Affirmation of Ecological Reasonings

Abstract: "Affirmation of Ecological Reasonings - What to do with Reasonability in the Anthropocene?"

This project seeks to examine what can be done with the concept of “Reason” in the contested era of the so-called Anthropocene. This concept, so central to occidental philosophy since its very beginnings, has somewhat fallen from grace in the last decades and even centuries that have been marked by various critiques of Reason. It has been asserted that the occidental notion of Reason is deeply entangled with the patriarchal and imperial exclusions that characterize(d) European Modernity, as well as with the corporeal normalizations and ecological and political consequences that are associated with it.

However, what most critical approaches do not radically rethink is the notion of a unity of Reason (with a capital R). To overcome this potential deadlock of a merely critical stance towards “the” Reason, I propose to pluralize Reason to attain better analytical clarity and tentatively develop a post-anthropocentric concept of fluid and multiple reasonings for a changing planetary ecosystem. Through this, we are enabled to a) critically affirm the values and strengths of a classical concept of occidental reasoning, b) show its limitations and problems in the wake of the Anthropocene and c) detect alternative forms of reasonings that are emerging in several contemporary discourses and were always dormant but suppressed by classical Reason (with a capital R) and its tendency to monopolize reasonability.

In speculatively investigating after contemporary forms of “post-anthropocentric”, “new materialist” and ecosophical reasonings, I want to clarify in how much a pluralization can be regarded as a tool for an ecologization of thought. The aim of this project is to help us better understand what is at stake in reasoning about the mattering of the precarious matter that composes the chaotic time of the Anthropocene.