ABSTRACT
This chapter will suggest interpreting the situation of sustainability as a crisis. Answering to it would have more likely the quality of ‘healing’ than that of a ‘solution’. According to Freud and Buber, “healing” can be described as a process of integrating experience into the own self, thereby increasing the potential to relate to the world. It will be claimed that, on a very fundamental level, we lack a perspective enabling us to examine the crisis of sustainability with regard to aspects such as our relationship to each other and the world.
The chapter will begin to look for the missing perspective at the point where contact between the individual and the world takes place – the human bodily situation. A perspective of “subjective body” will shed light on the following: while pursuing the process of integrating experience and thereby preserving one’s autonomy, the relation to other individuals and the world are extended and refined. Thus, the stronger the subjective bodily connection to the world, the less possible it is that lack of contact will impede transformation: caring will become a subjective necessity.
