Whether Earthquakes are Loveable: Knowing Nature in the Wake of Disaster

This essay examines the question of whether and how philosophical thinking is equipped to countenance in a meaningful way what for Spinoza is nature’s brutally manifest indifference to whether one likes it or not. Nature’s indifference to human pleasure, as well as its uniquely unsettling challenge for conceptualization, must be investigated if nature is to be a meaningful category for environmental ethics. In search of a way to conceptualize nature as it is, I take up an explication of key passages from Spinoza’s Ethics, and thereby maintain that earthquakes are “lovable.” I hold this position to be true for two reasons. In brief, earthquakes areontologically contiguous with the same power and force whereby all entities are maintained; secondly, love, understood intellectually and through a Spinozistic lens, is that modality of relating which understands power primordially and is able to act ethically without belaboring judgments of pleasure or pain, or even holding nature at a distance in order to revere it as something to save.