Schelling and The Sixth Extinction: The Environmental Ethics Behind Schelling's Anthropomorphization of Nature

Authors

  • Vincent Le Deakin University

Keywords:

Schelling, Naturphilosophie, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, Spinoza, Fichte, German idealism, ontology, metaphysics, climate change, global warming, the Anthropocene, anthropocentrism.

Abstract

What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction' due to anthropogenic climate change has obliged us to rethink our traditional assumptions about the rapport between ourselves and nature. While the reconceptualization of nature has largely been led by scientists and environmental theorists and activists, this paper argues that Schelling provides the best and earliest model for rethinking nature in the Anthropocene. To this end, Schelling critiques two approaches to nature. Schelling repudiates Fichte's idealism for reducing nature to an instrument for the self-assertion of our egos much like modern industrial capitalism views nature as an economic resource to be exploited for human gain. Further, Schelling critiques Spinoza for mechanizing nature as a structurally invariant system in the same way that climate change denialists hold that the earth's ecosystem is perfectly homeostatic. Having dismissed these two approaches, Schelling develops another environmentally ethical conception of nature to answer the question of how the free human subject emerges out of an allegedly blind and lifeless nature. Schelling's solution to safeguarding nature is to paradoxically anthropomorphize it further by reconceiving it as always-already structured as per the dynamic free spirit. This paper shall thus conclude by extracting two environmentally ethical principles that Schelling's anthropomorphization of nature entails. Contra Fichte, the ‘dependency principle' states that humans are radically dependent upon nature rather than nature being dependent on our positing it as an object of our intuition. Moreover, the ‘contingency principle' stipulates against Spinoza that nature is itself contingent, dynamic and precarious. In this way, Schelling provides a conceptualization of nature befitting the demands placed upon thought in the age of the sixth extinction.

Author Biography

Vincent Le, Deakin University

I am a graduate in Philosophy, English Studies and French Studies from The University of Adelaide and Sciences Po. I am currently pursuing postgraduate research in Philosophy at Deakin University with a thesis on the influence of Augustine's concepts of good and evil throughout the history of philosophy, from Aquinas and Descartes, to Kant and Schelling. 

Downloads

Published

11-11-2017

How to Cite

Le, V. (2017). Schelling and The Sixth Extinction: The Environmental Ethics Behind Schelling’s Anthropomorphization of Nature. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 13(3), 107–129. Retrieved from https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/632