Social science perspectives on climate change and development

The history of Western thought can be understood as the course of a mighty river that flows onward, stagnates at logical dams, and overflows again in modernity. The core of this journey is the question of being: what does it mean to exist and how do we relate to the things that surround us? To make this journey tangible, we can use the image of a real river and the human experience of interacting with it as our compass. Martin Heidegger shook this history by denouncing that Western philosophy had taken a wrong turn by forgetting this original question. To heal this gap, the German thinker carried out a demolition of tradition, a project that today connects directly with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the anthropology of Bruno Latour, and our immersion in the digital world. To grasp the magnitude of this intellectual earthquake, it is essential to descend from the very source of philosophy.

At the dawn of Greek thought, the pre-Socratic philosophers did not conceive of a separation between humankind and nature; humanity was water within water. Heraclitus of Ephesus synthesized this experience with his famous maxim: no man ever steps in the same river twice, for neither the man nor the river is the same. For Heraclitus, being is pure becoming, a perpetual flow of transformations and tensions governed by the Logos . Parmenides of Elea, on the opposite side, affirmed that being is immobile, eternal, and unique, rejecting the existence of change; for him, the river was an optical illusion, and real water was a frozen and imperishable mass. Despite their implicit rivalry, both shared the experience of truth as Aletheia , a process of unveiling where reality emerges from the darkness on its own. The world was a living mystery. However, Socrates brought about the first major shift by bringing philosophy down from the cosmos to focus it on the polis and the human soul. Through maieutics, Socrates compelled humankind to look beyond the surface of the world and examine itself in search of universal definitions of justice and virtue, shifting the focus of truth from external nature to the interior of rational consciousness.

This classical impulse crystallized definitively with Aristotle, who panicked at Heraclitus’s unstable river, since science required fixed pillars, not unpredictable currents. Aristotle resolved the dilemma by reducing being to the Ousia , the individual, static, and finished substance that is right there; the river is no longer a mysterious flow, but a geographical object with stable properties (flow rate, banks, depth). Although he developed the concepts of potentiality and actuality to explain the movement of water, his formal logic determined that the locus of truth was no longer the unveiling of reality, but the logical statement that judges whether a proposition corresponds to the facts. Heraclitus’s river was contained within a dam. Centuries later, during the Middle Ages, the current of Scholasticism took this rigidity to its extreme. Scholasticism, led by figures such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, set out to reconcile Christian faith with Aristotelian reason. They transformed ontology into a meticulous inventory of divine creation, a cosmic audit tasked with classifying every creature in the universe into abstract categories; the river became simply a resource designed by God in the hierarchical scale for the use of man.

The arrival of modernity broke with this medieval order and ushered in a radical obsession with scientific certainty, placing the human subject in absolute isolation from its environment. René Descartes spearheaded this rupture through the creation of his celebrated Cartesian method and the application of methodical doubt , a process of intellectual demolition whose objective was to dismantle all the dubious opinions of scholasticism in order to find a foundation of knowledge that was completely unassailable.

To understand how this method works, imagine Descartes standing on the bank of a river, trying to prove with scientific and mathematical rigor whether that river actually exists. Descartes divides his strategy into four fundamental rules:

• Evidence: The philosopher forbids himself from accepting the river as real simply because his eyes see the water or his hands feel its coldness. The senses are prone to deception; an optical illusion or a mirage in the desert could make us see a river where there is nothing. For Descartes, the river will only be real if it presents itself to his intellect as a clear and distinct idea, free from all doubt.
• Analysis: When faced with the complex reality of the river, Descartes breaks down the phenomenon into its simplest and most fundamental parts. He does not analyze the river as a mystical whole; he divides the problem by separating the movement of the water, the resistance of the stones, the physical temperature, and the geometric dimensions of the riverbed.
• Summary: Once the river is broken down into simple mathematical elements, Descartes conducts his thoughts in an orderly fashion. He begins with the easiest concepts to understand (such as the pure lines of geometry and the mechanical laws of motion) to gradually ascend until he grasps the more complex hydraulic mechanics of the river.
• Enumeration: Finally, he performs such thorough reviews and counts of his entire logical tree that he is absolutely certain that he has not omitted any loose ends in his theoretical proof.

However, to arrive at the foundation of this method, Descartes takes methodical doubt to a hyperbolic extreme through three levels of suspicion applied directly to the river. At the first level, he rejects sensory information because seemingly calm water can conceal treacherous currents, or the refraction of light can make an oar appear broken in the water. At the second level, he introduces the dream hypothesis: how can one be sure that one is actually dipping one’s feet in the river and not simply dreaming in bed that one is crossing a waterway? Seeing that even in dreams mathematics remains true (two plus two equals four both awake and asleep), Descartes introduces his third and most radical level of doubt: the hypothesis of the Evil Genius . He imagines the existence of a deceiving god, an extremely powerful and cunning being who has employed all his ingenuity to trick the philosopher, making him believe that there is a heaven, air, an Earth, and a murmuring river beside him, when in reality it is all an artificial mental construct.

Upon reaching this abyss of cognitive desolation, where the river and his own physical body have been erased by doubt, Descartes finds his immovable rock: although the Evil Genius may deceive him in everything, it cannot deceive him about the fact that he is doubting, and if he is doubting, he is thinking. From this emerges the indubitable truth: “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). Once the existence of his own mind as a Thinking Substance ( res cogitans ) is assured , Descartes reconstructs the world and demonstrates the existence of the physical river through the innate idea of ​​God, a perfect being who, by his very goodness, would not allow us to live systematically deceived when we perceive the environment clearly.

However, by circumventing the river through this logical detour, Descartes fractured reality forever. He divided the universe into two irreconcilable substances: the pure mind enclosed within the skull and Extended Substance ( res extensa ) . The real river was reduced to pure, lifeless geometry, to cubic meters of matter in mechanical motion devoid of life, poetry, or mystery. Humankind became a barren subject on the riverbank, a disembodied observer mathematically analyzing the external water from the distance of its own analytical consciousness.

To rescue philosophy from the dead ends of Cartesian dualism, Immanuel Kant sparked an unprecedented revolution in the eighteenth century. In the history of thought, this milestone is known as the “Copernican Revolution” of epistemology: the idea that objects must conform to the structure of our minds in order to be known, rather than the mind simply conforming to objects. Kant developed this metaphor by drawing directly on Nicolaus Copernicus’s astronomical discovery. Before the Scientific Revolution, Ptolemaic astronomy attempted to explain the erratic movements of the stars by assuming that the observer on Earth was stationary at the center of the universe. As those calculations became increasingly untenable, Copernicus put forward a brilliant hypothesis: what if the observer is the one who moves, and the Sun is at the center?

Kant applied precisely the same audacity to the theory of knowledge and to our relationship with the world. Descartes had placed enormous confidence in pure reason: if the mind could doubt everything and proceed with sufficient clarity and method, it could eventually reach secure knowledge of reality. Kant accepted the power of reason, but he argued that reason cannot simply leap outside itself and grasp reality as it exists in itself. Before claiming to know reality, we must first ask how reality becomes knowable to us at all. This was the central task of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) (a systematic investigation into the conditions that make knowledge possible and the limits beyond which reason cannot legitimately proceed).

Kant’s intervention was also a response to the long conflict between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz believed that reason alone could provide secure knowledge of reality. Empiricists such as John Locke (known for the idea of the mind as a “blank slate,” or tabula rasa, and for arguing that knowledge comes from experience) and David Hume (known for his scepticism about causality and for arguing that we never directly observe causes, only repeated sequences of events) argued instead that knowledge begins with experience. Hume’s scepticism was especially important because it challenged the foundations of causality itself. Kant’s solution was revolutionary: causality is not simply observed in the world, nor is it derived from experience alone; it is one of the conditions that makes experience of the world possible.

For centuries, philosophy had assumed that the subject was a motionless spectator on the riverbank, passively shaping the mind to reflect the waters of the external river. Seeing that this perspective generated insoluble contradictions, Kant postulated his revolution: let us admit that the spectator moves and imposes their own conditions. The real river itself — the noumenon — is inaccessible. We never encounter the river as it exists independently of every possible human experience. What we grasp is the phenomenon: the river as it appears through the structuring activity of the mind.

In other words, the river is not given to us in a raw, unfiltered form. It is filtered and organized by the internal “software” of the human mind through space, time, substance, causality and the categories of understanding. If the river flows chronologically, this is not because time exists in the water itself as an independent property we simply discover. Rather, the river appears to us through time because time is one of the forms through which the human mind organizes experience. The same applies to causality: we do not simply see causes floating in the water; we experience the river as causally ordered because causality is one of the categories that makes the river intelligible to us.

This does not mean that the river is imaginary, or that reality exists only in our heads. Kant’s point is more subtle. The river may exist independently of us, but our knowledge of it depends on the conditions through which it appears to human experience. We do not simply see the river; we see it through the pre-established categories that make it appear as a river in the first place.

This is why Kant is so important for the later history of ontology and sociology. He shows that reality, as known, is never simply given, but always mediated by the structures through which it becomes intelligible. Husserl would radicalize this insight through phenomenology; Weber would inherit it through neo-Kantian methodology and ideal types; and Heidegger would later try to overcome its remaining subject-centered limits by arguing that human beings are not detached observers, but beings already immersed in a world of practices, relationships and meanings.

Put simply, Kant’s great shift was to show that the question is not only what the river is, but how our minds make the river intelligible in the first place.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Edmund Husserl took the next crucial step in connecting this Kantian map with direct experience, becoming the father of phenomenology . Husserl observed with concern that modern science had made the mistake of “mathematizing” reality, substituting the real river with fluid dynamics formulas and H2O indices, falling into a blind objectivism that erased human experience. His mission was radical: to return “to the things themselves.” He devised the method of epoché , or bracketing , proposing to suspend all scientific theories and metaphysical hypotheses about the external world in order to focus solely on describing the raw, direct, and lived experience of consciousness.

To solidify this, Husserl developed the concept of the Lebenswelt , or Lifeworld . The Lebenswelt is the universe of the self-evident: the firm ground of everyday experience prior to any theory. It is the world where a fisherman or a scientist first experiences the river intuitively—feeling the cold water on their feet, hearing the murmur of the current, and seeing the sun’s reflection—before anyone attempts to formulate a physical equation about the flow. All scientific truth draws its roots from this fabric of lived experience.

The following is a conceptual map of this historical evolution before the arrival of contemporary deconstruction:

Period / Philosopher	Conception of Being and Reality	Relationship with the World / The Example of the River
Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus)	Being is becoming, constant change and perpetual flow.	Humans are integrated into the cosmos; no one crosses the same river twice ( Aletheia ).
Classical Philosophy (Aristotle)	Being is reduced to fixed and observable substance ( Ousia ).	The river is stabilized as a geographical object with fixed properties for intellectual analysis.
Medieval Scholasticism	Being is a hierarchical catalog of creatures designed by God.	Cosmic audit; the river is a resource classified in the divine order of creation.
Modernity (Descartes)	Radical break between thinking substance and dead geometric substance.	The philosopher doubts the river through the Evil Genius until he finds the Cogito ; the river is a geometric res extensa measured from the shore by a dry subject.
Criticism (Kant)	Being in itself ( noumenon ) is inaccessible; the phenomenal world is constructed by the subject.	Copernican revolution: the river adapts to the space and time structures of the human cognitive apparatus.
Phenomenology (Husserl)	Being is understood from the Lebenswelt (Life-World) , the subjective experience prior to theory.	The epoché is applied : the cold feet in the water and the murmur of the river are described before calculating its mathematical physics.

In opposition to the rigidity of absolute systems, existentialism arose. Its 19th-century pioneer, Søren Kierkegaard, rejected logical abstractions that sought to explain the universe while ignoring the tragic experience of the individual. However, it was Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century who took this premise to its most radical conclusion with the maxim that existence precedes essence . Sartre brilliantly applied this by differentiating between things and human beings. A river is a “being-in-itself”: its essence is predetermined by nature; it is born a river and cannot choose to stop flowing or become a desert. Human beings, on the other hand, are “beings-for-itself.” They have no fixed nature nor an instruction manual written by God or biology. First, we exist; we appear on the scene, and only later, through our decisions, do we define ourselves.

Hence Sartre’s profound thesis that human beings are condemned to be free . We do not choose to be thrown into existence, but once we are here, we are entirely responsible for each and every one of our actions. Even deciding not to choose is already a choice. If a man finds himself caught in the current of a raging river, the physics of water is an unalterable fact, but he is radically free to decide how to respond to that danger: he can struggle to swim, he can surrender and let himself drown, or he can pray on the bank. Sartre reminds us that trying to blame circumstances, society, or fate to evade our decisions is an act of “bad faith,” a lie we tell ourselves to escape the weight of our own absolute freedom.

With all these pieces on the table, Martin Heidegger burst onto the scene, combining Kierkegaard’s anguish, Sartre’s radical freedom, and the method of his mentor Husserl. However, Heidegger considered Husserl and Sartre still trapped in modern dualism by separating human consciousness from the objects of the world. Heidegger took up the sledgehammer and completely demolished the Cartesian observer on the riverbank. He asserted that the human being is Dasein (being-there): we are not outside the river looking at it, but rather we are immersed up to our necks in the river of time and history.

In our daily lives, when we cross a river in a boat or use a bridge, the tools are readily available ( Zuhanden ) and invisible; we are integrated into the practical flow of life. Cartesian dualism only appears when a technical breakdown occurs: if the oars break or the bridge collapses, the flow is violently interrupted, and the tools become readily available ( Vorhanden ) , cold and problematic objects that force us to stop and theorize. The great error of metaphysics was to study human existence based solely on the moment the bridge collapses. Furthermore, Dasein risks losing its authenticity by being diluted into Das Man (The Everyman), the social mass that dictates how we should live in an impersonal way. In his later work, Heidegger warned that modern technology was turning the world into a standing reserve . The Rhine River, for example, ceased to be a landscape feature and became a bland hydroelectric power station, an exploitable and numbered source of energy thanks to technology.

Finally, Bruno Latour took up this mantle with his Actor-Network Theory, but with a corrective to Heidegger’s nostalgia. For Latour, the modern river is no longer just mountain water or an isolated hydroelectric plant; Heraclitus’s river has transformed into a digital river of data, code, and algorithms in which we bathe continuously through the screens of our smartphones. Latour demonstrates that the separation between humans and non-humans is a fiction. We live in hybrid networks where objects possess colossal agency.

In this new ecosystem, Heraclitus’s maxim acquires a ruthless precision: you never bathe in the same social media feed twice. The algorithmic current flows ceaselessly, modifying itself every second according to your clicks. The algorithm is the material embodiment of the Everyman, leveling our thoughts and transforming our attention into a readily available resource that corporations exploit as raw material. Given this scenario, Sartre’s conditional freedom takes on a new dimension. The algorithm attempts to map your desires to nullify your capacity for choice, turning your decisions into automatic and predictable responses of digital “bad faith.”

However, Latour reminds us through his Dingpolitik , or politics of things, that the solution is not to flee the digital river and return to an idyllic analog shore of sterile subjects. Authenticity is won by opening the black boxes of software, politicizing technical networks, and ethically negotiating our alliances with the objects that surround us. Only by assuming responsibility for our freedom amidst the digital current, by opening up the code, and by demanding transparent interfaces, will we ensure that the technological river stops sweeping us away as optimized resources and begins to function as socio-technical assemblies that respect the complexity of our existence.

The following character chart visually summarizes how humanity’s position in relation to the world has changed throughout this philosophical journey:

┌────────────────── ──────────────────── ──────────────────── ───────────────────┐
│ CARTESIAN / KANTIAN / HUSSERLIAN TRADITION │
│ Descartes (1596–1650) · Kant (1724–1804) · Husserl (1859–1938) │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

SUBJECT / MIND
(Dry observer on the riverbank)

        │
        │  Perception
        ▼

[ Transcendental Filter ]
[ Categories of Understanding ]
[ Lifeworld / Lebenswelt ]

        │
        ▼

OBJECT / RIVER
(Mechanical matter to be observed)

Human being and world remain separated.
The river is something “out there” to be known.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SARTRE’S EXISTENTIALISM │
│ Kierkegaard (1813–1855) · Sartre (1905–1980) │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

BEING-FOR-ITSELF
(Human freedom)

        ════════════════►

     CHOICE
  RESPONSIBILITY
     PROJECT

        ════════════════►

BEING-IN-ITSELF
(The river, nature, facts)

The river has a fixed nature.
Humans do not.
We are condemned to choose.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ HEIDEGGER’S PHENOMENOLOGY │
│ Heidegger (1889–1976) │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

          DASEIN: BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

 HUMAN ────── TOOL ────── RIVER ────── HISTORY ────── OTHERS

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The observer disappears.

The human being is not standing outside the river.

The human being is already immersed in the flow of time,
history, practices, technologies, and relationships.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ LATOUR’S ACTOR-NETWORK ONTOLOGY │
│ Latour (1947–2022) │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  HUMAN
    ▲
    │
    ▼

SMARTPHONE ◄════► ALGORITHM ◄════► DATA STREAM

    ▲                               │
    │                               ▼

 SOCIAL NETWORKS ◄════► INSTITUTIONS ◄════► INFRASTRUCTURE

References

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–475 BCE)
Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments (B. Haxton, Trans.). Viking.
https://iep.utm.edu/heraclitus/

Parmenides of Elea (c. 515–450 BCE)
Parmenides. (1998). Parmenides of Elea: Fragments (D. Gallop, Trans.). University of Toronto Press.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/

Socrates (470–399 BCE)
Plato. (1997). Complete Works (J. M. Cooper, Ed.). Hackett Publishing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/93

Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
Aristotle. (1998). Metaphysics (H. Lawson-Tancred, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa Theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/

John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308)
Scotus, J. D. (1950–). Ordinatio. Vatican Press.
https://dunsscotus.org/

William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347)
Ockham, W. (1974). Summa Logicae (P. Boehner, Trans.). St. Bonaventure University.
https://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/300/ockham.htm

René Descartes (1596–1650)
Descartes, R. (1641/1996). Meditations on First Philosophy (J. Cottingham, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of Pure Reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Kierkegaard, S. (1843/1985). Fear and Trembling (A. Hannay, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8387

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
Husserl, E. (1913/1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (F. Kersten, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Blackwell.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
Sartre, J.-P. (1943/1956). Being and Nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

Bruno Latour (1947–2022)
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674948396

Group	Central authors in your post	Secondary / related authors	Why they belong together
Being as change / becoming	Heraclitus of Ephesus	Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Henri-Louis Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze	Reality is not fixed substance but process, flow, force, becoming.
Being as permanence / substance	Parmenides of Elea, Aristotle	Plato, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas	Reality is understood through stable forms, essences, substances or hierarchical order.
Scholastic ontology	Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham	Anselm of Canterbury, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Moses Maimonides	Being is classified within theological-metaphysical systems.
Modern subject and certainty	René Descartes	Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza	Knowledge becomes linked to method, certainty, mathematics and the observing subject.
Empiricism and scepticism	John Locke, David Hume	Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley	Knowledge comes from experience; Hume radicalizes this by questioning causality.
Kantian / transcendental philosophy	Immanuel Kant	Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert	Reality as known depends on conditions of possibility: categories, subjectivity, reason, history.
Historicism and social reality	Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Heinrich Marx, Maximilian Carl Emil Weber	Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim	Reality is historical, cultural, meaningful and socially produced.
Phenomenology	Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl, Martin Heidegger	Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz, Hans-Georg Gadamer	Reality is not first an object but something lived, disclosed, interpreted and inhabited.
Existentialism	Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, Martin Heidegger	Albert Camus, Karl Theodor Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir	Human existence is defined by anxiety, freedom, choice, finitude and responsibility.
Technology and modern enframing	Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour	Jacques Ellul, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Andrew Feenberg	Technology does not merely serve humans; it shapes reality, perception and agency.
Actor-Network / relational ontology	Bruno Latour	Michel Callon, John Law, Annemarie Mol, Donna J. Haraway, Karen Michelle Barad	Reality is made through networks of humans, non-humans, technologies and practices.
Space, place and produced reality	Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour	Henri Lefebvre, David W. Harvey, Doreen Barbara Massey, Edward William Soja, Yi-Fu Tuan	Space is not a container; it is produced through relations, power, history and practice.