The Imaginary End(s) of the World

SO GAIA MAY BE MUCH MORE than just an aide pensée, but to say this does not yet begin to elucidate an earthly imaginary or resolve the apparent contradictions in Lovelock’s account of Gaia. Lovelock’s insistence on the contrast between “living Earth” and “spaceship Earth” does, however, suggest that we need to think more deeply about how the earth might, or might not, come to be understood as purposeful and/or providential.

Insofar as he is mechanistic, Lovelock seems to evacuate the earth of all purpose (and therefore any association with an imaginary of theological providence or overarching progress), reducing living nature and human life to nothing more than the cybernetic systems that together compose the whole earth. That said, his distinction between spaceship Earth (qua inanimate contraption) and living Earth makes it absolutely clear that he wants to resist at least some of the implications of mechanistic approaches. Describing the earth as an actual machine is deemed inaccurate, explanatorily limiting, and degrading.

Ever since his NASA days, Lovelock has considered that life is distinguished from nonlife by its homeostatic capacities; living beings can, he argues, be defined as “self-regulating systems.” The earth, as we have seen, is also a self-regulating system involving living beings, but one that exceeds any comparison to a single organism, be it animal, bacterium, and so on. He also, as we have seen, recognizes that some “machines” are not living organisms, nor are they the planet Earth, but, like a thermostat, are nonetheless self-regulating systems. It seems to be the case, then, that from Lovelock’s perspective, being a self-regulating system is necessary, but not actually sufficient, to define a living being or the earth. It also seems impossible for all this to make sense unless Lovelock holds that there is a distinction between nature and artifice and that living beings and the earth as natural entities are actually deemed to recuperate, in some unspecified way, a self-generated nonteleological “purposefulness,” rather than just being incorporated in, and made subject to, the “external” purposes of human designs (i.e., “foresight” or “planning”; Lovelock 2000, 11).

In other words, despite recognizing that as a “good (post-Kantian) scientist,” he should have avoided ever describing the world in terms of purpose, Lovelock’s mode of addressing the earth often reveals quite different feelings. Remember that the problem from a Kantian perspective is that a nonteleological purpose is not really a purpose at all. All “genuine” purposes are deployed to reach toward final end(s), and these ends both are necessarily anthropogenic and progress toward the full realization of humanity’s potential. Other attributions of purpose are just “reflective” misapplications of the term, an error that science will eventually explain away, leaving only human (and theological) purposefulness remaining. As we have seen, Kantian purposefulness clearly expresses the kind of exceptionalism that regards humans as being in a unique position to provide an “external” purpose to objects; indeed, it limits the very notion of purpose per se to the way an object or artifact serves as the means for human projects to succeed. The agency here is all human, the final end is projected by humans, and nature is just a more or less refractory raw material. This is how the progressive imaginary understands the human condition. It is expressed in the celebration of human ingenuity, the Marxist reification of labor as the active agent of history, the commodification and mobilization of every aspect of the world to achieve economic growth, and so on. This is a description of the progressive imaginary in its own terms, moving continually on from project to project, regarding everything that no longer serves its previously defined purpose or has passed its sell-by date as a useless (unless recyclable) waste product.

Now Lovelock’s “driverless” spaceship is “purposeless,” but his earth is deemed purposeful independently from, and prior to, any human purposes. Contra Kant, and given Lovelock’s evolutionary perspective, human purposefulness has to be derivative (from nature), and it is not determinate; there are no final ends. In this sense, to conflate the earth with a spacecraft is indeed “despicable” (the moral tone is always present in Lovelock’s rejection of this term) because it only exhibits our obsession with our own technical accomplishments, the paucity of our imaginations, and the dire, and self-destructive, limits of an anthropocentric imaginary that is actually turning a “living” autopoietic world into waste material. By comparison with the living Earth, a driverless spacecraft just orbiting the sun in the earth’s place would soon lose any purpose it ever had bestowed upon it. It would, after a few revolutions, be no more than one more piece of space junk, like Elon Musk’s automobile propelled on an endless road to nowhere, a space-suited dummy propped behind the steering wheel—the perfect image, and unfortunately the reality, of capital-driven egoism and the failing imaginary of progress. For Lovelock, the earth is not an object, and its purposes are internally generated.

We need, though, to follow this idea of purposefulness further. This does not require entering detailed arguments about Aristotelian understandings of telos, arche, technē, and physis, although Heidegger’s (1993, 1998) own discussions of these mutually imbricated concepts does offer a critical opening here. Heidegger’s later work carefully unpacks the way efficient causes come to set the (mechanistic) standard for defining causes in general to such an extent that “we no longer count the causa finalis, telic finality, as causality” (Heidegger 1993, 290). That is to say, historically (as Kant illustrates), we have come to regard final ends as playing no part in nonhuman nature. Yet Heidegger allows us to go further, suggesting that the very idea of a final end, that is, a purpose that gives overarching meaning to things explained as having preceded and been directed toward it, is itself an integral aspect of how the ancient Greeks and those under their influence began to think “technology.” We might even say that the very idea of a final end is itself a reflective product of taking a specific and limited “technological” mode of relating to the world as the “model” for Being itself.

This point is crucial but requires further explication. First, note that for Heidegger, technology is not at all a specific array of technical machinery, or even technics in general, but a mode of engagement that transforms the world through challenging and ordering it. It is a specific mode of addressing the earth where the earth is forced to appear as material for human projects. Also, for Heidegger, technology is not something superimposed on the world by a (human) being who stands apart from the world; it is an instrumentally oriented occasioning of our being-in-the-world. Technē, from its ancient Greek origins, refers to crafting, making artifacts for a particular purpose, an end, like a pot or, in Heidegger’s (1993) example, a chalice—but a spaceship would do just as well. This end, this causa finalis, seems to be all too readily identifiable in such cases, albeit also intimately connected to the other aspects of the artifact’s production, namely, its intended form, the material employed, and its efficient causes. We think of the final cause of the object produced as anthropogenic because it is our designs that seem to initiate its production. The object so produced appears to us as finished when it achieves the material form that will fulfill its intended function. We are therefore drawn to say that this achievement is its telos, the final end to which its construction was always directed, and also the way it will appear at the completion of its limited task as having no further purpose: having helped Elon Musk ameliorate his insatiable desire for publicity, the car has completed its task and is now both driverless and purposeless, all the more so since, having escaped the earth’s confines, it cannot actually be recycled as raw material for other ends.

Heidegger (1993, 290), then, suggests that ideas of causation, including the idea of a final cause, are not something “fallen from heaven as a truth as clear as daylight” but, in this case, something inextricably associated with that limited (technological) mode of engagement or addressing the world, a mode that also frames and limits our understanding of the world. As this mode of addressing the earth comes to predominate, so we become apt to consider all aspects of our existence, our being-in-the-world, in this terribly limited light. For example, the book that so engrosses us that the everyday world falls away as we read is reinscribed as just “print technology” useful in imparting information—or perhaps just a waste of more productive uses of our time. The love for a child is to be scientifically explained as a matter of reproductive efficiency, or just treated as a means for marketing toys. Heidegger’s own examples famously include the river transformed into a source of hydroelectric power and the forest reduced to nothing but a source of timber. Such an orientation eventually becomes “second nature” to those under its thrall, even to the extent that referring to the whole earth as an assemblage of resources is assumed to be an ethically, epistemologically, and politically neutral description of reality! In other words, we come to (mis)take a specific technological mode of addressing the world as a fixed ontology of a now “objectified” world, and “having purpose” becomes entirely associated with involvement in telic productive activities.

This technological enframing of the globe is largely a product of the progressive imaginary, but it has a much longer heritage in Western philosophy. It does not yet entirely dominate the providential imaginary, but it is certainly present in its formulations and in much earlier accounts. Perhaps Western theological requirements for the universe to have a creator with a purpose in mind might themselves be indebted to this same mode of engagement: God as architect of the world; God as providentially organizing and making the world to have a certain purpose; God’s designs on earth (in this sense, humanism is residually theological in posting humanity as a “whole” as having a God-like power to produce and progress toward “our” own ends).

Take, for example, Augustine’s providential use of this technological trope:

Let us not, then, deem God inferior to human workmen, who, in proportion to their skill, finish and perfect their works, small as well as great, by one and that same art. (as cited in Fergusson 2018, 14)

This, though, is a form of political theology that, to invoke Latour’s earlier phrase, paralyzes nature, evolution, and the earth. It frames the earth’s creativity in appallingly limited ways. This is also the reason Heidegger returns to pre-Socratic philosophies, and specifically to earlier notions of physis, to find alternative understandings in the Western tradition. As Sallis (2016, 52–53) argues, these earlier traditions offer a figure of nature that refers the questions of creation and origins back to the earth:

Empedocles regards the άρχή [arche—that from which things arise] entirely in relation to generation, not the generation of being, but the generation by which vegetative life germinates in the earth and emerges into the light and the open air, as well as that by which animate beings are born. What is, perhaps, most conspicuous by contrast with later Greek philosophy is the total lack of reference to making or production (ποίήσις, τέχυη). Beings are not regarded as if they—even those that belong to nature—were made by imposition of form on shapeless material. One could say that in this sense Empedocles’ thought remains closer to nature, keeps it apart from the paradigm of human artifice, of τέχυη [technē]. There is hardly a trace of the contention that will erupt later between these two sides . . . to say nothing of the dominance of τέχυη over nature that will later set in.

Physis, then, offers a nontechnological way of understanding earth’s creativity and a way of distinguishing between nature and artifice that does not depend on making a simple ontological distinction between humanity and nature. The earth is not technological, and not everything humans do is a matter of artifice; that is, humans do not have to be technological in terms of their modes of addressing the earth, and they don’t necessarily require final ends.

There are, of course, many philosophers (see, e.g., Foltz 1995; Zimmerman 1990) who have followed Heidegger in tracing the dangers inherent in the technological way of understanding existence which, with modernity, has come to enframe the entire way the world is “made” to appear. We might say that technology (in its Heideggerian sense) has come to pervade and dominate every aspect of our materio-semiotic imaginary, to frame everything (including, eventually, ourselves) as “standing reserve,” without our becoming aware of its existential, experiential, and epistemic limitations. Why else is it that those seeking to defend the existence of anything at all are first of all asked, What use is it (Evernden 1999)? when providing an answer to such questions only serves to further enmesh the entity within the very imaginary that threatens its existence.

These Heideggerian critiques of technology tend to focus on the instrumental reduction of the earth and humanity to a potential means, that is, to standing reserve. However, Heidegger’s analysis also allows us to realize that this technologically derived notion of telos (of final ends) is also universally overextended. Realizing this, there is no reason (apart, of course, from the overbearing weight and historical reality of its colonization of every aspect of life and every part of the globe!) why this very limited mode of addressing the world should actually be thought to apply to every aspect of human existence, still less to nature’s activities, or to the earth as such. In other words, the continual technological and philosophical production of final ends or purposes (which are never actually final) does not have to be the “be all and end all” of earthly existence.

As we have seen, Kant’s distinction, used in moving from providential to progressive explanations of the human condition, is entirely caught up with preserving the exceptional dignity of humanity as a final end. We might suggest, to the contrary, that our exceptionality, our supposedly unique association with generating or being considered the earth’s final ends, comes to be justified through an unexplicated recourse to an entirely unwarranted extension of a historically and culturally specific (Eurocentric) misunderstanding of technology to the whole world, an occurrence that actually now leads that world to a very undignified “destiny.” This seems close to Heidegger’s own views, despite the fact that he regards his own work as still maintaining a space for human exceptionality.

Returning to Lovelock, we might now think about his distinction somewhat differently. He does often imply that the earth as a “living organism” is purposeful and that its being purposeful evolves with its self-creating and self-regulating capacity. This, however, is not at all in the sense of serving some ultimate purpose, a final end that it is “driven” to reach. He is certainly not describing Gaia as having any kind of final purpose in a Kantian sense, whether as an “end in itself” or as a means to a final end generated by creatures that have, in some historical circumstances, come to consider themselves exceptional. The earth’s purpose does not lie in becoming “standing reserve” for human projects. Rather, we might say, Gaia is purposeful in the sense that the earth is as near as we can ever get to (but is not) something that is an “end in itself”—having spent the last four billion years moving through evolutionary (nonteleological) transformations that eventually, by accident and circumstance, included the creation of that same self-deluding creature. In this sense, the earth created the very possibility of its being understood purposefully, but the realization of this possibility was not a matter of planetary progress! It is not something the earth had “intended,” something planned by external deity or earth goddess, or something predetermined or inevitable, and nor, contra Kant, will humanity’s progressive self-realization constitute the earth’s final end. Earth will almost certainly continue for billions of years after we have become extinct. Humans do not bestow purpose on the earth any more than we speak for it. We are not its materio-semiotic culmination but just one of myriad different evolutionary occurrences, albeit one we should, presumably, recognize and be extraordinarily grateful for! We are born of the Earth, of nature. “Natura comes from nasci, ‘to be born, to originate. . . .’ Natura means ‘that which lets something originate from itself’” (Heidegger 1998, 183).

Through approaches like Gaia theory, human beings are fundamentally decentered. We do not constitute, in any sense (however far deferred), a final end, which also means that we cannot, by anthropic fiat, ever justify defining the earth and its evolving creations as just a means to our ends, a resource to fulfill any theologically providential or progressive project. This flatly contradicts that imaginary that, following Kant, regards the earth as here only to provide sustenance and sufficient challenges to enable us to determine and reach humanity’s own final end(s). In any case. the emergence of the “Anthropocene” and global climate change demonstrates that this anthropogenic project is certainly not going to plan; indeed, it makes it obvious that there is no plan whatsoever!

Climate change now makes immediate and real that of which the imaginary of progress remains in denial—that there is no final end for humanity other than extinction and, furthermore, that the most likely immediate cause of this extinction will actually be the materio-semiotic hegemony of that same progressive imaginary that instigates anthropogenic climate change!1 The Kantian notion of a progressively realized “final end,” as something opposed to, and different from, the “great system of the purposes of nature” (Kant, as cited in Zuckert 2007, 128), was fateful and fatal, being grounded on a faith in, and a desire to maintain and extend, human exceptionalism. If Kant was correct in arguing that there are no final causes in nature, then this is only because there are no final causes at all in any ultimate or overarching sense. Ecologically and evolutionarily, this makes perfect sense and is very clearly and explicitly a key assumption of Gaia.