Übergängliche Natur
Kant, Herder, Goethe und die Gegenwart des Klimas
[Transient Nature. Kant, Herder, Goethe, and the Presence of Climate]

While everyone is talking about climate, nature’s time seems to have come to an end with the dawn of the Anthropocene. Without the concept of nature, however, most of modern philosophy would be unthinkable. In her study, Hanna Hamel mediates between positions from the late 18th and early 19th centuries and ecological theories of the present. In her reading of selected texts by Kant, Herder, and Goethe, she outlines a historical-theoretical self-understanding whose critical potential goes beyond the currently common gesture of mere demarcation from ‘modern’ concepts of nature. By juxtaposing it with current reflections by Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and David Lynch, a common concern becomes apparent that can be defined—in Goethe’s terms—as the representation and theorization of a ‘transient’ nature. The historical texts thus become a critical resource for the present.

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