A Hegelian Approach to Environmental Philosophy

Abstract

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has been known as one of the philosophers that does not promote environmentalism as most of his works were focused on Nature vis-à-vis Spirit implies anthropocentrism. Hegel was considered a champion of the unqualified industrial exploitation of nature. But recently, researchers deemed that Hegel’s philosophy can accommodate the problems related to environmental philosophy. Hence, this paper will focus on the potentiality of Hegel’s use in Environmentalism, in agreement with Nicholas Mowad’s work The Natural World Spirit : Hegel on the Value of Nature (2012), Alison Stone’s work Petrified Intelligence (2005), and Wendell Kisner’s work The Category of Life, Mechanistic Reduction, and the Uniqueness of Biology (2008). This paper agrees that there are only limited things to which anthropocentrism can be applied in nature and that there is still some essence of nature into which we can know and are true, not being influenced by human phenomena. Thus, the paper holds that it is the concept of Consciousness holds the key to how we can aid environmentalism through Hegel, with our capability of knowing the true nature of the environment, we can then help with aiding the environmental crisis.