Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology(New Perspectives in Ontology)

Moving between ancient and modern sources, philosophy and theology, and science and popular culture, Sean McGrath offers a genuinely new reflection on what it means to be human in an era of climate change, mass extinction and geoengineering. Engaging with contemporary thinkers in eco-criticism, including Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour and Slavoj Žižek, McGrath argues for a distinctive role for the human being in the universe: the human being is nature come to full consciousness. McGrath’s compelling case for a new Anthropocenic humanism is founded on a reverence for nature, a humanism that is not at the expense of nature, and a naturalism that is not at the expense of the human.

Table of Contents:
Preface; 1. Religion is not only the problem, but the solution; 2. Nature is a symbol, but of what?; 3.The theology of disenchantment; 4. Eco-anxiety; 5. Dark ecology; 6. The human difference; 7. What’s really wrong with Heidegger; 8. Negative ecology; 9. The road not taken; 10. Contemplative politics; 11. Anthropocenic nature; Bibliography.

About the Author :
Sean J. McGrath is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive (EUP, 2021), Thinking Nature. An Essay in Negative Ecology (EUP, 2019), The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious(Routledge, 2012), Heidegger. A Very Critical Introduction (William B. Eerdmans, 2008) and The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Catholic University of America Press, 2006). He is editor of The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook to Schelling (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020), Rethinking German Idealism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) and A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Rodopi, 2010).

Review :
A genuinely new contribution …McGrath avoids the real pitfalls into which so much contemporary discourse about the environment fall. Either humans are entirely unexceptional, mere objects in the universe alongside other objects, or they are so distinct as to be utterly unnatural and separate from the rest of nature or Creation. Escaping this false choice, McGrath argues for the recovery of a sense of humans as natural, alongside other natural beings, but possessing a unique responsibility and vocation. Thinking Nature is … the outcome of an impressive armament of interconnected research projects and a battery of relevant training, cultivated over a career just beginning to fully bloom. In it, McGrath draws upon a decade of scholarship on Heidegger, another decade of pioneering scholarship on Schelling, a variety of published essays on the German mystics, theosophists, medievals and Renaissance Neo-Hermetics who influenced them, doctorates in philosophy and theology, religious training in the Discalced Carmelite tradition, psychoanalytic training in the Jungian school, and insights gleaned from time spent at the helm of an ENGO called For A New Earth (FANE). Thinking Nature is born of the integration of contemplation and activism. Sean McGrath brilliantly deploys the resources of apophatic wisdom in response to the acute ecological challenge of our time. He taps the distinct eco-anxiety of contemporary culture while endorsing a radical contemplative attunement to the call of deep nature. A passionate, timely and audacious book.