As an offspring to my research on the car, I was invited by Manuel Moser to contribute to his edited volume on "Vivir bien" with a condensation of my research in paper form. You can now find the paper as a free pdf online here.
"The car is perhaps the symbol of the good life in its modern declination. To live a middle-class lifestyle, to inhabit a single family house in the suburbs and to own two or more cars to commute to work and go shopping with is still the predominant idea of having achieved something. Although this ideal is perhaps waning in some urban centers of the more privileged zones, for many in the more recently industrialized countries, these ideals of the modern Good Life only recently have begun to spread—with ecologically catastrophic consequences, as is well known.
At the same time in many booming discourses, Modernity (with a capital M) as a whole and the modern, consumerist lifestyle in particular is more and more seen as an obstacle we need to overcome in order to ensure the possibility of living and dying well in a future marked by global warming, the sixth mass extinction and other factors of biospherical demise. However, while there is a lot of recent research about Modernity as a philosophical and cultural construct that entails problematic relations with the environment, 1 there is comparatively little research about how this abstract concept of Modernity is embodied in everyday-life by means of prostheses that not only enable modern lifestyles, but also reproduce the conceptual tendencies/biases of modern thought as an everyday practice. I want to argue that, while it is true that Modernity (at least in its European form that is mostly discussed in academic and other circles) has started out in the realm of the philosophical and conceptual by mostly privileged white men having “enlightened” ideas in elitist academic circles of 17th century Europe, the problem of Modernity can today only fully be understood if we regard it as a prosthetic practice producing these mindsets as an everyday practice for everybody wanting to participate in modern life-worlds.
In this paper, I want to exemplify this very broad argument with a concrete example: I want to show how automobility—as one of the main prostheses needed to achieve a modern Good Life—(re)produces one of the central modern philosophical concepts: that of Nature (with a capital N). I want to show that the problem of automobility is not only its toxic exhausts damaging the environment, but also that it produces a certain attitude towards the environment that unifies it as one external Nature. This reproduces the modern hitherto “merely” philosophical concept of Nature as an embodied practice that is required to participate in contemporary modern culture. The modern cosmology of Naturalism (with a capital N) (in Philippe Descola’s sense) is thus transformed from a mindset of some elitist philosophers into a popular common sense that stabilizes a catastrophic status quo on an ontological globalized level.
In order to show this, I will first give a short overview about how Modernity is problematized by contemporary theories such as New Materialism, Ecosophy or Ecofeminism by focusing on its critique of the concept of Nature through the lens of ecofeminist theorist Carolyn Merchant and black studies philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. I will then move on to show how such a “naturalist” relationship to the environment has been popularized by means of modern technological prostheses such as the train and, more radically, the car. I will end this paper with a short reflection on the political consequences of these findings and sketch some pitfalls that alternative concepts of the Good Life, such as Vivir Bien, would have to avoid in order to become an environmentally flourishing ideal and viable alternative to the modern Good Life."
