Sympoietic Art Practice in Co-expressive Re-worlding with Hegel’s “Vegetal Subject”

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Lin Charlston ◽  
David Charlston
Keyword(s):  
Art Practice ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Couch Grass ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Human World ◽  
Hegelian Philosophy

“Sympoietic art practice”, construed as co-creative making-together-with plants, contributes to posthumanist discourse by forming cross-species partnerships which re-configure exploitative relations with plants. The posthumanist commitment of sympoietic practice to live equitably with the more-than-human world is inherently opposed to the tradition of anthropocentrism widely associated with Hegel’s idealization of reason and culture. But when Hegelian philosophy comingles with the radically different assumptions of sympoietic art practice in this exploratory paper, a co-expressive “worlding with plants” emerges. A transformative re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature reveals that the English translators have smoothed away the vibrant concept of a “vegetal subject” explicitly used by Hegel in the original German. The resulting interpretive fissure makes space for a creative scrutiny of human exceptionalism, humanist and posthumanist conceptions of plant subjectivity and human-plant relations. Our transdisciplinary article concludes with a performative knitting together and composting of shreds of Hegelian text with vibrantly participative strands of living couch grass.

POST-COSMISM AND POST-HUMANISM: TWO STRATEGIES IN THE MOD-ERN PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN

Chelovek RU ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 217-220
Author(s):  
Natalia Rostova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Current State ◽  
Human World ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Post Humanism

The article analyzes the current state of affairs in philosophy in relation to the question «What is hu-man?». In this regard, the author identifies two strategies – post-humanism and post-cosmism. The strat-egy of post-humanism is to deny the idea of human exceptionalism. Humanity becomes something that can be thought of out of touch with human and understood as a right that extends to the non-human world. Post-cosmism, on the contrary, advocated the idea of ontological otherness of the human. Re-sponding to the challenges of anthropological catastrophe, its representatives propose a number of new anthropological projects.

Reconsidering Children's Encounters With Nature and Place Using Posthumanism

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Malone
Keyword(s):  
Outdoor Education ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Research Project ◽  
La Paz ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Sustainable Future ◽  
Significant Phenomenon ◽  
Human World ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article explores and reconsiders the view of children's encounters with place as central to a place-based pedagogy that seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. I unpack the current fervour for reinserting the child in nature and nature-based education as a significant phenomenon in environmental and outdoor education. I will draw on recent literature on place-based research and theorise using new materialist and posthumanist approaches that seek to disrupt anthropocentric views and support new ways of considering our encounters with the more-than-human world. Then, using these new approaches, I will theorise a recent place-based research project with children in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, to illustrate how it is possible to challenge current assumptions that are firmly entrenched in the child in nature movement. I will conclude by considering what intra-species relations, place encounters and child-body-animal-place relations can teach us about questioning anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Finally, I consider how can we overcome these limitations of a narrow and nostalgic view of ‘child and nature’ and reimagine a more diverse approach to education for a sustainable future.

Hegel in France

1983 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Marcel Regnier
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The Face ◽  
Hegelian Philosophy

‘Hegel in France’ is a title which poses two questions: (i) the extent of French acquaintance with Hegelian thought, (ii) the influence exercised by Hegel on French philosophy. Initially it is necessary to recall what Hegel's personal contacts were with the French and the time he spent in France. In 1818 Victor Cousin (1792–1857), who had already been to Germany in 1817, suggested going to Munich. He wrote to Hegel asking him for letters of introduction. Hegel was still at Heidelberg, but had just been named Professor at Berlin and he replied on the 5 August 1818. Cousin thus met Hegel at Heidelberg. In 1824 while accompanying the Duke of Maitebello's son in Germany he was arrested in Dresden by Saxony police at the request of the Prussians who then imprisoned him in Berlin. Hegel intervened on his behalf to free him. In 1827 Hegel visited him in Paris, a visit about which Hegel wrote extensively to his wife, and Cousin followed him back to Germany. To what extent had Cousin, who exercised a wide influence on French universities himself, been an Hegelian and would he have contributed to the diffusion of Hegelian philosophy in France? In the important year 1828 when the change of government allowed him to take up his teaching again, he declared: ‘In Germany, a philosophy which draws its glory fran calling itself the philosophy of nature, has succeeded subjective idealism and in France if not on the ruins of, at least in the face of empiricism, a philosophy has developed which certainly has pronounced spiritual dimension. What can we conclude from these changes?

This Precious Human Life

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-255
Author(s):  
Colin H. Simonds
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Ecological Situation ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Human World

Abstract This paper analyzes the idea of “human exceptionalism” from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism. It argues that, in the Tibetan Buddhist context, many of the negative consequences of human exceptionalism are overshadowed by the concept’s ability to promote an altruistic comportment to the more-than-human world when supported by the Buddhist ontology and its broader project of liberating all beings from duhkha. To this end, this paper looks at how Tibetan Buddhist teachers qualify a “precious human life” by conducting a close reading of primary texts before extrapolating some general themes of these selected passages and applying them to our contemporary ecological situation. In doing so, it makes the argument that human exceptionalism is not a problem in and of itself but has a positive or negative effect on the more-than-human world depending on how it is established, maintained, and understood. It also demonstrates how Tibetan Buddhism can be a useful tradition for thinking alongside as we attempt to address global issues concerning the environment and nonhuman animals.

Hölse, System and Subject

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (01) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Robert B Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Hegelian Philosophy

Hegel, the philosopher most responsible for linking philosophy to history, appropriately argued that in his own day there simply could not be Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, or Epicureans, that one could not bring back an earlier stage of thought. In this massive two volume study Vittorio Hösle argues that, in the spirit of Hegel himself, there also cannot be contemporary Hegelians. But there can be “philosophers who attempt to mediate the tradition of objective idealism from Plato to Hegel with post-Hegelian philosophy and with contemporary science”, (p 57n) In the past many of the philosophers who have attempted such a “mediation” have concentrated on one or another aspect of Hegel's project, usually his philosophical anthropology, his social theory or political theory, his critique of modernity, theory of alienation, etc. Hösle ambitiously takes up what looks to be the most unlikely candidate for any “contemporary mediation,” Hegel's entire systematic attempt to link together “Logic”, “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit”. Often Hösle's study is simply a survey of Hegel's systematic enterprise, providing paraphrase and plausibility where possible, summarising claims, excusing or pointing out excesses, pausing to debate other commentators, or complain about prominent mis-readings. He introduces his account with a long historical and theoretical discussion of Hegel's Encyclopedia system, and then offers a running commentary on its three major parts, devoting the largest blocks of attention to the Logic and the philosophy of objective spirit in the Rechtsphilosophie. But there is throughout one great thematic problem at issue that sets the tone of the book at the beginning and is returned to again and again.

After Alice After Cats in Derrida's L'animal que donc je suis

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Polish
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human World ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Sacrifice

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.

Beatrix Potter's Mycological Aesthetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-184
Author(s):  
Erica Kanesaka Kalnay
Keyword(s):  
Human Exceptionalism

This essay argues that Beatrix Potter's work on mushrooms reveals the ways in which the Western ecological imaginary has responded to Victorian and Edwardian notions of childhood animism. It finds Potter's ‘mycological aesthetics’, or the interplay between attention and imagination that characterises her work, lingering in present-day ecocritical thinking that aims to dismantle the binary constructs underwriting human exceptionalism.

Creatures of Cain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document