Hegel’s Idealism and Environmental Holism

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend the frontier of Hegel’s idealism to confronting environmental problems. While our focus is on the theoretical issues bedeviling recent measures to addressing environmental problems, yet we also discuss the practical challenges facing environmentalists in getting to the root of the issues that bother them. The paper suggests that contemporary environmentalists can borrow much from Hegel’s idealism, especially his notion of harmony which his thesis of the absolute depicts. The paper argues, through an appeal to the method of dialectical ecologism, that Aldo Leopold and J. Baird Callicott’s land ethic and ecological communitarianism respectively could develop strong theoretical base if structured on Hegel’s non-exclusive thesis. Without relying on Hegel’s idea of harmony, consciousness and interconnectiveness of beings, we argue that environmentalists’ theses cannot be holistic as claimed.

Keywords: Dialectical Ecologism, Consciousness, Harmony, Environmental problems