Matthew Pye - Plato Tackles Climate Change

As mentioned, one of Kierkegaard’s main philosophical aims was to get us to wake up from our safe and cosy emotional illusions around work, love, family and a purposeful and meaningful life. Much like Nietzsche, he wanted us to see that life was wonderful because it was full of contradictions, paradoxes and unanswerable questions. For Nietzsche this ended in an embrace of life and its mysteries, whereas Kierkegaard ended up making his famous ‘leap of faith’. Kierkegaard had contempt for systems of thought that were overconfident in human reason – he was especially sharp in his criticisms of Hegel and his System, and of those in the Danish church who followed the Bible with little thought and were just going through the motions. And so, Kierkegaard, instead of trying to resolve the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, just threw himself on God. He described this leap as follows: “To have faith is to lose your mind and to win God”.

The ‘system-thinking’ that Kierkegaard opposed is similar to some of today’s ritual recyclers, polar bear mourners, ‘make-sure-you-turn-thelight-off-ers’, ‘technology-will-save-us-ers’ and ‘our-kids-will-solve-it-ers’.

These people lack the depth of thinking and understanding of the scale of the problem that would lead them to realise the banality of their actions and beliefs. When tackling climate change intellectually and in terms of emissions, we need a similar approach to Kierkegaard’s: we also need to ‘lose our minds’, which can happen in two different ways.

Firstly, by thinking outside the box - or rather, outside the system; just like Kierkegaard continuously attacked “the system” of Hegelian idealism.

We need to do this because the current one – which is purely focused on economic profit, based on the false assumption that the world has infinite natural resources and is totally tolerant of human interference – won’t be able to offer us any feasible solutions. And it isn’t just our disastrously consumptive system we need to change, we also need to change our ways of thinking when seeing ourselves as humans in relation to the rest of planet earth. We need to lose our current homocentric state of mind and realise that we, not just the fluffy polar bears and hungry pandas, will be pushed - 290 -