On Hegel’s Ground

Jeff Diamanti

doi:10.33280/2310-3817-21-11-1-53-74

Abstract

Climate change is not just about rising sea levels and greenhouse gases. It is also an intensive process of real-time terraforming without any obvious subject verbing the process. This is most visibly underway at the ablation zone of the Earth’s cryosphere. Is it reasonable to situate our understanding of ecological crisis at this new ground? What would it mean to take anthropogenic climate change as the ground for reason amid the ecological crises careening toward the present? This essay returns to the second half of part one of Hegel’s The Science of Logic —the culmination of the Objective Spirit — where something appears from nothing, and it does so in and as “Ground.” I argue that recent conceptual basins of attraction in climate and earth sciences —namely, the feedback loop and the tipping point —intimate a return to elemental philosophy, and that the dialectic of nonidentity that marks Hegel’s philosophy of nature interfaces with the form-matter-content triad thrumming at the culmination of the Objective Spirit. The nonidentity of the earth has been unearthed.

Highlights

The wealth of natural forms, in all their infinitely manifold configuration, is impoverished by the all-pervading power of thought, their vernal life and glowing colours die and fade away
This essay seeks to answer a rather simple question: What would it mean to take anthropogenic climate change as the ground for reason amid the ecological crises careening toward the present? This might seem like a strange question to pose since the very ubiquitous notion of anthropogenic climate change, both across Western university faculties as well as public discourse and policy, would appear to confirm that it has already become the ground of thought today
As many of the leading philosophies of the earth have insisted over the past two decades, the grounding of reason in the terrain of anthropogenesis poses a number of insurmountable paradoxes, not least of which is the nagging antinomy between what Michael Marder (2020: 64) calls earth’s “nonidentity” on the one hand, and the categories we bring to understand its actuality, on the other

Summary

Introduction

The wealth of natural forms, in all their infinitely manifold configuration, is impoverished by the all-pervading power of thought, their vernal life and glowing colours die and fade away. If the earth’s nonidentity formed the ground for reason at the end of the Holocene, it would involve the internalization of nonidentity into the category of Understanding, and, in turn, a geophilosophy of non-reciprocity, or what Hegel (1974: 208) calls the “diamantine identity” of a universality that “contains difference.” This could mean a number of things for how philosophy terms the animate materiality of its ground.

Results

Conclusion