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Paper short abstract:

Since the advent of Hobbes' Leviathan, our modern liberal view of nature has become dominant. The question is, can we solve the problems it creates without understanding the dialectics of its development, which is encapsulated in Leviathan?

Paper long abstract:

If we follow the historian Marcel Gauchet's interpretation, it becomes clear that Hobbes' Leviathan is the culmination of a development that led to our liberal approach to nature. The question is whether the problems that arise in the process can be compensated for by contemporary concepts if they ignore this history and our current state of exception (Anthropocene). There have been several strong attempts to synthesise these antagonisms. Keywords such as embedding liberalism, ecological republicanism and concepts of horizontal transcendence are examples of these attempts to heal the separation from nature. But in the face of impending and approaching climate catastrophe, we are reaching a new form of "state of emergency (or exeption)" (Schmitt, Hobbes) (perhaps marked by the "Anthropocene"). Therfore we should as ourselves: Is it enough to find the problematic concepts in the history of ideas and "straighten them out"? But also: can we find buried resources to solve this "state of emergency", thus enabling us to fulfil the hope of an anti-antagonistic relationship with non-human nature and to reopen ourselves to the experience of the concrete alterity of the non-human world? This lecture would like to pursue this question by paradigmatically tracing the paradoxical dialectic of the genesis of the liberal concept of nature, which was not a liberation from the Other in nature (transcendence), but suppresses this to this day.