Sean J. McGrath: Thinking nature: an essay in negative ecology
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Sean J. McGrath: Thinking nature: an essay in negative ecology Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 192 pp., ISBN-10: 1474449263, ISBN-13: 978-1474449267 Chandler D. Rogers1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Thinking Nature is essay in negative ecology, written in part to commemorate the deaths nature has died, pace Morton, Žižek, and even Latour. We have killed it;what now should we do? How to move forward? The path ahead will require eco-political action, to be sure. But brazen activism without the guidance of contemplative thought, McGrath argues, will not be sufficient to meet the demands of the present. Such a task demands discernment regarding the deeper roots of our ecological crisis, and knowledge of the developments that make possible both the emergence and the collapse of modernity, with its advancements in science and technology. Keywords Disenchantment · Ontology · Philosophy of nature · Eco-anxiety · Transcendence · Contemplation The dawning of the Judeo-Christian tradition shattered previous conceptions of nature as a closed, eternal, and unchanging whole.1 Its vision of God as infinitely transcendent granted the human a new hold upon reality, a “transcendent vantage point” from which to observe and transform the rest of creation (40). The sense of freedom it brought made possible liberation from what previous conceptions of nature, as eternal and unchanging order, had considered to be of the order of 1 “Without exaggeration, we could argue that holism is the predominant cosmology of the ancient world. The ancient kosmos was not a collection of extended objects or an aesthetic consumable. It was an unobjectifiable, self-normed and self-regulating totality that included everything within it – gods, mortals, nature and culture. The human soul or intellect had no transcendent vantage point from which it could make sense of things. It was merely one part of a greater whole that necessarily exceeded its comprehension, hence the relatively seamless blend of science and aesthetics in ancient philosophy” (40).
* Chandler D. Rogers [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, USA
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necessity—including subjection to slavery and the absence of social mobility. But the flipside of transcendence is the alienation it inaugurates in those it enlightens, dividing the human from the fabric of a universe with which it was, considered in retrospect, formerly congruous. Modernity marks the advent of a second death: If the first death of nature was the Jewish–Christian eclipse of kosmos as a normative whole in favour of the assertion of a transcendent God (God over nature), the second death of nature was the denial of both nature and God: no kosmos—but no spirit, either. Such is the desperate bleakness of late modernity: neither natural law nor transcendent spirit can save us anymore. …The fundamental psychological state of the modern is consequently not only disenchantment but also metaphysical disorientation (58). Disenchantment and di
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