Dissertation projekt
Modernity and Nature: The Cosmological Foundations of Modern Political Concepts
Introduction
In this PhD project, I study the concept of nature and how it relates to modern political concepts. The present is very much a time of rethinking and criticizing the tenets of modern society, and perhaps in no other area is this more evident than in the efforts to theorize the notion of sustainability. As indications of profound anthropogenic environmental change amasses and as the awareness rises of the finitude of human being and material resources alike, the holist problem of the relation between society and nature seems to be the site par excellence for future political engagement. The diagnosis of the present as encompassing inherently unsustainable social practice and of the future as crisis has spurred a wide range of theoretical attempts to engage with these issues, primarily by rethinking mankind's place in the world and its relation to nature. For instance, there are those who try to reinsert mankind and social order into a naturalist grand scheme of ecological relations, whereas others, primarily by referring to the concept of the Anthropocence, argue that there is no such thing as nature anymore since the effects of man's doings are visible wherever we look. Yet another group of theorists, coming from different critical traditions in political theory, depart from a constructivist approach to knowledge and human experience as they argue that any environmentalist politics would be best served if the concept of nature was done away with altogether. Often, all of these contemporary approaches combine their conceptual analysis with critiques of modernity and modern ways of politics. Western political thought, it is argued, is characterized by ideas of human exceptionalism, which gets its most manifest articulation with the advent of Enlightenment philosophy, modern rationalism and the enterprise of human emancipation by way of instrumental domination of nature. In the first part of the PhD thesis to come, I engage with these theoretical endeavors in an attempt to define their conditions of validity, and thus point at the foundational assumptions they require. It is my contention that these theories in general fail to treat political concepts as essentially social and thus not disengaged from historical practice. By turning to methodologies of conceptual history, I argue that political concepts should be understood as inferentially connected in larger conceptual frameworks, and that political practice and conceptual frameworks are tied together in mutual relations of effect. Given this approach to political ontology, it follows that in order to understand political concepts, one ought to study their function rather than simply their historical, current and normatively desired meaning. Hence, instead of being an exercise in definition, the main part of the thesis is an inquiry into the historical function of the concept of nature in political discourse. I confine the historical investigation to modern political thought, and primarily engage with the formative moments of the modern political project, namely Enlightenment philosophy and it's precursors, and German idealism. Chronologically, this roughly corresponds to the period between the beginning of the 17th century to the first part of the 19th century, and intellectually between Hobbes and Hegel. By reading the philosophical works of this era and relating the political philosophies therein to contemporary natural philosophy and the historical formation of the modern sciences, I hope to show that the characteristics of modern political concepts are contingent on constant renegotiations of nature and something unique to human being. Thus, it can be argued that the conditions of possibility of modern political concepts and knowledge – expressed through political vocabulary and materialized through political practice ¬– and in extension modern political experience as well, are made up of constant engagements with concepts of nature and something uniquely human. Such an interpretation, which is arrived at through a methodological sensitivity to historical contexts as well as an explicit awareness of the problem of anachronistically inferring concepts with meaning, of modern political theory is notably a stark contrast to the often voiced claim that modern society is instituted through a radical and absolute distinction of the natural world and human being, and that this is also its main shortcoming concerning the possibility of a future of wellbeing. Lastly, in this project I also develop the argument that in modern social order it is politics itself which seems to be the uniquely human, which would suggest that problems framed by concepts of society and nature cannot be overcome by means of modern politics since that which is currently perceived as a problem actually conditions such politics. Thus, the PhD thesis aspires to contribute both to the ongoing debates in what is usually referred to as green political thought about the possibility of environmentalist politics, and to the reappraisal of modernity's historical emergence in relation to the concept of nature, as well as engagements with conceptual history as a method in political science.
Department Researchers in this Project
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Koordinator/Projektledare
Rickard
Andersson
(Doctoral candidate) |
