A Purpose-Full World? Or How (Not) to Address the Earth

HAVING REJECTED THE IDEA that humans are exceptional in the sense that they can self-generate (or by God’s grace provide) a final purpose for the earth’s (or our own) existence, how should we think about purposes as such? Should we decide to follow Kant’s requirement that we eventually excise all reference to purposes in our rational explanations of the natural world but, having denied exceptionalism, also extend this to human existence, and even beyond what we now call scientific explanation? Should we make purposelessness an essential aspect of our novel imaginary, our worldview and practices? This might collapse any distinction between our explanations of nature and of artifice, effectively universalizing that same mode of explanation Kant encouraged in the form of a naively mechanistic philosophy. This “universal explanatory ontology” might take as its motto “there is no such thing as a purpose” or “efficient causation explains everything.”

Eradicating all notions of purpose would prove a challenge not only to humanism but to all those aspects of self-understanding and everyday language where we are accustomed to framing certain practices as purposeful—including, ironically, justifying science’s own explanatory projects. We need to recognize that dissolving and subverting the sovereignty of final purposes is not the same as denying the emergence of purposes altogether. We can, it is true, see arguments that suggest that any notion of telos (or progress) is inapplicable to the earth’s evolution (Nitecki 1988; see also the following discussion); however, there also seem good reasons for employing some notions of purpose even where biology is concerned (Allen, Bekoff, and Lauder 1998). Why would we think the squirrel’s sequestration of seeds and nuts for the coming winter months is not purposeful so far as the squirrel is concerned? More importantly, why would we seek to universalize a mechanistic understanding that is the very epitome, and one of the drivers, of the same technological enframing of the world, albeit now in the form of a posthumanism? As such, it would be no less colonizing and offer little or no resistance to the reduction of everything to standing reserve at the service of ever multiplying projects. This route, Baudrillard (2007, 62) argues, leads to the technologically inspired disappearance of the human, another form of extinction at our own, technically mediated, hands.

Alternatively, we might come to recognize a plethora of context-dependent situations in which it may, or may not, seem appropriate to speak of purposes. Some aspects of those contexts would be social, some ecological, some largely explicable, some less so. Purposes could not be rigorously defined as true or final because God given or human produced, but this obviously does not eradicate the fact that many activities include a temporary orientation toward a context-dependent accomplishment, albeit with ongoing reverberations and consequences. This might be envisioned as a kind inessential and contextual patterning of what appears as purposefulness constantly shifting on many different temporal and spatial registers throughout the earth’s evolution and ecologies, emerging in and through many different modes of being (human and nonhuman), senses, and encounters. We might imagine an anarchistic (lacking an overarching, unifying, or sovereign principle but by no means chaotic) worlding, where some patterns of apparent purposefulness may quickly vanish while others may persist over many generations, where some are culturally specific, some are not even species specific, each enabling limited, provisional, and never final ends to be reached, each involving things and practices that are never reduced simply to their being a means to an end.

There would certainly be lots of room for debate about what constitutes a purpose, its relation to intent, design, futurity, conscious or unconscious anticipation, instinct, function, accident, desire, determinism, and so on (Allen, Bekoff, and Lauder 1998), but also, and this is important, about the limitations of language itself, particularly languages so constitutively bound to a technological imaginary for expressing diverse “purposes.” Here we might decide that, even though the earth lacks an ultimate purpose, it is still, nonetheless, intimately involved as an ineradicable part of the context of any and all attributions or denials of purpose. This is why, even if we say that the earth is as close as one can get to being an end in itself (see earlier), this does not mean that it is on the way to becoming or producing its own purpose in the sense of a final end. It means, rather, that the earth’s multiplicitous creative activities afford the possibilities of purposeful activities. It means as well that the earth is that which, in its own modes of existence, forces us to leave open the question whether there are purposes in nature, purposes that exceed or are quite different from those defined technologically. Earth in this sense may be full of purposes.

This also means that any way of speaking of purposes is impossible to limit to the human realm. All kinds of relations between all kinds of beings might appear as purposeful in certain circumstances. It might, for example, seem appropriate, despite evolution being deemed nonteleological, and even if denied conscious intent, to say that the flash of the deer’s white tail serves the purpose of alerting other deer to danger but by no means appropriate to say that the purpose of the spring grass is to feed the deer. The “explanatory universalist ontology” would see both explanations as misuses of a term without any ultimate meaning, as two conjunctions that should be explained in terms of more or less complicated sets or systems of efficient causes. We, though, might rather say that words (even those describing efficient causes) never describe reality fully or directly. They express something of a context-dependent situation conjoined with more or less appropriate uses of language found in other contexts. (Metaphor, as Lovelock remarks, is important in science too!) Appropriateness is always a matter of interpretation, never just ontology, and it is never determinate.

Let us call this approach an “ecologically entangled wor(l)ding” (although we might later want to refer to it as an aspect of a provisional ecology). Its motto might be “the ontological status of the Earth is indeterminate” or “all apparent ends are provisional” or, to take us back to MacFarlane’s iceberg, “language is inadequate for expressing what the earth is.” This, too, provides a challenge to humanism, but what diversity of worlds might this respect, what different understandings of nature might transpire or be conserved, what affordances might it recognize in culturally diverse ways of dwelling? Would these worlds be so universally precarious?

Let us be clear: the difference between these approaches is not one of simply choosing to see the world in one way or another, as we might be asked to choose between cold reality and utopian daydreams. Nor is it just a matter of adherence to different understandings of ontology, although ecologically entangled wor(l)ding does suggest that any ontologies of which we can speak are always already modes of understanding and never just the bare, final “what there is” of the universe. In other words, it suggests that ontology is only ever posed as universal. It also recognizes the limits of language (especially modern language understood technologically) in its general inadequacy to capture nature or the earth, and the ways that language begins to lead us astray when we take it as a reified representation of the world’s ontology. Ecologically entangled wor(l)ding does not say that it is impossible to describe the world technologically or in terms of final ends and/or efficient causes; rather, it says that we pretty much have come to describe it completely like this without any such decision having been made, and this severely restricts the way we can address and be addressed by the earth. The problems of climate change, pollution, eroded soils, mass extinction, and so on that denote the Anthropocene are a consequence (an intended or unintended product) of the materio-semiotic realization of this mode of addressing the world. The difference between these ways of answering, then, is not so much about what the earth is objectively (we could not possibly know that, because our ontological categories themselves rely on judgments appropriate to our materio-semiotic condition) as it is about objectivizing the earth; that is, it concerns how we address the earth.

This might, once again, be illustrated by returning to Lovelock’s distinction. The very language of purpose becomes confusing here, where the difference seems to be whether or not something, planet or spaceship, might, or might not, be homeostatic, creative, living, an end in itself, a final end, and so on. An “explanatory universal ontology” might approach Lovelock’s distinction by questioning its validity in terms of whether there really is any fundamental ontological difference between a spaceship and the living Earth; whether life can possibly add anything purposeful to dead matter; whether nature and artifice are actually fundamentally different; whether every living being is a self-regulating system, by asking how we should define the self in self-regulating system; whether machines or cybernetic systems might be developed that can self-generate their own “purposes” in ways identical in all important respects to the purposes we ascribe to our own activities; and so on ad infinitum.1

These are certainly valid philosophical/scientific questions, but they ask about the spaceship and the earth in ways that assume that they are both just objects and that there may be an objective, determinate answer to these questions. That Lovelock, otherwise so obviously mechanistic, does not ask or answer these questions is one of the things that seems so contradictory about his approach, but then, as we have said, in many instances, he does not actually feel that the earth should be addressed as just an object. Objectification is always a consequence of a particular mode of addressing things. It relies on assuming that one can take an external view that does not shape the way the world appears; that is, it exemplifies exceptionalism in its making things available for “explanation.” From the perspective of ecologically entangled worlding, we are not, however, short of explanations; rather, we are dangerously short of modes of addressing the earth as something other than an object, a resource, a machine, a system. We keep looking for a word or theory that will encapsulate what the earth is, but what matters is how we are addressed by and address the earth.

Perhaps, then, we are beginning to have an understanding of how not to address the earth, that is, technologically or as an instrumentally appropriated whole, and have also begun to explicate a possible source of this error, one that links specific social practices with specific philosophical theory. It is not, of course, a complete “explanation,” it could never be so, but it seems plausible and appropriate to our situation. To not address the earth technologically requires, at a minimum, that we abandon the materio-semiotic imposition of that understanding of final ends that was only ever based on human exceptionalism and the hypostatization of a technologically derived understanding of causation as a universal and necessary feature of the world. That means that we cease to consider our own activities as ever having a final purpose and that we cease to assume or posit any kind of final purpose for creation, that we should accept the idea of a world without final ends. This is anathema to notions of theological providence and overarching progress. It requires different (plural and nonuniversal) imaginaries. It requires that we be open to other ways of addressing the earth.

This also requires that we be much more aware of the dangers in ascribing purpose or lack of purpose to any event. How easily, in our current imaginary, the view that something lacks purpose comes to mean that it has no value, except in relation to something that is deemed to have a purpose. How easily the declaration of a purpose comes to mean a final purpose, where that purpose is all that ultimately matters (materially and semiotically, and ethically).

Moreover, we see how damaging it is for any event to be circumscribed in terms of a self-contained productive process—from raw material via efficient cause and imposition of form to appearance of the final end. Where, we must ask, in the description of the modes of causation that define technē and its technological extrapolation, is there any mention of what is destroyed in the “process,” what is wasted, what is surplus to requirements, of the cascading and never-ending aftereffects of the act of production, of the social, economic, ecological, and so on circumstances of its production? Is the destruction of the tree not also a cause of timber production? Is waste not always a product of making? Are some products not always surplus to requirements? Are some consequences of technology not always unplanned, unknown, undesired? “Ecologically entangled wor(l)ding” at least recognizes that no process is self-contained, that no end is final, that no one is in a position to conclusively declare something worthless, that all ends and purposes are provisional.

Environmentalism might almost be defined as being the only modern ethico-political movement that, since its inception, has focused on this telic leakage—on the consequences and so-called externalities of the productive process, the toxic residues, the emissions, extinctions, erosions, the repercussions of genetic modifications, and so on, and on. Of course, environmentalism’s shallower versions merely suggest ways of keeping the predominant structure of productive processes going via reducing, re-using, or recycling, by more efficient use of resources, energy, and so on, that is, finding ways of internalizing externalities, bringing everything into a more expanded productivism, as in an “industrial ecology.” Such approaches generally accept, rather than challenge, the dominant structures of the progressive imaginary. They may, at best, suggest certain exclusions, spaces that might operate as refuges from, or momentarily ameliorate, its worst excesses, but as climate change exemplifies, these refuges only grow more precarious as the whole world becomes subject to capitalism’s own “global system of purposes”; that is, as we earlier suggested, capitalism and nature come to be regarded as an inseparable “system.” This is not to say that reducing consumption, reusing, and recycling are entirely useless (quite the contrary, they exemplify usefulness!), but perhaps they are most creative precisely where they do not assist the continuation of the current imaginary, where they offer genuine alternatives to systematized production/consumption, where they actually resist the extension of resourcism.

Our purpose, then, in rejecting the finality of ends through a critique of their technological indebtedness is not to eschew the ascription of purpose per se, nor to universally expand its occurrence and find purposes implicated in every entity and event as a necessary feature of the world’s ontology (as in theological providence). Nor do we intend to provide a different definition of purpose that might (or might not) prove more ecological. Rather, ecologically entangled wor(l)ding seeks to elaborate the ecological and cultural entanglements involved in any ascription of purpose, its materio-semiotic situatedness, its partiality (in its inevitable failure to capture the whole and to be impartial), and its telic leakage, in short, its provisionality. A theory of ecologically entangled worlding aspires to assist in de(com)posing the progressive imaginary, thereby opening possibilities for incipient imaginaries that are not technologically or anthropocentrically delimited. The world desperately needs such imaginaries, and Gaia, we suggest, might offer an inkling of one possible opening on these. However, unless Gaia can offer a way of addressing the earth that resists technological enframing, any imaginary associated with it will remain caught, rather like Lovelock, in its web.