Philosophy Today

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2019633283

David Wood, Deep Time, Dark Times: On Being Geologically

Human(New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

ALPHONSO LINGIS

Phenomenology had described the time each of us extends about our (non-
instantaneous) present, extending back into events retained and forward toward
events anticipated. It is our fundamental experience and understanding of time.
The time of my life extends into the time of the social and economic field about
me and the time of the natural environment; it extends back and also ahead into
the depths of the cultural and historical field of my fellow humans. I experience
the rhythms of day and night and of the seasons as coming from an indefinite
past and extending to an indefinite future.
David Wood writes of geological time—“deep time.” Not the coordinates in
which scientists situate geological events—the geological time that enters our
experience and affects our actions. People must always have some understanding
of geological time, the time of mountains and the glaciers and the forests. Creation
myths tell of events that occurred “in that time,” geological and cosmic time. But
our experience of extreme climatic events and our scientific understanding of
what is happening change the way we are living in geological and cosmic time.
We are experiencing record heat waves, drought lasting years, increased intensity
of hurricanes. The geological conditions under which life has evolved on this
planet—temperature, weather patterns, ocean acidity, and greenhouse gas levels in
the atmosphere—are being altered. We are understanding more fully what is hap-
pening, what its causes are, what will happen as a consequence of climate change.
Wood works to elucidate three issues: 1) What is geological time; what are its
distinctive characteristics? 2) What or who is this “we” who are living in geological
time? What kind of subjectivity and what kind of agency characterize this “we”?
3) What kind of responsibility do we have for the transition from the Holocene
to the Anthropocene and what kind of responsibility is incumbent on us now?
Wood explains that spans of time are experienced and calculated differently.
“My day.” The time of a task (repairing the roof before the predicted rain tonight).
Raising a garden this summer. Raising a child to adulthood. The time of reconcili-

© Philosophy Today, Volume 63, Issue 3 (Summer 2019).

ISSN 0031-8256 763–766
764 Book Review

ation after a civil war. The feudal era. The evolution of birds. The birth of galaxies.
The appraisal of where we are now in time and when events occur differs in the
kinds of time we are considering. We do not in experience or in reflection fit these
spans of time into an overarching line of time in general; from one span of time
to another there is discontinuity, rupture. Geological time is not simply a linear
extension of our experience of the time of our life. The geological time that forces
itself upon us in extreme climate events disrupts the time of our lifetimes, of our
projects for our children, of our economic and social enterprises.
There is a range of time that we can imagine; beyond it stretches of time can
be calculated but are unimaginable. We calculate but also imagine the time of our
carpentry project and of the era of European maritime exploration but cannot
grasp in imagination the 4.3 billion years of the Earth’s existence.
Deep time, Wood shows, has distinctive characteristics. In the range of our
life we can change the past, indeed reverse events: we repair and restore broken
things and monuments, make a failure an opportunity, reconcile with enemies.
But in geological time the consequences of climate change are irreversible and
extinction is forever. There is structural inertia in the causes of climate change;
our industrial and economic system is resistant to the pace of climate change.
There is structural inertia in our social and political institutions, resistant even
to recognizing events in geological time. Delay may be fatal: delaying action on
climate change until the need is evident may be too late to be effective. Geological
time is not simply a time of continuous and cumulative events; there are tipping
points when dramatic changes occur.
We now exist not only “in-the-world,” that is, in our practicable environment;
we exist in geological time. What is this “we”?
Our conception of ourselves as subjects and as agents has been under revi-
sion these past decades. The Enlightenment conception of our self as sovereign
autonomous subjectivity has been undermined. Anthropology and sociology
have mapped the economic, political, and religious or cosmic categories and
paradigms, and psychoanalysis and feminism have mapped the gender categories
and paradigms with which we speak and think and conceive of our own reality.
Psychoanalysis has brought to light unconscious drives and images that affect our
understanding and initiatives. Wood analyzes with penetration the concept of
agency after postmodernism, posthumanism, and new materialism.
The human microbiome project (launched in 2007) reveals how much our hu-
man body is composed of “foreign” organisms, archea, fungi, protists, and viruses,
including thirty to fifty trillion bacteria. We come to understand, Wood shows,
our selves to be fragile, multiple, and permeable. We also come to understand the
cooperative interconnectedness of life.
Geological time breaking into our experience discredits our conception and
centuries-long project of human sovereignty over nature. In our actions we find
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ourselves subject to geological forces, water and air pollution, depletion of natural
resources, extreme climate events.
From Greek antiquity the philosophical practice—submitting all one’s af-
firmation to question, to contestation or affirmation by anyone endowed with
insight—invoked our reciprocal belonging to the rational community. Now,
Wood says, we as individuals find ourselves assembled as a species. It is our col-
lective species agency that is bringing about climate change. It is as a biological
species endangered by pollution and by extreme climate events that we exist in
geological time.
We exist in geological time as a species that has an end. Not just with the
incineration of Earth 3.5 million years hence, but perhaps within the century,
Wood writes; a certain reality of the human species will come to an end. The
Enlightenment conception of a rational humanity united in respect of each as an
end in himself may not survive crop failure and starvation, spread of viruses and
infectious diseases, mass migrations and increasingly violent resistance to them.
In postapocalyptic literature and cinema, the humanity in the human species is
shown to be radically undermined.
We do not only cognitively recognize our existence at a tipping point in
geological time; we recognize this affectively. Wood lays out not only our under-
standing of the world and our imminent understanding of ourselves in geological
time, but also the fundamental affective bonds with the world. Wonder opens us to
the environment about us, but also, from the beginning, to the cosmos. Curiosity
awakens investigation and drives science beyond control and exploitation. Delight
radiates over the smallest insect and the grandest cosmic depths. But the concrete
effects of climate change we are already experiencing affect us with awe, despair,
resignation. There is a specific anxiety that situates us today in geological time.
In geological time we also find ourselves responsible; climate change is the
result of accelerated industrial activity by humans. With the revisions the concept
of autonomous subjectivity has undergone in past decades, the concept of an
autonomous subject who assumes responsibility for actions it launches for ends
it foresees has lost evidence.
It is not so much “humans” who are responsible for climate change as indus-
trial production driven by unbridled free-market capitalism. Whatever difficulties
philosophers may have with defining agency and responsibility, Wood points out
that juridically we hold corporations, as we do individuals, responsible for what
transpired through negligence. They are responsible for what they failed to do, for
what could have been foreseen. To be sure the future is the future, not an observ-
able presence, and thus there is a factor of the unknowable or “undecidable” in
every projection and anticipation.
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There is responsibility to the past as well as to the future. Responsible judg-

ment and action is required with regard to the Holocaust, to those who died in
fighting for civil rights.
New technology is being developed and is required to enable currently desired
goods and services to be supplied with a much lower carbon footprint. But also a
reduction of consumerism is required. Wood, referring to Bill McKibben, Do the
Math (Media Education Foundation, 2012), writes that bringing the rest of the
world up to Western levels of consumption, especially of fossil fuels, would require
four Earths to cope with the CO2 produced. Unbridled free-market capitalism is
driven by the unending wants and desires of consumers—whose wants and desires
are produced in them by social engineering. Curbing our wants and desires and
buying green products are quite disproportionate to scale and urgency of climate
change. It is said that mainly they make us feel good. But this feeling good about
what we individually are doing, Wood affirms, constitutes in part our identity, our
self-understanding, and self-worth, which are powerful motivators for appraisal,
judgment, and action. And vestiges of traditional identity, he says, may be required
to muster the strength to differ, to flee, to betray, to resist.
Wood does find resources in the new communications technology. They enable
a global sharing of information exposing and protecting wrongdoing. They enable
the formation of virtual communities, and facilitate collective action.
Deep Time, Dark Times contributes a penetrating analysis of the distinctive
characteristics of geological time and of the way it breaks into the time of our
perception and action in our environment. Wood elaborates an exposition of
species subjectivity and agency in geological time, and elucidates the irreducible
responsibility that subsists. The book exhibits the complexity of all these issues
and addresses innumerable questions about its own moves. Written with clarity
and vigor, this book will engage readers. An important philosophical contribu-
tion to the most important scientific, political, and practical issue of our time.
An important book.
Pennsylvania State University
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