| The critique of metaphysics that Descartes inaugurates is defined as a reckoning with the heliocentric cosmos and the concept of the planet as they are distinguished from the classical, Aristotlean understanding of nature. My dissertation follows the concept of the planet through the critique of metaphysics, from Kant to Derrida, tracing its development against the countermovement that dismantles metaphysically determined nature, and delineating a history that meets the phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change as a philosophical problem of freedom and necessity in the context of planetary temporality. In Kant, the planet and immediate, environmental nature bear different relations to rationality, and thus to necessity. In the first Critique, the disconnect between the planet and nature can be felt in Kant's treatment of mathematics and the imagination, challenging his separation of pure reason and appearances, and thus freedom and necessity. Nietzsche's idea of "earth" breaks from both the Aristotlean idea of nature as well as Kantian pure reason, and transforms the relation between freedom and necessity in terms that are distinctly planetary. From this groundwork in Kant and Nietzsche I follow the receding shadow of metaphysical nature, and the place of the planet, in readings of Heidegger's "earth" and Levinas' "elemental." I position deconstruction within this history by arguing that the themes of calculability and incalculable, hospitality and "life" in Derrida follow the logic of a "deconstructed nature," which I identify with the term "terrestriality," and suggest that Derrida affirms the scientific interpretation of the planet by developing Nietzsche's treatment of freedom, necessity and temporality. Finally, I show that Derrida can serve as the foundation for the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton and their related approaches to freedom and necessity in a planetary perspective. |
