On Hegel’s Ground

Abstract

Climate change is not just about rising sea levels and greenhouse gases. It is also an intensive process of real-time terraforming without any obvious subject verbing the process. This is most visibly underway at the ablation zone of the Earth’s cryosphere. Is it reasonable to situate our understanding of ecological crisis at this new ground? What would it mean to take anthropogenic climate change as the ground for reason amid the ecological crises careening toward the present? This essay returns to the second half of part one of Hegel’s The Science of Logic —the culmination of the Objective Spirit — where something appears from nothing, and it does so in and as “Ground.” I argue that recent conceptual basins of attraction in climate and earth sciences —namely, the feedback loop and the tipping point —intimate a return to elemental philosophy, and that the dialectic of nonidentity that marks Hegel’s philosophy of nature interfaces with the form-matter-content triad thrumming at the culmination of the Objective Spirit. The nonidentity of the earth has been unearthed.