Nature
Antonio Gómez Ramos
The current ecological catastrophe makes it imperative to revise the concept of nature that has been operative in Western culture since, at least, the radical modern rupture caused simultaneously by the scientific revolution, the modern state, and capitalism. The concept has become rather unstable (Latour, 2017); and although “Nature” has been the term of reference for discussions around ecology, often loaded with emotional and normative connotations, the review we will here address involves questioning those connotations, perhaps using it in quotation marks, or exploring new names: Gaia, world ecology, Earth-system, the planetary, etc.
The most immediate intuition has been the conception of nature or the natural as that realm of reality that predates the emergence of culture and, therefore, is not or has not (yet) been affected by human action. Undoubtedly, naturalist positions—from Aristotle to nowadays—have understood that culture is also governed by the same principles as nature and is part of it; but the Greek distinction between physis and nomos has always demarcated a strictly human realm distinct from the mineral and biological matter of the universe. It was however from the 17th century onwards, particularly since Cartesian philosophy, that a sharp separation was established between nature understood as res extensa, the material universe governed by the laws of physics and studied by the natural sciences, and res cogitans, the world of mind, in principle only accessible to humans, distinct from nature, but capable of knowing it through its representation.
With all the variations that the original Cartesian conception has undergone, this strict division between nature and culture is considered (Moore, 2015; Latour, 2017; Heidegger, 1995) to be the precondition and driving force behind the network of economic, technological, and social processes that have led to the ecological crisis. Precisely this, formulated as the Anthropocene, calls into question that division and therefore forces us to reconceptualize “nature”: understanding the Anthropocene as the emergence of physical and biological processes, distinct from the human, in history and culture. Reciprocally, the revelation that human action has the potential to become a geological force that dramatically alters these processes, even in their deepest temporalities and rhythms, without controlling them. Far from there being a gulf between the “purely natural” and the “human,” what exists is an interaction of physical-chemical, biological, and cultural processes where the “natural” and the ‘cultural’ entangle to the point of sometimes being blurred. It is on this entanglement that new conceptions of what was once called “nature” must be considered.
At the same time, how this entanglement is understood, what degree of autonomy or subsistence exists between the natural and the specifically social, is decisive to base normatively the new practices that are becoming imperative in the ecological crisis. Above all, with a view to the inevitable and urgent self-limitation of human action; also, for the revision of anthropocentrism and to define the necessary parameters of the decentring of the human (Chakrabarty, 2021).
The modern mindset divides between a material reality that occupies all external space and evolves within it, but is ontologically distinct from the mental, and a mental world that perceives and categorizes it (Whitehead, 1920). This is the human world, the cultural world, endowed with meaning and values. Nature is reduced to pure, silent, inert matter, devoid of meaning but subject to laws that the human mind can uncover.
Strictly, the separation only existed as fiction. Latour (1993) has shown that moderns were successful thanks to the continuous production of hybridizations of natural and cultural objects, both in producing scientific theories (always in the laboratory) and in developing political philosophies (such as Hobbes and the artificial “state of nature”).
Furthermore, the fiction of this mechanical and mute nature was always uncomfortable, as shown by Pascal’s initial anguish (“The silence of infinite spaces terrifies me”) or the repeated romantic efforts to rearticulate culture and nature, and to give the latter meaning, even if only aesthetic. Precisely, aesthetics (Tafalla, 2018) has been one of the ways in which Modernity has attempted to reconsider nature, but this testifies the strength of the division and the place reserved for it. Nature was, both in theological and materialistic models, the neutral, timeless stage in which human history unfolds.
Critics of Modernity have denounced this neutralization of nature as a form of subjugation and domination. This denunciation first came from phenomenology as a critique of technological civilization (Heidegger, 1995). However, in the specific situation of eco-social collapse, the eco-Marxist critique seems more appropriate (Moore, 2015), understanding the division between nature and culture as the strategy through which the triple alliance of State, Science, and Capital has built the modern world.
Capitalism was born at the same time as the view of nature as external and separate from culture. Seen in this way, from Moore’s perspective, nature is that material realm where Science identifies new spaces for free extraction and free appropriation—raw materials and energy sources—as well as those bodies (women, Indians, blacks, animals) that are not yet civilized but are a source of cheap, non-commodified labor, essential for the circulation and accumulation of capital. Because it is constructed as neutral, mute, and meaningless, nature can be used as a source of resources and a sink for waste.
The most naive, but dominant, green thinking believes that the ecological crisis consists of nature having reached its limit because humans have exploited it too much; that, therefore, a greater dose of respect for nature combined with the right green technology would serve to overcome the crisis (see Green capitalism). It remains trapped in the Cartesian division and a reductionist conception of nature, although often camouflaged by a romanticized view of it.
But nature is also historical, and therefore social; each social formation produces its nature in interaction with all the material elements of the earth. There is, therefore, according to Moore, no Nature/Culture dichotomy, but rather a “double internality” of both, a “world-ecology” co-produced in each case by us and “nature with an emphatic lowercase ‘n’” within and around us. What exists is the plot of life, and the oiekeios (in Moore, already an alternative designation) as an environment created within it by the interaction of people and non-human entities.
What has reached its limit in the ecological catastrophe, then, is not nature, but a specific world-ecology, the capitalist one, based on the creation of a separate nature, as a space for almost free extraction or a waste dump, at the service of the complete commodification of human relations. The limit is that of capital itself, of the world-ecology it has constructed, not of nature as such.
Despite its Marxist roots, Moore’s proposal has been strongly criticized by those who believe that it unjustifiably disregards the importance of the metabolic rift caused by capitalism (Foster, 2000) and refuses to recognize the autonomy of nature with respect to human action, therefore not being sufficiently sensitive to the imminence of socio-ecological collapse (Riechmann, 2020). Gaia, or the entire highly complex self-regulating system of the Earth-system, exists beyond each particular ecology-world, imposing insurmountable external limits on it, which are reflected in the current crisis. The “double internality” of culture and nature that constitutes the core of Moore’s argument would threaten the distinction between society and nature —which is analytically necessary, although not in the Cartesian sense— and would remain within a “capitalocentric,” or in any case anthropocentric, perspective.
Whether justified or not —Moore would have answers for some of them— these criticisms point to the question of how to reformulate the mutual relationality of humans and nature, due to the latter’s autonomy and the normative sources of self-restraint in human actions. Is this self-restraint a result of the pragmatics with which a new world-ecology is constructed, or does it comply with the respect we owe to the sacrality of all that is natural, non-human, as an end itself, as an intrinsic value?
It does not help Moore that he speaks in a general and indistinct way about all “forms of life” (Chakrabarty, 2021, p. 46), without further specification, and that he does not completely abandon a human exceptionalism that is now highly debatable.
The problem, when it comes to overcoming the culture-nature division, is how to conceive and normatively order this network of life in which physico-chemical and biological processes have cultural value and force (from CO2 to oil to viruses), and in which humans, themselves pierced by “natural” elements, continue to be main characters, but can no longer be considered as exceptional. Only in this way can rights and duties be defined, as well as the possible “intrinsic value” that can also be recognized in non-human agents in this new relationship that we seek to establish.
Current proposals that reconceptualize nature beyond the modern division should be understood as attempts to conceive and reorder this network of life. Jane Bennett (2010) proposes eliminating —or at least making more fluid— binaries such as life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, organic/inorganic, which have conditioned the modern conception of nature with a vertical and anthropocentric distribution.
Without a doubt, the sociocultural outcome of the ecological crisis will entail a concrete, albeit unpredictable, reconceptualization of these binary schemes (unless the rigid Cartesian distinction is maintained alongside capitalism, to which it provides its theoretical foundation; but then the collapse will be irreversible). Bennett, for example, speaks of “vibrant matter” rather than nature, an ontology populated by actants, thing-powers whose very impulse to exist —their Spinozist conatus— brings them into relation with other things, human or non-human, affecting them or being affected by them.
The relational and processual nature of all entities comes to the forefront, such that the density, complexity, and effectiveness of the whole become incomprehensible to the subject who believed they could mentally place themselves outside of nature in order to penetrate and systematize it. The problem is how to name, from within, this complex network of relationships in such a way that its interactions are normatively addressed, thus allowing to generate eco-politics that include both humans and non-humans.
Among these efforts, authors such as Haraway (2016) emphasize the productivity of all types of interactions and intersections within a purely horizontal ontology of human and non-human, organic and non-organic entities; but, as suggestive as it may be, Haraway does not determine which should be the evaluative patterns of interaction. Latour, for his part, suggests replacing the nature/culture dichotomy with the concept of “‘world-making’ […] as that which opens up to the multiplicity of existents” and their ways of existing (Latour 2017, p. 14); existents that are “actants”: not because they have intentional agency, but because of their capacity to affect and be affected. This applies equally to the Mississippi River, bacteria, social classes, or human institutions. A parliament of things should give voice and regulate the relationships between them, all of which are natural.
Behind all these attempts, the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock, 1979) operates with varying degrees of prominence. The Earth as a living being itself, a system self-regulated by its own elements, which fragile produce their own conditions of existence. The environment is not a pre-given setting in which living beings, particularly humans, show up: it is produced by living and non-living beings themselves in their interactions, resulting in an unstable global complex of all these interactions that is worth sustaining.
Chakrabarty (2021b) proposes talking about the planetary. What is at stake is the narrow strip that encompasses the Earth’s crust, the biosphere, and the stratosphere, that is, the thin layer of a few hundred kilometers thick, where what we call life is played out: it is both “miraculous (because of the complex forms of life it sustains) and dangerous” (Chakrabarty, 2021, p. 198). Under its gaze, it is not worth betting on geotechnologies that reproduce the modern desire to dominate nature, but rather paying attention to its deep history, to all the agency of the non-human and the non-living, thinking the human as a form of life connected to other forms of life.
Only in this way can we think in a non-anthropocentric, but rather “planetocentric” way: instead of seeking domination and control—whose effects have been destructive—we should set off from fear and awe, of the reverence produced by the complexity and opacity of life.
This attitude, which comes as a result of awareness of the situation of the planetary, rather than giving intrinsic value to each element of “nature” or offering a definition of it that replaces previous ones, can “promote a political ecology and a notion of the public sphere where both the human and the non-human share an experience of harm.” (Bennett 2010, p. 20).
Bibliography:
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Chakrabarty, D. (2021b). On the Idea of the Planetary, Soundings, 78, 50-63. https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN.78.03.2021
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