DeepSummary
In this podcast episode, Greg Ellermann discusses his book 'Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature' with the host. He explains how the Romantic poets and philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Shelley were attuned to the ephemeral and ungraspable aspects of nature, and how they tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism.
Ellermann delves into how the Romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and how they sought to develop a poetics of wilderness that attends to fleeting presence and allows things to be. He examines their engagement with concepts like ether, anthropomorphism, and the relationship between nature and consciousness.
The discussion covers topics such as Shelley's vegetarianism, Wordsworth's poems of encounter, and Kant's struggle to reconcile nature and natural history. Ellermann also discusses his future projects exploring philosophical ideas on non-active action and ethical forms of relation.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The Romantic poets and philosophers were attuned to the ephemeral and ungraspable aspects of nature.
- They tried to develop a 'poetics of wilderness' that attends to nature's fleeting presence and lets things be.
- The Romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual mastery and economic domination of nature.
- They saw philosophy and industrial labor/exploitation as part of the same culture of dominating nature.
- The Romantics valued nature escaping complete human grasp and transformation into raw materials.
- Figures like Kant, Hegel, Wollstonecraft analyzed the relationship between human consciousness and nature.
- Concepts like ether, anthropomorphism were used to rethink human-nature relations beyond capitalist exploitation.
- The episode examines the Romantics' challenge to aesthetics and politics of dominating nature.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Part of what I'm doing here is really just to kind of extend the argument of the Kant chapter into a more explicitly social, political direction. And this is Hegel's move, basically, is to say that Kant gives us this theory of consciousness, right. This theory of consciousness as basically reflective, right. As sort of defined by its own kind of reflection on its capacities, right?“ by Greg Ellermann
- “Essentially that it kind of opens up a space for something to escape, for something in nature, again, to escape cultivation, to escape our efforts, maybe, to, to kind of transform it into raw materials.“ by Greg Ellermann
- “There's something not just analogous, but for Hegel, there's something intimately linked about this sort of coincidence of philosophy, on the one hand, and the reshaping of labor or work, the exploitation of nature in particular, on the other. These things are part and parcel of the same culture for him.“ by Greg Ellermann
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
2/3/24