On islands of truth in the Anthropocene

Kant, Rousseau and the loss of worlds

Bibliographic Data

ID4480758
AuthorsVirgilio Rivas (Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Philippines, Asia, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume176
Issue1
Pages3-23
Publication date2023-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThesis Eleven (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/07255136231181444
OpenAlexW4381856752
LanguageEN
References cited31

Here I explore how the island was transformed into the site of the instrumentalization of evil, allowing Kant to expand its conception as a land of truth concerning its default genealogy in the homeland, lending purposiveness to evil to ensure this land of truth is protected from natural illusion. By contrast, Rousseau proposed the opposite course, which surprisingly bears important links to contemporary predicaments, in line with the idea of modern progress premised on a generalizing moral ecology. By the turn of the 20th century, reason usurped a new title claiming this land as a planetary system, touted as the second Copernican revolution. This new revolution overlaps with the geological acknowledgment of the turn to the Anthropocene in the century that follows. The article concludes with an interpretation of the Anthropocene as an anxious competition for misrepresenting the future, borrowing the Deleuzian sense of the desert island and the power of the false, vis-a-vis Derrida's no-world spatiality, altogether shaped by a new relational ontology in a time of climate change compounded by post-truth challenges to political democracy

Anthropocene · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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