This paper argues that our present conceptual resources are inadequate to the task of understanding and intervening into the ecological, political, and economic crises confronting us today. Enabling, inclusive, and effective social imaginaries, that conceive of all beings as part of and dependent on nature, can and should be promoted. Spinoza’s philosophy of the imagination, embodiment, and affect is shown to be apposite to this endeavor. Further, his misunderstood notion of ‘God of Nature’ is presented as a largely unrecognized conceptual innovation crucial to understanding and constructively addressing the human condition today.
This article examines the conflict between eco-social imaginaries through the lens of Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific images. It first addresses the debate on the “end of nature,” questioning the advisability of abandoning the concept of nature. Drawing on Hegel, Benjamin, and niche construction theory, it argues that a dialectical account of the organism-environment relation can complement the compositionist perspective advanced by Bruno Latour and further developed by Donna Haraway. Finally, the Anthropocene is interpreted as an emblematic case requiring a dialectical rethinking of the tension between anthropocentric and compositionist eco-imaginaries.
The article illuminates the multiple dimensions of the affective relation that contemporary affluent societies develop with regards to the global ecological crisis. The central question is, how does it become socially possible and feasible to repress and deny a crisis that is unfolding with such force? Psychoanalytic theories of evasion, forms of social derealization through what I call “unfeeling,” and the colonial rule of nature are introduced as theoretical approaches to understand how such evasion is being naturalized and upheld despite experiences with and scientific knowledge about global warming.
Today, catastrophe surely needs to be a keyword for political thought. I argue that what Adorno calls constellations are eminent tools for thinking through catastrophic situations. My argument proceeds through a detour through Arendt and Benjamin. With the help of Arendt’s idea of reflective judgement, I argue that constellations depend on imagination. Benjamin helps us see how constellations and imagination can play crucial roles even when the subject is unfree and caught up in melancholia. The result is an idea of “constellation” that stresses its relation to catastrophe and sensitizes us to its historical rootedness.
This article develops a phenomenological account of solastalgia, the distress experienced in response to environmental degradation, arguing that it is a disclosive emotion revealing a new transcendental topography of our time. After clarifying the conceptual ambiguities that affect the scope, affective structure, and temporal forms of the concept, the article distinguishes between perceptual, cognitive, and perceptual-cognitive solastalgia, and addresses phenomena such as anticipatory and manufactured solastalgia. Drawing on Lukács’ idea of transcendental homelessness and eco-phenomenological accounts of place, the paper advances the thesis that contemporary solastalgia discloses transcendental placelessness, in which late-modern environments increasingly undermine possibilities of placemaking.
My claim in this article is that addressing the challenges of the present calls for a critical rehabilitation of philosophical anthropology, or of the idea of human essence. Several habitual blockages of thought need to be overcome to enable this rehabilitation. I argue for a Hegelian relational essentialism and show that the essentialism of the young Karl Marx is a variation of it. Hegel’s and Marx’s relational essentialism provides a framework for articulating the parameters of good human life in all the constitutive relations in which it is lived and on which it depends, including relations with nature.
I argue that, in Michel Foucault's work, archaeology and genealogy both have a diagnostic function, and in fact that they depend on each other to implement it. They should therefore be construed as the two aspects of the same method whose aim is to diagnose the present. I claim that, in turn, diagnosing the present does not consist in describing “what is happening” as a journalist would do, nor in a hermeneutical or therapeutic endeavor, but in showing that our present is characterized by difference and rupture. It is a laborious task that requires careful historical-philosophical work in order to “fragilize” our present—which, far from being stable and immobile, is revealed to be a site of perpetual change, actual and possible. The aim of Foucault’s archaeological-genealogical method is, I conclude, precisely to awaken us to the live possibilities for transformation that our present harbors.
This essay thinks through Lucretius’ linguistic mirroring in De Rerum Natura, not only in his use of elementa (letters) as a simulacrum for elementa (first elements), but also as a phenomenon of the inquiry itself. In Lucretius’ account (ratio), the sense (ratio) of his seeking requires poetry even as he distances himself from the fantastical gods that the poets create. The relationship between touch and sight is critical, for touch is invoked by “holy powers,” and atoms are as “blind” in their swerving as we are in our longing to trace their footsteps. The composition of things materializes literally and figuratively through Lucretius’ words. That is not to say that he invents things from thin air, but rather, that he comes upon them as he comes up with them. This sensitive reading of insensate elements brings new meaning to Lucretius’ so-called materialism.
After helping to inaugurate the Anglophone Hegelian revival, Pippin offers a striking reassessment of that revival in The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy. Pippin’s main claim is that Heidegger “understood the Idealist tradition and its significance better than anyone had hitherto.” However, this claim overlooks the depth of Schelling’s understanding of German idealism and the strength of his critique of Hegel. Schelling mounts a formidable critique of Hegel that anticipates crucial aspects of Heidegger’s critique, including aspects missing from Pippin’s account. I rehearse the development of Pippin’s pursuit of a defensible account of Hegel’s argument for the speculative identity of thought and being. I then present Pippin’s post-idealist turn in The Culmination by summarizing the book. Finally, I demarcate the Schellingian lacuna in Pippin’s endorsement of Heidegger’s critique of Hegel.
This paper argues that a central thread uniting much of 20th-century French philosophy is a reconfiguration of Kant’s transcendental dialectic as a response to the dominance of Hegel’s thought. After setting out Hegel and Kant’s accounts of dialectic, the paper explores how Merleau-Ponty uses Kant’s concept of antinomy and Derrida uses the concept of a transcendental ideal to develop a non-Hegelian account of thought. In contrast to Hegel’s sublation of contradiction into conceptual unity, these thinkers highlight how Kant’s transcendental dialectic reveals the limits of conceptual thought and how, once resituated as operating between conceptual and non-conceptual aspects of the phenomenal world, it opens the way towards an understanding of pre-conceptual structures such as perception and différance.
