The 20th
anniversary
edition
March 14 & 15, 2025
at UNESCO • Paris

Professor of Philosophy at the University Gustave Eiffel, Corine Pelluchon is a specialist in moral and political philosophy and applied ethics.

In her latest book, L'Être et la mer, she broadens her philosophical reflection by addressing ecological existentialism. She argues that traditional existentialism, which questions the contingency of our existence, must be enriched with a deeper ecological understanding. Building on a liquid ontology, she challenges the obsession with territoriality and the contradictions of international maritime law, calling for a re-evaluation of humanity's place in the world, starting from the sea. The book emphasizes the sea-mother as the origin of life and offers a vision of human immersion in the common world, free from the constraints of terrestrial metaphysics.

In your latest essay,  L’Etre et la mer, published by PUF, you note that our humanity, our era, is immersed in and haunted by tragedies that mark our history, with the collapse of ecological and climatic balances crowning this whole process. You remind us that existentialism is about philosophizing with this tragic element. Could you remind us what existentialism is and what it brought to thought in the 20th century and at the start of the 21st century?

Corine Pelluchon: Existentialism is a school of thought that highlights the connection between our contingency — the fact that we are not the foundation of our existence — and freedom, between the indeterminacy of meaning and responsibility. It takes seriously our ambiguity and our sense of abandonment, also emphasizing the role that awareness of our mortality plays in our ability to live an authentic life or break free from alienation. For this reason, I find it very relevant today. To understand the difficulty we face in carrying out the ecological transition and resisting the oversimplified discourse of the extreme right, we must take the ambivalence of the human being seriously, as well as its contradictions, creativity, and destructiveness. I stress the need to enrich this existentialism, which in the past was still anthropocentric and conceived existence through the lens of freedom and the individual project. But the ecological existentialism I propose is not a simple coexistentialism that takes into account our habitation of the Earth and our dependence on nature and other living beings.

You propose in this book a new ecological existentialism with the horizon and immersion in the common world. Could you present this revisited existentialism that you describe in your work?

Instead of focusing solely on clarifying our terrestrial condition, as I have done until now, I think of humanity from the sea, from which we live but which remains foreign to us. The idea is to embark on a journey to sea, breaking with a solid ontology and a terrestrial, territorial imagination that leads us to have an instrumental relationship with nature. Instead of seeing the land and sea from our shore, as if the sea were a vast stretch of water bordering our coasts, marine ontology rests on two principles: the unity of the ocean and its precedence over the lands that emerged like islands. The Earth, seen as a fragile and submersible surface, is no longer the starting point of our policies, but we must recognize our vital dependence on the ocean and begin with the possibility of a shared shipwreck. This is what I call thalassopolitics, which does not separate what happens on land from what happens at sea and could resolve some contradictions in international maritime law. But it is primarily the anthropological consequences of this shift in perspective and this ontology of fluidity that interest me. Thus, this marine existentialism begins from our immersion in a common world, older and larger than us, which welcomes us at birth and should survive our individual deaths. Like the sea, it is linked to memory and the immemorial. Each of our works, each of our actions, emerges from this bottomless space where the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious, past, present, and future are blurred, much like in water. The project no longer has the voluntarist character it had in Sartre, but becomes a floating one. Finally, humanity, which is a complex being needing to participate in something larger than itself, can be overwhelmed, which is positive when it becomes aware of its belonging to the common world but also negative or painful, as this immersion in the bottomless reminds us of the ephemeral nature of our existence. Submersion is both the expansion of subjectivity that gives rise to ecological consciousness and the invasion of the unconscious, creation and madness, passion and the delirium of nationalism. A significant part of the book is dedicated to the importance of the denial of death, the psychological, ecological, and political cost of repressing the terror generated by the prospect of our own death and the potential for collapse. I propose some ways to navigate this negativity, which is an existential gesture, because existentialism is a thought that forces us to confront our factual nature and transforms the absurd into commitment.

Can this new humanism inspire both individual and collective life projects, even a political project?

Talking about humanism requires recognizing the value of each individual's uniqueness, and this is at the heart of the philosophy I propose, even as it emphasizes our dependence on nature and other living beings. I explain, book after book, the renewal of humanism that ecology and the animal question imply. I can't explain it all in just two lines, but let’s say it involves a philosophy that illuminates the human condition based on our corporeality and the materiality of our existence, the fact that we eat, drink, live somewhere, are dependent on our environment, and in relation to other living beings. In each book, I deepen this description of our human condition and draw the normative, moral, political, and legal consequences.

What can make us optimistic about the future?

The words optimism and pessimism do not belong to the philosopher's vocabulary. In 2023, I published a book on hope, which is a theological virtue and has nothing to do with hope, a particular expectation, or with optimism, which is the mask of denial and reflects the inability to accept one's limits, to mourn the ability to control everything. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic; I work, and the more chaotic the world is, the more I work, asking myself how to be more useful, how to find in the past, including in the unfulfilled promises of the past, the seeds of the future. And, as I read the great authors, such as Günther Anders, I try not to be "illiterate in fear" and learn to transform my fear of the future into endurance and the disappointments provoked by the spectacle of current political life into a resolve to work as best as possible to illuminate the people who generously read me. I also feed myself with the writings of Simone Weil, Levinas, and Kant. Being in contact with these great minds pushes away sorrowful thoughts and relativizes them, because small minds leave nothing, except a field of ruins. So, let us think about (re)building.