Our Spaceship Earth and the Inevitable Apocalypticism of the Anthropocene

 The term “Anthropocene,” as Sloterdijk states, carries an urgent moral-political message under the guise of scientific neutrality, as it points at humanity as the responsible agent for the habitation and management of the planet. It tells us that humanity is no longer seamlessly integrated with the planet. As the Anthropocene has a responsible agent, it bears the content of an accusation. Sloterdijk contemplates on it via an imagery of a judicial setting: as “When we speak of an ‘Anthropocene,’ … we are taking part in a court case –in a preliminary hearing before the main trial, to be more precise– in which, as a first step, the accused’s culpability is supposed to be settled … This preliminary hearing is concerned with the question of whether it makes any sense at all to try the offender in question, given that the latter is not of age.”[1] The accused is not of age, and in some respects, it is insignificant, even weightless. Referencing Stanislaw Lem on the ineffectiveness and insignificance of humanity in terms of biomass, Sloterdijk questions “the point of putting on trial a species that pales in comparison to the material dimensions of the Gaia-system, the hydrosphere.”[2] Of course, the answer is that humanity’s biomass is not the sole determinant of its impact, and a weightless humanity can impact its environment in significant ways. “If humanity is supposed to be put on trial, this is mainly because it epitomizes a meta-biological agency that is able to exert quite a bit more influence on the environment, by virtue of its capacity for action, than we would assume on the basis of its relative physical weightlessness.”[3]

The agent “humanity” implies all human beings as the collective that is responsible for the destructive consequences of the Anthropocene. However, within the context of the radical technological advancements of the modern age, “humanity” refers to the European civilization and the technocratic elite.[4] Sloterdijk writes that starting from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the European technocratic elite, with the use of coal and petroleum in machinery, transformed the global scene, and the discovery and technical mastery of electricity led to “a new universal” in terms of energy. As such, “The collective that is characterized these days by expressions such as ‘humanity’ mainly consists of agents who within less than a century have acquired technologies developed in Europe. When Crutzen speaks of an ‘Anthropocene,’ this is a gesture of Dutch courtesy – or avoidance of conflict. In fact, talk of a ‘Eurocene’ or a technocene initiated by Europeans would be more fitting.”[5] (Thus, Sloterdijk adds another suggestion to the list of alternative names for the Anthropocene, such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Anthrobscene, Misanthropocene, and Chthulucene).

For Sloterdijk, the concept of “Anthropocene” reflects the 19th-century epistemological obsession of contemporary geology of historicizing and organizing historical fields into eons, ages, or epochs.[6] The emergence and proliferation of the concept of the Anthropocene is linked with the triumph of historicism, which itself is linked to the idea of evolution. Behind the triumph of historicism, Sloterdijk particularly elaborates on Marx and Engels, who viewed human history as a special case of natural history as humans must secure their own existence through production –the history of relations of production is a continuation of natural history in a different form. The Marxist image of the world (the operation of relations of production shaping and determining the stages of society’s evolution from hunter-gatherers to slave-holding societies, feudalism, capitalism, and finally to communism) has replaced older doctrines in terms of the segmentation of the ages of the world. In this context, with the Anthropocene, which belongs to another pragmatic theory on the ages of the world, the responsibility of “weightless” humanity is revealed as an ethico-political project in which humanity must go through a test of transforming “emission” into a “mission”:

The concept of ‘emission’ helps us to recognize that the kind of influence we are concerned with here has until now taken place in the mode of a ‘side effect’ – otherwise, we would be talking about a ‘mission’ or a ‘project.’ The ‘e’ in ‘emission’ reveals the involuntary character of the anthropogenic impact on the exo-human dimension. Thus, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ includes nothing less than the task of testing out whether the agency of ‘humanity’ is capable of transforming something ejected into a project or of transforming an emission into a mission.[7]

A central component of Sloterdijk’s account is concerned with the temporal/historical character of the anthropocenic standpoint, which he links with the apocalyptic logic: since “effective histories can only be organized from their end points backwards, the anthropocenic standpoint amounts to a narrative with a stark moral choice.”[8] In the past, this narrative was dominantly in the form of apocalyptic literature in the West, as the apocalyptic approach evaluates the world from its end and is a cosmic moral procedure of sorting good (worthy of survival) from evil (not worthy of survival).[9] Sloterdijk writes,

Everything thus suggests conceiving of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a term that is only meaningful within the framework of apocalyptic logic. Apocalypticism signifies evidence from the end. Since, as a collective, we cannot be all the way to the end yet but always have to somehow carry on for a while longer, and human intelligence cannot definitively review its own history. It can only try different versions out in diverse forms of anticipation – a fact testified to by an illustrious series of simulations, sacred and profane, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the first report of the Club of Rome.[10]

The indispensable apocalyptic logic highlights the mythological character of the narratives we form on the Anthropocene, as the specific temporality of human beings drops its shadow over the stories we produce. In terms of humanity’s relation to nature, Sloterdijk views the Heideggerian insight of conceiving being as time as essentially correct but missing a significant aspect: We notice time when its flow is disrupted.[11] For Sloterdijk, we see this disruption as a delay in the basic form of tragedy, and in current times, humanity must deal with constant delays with regard to our environmental policies. But modern humans, as Sloterdijk emphasizes, notice time as time mostly through accelerations: “Accelerating as fast as possible on one’s trajectory is what drives apocalypse as a temporo-logical form.”[12] The “logic of self-reinforcing sphere of activity that feeds back upon itself” determines the modern era: Humanity has witnessed the emergence of devastating circuli virtuosi, but certain important events led to the circulus virtuous emerge in the modern era, their effects leading to a new perception of time.[13] Sloterdijk specifies six self-reinforcing circular and interwoven processes that have emerged until now: fine arts, banking, engineering, the state, scientific research, and law.[14] The formulation of the concept of Anthropocene inevitably follows the apocalyptic logic because it indicates that the cosmic insouciance that was the basis for historical forms of human being-in-the-world has come to an end. In conventional terms, we could describe ‘the human place in the cosmos’ – to recall Scheler’s treatise – as a kind of scenery-ontology: on this view, the human being, as a dramatic animal, performs before the massif of nature that can never be anything other than a placid background for human operations. Such scenic ontological thought remained predominant for quite a while, even after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, although nature-as-background is nowadays construed as an integral storehouse of resources and as a universal landfill.[15]

The apocalyptic framework reveals the binary of foreground-background or stage-play ontology of the old ecology. As Sloterdijk states, in the 19^th century, the traditional scenery-ontology was starting to be supplanted by an ecological logic, and the scenery-ontology, the old divide of foreground and background, the old ecology of stage and play have lost their ground.

What currently creates epochs is the revenge of the former background on the depicted figures and frameworks: the background has emerged from its inconspicuousness and quit its assigned position as the supplier of self-evident things. The old ecology of stage and play is out of joint. It is now no longer possible to place ruthlessly risky cultural figures on endlessly resilient natural slides. The slide itself demands that its previously overlooked improbability be entered into the figures it carries and considered in them. It might even seem that nature took revenge on history by having its own fragility suddenly surpass the riskiness of the historical structure. Thus, the due de-dramatization of history gives a prelude to the rediscovery of a dramatic nature. If humanity were to awaken from its historical narcissism, it would discover that it no longer has a mission other than to make the concern of an overly finite nature its own.[16]

Nature as the “supplier of self-evident things” belongs to the Cartesian/modernist anthropocentric imaginary. Sloterdijk views historicity as a fragility, as it means mortality for civilizations.[17] The Anthropocene reveals how the old stage/background Nature discarded its assumed role and demonstrated its excess fragility, calling for the recognition of its limits. This view resonates with the feminist new materialist maxim, “There is no outside Nature.” Or, following Donna Haraway, we are always already within nature cultures (within what has been viewed as “stage” (nature) and “play” (history/culture).  There is no exit from the stage or play, no absolute exteriority. For Karen Barad, “There are only ‘acts of nature.’” For Vicki Kirby, who revised Derrida’s “No outside of text” as “No outside nature”, this is not privileging nature because “there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text.”[18] As there is no outside, we as humans are viewed as ethical modalities. The idea of being inside forever reveals our responsibility to take care of the “inside,” highlighting the dimension of our accountability: “Taking account entails being accountable, for all ac/countings are from within, not without. There is no pure external position, only agential separability, differences within, différance.”[19]

I contend that the maxim “No outside” is closely connected to Sloterdijk’s reworking of the imagery of the Spaceship Earth, as “Spaceship Earth does not have any exits, neither for emergencies nor for normal situations.”[20] Sloterdijk, referring to Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968), writes that Fuller’s imagery “consisted in the truly prodigious redefinition of our home planet: from this critical moment on, the good old-fashioned Earth may no longer be envisaged in terms of natural dimensions, but is rather to be conceived of as a colossal work of art. It was no longer a foundation but instead a construct; it was no longer a basis but instead a vessel.”[21] The fundamental implication of living in a spaceship Earth is that “its crew must in fact have a vital interest in the maintenance of livable relations within the interior of the vessel.”[22] For Fuller, the most important condition for humans to stay in spaceship Earth was that there was no operating manual, so the passengers were supposed to learn and understand how things were by themselves. In the past, humans made some ignorant mistakes, which the system was designed to bear for a remarkable amount of time. However, as the passengers start to understand their situation and seize control over their environment, the system does not indulge in ignorance as it did before.

Human being-in-the-world, of which twentieth-century philosophy spoke, is thus revealed as being on board a cosmic vessel that is susceptible to failure. Some time ago, I suggested the concept of ‘monogeism’ to characterize the human being’s appropriate cognitive relation to this vessel – a term that designates the minimum, as it were, of a non-ignorant contemporary relation to the paramount importance of the Earth. It likewise forms the axiom for a political ontology of nature.[23]

Thus, “No outside nature” means “No outside Spaceship Earth.” As such, Sloterdijk sees “the true conception of the conditio humana” as “life-and-death autodidacticism.”[24] As the passengers of the spaceship, we must use our own minds, make our own decisions, and essentially learn how to travel in space all on our own. In terms of our eco-political issues, Sloterdijk questions the timing of our “knowing” as it seems to always come too late. However, there is also “a prognostic intelligence that proves itself precisely in the gap between ‘late’ and ‘too late.’”[25] For Sloterdijk, until now, humanity has accepted the principle of learning from mistakes, but prognostic intelligence tells us that we must learn before making mistakes. In order to figure things out, the kinetic expressionism of the last century must be disposed of or radically modified. Sloterdijk defines kinetic expressionism as “modernity’s mode of existence, which was primarily made possible by the ready availability of fossil fuel.”[26] The availability of such materials led to the specific economic, political, and cultural climate and impacted our sense of identity, as well as our understanding of personal freedoms: “We can no longer imagine a freedom that does not always also include the freedom to rev our engines and accelerate, the freedom to move to the most distant destinations, the freedom to exaggerate, the freedom to waste, indeed, lastly, even the freedom to detonate explosives and destroy ourselves.”[27] Sloterdijk believes that we must fundamentally change our thinking as the expressionistic character of current lifestyles in affluent societies demonstrates that nature has not been and is not indifferent to human activities and that there are indeed limits to expression, emission, and the indulgence of ignorance. The 21^st century will go down in history as a carnival of redemptive vanities, at the end of which human beings will long for redemption from redemption and salvation from saviors. At the same time, it heralds an era of hypocrisy and the double standard. Nevertheless, beyond vanity, panic, and hypocritical rhetoric, this age will continually confront the question of whether to set up something like a stabilizing regime on board the spaceship Earth. It should be borne in mind that, from the outset, we must have modest expectations regarding the concept of stabilization. Cultural evolution knows no stable equilibrium. At best, it can segue from one livable state of disequilibrium to the next.[28]

Sloterdijk points out that the current struggle is essentially between expansionism and minimalism. There is a “gigantomachy” in which the idealistic party as a side argues for a new modesty and for reducing all kinetic expressionism to an eco-political minimum:  reduction instead of increase, minimization instead of maximization, and self-circumspection instead of self-liberation. For Sloterdijk, “it seems as though ecological puritanism might be the only reasonable morality on board the spaceship Earth … We realize that we are obligated to cultivate a modus vivendi that corresponds to the ecological-cosmopolitan insights of our civilization.”[29] However, he thinks that a global ethics of moderation is not realistic, due to the link between self-preservation and self-advancement. In affluent societies, people view their wealth as “the irrevocable spoils of conquest”[30] and they will not accept parameters of moderation or negative growth. The argument of modesty maintains these rich societies will ultimately have to accept the ecological facts that their consumption habits are not sustainable in the long run and that there is only one Earth. Sloterdijk finds this argument of the Earth as “an irreplaceable singularity” undeniable at first but questions the monadological interpretation of the Earth. There is the aspect of the technosphere, as such, we do not yet know what will happen “if the geosphere and biosphere are further developed by an intelligent technosphere and noosphere. It is not impossible a priori that such further developments will lead to effects that amount to a multiplication of the Earth … technology has not yet spoken its final word.”[31]

In the end, for Sloterdijk, the Anthropocene implies care for the cohabitation of all human and nonhuman agents and is a call to build “a network of simple and more advanced settings in which the agents of the current world will create their existence in the mode of co-immunity.”[32] Addressing the challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of human cultures, lifestyles, and economic systems, and the processes of moving away from kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability must be evaluated in unconventional perspectives for plausible change. Additionally, Sloterdijk underlines the need for a new politics for the Earth that can address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. This will require a fundamental transformation of human civilization and its relationship with the planet.

The Subject-Object Myth and the Metamorphic Zone

Latour echoes Sloterdijk’s engagement with the modern subject’s ontological and temporal constraints when he contemplates the cold scientific statement: “The maximum permissible CO2 limit was crossed just before 1990,” and questioning how we can “swallow the news that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is vastly older that the very existence of the human race … but we also have to absorb the disturbing fact that the drama has been completed and that the main revolutionary event is behind us since we have already crossed a few of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ considered by some scientists as the ultimate barrier not to overstep!”[33] This predicament resonates with the inevitable apocalyptic logic conveyed in Sloterdijk’s account. We are not able to deal with the vast scale of events mentally or emotionally while simultaneously taking on agential responsibility for everything: “How can we simultaneously be part of such a long history, have such an important influence, and yet be so late in realizing what has happened and so utterly impotent in our attempts to fix it?”[34] For Latour, we are unable to simply read such scientific statements as objective facts and maintain our distance, as “There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well; or at least, an older notion of objectivity that was unable to take into account the active subject of history.”[35] The current issue concerns understanding the role of human agent “not only in the construction of facts but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document.”[36]

The problem of rethinking agency is deeply connected to Latour’s conception on the Earth as a full-fledged actor of what he calls “our common geostory.”[37] He emphasizes that the ways of telling our common geostory is the problem of philosophy, science and literature. Viewing the Earth or all nonhuman or more-than-human agents as full-fledged actors imply abandoning the view of human agency within the framework of the active subject-passive object binary. From a new materialist lens, human agency can be viewed as another mode of agency “receiving, storing, processing and emitting information.”[38] Humans and nonhumans engaging in these operations isomorphically reveal the non-exclusivity of human agency. In a similar vein, for Latour, “One of the main puzzles of Western history is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism’, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated world of mere stuff; just at the moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day. The more we move in geostory, the more this belief seems difficult to understand.”[39] Latour does not understand the accusation of “anthropomorphism” (or attributing agency) often directed at novelists or scientists as well. He believes that every entity they deal with “are all born out of the same witches’ caldron because, literally, that is where all of the shape-changers reside.”[40]

This resonates with the agential realist account of Karen Barad, for whom agency is simply a “‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity”[41] and “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.”[42] All agencies, human and nonhuman, participate and intra-act within the material-discursive continuum, the spacetimemattering. In this framework, human or human agency is viewed as an ethical modality, as being accountable means acknowledging how and through which acts we leave “marks on bodies.”[43] A nonhierarchic understanding of agency is a matter of engaging with responsible “cutting practices” –“an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment to understand how different cuts matter.”[44] It is about engaging with responsible material-discursive practices that acknowledge and take into account the materiality of all beings.

Thus, Latour’s view of agency can be understood within the framework of the new materialist framework to which he belongs and which problematizes the constituent subject-object divide of the modernist tradition. Being a ‘subject’ is not to act in front of a background but “to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects –or rather quasi-subjects– that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized.”[45] Thus, in the Latourian relational framework, “Gaia is another subject altogether –maybe also a different sovereign.”[46] Latour’s account echoes Sloterdijk’s, particularly in terms of the problematization of nature as passive and human as active (the old ecology of stage and play), as he observes an ironic twist in the subject-object poles of our traditional understanding: Human societies ironically have become “the dumb object” whereas nature has taken the role of the active subject.

The co-existence of agents is obfuscated by the scientific worldview, which led to the material world in which the agency of all the entities has been made to vanish: Latour calls this “a zombie atmosphere” in which “nothing happens anymore since the agent is supposed to be ‘simply caused’ by its predecessor. All the action has been put in the antecedent … The consequent could just as well not be there at all … their eventfulness has disappeared.”[47] But storytelling is common for human and nonhuman, rather than being a property of human language –it is a result of being thrown in a “fully articulated and active”[48] world. Latour believes that we must form a common geo-story with the Gaia. The idea is not succession or causality but rather relationality and (a Harawayian) making-with or sympoiesis.

Latour proposes an approach that embraces a common source of agency: a metamorphic zone “where we are able to detect actants before they become actors; where ‘metaphors’ precede the two sets of connotations that will be connected; where ‘metamorphosis’ is taken as a phenomenon that is antecedent to all the shapes that will be given to agents.”[49] Detecting this metamorphic zone is crucial politically as well, as what is needed in politics is “a common world that has to be progressively composed.”[50] What we should compose cannot be divided into animate (having agency) and inanimate (not having agency) or else, such a process of composition is made impossible. The old divide of nature and culture is problematic, as well as the efforts to combine or reconcile the two as distinct domains. As with other new materialist thinkers, Latour rather maintains the idea of a nature-culture or material-semiotic continuum.

The point of living in the epoch of the Anthropocene is that all agents share the same shape-changing destiny. A destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented by using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity. Far from trying to “reconcile” or “combine” nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, is, on the contrary, to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible — until that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject that are of no interest any more except patrimonial.[51]

With the return to the metamorphic zone, the Earthbound will “articulate their speech in a way that will be compatible with the articulation of Gaia.”[52] According to Latour, there should be a new way of creating global geopolitics that does not involve expanding politics towards nature or naturalizing the human sphere. Thus, we need to distribute agency more radically, widely, and far away and traverse the worn-out binaries of subject-object and nature-culture. What he means is our political theory, and ecological thought must be open to addressing the intricate interactions of human and nonhuman actants, of people and things, of animate and inanimate entities alike, by recognizing their mutual dependence and relationality.

In both Sloterdijk’s and Latour’s accounts, the Anthropocene is viewed as a shift from a view of nature as an objective backdrop to human activities to the recognition that human actions are now profoundly shaping the Earth’s systems. Anthropocene implies a new moral and political responsibility for humanity to relate with the Earth. In Sloterdijk’s account, the Anthropocene is understood within an apocalyptic framework, evaluating the world from the end, bringing both the potential for catastrophic outcomes and for redemptive possibilities. Addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of our traditional onto-epistemological frameworks as well as our cultural and economic systems -like the issue and implications of breaking from the modus operandi of kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability. Latour focuses on agency in the context of the Anthropocene, arguing that traditional binaries and dichotomies of subject-object, nature-society, and animate-inanimate are no longer sustainable or tenable in this new era. Like Sloterdijk, he maintains that the Earth must be viewed as an active agent that is being transformed by human actions rather than an objective backdrop. The more we engage with the geostory of the Earth and with the interconnected agents that compose it, the more we see the dysfunction of our old views and systems. Latour proposes a different ontological approach, a common source of agency which he calls a “metamorphic zone,” arguing that we must distribute agency as far and in as differentiated ways as possible. This shift in perspective is necessary to understand and re-evaluate the complex challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1–2), 2012, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1–2.28067

Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1, (Winter 2014). DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2014.0003

Kirby, Vicki. “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, edited by Vicki Kirby, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, 2020.

Sloterdijk, Peter. What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, translated by Christopher Turner, Polity Press, 2018.

Watkin, Christopher. Michel Serres, Figures of Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, trans. Christopher Turner (Polity Press, 2018), 8.

[2] Ibid., 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 10.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 12.

[7] Ibid, 14.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 16.

[15] Ibid., 21.

[16] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, trans. Sandra Berjan (Polity Press, 2020), 143-144.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Vicki Kirby, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. ix.

[19] Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2), 2012, 47, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067

[20] Sloterdijk, What Happened in the 20th Century?, 25.

[21] Ibid., 24.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 25.

[24] Ibid., 26.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 27.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 32.

[29] Ibid., 35.

[30] Ibid., 36.

[31] Ibid., 38.

[32] Ibid., 43.

[33] Bruno Latour, “Agency in the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2014), Johns Hopkins University Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003, 1.

[34] Ibid., 2.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 3.

[38] Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres, Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 314.

[39] Latour, Agency, 8.

[40] Ibid., 13.

[41] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 178.

[42] Ibid., 141.

[43] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 47.

[44] Ibid., 46.

[45] Latour, Agency, 5.

[46] Ibid., 6.

[47] Ibid., 14.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., 15.

[50] Ibid., 16.

[51] Ibid., 17.

[52] Ibid.

The post From being in the world to being onboard: Sloterdijk and Latour on the Anthropocene appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Strangely, Strauss appears to be more of a modern than a classicist in his understanding of nature as a forerunner to positivism. According to Brague, the concept of nature underwent a transformation that not only banished divinity from itself but also expelled divinity from the concept of law. The modern period is characterized as a period where humans became fully autonomous in their ethical, economic, and political actions. The law no longer required divinity: it was legislated by and for human beings.

Mathematics, and to a lesser extent, the natural sciences, became the model of causality and, later of nature itself. For Brague, Descartes was the first thinker who sought to understand nature as a mathematical entity: nature was conceived of as laws instead of rights (LG, 234). The law of nature was one of motion without telos: there was no prime mover with which nature sought unity (LG, 234).27 With the rise of “scientific law” mathematical physics, both the concepts of nature and law moved away from an Aristotelian ontology to a scientific causality. By the time of the sixteenth century, the law was understood as natural in the sense it was a type of motion that was neither violent nor accidental; as Hooker wrote, “That which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working, the same we tearmed a Lawe” (LG, 235).

Coinciding with the change in the concept of nature was the change in the concept of divinity. Descartes still required a God for his law of nature to work, but it was a God characterized by its omnipotence rather than by its teleology: “The lawgiver of nature is freed from His own laws” (LG, 235). Descartes asserted that “it is God who has established the laws of nature [as eternal mathematical truths], as a King establishes laws in his Kingdom,” with such a law of nature “inborn in our minds, as a king would establish law in the hearts of his subjects if he had power enough to do so” (LG, 235). The law of God therefore was the law of nature, making the normative and the descriptive one and the same, but removing nature’s teleological drive towards the divine.

By the time of Hobbes, the law of nature still was the law of God, but it had become plural. This shift from the singular to the plural removed the notion of a universal order and was replaced by a universal science of constant and observable relations. This new science no longer searched for causes or, as Auguste Comte wrote, “the inaccessible determination of causes—that is, for the constant relations that exist between observable phenomena” (LG, 235). God was re-conceived as the clock-maker deity and eventually became superfluous to any claim to observe the regularities that exist in nature. The notion of the “laws” of nature was replaced in the nineteenth century by mathematical equations or vaguely-formed principles. Nature thus was no longer understood as the general laws of God, whether singular or plural, but as a phenomenon of uniform motion that was regular, observable, and ultimately purposeless.

Law in the strict sense was no longer conceived of as natural and, therefore, was entirely human, as Spinoza claimed: a law is “a prescribed rule of conduct (ratio vivendi) that man prescribes for himself or that he prescribes for others with some aim in mind” (LG, 238). Montesquieu continued in Spinoza’s footsteps with his Esprit des lois, where he remarked, “Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things. Law in the general is human reason insofar as it governs all people of earth” (LG, 238–9). The law was entirely a human invention. If there were any association of divinity attached to the law, it was the result of clever people; as Montesquieu wrote, “Any law, without which [society] could not exist, becomes by that token a divine law” (LG, 240). Earlier, Machiavelli had made a similar observation about how civil authority required divine authority regardless of its truth. The divine was the recourse of clever people who wanted to establish laws that went beyond what was commonly accepted. Although the law was not divine, it still needed divinity not because it was true but rather because it provided the foundational legitimacy for the state (LG, 240).28

According to Brague, Austin was the last example of one who resorted to a notion of divinity to support his theory of legislation. In The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, Austin asserted that “the divine law is the measure or test of positive law and morality,” with God defined as “the intelligent and rational Nature which is the soul and guide of the universe” (LG, 240). However, humans recognized the divine law not as something revealed but rather as derived from the principle of general utility, for positive law was “fashioned on the law of God as conjectured by the light of utility” (LG, 240–1). What was commonly demanded was what God had demanded. By invoking God as the standard of positive law and equating Him with the principle of general utility, Austin did not have to appeal to the “ambiguous and misleading” law of nature (LG, 240–1).

Austin’s notion of divinity was so vague that the contents of it could be arranged by humans to suit themselves, while at the same time he discarded the notion of nature as a standard and thereby also the requirement that humans subject themselves to it. Previously, the concept of nature had been stripped of any idea of divinity; now, it had been emptied of any notion of mathematical and logical causality to which humans would have to submit themselves. All that remained was an entity to be prodded and exploited by humans for the principle of general utility. The scientific method and the instrumentalization of the divine had emptied nature of any meaningful content for either law or human beings.

The Emptying of Divinity

If nature had become emptied of any meaningful content, then the divine would have transformed from Aristotle’s prime mover to Kant’s legislator. The elimination of divinity’s magnetic attraction for nature, as informed by nous, would result in a deontological ethics of self-imposed duties. According to Brague, this transformation started with the Protestant Reformation, with Luther’s return to St. Paul’s polemic concerning faith alone against the law. Although Luther redirected the polemic against the Roman Catholic Church with an understanding of grace as the unmerited favor of God, he also emphasized the law as being an essential aspect of Christianity, such as in his teaching of the two kingdoms (LG, 242).29 Christianity came to be perceived in juridical categories, with Jesus known as the Lawgiver, to both the defenders and critics of Christianity.

The tendency to place law at the center of religion found its culmination in the works of Kant, who re-conceptualized ethics as commandments. The moral law that commanded someone, with no hope to appeal, has no need of a source, even if that source were God Himself (LG, 243). Morality consequently did not rest on a religious foundation—in fact, religion rested on the foundation of morality. Kant wrote of “the recognition of all duties as divine commands, not as sanctions, i.e., arbitrary and contingent ordinances of a foreign will, but as essential laws of any free will as such.” However, “even as such, they must be regarded as commands of the Supreme Being, because we can hope for the highest good (to strive for which is made our duty by the moral law) only from a morally perfect (holy and beneficent) and omnipotent will; and, therefore, we can hope to attain it only through harmony with this will” (LG, 243). Like Strauss, Kant required a type of “faith” in an omnipotent God and in the immortality of the soul in order for his philosophy to operate.

Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience. The moral commandments required the statutory commandments to clarify certain matters, such as the worship of God, but ultimately they were from the human and not from the divine. Religion was nothing “but laws” for Kant—a simple appendix to morality (LG, 244). The divine had been reduced to law, and the functional source of that law resided in human conscience.

After the French Revolution, the connection between divinity and law resurfaced, but in a historical context. The historical study of law arose in reaction to the fabricated juridical rules born of the French Revolution that Burke had criticized. This school of thought emphasized the organic development of law as a historical process. Brague concentrates on three thinkers to represent this turn in Western thought: Henry Sumner Maine in England, Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Switzerland, and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in France. Believing in the notions of progress and evolution, these three thinkers pushed divinity back to its primitive origins and reduced it to a phenomenon from which humans had escaped in order to pursue a purely rational and systematic law for modern Western civilization.

Maine modeled his historical method after the natural sciences and concluded that the idea of the natural originated in the need to find principles to integrate foreigners, who had no legal status, into ancient Rome (LG, 245–6). The Roman ius gentium was combined with the Greek notion of physis to solve this problem, with the family as the starting unit for law. Although religion never appeared as a theme, it did surface as something associated with law throughout his works, particularly with canon law. Maine recognized that the divinity prescribed certain laws; however, the divinity in his overall account was something from which humans and the law should escape. The history of law was one of the individual liberating himself over time from various group units to his autonomous, independent self. Bachofen conceived of history progressively but differently in content when compared to Maine: history was the march from a maternal and material principle to the paternal and immaterial ones (LG, 246–7). Initially, there was one great law that governed all of humankind, and this one great law was associated with the religion of Mother Earth and Her notion of equality. This law of equality was older than the positive law of the state but has now been supplanted by the paternal and immaterial law of humankind’s historical progress. Like Maine, Bachofen recognized the divine origins of the law and also dismissed it as a relic of a primitive and no longer needed civilization.

Coulanges also concurred with Maine and Bachofen that the law was initially religious, with the familial existing before the civic (LG, 246–7). No human invented the law: the law was presented to humankind without being sought. A direct and necessary consequence of religious belief, the law applied itself to the relations among all people. The ancient law was never explained, written, or taught: it was learned in the religious rituals of a people. Contrary to Rousseau’s contention, the law was not the work of a legislator but was imposed on the legislator. However, Coulanges, like the others, argued for the inherent limitations in the ancient law and rejected it for a more progressive—rational and systematic—account of law for the civilization of his day.

Conclusion

The emptying of the conception of divinity reduced God to human conscience and later to primitive civilization, while the emptying of the conception of nature reduced its teleology to Austin’s entity of ambiguity and purposelessness. The emptying of these concepts yielded a positivist (or what Brague calls “sociological”) study of both legal and religious phenomena (LG, 248). Setting aside all claims of the validity of the object he studies, the positivist reduces notions of divinity, nature, and law to mere opinions. The irony is that the positivist can follow the development and path of these opinions, but he himself is unable to leave any mark on history because he has nothing to say about the truth of what he is studying.

Strauss seems to be following the positivist’s path, although he would reject the claim that he only wrote about opinions. Rather, it would appear that Strauss believed the positivist program would yield objective truth claims, such as a theory of natural rights, which would have no essential need for divinity. Strauss’s criticism of Weber, the great sociological positivist, was that he “never proved that the unassisted human mind is incapable of arriving at objective norms.”30 For Strauss, natural right could be discovered by the unassisted human mind, i.e., without divinity, if only one were able to pursue this aim for his entire life. This claim is a genuine possibility and, as Brague has traced in his book, represents where we are today. Whether this project is possible is something on which Brague refuses to comment.

Where Brague and Strauss disagree is in their interpretation of Greek philosophy. For Brague, nature was a repository of divinity for the Greeks, a position that is contrary to Strauss’s. An examination of Aristotle’s physei dikaion and its related concepts of physis, nous, phronesis, and spoudaios suggest that Brague’s interpretation is more accurate than Strauss’s. However, Brague’s account of physis is also deficient because he fails to note its dual teleological structure: it seeks to realize its own essence as well as its unity with the prime mover. Brague’s neglect of the prime mover as related to the Greek concept of physis, and his neglect of Aristotle more generally, has been remedied by my analysis of Aristotle’s account of nature and its relationship to the modern notion.

Notes

27. Brague recognizes this change in the conception of nature in terms of its teleology, thereby making his neglect of Aristotle’s “right by nature” all the more perplexing.

28. As Brague later notes, this explains why both Rousseau and the French Revolution sought a return to the sacrality of the laws when establishing a new regime.

29. For example, Brague cites Zwingli as one who returned to Old Testa- ment Law in his Protestant Christianity. Strangely, Brague neglects Calvin, who would be the best example and evidence of this argument.

30. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 70.

The post Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God (Part Three) appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Aristotle’s right by nature (physei dikaion) was where “everywhere [it] has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that . . . and yet it is changeable—all of it (kineton mentoi pan).13 Thus, Aristotle’s physei dikaion appeared self-contradictory, where it was valid everywhere and always, but it was also everywhere changeable. One possible solution was that Aristotle wrote esoterically, although it is not clear what would be the hidden truth.14 A more likely answer was that Aristotle meant what he wrote and left it to us to figure out what he meant by physei dikaion as being both universal and contingent.

On the one hand, Aristotle argued that physei dikaion was universal: it had the same force everywhere in forbidding such acts as murder and theft. On the other hand, physei dikaion was changeable in the sense that universal principles can have diverse actualizations according to time, object, aim, and method. The criteria of time, object, aim, and method allowed us to make the distinction between killing and murder. If certain acts fell short of or exceeded this criterion (the mean), then they were considered bad, for as Aristotle wrote, “There is neither a mean of excess and deficiency, nor excess and deficiency of a mean.”15

Murder consequently did not break some abstract rule, but it missed the mean for concrete action. Although the criteria of time, object, aim, and method may appear vague, e.g., “Do not kill at the wrong time, involving the wrong object, with the wrong purpose and method,” for Aristotle, it was appropriate to a reality that did not yield a permanent, detailed standard. Moral and ethical acts were not governed “by any art or set of precepts” but rather “according to right reason” because what was right was “not one, nor the same for all.”16 Each situation must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis with the underlying universal substance of ethics—the one way of being good—driving all of the means.

This paradox of physei dikaion was personified in the mature person (spoudaios) who saw “the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them” and who possessed the virtue of practical wisdom (phronesis) that included other virtues, for “with the presence of the one quality, practical wisdom, will be given all the excellences.”17 Like physei dikaion, Aristotle defined phronesis paradoxically: its possessor had the “ability to deliberate well about what sorts of things conduce to the good life in general” but could produce “no demonstration” of its first principles, even though its particular actions were true in practice.18 Phronesis could not become a science (episteme) because it was bogged down in the particulars of the world, yet, at the same time, it required deliberation of what was generally good.

This paradox of phronesis can be somewhat clarified by looking at Aristotle’s concept of nous (intellect) as both divine and human. Nous was “something divine” and superior to “our composite nature,” but it also “more than anything else is man.” By following nous, humans could make themselves immortal and “strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”19 Thus, Aristotle discovered that human beings possessed something within themselves that was different from them and yet paradoxically was the best thing of them—something superior to humans, which they were able to locate through a cognitive faculty that Aristotle termed nous. By making this cognitive faculty both human and divine, Aristotle had shifted divinity from the anthropomorphic gods to the intellectual faculty of the human soul.

It is clear that Aristotle believed in a divinity that was superior to but connected with humans. He wrote that there were “things much more divine in nature even than man,” which included not only the heavenly bodies but also the creator god as a physical force.20 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle also stated that “first philosophy” studies ontology, eternal causes, and the “first mover” god who was “in a better state” than humans.21 However, this “first mover” was not a creator god. Aristotle conceived of it as a final cause and not as one who set things in motion. The prime mover therefore was not the cause of the world, but the preservation of it by its rational and love-inspiring attraction.22 Thus, for Aristotle, the notion of divinity had shifted from the anthropomorphic gods to both the human intellect and the prime mover, the two of which were different yet attracted to each other.

Nature therefore was all of reality’s present form moving towards the prime mover. Defining nature as a member of “the class of causes that acts for the sake of something,” Aristotle declared that the “form” of any reality and the “mover” of any nature often coincide.23 If nature could become identical with divinity, then it would be both natural and divine. Like nous, nature was both divine and non-divine in its composition, with the latter being drawn towards the former. This claim rested upon the human reflection of their nous: “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”24 As a result of this conceptualization of nature, Aristotle’s physei dikaion was the attraction that humans have both physically and ethically to the prime mover.

The apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s physei dikaion—it was universal in force but changeable in action—was resolved by his understanding of nature’s being everything and everywhere and having a dual final cause at the same time. All of reality sought unity with the prime mover and for what it was supposed to be. For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans that occurred within the nous of the mature person (spoudaios).

Strauss, Brague, and Greek Philosophy

Given the variability of phronesis, Aristotle denied it the status of science (episteme) while categorizing it as a deliberate intellectual virtue. The universal-variable principle of phronesis, the many practical paths towards the prime mover in ethical action, precluded logical and consistent proofs. But the universality of the objective was unchanged, which allowed the spoudaios to make decisions rooted neither in relativism nor deontology but something in between as a physei dikaion. However, if physei dikaion cannot be studied at the level of episteme, how can it be demonstrated, especially with regard to Strauss’s and Brague’s differing understandings of nature’s relation to divinity? Is a theory of natural rights only accessible by an autonomous reason that uncovers a nature devoid of divinity? Or does a theory of natural right rest upon an account where both nature and reason are consubstantial with divinity?

The impossibility of studying physei dikaion at the level of episteme certainly restricts the types of demonstration of its existence where the objects of natural reason can be known as the “experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight.” Such an account of physei dikaion cannot be verified by the positivism that Strauss seemed to advocate or that modern science demands. Deductive and logical reasoning are also avenues that are blocked, since physei dikaion has no axioms from which one can reason to conclusions or first principles. By relying upon habituation in virtue and the experience of a mature person to make correct judgments, physei dikaion is beyond the grasp of those who are neither virtuous nor mature. In short, the traditional demonstrations are not available for the proof of physei dikaion.

The demonstration of physei dikaion is the same as the demonstration of nous as something both human and divine. To repeat from above, Aristotle wrote about his claim of nous, “The object of our search is this—what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is evident: as in the universe, so in the soul, it is God. For in a sense, the divine element in us moves everything.”25 Aristotle appealed to a philosophical introspection of human experience for the demonstration of nous and, one could infer from his other statements, for physei dikaion, too. The acknowledgment that an action is ethical—that it is right by nature—can be verified by others not through empirical, mathematical, or modern scientific reasoning but through the introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature, serious, and virtuous person.

Some may find this proof unsatisfactory because it lacks the objective character that positivism claims for itself. Be that as it may, it should be evident after investigating Aristotle’s concepts of nature (physis), right by nature (physei dikaion), human intellect (nous), and practical wisdom (phronesis) that Aristotle had rejected an epistemological framework of sense-based, logically consistent propositions that Strauss advocated. The end result is that Aristotle’s physei dikaion is not the theory of natural rights that Strauss attributed to Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s appeal to the philosophical introspection of one’s own experiences as a mature person (spouadios) to verify whether one’s actions were physei dikaion is as different as can be when compared to Strauss’s account of Greek philosophy. Simply put, when compared to Brague, it appears that Strauss had misread Aristotle and, perhaps more broadly, misinterpreted Greek philosophy.

However, Brague’s account of Greek philosophy as one where the concept of divinity became separated from anthropomorphic gods to reside in physis is only partially correct. What Brague fails to account for is Aristotle’s prime mover as the other repository of divinity.26 That is, physis was the expression of divinity as an intelligible, rational structure, but this expression was incomplete because it longed for unity with a prime mover. Physis therefore had a dual telos: it sought to realize its own essence as well as unity with the prime mover. The neglect of the prime mover—and Aristotle more generally—in Brague’s work does not weaken his overarching argument, but it does not strengthen it either.

Notes

13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134b18–20.

14. It would seem unlikely that Strauss would make Aristotle a nihilist, given his remark that the philosopher needs to have a type of faith in his quest to know the whole of reality.

15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106a25–1107a26.

16. Ibid.,1103b31–1104a9, 1106a32.

17. Ibid., 1113a30–35; 1144b30–1145a1.

18. Ibid., 1140a24–1140b30; 1142a11–30; 1146b35–1146a7.

19. Ibid., 1177b27–1178a8.

20. Ibid., 1141b1–2; also see Aristotle, Metaphysics, 98b–984a.

21. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a–1005a, 1026a.

22. Ibid., 1072a20–1072b4; 984b15–20.

23. Aristotle, Physics, 198a20–198b10.

24. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1248a25–7.

25. Ibid., 1248a25–7.

26. Cf. n. 12.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer.

The post Nomos, Nature, and Modernity in Brague’s The Law of God (Part Two) appeared first on The Miskatonian.