Alison Stone

Adorno and the disenchantment of nature

In this article I re-examine Adornos and Horkheimers account of the disenchantment of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment. I argue that they identify disenchantment as a historical process whereby we have come to find natural things meaningless and completely intelligible. However, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that modernity not only rests on disenchantment but also tends to re-enchant nature, because it encourages us to think that its institutions derive from, and are anticipated and prefigured by, nature. I argue that Adornos Negative Dialecticsand Aesthetic Theory show how constellations and artworks generate an alternative form of reenchantment which is critical of modernity and its domination of nature. This form of re-enchantment finds natural beings to be mysteriously meaningful because they embody histories of immeasurable suffering. This experience engenders guilt and antipathy to human domination over nature.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity

In this book Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.

Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and the Re‐enchantment of Nature

In this paper I reconstruct Schlegels idea that romantic poetry can re‐enchant nature in a way that is uniquely compatible with modernitys epistemic and political values of criticism, self‐criticism, and freedom. I trace several stages in Schlegels early thinking concerning nature. First, he criticises modern culture for its analytic, reflective form of rationality which encourages a disenchanting view of nature. Second, he re‐evaluates this modern form of rationality as making possible an ironic, romantic, poetry, which portrays natural phenomena as mysterious indications of an underlying reality that transcends knowledge. Yet Schlegel relies here on a contrast between human freedom and natural necessity that reinstates a disenchanting view of nature as fully intelligible and predictable. Third, therefore, he reconceives nature as inherently creative and poetic, rethinking human creativity as consisting in participation in natural creative processes. He replaces his earlier “idealist” view that reality is in itself unknowable with the “idealist realist” view that reality is knowable as creative nature, yet, in its spontaneous creativity, still eludes full comprehension. I argue that Schlegels third approach to the re‐enchantment of nature is his most consistent and satisfactory, and is important for contemporary environmental philosophy in showing how re‐enchantment is compatible with modernity.

From Political to Realist Essentialism Rereading Luce Irigaray

This paper re-examines debates surrounding Irigaray’s ‘essentialism’, arguing that these debates have generated a widespread assumption that realist essentialism is philosophically untenable and that Irigaray must therefore be read as a non-realist, merely ‘political’, essentialist. I suggest that this assumption is unhelpful, as Irigaray’s work shows increasing commitment to a realist form of essentialism. Moreover, I argue that political essentialism is internally unstable because it aims to revalue femininity and the body as symbolized, thereby reinforcing the traditional conceptual hierarchy of the symbolic over the corporeal. I reinterpret Irigaray’s own work as moving away from her earlier political essentialist project of revaluing symbolic femininity, towards the realism of her recent thought, which urges us to revalue and transfigure real, sexually differentiated, bodies by pursuing their cultural expression and enhancement. I aim to show that Irigaray’s recent work is philosophically coherent and sophisticated, and that it opens up the possibility of a radical and transformative kind of realist essentialism.

On the Genealogy of Women

Within feminist philosophical and theoretical contexts, third wave feminism may be defined as encompassing ‘all critical work … that points … to the homogenizing or exclusive tendencies of earlier dominant feminisms’ (Heyes 1997, 161).1 Third wave feminists object, in particular, to exclusive tendencies within the dominant feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, theories that emerged more or less directly from second wave feminism as a political movement (e.g. Catherine MacKinnon’s critique of pornography reflecting feminist activism around the sex industry). Subsequent feminist thinkers, writing in the later 1980s and 1990s, articulated their objections to these exclusive tendencies primarily through critiques of ‘essentialism’. The central target of anti-essentialist critique was the belief — arguably widely held amongst second wave feminists — that there are shared characteristics common to all women, which unify them as a group. Anti-essentialists of the third wave repeatedly argued that such universalising claims about women are always false, and function oppressively to normalise particular — socially and culturally privileged -forms of feminine experience.2 The widespread rejection of essentialism by feminism’s third wave generated problems in turn. Ontologically, the critique of essentialism appeared to imply that women do not exist at all as a distinct social group; and, politically, this critique seemed to undercut the possibility of feminist activism, by denying women the shared identity or characteristics that might motivate them to engage in collective action.

The Romantic Absolute

In this article I argue that the Early German Romantics understand the absolute, or being, to be an infinite whole encompassing all the things of the world and all their causal relations. The Romantics argue that we strive endlessly to know this whole but only acquire an expanding, increasingly systematic body of knowledge about finite things, a system of knowledge which can never be completed. We strive to know the whole, the Romantics claim, because we have an original feeling of it that motivates our striving. I then examine two different Romantic accounts of this feeling. The first, given by Novalis, is that feeling gives us a kind of access to the absolute which logically precedes any conceptualisation. I argue that this account is problematic and that a second account, offered by Friedrich Schlegel, is preferable. On this account, we feel the absolute in that we intuit it aesthetically in certain natural phenomena. This form of intuition is partly cognitive and partly non-cognitive, and therefore it motivates us to strive to convert our intuition into full knowledge.

Introduction: Nature, Environmental Ethics, and Continental Philosophy.

Until recently, there has been relatively little self-conscious reflection - from either environmental or continental philosophers - on the specific contributions which continental philosophy, insofar as it is a distinctive tradition, might make to environmental thought. This situation has begun to change with several recent publications, such as Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvines (2003) edited collection Ecophenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, and Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodemans (2004) collection Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. This special issue aims to continue the discussion of how the continental tradition might advance or transform environmental thinking, both by reconsidering authors such as Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and by considering how themes and concepts from continental philosophy and social theory - including Merleau-Pontys concept of flesh, Foucaults notion of discipline, and Bourdieus social critique of taste - bear on environmental practice and theory.

Adorno, Hegel, and Dialectic

This article explores critical theorys relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adornos thought relates to Hegels. Adornos apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adornos allegiance to Hegels dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegels dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegels view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.

Matter and Form: Hegel, Organicism, and the Difference between Women and Men

Infamously, Hegel in his 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right maintains that it is an essential feature of modern European societies—and in accordance with the principles of right—that women are confined to the family, excluded from the public spheres of work and politics. “Woman [die Frau]... has her substantial vocation in the family, and her ethical disposition consists in this piety.” 1 Feminist scholars have offered a range of interpretations of Hegel’s philosophical rationale for making these claims. For instance, according to Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract, Hegel makes these claims because he retains classical social contract theory’s male-defined conception of the civil individual.2 Others see these claims as rooted more broadly in Hegel’s philosophical system. Genevieve Lloyd thinks that his relegation of women to the family reflects a hierarchical opposition between life (gendered female) and self-consciousness (gendered male) that structures his whole philosophy of mind. Even more broadly, Luce Irigaray thinks that Hegel’s claims about women and family reflect the nature of his dialectic: he places whatever is oppositional and other to (male) subjectivity at the service ofthat selfsame male subjectivity, thus having women serve men within the family.3

ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

preference for artistic over natural beauty (see, e.g. Bruce V. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1995), 171) or – over-simplistically, as I will argue – his ‘anthropocentric’ view that ‘nature [is] as it ought to be only when man ha[s] transformed it’ (John Passmore, ‘Attitudes to Nature’ in Environmental Ethics, ed. by Robert Elliott (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 135). 2 Most scholars treat Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature as exclusively theoretical: see R.-P. Horstmann and M. J. Petry, eds, Hegels Philosophie der Natur: Beziehungen zwischen empirischer und spekulativer Naturerkenntnis (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1986); Stephen Houlgate, ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany, SUNY, 1998); M. J. Petry, ed., Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften (Stuttgart, Frommann-Holzboog, 1987); M. J. Petry, ed., Hegel and Newtonianism (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1993). The ethical content of Hegel’s theory of nature is touched on in Thomas Kalenberg’s Die Befreiung der Natur: Natur und Selbstbewußtsein in der Philosophie Hegels (Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1997), 396–40, and more fully explored in Fritz Reusswig, Natur und Geist: Grundlinien einer ökologischen Sittlichkeit nach Hegel (Frankfurt, Campus, 1993). ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE