Notes
Prologue: Earthly Indifference
In appropriating aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy, we certainly recognize concerns regarding his political association with national socialism in the 1930s and his personal anti-Semitism. The degree to which these inform, or are expressed at all in, his philosophical work continues to be a matter of considerable academic debate. Heidegger’s work has, however, become an integral part of many, very different political philosophies and of a very necessary and fundamental self-critique of the Western philosophical tradition. In this sense, it needs to be employed cautiously and critically but cannot be ignored.
Progress, Providence, and the Anthropocene
Imaginary in this sense is not simply a reference to the arrangement and emergence of patterns of human thought understood in terms of an individualized psychology, still less to imagination as it is often opposed to “reality.” Rather, it has close connections with Anderson’s (1991) notion of the nation-state as an “imagined community” that is materially influenced and enacted. It might also be linked with Castoriadis’s (1998, 146) notion of the “actual” and “radical” imaginary “manifested indissolubly in both historical doing and in the constitution before any explicit rationality, of a universe of significations,” and a materio-semiotic extension of the “social imaginary” defined by Taylor (2005, 23) as “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”
Which is not to say that this work constitutes a conscious design for Kant’s philosophical project; rather, along with his later work Toward Perpetual Peace, this is as near as we get to a this-worldly ethico-political characterization of humanity’s purposive and progressive possibilities.
For a more detailed critique of Morton on “nature,” see Smith (2011). Žižek (2008, 445), like Morton, suggests that “what we need is an ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on,” but this is disingenuous, because the fact that other species and entire ecological communities are imperiled by climate change does not seem to concern him at all. Žižek is interested specifically in disputing any idea of a “balance of nature,” describing nature, very like Kant, as a “mega-catastrophe.”
Gaia as an Incipient Terrestrial Imaginary
Lovelock (2006) here makes a distinction between the Gaia hypothesis as originally formulated and Gaia theory; the latter emphasizes that it is the whole earth, and not just the totality of its living components, that constitutes a homeostatic system.
Although, in his typically inconsistent manner, Lovelock sometimes suggests that humans may indeed have exceptional, unique, and potentially overarching planetary purposes, including being “stewards.” For example, he muses whether we might function as a “Gaian nervous system and brain which can consciously anticipate environmental changes” (Lovelock 1979, 147) and might potentially use our technologies to save the planet from things like meteorite strikes.
Note, for example, the reoccurrence of previous tropes, when Latour (2017a, 291) imagines us exploring, through Gaia, “in a way, a path for progress and invention” (emphasis added).
Contrary to the popular phrase, there is a sense in which cybernetics, at least in its earlier instantiations, was, quite literally, rocket science, although it is also now information science, meteorology, economics, ecology, and so on. There are, of course, developments in systems theory that provide opportunities to reconceptualize our earthly relations, as Bateson’s (1987) work and those strands of second-order systems theory emerging from the work of Maturana and Varela exemplify (Wolfe 1998; Clarke 2020; Young 2020). These, however, are not the forms of systems theory Lovelock employs.
Latour castigates Tyrell for inattention to the subtleties of Lovelock’s language but entirely overlooks these “subtleties” when it suits him. For example, immediately following Lovelock’s denial of teleology quoted earlier, Lovelock (2009, 6) says, “The Earth has not evolved solely for our benefit” (emphasis added). But how does a reader “sensitive to the tropisms of prose” (Latour 2017a, 132) interpret this? Might it not be suggestive of a form of more-than-just-human providence?
The Imaginary End(s) of the World
Though, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017) remind us, we had better not ignore other anthropogenic possibilities, such as nuclear war.
A Purpose-Full World? Or How (Not) to Address the Earth
We can also see that this mechanistic approach does not present a challenge to the progressive imaginary but rather sets it to work on new tasks and projects. For example, we might be increasingly sidetracked into technologically driven debates about the possibilities of autopoietic machines or transhumanism, those forms of “posthumanism” that are, as Cary Wolfe (2010, xv) points out, better understood “as an intensification of humanism,” a faith in the indefinite futurity (and profitability) of human-induced “progress” still framed as the irresistible replacement and movement away from a spent nature. Scientistic fantasies, of leaving our mortal bodies and even an anthropogenically polluted earth behind to colonize “empty space” (a novel, extraterrestrial Terra nullius) by Terra-forming lifeless planets not only threaten to repeat history as tragedy and farce; they are fatal distractions. The earth is Terra-formed, and this is surely Lovelock’s point.
Thinking the Earth Provisionally
Although, of course, as the end of the dinosaurs exemplifies, there are random events, such as the impact of extraterrestrial meteorites, that can have a huge effect on the direction and possibilities of evolution. Gaia is also so very dependent on the sun’s energy; the earth is not a “closed system.”
A tendency identified by Evernden (1999, 54), using Whitehead’s apt term the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This fallacy is made appallingly evident in attempts to account for the earth in terms of monetary evaluations of “ecosystem services” (Sullivan 2010).
Haldane had purportedly been asked by a theologically inclined audience to say what his biological studies had revealed about God, although this oft-repeated “quotation” does not appear in any of Haldane’s written works.
Dutch elm disease in Britain has, since the appearance of new varieties of this fungal pathogen in the 1960s, destroyed some thirty million elm trees, virtually the entire mature population.
In a previous text, Smith (2010, 391–92) suggested that radical ecology could be understood as a “provisional ecological politics. Here ‘provisional’ would mean (a) offering an always revisable—provisional—understanding of (b) how ecological communities are both composed by and provide for the (more-than-just-human) denizens that inhabit them and (c) giving due recognition to the constantly changing conditions and modes (the eco-temporal provisionality) of such provision and (d) recognizing the provisionality of (ecological) ethics and politics as such, that is . . . politics as constitutive of, and providing possibilities for, enacting ‘community’ rather than something contained within and limited by (more or less permanent) constitutional political forms or principles.”
The immediate intellectual source of Darwin’s unintentional providentialism may be Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand.” Gould (2002, 123) goes so far as to state that “the theory of natural selection lifts [Smith’s] entire explanatory structure virgo intacta, and then applies the same causal scheme to nature. . . . Individual organisms engaged in the ‘struggle for survival’ act as the analog of firms in competition. Reproductive success becomes the analog of profit.” What Gould does not speak to, though, is that Smith’s idea of the invisible hand is itself derived from a providential paradigm that argued that “God was at work in the market economy” (Oslington 2011, 63). This providential theology is largely ignored in contemporary economic discussions of Smith’s invisible hand, but it makes little sense without it.
There are, of course, debates about “direction” in evolution and also about whether evolution might, despite mass extinctions and cataclysmic events, be understood, in general, as bringing about increasing levels of biological and ecological complexity over time. However, there is no simple nontautological way to associate complexity with progress. For example, complexity may actually increase vulnerability; tardigrades might well stand a better chance of continuing to reproduce than humans in a radically changing world. Gould, to be sure, makes an argument for recognizing certain directional (but nonteleological) changes in evolution, but his view of progress could hardly be stated more strongly: “Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history” (Gould, as cited in Nitecki 1988, 319).
The Gathering Earth
Hans Jonas makes a similar claim regarding Heidegger’s refusal to engage with evolution and ecology, but his account of evolution is completely humanistic, teleological, and progressive in all the ways criticized here (Vogel 2018).
A Caring Earth?
Though it might also be possible to identify more “self”-centered moralistic prescriptions in terms, for example, of Foucault’s (1986) care of the self.
Although Spretnak’s Gaia came directly from her engagement with ancient Greek mythology and spirituality rather than via Lovelock and Margulis.
Here there was also the justifiable concern that a so-called religion of nature had played its own part in Nazism.
This points to a quandary at the very heart of dominant paradigms of modern Western ethics: the insistence that ethics be formulated as a selfless provision that first requires the establishment of a self to subsequently count as acting selflessly. This was less true of certain forms of premodern ethics and is explicitly denied in Levinas’s (1991) account of ethics as first philosophy, that is, as an other-oriented concern that emerges prior to the ontology of the subject, although, unfortunately, though perhaps not unexpectedly, Levinas’s position is itself compromised by his spiritual humanism (see Smith 2012).
As Plumwood (2013) points out, modern funeral rights are focused on delaying this provisional involvement so far as is technologically and financially possible.
Attending to and Experiencing Earthly Provision and Care
Jefferies was author of a postapocalyptic novel, After London (1885), in which nature has overrun every sign of “civilization”; of children’s books where animals speak, such as Wood Magic: A Fable (1881); and of numerous popular articles on English country life, collected, for example, in the posthumously published Life of the Fields (1947). His most expressive book, albeit “a failure on publication” (Looker, as cited in Jefferies 1948, 139), remains The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (1883).
In his middle age, Johnson famously stood in the marketplace of Uttoxeter bareheaded and for a “considerable time . . . oblivious to the staring citizens and the pelting weather” (Wain 1974, 299) as a penance for his refusing to take charge of his father’s bookstall there many years before.
Kolnai’s phenomenological investigations suggest that disgust can only, ever, be associated with encounters with living, or once-living, beings. “Disgust,” says Kolnai (2004, 30), “is never related to inorganic or non-biological matter.” However, while “Kolnai’s phenomenology helps link together the intentional objects and embodied sensations of disgust, it doesn’t yet connect these to the larger social order” (as our notion of a materio-semiotic imaginary attempts to do) (Smith and Davidson 2006, 60).