_muNew #Books in Critical #Theory: Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative
#Realism to Ethical #Pessimism" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
Episode webpage: https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/critical-theory/
Media file: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2042128884.mp3
This is so bad. The autor claims to do #philosophy, that is "guided by #science", namely by the laws of #thermodynamics, namely by the ubiquity of #entropy just to then equal entropy with evil.
I do agree, that it is stunning to think about how all of “our” (Including nonhuman lifeforms such as plants) metabolisms are dependent on a total/external energy-influx (aka the sun). #Metabolism IS using out-of-system energy to create states of higher complexity within dynamic local systems, while accelerating out-of-system/total entropy. That just IS the condition of our existence. That is the mode of our being. It seems so absurd to coin this fact (or the fact of ubiquity of entropy) as some kind of absolute #evil.
This is just so weird on so many levels. Let's start with the temporal dimension. If entropy is pure evil, are we then to conclude, that eternal existence would be the essence of good? Entropy will end humanity at some point if nothing else has done so before, that is for sure. But climate catastrophe, to take just one obvious example, is NOT an inevitable effect of entropy — if evil is the end of life and energy-negativ systems are the nature of life, it would seem more logically sound to posit the evil as the thing that lies in "our" (aka human) hands and weird little energy-negative systems that create some states of higher energy-complexity in the eye of their storm as the essentially good (if you have to). But no, instead, the autor claims that he wants to exit anthropocentrism, only to then ascribe the inherently human categories of good and evil to the most basic conditions of our existence, thus achieving the opposite.
Maybe the author is practicing himself the "fashionable nonsense" that he wants to see been "driven out of the academy"?
More importantly, the ethical consequences of this questionable arrangement are devastating: The ethically good that has to stand in, in absence of eternal existence is understood simultaneously as a virtue and as inevitably futile. This is no #ethics for a human future on an exceptional planet, but for individuals who like to think of themselves as exceptional while watching the socio-ecological demise of a planet. It is an ethics for and by #privileged #academics, who still manage to think from a non-position, as if their subject-hood was somehow external to the material world it treats as an object (of knowledge). It is essentially #crypto-conservatism and as such, it fails to do the social and cognitive metabolic work necessary to take side with the ongoingnes of life and with those who are most exposed to its precarity.
It is thus putting wheight to the wrong side of the scales, in this fearful historical moment!
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