This is a recording of a paper given at the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy Conference, December 2021.
Paper title
“Artificial state of nature: how an aporia of myth shapes our experience of emancipation and the market”
Abstract
This paper argues that there are two contradictory modern Western understandings of nature, vividly captured in the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau respectively. These theories borrow the logic of the theological “fourfold state” of humanity, but we are no longer clear today how we can be saved. These very different concepts of nature give rise to two incompatible paradigms for engaging with the natural world, two incompatible accounts of the modern West’s most fundamental value: freedom, and two radically different views of the market, which itself acts like a second nature. The paper argues that we must both recognise this incompatiblity, and that we will de facto make a choice between these concepts. Perhaps a way of reconciling them can be found by returning to the theological narrative on which they both draw.
