The Environmental Crisis and The End of Philosophy

Abstract

By means of Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit the present paper justifies Descartes’ “mortification” of nature to res extensa as the exclusive condition of possibility of solving the environmental crisis. It reveals that the modern – exploitative – treatment of nature is not the foundation of the environmental crisis but the basis for its solution. This revelation turns our attention from the (theoretical) origins and impels us to ascend to everyday (practical) life. This “overcoming of mediation” results in the standpoint of “reflexive naivety” which knows that it should not re-evaluate the instrumental relationship towards nature institutionalized by capitalism, but instead consequently assert this relation so that humanity extracts energy from nature by even more efficient ways and thereby displacing the less efficient manner of today. The promise says that the even more efficient extraction of energy from nature allows us to leave nature affected by the relatively inefficient extraction alone in the sense of Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit.