NATURE AND THE COMMON HOUSE
IN INTERCULTURAL AND INTERRELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVE
Center for Interreligious Studies
Pontifical Gregorian University
Rome, October 13-14, 2022
Call for papers
In every culture, from primitive Paleolithic cultures to contemporary Western globalized societies, human beings need to adopt a stance towards the nature that surrounds them and in which they live. These relationships have been extended not only to the environment but have reached the cosmos, when human beings have experienced the cycle of the seasons, the annual variations of sunlight, or have developed calendars to guide their lives.
Moreover, climate and soil, as Montesquieu pointed out and Hegel repeated, are the very first factors that determine peoples’ ways of valuing, appreciating and acting. They are constitutive elements of their way of being, of their idiosyncratic personality, of their ways of being in the world or inhabiting in it; they are also determinants of some of their ethical ideals, of their most characteristic juridical institutions, and of their aesthetics and arts; and they even give rise to peculiar modes of religion: cults and prayers. We are dealing with a relationship of human beings with the concrete space and nature that surround them, with their climates and orography, with the landscapes that make up the background of their existence.
In primitive societies these relationships were extremely immediate; in modern and contemporary societies, legal and economic mediations have distanced human beings from their relationship with the concrete nature in which they live, and which, as Tetsuro Watsuji emphasized, constitute different horizons of understanding of the being.
Current ecological challenges can be approached from a technocratic and universalist perspective, forgetting the different cultural sensitivities, but as Pope Francis has recently emphasized, “solutions will not emerge from just one way of interpreting and transforming reality. Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality.” (Laudato si § 63). If the Earth is a patrimonial unit for the human race as a whole, and our responsibility towards future generations is demanded, it is also necessary to study the patrimony that humanity has inherited from cultural systems of valuing nature, of visions of it and of its relationship with its foundation. In other words, ecological culture, as a new way of relating to nature, goes hand in hand with cultural ecology (Ibid. § 143). From this rich cultural heritage many lessons can be drawn of diverse ways of perceiving, conceptualizing, treating, managing, and relating culturally to nature. Thus, a meeting takes place between diverse worldviews, codes of conduct, institutions, and norms, which, far from colliding, allow “each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents” to collaborate in the care of our common home (Ibid. § 14).
This leads us to an understanding of nature in its most enveloping aspect, which goes beyond merely "natural" nature, and which immediately summons man himself as a being who is directly part of that nature, while at the same time being capable of humanizing it. And in this humanization, he unfolds his own nature in a way that points to his capacity for habitability and projection of openness, in a dialectic that conjugates those two "living elements", in Deleuze's expression, which are "the house and the universe".
To speak of the "common house" is based on the idea of "house", in that first sense of humanization of the surrounding nature; and points at the same time, in that "common" character, to a necessary interdisciplinarity and dialogue that takes charge of the necessary contributions of the diversity of the human to the home, while inviting to the idea of community, only possible by something fundamental that unites us, Mother Earth, common expression to so many and different cultures, which ratifies our peculiar nature, "unitas multiplex", in the words of Morin. It is therefore urgent to rethink in its many facets the "human root of the ecological crisis" (Laudato si § 101).
Deadline for submitting proposals: June 10, 2022
Submit your abstract at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeYc3U3aweQ5mArkv8xa3JUyYA0G40Al9Yjfhq_IcEsMKZ8IQ/viewform
