- Title
- Beyond Pierre Hadot’s promethean and orphic framework: critical reflections on Leonardo Dicaprio’s environmental documentaries in relation to the veil of ISIS
- Creator
- Kotze, Mieke
- Subject
- Philosophy of nature
- Subject
- Documentary films -- United States -- History and criticism Environmental films -- United States -- History and criticism Motion pictures -- United States -- History -- 21st century
- Date Issued
- 2019
- Date
- 2019
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/40599
- Identifier
- vital:36186
- Description
- In his book The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (2006), Pierre Hadot details two opposing paradigmatic attitudes to nature that have prevailed over the ages, namely, the Promethean and Orphic approaches, which entail, respectively, the violent unmasking of nature’s secrets through technology and the gentle approximation of them through aesthetic means. However, while this dichotomy does constitute a useful tool for understanding broad attitudes toward nature, it does not allow for consideration of the more nuanced, responses to nature across the various epochs, including the contemporary context of the looming ecological crisis. For this reason in what follows, Hadot’s Promethean-Orphic binary will be extended into a more comprehensive framework that allows for the contemplation of three additional approaches to nature, namely Socratic withdrawal, Aristotelian-inspired faith in teleology and the Hippocratic pursuit of balance with nature – which Hadot sees as either displaced by or incorporated into the Promethean attitude. Thereafter, various historical epochs will be explored through the lens of this extended Hadotian framework in order to assess the manner in which the abovementioned attitudes and approaches to nature have been adopted and progressively rearticulated, from Archaic Greece to Deleuze’s control society. And it will be advanced that, while at the outset, these approaches were more or less equivalent in terms of their discursive influence, over time Prometheanism, and the rearticulated permutations of Socratic withdrawal and Aristotelian-inspired faith in teleology, have combined to constitute what is here referred to as the Promethean/Socratic/Aristotelian nexus; a nexus which, as will be discussed, has progressively eclipsed the less invasive approaches of Hippocratic balance and Orphism, to the detriment of both nature and human relations to it. The progression of such tendencies will then be examined in relation to the two contemporary environmental films associated with Leonardo DiCaprio, namely The 11th Hour (2007) and Before the Flood (2016). This will be done in order to draw into conspicuity the intensification of discourses surrounding the technological dominance of the environment by humans who have withdrawn from nature, inspired by faith in the telos of the free-market economy, along with and the attendant marginalization of balance-seeking and aesthetically-oriented approaches to nature. Furthermore, it will be advanced, in concluding that such discursive patterns could account for the widespread apathy and indifference which characterizes contemporary responses to the environmental crisis.
- Format
- iii, 229 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Arts
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Mieke Kotze.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |