Progress, Providence, and the Anthropocene

DISCOURSE AROUND THE ANTHROPOCENE often forces nature to appear as little more than a surrogate for capitalism, both “systems” being destructively and irreversibly entangled, both now deemed impervious to the sufferings they inflict. Indeed, the Anthropocene seemingly denotes a hopeless situation for all, except those retaining an unshakable faith in technical fixes or a monomaniacal desire to profit from others’ misery (Klein 2007). There is certainly no shortage of such people, yet to describe a situation where the entire world is threatened by an economic system inducing mass extinction and climate change as either “providential” or a matter of “progress” now seems entirely implausible.

Providence is, in any case, a term that has largely vanished from all but theological lexicons. Yet progress is still a world-structuring concept—or perhaps, more accurately, it remains, for the moment, a key aspect of a world-shaping imaginary, by which we mean the shared and circulating materio-semiotic flows that (de)limit possibilities for visualizing, expressing, and understanding our social-ecological situation.1 Science, for example, is still, by and large, envisaged as a process of continual epistemic progress despite its contributions to, and expression in, the rather obvious downsides of “inventions” like nuclear weapons, virulent pesticides, nanoparticles, plastic waste, and mass surveillance. The point here is not to argue whether science per se is either “good” or “bad” but to illustrate how impossible it has been to engage in any such debate without immediately invoking an image of its contribution to something called “progress,” even if only as an overarching alibi to justify that which is ethically inexcusable.

We might say, then, that an imaginary, such as that surrounding progress, constitutes a pervasive atmosphere of possibilities within which a given society operates, one inhaled and exhaled through every interpretative, creative, productive, and destructive act, even when dreaming of alternatives. In this sense, this imaginary also denotes a hermeneutic “breathing space” that, so long as it is materially and ideologically sustainable and sustaining, continues to inspire that society. Ironically, with the advent of global climate change, it is increasingly clear that the imaginary associated with progress no longer has a future (Beradi 2011, 17). The atmosphere it has produced is, quite literally, becoming unbreathable, its waters anoxic. Have we finally, then, reached the end of progress? If so, what might “end” here signify: the end of an illusion (Gray 2004), the end of a colonizing European ideology (Allen 2016), the end of a/the world (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017), and/or, perhaps, the completion of the, rather unexpected, telos of modernity? What will the sublimation of this imaginary leave behind when everything that once declared itself so solid is revealed as so much hot air?

In considering the immanent end of this world-shaping and shaped imaginary, we might do well to return to its origins to better understand how “progress” became insinuated into every aspect of a synonymously “modern” epoch. Lloyd (2008) carefully traces how, from the seventeenth century onward, “progress” actually emerges as a replacement for theological (and, before that, much more ancient) notions of “providence.” It expresses an increasingly secular but, if anything, even more narrowly anthropocentric idea of agential teleology. She tracks this movement philosophically (although we would also emphasize its immense materio-semiotic resonances and ramifications) from ancient Greek tragedy through Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, and Rousseau to Kant, where this change and emergent imaginary first become explicit.

Kant’s argument is subtle but far-reaching. He admits that we could just interpret natural relations in terms of how their existence assures the provision of sustenance for humans. For example, we might claim that animals are placed here by God for us to domesticate, eat, and so on. Or we could interpret the world purposively, for example, “herbivores are there to moderate the opulent growth in the plant kingdom, which would otherwise choke many species of plants.” This approach leads to a similarly anthropocentric, but not identical, conclusion that “man [sic] is there to hunt the predators [of these herbivores] . . . and so establish a certain equilibrium between the productive and destructive forces of nature” (Kant 1987, 427). The former possibility is clearly providential; the latter might seem to link nature’s own purposiveness with a hierarchic role for human stewardship over the earth, though, from Kant’s perspective, its problem is that it opens the door to reducing the “dignity of [humanity’s] being a purpose” to having only what we might now consider a naturalized ecological and functional role, where humanity “would only hold the rank of a means” (Kant 1987, 427) rather than a “final end.” That is, humans would become just one species among many, each having its naturally appointed role in the “great system of the purposes of nature” (Kant, as cited in Zuckert 2007, 128).

This phrase illustrates how Kant thinks it is acceptable, up to a point, to employ a principle of purposiveness in understanding the natural world, but he deems this employment “merely reflective not determinate” (Zuckert 2007, 130). In other words, we may sometimes find this attribution of purposiveness necessary as a way of thinking about “ecological” relations, but this does not actually explain those relations. Kant argues that we actually have an “obligation to give a mechanical explanation for all products and events in nature, even the most purposive, as far as it is in our capacity to do so” (Kant, as cited in Zuckert 2007, 130, original emphasis). Thus, for Kant and those who follow, enlightened scientific approaches should seek to excise both purposive and providential explanations from their accounts of nature. The language of purpose should really be reserved for human activities.

The centrality of human exceptionalism to his philosophical project certainly provides one reason why Kant is unwilling to reduce humanity to its “ecological” role in nature’s great system. However, he also argues that a more thoughtful and thorough acquaintance with the earth’s “natural history” shows that what looks at first sight like the purposive ordering of natural beings and the habitats in which they seem to thrive is actually wholly unintentional and, what is more, is produced by “causes that are more likely to be devastating than to foster production, order, and purposes” (Kant 1987, 428).

Land and sea contain memorials of mighty devastations that long ago befell them and all creatures living in or on them. Indeed, their entire structure, the strata of the land and the boundaries of the sea, look quite like the product of savage, all-powerful forces of a nature working in a state of chaos. (Kant 1987, 428)

In other words, seen in the whole, there is no overarching purpose, order, or preordained “balance of nature” there to be maintained, and Kant (1952, 108) concludes that “without man the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end.” Kant, then, wants to argue that “Man is the ultimate purpose of creation here on earth” (Kant 1987, 427) but needs to do this without reverting to the naive, selective, and dubiously positive notion of theological or natural providence he has just critiqued. His solution is to emphasize human “progress.” The antinomies of nature, that is, its apparent provision of sustenance and its often chaotic and destructive activities, are to be taken together and subsumed by and within the struggle of humanity to progressively understand, and gain mastery over, the natural world. In this imaginary, what harms us individually may actually help humanity, over time and as a whole. “Man wishes concord, but nature, knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord,” for without this discord, humans, “as good natured as the sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of their animals” (Kant, as cited in Lloyd 2008, 288).

In Kant’s philosophy, nature’s purposiveness is ultimately reduced to providing the sometimes challenging circumstances necessary to force humans to develop their latent potential to assimilate nature to their own purposes and ends. We might even say that this ultimate purpose is ethico-politically characterized in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (Kant 1991).2 Indeed, the third proposition of this work describes this process in terms of nature’s “intent” and its human supersession in what Apel (1997, 97) refers to as a “quasi-dialectical idea of a ‘cunning of nature’”:

Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should not partake of any other happiness or perfection than that which he has procured for himself without instinct and by his own reason. . . . It seems as if nature had intended that man, once he had finally worked his way up from the uttermost barbarism to the highest degree of skill, to inner perfection in his manner of thought and thence (as far as is possible on earth) to happiness, should be able to take for himself, the entire credit for doing so and have only himself to thank for it. (Kant, as cited in Apel 1997, 90)

How generous of nature, to take no credit! To adopt a modern vernacular, it seems that providence, in the form of nature, does not guide history to its final ends but rather provides “opportunities” to be exploited by human entrepreneurs, self-made men and/or Man, who then take(s) all the credit and reap(s) all the profit. Here we can see how Kant anticipates the movement from a providence that is weakened but not entirely expunged to a progress that effectively becomes a rationalist and humanist equivalent of a theodicy of good and evil, one that becomes transformed, elaborated, and materio-semiotically enacted in innumerable (and often incredibly destructive) ways as it inspires the imaginary of an emerging modernity.

This raises two important issues. First, Kant’s envisaging this specifically European solution to a specifically European philosophical problem as the “universal” end for humanity and the earth does not necessarily lead to cultural tolerance, as the use of the term cosmopolitan might now suggest, or to “perpetual peace.” Rather, in aligning progress with European developments, it actually provides another justification for European colonialism and its “overcoming” of the “challenges” posed by very different (purportedly primitive) peoples and cosmologies that are deemed to stand in the way of that progress to “inner perfection.” Second, because nature’s ultimate purpose is now entirely focused on humanity as both an end in itself and for the earth as a whole, nature’s value is confirmed as being entirely instrumental—it is just a means to that end; it cannot, for Kant, be a matter of ethical concern. Nature as such, we might say, also becomes a victim of modern Eurocentric indifference. As we shall see, this leaves the very idea of a final end, and the possibility of its being distinguished from nature’s great system of purposes, resting on the unstable ground of human exceptionalism.

Kant’s optimism regarding how anthropocentric agency overcomes natural chaos and intransigence exemplifies the “progressive” and anthropogenic imaginary that comes to infuse everything from Western culture to capitalism, Marxism to meteorology. Golinski (2007), for example, describes how the temperate but changeable nature of the British climate came to be regarded as a natural condition that could actually explain the origins of British innovation and progress. Providential accounts of weather had completely dominated the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but an emerging science of meteorology sought to provide “enlightened” accounts both of this “providential regularity” (Golinski 2007, 65) and of extreme departures from these norms. Events like the Great Storm of 1703 and the summer haze of 1783 were obviously, as in Kant’s examples of past devastations, providentially challenging. The new meteorological explanations accounted for this through an increasingly secular science that both removed requirements to second-guess God’s purposes and, through their repetitive gathering of weather data, sought to replace a temporality of discontinuous weather events—a sacred kairos—with a continuous secular climatic chronos (Golinski 2007, 78; Serres 1995). This emphasis on long-term weather patterns (climate) offered the prospect of reliable predictive capacities and even an eventual managerial mastery of climate. British colonists, for example, claimed that their environmental “improvements,” clearing forests and draining swamps, were also changing the climate of colonized lands for the “better.” “They expressed the optimism of the Enlightenment in their conviction that the American climate had been tamed by human enterprise and reason” (Golinski 2007, 5). Anthropogenic climate change has clearly been part of the modern Western imaginary for longer than we might imagine!

“Progress,” then, might be understood rather differently as that movement in every field away from an imaginary of a providential nature toward a nature that humans must struggle to manage and subsume within their own, consciously directed social projects. Humanism, in this sense, becomes the explicit ideology of the imaginary of progress. This change, from understanding nature as the material expression of God’s providential concerns for humanity to nature as an infinitely transformable resource for humanity’s projects (as standing reserve, in Heidegger’s [1977b] terminology) has many implications, yet it obviously retains a core vision of human exceptionalism while dramatically reducing the imaginary possibilities for involvement with and appreciating nature. Indeed, as we enter the so-called Anthropocene, an epoch dominated by anthropogenic processes, many claim we have erased nature altogether (Morton 2007; Žižek 2008).3 Even to refer to nature now risks being labeled theoretically naive, obsessively nostalgic, and perhaps, because it is not deemed sufficiently “progressive,” politically reactionary. For nature, as Lefebvre (1994, 31) somewhat disdainfully remarked, has been left behind: “anyone so inclined may look over their shoulder and see it sinking below the horizon behind us . . . lost to thought . . . defeated” and waiting only “for its ultimate voidance and destruction.” The progressive humanization of nature is, it seems, nearing completion.

How shocking, then, that climate change, with melting glaciers, raging wildfires, droughts, floods, and mass extinctions, confounds such speculations on a global scale. Of course, some simply deny the reality of climate change, while many more remain in a state of denial regarding its implications. Whether one regards such denial as existential “bad faith” or just a spur to “theoretically enterprising” defenses of humanism depends on whether one is willing to continue buying cut-price retreads of worn-out revolutions: scientific, agricultural, American, industrial, proletarian, informational—modernity is littered with them. All once so “promising,” all now climatically/climactically compromised. Only this state of denial allows climate change to appear in a Kantian light, as just one more challenge for humanity to overcome.

No doubt, even at the height of meteorological optimism, it was always the case that “strange weather phenomena showed the natural world in its most recalcitrant aspect, continuing to resist attempts to bring it within the pale of scientific reason” (Golinski 2007, 76). Now, however, it is scientific reason that propounds the world-encompassing nature of a new climatic normlessness. Even meteorology no longer predicts climatic regularities but rather foresees only intemperate and increasingly extreme weather events. It is not just ironic but tragic that the imaginary of progress, so deeply and materially implicated in subverting the climatic regularities previously deemed providential, now leaves us facing an anthropogenic realization of Kant’s intimation of “nature as chaos.”

And so, climate change now appears as something apocalyptic, potentially creating a “final end” of humanity and the world in a very different sense from Kant’s intentions. Indeed, we might say that the emergence of climate change is to “progress” what the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was to “theological providence” (Molesky 2016). Whereas the emerging humanist imaginary of modernity would eventually come to reenvisage the Lisbon Earthquake as a natural disaster, rather than an act of God’s mysterious purpose, no comparable shift or excuse is yet available for climate change. Indeed, insofar as the Anthropocene denotes the “success” of modernity’s assimilative project, the humanization and the consequent “end” of “nature,” it also exposes the abject failure of the imaginary of progress to produce any kind of a future that remotely resembles a livable world where all the earth’s inhabitants are provided for.