With Nature

Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy

Warwick Mules, Rod Giblett, Warwick Mules, Emily Potter, Rod Giblett, Warwick Mules, Emily Potter

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781841505732
• eBook ISBN: 9781783202928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With Nature provides new ways to think about our relationship with nature in today's technologically mediated culture. Warwick Mules makes original connections with German critical philosophy and French poststructuralism in order to examine the effects of technology on our interactions with the natural world. In so doing, the author proposes a new way of thinking about the eco-self in terms of a careful sharing of the world with both human and non-human beings. With Nature ultimately argues for a poetics of everyday life that affirms the place of the human-nature relation as a creative and productive site for ecological self-renewal and redirection.

Part I

The Things of Nature

Chapter 1

Nature Otherwise

Encountering things

To know nature is to set up a distinction between a subject who knows about nature and nature as the object of this knowing. Nature as something given, something close at hand, disappears in the playing out of what nature signifies for the knowing subject and its objectification into systems of knowledge.¹ To speak of nature as an object of knowledge is to enter a self-reflection where nature becomes mirrored between subjective and objective modes of knowledge production.² Nature loses all sense of being this nature, and becomes instead an appearance for the subject whose interests determine what nature is and could be.³ In its aesthetic mode, knowledge of nature passes through the subject in terms of internal states and affects; while in its scientific mode, knowledge passes through the same subject but in terms of the apodictic certainty of concepts held in the mind. In both cases, the subject acts as a conduit for the knowledge of nature. Speaking about nature becomes speaking on behalf of the subject who already knows about and experiences nature through self-reflection.

In this subjective mode of knowledge, the mirroring of nature is mistaken for nature itself reflecting the subject’s own thought, while encounters with the things of nature – whatever is at hand to think with – are blocked by the knowledge applied to them.⁴ A thinking that thinks with the subject in seeking to know nature overlooks the fact that the things of nature remain where they are, close at hand and accessible in a certain way. There, they can be encountered otherwise. Such an encounter is not a matter of sensory contact or observation, but takes the form of a questioning of the fact that such things are, requiring an account of their mode of being.

To encounter nature otherwise is to see nature for what it can be, other than as a mirror image of our own thought. In such encounters, we free up thinking for another way of relating to nature. Thinking about nature is no longer determined by a self-reflecting subject producing nature as an object of its thought, but occurs right at the place where nature is encountered. Why do we need to do this? For reasons related to industrialized production and consumption on a vast globalized scale, we are now faced with a critical issue of how to live on the earth; how to live well without exploiting nature for our own ends. To see nature otherwise is to be already with nature in its possibilities, as the beginning of something else, some other human-nature relation. In this book I develop a line of enquiry to see and to think nature otherwise – to think with nature rather than against it.⁵

My aim is to engage in critique. By critique I mean thinking about nature in its possibilities, for what it can be, as distinct from what it already is. Possibility here refers to enablement, as proposed by Martin Heidegger in his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (Heidegger 1998, p. 242). Something is possible in this enabling sense, not because it is calculable, inevitably or necessarily so, but because it can happen within finite, contingent circumstances – it is enabled by the situation. Enabled possibility is not a matter of choosing between possibilities set up in advance, but is the very fact that something could be otherwise, a fact built into what something is. Possibility is its exigent otherness.⁶

Insofar as nature is something and not nothing, then it must be something encountered in a particular way, at a finite place, for somebody. It must already be there even as it disappears into the mirror play of the subject/object set-up. I call this already being there of nature, nature ‘as such’. Nature ‘as such’ is the being there of nature – the irreducible ‘this’ of the ‘things of nature’ as we encounter them and think about them.⁷ Nature ‘as such’ – the things of nature – are, not as outwardly perceived objects nor as inner subjective states, but as positive remainders of that which thought is not: a residue that partakes of, yet remains irreducible to, this thinking. We always experience the things of nature as such ‘otherwise’, in the residual sense that thought leaves behind. I argue that to get out of the mirror play of subject and object that locks thinking about nature into fulfilling our own desires we need to encounter the things of nature ‘as such’ – as affirmations of the ‘not’ of thought.⁸

By encountering the things of nature as the ‘not’ of thought, they take on an enabling capacity. They call for thought and beckon us to action. Rather than projecting our desires onto them as mute objects of our thought, we let them be in their possibilities as such. To do this, I argue, requires another way of thinking, neither subjective nor objective, but a thinking ‘in-between’. Thinking in-between the subject/object set-up requires that we begin our thinking with the ‘there is’ of what is, insofar as this there leads us not back to our already-known self, but to somewhere else in this thinking otherwise, an always remaining possibility.

Nancy’s cat

To think right at nature is the task before us. Jean-Luc Nancy describes this kind of thinking as follows:

It is an impossible thought, a thinking that does not hold itself back from the circulation it thinks, a thinking of meaning right at [à même] meaning, where its eternity occurs as the truth of its passing. (For instance, at the moment at which I am writing, a brown-and-white cat is crossing the garden, slipping mockingly away, taking my thoughts with it.)

(Nancy 2000, p. 4)

Here Nancy describes a way of thinking that follows what disturbs it in thinking about something. This ‘impossible thought […] does not hold itself back’; that is, it does not hold itself back into a self-reflection, but lets itself go, and in so doing, finds itself right at meaning in its connection with things.

Nancy describes this being right at meaning as a moment of distraction where a cat crosses the garden right there where he is thinking, taking his thoughts away into an endless circulation – an intimation of Nietzsche’s ‘“eternal return”’ (p. 4). The cat comes to interrupt the thinker’s thinking, thereby bringing it to a threshold. Nancy describes this threshold as the ‘eternity’ of thought occurring as the ‘truth of its passing’. That is, the thought, suddenly reduced to its finite occurrence, is ‘eternal’, in that it has no temporality to ground itself except for the ‘moment’ of its thinking. At this moment thought is placed en abyme, in an open or ‘absolute’ possibility. However, in this momentary state of being en abyme, it still remains attached to the ‘outside’ – it latches on to a ‘something’ already in the vicinity, no matter how insignificant (a cat slinking away will do). Thought’s eternity – its ‘truth’ in the singular moment of its happening – is revealed as a ‘passing’ and ‘slipping away’ with some thing. Here, the thing is grasped not in itself, but in its contingency. As a contingent thing, it withdraws, and in so doing takes thought away with it. The subject gives itself up to the uncertainty of an irrecoverable otherness in the way it encounters things in their withdrawing from thought.

Finite thinking is thought interrupted by the transitive movement of the thing in its slipping away. This slipping away has no destination, no aim, no goal, but is simply the transitivity of the thing itself, in its restless yearning to be elsewhere other than where it already is. Thinking right at nature is a finite thinking that leads away from itself into an abyss of not knowing. Yet in this movement a freedom to be otherwise is affirmed.

Schelling – Heidegger – Benjamin – Nancy

To develop the critical and conceptual terrain to think right at nature I will initially engage with the philosophy of the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling (Chapters 3–6). Schelling’s nature philosophy (Naturphilosophie), written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thinks the ‘in-between’ of thought and nature as an emergent, differentiating movement of free becoming.⁹ Schelling’s Naturphilosophie provides a positive account of the human relation to nature, which I will propose as an alternative to the negative account that Kant provides in his critique of reason.

Schelling’s philosophy of nature presents ideas about nature and singularity, partage (the being-together-apart of singular things) and free-being that can be deployed to develop a nature philosophy today. Schelling argues that critique needs to begin not with the Kantian subject who only knows the things of nature as objects of thought, but with the ‘thatness’ of things – the fact that they are. For Schelling, Kantian critique proposes only ‘the concept of a thing […] but nothing of its thatness [Daß], of its existence’ (Schelling 2007, p. 147). Schelling overcomes the subject/object opposition separating mind and nature in Kant’s critique by beginning with things in their ‘thatness’, as possibilities opened up in encountering them. A nature philosophy following Schelling’s insights would be a philosophy that thinks with the things of nature, not against them.

Although providing a beginning, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie cannot provide all of the conceptual material needed for a nature philosophy today. It remains steeped in idealist assumptions about higher nature and mythic fulfilment, as well as ‘the will to System’ in the aftermath of Kant (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy 1988, p. 33).¹⁰ To assume such providential ideas about higher nature and mythical renewal is to overlook the situation today, where nature disappears into nothingness within systems of meaning and production. A nature philosophy must first respond to this nothingness (nihil) and think nature otherwise from this place.

To think from the nothing that nature has become in today’s technologically ordered world, I will turn to the philosophy of Heidegger (Chapter 7), in particular his writing on technology and art (Heidegger 1971, 1977), and on the event of Being as Ereignis or finite openness (Heidegger 1999). Heidegger relates the things of nature to art and technology, and his argument that art constitutes a turn in technology as epochal opening (Heidegger 1977, p. 35, pp. 41–43) indicates a role for art in nature philosophy that picks up on Schelling’s own ideas of art and epochal history (Schelling 1978, Parts 5 and 6; 1989, Part 1). Heidegger’s later philosophy provides insight into the kind of thinking about the nature-art-technology nexus needed to respond to this coming epoch, a thinking that says ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to technology at the same time (Heidegger 1966, p. 54). My aim here is to work with Heidegger’s philosophy to draw out the complex issues of art, technology and poietic becoming (poiesis) in the modern epoch, and to show how a nature philosophy can engage with this nexus to begin the kind of otherwise thinking adequate for an age of technology. However, there are limitations to Heidegger’s position. His central insight – that the event of Being opens to an otherness that ‘must be held open and free for the current factical possibility’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 355)¹¹ – is undermined when he turns his own critique back into myth. Heidegger’s critique is not critical enough to break away from an underlying mythification that haunts it throughout.¹²

To counter Heidegger’s lapse into mythical thinking, I will propose the idea of a transitional poetics that remains within the ‘in-between’ of the nature-art-technology nexus as a way of keeping openness open. To do this I will draw on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘poetized’ as the shaping force (of nature) enacted in artworks as singular events of absolute ‘truth’ (Benjamin 1996, pp. 18–19), as well as the poetics of Paul Celan who, in his poems and essays, proposes a post-mythic mode of poetic ‘speaking’ (Celan 2005). By doing this, I will retain the poietical opening of nature (its transitivity) carried by the artwork and the poem, but in terms of a critical demythification of the place of nature in the contemporary world of industrialized objects, systems and technical procedures. A transitional poetics, I will argue, allows us to think nature otherwise without turning this otherwise into a new mythology of nature awaiting human being. Rather, it indicates a critical interruption of the systems of meaning that perpetuate the mythic terrain of the human-nature relation in its current configuration as technical fact. Through its singular activities, a transitional poetics continues the essentially political task of pursuing freedom and justice not just for human beings but for the things of nature as well, as part of an expanded sense of human responsibility towards ‘free being’ with nature.¹³

Broadly speaking, I will propose an ontological critique of nature ‘as such’ by drawing from Schelling, Heidegger and Benjamin, employing concepts derived from their thinking about nature as poietic becoming, while also recognizing their shortcomings. From Schelling I will draw on the concept of nature as the beginning of possibility in the ungrounding of nature (Unground) as positive freedom; from Heidegger, I will draw on the concept of nature as an event of Being – an epochal opening into otherness (Ereignis); from Benjamin and Celan I will draw on the poetic act as one of enabling-transition. I will also draw on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, in particular his idea of world-forming (mondialisation) as the reclamation of the finite place of a renewed possibility of being with nature within denatured globalizing worlds (Nancy 2007, pp. 27–28). These concepts will help me to develop a critical approach to nature ‘as such’ right at the place where it happens, in the breaching of technological order by thought thinking ‘otherwise’.

Poiesis

Poiesis will be a key concept in this book. I take poiesis to be a postulate of critique. A postulate is a principle demanded by critique in its praxis:

[I]t indicates the inseparability of theoretical from practical philosophy by grounding all theoretical knowledge in the activity of a positing self. In contrast to an axiom, which has the strange form of a product not recognized as having been produced by anything, a postulate is always the product of a postulating activity.

(Lauer 2012, p. 47)

Axioms are fiats; they announce projects as ‘things to be done’. Postulates, however, are part of the praxis of the announcing; they ‘do’ the very thing that they announce as needing to be done. Postulates are not fiats but speculations in open possibility; they pose questions and open up lines of enquiry.

Poiesis is postulated in this present work as the transitivity of nature. To define poietic transitivity we can turn to classical Greek philosophy, where poiesis means ‘making’ or ‘producing’, as distinct from praxis, meaning ‘doing’ or ‘acting’ (Taminiaux 1987, p. 137). Poiesis is neither an independent force (e.g. an élan vital, the ‘power of nature’) that acts on things, nor a vital materialism (hylozoism) acting in things. Rather poiesis is that which is required by critique to account for the fact that things have their being in a ‘bringing forth’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 10). Poiesis is ‘a change of place or of situation’ (Weber 1996, p. 64), a transition that carries the thing to where we can say ‘it is’. In Benjamin’s ter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Deedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Wanted – A Nature Philosophy
• Part I: The Things of Nature
• Chapter 1: Nature Otherwise
• Chapter 2: Saying Nature
• Part II: Nature Philosophy
• Chapter 3: Schelling after Kant
• Chapter 4: Unground
• Chapter 5: Positive Freedom
• Chapter 6: Virtual Nature
• Part III: Poetics
• Chapter 7: Heidegger’s Thing
• Chapter 8: Poetics: Benjamin and Celan
• Part IV: Technology
• Chapter 9: Benjamin: Collapsing Nature
• Chapter 10: Nancy: Renaturing and Bio Art
• Conclusion: Towards Ecopoetics
• References
• Notes
• Index