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Abstract
Deep ecology holds that profound inner transformation is a necessary part of entering an ecological age and building a society that includes nonhuman lifeforms in meaningful ways. I am going to argue that this is definitely the case, and that the shock of realizing the truth of the Anthropocene amounts to a first step on a pathway that one might accurately see as 'spiritual,' if only for its profundity—though certainly not for any disengagement with the political.
What this transformation amounts to in part is a new way of experiencing 'selfhood' or the 'inner self' (or whatever we want to call it). This new mode sees existence to contain a necessarily spectral dimension. While it obviously makes reductionist forms of materialism untenable, such a dimension also troubles some of the ideas we might have about spirituality. I seek to show how the spectral is a vital element of being an ecological being, and argue that this spectrality affects how we conceptualize all kinds of other domains, such as ethics, politics and art.

Michael Strevens develops kairetic account of causal explanations as a brand of explanatory reductionism. He argues that explanations in higher-level sciences are complete (stand-alone) only because they can be potentially deepened—that is, added kernels of causal processes all the way down to the level of micro-physical relations. Thus, they are, in essence, the result of abstraction from deeper causal explanatory levels. I argue that Strevens's discussion of the notion of depth in science is limited to a very narrow domain, the boundaries of which are determined by a simplistic amalgam of science textbook and everyday cases analyzed by means of rational metaphysics. In contrast to his view, history of scientific practice shows that scientific explanations are typically bounded within a level and do not draw their viability from their potential for lower-level explanatory deepening. Moreover, a result of such deepening of higher-level explanations produces changes and refinements much more complex than Strevens's account assumes.