Ever since the environment and nonhumanity became major ethical topics, human-centered worldviews have been blamed for all that is morally wrong about our dealings with nature. Those who consider themselves nonanthropocentrists typically assume that the West’s anthropocentric axiologies and ontologies underlie all of the environmental degradations associated with our species. On the other hand, a handful of environmental philosophers argue that anthropocentrism is perfectly acceptable as a foundation for environmental ethics. According to Bryan Norton’s convergence hypothesis, "If reasonably interpreted and translated into appropriate policies, a nonanthropocentric ethic will advocate the same [environmental] policies as a suitably broad and long-sighted anthropocentrism" (Norton 2004:11). Norton notes that although adherents to either ism may disagree about the relative importance of the various reasons they have for advocating such policies, they nevertheless share an equal commitment to protecting the environment. Because any form of anthropocentrism must fundamentally favor humanity over nonhumanity, nonanthropocentrists are nevertheless concerned that such favoritism is "nothing more than the expression of an irrational bias" (Taylor 1981:215). They reason that only a nonanthropocentric ethic can guarantee that policies do not arbitrarily favor humans when their interests conflict with those of nonhumans. I argue that critics of convergence fail to appreciate that Norton’s hypothesis is limited to ideologies that he deems "reasonable" and "suitably broad and long-sighted," or else they misapprehend what these terms imply. When it comes to ethics, nonanthropocentrists and anthropocentrists alike vary along a continuum according to whether their overriding intuitions are more aligned with individualistic or collectivistic axiologies and their associated timescales. The most unreasonable, narrow, and short-sighted ideologies are those that are the most individualistic. It is at the collective end of the continuum that Norton’s proposed convergence takes place. I defend a version of anthropocentrism that I term ecological anthropocentrism.

In the early 20thcentury, a “crisis of ocularcentrism” arose in philosophy, replacing the Cartesian epistemological notion of a disembodied mind inspecting the object-world from the outside with an ontological and phenomenological approach to vision and being, embedding humans corporeally in a world exceeding their perceptual horizon (Jay 94). In response, modernist artists abandoned realist and naturalist techniques, rejecting mimetic representation, and experimented with new artistic forms, trying to account for the new complexity of life.  In this context, Virginia Woolf wrote her novel The Waves (1931), “an abstract mystical eyeless book” (DIII 203). Despite countless studies on The Waves and vision, its “eyelessness” has never been thoroughly examined before. Since Woolf considered vision and being to be inherently embodied and communal and longed for capturing moments of being, this thesis proposes to unlock Woolf’s eyeless writing in The Waves through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late corporeal phenomenology. Alongside his concepts of the flesh and chiasm, this thesis claims that eyeless writing is Woolf’s method to go beyond vision in order to reveal the inherent corporeal interconnectedness of all beings in a hidden, visually imperceptible pattern—the eyeless flesh of the world—by creating a narrative that is eyeless in several ways. It is at once eye- and I-less due to lacking a single focalising point and denoting an anonymous visibility enveloping all beings. Rather than being structured by a narrative eye/I, it is governed by the characters’ bodies and their chiasmatic relations with the world. On this basis, emphasising the carnal adherence of all human and non-human beings, their eyeless kinship thus comes to light, creating a nonanthropocentric conception of Being-in-and-of-the-world. In this sense, The Waves uncovers that since the Wesen (essence) of Being lies in the common, visually imperceptible flesh, it can only be reached eyelessly, via the body.