Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

In the history of ideas of liberalism there are a lot of conflicts between the human world and humans’ desire of freedom and the non-human nature. Despite new concepts emerged to overcome this antagonism the climate crisis is strengthening it again. Does the clue lie in liberalisms history of ideas?

Paper long abstract:

The history of liberal Enlightenment ideas is characterised by antagonisms that constantly refer back to nature. On the one hand, there is freedom in the state of nature as a guarantee against an invasive state. On the other hand, there is the idea of human freedom from the constraints of nature, as well as the freedom of human beings to use objectified nature. Recently, however, there have been several strong attempts to synthesise these antagonisms. Keywords such as embedding liberalism, ecological humanism 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" (Schmitt, Hobbes) (perhaps marked by the "Anthropocene"). At such a point, the risk of falling back into polemical, antagonistic thinking, which does not allow us to experience the "otherness" of nature as a way of transcending ourselves, is exceptionally high. And we can already see this in our political debates, in which more and more local and global conflicts are emerging. Therefore, the question is not only: 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?