Dr. Mathew Abbott

Research Project

Self-Conscious Life in the Disrupted Earth System

From the rejection of binaries and alleged dualisms familiar from scholars influenced by Heidegger and poststructuralism, to posthumanist and new materialist attacks on the very category of the human, there is a near-consensus among academics working in the environmental and critical humanities that understanding and responding to ecological crisis will require our species to stop conceiving of ourselves in distinction from the rest of nature. Self-Conscious Life in the Disrupted Earth System challenges this consensus, arguing instead that grasping our disruption of Earth means understanding self-consciousness: the natural feature distinguishing us from the rest of nature. For we can address the sources of the crisis we face only by coming to grips with ourselves as self-conscious animals, engaging in special forms of thought and action and bearing associated responsibilities. Rather than attack the idea of human distinctiveness, this project shows we must grasp what distinguishes us from the rest of nature to understand why we are destroying the natural conditions of our own existence and how we might act collectively to overcome the forms of social compulsion leading us to do so. A five-chapter monograph with a substantial introduction and conclusion, the project connects eco-Marxism with recent work in the analytic Hegelian tradition to explain what makes us different from other organisms, elucidating the self-conscious form of the dependency on nature we share with them.