Anthony Paul Smith

Philosophy and Ecosystem:Towards a Transcendental Ecology

I. Moving from Environmental Philosophy to a Unified Theory of Philosophyand Ecology

Many are looking to foster a relationship between ecology and philosophy asit becomes clear that the reality of our contemporary age, as well as the future that weare rushing headlong into, is determined in large part by the environmental crisis. Thisattempt is not unprecedented as the environmental movement and some form of environmental studies has been around at least since the writings of John Muir andHenry David Thoreau. The legacy of the relationship between ecology and philosophy has been and continues to be led by the discipline of environmental ethicsand environmental aesthetics.

In this way philosophy prescribes ethical and aestheticnorms on the basis of ecological findings, but philosophy itself tends to remainunchanged by the encounter. There may be some change, often favorable (a favorite isreplacing the Western subordination of ethics to reason with principles from Eastern philosophy and religion), but what remains after this change is still a philosophicalsystem, in this case based on ethics as first philosophy, developed apart fromscientific ecology.When comparing the immense amount of literature on environmental ethicsand aesthetics it becomes clear that attempts to begin thinking about ecology frommetaphysics prior to ethics, as found in some Schellingian thinkers like Žižek, are inthe minority.

Most of these attempts deploy ecology very selectively, often usingmore from political ecology or environmental studies than scientific ecology, and they1

Some anecdotal evidence for this majority position of ethics and aesthetics can be had by comparingthe amount of Google hits one receives for “environmental ethics” (about 1,180,000) and“environmental aesthetics” (about 26,900) compared to “ecological metaphysics” (241) and“metaphysics of ecology” (9). Both environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics also haveentries in the major encyclopedias of philosophy, where ecological metaphysics does not. Further tothis anecdotal evidence there is a major journal dedicated to environmental ethics (

Environmental Ethics

), but there is a complete absence of a journal that focuses on the metaphysics of ecology. Eventhe more far-reaching

Journal of Environmental Philosophy

tends to focus on ethics and aesthetics(largely from a phenomenological perspective), while metaphysics figures very marginally.

For Žižek’s criticism of the ideology of ecology and his own attempt to recast the problem of naturealongside of ecology see “Unbehagen in der Natur,” in his

In Defense of Lost Causes

(London and New York: Verso, 2008). For Žižek’s indebtedness to Schelling see his reading in Slavoj Žižek,

The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London and New York: Verso, 1996) andfor an account and criticism of that reading see Iain Hamilton Grant, “The Insufficiency of Ground: OnŽižek’s Schellingianism” in

The Truth of Žižek

, eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), pp. 82-98.

do so in the service of rethinking the question of nature rather than thinking about thenature of philosophy or ecology.

What is common to these thinkers is a subjugationof ecology to philosophy of nature, rather than a building of philosophy of nature inthe light of ecology. While the growing Schellingian influence on Continental philosophy of nature is a step in the right direction in that it invites us to think philosophy with non-philosophical practices, redirecting us to “the eternal andnecessary bond between philosophy and physics”, it is inadequate in itself for thinking about ecological nature.

Partly, this inadequacy comes from a difference ingoals. The Schellingian revival in Continental philosophy of nature is more concernedwith reviving a metaphysics connected to material practices, and so what I am herecalling “Schellingian” applies to a whole host of thinkers not normally associatedwith Schelling as such, like Deleuze & Guattari and Bergson and those who take themas inspiration for their own work in philosophy of nature. But there is a deeper reasons why this is inadequate in itself for thinking about ecology and nature, for if bynature we mean a first identity descriptive of the Real from which a whole host of regional knowledges think (physics, ecology, poetry, philosophy of nature), thennature cannot be captured by physics as a unitary discourse and cannot be thoughtthrough physics alone. This becomes especially clear as physics is, as witnessed by itsown practices, not one thing in itself. Therefore, when we subordinate ecology to a philosophy bonded to physics we have not yet begun to think about what ecologythinks about. Instead of looking to philosophy’s outside we take philosophy of natureitself as if it were some outside to philosophy rather than an instance of philosophy.What is common in all of these attempts to think ecology, from the ethical andaesthetic to the metaphysical, is the remainder of a philosophical decision built uponfaith in the self-sufficiency of philosophy.The aim of this paper is to challenge this dominant relationship of philosophyover and above ecology, be it via ethics and aesthetics or metaphysics, in order toreturn for the first time to ecology and ask how it challenges the practice of philosophy in philosophy’s own attempts to think the ethics and metaphysics of 3

Bruno Latour’s

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy

, trans. CatherinePorter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) is a popular example of this tendency. MichaelLewis’

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction: On Nature

(London and New York: Continuum, 2007) isalso a good example of this tendency, though without the desire to erase the word nature from our lexicon, as he creatively recasts Heidegger’s ontological investigations to deal with the question of nature.

Iain Hamilton Grant’s work is at the forefront of this exciting reclamation of philosophy of nature.See Iain Hamilton Grant, “The ‘Eternal and Necessary Bond between Philosophy and Physics’: ARepetition of the Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy” in

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

10:1 (April 2005), pp. 43-59 and Iain Hamilton Grant,

Philosophies of Nature after Schelling

(London and New York: Continuum, 2006).

ecology. I am not offering a final criticism of these modes of philosophy and ecology,such a criticism is not even possible from the perspective of non-philosophy, butinstead aim to create a democracy (of) thought between scientific ecology and philosophy. More explicitly, this paper is the beginning of an attempt to cast ecologyas a non-philosophical practice that allows us to read and practice philosophy under the auspices of a transcendental ecology analogous to Gilles Deleuze’s transcendentalempiricism or François Laruelle’s transcendental axiomatics. Note that this is only aclaim about changing the way we practice philosophy via non-philosophy and makesno pretense of heralding in some new philosophy that can finally answer everything;the message of this paper is not that ontology is ecological or that epistemologicalquestions are answered through ecological science. Rather transcendental ecology, asdeveloped in this paper, is a method of reading the philosophical history underlingenvironmental thinking and the beginning of a non-philosophical practice of thinkingthe questions of nature and ecosystem outside of philosophy’s self-sufficiency inmatters of ecological metaphysics and ethics.This paper opens that attempt by introducing the history of non-philosophy asit has developed through François Laruelle’s work. This section will necessarily bedense, as it condenses 30 years of work into a few paragraphs, and many will nolikely feel immediate resistance to both Laruelle’s criticism of philosophy in generaland the way he goes about his own conception of non-philosophy.

This resistanceowes, in great deal, to what may initially appear to be an incredible amount of jargonand obsessive focus on syntax. I make no attempt to defend Laruelle here in theabstract, though of course I find his work not to be merely another instance of trendy jargon but rather an attempt to think differently, and instead present the material of non-philosophy as offensively dense as I find it. This is done, however, with the clear purpose of showing how it opens a path towards the unified theory of philosophy andecology through the discovery of a transcendental (to philosophy) reading of philosophy via ecological principles. I only note, for the sake of the reader’s sanity,that Laruelle expects philosophical resistance to non-philosophy and has intentionallywritten it as a kind of stumbling block to philosophers of Alterity and foolishness to philosophers of Being; Being and Alterity forming philosophy’s twin obsessions.

There is of course a history of “non-philosophy” in both the German and French traditions. These areusually identified by philosophers, whereas Laruelle aims to unbind non-philosophy and practice itfrom within rather than as a philosopher. See his remarks comparing the non-philosophy identified byDeleuze and Guattari in their

What is Philosophy

to his own practice of non-philosophy in FrançoisLaruelle, “Response to Deleuze”,

Pli

20 (2009), pp. [Need page numbers].

The allusion is, of course, to St Paul’s statement “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block tothe Jews and foolishness to Gentiles [Greeks]” (1 Corinthians 1:23 NSRV). Laruelle’s reference here isto the Greek and Jewish lines of thought that have largely determined the course of Western