Volume 10, 2022
Ethics, Politics, and the Idea of Nature
Robert Bernasconi

Pages 111-120
https://doi.org/10.5840/ecoethica202341342
Against Nature
Pure nature, the nature that we distinguish from grace, spirit, nurture, society, history, culture, and the supernatural is an abstract fiction. A genealogy of the idea of pure nature reveals its source in the problematic theological idea of a purely human nature. But it was subsequently transformed and expanded by Rousseau into the idea of a state of nature from which all else derives. This all-encompassing nature stifles thought by dehistoricizing. Adorno¡¯s ¡°The Idea of a Natural History¡± and Sartre¡¯s offer a dialectical approach that returns us to the concrete.