Being in Nature and Becoming Green: Two Modes of Ecological Authenticity

Joseph Grim Feinberg, an anthropologist at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

The lecture analyzes two modes of authenticity at play in ecological discourse. One mode of authenticity emphasizes the artificial and alienating qualities of modern society and seeks a new type of experience of natural objects, integrated into a whole called “nature.” Another holds contemporary society to be unsustainable, and thus incompatible with long-term itself, and it attempts to remake society into something consistent with its own capacities and principles. The former takes part in a philosophical tradition that maintains the possibility of ontological perfection, the idea that non-alienated, unproblematic, self-grounded (absolute) Being exists and can be approached in authentic subjective experience. The latter dispenses with the hypothesis of ontological perfection, emphasizing instead the relative internal coherence or incoherence of contingent social structures. In discussing how these two modes of authenticity operate in movements to return to “nature” and in movements for a “green transition,” I will argue that a relativist mode of authenticity—one that seeks the authentic in contingent structures—is more adequate to the needs of the present than an absolutist mode of authenticity that seeks Being in nature.

Joseph Grim Feinberg is an anthropologist and social theorist at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work explores problems of authenticity and performance in folklore, the politics of aesthetics, and the ideas of nationalism and internationalism. His book The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia appeared in 2018.


The seminar takes place as a part of the ERASMUS-JMO-2021-CHAIR project 101048187 Postsocialsit societies and cultures under European Green Deal – POSTGREEN.