“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, June 2, 2016

I Wrote This For an Essay on Frankenstein

...which I'm proofreading right now:

Heidegger’s whole argument is devoted to showing how being is not presence. An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to, yet is strangely there nonetheless. When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is ‘over yonder’ in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement. Nature is what is constantly present despite . . . (fill in the blank). But constant presence is just what environmentality is not.

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