Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei: Thirteen Ways of Thinking About a Blackbird: The Meaning(s) of ‘Nature’
Thursday | June 19, 2025 | 2:45-3:30
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
Western thinking about 'nature' has been implicated in its degradation--metaphysically relegating its materiality to a lower order of being, epistemically imposing quantitative frameworks that facilitate its exploitation, and aesthetically regarding its beauty as an occasion for human pleasure or the elevation of reason. In recent ecocriticism, nature has been rejected as a product of culture, an idea that attends human expansionism; as a romantic fantasy that greenwashes our industrial complex; or as a tool of subjugation that aligns with the degraded earth those deemed opaque to reason. Without diminishing the importance of these critiques, this intervention challenges the dismissal of the concept of nature, and explores the possibility of an ecological pluralism that addresses both our striving to understand nature and its non-absorption by human thought, finding inspiration in philosophical and literary works for possibilities and limits of thinking 'nature.'