Towards Ecosophy in a Participating World: Rhetoric and Cosmology in Heidegger’s Fourfold and Empedocles’ Four Roots

Abstract

This chapter argues that Heidegger’s fourfold and Empedocles’s four roots (or elements) provide phenomenological and rhetorical resources for addressing environmentalist challenges. Both these figures pursue an understanding of rhetoric emergent with and responsive to our lifeworld. They grant a respect for ecology combined with an attentiveness to what transcends the human, including the divine. This cosmological approach provides grounds for transforming debates about climate change sparked by conservative religious groups. Heidegger and Empedocles emphasize that human thriving requires attunement to the phenomenological world. The chapter concludes by examining the ontology of spacecraft as a new way of coming to ecosophic awareness. Even the most sophisticated technologies have the capacity to disclose our precarity and attune us to more environmentally secure paths for the future.