Abstract
In this chapter I will describe six fundamental conceptual elements of scientific ecology after a discussion of the ecosystem that they all relate to. The point here is to think philosophically and theologically through the material of scientific ecology. But the presentation of these ideas will not simply be historical or scientific or philosophical, though they will also be these things, but presented in the same style as Laruelle’s “generic science” or unified theory. This means that though the integrity of the scientific nature of the ideas is respected, meaning we don’t treat them as “absolute” concepts, they are read with regard to philosophical theology rather than terrestrial or aquatic ecosystem dynamics. Whereas Laruelle brought together quantum mechanics and philosophy by way of “idemmanence” or the immanence expressed in quantum physics’s conception of idempotence, we bring together ecology and philosophical theology by way of an “ecology (of) thought.”1 In this generic science thought itself is treated as if it were operative within an ecosystem. The point of this thought experiment is not to create an ecosophia, as Naess aimed to do, but to show that the normal philosophical and theological ways of thinking about nature do so without engaging with scientific material. As I showed in part I, even when scientific material is engaged with, it is never a deep engagement with ecological scientific material.
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Notes
François Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard. Générique, quantique, philo-fiction (Paris: Kimé, 2010), pp. 53–54.
Timohy Morton, The Ecological Thought, (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 3.
See Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 49–64;
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 2005); and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail (London and New York: Penguin, 2006);
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Lévêque summarizes this debate nicely writing, “Ecology is especially the field of heuristic principles, that is, hypotheses that we do not seek to prove as true or false, but that are adopted provisionally as directive ideas in search for facts. Unlike physics or genetics, for example, ecology has not created a significant construct of organized laws. In this sense, many propositions of ecology, such as the concepts of niche, climax, or even biosphere, cannot be tested in the sense that Popper defines testing. But one of the reasons why we sometimes question the status of ecology as science is that it is often difficult to eliminate the particular point of view of the observer and to eliminate all value judgements on the object of study. In reality, behind this rather academic debate lies the major question of recognition of scientific domains that do not raise the same paradigms as those of physics, which have dominated science till recently. There are domains in which the elaboration of universal and deterministic laws, and the experimental process, are much more difficult to implement, taking into account their nature and complexity. Some even cast doubt on the fundamentals of scientific discourse and search for alternatives to the basic paradigms that have been offered to us by physics and mathematics. Behind the well-known affirmation that the whole is more than the sum of its parts lies the idea of an ecosystem that is not simply a juxtaposition of living and inert elements but has emerging properties that are not deduced from just the characteristics of its components. There lies the difficulty” (Christian Lévêque, Ecology: From Ecosystem to Biosphere [Plymouth, UK: Science Publisher, Inc., 2003], p. 4).
Golley explains in his book that population ecology was dominant in Britain, while ecosystem ecology is often said to have developed largely in America. He writes, “The study of species populations and the interaction between populations captured the attention of ecologists and became a major area of British ecological work. It was not only exciting in itself, but it satisfied the scientific desire for ecology to move to a phase where hypotheses were tested through experiment and observation. One could undertake experiments with populations, and it was possible to apply the hypothetical-deductive approach to them. Further, species population ecology built upon the long British history of fieldwork in natural history in which botanists or zoologists collected, described, named, and reported on the distribution and abundance of organisms. Large research teams were not required. The research could be carried out by an individual ecologist” (Frank Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993], p. 177).
F. Stuart Chapin III, Pamela A. Matson, and Harold A. Mooney, Principles of Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology (London: Springer, 2002), p. 7.
Cf. François Lamelle, Introduction aux sciences génériques (Paris: Pétra, 2008), pp. 24–31.
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. xii, xx.
This is one of the truly interesting aspects of Mullarkey’s reading of Laruelle, as he reads Laruelle as fundamentally thinking from the actual rather than the virtual. See John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 125–137.
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 29.
Paul S. Giller, Community Structure and the Niche (London and New York: Chapman and Hall, 1984), pp. 1, 9.
Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Lsis: An Essay on the History of the Ldea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 10.
Cf. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 25.
Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Agamben’s short text provides a succinct summary of the biopolitical elements at work in philosophy of nature. It should be noted that the emphasis on Jacob von Uexkiill, found in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and to a lesser extent Deleuze, as well as their interpreters, is out of proportion to the actual legacy he has left on scientific ecology. His name, e.g., is not mentioned in any of the major histories I have read for this project and yet Agamben mistakenly credits him as one of the “founders of ecology” (p. 39).
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© 2013 Anthony Paul Smith
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Smith, A.P. (2013). Elements of an Immanental Ecology. In: A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331977_10
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