A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

Ecologies of Thought

A. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781349463282
  9781137335876
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137331977
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ecology

Utilizing François Laruelle's "non-philosophical" method, Smith constructs a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology by challenging environmental philosophy and theology, claiming that and engagement with scientific ecology can radically change the standard metaphysics of nature, as well as ethical problems related to "the natural".

Part I

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The Perversity of Nature Foreclosed to Thought

Chapter 1

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Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse

In the introduction I said that the goal of this work is to foster a democracy (of) thought among the disparate fields of philosophy, theology, and ecology. This democracy (of) thought is not an end unto itself, but is necessary in order to denude these discourses of any pretense to a hierarchical posture over the others. This in turn will allow us to treat material within these discourses as just that—simple material that can be distributed and organized in a different ecosystem (of) thought. This chapter serves to survey these fields as they are currently organized in relation to one another. In terms that will be discussed at length in part III, we will examine the ecotones or the limits of their identity as they come up against one another as already constituted, though unconsciously, as ecosystems (of) thought (an ecotone is a transition zone between two different ecosystems, often there will be a blending of elements from two different ecosystems and species will be present in the ecotone that are not present in either of the two bordering ecosystems). I will trace their limits and the spaces at their limits where they blend (ecotone) and in these limit-ecotone spaces we will find what remains unthought within their strict borders, what remains presented as if unecological in being thus thought, and we will then begin to identify the perversity of nature foreclosed to thought. As we will come to see, it is this blindness of these discourses to the perversity of nature foreclosed to thought, their refusal or inability to allow scientific ecology to infect and mutate their own thinking about their own thinking, that lies behind their remaining unecological in thinking nature.

Recognizing the perversity of nature is recognizing that nature is stranger than any one regional knowledge, be it philosophy, theology, or scientific ecology, can capture. Recognizing the perversity of nature means recognizing the radically foreclosed character of nature to thought. In terms that I adapt from Laruelle, “nature” becomes a first name for the Real. Laruelle gives this definition to first names, “Fundamental terms which symbolize the Real and its modes according to its radical immanence or its identity. They are deprived of their philosophical sense and become, via axiomatized abstraction, the terms—axioms and theorems—of non-philosophy.”¹ A certain term, chosen in part for its fittingness with the Real, is transformed from its philosophical sense or meaning and thought according to certain axioms of the Real. The sense that nature is foreclosed to thought is a mutation of the historical philosophical stance toward nature, transmitted through its Greek filiation, that “nature loves to hide.”² As Pierre Hadot has shown, this underlying idea about nature has been able to accommodate a variety of very different philosophical visions about nature, from its original meaning in Heraclitus that the death of things is unavoidable, “What is born tends to disappear,” to the modern antagonism between the Promethean and Orphic attitudes.³ The first, combining the attitudes of both magicians and scientists, claims that nature has hidden itself in mechanization and that mechanics itself can unveil nature and reveal its secrets, which are of or can be turned into human use. The second, sharing much in common with the green notion of “small footprints,” seeks to unveil the spiritual secrets of nature, to unveil nature though contemplation, art, and poetry and thereby take pleasure in this knowledge without any particular concern for its use. While there is certainly an antagonism between these two attitudes, there is also a fundamental amphibology: for both, nature is veiled and can be unveiled.

This is not what our axiom, that the perversity of nature is foreclosed to thought, means. Nature itself is not veiled, nature does not “love to hide”; no, nature is radically immanent as the Real. That is, the metaphor of nature’s veil already beguiles one into thinking that there is something other than nature, something we can appeal to outside of nature. Yet, if we think nature in an ecological thought we have to recognize that the veil is also nature! No, nature is not veiled, but thinking this allows our regional knowledges to think that they can unveil nature, that they can touch and circumscribe nature with thought and thereby either exploit her for our own gain or save her. Our contemporary climate, both in the physical and intellectual sense, is determined by a single force: the neoliberal capitalist ideology that demands everything reduce its value to the quantitative measure of money so that it can produce more of this measure. Nature, though, appears to be purposely deviating from what is accepted as good, proper, or reasonable in capitalist society. Nature itself appears to be refusing to go away, to separate itself off from “culture” and the human person, and insists on inhering to every part of culture and within every human person, and it resists bowing before capitalism’s demand, to be measured as something relative rather than the radical condition for any relative measurement.⁴ This is not hidden from us; we know the perversity of nature. It is present in our bones, the aches some get when a storm is coming and the way that weather is no longer a matter of mere conversation but of life and death concern.⁵ We are witnesses to the perversity of nature as we are an instance of its perversity.

In other words, which will be explained in more depth in part II, the causal relationship of nature to thought is a unilateral one. Nature, as a name for the Real, determines all thought; in the last instance all thought is natural. This may cause certain misunderstandings. For instance, someone may read this and think it means that thought has no influence or causal power in the world. This would be to confuse two levels of autonomy, the relative and radical, for, of course, thought can affect things in the world. An idea can lead to or participate in a change to a society. An idea can lead us to destroy an ecosystem or to restore a degraded one. Yet, none of this destroys or saves nature as such. The thought can never become unnatural; it is never not a real idea and what is real is natural. Thought can have real effects, but cannot affect the Real; thought can think the unnatural, but it does not do so unnaturally.

Allow us to step back for a moment, before diving into the local material of specific thinkers, and survey the whole of the field from a little higher up. We have three distinct regional knowledges, what we call ecosystems (of) thought: philosophy, theology, and ecology. These identities may seem too pure in the simple separation here, for, as regards philosophy and theology, there has been no actual purity of either that we can locate in the history of thought and the same holds true for ecology, as it found itself developing among and responding to philosophical and theological notions of nature. The messy reality of these discourses gives me no offense and it does not need to lead into mystification. After all, though Spinoza devotes the first part of his Ethics to a treatise on God, surely a theology by definition, no one feels all that uncomfortable calling him a philosopher. In the same way Aquinas, while clearly devoting much of his work to “pure” philosophical matters or matters that seemed removed from the everyday problems of religious believers, he is nevertheless a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church and we have no difficulty referring to him as a theologian. Finally, though Aldo Leopold’s classic 1949 work A Sand Country Almanac bears upon certain philosophical problems, both metaphysical and ethical, he was never a professor of philosophy but rather was a forester and eventually became a Professor of Game Management in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and no one seems to think a professorship in philosophy was stolen from him.

We are comfortable calling the work of one a “philosophy,” the other “theology,” and the third “ecology.” There is a deeper reason for that comfort than mere institutional status, where they did their work or where that work is now taught, and it goes to the heart of their identities as distinct practices of knowledge. Their identity as philosophy, theology, or ecology has to do with the material of thought that they work with and the way in which they work with that material. For example, both Aquinas and Spinoza wrote about God and nature, in both cases their material can be said in the abstract to be the same and both even engaged significantly with Christian and Jewish scripture, but their stance toward that material and subsequent practice differs radically. Aquinas approaches problems from the perspective of a Christian theologian; all his work is ultimately concerned with the particular reception of revelation within the Roman Catholic tradition. Thus, when it comes to nature Aquinas himself recognizes that the philosopher and the theologian think in very different ways, the theologian according to the “light of doctrine” while the philosopher considers creatures (creation or nature) “as they are.” Aquinas explains,

The Christian faith, however, does not consider them as such; thus, it regards fire not as fire, but as representing the sublimity of God, and as being directed to Him in any way at all. For it said: “Full of the glory of the Lord is His work. Hath not the Lord made the saints to declare all His wonderful works?” (Eccles. 52:16–17)⁶

Spinoza, insofar as he is not working within a particular community of faith and aims at a universal knowledge that undercuts conflicts concerning the specifics of dogma, is quite different. While in the aforementioned passage we see Aquinas ground his distinction between philosophical and theological metaphysics in a passage from scripture, Spinoza’s considerations of scripture as revelation lead him to posit the superiority of natural knowledge over revealed knowledge. He writes, “I prove that the revealed word of God is not a certain number of books but a pure conception of the divine mind which was revealed to the prophets, namely, to obey God with all one’s mind by practicing justice and charity.”⁷ This is revealed knowledge in the sense that it is given to the people from positions of authority, but revealed knowledge does not clash with natural knowledge, which is equally divine.⁸ In fact, for Spinoza there is nothing in revealed knowledge, as claimed by particular traditions that cannot be known more securely in natural or universally revealed knowledge.

In some sense, then, when we use theology in the course of this work, we refer to a relating of everything back to God as understood within a community that has arisen around a specific understanding of a revelation.⁹ The material is reality itself, but the posture taken toward reality is determined by the development of dogma in the light of a particular revelation, while philosophy, especially at its limits in thinkers such as Spinoza, aims to think from a position that it takes to be more universal, unmoored by strict boundaries (though there are of course some) and to find some kind of secure grounding for knowledge outside of particular or local revelations. Here the material is also reality itself, but the stance is more universal, in varying degrees, and an attempt to think a universal ground of knowledge. This means that philosophy can dismiss more easily certain antagonisms between certain dogmatic statements coming out of a religious community and what knowledge derived from “nature” or from outside of that religious community, but it also means that philosophy tends to split up thought itself in a way that theology does not tend to, for instance, between revelation and ground. These are both incredibly schematic definitions and not intended to bestow any kind of absolute judgment on either theology or philosophy, but only to delineate distinct fields by way of strong tendencies in terms of material worked with and the practice of working on that material. As will become clear throughout this chapter I find within both fields aspects that are problematic in terms of thinking ecologically and aspects that are indispensable. We can, however, give a definition to ecology that is a bit more precise. While the material of philosophy and theology is reality itself, a necessarily abstract definition if we are to include all the various philosophers and theologians valued as such in the history of thought, the material for ecology is more concrete and common among ecologists. The primary material is that of the ecosystem, discussed at more length later, and it is from the concept of the ecosystem that working with any other material is practiced, be it philosophical or some physical material within a particular environment.

These then are our three distinct regional knowledges that we move within in this work. We can speak of their limits as regards each other because of the dominant tendencies we have located, which also avoid any kind of naive, strict separation or desire for purity among them. What is most at issue is not the relationship of philosophy and theology, often an antagonistic one that every philosopher and theologian has some opinion on. No, what is most at issue here is the relationship between science and philosophy or theology, specifically between ecology and philosophy or theology. Not as regards the historical relationship between science and philosophy or theology, which has been both antagonistic and beneficial, but as regards this specific science, ecology, and the stances that philosophy and theology take toward it with regard to their own thought. First, we will examine the relationship of ecology to philosophy or theology, which I simply call “thought” in this section. This is important because the overdetermination of scientific ecology by prior philosophical or theological images of thought tends to go unacknowledged. Corollary to this, many miss the fact that certain key concepts in ecology are responses to that overdetermination and therefore these concepts could be taken up within philosophy and theology as well. I will then turn to the relationship of philosophy and ecology, and a short section on recent philosophies of nature’s “bondedness” with physics, while saving a wider discussion of philosophy’s relationship toward science in general until the next chapter.

While I discuss a variety of different philosophical positions, from those whose work is self-described environmental philosophy to phenomenology and new philosophies of nature, they can be separated into two general types. The first I call the subsumption type, where science must be subsumed into philosophy for it to think, and the second I call the bonded type, where philosophy is understood to be bonded to natural science, specifically physics, in its own philosophical operations. With regard to the second I will show that philosophies of nature have not engaged with ecology, limiting their scientific contamination and in the first I will examine the very limited engagement with ecology that environmental philosophy has. Finally, I will turn to theology and ecology and trace similar limits, though understanding the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   The Perversity of Nature Foreclosed to Thought
• Part II   The Non-Philosophical Matrix
• Part III   Immanental Ecology and Ecologies (of) Thought
• Part IV   A Theory of Nature
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index