“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, May 16, 2009

Beautiful Soul Syndrome

In “Talks and Stuff“ in the right hand column, I just uploaded a pdf of the talk I was scheduled to give at UCLA this wednesday (May 20). Unfortunately I won't be able to make it in person—but I'll be podcasting the talk for my Romanticism course on iTunes U. Let me know what you think if you read it or hear it. It's for a seminar called “A Cultural Prehistory of Environmentalism.”

The talk is about the way in which some forms of environmentalism are caught in Hegel's dialectic of the beautiful soul—an attitude towards reality that sees the world as evil.


Beautiful Soul Syndrome

No comments: