning of greatness. What is greatness, in a nation, an empire, a civilization? Certainly, it is not a matter merely of brute force, the capacity of one nation to coerce other, weaker nations to do its bidding on pain of economic and perhaps other forms of annihilation. Yet this wolfish posture is one that China seems recently to have embraced in relation to Australia and other countries: do our bidding, Chinese officials seem to say, or we will crush you – we will cripple your economy.

Admittedly Australia has, over the past several decades, been foolishly short-sighted in allowing itself to become economically dependent on trade with China. But China’s new punitive demeanour towards Australia serves only to turn us away, driving us to seek alternative markets, other partners. The example China is presently making of Australia sends a shudder of fear but also of revulsion through many countries.

What Does the Dragon Want?

Years ago, when I still used air transport, I was flying home from Canberra at sunset early one evening. I was gazing out the window as the plane passed over snow-powdered alps. The mountains stretched on and on to the curved horizon, unpeopled, the ribbon of a rare road showing up only now and then. The landscape was wrapped in pink haze, deepening to a glowing rose around the edges of the world, without any line at all between land and sky. I gazed and gazed, in nameless reverie. Feelings I could not identify moved in me, a sense that the presence I was forever seeking yet which remained just out of sight, just out of reach, was there. In my reverie I imagined that the wild vista on which I was gazing was populated by dragons and sages in caves – that mystery still dwelt down there. I imagined that I was separated from that mystery, or its larger source, only by an invisible veil. There lay the enchanted world, as real and beautiful as it could be, but I was looking at it from within the bubble of modernity, the aeroplane with its packaged food, plastic cups, glossy commercial magazines along with its cargo of trussed-up moderns.

Thinking about it today, I wonder if the question that architect, William McDonough, did not quite ask offers an opening through that veil: what do those mountains and the rivers running through them and the rosy fields of light in which they float want from us? Imagine the river-dragon slipping down from its alpine sources towards the sea, its tail trailing out into the Milky Way. Imagine it lifting its long neck and looking about as it streams along. It sees peaks and gullies sculpting the fields of energy through which it swims. There are tall trees and riparian groves and upland cress-fields and pastures drinking up dragon water and breathing out plumes of atmosphere, cascades of weather. Birds as bright as berries light up the woods, greeting one another from the little sanctuaries they have spun in the trees on the dragon’s flanks. Furred creatures sleep and wake, climb and hop and yearn as the dragon passes.

This chapter examines one moment in Shakespeare—from As You Like It—in which Shakespeare might be said to play with skeptical, Pyrrhonist principles: in which opposed positions seem to have lodged themselves within a character. The chapter explores what can happen to philosophical, in this case Pyrrhonist, notions when they are not articulated by characters themselves and are instead embodied in performance; when the character who embodies those notions is not a particularly philosophical character at all; and when philosophical notions are not only performed but also transformed by the passions which Pyrrhonists would curb and without which Shakespeare’s plays would be intolerably boring. Addressing these questions, the chapter considers the form that virtue can take when it arises not as a consequence of, but in the absence of, a philosophy.

Prudence is the ability to determine the right course of action for a given situation. The virtue is fundamentally concerned with what we should do to achieve a desired objective, rather than what we should believe. Prudence is also a translation of Aristotle’s concept of phronesis (practical reason), which the Nicomachean Ethics defines as an “excellence of deliberation” (VI.9.9). In his formulation, Aristotle emphasizes the rightness of the ends being pursued, unlike several premodern and modern theories focusing only on the ability to attain desired ends, and which develop a somewhat uneasy relationship between prudence and virtue. Shakespeare makes the ethical challenges of prudence integral to The Merchant of Venice, a play featuring many deliberations over the means to such ends as happiness, wealth, friendship, and love. Throughout the play, Shakespeare takes a largely Aristotelian approach to prudence: characters who “hazard all” to gain noble ends are depicted as the most prudent, while the “shrewd,” who deliberate well but for immoral objectives, inevitably fail. Still, Shakespeare adds a final constraint to the virtue, suggesting that prudence is not a static trait but a dynamic effort to uncover one’s blind spots – and thus a virtue that few can hope to master.

Black theology is an academic movement calling for the reevaluation of Christian thought based on the claim that God sides with the oppressed – or, put more vividly, that God is Black. From the perspective of Black theology, many virtues turn out not to be virtuous at all but rather practices that secure white supremacy. What are commonly dismissed as vices may, from the perspective of Black theology, turn out to be virtues: practices essential for survival and flourishing in the face of racial domination. The Tempest is, in part, a meditation on domination, and this chapter explores what it would mean to approach the play from the perspective of Black theology. The apparent virtue of Miranda and Ariel turns out to be white virtue, habits that claim objective goodness but that actually affirm and naturalize arbitrary rule. Caliban, attuned to primal enchantment and desiring liberation from arbitrary rule, exhibits habits that appear vicious but that may be read as virtuous from the framework of Black theology.

In the Christian tradition, faith, hope, and charity have God as their object and instigator, and they are the means by which we share in his nature. Hence they are called theological or deiform virtues. But during the Reformation Luther emphatically isolated faith from the other virtues, and from the virtue tradition tout court. This understanding of faith deliberately severed faith from any idea of virtue as human deed, habit, or disposition, and from any works, for that would precisely compromise the exclusive and one-sided donation of faith as a freedom from any necessary conditions of human emotion or thought. In this chapter I examine this trajectory and its logic. I trace the integration of the theological virtues, briefly looking at the allegorical treatment of the virtues in Dante and Spenser, and discussing the implications of this severing in Calvinism especially in its pastoral implications. When it comes to Shakespeare I focus in particular on hope in The Winter’s Tale, and faith in Cymbeline, on the understanding that each play treats these examinations in the context of a ruptured and interrupted love.

This chapter considers grounds for hearing listening in The Tempest as a Jewish, and specifically Rabbinic, virtue, namely, the virtue of a “listening ear” (middat shmiat ha’ozen) described in Pirke Avot, a core text of Jewish ethical literature, published in Latin in 1541. I suggest that this publication witnesses a tension in the Reformation’s re-inscription of supersessionary tropes of Jewish otherness as spiritual deafness. I theorize this tension as sublimation of the memory of Jewish virtue ethics and ethical listening. I trace the oneiric distribution of signifiers of Jewish alterity in the figures of the vengeful, bookish, exiled Prospero and the dispossessed indigene alike, considering the implications of this reading of the spiritual subaltern as one who can hear but not access the spiritual bounty of their birthright. I suggest that the suppressed memory of Jewish virtue ethics in the Tempest surfaces in the memory of drowned books and fathers and in the play’s echoes of the Book of Jonah, particularly its auditory compulsion to mercy and its song of the deep. I demonstrate how the play bears witness to this sublimation in its “sounding” (plumbing and amplifying) of submerged memory and in the auditory virtue demonstrated by its percipients.