Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter (Cam-bridge: Polity Press, 2017).
Sean J. McGrath, Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Unbehagen in der Nature: Warum unser Realitätsglaube uns Blind Macht für die Umwelt-krise’ Lettre International 78 (Berlin 2007).
On the hermeneutics of Destruktion, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit § 6.
On the hermeneutics of symbols, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 9ff; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (University of Chicago Press 1967), volume 2, pp. 239ff.
‘We must think nature in the way it is given to us to think it today. No longer is nature accessible to us as divine cosmos or eternally balanced container of human life. Traditional preconceptions of nature have come to an end in the Anthropocene’ (McGrath, 2019: 1).
Despite the claim of Latour and ‘dark ecologists’, that ‘nature is dead’, the symbol of nature remains the rallying cry for environmental theory and policy. Nevertheless, it is clearly the case that the concept of nature is burdened with out-dated senses that have become hardened into ideology. We will ap-proach the task of ‘deconstructing’ nature in the best sense of the term, dismantling traditional con-cepts of nature and tracing them back to their historical sources in order to free up possibilities for thinking the concept forward in the Anthropocene. We will analyzse, in the following order:
· the Greek model of nature as kosmos (selections from Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato, Stoicism, Greek Church Fathers)
· the Medieval moral order (selections from Thomas Aquinas)
· spiritless mechanism (selections from 17th century determinism, e.g. Descartes, Hobbes, New-ton)
· infinite productivity (selections from Romantic Naturphilosophie: Goethe, Franz von Baader, early Schelling)
· and finally, absolute contingency (selections from Speculative Realism of Latour and Meil-lassoux).
The point is not to demolish any of these models but rather to approach them in the spirit of the via negativa of medieval theology, to show how each of these constructs tells us something about how we thought about nature, and also about how inadequate our thinking about nature remains. We may be bereft of predicates adequate to the symbol of nature in our time, but that does not mean that nature as a symbol is no longer still alive for us. To the contrary, we will pursue the thesis that no symbol is more important for uniting the concerns of all people on the planet today.
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