Climate dialogues: Freedom in a Time of Ecological Crisis

Organized by the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague (CETE-P), Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

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For details please see the CETE-P website

Climate dialogues: Freedom in a Time of Ecological Crisis
Workshop with Wendy Brown & Eva von Redecker

From the transatlantic revolutions ushering in ‘modernity’ to anti-colonial rebellions of the twentieth century to 1968 in Prague and Paris, ‘freedom’ has animated a political project of human emancipation and collective self-rule. Today this project appears to have come to a harrowing halt. ‘Freedom’ is everywhere the battle cry of the far right, and serves to dismantle progressive achievements, challenge democratic governments and unleash ever greater forces of earthly destruction. 

On the side of emancipation itself, doubts arise as to whether freedom is a value that can guide us in the future. In the face of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, it often seems as if only less, rather than more, freedom might save us. Liberty in the West has never been an ecological value. Even where it wasn’t cast as direct triumph over mute matter, autonomy was formulated in contrast to a realm of natural necessity. However, if we follow the arguments of ecofeminists and recent Earth sciences, a mechanistic notion of planetary life is highly inaccurate. The biosphere is complex, interconnected and evolving; it enables and complicates but does not constrain our species’ particular agencies. 

In this year’s Climate Dialogues, Wendy Brown and Eva von Redecker probe possibilities of theorizing freedom anew, and in terms especially more amenable to ecological realities. A freedom that rises with, rather than against the living world requires a thorough conceptual and practical reorientation. Freedom’s crucial dimensions, senses and activities need to shift: time rather than space; listening rather than only speaking; responsiveness and repair rather than control. And yet, freedom must be more than adaptation to new circumstances to continue to carry its promise of fulfilled human potential, the inspiration to act together, and the desire to live without fear.