Abstract
In Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of Enlightenment, the spiritual and mimetic relation towards nature in early myth society increasingly gives way to nature’s disenchantment: the process by which a holistic and qualitative nature is systematically reduced and fragmented into the purely “rational” material of natural science and, ultimately, industrial, carbon-based society. But as Horkheimer as Adorno make clear, Enlightenment, what promised to liberate us from the irrational, becomes an even more irrational force than the nature it supposedly subdued, giving rise to catastrophes—genocide, nuclear fallout and now global warming—that dwarf the violence nature originally wrought.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Climate Change, Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, Theology
