Nature

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from etymology: in "nature" there is "being born". The natural is what one has by birth, heredity, and power has always invoked it to justify the established order12. He maintains that the concept of nature is a human creation: one must have left nature in order to speak of it, and in this sense history precedes nature3. He distinguishes nature from matter and from the environment. Nature, the object of physics, knows neither good nor evil, only relations of force. It is the realm of necessity and also shows itself within us, for example in hunger45. The environment, the field, the chapel are by contrast products of human labour. He therefore calls himself a defender of the environment and an adversary of nature, and wants man to be its shepherd6. He criticises nature fantasised as a mother, which he links to a pantheism and to Callicles' argument. In Rousseau, he distinguishes a physical sense and a polemical sense: there, nature is the recourse against injustice, and the island is its metonymy.

1. 1Introduction to the upcoming workshops23 Mar 2020 · 1:25:52
2. 2Panzer-philosophy against the cogito: neo-fascism or the ideology of nature (Heidegger, Descartes)5 Mar 2022 · 27:41
3. 3The Phenomenology of Spirit2 Jul 2018 · 1:08:30
4. 4#1.3 Between crisis and war: philosophising?14 Sept 2015 · 32:18
5. 5#1.3 Between crisis and war: philosophising?14 Sept 2015 · 1:07:18
6. 6The world before, the world after (part 2)16 Jan 2021 · 14:04

Summary produced automatically from 90 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.