The Last Humanity

The New Ecological Science

Francois Laruelle, Anthony Paul Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350008243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Ecologia

In the course of more than twenty works François Laruelle has developed one of the most singular and unique ways of thinking within contemporary philosophy. This volume develops the style of his late work, which has sought to combine the idioms of diverse areas (from the language of quantum mechanics to theology, messianism and Gnosticism) to create non-standard philosophical fictions which further articulate his thinking of radical immanence in relation to wide-ranging themes and concerns. The focus here is a reassessment of his attempt to rethink what it means to be human. Much of that work has taken place through an engagement with science, politics and religion, but now we see Laruelle confronting the challenge of ecology for his kind of humanism (which he would call a 'non-humanism', meaning a non-standard humanism). This challenge is one of thinking of the ethical demands of other entities within a general ecology. Namely the lives of plants and other vegetation alongside that of animals. Dealing with the intersections between science and philosophy in current French thought, this book is of particular interest to those concerned with the philosophical innovation and renewal of ecological thought that have influenced ecological theory. The first English translation of a key work from this highly original experimental philosopher, it will surely help cement his place in the firmament of avant-garde French thinkers, from Derrida and Deleuze to Badiou.

1

IN SEARCH OF A
MESSIANIC ECOLOGY

Between Biology and Philosophy

We are looking for a very narrow path between biology and philosophy that is not controlled by spontaneous philosophy or positive molecular biology, but which nevertheless uses both at once modeled in a new “ecological” conjugation that turns to quantum theory. The philosophy of life is more about its immanence (Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Henry), but suffers from its usual “sufficiency.” The science of life, molecular biology, has given rise to a first quantum formalization (Bohr, Schrödinger). A new ontic theory of life obviously cannot be our object, but the knowledge of life as it interests humanity is our one and only “onto-logical” object. Our project has a “transcendental” aspect and focuses on the knowledge of life itself. We are not involved with either of the two kinds of solutions, each antithetical and positive in their way. And yet we will require both (almost) simultaneously as productive forces of knowledge, a certain nonpositive quantum modeling of life and a certain philosophy of life that is no longer dominant and sufficient.

Why this complicated strategy, what is at stake? It is twofold: to reformulate an ecological problematic as the context for the knowledge of life, and human life in particular. On the first point, can ecology become a competing project with philosophy? What are the conditions for a rigorous thought of life that gives it its full ecological amplitude? On the second point, it is indirectly a question regarding the knowledge of universal life within human life, but also regarding human life and human knowledge within all animal and plant life. How is it possible to break deterministic causality at the risk of returning to the Great Everything of a universal ecology? It is precisely a question of suspending this other antithetical between determinism and a vicious causality and establishing a new anthropic principle (of non-sufficiency) in the ruins of ecological anthropology. However, on the condition that there is a decisive nuance: the anthropic principle is to be in-the-last-instance and ecology is to be a thought “in-the-last-humanity.”

Of all the aporias that clutter thought, few have become as insistent as the difference between man and animal more generally, and then adding the plant as well it becomes a circular and vicious conception of the MAP system (Man, Animal, Plant). This abstract generality, specific to everyday conversation as well as to the philosophers, requires a radical clearing of thought, but by no means a tabula rasa. It is not a question of erasing all difference through a summary rejection of metaphysics, but just that of finding a non-sufficient principle for the distribution of the living within life and outside of it. The indefinite, asymptotic approach of man and animal seem to us to be as unthinking in their absolute difference and to be part of the same conversational philosophy. We oppose “Being-in-the-last-humanity” of all life to the circular nature of a hermeneutic ecology as much as to its casual linearity, and we say that “in-the-last-humanity” can be said also as the “man’s before-priority” over the animal and the plant. From causality’s point of view, this is a paradox since the two meanings seem opposed to one another, but each of them takes on some nuance that makes them compatible. In any case, what is excluded is man’s metaphysical priority over the two other kinds of life, his assumed superiority and his sufficiency of measure for the others. There is a plane of immanence of life where each of the three kinds is equal to the two others and this plane is defined by the univocity of the lived-without-life that is imposed by the quantum postulate of its discretion as the minimum threshold below which it is impossible for life to descend. This threshold has only been approached by molecular biology (in the form of a code of life) for a positive science of life. But we posit the quantum of the lived as the threshold that makes life accessible to a science that is generic this time. Of course, this discreetness of the minimum of the lived conforming to the quantum spirit is contrary to speculation and makes a “speculative ecology” impossible in the excessive sense, even if it aims at a formalization in-the-last-humanity of life rather than a Hegel-style speculation upon its Great Circle.

Traditional ecology’s foundations are differential and naturalistic, enclosed within eco-logical difference, they go back at least to Aristotle and continue to legitimize its political fury that plays out across the media. The irritating criticism of ecological “movements” and the little bit of thought that is hidden there in its well-known “empathy” is hardly sufficient. It would still be necessary to update the possibility of ecology inscribing itself within the immanence of life in these three paradigmatic forms: human, animal, and plant. As well as being necessary to elucidate the deadly and protective role that humans play in this ecological triangle. The mass of unclear assumptions is justified by a theoretical bric-a-brac, by almost philosophical considerations, and by the usual kinds of ignorance that philosophy devoted to the World’s inertia, maintained in all good conscience. However embedded the eco-logical difference may be, however varied its modalities and dimensions, it is itself destined to be auto-erasing as a structure. It shows little real amplitude and effective work, preferring to speculate on technology, Being, the climate, and the exploitation of nature. Reduced to the denunciation of the devastating relationships between humans and animals in the arena of plants and the Earth’s climate, to the problems of humanity’s survival, it fuels media, political, and ideological unrest, which the greatest speculations can hardly struggle against, those concerning man and his Being-in-the-world, on the body and mind, on matter and memory. A dissociation affects it, subjected to the extremes by Darwinian scientific naturalism, which leads to animal culture and pathos, and elsewhere by a religious and creationist nostalgia, able to be identified in a too quick and ready-made understanding of man’s indivisible essence.

Note for the Reader

As has already been said, this essay is not based on the various references or information found in the disciplinary or epistemological field of ecology. Instead it is a “prolegomena for any ecology that can present itself as a future.” Thus, the construction of a problematic or a “building” intended to shelter isolated or crossed theoretical species, some of which may be in the process of disappearing, becoming more scarce, and degrowth, like philosophy and metaphysics, while others are in the process of an ascending growth, like ecology itself and the sciences that support it. The often combinatorial style of this project explains why the main concepts are symbolized by initials or acronyms for ease of reading and that should be read as simply opening or deploying them discursively as a symbol for the concepts. For example, M, A, P reads as “man, animal, plant,” but M/A reads as “the duality of man and animal,” and MA as “the fusion of man-animal or of man as also an animal.”

Ecology versus Philosophy: The New Antinomy

“Ecology” is the symptom of a double process that involves multiple sites and disciplines, the Earth and its inhabitants. A contradictory process, and perhaps self-contradictory as well, in which the plaintiffs each seek to establish a court that will vindicate them. So another dispute of a higher level is engaged, beyond strictly ecological debates, between a declining philosophy and a rising and rival ecology. This double level each time implies a trial and a counter-trial that are distributed like a patchwork. Whether we take it from one or the other of its parts, we see a constant variation in the local relationships of force, sometimes to the benefit of the newest and weakest, sometimes to the benefit of a more global force [pression] known as “capitalism.” If we look now for the means mobilized by all parties then the dispute changes in terms of theoretical scope and style, it mobilizes Marxism, Nietzcheanism, and Foucauldianism. We have not one, but several toolboxes. However, one is missing, which is that of a universal science, a context that is specifically physical and contemporary, such that without this intervention ecology would inexorably continue the fall (if we can put it this way) that it began with and can present a rather vulgar face. Although at these counter-trials all living things are summoned as witnesses for the prosecution, it is—as we understand it in a narrow and media-friendly sense and in a way that is still very philosophical—an ecology of spontaneous protest and a demand that could well become, who knows, a personal hypothesis, the equivalent of what the Reformation was for the old Catholic and Aristotelian world but now in the field of the perception of life by the living. It would still have to be grounded as a possible new life. But let’s leave it there.

Let it be understood that what we call an “antinomy” is a conflict not without exchanges, a dispute not without confusion between two contemporary postures of thought, one of which is in the making, so therefore in a less narrow and rationalist sense, and one more complex than the Kantian antinomy that was dialectically prepared to receive a rationalist solution. One might object that we too are preparing the antinomy so that it necessarily receives a quantum solution that is worthy of contemporary thought, of its rationality and not of rationalism. What we are aiming for as an antinomy is not resolved in a rationalist way but tolerates postmodern ambiguities. It is inevitable, each era has its answers and the questions that are adapted to them but the terms and their relationships will almost all change as will the content and solution of the antinomy. We must be persuaded that it is better to anticipate the coming of an antinomy that is still barely perceptible between philosophy and ecology, decided and well designed by those who see it coming, than to deny it on the basis of phenomena that are already too old or irrelevant when they manifest themselves. We are forcing the appearance of an antinomy that seemed improbable on first sight. But this way of doing things corresponds to our way of doing things, it is not only the solution that is a utopia, it is the problem itself that seems to not yet exist. This is the art of “whistleblowers,” those modern Cassandras, those from whom what we call philo-fiction and here eco-fiction would do well to draw inspiration, a function of watchmen and messiahs for philosophers who have lacked so much vigilance, even the best symptomatologists of them read the future in the womb of their cadaverized past.

To this end, we introduce the notion of a Pure Quantum Reason as a solution to the antinomy, the concept of which must be seriously expanded and subtracted from the too narrow dimensions it is usually confined to. All that will remain of Kant is enough to legitimate a certain similarity with him, not a copy of the Kantian dialectic or even a copy of quantum physics, “orthodox” or not. Quantum theory is our toolbox according to the established formula, theoretical tools that have changed considerably. But it always a matter of enclosure, from the box for Schrödinger’s cat to De Broglie’s photon box to Plato’s theatrical cave, from the bubble chamber to the collider and from the particle tunnel to the Universe as a supercollider. An enclosure must always be pierced, the housekeepers of the Universe that physicists are know this and pass it on through something other than the wormholes that still remain in it. Is there nothing more noble and more human than these wormholes? Something like a messianic breakthrough into the Universe itself? That will have to be seen.

Let us assume that in modernity, the original trial, the party who decides with his complaint that a trial is to be held and that it is urgent to set up a tribunal, that of philosophers against the inhospitable environment of nature, which calls for its mastery and its possession, its “questioning” (Kant), but which in return also creates guilt for those humans who exploit it at will. Hence a later counter-trial that the Earth calls for against the most ruthless of its inhabitants who are thereby set in self-contradiction. It is the silent protest of animals, plants, the violent protest of the Earth itself against the lack of concern, the casualness and exploitation of its resources.

Philosophy nourishes a large part of ecology, which can only rise up as a new vision of life and thought, and not only, too easily, against Cartesianism. There is in any case a duplicity of philosophy that in a homologous way internalizes ecology into its own internal conflict with itself. This means that, as a new form of the “misunderstanding of reason with itself” (Kant), it places us on the path of a problem that becomes sensible, that of an antithetics of reason that replaces older ones, also those of physicists, and whose true dimensions, ignored by their fighters who are manipulated by it, are those of a conflict within philosophy that proposes its traditional solutions, and of an emerging ecology that seeks to make a place for itself, that enters fully into this fight and intends to inaugurate a new kingdom finally proper to Human reason inasmuch as it must guide life in an immanent way rather than govern it.

We need a new post-rationalist “critique” to share the blame between the Earth and its inhabitants, perhaps to establish a universal peace treaty between philosophy and ecology. It is this conflict of Ecological Reason, regarding which we are trying to be “critical,” that is, as it must be repeated after the other ones, a positive evaluation, with contemporary means and materials different from Kant’s. The pure reason that is affected by this antinomy will be defined under quantum conditions that are capable of modeling this conflict and providing it with the means for a balanced solution. It is a “Pure” Quantum Reason but not at all a “speculative” one and not simply a “critical” one. Its quantum means, instead of Newtonian ones, eliminate speculation from the philosophy it mobilizes but equally eliminates the Kantian critique through the probability that it establishes in knowledge.

We thus propose to define upon new foundations, scientifically renewed and philosophically reformed, what Kant calls a peace treaty and the Ancients generally called an immanent “Life,” both contemplative (vita contemplativa) and practical (vita practica). We call this peace a vita ecologica. It is therefore not a question of rethinking existing ecological disciplines and their traditional positive and metaphysical foundations through the introduction of new anthropological materials, recent and alarmist information on the “state of the planet,” but of coming to a situation of “good neighborliness” for humans in the World and within the horizon of the Earth in the company of animals and plants under the double guard of the highest authorities of thought: the One, Being, the Other, and more recent forms of rationality from physics. However, we expect nothing like the evangelical sleep of the lion and the lamb side by side, the situation of humans and other living beings is not only too complex and mixed in appearance to find this satisfying but, as quantum physicists say, the situation is too “entangled” to be satisfied with this and other silly pap proper to a sleepwalking ecology. One of the difficulties in resolving this antimony lies in the state of entanglement of the ecological real, since we will assume that such a real of the microscopical order exists and disturbs macrobiological conceptuality without rendering it obsolete, because the quantum is sometimes applicable to macroscopic entities. This is the case with those still philosophical concepts of life and the living. We obviously do not do molecular biology (we will encounter this problem with the definition of a quantum of the lived and humanity), we quantize thinking concerning life; it is ecological discourse, not this living thing or that species, that supports this quantification or “placing in a superposition,” this is why our own discourse will have a transcendental style and do so within the very same quantum. Such purely transcendental principles (not mixed with experience but which speak about it and for it, meaning the knowledge contained in the antinomy that we treat as a material) as those of superposition and noncommutativity, are necessary to make accessible in theory and in epistemology the physical-and-philosophical real of ecology that traditional philosophy or ecology left to itself hardly helps us to understand.¹

Some will be offended that so much ambition is accompanied by our customary absence of references to the countless works that present themselves as “ecological,” to our lack of information within the positive disciplines that serve as their ordinary justification. This is our style of intervention, it asks us not to confuse architecture with a philosophy of furniture, and the architect of those already future ruins of the ecological palace, which the Earth is, with an interior designer who arranges his pedestal tables with the best of taste. However, it is not a speculative ecology, we claim the right to a temptation that we hope to become an attempt of (as Nietzsche says) or even an eco-fiction. If it is speculative, and there will indeed be reason to make such a complaint, it is only in a banal sense and one distorted by its theoretical difficulty, for the...