Peter Critchley
Peter is an intellectual range rider, with a record of achievement in several subject areas. His research activity demonstrates an ambitious interdisciplinary approach, embracing a diversity of materials drawn from philosophy, history, political economy, urban studies and social and political ecology to develop notions of social, cognitive and ecological praxis. At the heart of Peter's work is a conception of ‘rational freedom.' This idea holds that freedom is a condition of the appropriate arrangement of the cognitive, affective, interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of human life, incorporating essential human attributes from instinct to reason.
Defining politics in the ancient sense of creative self-realisation, Peter seeks to realise the emancipatory themes contained in the 'Greco-Germanic’ tradition of 'rational freedom'. Originating in the critical appropriation of Plato and Aristotle on the modern terrain by Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, the concept of ‘rational freedom’ is developed to affirm a socio-relational and ethical conception of freedom in which individual liberty depends upon and is constituted by the quality of relations with other individuals. Peter therefore stresses the intertwining of ethics and politics within a conception of public community as the good life. Reason is developed in terms of its ethical component alongside its technical component.
Peter applies these themes to contemporary environmental problems, developing the idea of the Ecopolis in terms of a moral ecology.
Peter finds the ethical grounding of 'rational freedom' in transcendent standards of truth and justice as against conventionalism and constructivism. If transcendent standards do not exist, then sooner or later we have to submit to endless struggle in the nexus of power/resistance, a sophist world in which variants of Hobbes and Foucault exist in constant opposition. Against this, Peter affirms a genuine public community not as a condition of freedom and happiness but a dimension of them as human self-actualisation.
You can subscribe to Peter's Being and Place site and receive regular updates here https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/contact-me
Supervisors: Professor Jules Townshend 1995-2001, Gary Banham, and Lawrence Wilde
Defining politics in the ancient sense of creative self-realisation, Peter seeks to realise the emancipatory themes contained in the 'Greco-Germanic’ tradition of 'rational freedom'. Originating in the critical appropriation of Plato and Aristotle on the modern terrain by Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, the concept of ‘rational freedom’ is developed to affirm a socio-relational and ethical conception of freedom in which individual liberty depends upon and is constituted by the quality of relations with other individuals. Peter therefore stresses the intertwining of ethics and politics within a conception of public community as the good life. Reason is developed in terms of its ethical component alongside its technical component.
Peter applies these themes to contemporary environmental problems, developing the idea of the Ecopolis in terms of a moral ecology.
Peter finds the ethical grounding of 'rational freedom' in transcendent standards of truth and justice as against conventionalism and constructivism. If transcendent standards do not exist, then sooner or later we have to submit to endless struggle in the nexus of power/resistance, a sophist world in which variants of Hobbes and Foucault exist in constant opposition. Against this, Peter affirms a genuine public community not as a condition of freedom and happiness but a dimension of them as human self-actualisation.
You can subscribe to Peter's Being and Place site and receive regular updates here https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/contact-me
Supervisors: Professor Jules Townshend 1995-2001, Gary Banham, and Lawrence Wilde
less
InterestsView All (60)
Uploads
Books by Peter Critchley
This book has now been published as The Proletarian Public: Autonomy and Order: The Principle and Practice of Proletarian Self-Emancipation
Philosophers need to penetrate beyond the intellect to identify the principles which were ‘engraved in the human heart in indelible characters’ and thus find truth in the comprehension of the depths of being. This book shows that Rousseau's great achievement is to have embodied this true philosophy in a viable social and political order, uniting the inner landscape and the outer landscape. In coming to understand essential being, Rousseau makes it possible to comprehend the fundamental features of human society, thus enabling us to reach the level of universal principle. The moral "ought-to-be" of philosophy is thus grounded in something real, in human nature and its potentialities, rather than in something impossibly ideal, some abstract standard. Rousseau thus gives individuals a vision of the ideal human society that they would, by nature, create and flourish in in order to become truly human beings. With Rousseau, politics and ethics are united in a social order that enables the creative realisation of the human ontology. For this reason, this book argues that Rousseau remains a contemporary figure.
Vol 1 Dante's Politics of Love - from theory to practice;
Vol 2 Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise - music and metaphysics;
Vol 3 Dante and Rational Freedom - a philosophical and sociological analysis of infernal production, alienation, and rationalisation;
Vol 4 Walking and Talking with Dante: Endless Conversations on the Unending Road - public and personal responses to Dante since his death.
This book conceives philosophy in terms of philosophizing as an active process. The intention of the argument is to restore philosophy to its origins as an ethos, a practice, a way of living for rational beings. Philosophy is therefore presented more as a practice or an activity than as an intellectual exercise or subject discipline. Philosophy is something that one does as a rational being. This is not an invitation to sloppy thinking; it is an invitation to all to philosophize as rational beings. A questioning, critical approach grounded in the rational faculty is taken to be the most salient characteristic of philosophy. This emphasizes intelligence and its application over knowledge.Philosophy is not a question of knowledge but of the application of intelligence. The book proceeds from Socrates as the key figure in this conception of philosophy as philosophizing. Socrates was no ivory tower philosopher but took philosophy to the men and women of 'the real world' in an attempt to get them to support their views and activities with arguments, with good reasons for doing, thinking, stating the things they did. The 'real world' is not the one revealed to ordinary sense experience. This book shows that only by philosophizing can individuals enter the real world.
This book argues that the reality of environmental crisis and the prospect of future social transformation challenges our science and our values. Whilst it is plain that change is normal in the history of the planet and that human beings, as change agents, are very adept at responding to change, the nature of the contemporary environmental crisis is the uncertainty with respect to the levels, character and timings of changes. And the evidence is that the rates of change may well be increasing, with a whole number of practical implications.
The book examines the key questions within the many-sided predicament concerning the factors influencing environmental change and how to respond to that change: How is nature conceived and how should nature be conceived? What should human beings do and how should human beings act? What are the objects and what principles should action be guided by? In putting these questions the paper is concerned to relate Green politics not only to the scientific analysis of the environmental crisis but above all to moral, cultural and psychological states and attitudes.
This implies that ecologists need to discover and advance answers to the moral, social and political questions that are of most concern to individuals. This comes with the corollary that ecologists in politics should leave most of their scientific capital behind and address individuals on the level of the issues that most concern them. What kind of world do people want to live in? What kind of social and natural landscape fits this world? What contribution can people make and what can people do to move that part of the world in which they live and work in this direction, whether as individuals alone or as part of a collective project? Of course, the life support systems of planet earth is a universal cause which gives some substance to notions of the common good. Humankind as a whole has a common interest in protecting life on this planet. Ecology as politics can therefore envisage the inclusive politics that has been pursued by the great religions and the grand narratives of politics, but which has continued to prove elusive. The elusive character of the general interest and the universal ethic should warn anyone thinking that building consensus is easy. In pursuing the common good, human beings are approaching the universal from very uncommon ground.
So the goal of an inclusive environmentalism involves a re-thinking of ethics, one capable of integrating a diversity of social movements in a common moral cause. The goal is to act and make a contribution so as to create a liveable and sustainable world for all, humans and nonhumans alike.
The main challenge is not technical and institutional but moral and psychological, the way that the human personality has been moulded to fit the system. For the best part of a century, a long succession of thinkers, politicians and advertisers have urged individuals to throw off moral, psychic and communal restraint to act on impulse, yield to desire, and abandon measure in self-gratification. The result is an inability to think for the long term common good.
These observations are shown to point to the need to embed a cognitive praxis within the institutional framework of government and politics so that actions and outcomes are more closely connected, greater cooperation and coordination is achieved between actors, greater clarity is expressed with regard to decision making results, and insight into long term ends comes to inform short term choices.
Rather than concentrate on achieving predictability within existing modes of thought, action and organisation, the argument of this book is that the emphasis should be upon increasing adaptability through the innovation of new modes on the basis of immanent lines of development. This makes the affirmation of ecological and social capacity building as at least a much a part of Green politics as campaigns for votes and office. The position emphasises human beings as makers, as doers, as change agents capable of assuming ethical and political control of a world which is in large part self-made. This argument is developed in terms of concepts and values, mentalities and modalities, which allow for a plurality of meanings, institutions and practices which are adaptable in face of new developments and unforeseen events — and which also facilitate positive and coherent responses to change. This commitment to praxis as the means by which human agents reclaim the ethical content of a self-made world is considered worthy in its own right, as well as being an integral part of dealing with the challenges presented by climatic change."
This book has been published in paper form and can be found on Amazon
In the past couple of years there have been growing demands that ‘the greens’ abandon certain principles and policies with which they are most identified and embrace the contributions that certain new technologies can make to resolving the environmental crisis.
This book examines the case for planetary engineering and management that seeks to redefine and reorganise environmentalism around nuclear power, biotechnology, GM food and geoengineering. This amounts to moral and political disarmament of the environmental movement and can be resisted. This book examines what these proposals amount to and what kind of thinking – and politics – lies behind them.
Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Mark Lynas follows suit and entitles his book The God Species.
These books focus almost exclusively on technology and offer technological solutions to the environmental crisis. There is nothing on morality, an explicit repudiation of ‘ideology’, little on social practices, and a disdain of politics which always seems to slant against socialism and the left.
There is a basic flaw running through these books and the clue is there in the references to god and gods. The environmental crisis ought to have concentrated minds and caused us to take the notion of natural limits and planetary boundaries more seriously. However, far from coming to terms with the Faustian bargains which lie at the heart of modernity, the inversion of means and ends, the enlargement of means at the expense of ends, the planetary engineers come to invest our technologies with a divine power. Brand and Lynas do not revalue the dignity of human beings as moral beings capable of assuming responsibility for their powers and exercising choice. Instead, they equate power with technology. This is the Faustian delusion at its most crude. Far from resolving our predicament, Brand and Lynas do not even recognise it. They cannot see that the price for Faustian pacts is now being demanded. Instead, they still think that our technology, reliance upon which has brought us to this predicament, will save us. It soon becomes apparent that what Lynas and Brand and the planetary engineers and managers are offering is a massive gamble dressed up as a technological fix. The irony is that the claims made for technology are pitched at such a high level, overriding so much within culture and politics and ethics, that they are likely to rebound.
This gamble can be refused. What Jacques Ellul identified decades ago as ‘the technological bluff’ can be called. We can refuse the bribe of the megamachine. The promise of salvation through technology has never been rendered so bare. The basic rationale of the gamble urged on us by Lynas and Brand is not the pull of a better life but the push of environmental necessity. The old promise of science and technology has never sounded so weak.
Against assertions that our divinity is located in our technology, this book retorts:
God does not play Dice with Gaia.
Which brings us to James Lovelock and his Gaia thesis. It is worth wondering why, when the environmental crisis has allowed us to recall the name of Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, from the ancient past, divinity remains firmly and exclusively male in these books emphasising our technological power. For all of the talk of gods in the books by Lynas and Brand, there is one single solitary reference to ‘goddess’, by Brand, and even then it is a passing reference to Lovelock’s Gaia, in parenthesis. Lovelock’s Gaia, it has to be made clear, is not the Gaia of myth but a Gaia of science. Lovelock is proud that Gaia is a scientific theory and he loathes any New Age associations. Fine. Except that Gaia as proposed by Lovelock is a machine rather than an organism. Lovelock believes that Nature is alive, but he admits he can’t offer any scientific proof to back his intuition. Strictly speaking, the Gaia that James Lovelock presents scientifically is a self-regulating machine more akin to cybernetics than organicism. So, in addition to the books by Lynas and Brand, it is worth also examining James Lovelock’s book from 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. In the arguments of technocrats, Gaia has vanished already. And perhaps she was not even present in Lovelock’s argument from the start. Gaia the Earth Goddess seems to be no more than the ghost in ‘the machine.’
I develop my case in three parts.
In the first part I examine Lovelock’s Vanishing Face of Gaia, Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and Lynas’ The God Species in turn. I shall take these books on with respect to specific points, examining the cases made for nuclear energy, biotechnology, GE food and geoengineering. In addition, I take issue with the mode of argumentation adopted in these books. Far from being a balanced discussion of the arguments, the authors display a highly tendentious approach, exhibiting a tendency to set up straw men, to stereotype and caricature, to adopt of selective approach to the evidence, to pose false antitheses, and portray alternative views in the worst possible light. I also comment on the books as a concealed, covert politics, a politics which hides behind the supposed neutrality of science and technology and which expresses itself in a series of casual sneers at ‘environmentalists’, ‘greens’, ‘leftists’, ‘extremists’, ‘anarchists’. It all amounts to a consistent repudiation of ‘the left’ in politics and a denigration of the connection of the Greens with the Reds.
In the second part I shall set the books by Lovelock, Brand and Lynas within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature.
In the third part I address the anomaly that whilst the new ecological sensibility is developing under the auspices of Lovelock’s Gaia thesis, the arguments are of a piece with H.G. Wells’ old fantasy of ‘Men as Gods’. Men? Gods? Mark Lynas writes of human beings as ‘the god species’. Why not the Goddess species? Brand says we are as gods and so must get good at being as gods. Machines and men, men and gods, gods and monsters. It’s the Frankenstein tale writ large. To become as gods, it is as well to know where we have come from. To have a future, we need to remember our origins. We can easily rewrite Brand’s quote to gain a fuller sense of who we are and what we need to do: ‘we have been as gods for too long, but now we HAVE to get good as being goddesses’. So I want to know whatever happened to the Goddess and all the other goddesses.
To make things very clear from the start, this does not involve rejecting patriarchy for matriarchy, for tearing down technological urban civilisation and going ‘back to Nature’. It seems so obvious that as the ancient world of the goddess was overthrown by monotheistic world of the single white male, men dominated over women, war replaced peace, civilisation suppressed nature. Go back to nature and peace and harmony will reign once more. If only things were so simple. The world of ‘the Goddess’ was never so benign. It was a world where natural necessity and biological imperatives rule. The danger is this, if we fail to assume conscious control of our technics, we will be driven by the social necessity of an expansionary techno-industrial civilisation to transgress planetary boundaries and as a result be thrown back into a world of harsh natural necessity. That’s the Gaia that Lovelock threatens us with.
Unravelling this little riddle lies at the heart of the critique I offer and the principles I outline.
This book has now been published in paper form and is available on Amazon
John Bellamy Foster's "The Return of Nature" presents the work of a range of influential socialist scientists and thinkers to establish the historical and theoretical connections of socialism and ecology.
Foster’s intellectual and political genealogy reveals a chain of thinkers whose work connects the distinctive – active, dynamic, metabolic - materialism of Marx and Engels to the greatest ecological thinkers of the twentieth century and beyond. The book thus elaborates upon the emergent ecological materialism that Foster, in his previous works, discerned in the metabolic thought of Marx.
Foster shows that in the course of the century after Marx's death, socialists and other radical materialists made fundamental contributions to the development and understanding of ecology, both as a natural science but also, and most importantly, as a socio-ecological critique, going well beyond socially imprecise notions of 'human activity' and 'the economy' to locate environmental problems in the normal operation of the capital system. This identification of the socio-economic forces driving ecological destruction is imperative if they are to be uprooted and supplanted through systemic transformation. The book contains insightful discussions of environmental questions over time, relating these issues to the contradictory dynamics of an accumulative logic that is detached systemically from the sources of ecological (and social) sustainability. The lesson is that society and nature are involved in continuous metabolic interaction, which may be destructive or creative, depending upon the specific forms of mediation.
Examining the relation between humanity and nature - with production-labour within specific social forms as a mediating term – is central to the work of the figures examined in this book, defining a social-natural dialectical ecology.
The people that I refer to as planetary engineers and managers do not revalue the dignity of human beings as moral beings capable of assuming responsibility for their powers and exercising choice. Instead, they equate power with technology. This is the Faustian delusion at its most crude. Far from resolving our predicament, Brand and Lynas do not even recognise it. They cannot see that the price for Faustian pacts is now being demanded. Instead, they still think that our technology, reliance upon which has brought us to this predicament, will save us. It soon becomes apparent that what Lynas and Brand and the planetary engineers and managers are offering is a massive gamble dressed up as a technological fix. The irony is that the claims made for technology are pitched at such a high level, overriding so much within culture and politics and ethics, that they are likely to rebound.
This gamble can be refused. What Jacques Ellul identified decades ago as ‘the technological bluff’ can be called. We can refuse the bribe of the megamachine. The promise of salvation through technology has never been rendered so bare. The basic rationale of the gamble urged on us by Lynas and Brand is not the pull of a better life but the push of environmental necessity. The old promise of science and technology has never sounded so weak.
In this second part of Of Gods and Gaia, I set the case for planetary engineering and management within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature.
Forget the "men as gods" delusion.
"It's our limitations that keep us sane."
Dr. Bertha Simos
This book has now been published as The Proletarian Public: Autonomy and Order: The Principle and Practice of Proletarian Self-Emancipation
Philosophers need to penetrate beyond the intellect to identify the principles which were ‘engraved in the human heart in indelible characters’ and thus find truth in the comprehension of the depths of being. This book shows that Rousseau's great achievement is to have embodied this true philosophy in a viable social and political order, uniting the inner landscape and the outer landscape. In coming to understand essential being, Rousseau makes it possible to comprehend the fundamental features of human society, thus enabling us to reach the level of universal principle. The moral "ought-to-be" of philosophy is thus grounded in something real, in human nature and its potentialities, rather than in something impossibly ideal, some abstract standard. Rousseau thus gives individuals a vision of the ideal human society that they would, by nature, create and flourish in in order to become truly human beings. With Rousseau, politics and ethics are united in a social order that enables the creative realisation of the human ontology. For this reason, this book argues that Rousseau remains a contemporary figure.
Vol 1 Dante's Politics of Love - from theory to practice;
Vol 2 Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise - music and metaphysics;
Vol 3 Dante and Rational Freedom - a philosophical and sociological analysis of infernal production, alienation, and rationalisation;
Vol 4 Walking and Talking with Dante: Endless Conversations on the Unending Road - public and personal responses to Dante since his death.
This book conceives philosophy in terms of philosophizing as an active process. The intention of the argument is to restore philosophy to its origins as an ethos, a practice, a way of living for rational beings. Philosophy is therefore presented more as a practice or an activity than as an intellectual exercise or subject discipline. Philosophy is something that one does as a rational being. This is not an invitation to sloppy thinking; it is an invitation to all to philosophize as rational beings. A questioning, critical approach grounded in the rational faculty is taken to be the most salient characteristic of philosophy. This emphasizes intelligence and its application over knowledge.Philosophy is not a question of knowledge but of the application of intelligence. The book proceeds from Socrates as the key figure in this conception of philosophy as philosophizing. Socrates was no ivory tower philosopher but took philosophy to the men and women of 'the real world' in an attempt to get them to support their views and activities with arguments, with good reasons for doing, thinking, stating the things they did. The 'real world' is not the one revealed to ordinary sense experience. This book shows that only by philosophizing can individuals enter the real world.
This book argues that the reality of environmental crisis and the prospect of future social transformation challenges our science and our values. Whilst it is plain that change is normal in the history of the planet and that human beings, as change agents, are very adept at responding to change, the nature of the contemporary environmental crisis is the uncertainty with respect to the levels, character and timings of changes. And the evidence is that the rates of change may well be increasing, with a whole number of practical implications.
The book examines the key questions within the many-sided predicament concerning the factors influencing environmental change and how to respond to that change: How is nature conceived and how should nature be conceived? What should human beings do and how should human beings act? What are the objects and what principles should action be guided by? In putting these questions the paper is concerned to relate Green politics not only to the scientific analysis of the environmental crisis but above all to moral, cultural and psychological states and attitudes.
This implies that ecologists need to discover and advance answers to the moral, social and political questions that are of most concern to individuals. This comes with the corollary that ecologists in politics should leave most of their scientific capital behind and address individuals on the level of the issues that most concern them. What kind of world do people want to live in? What kind of social and natural landscape fits this world? What contribution can people make and what can people do to move that part of the world in which they live and work in this direction, whether as individuals alone or as part of a collective project? Of course, the life support systems of planet earth is a universal cause which gives some substance to notions of the common good. Humankind as a whole has a common interest in protecting life on this planet. Ecology as politics can therefore envisage the inclusive politics that has been pursued by the great religions and the grand narratives of politics, but which has continued to prove elusive. The elusive character of the general interest and the universal ethic should warn anyone thinking that building consensus is easy. In pursuing the common good, human beings are approaching the universal from very uncommon ground.
So the goal of an inclusive environmentalism involves a re-thinking of ethics, one capable of integrating a diversity of social movements in a common moral cause. The goal is to act and make a contribution so as to create a liveable and sustainable world for all, humans and nonhumans alike.
The main challenge is not technical and institutional but moral and psychological, the way that the human personality has been moulded to fit the system. For the best part of a century, a long succession of thinkers, politicians and advertisers have urged individuals to throw off moral, psychic and communal restraint to act on impulse, yield to desire, and abandon measure in self-gratification. The result is an inability to think for the long term common good.
These observations are shown to point to the need to embed a cognitive praxis within the institutional framework of government and politics so that actions and outcomes are more closely connected, greater cooperation and coordination is achieved between actors, greater clarity is expressed with regard to decision making results, and insight into long term ends comes to inform short term choices.
Rather than concentrate on achieving predictability within existing modes of thought, action and organisation, the argument of this book is that the emphasis should be upon increasing adaptability through the innovation of new modes on the basis of immanent lines of development. This makes the affirmation of ecological and social capacity building as at least a much a part of Green politics as campaigns for votes and office. The position emphasises human beings as makers, as doers, as change agents capable of assuming ethical and political control of a world which is in large part self-made. This argument is developed in terms of concepts and values, mentalities and modalities, which allow for a plurality of meanings, institutions and practices which are adaptable in face of new developments and unforeseen events — and which also facilitate positive and coherent responses to change. This commitment to praxis as the means by which human agents reclaim the ethical content of a self-made world is considered worthy in its own right, as well as being an integral part of dealing with the challenges presented by climatic change."
This book has been published in paper form and can be found on Amazon
In the past couple of years there have been growing demands that ‘the greens’ abandon certain principles and policies with which they are most identified and embrace the contributions that certain new technologies can make to resolving the environmental crisis.
This book examines the case for planetary engineering and management that seeks to redefine and reorganise environmentalism around nuclear power, biotechnology, GM food and geoengineering. This amounts to moral and political disarmament of the environmental movement and can be resisted. This book examines what these proposals amount to and what kind of thinking – and politics – lies behind them.
Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Mark Lynas follows suit and entitles his book The God Species.
These books focus almost exclusively on technology and offer technological solutions to the environmental crisis. There is nothing on morality, an explicit repudiation of ‘ideology’, little on social practices, and a disdain of politics which always seems to slant against socialism and the left.
There is a basic flaw running through these books and the clue is there in the references to god and gods. The environmental crisis ought to have concentrated minds and caused us to take the notion of natural limits and planetary boundaries more seriously. However, far from coming to terms with the Faustian bargains which lie at the heart of modernity, the inversion of means and ends, the enlargement of means at the expense of ends, the planetary engineers come to invest our technologies with a divine power. Brand and Lynas do not revalue the dignity of human beings as moral beings capable of assuming responsibility for their powers and exercising choice. Instead, they equate power with technology. This is the Faustian delusion at its most crude. Far from resolving our predicament, Brand and Lynas do not even recognise it. They cannot see that the price for Faustian pacts is now being demanded. Instead, they still think that our technology, reliance upon which has brought us to this predicament, will save us. It soon becomes apparent that what Lynas and Brand and the planetary engineers and managers are offering is a massive gamble dressed up as a technological fix. The irony is that the claims made for technology are pitched at such a high level, overriding so much within culture and politics and ethics, that they are likely to rebound.
This gamble can be refused. What Jacques Ellul identified decades ago as ‘the technological bluff’ can be called. We can refuse the bribe of the megamachine. The promise of salvation through technology has never been rendered so bare. The basic rationale of the gamble urged on us by Lynas and Brand is not the pull of a better life but the push of environmental necessity. The old promise of science and technology has never sounded so weak.
Against assertions that our divinity is located in our technology, this book retorts:
God does not play Dice with Gaia.
Which brings us to James Lovelock and his Gaia thesis. It is worth wondering why, when the environmental crisis has allowed us to recall the name of Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, from the ancient past, divinity remains firmly and exclusively male in these books emphasising our technological power. For all of the talk of gods in the books by Lynas and Brand, there is one single solitary reference to ‘goddess’, by Brand, and even then it is a passing reference to Lovelock’s Gaia, in parenthesis. Lovelock’s Gaia, it has to be made clear, is not the Gaia of myth but a Gaia of science. Lovelock is proud that Gaia is a scientific theory and he loathes any New Age associations. Fine. Except that Gaia as proposed by Lovelock is a machine rather than an organism. Lovelock believes that Nature is alive, but he admits he can’t offer any scientific proof to back his intuition. Strictly speaking, the Gaia that James Lovelock presents scientifically is a self-regulating machine more akin to cybernetics than organicism. So, in addition to the books by Lynas and Brand, it is worth also examining James Lovelock’s book from 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. In the arguments of technocrats, Gaia has vanished already. And perhaps she was not even present in Lovelock’s argument from the start. Gaia the Earth Goddess seems to be no more than the ghost in ‘the machine.’
I develop my case in three parts.
In the first part I examine Lovelock’s Vanishing Face of Gaia, Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and Lynas’ The God Species in turn. I shall take these books on with respect to specific points, examining the cases made for nuclear energy, biotechnology, GE food and geoengineering. In addition, I take issue with the mode of argumentation adopted in these books. Far from being a balanced discussion of the arguments, the authors display a highly tendentious approach, exhibiting a tendency to set up straw men, to stereotype and caricature, to adopt of selective approach to the evidence, to pose false antitheses, and portray alternative views in the worst possible light. I also comment on the books as a concealed, covert politics, a politics which hides behind the supposed neutrality of science and technology and which expresses itself in a series of casual sneers at ‘environmentalists’, ‘greens’, ‘leftists’, ‘extremists’, ‘anarchists’. It all amounts to a consistent repudiation of ‘the left’ in politics and a denigration of the connection of the Greens with the Reds.
In the second part I shall set the books by Lovelock, Brand and Lynas within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature.
In the third part I address the anomaly that whilst the new ecological sensibility is developing under the auspices of Lovelock’s Gaia thesis, the arguments are of a piece with H.G. Wells’ old fantasy of ‘Men as Gods’. Men? Gods? Mark Lynas writes of human beings as ‘the god species’. Why not the Goddess species? Brand says we are as gods and so must get good at being as gods. Machines and men, men and gods, gods and monsters. It’s the Frankenstein tale writ large. To become as gods, it is as well to know where we have come from. To have a future, we need to remember our origins. We can easily rewrite Brand’s quote to gain a fuller sense of who we are and what we need to do: ‘we have been as gods for too long, but now we HAVE to get good as being goddesses’. So I want to know whatever happened to the Goddess and all the other goddesses.
To make things very clear from the start, this does not involve rejecting patriarchy for matriarchy, for tearing down technological urban civilisation and going ‘back to Nature’. It seems so obvious that as the ancient world of the goddess was overthrown by monotheistic world of the single white male, men dominated over women, war replaced peace, civilisation suppressed nature. Go back to nature and peace and harmony will reign once more. If only things were so simple. The world of ‘the Goddess’ was never so benign. It was a world where natural necessity and biological imperatives rule. The danger is this, if we fail to assume conscious control of our technics, we will be driven by the social necessity of an expansionary techno-industrial civilisation to transgress planetary boundaries and as a result be thrown back into a world of harsh natural necessity. That’s the Gaia that Lovelock threatens us with.
Unravelling this little riddle lies at the heart of the critique I offer and the principles I outline.
This book has now been published in paper form and is available on Amazon
John Bellamy Foster's "The Return of Nature" presents the work of a range of influential socialist scientists and thinkers to establish the historical and theoretical connections of socialism and ecology.
Foster’s intellectual and political genealogy reveals a chain of thinkers whose work connects the distinctive – active, dynamic, metabolic - materialism of Marx and Engels to the greatest ecological thinkers of the twentieth century and beyond. The book thus elaborates upon the emergent ecological materialism that Foster, in his previous works, discerned in the metabolic thought of Marx.
Foster shows that in the course of the century after Marx's death, socialists and other radical materialists made fundamental contributions to the development and understanding of ecology, both as a natural science but also, and most importantly, as a socio-ecological critique, going well beyond socially imprecise notions of 'human activity' and 'the economy' to locate environmental problems in the normal operation of the capital system. This identification of the socio-economic forces driving ecological destruction is imperative if they are to be uprooted and supplanted through systemic transformation. The book contains insightful discussions of environmental questions over time, relating these issues to the contradictory dynamics of an accumulative logic that is detached systemically from the sources of ecological (and social) sustainability. The lesson is that society and nature are involved in continuous metabolic interaction, which may be destructive or creative, depending upon the specific forms of mediation.
Examining the relation between humanity and nature - with production-labour within specific social forms as a mediating term – is central to the work of the figures examined in this book, defining a social-natural dialectical ecology.
The people that I refer to as planetary engineers and managers do not revalue the dignity of human beings as moral beings capable of assuming responsibility for their powers and exercising choice. Instead, they equate power with technology. This is the Faustian delusion at its most crude. Far from resolving our predicament, Brand and Lynas do not even recognise it. They cannot see that the price for Faustian pacts is now being demanded. Instead, they still think that our technology, reliance upon which has brought us to this predicament, will save us. It soon becomes apparent that what Lynas and Brand and the planetary engineers and managers are offering is a massive gamble dressed up as a technological fix. The irony is that the claims made for technology are pitched at such a high level, overriding so much within culture and politics and ethics, that they are likely to rebound.
This gamble can be refused. What Jacques Ellul identified decades ago as ‘the technological bluff’ can be called. We can refuse the bribe of the megamachine. The promise of salvation through technology has never been rendered so bare. The basic rationale of the gamble urged on us by Lynas and Brand is not the pull of a better life but the push of environmental necessity. The old promise of science and technology has never sounded so weak.
In this second part of Of Gods and Gaia, I set the case for planetary engineering and management within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature.
Forget the "men as gods" delusion.
"It's our limitations that keep us sane."
Dr. Bertha Simos
Institutional Reformation and Spiritual Regeneration in the Thoughts and Deeds of Gerrard Winstanley.
In praise and celebration of the Digger Commonwealth
Turning the World Upside Down
First published praxisphilosophie.de
This paper is now published in the book, Peter Critchley "The Rational Moral Freedom of Immanuel Kant."
It argues that although Kant has been understood as a deontologist pure and simple, Kant sought not to turn away from virtue, but to place virtue ethics on a more secure foundation. In recovering Kant’s conception of virtue, this paper argues that Kant sought to build an ethical theory based not just on rules but upon agents and the kinds of lives they lead. The paper argues that Kant’s great achievement is to have created a moral theory which, in paying close attention to both the life plans of moral agents and to their discrete acts, combined rule ethics and virtue ethics.
First published praxisphilosophie.de
This paper is now published
12 September 2014
At a time of utter division and violence, to what extent does the world remain, or become, "one world"?
https://www.meetup.com/The-Left-Bank-of-Orange-County/events/195657892/
Plato and Aristotle defined the concept and established the philosophical foundations of what may be called ‘rational freedom’. Plato and Aristotle defined the key themes of ‘rational freedom’ and sought to show how these could be embodied in the polity. The most important question discussed by Plato and Aristotle concerns the nature of the relation of the individual to the political community. The human being as a zoon politikon or social animal is not an isolated, autonomous entity but a part of society, living in a social context. It follows that the flourishing of the individual required a social context that is devoted to realising the good life. Individuals as social beings realise their essential human potentialities in and through the political community, in relation to rather than as against each other. The principal concern of Plato and Aristotle was to discover the norms and rules that govern the life of the political community as the good life enabling the flourishing of the human individual."
Pythagoras taught the means to attain freedom through rational conduct and the philosophic life. Pythagoras is the origin of the Platonic trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful. His metaphysics enables the Intellect to apprehend and to know the ultimate TRUTH. His moral precepts ensure the conformity of human conduct with the perfect GOODNESS. His aesthetics cultivate the adoration of the supreme BEAUTY, inspiring the Muses and the Arts. Mathematics, music, art and architecture – the highest human achievements - all adhere to the cosmic principle of harmony – the music of the spheres. The failure to respect harmonic laws generates ugliness and disorder, which is to sin against the Muses. Respect for harmonic laws presupposes a state of soul open to Intelligible Beauty and gives human beings access the divinely beautiful order of the cosmos. The beauty in the eye of the beholder is the divinely beautiful order of the cosmos which human beings are capable of seeing if their souls have been opened by mathematics, music, philosophy, art and architecture."
The argument is that there is no peaceful Eden to return to in the past. A pacific existence is something to be achieved in future society. The Edenic past may well be a myth, but is a necessary myth which attempts to get human beings to accept the limits of knowledge and seek a more harmonious and balanced relationship with their world.
The paper criticises the technological imperative as the new idolatry, the sorcerer’s apprentice, Dr Frankenstein's monster. Since, as Nietzsche pointed out, we have killed god, it is now necessary to creatively live up to the power that is knowledge. This requires that we place our technical means in their proper place as means, restricting excess and tempering possibility according to humane scale and qualitative ends.
The moral is that we need to understand that we are a unity of the finite and the infinite, we need to distinguish between the transitory and the permanent, stop obsessing about passing circumstances, stop being overwhelmed by the whims of fame and fortune, and identify with what is of lasting value in our selves in building a life.
Don’t fight against the course of events, let things happen naturally through identifying oneself and one’s life with the cosmic rhythm.
The paper concerns what it takes to be true to oneself and coming to be the person you know you can be. This is the joy of discovering what you were born to be.
The moral I want to draw is not that the human species is inherently destructive and that civilisation is doomed. Rather, the argument is that the original polytheism of gods and goddesses living in peaceful coexistence points to the possibility of reconstituting harmony at a higher level of development. If I point to the self-destructive aspects of civilisation, particularly the technics of power and domination, then I’m not arguing that this is inevitable.
This thesis examines a range of issues raised on the topic of European industry and economy, organising the material according to a thematic structure, which is designed to give continuity and coherence to the argument. The question of theory and method is addressed at the outset, followed by applied analysis with respect to the problems facing industry in the European economy and in the global economy generally. The opening chapters therefore formulate the theoretical and conceptual apparatus that is applied throughout the rest of the thesis. The argument proceeds to analyse key aspects of European industry in the context of an increasingly globalised environment. Having discussed problems and prospects, the thesis draws some conclusions and identifies the key elements of a solution."
The bulk of the focus in this volume falls on the Rhenish-Scandinavian models of the social market economy. These models are shown to combine greater levels of economic efficiency and social justice and equality than the liberal economies of the US and UK."
This volume examines attempts to establish universalism up to and including the Renaissance.
The flaw in the attempt to establish the universal state is easy to identify: universalist theories and programmes have tried to impose beliefs, practices and identities from above and from the outside, from the centre outwards and downwards, which can only be achieved on an enduring basis by consent. These attempts pay insufficient attention to the need to identify the conditions and relations facilitating the individual grasp of the universal via social and discursive interaction."
This volume locates the structuring and functioning of the city in the interplay between relations of production, consumption and exchange, revealing capital to be the architect of the socio-spatial order of alien power, creating the physical landscape for accumulation. The perspectives of Harvey (1973 1975) and French urban theory (eg Lamarche 1976) are developed to show how the expansionary dynamic of the capital system generates the overscale anti-city which violates the “rational” urban principles pertaining to the physical, socio-relational and anthropological infrastructure for human self-realisation.
Global shifts and connections are examined with respect to economic relations, as well as to the media, electronic landscapes and communications to contest assertions of the end of geographic space (Lash and Urry 1994). The argument identifies possibilities for a renewed emphasis upon place, highlighting the intersection of the local and the global in a regional politics of scale (Storper 1997). The chapter adapts the “glocal” conception of Swyngedouw (1997) to project the recovery of the city state ideal in the face of the globalised city region.
Taking the view that a genuine regeneration depends upon the quality of human relationships, the key task emerges as that of reconciling the new techno-urban paradigm with place based social meaning so as to check escalating metropolarities."
This volume proceeds to examine the possibility of reasserting place-based social meaning through the principle of community control. Developing themes and perspectives drawn from the work of Castells (1983), urban social movements are examined as social experiments in the transition from the top-down, centralised “monological” modes of thought, action and organisation to recursive-interactive “dialogical” modes which emphasise the citizen interaction, association and discourse capable of constituting urban life as a public sphere. The principle of “rational freedom” connecting the freedom of each individual with the freedom of all individuals thus comes to be placed on an associative basis within community."
The argument will consider the work of a number of postmarxist democratic theorists in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the state-civil society dualism at the heart of Marx’s critical project. The common theme uniting contemporary radical, democratic and liberal thinkers is the need to ensure the institutional separation of the state from civil society. Contemporary liberal and democratic works are characterised by an emphasis upon pluralism, the necessity for the state, the delimitation of the state power in the interests of individual liberty, and an overall hostility towards attempts to replace representative democracy by direct democracy. The overemphasis upon institutional separation as a condition of democracy is shown to be mistaken. Instead, democracy is shown to be capable of being achieved only as the result of a singular process in which the power of control alienated to the state and capital is practically reappropriated and reorganised by society as a social power subject to conscious democratic control within everyday life. Power is restored to human proportion and dimension. The faith that democratic theorists place in the state codification of rights is thereby rendered problematical. Individuals capable of exercising power in their everyday life no longer require the protection of rights."
The final section considers the political implications of Marx's approach to morality with regard to the debate between liberals and their communitarian critics. This has been one of the influential debates in recent times, especially in terms of evaluating the respective merits of individual freedom and socio-political bonds. In changing the register to individual needs and capacities within a conception of community and the good, Marx exposes the liberal emphasis upon rights to be misplaced. At the same time, the communitarian conception of 'community' and common interest is shown to be similarly vitiated by its failure to escape the abstract dualisms of individual and society characterising the liberal framework. One of the advantages of approaching Marx in terms of the modern polis democracy lies in the ability to avoid this debate by repudiating the liberal antithesis of individual and community. By such means, Marx incorporates aspects of both liberalism and communitarianism. But he does so by completely rupturing the liberal framework of rights and justice, exposing the state as an alienated social power and as an antagonistic form which imposes an abstract moral and legal code as it regulates and rationalises capitalist class relations."
Marx will be understood as seeking the restitution of human powers at the level of the reciprocal relations between individuals within the everyday world. His materialism is affirmative in the way that it asserts the sensuous, active, direct and rooted aspects of life over abstraction, dualism, rationality, system. The everyday life world of real individuals is the terrain for the embodied experience which provides the basis for dissolving that abstracted rationalism divorced from human life which Marx discerned in Hegel's doctrine of the state. Marx's life-affirming materialism is aimed at overcoming the way in which human-social power has become disembodied, invested in an institutional-systemic world raised above real society, disempowering individuals in the process."