Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, or, There Is No Green Discourse

[This is yet another essay on Environmental Politics, in response to the essays "Farewell to the Green Movement? Political Action and the Green Public Sphere" by Douglas Torgerson (a bastardization of Habermas, featuring Arendt, probably likewise bastardized, though I've not read her) and "Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics" by Paul Wapner (which seeks to extend the scope of 'politics' beyond its traditional moorings, e.g. activist groups). My main argument is that what is (by some) called 'Green (political) Discourse' is merely parasitic upon other forms of discourse and has no autonomy whatsoever; this discredits the notion of a 'green public sphere', which in turn discredits the efficacy of politics regarding environmental problems. In case my pessimism seems disconcerting, I have come to view my position as a theoretician as being akin to that of the hacker who is hired by a bank in order to expose the weak points in the system so that the bank can duly fix them.]

Max Stirner: The Problem of Realism & The Heuristic Response

“Ich hab’ Mein’ Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.”

[I have set my course on nothing.] 

~Stirner, quoting Goethe’s poem “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!”

Max Stirner (the penname of Johann Kaspar Schmitt) was a member of the Young Hegelians (of which Marx & Engels were members), which believed that Hegel was a covert atheist, i.e. that his ‘theology’ could be removed from his system with no significant loss. As well, they abided by Marx’s now-clichéd line: “The philosophers have hitherto explained the world. The point is to change it”^[1]. Feuerbach in his book The Essence of Christianity & Bruno Bauer in his book Critique of The Gospel History both rejected religion in favor of a humanism which is also evident in Marx’s earlier writings. Stirner worked as a teacher in a girl’s school, a job which he very much cherished, but which he left before publishing his magnum (and for that matter, only) opus, Der Einzige Und Das Eigentum^[2] (The Ego & Its Own), in order to prevent scandal when the book’s authorship was traced to him. Indeed, it caused something of a scandal in Germany, and was entirely unexpected by Stirner’s fellow Young Hegelians, as Stirner was one of the most quiet and benign members: the book is a fierce invective toward each of the Young Hegelians, one of his arguments being that Feuerbach & Bauer had merely replaced God with ‘Man’, another hypostatized notion that was hardly better than before. Marx himself spent 300 pages arguing against Stirner in The German Ideology (at times in an embarrassingly puerile fashion), before ultimately leaving the book unpublished. Bauer & Feuerbach also countered Stirner, but were refuted in another of his essays, this one under the guise of a university student, called Stirner’s Critics. Bernd Laska and J.L. Walker’s introduction to The Ego & Its Own both argue that Stirner was a founding influence on the thought of Nietzsche, and it is Stirner’s book to which Foucault refers when he asserts that Nietzsche’s writings about the ‘death of God’ were actually obliquely referring to the death of Man. The book was also read by Adorno, who is reported to have said that Stirner “let the cat out of the bag”, as well as by Jürgen Habermas and perhaps Carl Schmitt.