Conclusion
Summary
In the end, hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized.
Theodor W. Adorno (MM 98)The radical ecologists discussed in Chapter 5 emphasize the unity of nature to the detriment of its diversity. Naess may have conceded that we can debate the nature and limits of the unity of life on this planet, but it is a central tenet of Ecosophy T that life is fundamentally one (1989: 166). Bookchin stressed the unity of nature as well; he gave this idea a Hegelian twist when he argued that nature's unity takes the form of a latent subjectivity that “expresses itself in various gradations, not only as the mentalism of reason, but also as the interactivity, reactivity, and the growing purposive activity of forms” (1991a: 275). And, while Merchant claims that her ethics recognizes both the continuities and the differences between human beings and the rest of the natural world (2003: 217), she views human and non-human nature as identical when she treats them as partners. When she endorses Bohm's process physics, which grounds animate and inanimate matter in the holomovement (ibid.: 209), Merchant again champions unity over diversity.
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- Information
- Adorno on Nature , pp. 155 - 162Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011