The Body Problem and the Climate Crisis

Students of Anglo-European philosophy might be familiar with the “mind-body problem.” The problem originates with early seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who developed a mechanistic philosophy of “the body” while retaining a disembodied concept of thought from earlier centuries. Descartes was very interested in the body’s mechanics; however, he defined thinking as immaterial. The capacity for thinking was not incidental to that body he called “man.” The capacity for thinking was definitive of what “man” meant. But thinking was not a body part. In this way, Descartes combined two incompatible interests: his investment (1) in defining man as an abstract thinking mind and (2) in investigating the workings of an inert mechanical body. And so Descartes bequeathed to post-Cartesian philosophers a disjointed project: the study of a machine-like world and the study of a mind not part of that world but somehow residing within it. How do these two relate? This is what has come to be called the “mind-body problem.”

I am interested in something I call “the body problem,” which predates the mind-body one. In Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body, I argue that the problem of the body is upstream from two diverging flows: ongoing political crisis and ecological crisis. How do these two relate—the political and the ecological? Clearly, they do. There are abundant demonstrations in the work of contemporary philosophers of race and ecology that the distinction between the “political” and the “ecological” is false, as in the work of Rosi Braidotti, Axelle Karera, Romy Opperman, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Nancy Tuana, Kyle Whyte. To understand the political, you need the ecological. To understand the ecological, you need the political. To understand one you need the other. The realms to which they refer are not distinct. Nevertheless, the concepts themselves resist each other, and much of their respective literatures are distinct. Anglo-European ecologists often neglect the race, class, sex, gender, disability, national, and linguistic dimensions of their work, and many political philosophers have little to say about ecology or the climate crisis. “The body” is the sine qua non of politics, while “bodies” in the plural seems to suggest something other than politics is going on. After all, there are planetary bodies, cat bodies, bodies of all sorts. Multiplicity prevails in ecology. But when one admits that humans are, like the rest of the planet, multiple, this threatens to upset the coherence of the polis, the political realm insofar as these terms connote a realm of uniform need. This is the problem of “the body” or the body problem: A certain body is taken for granted as ideal in the political realm, and the abstract way in which that body is invoked demonstrates just how alienated the polis is from its ecology. The body as a concept defines the political in contrast to the ecological.

One universal body persists as definitive of humanity. The very notion of “the body” is ubiquitous. And yet there is no such thing. There is no “the body.” The concept of “man” was the body for most of the history of Anglo-European philosophy. But man is not really the problem. The problem is this reemerging belief in one generic body defining the preponderance of Anglo-European philosophy. For Descartes and many before him, this universal body is the site of the polis or city. The concept of the polis is in this way built on the body problem. Polis is the root of the term political. What exceeds this universal body and makes up the polis in its ancient Greek sense is a surrounding, environment, or ecology, named after the Greek term oikos or home.

A certain man serves as the meaning of the body. As existentialist Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex in 1949, “man represents both the positive and the neutral to such an extent that in French ‘hommes’ designates human beings.” It is still possible to hear people referring to “man” when they mean “human,” and the informal “guys” is used in the same way. But Beauvoir didn’t go far enough. Who is “man”? What man and guys usually mean is a man who is white, able, heterosexual, cis, thin, economically able, monolingual, residing in the so-called global north (everything is north of everything on a spheroid), having no need to migrate, and other presumptions. Man is anything but a generic term. Nonetheless, it is used in a generic way. This is the ultimate meaning of the body.

At the same time, the body problem is awkwardly two: man and “the female body.” Talia Mae Bettcher has argued that “the female body” as a concept is thought to have its own distinct genital structure. It is thought to be complete only when it matches the biology textbook definition of “the female body.” Bettcher rightly points out that this is an Anglo-European phenomenon. It is also a recent historical development. C. Riley Snorton has explained that the biology textbook definition came about through the dehumanizing treatment of Anarcha, Lucy, Betsy, and others who still go unnamed because the so-called father of gynecology J. Marion Sims did not know or did not record their names. It is through dehumanization that “the female body” becomes its own generic. This term now also functions generically, just as “man” did alone for millennia.

I can offer two examples of how “the female body” functions as its own generic. One example of this would be the World Athletics rule barring Caster Semenya from running in the women’s 800m Olympic competition in 2019. This is an indication of the—in fact—very specific expectations for women to compete in that race. Black women from Africa are often asked to verify their status as female by World Athletics, which has always been headquartered in Europe. And it’s not like Caster Semenya is permitted now to run in the men’s race. She is in effect erased from the competition. A second example would be the way in which some feminists define woman as “adult human female”. Historian Susan Stryker speaks of this as a “resurgence of an explicitly transphobic feminism” that “has made very strange political bedfellows with virulent reactionary forms of ethno-nationalist populism.” (Roughly in minutes six and seven of this interview.) As C. Riley Snorton’s work illustrates, the notion of “the female body” was not invented by feminists. But many feminists double down on this concept. Such feminists cling to the body to define feminism. They bolster the body problem instead of questioning it. Protesting the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush referred to the dangers of this decision to “birthing people” instead of to women, and many feminists took offense. Nonfeminists define the body as man, and (some) feminists define the body as man and woman.

There are thus two generics. The body is awkwardly dual. It is a racial, ethnic, class, ability, binary, cis, national, size, language, straight imperative that reflects the lived experiences of only some humans. The body dehumanizes by means of abstract thinking that stands in for authentic engagement with what it is like to be human. As most restrooms make brutally plain, this set of two represents the polis or political terrain, as if the two are universal, when they are not. Twoness cannot be an accurate picture of humanity. And yet the body is an overwhelmingly common phrase in English at present.

The very idea of a generic body is what props politics up out of an ecological context synonymous with biological hierarchy. When the body is used as a sign of the polis or the political, variations from it must be suppressed. Meanwhile, those same variations are emphasized and have long been the focus of scientific research in a mode that is flatly ecological. Homogeneity demarcates the political; variety or “diversity” demarcates the presence of the ecological. On both sides of this divide is what I call “elemental difference,” the relational differences and responsiveness characteristic of life on Earth. Humans are not all alike. No human invented that fact. Whether or not humans differ from each other deliberately, the fact that they do is the point. There has never been a society of uniform universal humans with no differentiation among them. Differences in sizes, colors, shapes, languages, and on and on—differences that perhaps aren’t understood or articulated yet—are evidence that we are denizens of Earth. Elemental difference is neither heterogeneity nor homogeneity. It is denied in such a polarization. Elemental difference is a plurality that cannot be numbered.

It is not enough to say that people are heterogeneous. In fact, it is just as dangerous a thing to assert as subscribing to “the body” in the present. The body problem and the polis as a concept need to be addressed. When philosophers claim that people are plural, if the body problem is not explicitly explored, they are either talking about the polis (which I would argue is the case for Hannah Arendt) or ecology (which I would argue is mostly the case for Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour). The problem with the polis is that it is a celebration of the body’s unilateral agency. The problem with ecology is that it connotes a realm without human identity or morphology. Insofar as the political and the ecological are separable concepts, philosophers of the polis can be philosophers of ecology and ecological fascism (which I would argue is the case for Martin Heidegger). Ecological fascism seeks to protect the polis and the body from an encroaching ecology.

Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body begins with a philosophy of elemental difference, but the goal of the book is an understanding of climate crisis. Elemental difference is a concept needed to have a conversation about climate crisis, because climate crisis is neither a political concern nor an ecological one. It’s both. These terms get in the way of understanding the significance of the euphemism “climate crisis.”

People who take one side (political) or the other (ecological) in order to explain climate crisis are inadvertently influenced by the body problem. In doing so, they miss the bigger picture. Some argue that climate crisis is a political problem. It dramatizes and exacerbates preexisting problems among people. The problem for them is political. But they cannot explain why any antagonism among humans would be worth devastating a planet. Others argue that climate crisis is an ecological problem. If humans appreciated their dependence on Earth, there would be no climate crisis. The problem is valuing and studying ecology, not rethinking politics. But they cannot explain why fascism has always been ecological fascism.

Both sides miss the more fundamental problem of the body as a rejection of relationality and the limits of locality. The body and the polis are reactions to a world of variation and flux. Long before René Descartes pondered mind and extension, Aristotle argued that man is the political animal. As Emanuela Bianchi puts it, Aristotle’s polis is “the privileged and sui generis site of beautiful dialogue among equals, sharing rule by turns, and bound by affective ties of friendship.” In other words, the polis is a desire for incomparability. It is a desire for unilateral power. For that which is placeless and alone. These are what make the polis and the body worth locating at all. This philosophy of the polis is built out of a presupposed preeminent body. This is in my view the source of climate crisis, this repudiation of the relation and variety characteristic of living, aging, undergoing, and dying. On Earth there is no absolute power. The body is itself a response, a response that doesn’t perceive itself as such.

Insofar as the polis is left unaddressed, the body despite all its glory is only valued because it happens to be the location of thinking. Thinking is the ultimate value here. It’s just that the negativity toward the body attaches only to that which exceeds the body. The body rejects all engagement in war and use of technology other than its own. This negativity toward body-ness is why the body invents bodily hierarchies, racial capitalism, the Doctrines of Christian Discovery, climate crisis. It doesn’t direct that negativity toward itself, but the negativity is there. 

This is a way of life incompatible with its own needs. Thinking according to the polis is literally a non- or anti-material power. What could possibly represent an opposition to the material? A body. Whatever exceeds this body becomes evidence of its own specificity, and thus a reminder of that which the body is determined to escape. 

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Emily Anne Parker

Emily Anne Parker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Towson University. She is the author of Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body, Oxford University Press (2021), and with Anne van Leeuwen co-editor of Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray (2017), also published by Oxford University Press. Originally from west Tennessee, Emily now lives in Baltimore, Maryland.