On Nature

Author(s): Muriel Combes and Sanford Kwinter

Source: Log , Summer 2020, No. 49, Observations on architecture and the contemporary
city (Summer 2020), pp. 146-163
Published by: Anyone Corporation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27092849

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Muriel Combes is a philosopher and a shiatsu practitioner – a rare soul who can demonstrate
with ease that thinking is not an incorporeal activity but is operated with the hands as much
as with the head and the body’s meridians. She is the author of Gilbert Simondon and the
Philosophy of the Transindividual, arguably the most elucidatory book written on Simondon,
the postwar philosopher of “individuation” underlying generative processes that give rise to
individual beings. Here, Combes unpacks Simondon’s philosophy by weaving it with the rad-
ical thinking of Spinoza, the ancient wisdom of Chuang Tzu, and the contemporary landscape
sculpting of Gilles Clément.
For Combes, the common thread running across her Simondonian quartet is the rejection
of a cosmos bifurcated into naturalia and artificialia. Instead, all four analyses reveal prob-
lematic dimensions of long-established discourses that promote cultural domination of, and
human elevation above, nature. Each also posits an underlying pre-individual continuum,
from which manifold modifications and individuations – of humanscapes and landscapes –
constantly arise, operate immanent to one another, immanent to life as such.
There is much for architecture and philosophy to attend to urgently in this subterranean
lineage, particularly at a time of ecological catastrophes and social upheavals, at a time when
we are (once again) confronting the bankruptcy of our instrumentalist approaches to nature
and to each other. Such is Combes’s call: it is time to come up with symbiotic ways of thinking
and making that affirm the generative continuity extending across natural, built, and social
environments. Beneath the dogmas of our collapsing epistemic and practical regimes, Combes
reminds us, we can still easily discover the covert seeds of a fully cosmic ethico-aesthetics. – GK

***
The text provided here was originally commissioned and presented to a class of ours at the
Pratt Institute School of Architecture, a class dedicated to “ontology” and nature. (The onto-
logical orientation was determined by a spiraling set of references to this term within con-
temporary theory and architecture school culture in recent years.) For this occasion, Combes
made a unique exception for us to address her thoughts on “the nature problem” in the light
of her postphilosophical explorations in the somatic arts. Among the seemingly determined
intellectual destinations of any philosophical holism or monism, is an expansion and refine-
ment of the consequences of “ecological thought.”
What Combes brings to the fore today is an affirmation of an urgent type of 21st-century “nat-
uralism,” one steeped in, and germinated out of, the history of thought about the physical world
from Anaximander through Spinoza as it is prismatically synthesized in the 20th-century work
of Gilbert Simondon. The focus and power of this work centers on the problems of potential with
respect to action: how it is constituted, where it circulates, how to capture it, and what it does.
This exploration unfailingly recognizes many sovereign traditions of both thought and
action, notably those originating in Asia and in premodern times, traditions that did not

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Muriel Combes
Translated from the French
by Sanford Kwinter
On Nature

The philosophers are the narrators of many things. – Heraclitus

Someone who tells is someone who heals. – Goliarda Sapienza

I like beginnings. For example, when I am asked to talk about

1. Shizuto Masunaga, Shiatsu e médecine
orientale (Paris: Éditions Le Courrier du
Livre, 2010), 425.
nature, I can imagine several beginnings, several paths that open,
or several threads to follow, and perhaps to weave together.
I wish I could think in the way that a plant grows its
roots or buds or leaves: expanding in all directions at once.
But how to do this when discursive thought is linear, and sub-
ject to Chronos?
I like beginnings. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I
love Gilbert Simondon’s thought as a philosophy of individua-
tion, with its descriptions of ever new states, through mul-
tiple planes of consistency. And it is perhaps this same love of
beginnings that, after the philosophical abstinence into which
I entered a few years ago, made me come to love Shiatsu and
the ancient Chinese thought that supports its practice, because
it is a thought of people connected to the land, which is to say a
cyclical thought, built from the observation of natural cycles.
Shiatsu is a manual therapeutic technique, consisting
essentially of stable and continuous pressures applied by the
fingers or hands to the body’s meridians, or to acupuncture
points along the meridians, intended to prevent or repair
organic dysfunctions through the rebalancing of energy. At
the heart of Shiatsu, therefore, is energy, 気 Qi or Ki, a notion
on which I would like to linger for a moment. “The term
refers, in a general way, to the energy circulating through-
out the cosmos.” “The ideogram for Qi is composed of two
characters: the upper character is a pictogram representing
steam (symbol of the immaterial, impalpable energies of the
Sky) and the lower character represents rice or millet (sym-
bols of the food, material element of the life energy of the
Earth), the whole literally representing ‘steam rising from
rice or millet as it is cooked’ and, more generally, any breath
of life or natural phenomenon occurring between Heaven
and Earth, where Earth and Heaven or sky are indissolu-
bly linked.”1 This indissoluble link between Earth and Sky

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effectuate the artificial separations upon which many of our (design and thinking) habits
are based.
So how do these various but related principles of “potential” get characterized? By and
large not only by the concept of a substrate beneath the appearance of things, a continuum
that is undivided and which supplies a natural reservoir of both energy and information, but
also, and most important, one governed by a principle of eternal incompleteness (and uncom-
pletability). This underlay creates a tension, a fundamental dissymmetry within our seem-
ingly fixed reality, one that eternally pushes all that is, “out of step” with itself, causing it
perpetually to adapt and transform. The difficult term that we discover in Simondon is that
of the “preindividual” along with its persistence as the eternally unresolvable, and hence the
guarantor of an eternally creative future, and more generally of the dynamism of Being.
Likewise, Combes’s Spinoza reveals to us, with immense and necessary emphasis, the
powerful primacy of action that takes place in and through the “modes” so critical to the con-
cept that underlies all of Spinoza’s thought: that of the persistence of freedom as something
achievable in the world. By assimilating these concepts of Nature and potential to those of con-
temporary ecologists (Clément) and to ancient Chinese thought, Combes broadens dramati-
cally the understanding of how humans impersonally belong, and cultivate their belonging, to
the world namely by grasping their finitude and specificity in continual engagement with the
infinite and the not-yet-differentiated (Anaximander’s Apeiron, Clement’s delaissé).
What the designer might take from acquaintance with such a system is the fresh and
enlightened attitude that design action is always but a modification – a slowing, a selection,
an improvisation – introduced into a torrent of forces that precedes and extends indifferently
beyond it, every gesture seeding designs and transformations to come. – SK

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2. A similar tripartite division can be
found already in Plato’s Laws, Book X,
but has a different meaning in Aristotle.
Plato’s concern is to insist against the
Physiologists, on the primacy of art, in
the sense of the art of the demiurge. On
the other hand, the Aristotelian divine is
no longer demiurgic; art is understood in
the sense of human art, and human art
does not intervene in the explanation of
things pertaining to the natural order; it
is therefore a question of distinguishing
the naturalia – those things caused by
nature – and the artificialia – those which
come into being by the action of technè. See
Pascal Dupond, “Commentaire du livre II
de la Physique d’Aristotle,” (Commentary
on Book II of the Physics of Aristotle),
Philopsis, http://www.philopsis.fr.
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is what expresses the notions of Yin and Yang, as well as the
symbol that expresses the cyclic relation at play in the succes-
sion of the seasons, in the ages of life, or in the hours of a day.
When one loves beginnings, cyclical thinking works
rather well: at every age of life, at every season of the year,
at every lunar cycle, at every phase of the moon, at every
sunrise, indeed at every new moment, at each draw of our
breath, the world begins again and renews us.
This idea of perpetual commencement is at the heart of
the idea of nature. The Greek word physis comes from the
verb φυω, to push, to grow as it refers to a vegetable. And the
Latin word natura comes from the verb nascor, which means
to be born. To wonder about nature is to wonder about pro-
cesses of begetting.
Plato launched an inquiry about the being of being, about
what makes “be” what is. Aristotle prolonged this question-
ing into a thought of physis, which systematized a philosophy
of knowledge of the different causes of what is. With Aristotle,
the thought of nature as begetting turned to a thought of the
principles of begetting at work within and through all that is.
This is how Aristotle distinguishes between what is an end of
itself and what is by dint of something else.
“Among the beings, some are by nature,” as Pascal
Dupond explains at the beginning of his commentary on Book
II of the Physics of Aristotle, to delimit the field of the objects
that physics proposes to study, Aristotle distinguishes two
kinds of beings: some are by nature (phusei), others are by
other causes (di’allas aitias). These other causes are random,
chance, . . . human intelligence, art, techne, that is, productive
activity of the mind acting according to a rational rule.2
We know the fate of this distinction between nature and
technique, technè, or technology, nature and artifice, and
consequently nature and culture, which constitute the tradi-
tion of Western metaphysics. However, since the end of the
1990s, many discoveries have changed our understanding of
nature, in particular, many works in ethology that demon-
strate the existence of culture among animals (I think of the
work of primatologists Franz de Waal and Jane Goodall), and
the proliferation of botanical studies regarding the existence
of “plant intelligence.” The notable wide success of Peter
Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees or the participation
of the botanist Francis Hallé in the mainstream film It was a
Forest, by Luc Jacquet, demonstrates the growing interest in
the narratives about interspecies cooperation within the plant
world (in particular between the trees and the mycelium that
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3. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI,
Chapter XIV, no. 17.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First
Part of the Second Part, Question 10; Reply
to Objection 2. https://www.newadvent.
org/summa/2010.htm.
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inhabit their root systems), as well as between the kingdoms.
What, then, is nature if we try to think of it outside of
the binary nature/technology or nature/culture? Of course,
one could apply to nature the words that St. Augustine applied
to time: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I
wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”3 If no one asks
me what nature is, it seems to me that I know. But if someone
asks, a disorder comes over me.
A disorder, because when we speak of nature, I am caught
between the immediacy of intuitive understanding and the
mass of accumulated knowledge; the presence of that which
we see or experience with our senses – see nature everywhere
– and the absence of that which requires explanation.
A disturbance which no doubt is also due to the double
meaning that the concept has taken on from its Aristotelian
definition: the physis as that which has its cause in itself as
distinct from that which has its cause in something else; but
also the nature of things – that which defines each thing.
As Dupond explains in his article, Aristotle distinguishes
what possesses a nature (phusin echei) from what exists
according to nature (kata phusin). “But that nature exists, it
would be ridiculous to try to demonstrate it < deiknunai >,”
says Aristotle.
St. Thomas Aquinas said: “That nature is, is known by
itself as natural things are manifest in our senses. But that
which is the nature of each thing, or that which is the prin-
ciple of movement, is not manifest.”4
What exactly do we mean when we talk about the nature
of a natural being? One interpretation identifies nature with
matter. According to a materialist conception of nature, the
nature of a being would be what persists through all its modi-
fications. According to a second interpretation, it is the form
that would be the principle of the movement of natural beings.
Hylê or morphê/eidos ... matter or form ... this is the con-
cept of hylomorphic being that Simondon raises by substituting
the operation of individuation for the question of the principle
of individuation.
I myself grew up in a family of farmers, and I received
a Catholic education. As a child, I expected to receive the
Holy Spirit just as I had been told that the apostles did, after
the death and resurrection of Jesus, to transmit to the world
the message of the love of Christ. When I was in church, I
expected to receive faith as a sudden illumination that would
transform me entirely. But that did not happen, and the God-
father, the God-law that I had been taught, did not speak to
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5. See Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon,
Une pensée opérative (Saint-Étienne:
Publications de l’université de Saint-
Étienne, 2002). The citation (IG) in
the excerpt refers to Gilbert Simondon,
L’Individu et sa Genèse physico-biologique
(Paris: Jérome Millon, 1995); the citation
(E) refers to Spinoza’s Ethics.
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me. But when, at the age of about 20, I discovered Spinoza’s
Deus sive Natura, I also found an attitude toward God that
spoke more to my sensibility.
In the Spinozan concept of nature, the dividing line no
longer passes primarily between nature and technique, which
is to say between humans who are technê authors and non-
humans, but between natura naturata and natura naturans.
Both within us and outside of us.
Later, in Simondon, I discovered another system of
thought in which the emphasis was not on the break between
the naturalia and artificialia, but rather between the individu-
ated and the pre-individual and on nature as apeiron. This
concept, which invokes an indeterminate background, helps
Simondon to conceptualize this pre-individual as something
that can be reactivated in multiple individuations. Hence,
Simondon allows himself a jump beyond Aristotle, and even
Plato, by invoking the so-called pre-Socratic thinkers, in par-
ticular Anaximander, where he finds inspiration to nourish a
gesture toward relational thought.
At the beginning of my book on Simondon, there is a com-
parative study of individuation in the philosophies of Spinoza
and Simondon. In the chapter titled “Thinking about becom-
ing, renewing naturalism,” I try to show that Simondon
criticizes Spinoza, but that this criticism makes it possible to
understand their intellectual commonality, a philosophy of
nature that at its heart has an ethical concern. I would like to
quote here a long passage from that chapter:5
“Simondon criticizes Spinoza for not having thought about the
reality of the individual being and for that reason having failed
to think about becoming. ‘Substantial being,’ writes Simondon,
‘is always the absolutely single-phase being, because it consists
in itself; Being in oneself and for oneself is also the fact of being
coherent with oneself, of being unable to be opposed to oneself.
The substance is one because it is stable.’ (IG, 238)
“Now, between propositions 15 and 16 of the first part of
Ethics, there is a tension which, once resolved, makes it possible
to understand what constitutes becoming in the Spinozist uni-
verse. Spinoza explains that ‘Whatever is, is in God,’ but that
God itself is nothing without the capacity for a multiplicity of
modes. So much so that substance gives modes their reality, it is
what makes them be and think; but in return, modes give sub-
stance its concreteness, they actualize substance. In fact, what
would power be worth, or activity in general that would not
take place in any singular being be worth, if it would not also
become the power and activity of concrete beings themselves?
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 “The key to the relationship between substance and mode
lies in the close theoretical relationship between Spinoza’s
understanding of causality and his definition of power. With
regard to causality, Spinoza introduces the new concept of
‘immanent cause’: ‘God is the immanent and nontransitive
cause of all things’ (E I, Prop. 18).
“But at the heart of transitive causality, which goes from
mode to mode, it is still God who acts to make the modes
operate; more precisely: ‘God, in so far as he is considered to
be affected in a certain way’ (E I, 28 dem.). So that, rather
than two orders of causality, we should speak of two regimes of
a single causality, sometimes understood from within, from
the point of view of what acts in each mode, sometimes con-
sidered from the outside, from the point of view of what is
done and is effected. Immanent causality and transitive cau-
sality are therefore distinguished not in concrete reality, with
respect to two distinct orders, but ethically, with reference to
distinct ways of both understanding and existing.
“Now the naturalism of Spinoza has an ethical dimen-
sion. In the preface to the third part of Ethics, Spinoza writes:
‘Nothing happens in nature which can be attributed to any
deficit in it, for nature is always the same, and its virtue and
power of action are everywhere one and the same, in other
words, the laws and rules of nature, according to which all
things happen and change from one form to another, are
always and everywhere the same. It therefore follows that the
way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever
kind, must also be the same; namely, through the univer-
sal laws and rules of nature.’ It is clear from this passage that
the unity of being can be understood in Spinoza as univocity.
The order of nature is single and unique, it is everywhere a
single power to act; being affirms itself in a single sense for
the multitude of modes that differ infinitely. The unity of the
substantial being is not ultimately a unifying unit. Rather, it
consists in the univocity of potential, which is expressed in as
many gradations as there are modes. According to this under-
standing of unity, it is no longer in contradiction with becom-
ing, but on the contrary makes it possible to understand what
becoming in Spinoza consists of even if he never explicitly
thematizes it.
“In the philosophy of action represented by Ethics, the
becoming of substance in which the divine potential takes
place merges with the becoming-active of modes. More
precisely: the becoming-active of modes anchors itself in
the becoming-substance, but this latter can be understood

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 correctly only according to the point of view, or within the
perspective, of the becoming-active of modes. The univoc-
ity of being, in fact, according to which there is everywhere
a single and same power to act, implies that all ‘suffering’
(undergoing) can be transformed into action, all impotence
into power. And becoming-active, for a mode, which is to
say to make the majority of its effects ensue from its unique
nature, does not mean anything other than to activate in one-
self – at the level of one’s finite being – the naturing naturans.
“Indeed, if it is a single power of action that is exer-
cised everywhere, we understand that the separation between
naturans and naturata, between naturing and natured, has for
Spinoza an ethical as well as an ontological sense. Or, rather, it
has an ontological meaning only insofar as being consists in a
power to exist and to act, a power to produce effects, and to
do this from the most fundamental level.
“It is not insignificant that in the passage where
Simondon criticizes Spinoza’s ‘substantialist monism’ he
expresses himself in Spinozist terms. Simondon writes: ‘What
is lacking in the concept of substance, in spite of Spinoza’s
terminology, is to be nature, or else not to be at once indis-
solubly both naturata and naturans’ (IG, 238). Saying this, he
suggests that the Spinozist concept of nature, insofar as it is
articulated according to the Natura naturata / Natura natur-
ans dyad, is insufficient. But even before we understand what
in Spinoza is specifically being criticized here, we can imme-
diately note that Simondon takes on the thought of being as
nature; what remains is to understand what naturalism he is
going to claim. The criticism he directs to Spinoza, to have
conflated – ‘at once and indissolubly’ – Natura naturata and
Natura naturans, is implicit in the criticism of substantial
being as a ‘one’ that is unable to become.
“According to Simondon, substance cannot fully cover
nature because it does not have within it an element that
would become, because it draws within it the totality of finite
determinations at the same time as it serves as what makes
them both ‘be’ and ‘understand.’ Since there is no poten-
tial that permits one to posit a productive gap in substantial
being between the infinite power of substance and its effects,
the distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata
would be nothing but a distinction of reason.
“Now, although naturans and naturata do not refer in
Spinoza to two orders of reality, they are not, however, uni-
fied. Indissoluble if it is in fact true that there is in nature only
one power by which everything comes to pass, the naturing

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 nature and the natured nature differ by the way that the
power effectuates them. And this difference is real in that it is
an ethical difference distinguishing two modes of existence.
“What Simondon reproaches Spinoza for, even while
borrowing his concepts, reveals to us what he himself means
by nature. Nature must be richer than simple coherence with
itself, it must contain something that becomes. In Simondon’s
own words: ‘Being is both structure and energy’ (IG, 238).
And Simondon expresses this in a spontaneously Spinozist
way, writing about the particle and its field: ‘In the physi-
cal individual, substance and mode possess the same level of
being. The substance consists of the stability of the modes,
and the modes, in changes of the energy level of the sub-
stance.’ (IG, 99). In this formulation, the substance is referred
to the modes as the structure to the energetic variations that
come to it. That Simondon, here outside of any debate with
Spinoza, nonetheless uses Spinozist concepts to express his
own conclusions interests me. It seems to me to be a way
of regenerating, at the source of the physical model cho-
sen by Simondon, categories that seem to him at once inad-
equate but worthy of being reelaborated. And when, using
the term modes here to designate the energetic aspect of the
physical individual and the term substance to designate its
structural aspect, Simondon imagines transforming the use
of these terms (using them to designate two dimensions of a
single reality), he is perhaps closer than he imagines to their
Spinozist use (except that in Spinoza the transformative
function at the heart of every individual is that aspect of sub-
stance understood as immanent causality).
“What Simondon means by nature seems to me clearly
expressed when he writes, ‘Being as a being is given entirely
in each of its phases, but with a reserve of becoming’ (IG, 229).
Being is nature in that it contains what is needed for becom-
ing, that is to say, it contains the pre-individual capable of
being activated through the multiple individuations within
which it takes on form.
“It now becomes possible to attend to the naturalistic
meaning of the individuation theory, which becomes mani-
fest in the explanation of the ‘passage’ from one individua-
tion to another. Because if the being is individuated according
to several regimes of individuation – physical, vital, psy-
chic, psychosocial – it is necessary to understand the relation
between two successive individuations, that is to say how one
passes from the physical individuation to vital individuation,
or from it to psychic individuation. Simondon tells us that

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 vital individuation, for example, does not follow from physi-
cal individuation, as if the latter were its cause, but occurs as
a ‘slowing down’ (ralentissement) of it (IG, 231); likewise, ‘the
psychic intervenes as a slowing down of the individuation
of the living’ (IG, 163). By this, we must understand that an
individuation does not succeed another, dissolving the previ-
ous, but that, if a new individuation can happen to the already
individuated, it is according to a preindividual part that it
contains, and will function as a starting point for a newly aris-
ing ‘problem’ (problématique). Thus, ‘there remains within the
physically individuated reality potential for a vital (living,
biological) individuation, and this ‘would be like an unfold-
ing of the inchoate stage, allowing an organization, a deepen-
ing of what was present at the extreme beginning’ (IG, 231).
“Now, if the passage from one individuation to another
is thus understood as the insertion of one individuation into
the other, it is made possible by the preindividual that sub-
sists in the individual, and thanks to which, the individual is
able to resolve a new problem (problématique) that remained
unresolved within the previously existing structure. It is the
insistence of the preindividual within the individual, that is
to say, on the one hand by its very nature, that the individ-
ual becomes the milieu of several successive individuations:
‘because the pre-individual past survives alongside the indi-
viduated being and remains as a germ for ever new amplifying
operations; individuation intervenes in being as the correla-
tive birth of distinct phases from that which did not involve
them, being pure omnipresent potential’ (IG, 232). It is by
continually reactivating the preindividual that persists within
individuals, that being, in the variety of its forms, becomes.
But then, the individual, although real, is not primary; it
must ‘take on being’ (pris sur l’être), it is, writes Simondon
in a clearly Spinozist inspiration, a ‘way of being,’ a moment
within this operation by which the preindividual, in response
to the new problems that arise, divides into phases.
“If the naturalism of Spinoza revolves around the notion
of power and the naturans/naturata relationship in which it
takes place, then Simondon’s naturalism is formulated around
the notions of potential and preindividual, which are tantamount
to distant reformulations of Spinozist notions. In both cases,
the distinction between naturans and naturata is preserved as
the source of a point of view on being such that we focus either
on what makes things happen or on the result of this activity.
“In Spinoza, to grasp naturing is to understand what is
happening in the modes and the principle by which the modes

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 act, which makes the modes capable of activity. The naturing,
in this sense, is the condition for a human freedom to meet
the level of human action. On the other hand, to attach one-
self to what is natured (naturata) will mean to seize in partial
operations the deposit of this activity. In a similar way, this
gap between naturing and natured is developed in Simondon
as the gap between the operation of individuation, in which
the pre-individual is individuated, and the individuated
being that, in a partial and provisional way, is its resultant. To
become attentive to the naturing signifies henceforth putting
into play the ‘individuating’ aspect of the being, that part of
nature through which the individuated beings become part of
new individuations.
“From this reformulation of the meaning of Spinoza’s
and Simondon’s respective naturalisms it immediately
emerges that to think being as nature, that is, to think the dif-
ference between processes and what is formally deposited as
constituted reality, is in both cases an ethical project.
“The latter, immediate in Spinoza, where the difference
between naturing and natured is nothing other than the dif-
ference between the causality which that governs free action
and those that mandate the constrained operation, appears in
the concluding pages of Simondon’s text. There, in fact, it is
argued that ethics ‘express the sense of perpetual individua-
tion, the necessity of becoming, which is intrinsic to Being as
preindividual, and ever-individuating’ (IG, 247). Ethics can
be thought of as the guarantor of becoming only insofar as
the becoming itself is that of the pre-individual in the indi-
viduated, which is to say as long as there remains within the
being a reserve of becoming: a part or component of ‘nature.’
Simondon often designates with this word what would be
called ‘naturing’ in Spinoza. Nature, in this sense, is that very
capacity within the state of things that renders further indi-
viduations possible.”

***
The question of naturalism today is perhaps not so much
What is nature? as Where is nature? Is it really outside of us, as
the notion of environment frequently suggests?
In the perspectives of both Spinoza and Simondon,
nature is in us at least as much as outside of us. And yet it is
not outside of us, in the sense of something that is facing us. It
is not an environment, but rather a reserve to become.

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6. Gilles Clément, Manifeste du Tiers paysage
(Paris: Sens et Tonka, 2014). An English
translation is forthcoming in the Writing
Architecture series with MIT Press.
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***
Gilles Clément, gardener, landscape architect, botanist,
biologist, and writer, has developed a Manifesto of the Third
Landscape in reference to the concept of the Third Estate pro-
posed by Abbé Sieyès at the time of the French Revolution.6
− “Undefined fragments of the planetary garden, the
Third Landscape is made up of all the places passed over by
man. These marginal spaces give place to a biological diversity
that is not currently accounted for as wealth.
− The Third Landscape refers to the Third Estate (and
not the Third World), spaces expressing neither power nor
submission to power.”
− Clément cites the opening lines of Abbé Sieyès’s 1789
pamphlet:
“What is the Third Estate? Everything.
What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.
What does it want to be? Something.”
The concept of the Third Landscape brings together all
of the forsaken or neglected natural spaces (les délaissés) as
the originary or wild land parcels – in other words, heteroge-
neous realities with respect to the fate that is made for them
by land management practices, but which all have one thing
in common: they represent harbors for biodiversity.
− “The abandoned parcel – délaissé space – proceeds
from the withdrawal from formerly worked and developed
land. Its origins are multiple: agricultural, industrial, urban,
touristic, etc. Délaissé and fallow are synonymous.
− The reserve is an untapped place. Its existence is due
to happenstance or to difficulty of access that makes utiliza-
tion impossible or expensive. It appears by deduction from the
humanly accessed and humanly occupied (anthropisé) territory.
− Reserves exist de facto as default and wild states but
also by administrative decision. The indeterminate nature of
the Third Landscape is the default state of the biological entities
that make up the territory absent of any human intervention.”
At once a refuge and “place of possible invention,” the
Third Landscape – and especially the “neglected” délaissés at
the margins of human activity – appears as a type of “open”
space where a certain metastability reigns and where new
species can be accommodated:
− “Derelict délaissés never benefit from operating as
a reserve. They welcome pioneer species with rapid cycles,
each of which prepares for the coming of the following
ones, whose cycles lengthen until one settles in a state of
apparent permanence.
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Manifesto on the Third Landscape: Undecided Fragment of the Planetary Garden
Gilles Clément. Translated from the French by Denise Bratton. Excerpts from parts V, Stakes; VIII,
Scale; X, Rapport with Time, and XII, Rapport with Culture.

V.1. Biodiversity is expressed by the number of species on the planet and by the variety of behaviors.
V.2. The variety of behaviors depends on the latitude afforded to each species (freedom of
action), but also the biological range of each species (its capacity for adaptation).
V.3. For human societies, the variety of behaviors occurs within one single species (Homo sapi-
ens). It derives from the culture in which each individual evolves.
V.4. In theory, biodiversity is not finite.
V.5. The number of species or behaviors increases or decreases in proportion to environ-
mental changes.
V.6. Cataclysm (meteorites, volcanic eruptions, wars) drives the massive and brutal decrease
of their number. Slow transformation (glaciation, tropicalization) leads to the succession of
species, and progressive decreases or increases in number.
V.7. The human conquest or anthropization of the planet, in comparison with natural phenom-
ena, leads to a decrease in the number of species analogous to that of cataclysm.
V.8. The standardization of human practices leads to a decrease in the varieties of behaviors.
V.9. With fluctuation in the number of species, the Third Landscape positions itself as a territory of
refuge, a passive situation, and at the same time, a space of potential invention, an active situation.
V.10. As the reservoir of all planetary genetic configurations, the Third Landscape represents the
biological future.
V.15. The increase of the human population – planetary occupation – does not coincide with an
increase in the number of human behaviors. The effect of cultural intermingling translates
into a reduction of potential behaviors.
V.16. For animal and plant species, planetary intermingling functions selectively (disappearance
by competition) and in a dynamic way, creating new behaviors, hybridizations, mutations,
even new species.
VIII.3. A forest constitutes an ecosystem, as does a lichen, a river bank, a strip of bark, a moun-
tain, a rock, even a cloud ...
VIII.4. The instruments for evaluating the Third Landscape range from the satellite to the microscope.
VIII.5. The analysis of the information obtained from satellites reveals, in particular, the activity
of the biomass for a given region, expressing a multitude of interrelated ecosystems.
VIII.6. The analysis based on the microscope reveals, in particular, the character of the simplest
living beings in the ecosystem.
VIII.7. All intermediary instruments facilitate the cataloguing of habitats, then of inhabitants.
X.1. The Third Landscape evolves through a process of biological dependency.
X.17. The Darwinian process is accompanied by violent and rapid changes; the Lamarckian, by
gradual and slow modifications.
X.18. The general process of evolution could be understood as a succession of short-lived and
slow phenomena (Darwinian and Lamarckian), for given biological systems.
XII. 5. A space of life deprived of the Third Landscape would be like a mind deprived of the
unconscious. Such a flawless scenario, one without daemons, exists in no known culture
On Status: Present the Third Landscape, undecided fragment of the Planetary Garden, not as
patrimony, but as the common space of the future.

158

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 − The rapid appearance, then disappearance of pio-
neer species in favor of stable species is a prime feature of the
délaissés: they require an open terrain, devoid of competition,
so that the pioneer species take hold.
− As the field begins to “close,” the dynamics of com-
petition and conquest abate. The life of the délaissé is short.
− Each natural incident contributes to reopening
a closed terrain and can be considered a recycling of the
délaissé through itself, giving place to new pioneer species
again and again.
− The flora of the délaissé is not limited to its native
natural cohorts and may well host all kind of exotic pioneer
flora compatible with the ecosystem (biome).
− The sum of all délaissés on Earth constitutes the
domain of a “planetary brewing.”
Hence, the Third Landscape can be understood not only
as a reserve of biological diversity but also as a reserve of
becoming for the diversity of species. Clément, one might say,
proposes to think of it as a sanctuary of the “preindividual of
landscape,” as the basis of a policy of non-planning within
planning policy, leaving space for non-doing, for a non-action
at the heart of a planetary and global environmental action.

***
Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed to classify “under NATURE”
“everything that philosophy considers as the NOT-ME.”
Nature – what moves through me and precedes me; the non-
me that can cross through me; which is at once before me
and after me because it passes through me, at once in me and
both greater and other than me; also well beyond me. Water,
which comprises about 80 percent of us, and which also flows
alongside us in the stream; the light around us, the song of the
stream, the rustle of wind in the trees, all these manifestations
that technically are not us, are arguably outside us, although
there is nonetheless a force within us that can respond to these.
Everything that exists between heaven and earth, all of the
not-me that passes through and constitutes us, from the oxy-
gen produced by the plants and that we breathe to the light of
the sun that enters our skin and helps our bodies to synthesize
vitamin D or simply makes us feel alive and elevates our mood.
Whether nature is in us or part of us or whether we
belong to it, there are many ways to understand it. We host,
for example, a multitude of lifeforms – bacteria, fungi, etc. –
which are sustained by the food we eat, the water we drink,
the air we breathe. These microorganisms have the power to

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7. Sandor Katz in Marie-Claire Frédéric, Ni
cru, ni cuit (Paris: Alma Editeur, 2014), 42.
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make us do and feel things and make us what we are.
In her book Ni cru, ni cuit (Neither raw nor cooked),
Marie-Claire Frédéric tells us that it is possible that the evo-
lution toward Homo erectus was due to the appearance of fer-
mented foods, which favored an evolution of the jaw of the
hominids that consumed them. She quotes Sandor Katz, who
writes, “Man did not invent fermentation, it is fermenta-
tion that invented man.” Recent hypotheses suggest that the
beginnings of agriculture might be linked to fermented foods
such as bread and beer, first produced from wild grain, in
order to obtain larger quantities. Hence, “the first domestica-
tion carried out by humans is that of micro-organisms, well
before those of the dog, the horse or the dairy cow.”7
But also, following the inspiration of Emanuele Coccia’s
The Life of Plants, if plants produce our atmosphere, then
human life on earth depends on plants, and therefore on what
we do with and to plants, through the process of respiration,
the breath, we become the world and the world becomes us.
From this point of view, the question of pollution takes on a
further dimension, for it is not the environment that we pol-
lute but ourselves. We are immersed; that is to say, we have in
us all that which contains us – a fractal or topological reading
of Anaxagoras’s idea that everything is in everything.
The idea of nature as separate from the human and “out-
side of us” is a concept produced jointly by the imperatives of
modern knowledge and the dispositions of power that have
enabled capitalist accumulation.
***
On the question of knowledge, another path to the question
of nature would be the break that Michel Foucault identifies
between scientific knowledge and spiritual knowledge.
Today we know many things, there are entire scientific
fields devoted to climatic and ecological upheaval; we have a
mass of data from varied scientific disciplines – economics,
biology, etc. – much of which converges on the likelihood of
a general and proximate planetary collapse.
Despite this knowledge that we possess, we have yet
to believe it. As long as we remain on the side of scientific
knowledge, little can change. Spiritual knowledge would
consist simply in “believing in what happens to us,” as Gilles
Deleuze said. Collapsologists can talk as much as they want,
but their collapsology does not suffice. It should be something
like a collapsosophy. It would require a felt understanding of
collapse. A knowledge that would simultaneously be a feeling.
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8. Lena Balaud and Antoine Chopot, Nous
ne sommes pas seuls (We are not alone),
forthcoming with Éditions du Seuil.
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The knowledge of nature cannot but also be an experi-
ence, a feeling: the feeling at once of both belonging and oth-
erness; the feeling of belonging to otherness. It is a feeling of
this type that is inseparable from all ecological thought; ecol-
ogy is a prime example of what all thought is and must be,
one and the same time a feeling. Ecology and what is referred
to as spirituality have one important point in common: to
invite us to look at relationships (relations). In other words,
to see how we are not separated from other things. One could
say that there are spiritualities that promote separation, that
Christianity is more a spirituality [faith] of separation than
Buddhism, for example, which places more emphasis on the
interrelation between beings, but in Christianity there is also
the example of a Saint Francis, who insisted on the solidarity
of all creatures before their creator.
***
In the history of capitalist accumulation, the concept of
nature has often served as an operator to exclude, or dis-
qualify, those who had no voice, those who were not human,
indeed even the white human endowed with reason, as well
as other peoples, women, animals and plants, but also riv-
ers, forests, the sun, and the wind. . . . What was endlessly
assigned to the other side – to nature – hence what was
deprived of rights, and therefore what we could appropriate
at will or put to work for free.
And what if it is not nature that belongs to us but we who
belong to it?
Antoine Chopot and Lena Balaud, in a book they are
writing,8 propose to define nature as “an otherness to which
we belong,” a beautiful definition that abruptly reverses the
Cartesian dogma that “we exist as masters and possessors
of nature.” Because even if the word as indicates that this
Cartesian idea is indeed a fiction – for which we may one day
have to pay the price – the rest of the sentence consists of grant-
ing us humans authority to act as if, in other words, to act as
masters and possessors of nature; for us to simply appropriate it
wholesale, to transform it at will, to breach and “occupy” it, as
Heidegger would express it three centuries later. One might add
to Chopot and Balaud: “an otherness to which we have forgot-
ten that we belong,” or “an otherness of which (we have forgot-
ten that) we are part, as much as it belongs to us,” and transpose
to nature the Heideggerian motif of forgetting of being.
The production of nature as “outside us,” at once an
object of modern knowledge and stock of resources, is what
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9. Anne Cheng, “Can we speak of ” human
nature “in ancient Chinese thought?,” in
The natures in question, colloquium at the
College of France, October 2017. I quote
this intervention from the video capture
at http://www.college -de-france.fr/site/
colloque-2017/symposium-2017-10-20-
10h00.htm.
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prevents us from seeing that nature is us – a reserve of becom-
ing – and other than us – an otherness to which we belong. To
say that we are part of nature is to begin to ask questions on
the order of how: how our way of living raises the question of
our coexistence with other species, or how it overlooks this
question with silence, proceeding as if it goes without saying
or that the question simply does not arise.
In closing, I would like to place these comments in the
perspective of ancient Chinese thought. In a speech at an
October 2017 colloquium at the College of France, Anne
Cheng addressed the issue of human nature in ancient
Chinese thought.9 The Chinese word for nature is 性, which
is said to be pronounced “xing” and contains the word sheng
生. She explained that it is tempting to attribute to xing the
concept of nature, since “sheng means young shoot, plant that
points out of the ground, and has to do with birth, engen-
dering.” But she demonstrated that, in reality, xing does not
designate a substance, an ontological entity, but rather “the
modus operandi of life itself.” Indeed, according to Cheng,
“All the intuition contained in the notion of xing is in the idea
of the potential tree residing in the young shoot, in the pro-
cess of growth, of development, to be thought not in ontolog-
ical terms but in terms of vital energy, or even world-energy.
It is the idea that every being comes into the world in connec-
tion with Heaven Sky as the natural order of things.”
And the texts of Mencius or Chuang Tzu where this
notion of xing appears, reflect, according to her, a func-
tionalist and nonconceptual approach. Indeed, in a debate
on the question of human nature, Mencius speaks not of a
“good human nature” but of a “mode of functioning of the
human in its optimal form.” He compares the “human xing”
with water that will flow east or west according to the path
one opens for it; for water is defined according to its mode
of operating (it flows downward) and not according to its
apprehensible physical properties (liquid, transparent, etc.).
Cheng concluded her talk by quoting Mencius, which,
she said, is “the most beautiful and the best way to illustrate
what Mencius meant by Qi, vital energy. He says: ‘The trees
of the Mountain of Oxen were beautiful in the past. But being
located near the capital of a big country, they were felled by
ax. How, then, could these woods retain their beauty? Because
of the repose that these trees take during the day and the
night, and the moisture brought to them by rain and dew,
several shoots sprout forth but then the oxen and the sheep
arrive to graze them. That’s why the mountain is so destitute.
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 Seeing the mountain thus stripped, one could believe that it
was never dense with wood. But how could this be its mode of
mountain being-in-the-world – its xing as mountain? As for
what is found in man, how could there be no spirit of human-
ity and justice? What makes him give up his fundamentally
noble spirit is exactly what the ax does to trees: if trees are cut
down day after day, how could the forest sustain its beauty?
Because of the rest a man takes during the day and the night,
and the energy [Qi] that the early morning gives him, his
attractions and aversions are more or less those of a human
being. But then, what he does during the day leads him to lose
what is gained during rest. By dint of attrition, his energy,
accumulated during the night, is inadequate for survival.
And when it runs out, our human is not very far from being a
wild animal. And now seeing in him a wild beast, one is hard
pressed to believe he ever had potential for goodness. But is
this his true mode of functioning as a human being – his xing
of being human? Thus, as long as he or she finds something
to eat, every being develops. But let him or her lose her sus-
tenance, she is doomed to wither. “We have here a magnifi-
cent illustration of the natural anchoring of this notion of
xing understood paradoxically through the evocation of the
destruction of nature: the evocation of deforestation, which
as this text demonstrates began very early in China and from
which current China suffers the consequences today.”
Our nature clearly depends on our actions and our poten-
tials, and the means by which we individuate them. There
is no sense in which we can be “denatured,” for this would
imply the existence of an originary nature from which we
could be separated or that we could somehow lose; on the
other hand, our nature does not cease to change according to
what we do, according to our modes of existing and acting.
Our nature is an ethical issue.

Muriel Combes, a philosopher, is the

author of La vie inséparée: Vie et sujet
au temps de la biopolitique (The insepa-
rable life: Life and subject in the time of
biopolitics; Éditions Dittmar, 2011) and
Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of
the Transindividual (MIT Press, 2012).

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