James Fontini

This essay takes the work of Friedrich Hölderlin as a vehicle for reframing the question of ecology. Orienting itself around the problem of commonality and individuality in modern European philosophy, it begins by addressing Hölderlin’s critique of reflexive self-consciousness and his advocacy for a pre-reflexive subject modeled on the tragic subject. The notion of a pre-reflexive subject is tied intrinsically to Hölderlin’s thinking of nature as indivisible, structured as an incessant, irresolvable tension between becoming and dissolution. Humankind, as pre-reflexive, is located as or within this tension. On the basis of this, a paradigm of human subjectivity as ecological awareness is proposed. Ecological awareness is given as the experience of an undivided nature in the person in ways that preclude the intentional, subjective manipulation of nature. The essay then closes by reflecting on the impact this view of subjectivity has on our understanding of language and raises the question of a new grammar that might match humankind’s self understanding as ecological awareness.

This article was initially written (in 2020) for a private collection gifted to Alexander García Düttmann on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It explores themes of education and the transmission of knowledge in relation to figures of youth and extinction. Georg Trakl's poem "Abendlied" serves as the essay's centerpiece and is brought into dialogue with comments made by Levi-Strauss on a 'prima material'. Certain ecological overtones appear when an overzealous Prometheanism is contrasted with a labor of re-creation.

A comprehensive reading of Heidegger's work from the mid-1930s to the 1960s that seeks to develop an ecological thinking rooted in reflections on the Heraclitean 'hen', relationality, and the impossibility of totality. An elaboration of the structural homology between Heidegger's use of the terms 'Technik' and 'metaphysics' sets the stage for his later work or topology. The Spätwerk is presented as an irresolvable polarity between 'Technik' and 'Ereignis', between a totalizing movement and a movement of disruption. This serves as the basis for reflections on human experience of and as the ecological. Nature as Limit serves as a contribution to both eco-philosophy and to philosophical methodology more broadly, with philological and hermeneutic excursions that engage the relationship between language and the ecological motifs being developed in the work.

The article sketches a view of nature as a movement undermining totality. Awareness of our entanglement in an inherently incomplete movement forces us to rethink or reinvent our relationship to nature. The view provided here has been developed by drawing heavily from the later work of Martin Heidegger, moving with and beyond it in an examination of the limitations of Western philosophy in approaching questions of nature and ecology. Thinking ecologically becomes a question of grammar and the binding (and unbinding) force of language as it pertains to human thought and (or in) its physical environment.