Sofia Lemos: The Eight Clime | Reconciling the Metaphysical Divide

Guided by Sylvia Wynter's decolonial theory and critical genealogy of the human, “The Eight Clime” explores how conceptions of humanity in the Eastern Mediterranean influence environmental thought. It draws on Wynter’s concept of the “ecumenically human,” using “ecumenic” to denote the human as a planetary species rather than to refer to an undivided Christendom, to convene ecological practices and ideas intersecting interdisciplinary and interfaith studies with contemporary artistic responses.

Wynter has offered a compelling account of how colonial modernity and the broader “coloniality of being” have structured our modes of knowledge production and shaped our current sociopolitical and symbolic orders. She discusses different “genres” of humanity, evolving from the medieval Christian world, to demarcate the racial and religious boundaries that justified serfdom and enslavement. These ultimately produced an idea of Man validated by the natural sciences, which coded his racial others as “naturally deselected.” Attending to the importance of storytelling and myth-making, Wynter emphasizes how a dominant European conception of Man “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”

This ideological foundation was a direct contravention of the exchange of cultural philosophies facilitated by pre-modern trade and migration across India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. Their philosophies placed accountability on human stewardship of the earth, through more encompassing understandings of being human. As I argued in “Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics” (2024), this alternative genealogy of the human had its intellectual flourishing in Andalusia largely through the dissemination of Arab, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin translations from the Islamic scholars of al-Andalus. Recovering the ideas that enriched the philosophical and spiritual insights developed at this time in the Mediterranean region contributes to rethinking the Western world as a confluence of Greek, Persian, and Indian thought against the universalizing vistas of global capitalism.

Spanning from Andalusia through Crete and Persia, to India, this Mediterranean is not a product of conventional cartography. Rather, it resonates with “The Eight Clime,” which twelfth-century Persian philosopher Sohravardī described as a place outside of sensible space that is available to imaginative perception, however invisibly. In addition to the seven physical climates identified by ancient Greek geographers, “The Eight Clime” questions our points of departure to generate new perspectives, genealogies, and trajectories of environmental thinking.

This research fellowship investigates how philosophers, spiritual leaders, and contemporary visual artists from the region return to early Greek philosophical thinking to support the emergence of new ecological visions, focusing on eco-mythology, non-dualism, and interfaith dialogue, in resonance with Wynter’s original environmental thought.