Against naturalism

This presentation section is under construction!

Naturalism is both:

  • The idea that every being or thing has a nature, or essence, an inner reality with both descriptive and prescriptive value.
  • The idea that the order of the world is determined by a quasi-divinity, Nature, whose commandments must be respected.

Naturalism is a false and conservative view of the world.

Political ecology is strongly imbued with naturalism. That's why it's important for animalism to distance itself from it:

  • “Why I am not an environmentaliste”, a text written in 1988 and which aimed to clarify the distinction between antispeciesism and environmentalism. It testifies to my state of mind at that time, when I was coming out of naturalist mould, and to a good number of ideas, many of which I developed more fully later, or still remain to be developed.

But environmentalism could be something different:

Sooner or later, this will mean evolving the world. In this section I have grouped together two texts defending “intervention” in nature – though this is a misnomer, since we are ourselves part of nature.

The anti-speciesist critique of naturalism is also a critique of the refusal of the public in general, and of biologists in particular, to abandon finalist language in their conception of nature and evolution – despite Darwin, more than a century and a half after him. Several texts in the section Darwinism against naturalism also show the fruitfulness of anti-speciesism in the scientific field.

Three other texts add to my contribution to this subject: