Pandora's box reopened : an essay on death, darkness and the meaning of nature

Cowley, Graeme

Pandora's box reopened : an essay on death, darkness and the meaning of nature

Doctoral Thesis

2000

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Religious Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This study seeks, as its primary objective, the formulation of a genuinely ecocentric hermeneutic. It consequently incorporates an argument against those "shallow" schools of ecological philosophy which assess the ecological crisis as simply an issue of enlightened self-interest, or of more effective resource management. More significantly, however, we have sought to deconstruct the mythos of contemporary ecocentric philosophy, itself, in order to demonstrate that its ideological underpinnings are not consistently ecocentric in nature. This polemical task serves to reframe the ecological crisis as, above all, a crisis of affirmation, and comes to yield a threefold problematisation of (ecocentric) meaning: the problem of methodology, or that of the relation between truth and representation; the problem of morality, or that of the relation between truth and value; and the problem of Immanentism, or that of a full-bodied divinity. Such problematisation has been negotiated by the systematic application of ecocentric precepts to an understanding of the relationship between Self, Nature and God. Particular recourse has been made to the category of organic 'interdependence" - or the idea of the profound kinship of the human and the non-human-and the notion of the primacy of "becoming" over "being - or the idea of the fundamental temporality of all existence. The implications of these principles are extracted through a critical dialogue with the thought of Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche- an intellectual lineage which, it is argued, most fully embodies the ecocentric ambition.

Description

Bibliography: leaves 281-289.

Keywords

Religious Studies

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

Full item page