The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism by Murray Bookchin

The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism Reviews

• 
  Will

  Bookchin has found a way to mesh ecological ethics into a purely Western tradition. The modern American environmental/ecological movement has applied chunks of Eastern and Quasi-Eastern spirituality into the philosophy where it doesn't fit. He claims that it is due to intellectual laziness. I would argue that it is also due to a void of spirituality from the backlash of denouncing Christianity's dominion theory.
  Compared to "What's Next for the Ecology Movement?" this book was really informative. It concentrated less on bitching about Biocentrists, Ecomystics and Deep Ecology, and more on creating a good argument FOR Social Ecology on a basic philosophical basis.
  Sometimes its hard to swallow some of the biocentric criticism, due to almost 20 years of putting myself into that category, but I have never seen eye-to-eye with American Greens and valued a more traditional Euro-Green approach infused with a more social Libertarian bias.
  Bookchin didn't have to sway me by being critical of other views within the modern enviro movement, but simply laying out the theoretical argument for Social Ecology was persuasive.
  
• 
  Andrew Pixton

  Why Hegel??? On gods I don't understand the fascination with philosophy that so few can understand. He does say in the footnotes at the end he's not a Hegelian, as he doesn't buy into the Geist part, but is a dialectician. I suppose there is something to how opposites shape each other, but reading this just solidified a growing sense for me that ideals and philosophies are meaningless. Just language trying to pin down the world we live in and worse, they adapt poorly. In the case of philosophy, I worry that many become too focused on books and lectures and not on the world itself. He was apparently quite an activist, but activists, though deeply involved in the world, can be more mindless about their dogma than anyone.
  
  His libertarian socialism, like so many ambitious ideologies, sounds nice but looks horribly unachievable and neglects the bloody history of similar utopian goals, or the banal history of revolutions that never got off the ground. Recall that previous revolutions either happened by accident, we didn't choose "capitalism" it chose us. The changes we did choose haven't turned out well except for painfully incremental democratic ones. Anyway, I really liked his discarding of the naive romanticism of nature. I love nature to death, but it is really fucking brutal. There's no harmony or balance, just constant warfare. He doesn't go too hard that direction either, in fact he's quite balanced here. Middle ground almost. He points out that everything evolved together, not just side by side but depending on the evolution of everything else. And since this mostly artificial division of human civilization and nature, both problematic terms according to him, is an extension of that, it too must evolve in greater sync with everything else. If I correctly understand this as his main point, it was a good book. I just shouldn't have to suffer for it so much.
  
  I also began to feel at the beginning where he cites Aristotle's rule of identity, A=A. What was the point of that phrase? Why would A not be A? I mean people do misidentify things, but that's more of a mistaken belief of what both As are, not that A is something else. Also not sure I'm on board with the addition, A is A, and -A. It's understood that this is the negative space around A. Just as I am me, but when you see me you also see the space around me that is not me. But the negative space isn't me, it just follows me. I suppose it exists definitionally, but here we get into that language again. Here we have to let philosophy sometimes just be mind games, puzzles for intellectuals. That's fine, even if spending tons of money on it. I'm just not sure the purpose of this book by an author that wants a revolution and yet can't seem to write in a way that will cause one.
  
  This was a real slog, I found maybe three gems and not very insightful ones at that. Was also annoyed at his frequent passing shots. Not uncommon for him to make a one sentence reference to a philosopher as if they were obviously wrong about x, needing no further argumentation. He bulldozes about that way, it kind of distracted from the point he was making as I had a hard time recalling if he was arguing against them or to some obscure point I'd forgotten in his sea of word vomit. Anyway, get out of your intellectual bubble and see what the world actually is.
• 
  Nick

  I found this to be the most coherent of Bookchin's works that I've read thus far. Perhaps I've gotten used to his style at this point, but it felt like the rambly, convoluted nature of his other works was less present in this collection of essays. It's still there, alongside the philosophical jargon, but subdued to a point where I don't find myself at the end of a long rant wondering how I got there.
  
  All in all, a cogent set of critiques of other philosophical traditions and arguments for an ethical framework grounded in and evolving from the natural world, which is used to argue for a left libertarian world. Would recommend for those interested.
• 
  Franklin

  pretentiously and pompously written sally into philosophy, replete with caricatures of those (like Marx) Bookchin wants to attack, and generally worthless when it comes to philosophy or politics
• 
  Ryan Hartman

  Good book I guess, but I feel like I need to take some philosophy courses and read a couple hundred classics before understanding most of what he's saying.
• 
  Uğur

  There are books that should be evaluated together with the author. So much so that these books can become a trend and affect the world of thought of humanity and cause devastating destruction in person. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Simone De Beauvoir and Rosa Luxemburg are the names considered at this point. I think that Murray Bookchin should be added to these names. Because this work he wrote has a very valuable approach in the world of thought in the 21st century and also has a serious attitude towards reuniting humans with animals and nature ideologically.
  
  Bookchin is an anarchist thinker. Therefore, many of his analyzes may disturb 'many' authorities. Anarchism is an ideology that includes many different intellectual movements and theories. Although they have very different currents, they agree on some basic theories and main issues. At the core of anarchist philosophy; certain idea about human nature, present
  there lies a critique of the system, the ideal of creating an emancipated people, and a method for reaching the people.
  
  Combining anarchist thought with ecology, Bookchin's theory aimed to develop an effective view of the social sources of ecological problems, especially ecological problems caused by capitalist man, thus keeping the public in a rational stance, preventing capitalist perception and not breaking away from the main problems.
  
  Bookchin offers us an ecoanarchist life that will make us rethink "human purpose". Free human, free thought, decentralization, spontaneity perspectives melted an ecological stance and revealed eco-anarchism, which is realistic, justified and in life for human beings. It's not even negligible.
• 
  counter-hegemonicon

  To paraphrase Chomsky, when someone says “dialectics” I have no idea what they’re talking about. This was a slog of mostly unanalyzable statements and isn’t very didactic in offer improvements for how we can better interface with ecology. And then there’s all the Hegelian nonsense, like LET THE MAN REST. If your philosophy is predicated on a statist understanding of history, why the hell do people insist on moving backwards? What is synthesis then? And Bookchin’s abandonment of anarchism just reminds me of late Huey. I swear something happens to these guys where they just start babbling about continental philosophy in their later years. This book should just be cut to the last two or three essays. Your better off just reading environmental journalists and actual activists
• 
  Mason Hardman

  Great book, and great introduction to Bookchin’s thought. It’s definitely got me wanting to read more of his thought. I have read post-scarcity anarchism and the history of the Spanish anarchists. But now, I want to get into The ecology of freedom and what more he got to say about cybernetics.
• 
  Lori

  "There is nothing more natural than humanity's capacity to conceptualize, generalize, relate ideas, engage in symbolic communication, and innovate changes in the world around it, not merely to adapt to the conditions it finds at hand." (p. 119)


  
  In a broad sense this book represents the culmination of an attempt to create a new philosophy of nature, that repudiates anti-rationalist tendencies, is humanistic, and embodies the best of the left's revolutionary tradition: social ecology.
  
  Honestly speaking, this is Murray Bookchin's most pompously written and most difficult to follow writing. The essays in this book were written independently (I think), and patched together as a book, so they are really hit and miss, and the chapter "Towards of Philosophy of Nature" being among the most tedious, and pointless of them all, while the introduction*—being a synthesis of all the content—is the clearest, and most coherent version of the arguments found in this book.


  
  The reader can expect a good explanation of what dialectical naturalism is, the distinction between "first nature" and "second nature" are better laid bare than anywhere else, and the particularities of Murray's "dialectic reason" are explored quite thoroughly—again, quite tediously.

Overall, while many passages are enlightening, others are the exact opposite.
  
  This book has done nothing but make me raise more questions about social ecology than it helped answer. And I am not talking about the good kind of questions that push the use of a theory to unexpected situations, but rather the kinds of questions that question the very foundational principles of social ecology.


  
  *introduction which is only present in this second edition.
• 
  Nevra Arslanturk

  Kitap gerçekten çok ağır ve akmıyor. Çeviri de etkili bence, önce kant, hegel ve felsefe okumalarını derinleştirdikten sonra buraya tekrar geri dönülebilir. Bookchin giriş kitabı ise kesinlikle değil. Kendim için yeniden bakınmak üzere ilerisi için bir not düşüyorum.
• 
  vahumbug

  my favorite