Planetary ecologies

KARNARAJSINH VAGHELA

Dipesh Chakrabarty in the essay ‘The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category’ leaves us with this question: ‘If one reads ESS (earth system sciences) as providing an (auto)biography of humans when humans have become a question for themselves, what indeed is that question that motivates this narrative?’ We think the question that motivates this narrative is: As sentient but limited beings, when we speak of the planet through our perspective-dependent world-conception, how do
we/can we actually refer to a perspective-independent world, the world of the planetary?

What is intuitively obvious is that world-conception necessarily implies there being a world, but this is problematic both for philosophy and science. Post-Anthropocene explanation of reality has deemed the human perspective too human-centric, and so essentially a world-conception incapable of making sense of the non-human or zoe-centred (perspective independent) world. At the same time, technoscientific explanations of reality are beginning to conclude that human perspective is totally algorithmic, and determined to make sense of the world as it does (or as is given), leaving world-conception bereft of any agency.

What sets an opposite ecological explanation apart is that it does not appeal to knowledge born from a specialized group of people, knowledge produced in select institutions, through the use of cutting-edge technological apparatus, or privy to local-cultural genealogies. An ecological explanation is, in fact, global, where, we know from both Heidegger and Chakrabarty, the ‘global discloses the planetary.’ And the global does more than just disclose the hidden potential of the planet-wide ecosystem, it also reveals to us an incredibly rich alternative, that of creative explanations and practices geared towards the planetary.

If the planetary is to be characterized as a dynamic interplay between human and other multicellular environs, also known as ‘resilience’, then any explanation of the planetary must target at once instances of the environmental and the ecological. A Planetary explanation is ‘environmental’ insofar as it addresses the resonance field of the organisms in question, and ‘ecological’ insofar as it addresses the totality of these resonance fields. A planetary explanation, then, traces the planetary drift in vital processes and corresponding practices, in both humans and non-humans. Sound responses to the planetary drift demand an emergent-metaphysical explanation of reality supervening on the physical and Stiegler’s organological framework.

A planetary explanation of the drift cannot be ‘personal’ in the sense of an explanation of one’s phantom-limb, however it can and in most cases is ‘personal’ in the sense an explanation of a casted vote. For example, a rise in temperature in my city must be knowable to me without the aid of a weather report (in most normal circumstances), but the cognizance of the un-usuality of the rise in temperature must be a result of some resonance field, which we are used to calling an echo-chamber.

In his book The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan sheds light on the architecture of naturalist explanations of reality. He suggests that naturalist explanations (from philosophy of science, natural philosophy, or scientific naturalism) are concerned with mechanisms, which consists, of other things, interacting elements, organizations, and supervening emergent phenomena. But as is evidenced by a glance at the scientific predicament the need to predict and analyse the world creates room for hypothetical generalizations. Since we choose to explain reality through events in nature, and at the same time feel the need to produce nomological propositions with respect to those events, it is not entirely impossible to imagine that in some cases our general heuristic is made to serve our purpose.

This possibility appears more clearly through a point in case, the Turing machine. Tracing Glennan’s own use of this example, we note that the physical structure of the Turing Machine can be easily explained through a description of interactions between its constitutive parts. Notice that a purely material explanation of the machine completely misses the abstract or the instructions fed into the Turing machine which when processed through become algorithmic memory. The machine becomes or “behaves” as a model for the emergent phenomena, i.e. ‘algorithm intelligence’.

Our only access to algorithm intelligence, until very recently, were machine-models, and so knowledge of it depended on our conceiving Turing-like machines, until, of course, our ways
of accessing algorithm intelligence, expanded to include human bodies. This other way of knowing it allows us to know something more about algorithm intelligence, giving our ‘concept’ room to evolve, perhaps even metamorphose. Peter Slojterdijk, in the first volume of his epic project Spheres, notes that intelligence ‘receives its key stimuli from other intelligence. Like language and emotion, intelligence is not a subject, but a milieu or a resonance circle.’ To the extent that intelligences are not standalone, self-same subjectivity and a planetary explanation is inherently global, our (human) questions around ecology cannot be addressed without appealing to general (human) heuristic. 

Arguably, the model-based heuristic is how we, as sentient but limited beings, explain most aspects of reality. Take for example Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, where Lolita is the model for the abstract nymph. If nymph-behaviour is a certain peculiar organization of activities and interactions, it becomes real to us only through an ‘explanation’ of the narrative-construct, Lolita. Through Lolita’s being and doing, we explain what a nymph is and does.

Take the Solar System as another example of the general heuristic; the planetary organization around the sun is one model through which we explain post-singularity events, where these explanations have real epistemic value, since based on them we draw assumptions used for searching exoplanets. Observing this general heuristic gives us clues as to how we engage with the ecological explanation in relation to the ecological, the planetary, and the drift. Since our world-conception needs to remain relatively stable for us to ‘function’, and our world-conceptions are strictly perspective-dependent, it is easy to see why frequent or constant change in perspective would be undesirable.

Now since our perspectives could evolve only through evolving models (i.e. models that reciprocate to acknowledged errors) a fixed model becomes the acting force of inertia against changing perspective. Although in most cases, models do evolve, the Turing machine becomes a super-computer, a geocentric planetary organization becomes heliocentric, our general explanations of the planetary drift seem to prefer model-fixation.

Most natural mechanisms, if repeated perfectly, will produce recurrent phenomena. Because the need for a stable world-conception is met by explaining successful repetitions, those near-perfectly repeatable mechanisms become targets of our staple explanations, which in turn become culturally fixed as models for those target phenomena. Like any other model, looping ‘repeatability’ appears to be a characteristic feature of our current ecological explanations, for example, explaining global warming. The explanations of global warming, which it seems has reached a plateau for a while, is maintained through a feed-back loop between the model and the mechanism, between the need for stable world-conception and engineered staple-explanations.

In the case of global warming, our general heuristic model happens to be
the empirical observation of ‘rising temperature’ (which is easily replaceable by other empirical observations, like the images of melting glaciers), while the target of the explanation is the mechanism upon which ‘global warming’ emerges as a phenomena. In our environmental explanations, the model of ‘rising temperature/melting glaciers reproduces knowledge of global warming such that the knowledge can re-enter the model and be reproduced without any change in perspective. The lack of change in our concept of global warming after being explained by a model, here rising temperature, is a pressing call to see that the latter is there to serve a purpose, that of producing a stable world-conception.

However, if our only access to global warming is rising temperatures and other substitutive empirical observations, then we are at risk of missing out on all the other dimensions of the ecological event, which may hold untapped valuable information about the planetary. But why are models (as explored above) never recognized as such? Why is the distinction apparent between models and mechanisms lost on our most general explanations of reality, including that of the planetary drift? This assumed unity of perspective dependent explanation and the perspective independent event, if nothing, is intriguing. In his exposition on Kant’s architectonic Stephen Palmquist notes that Kant’s unity of reason rests on a certain leap of faith. The faith that the ‘concept’ of the unknowable thing in itself fills the equally unknowable ‘transcendental space’ between the empirical and transcendental.

The bridging of the gap between model and mechanism in our general explanations could be a result of just one such leap, where an inkling to the mechanism, more specifically, its organization, fills the space between the empirical model and the transcendental mechanism. Although, as an occurrence, having an inkling surely appeals to great curiosity, but is certainly not a matter of surprise. It is a regular occurrence for multi-cellular organism to have an inkling, for example a flower knows when and how to release its pollen, velocity and gravitation, as mechanisms but not as concepts, are ‘known’ to the flower. It is by looking at planetary interactions like these that we come to acknowledge how the wider empirical life is poised with the reverberation of the ecological, and vice versa. 

Glennan takes most natural explanations to be descriptions of dependency relationships. In social practice, dependency-descriptions of natural events do in fact make up most of our spatio-temporal explanations, anchored around a sequence of becauses, therefores. General explanations of specific ecological events, for example, the extinction of Pinta Island Tortoise, begin with temporally situating the target explanandum by drawing out the description of other ‘events’, before and after, for example, that during the 19th century, many communities of fishermen took stopovers on Pinta Island on their voyages.

Over many years of hunting for food by these fishermen communities, they ended up slaughtering most of the tortoise on that island. However, after many years that Pinta Tortoise was thought extinct, we found a lone male survivor, who eventually succumbed to age. In being able to tell this story
as a narrative, we makes sense of the ecological event. But narrative explanation of natural events cannot go without spatial cognizance. The explanatory inclusion of this spatial cognizance in the narrative sequence, it seems, involves a leap of faith from the temporal to the spatial. In real time this leap look like this: the echoed-narratives of ‘rise in temperatures’, ‘loss of habitat’, ‘damages from radio wave activity’, all bearing temporality (rise, loss, degeneration), are meta-physically identified with objective events, at the sight of arctic glaciers, Amazonian rainforests, the locale of 5G towers, all of which bear spatiality. 

Now, once aware that our explanations are contingent on a Kantian leap, does it or can it change our way of explaining reality? Consider that in a 2006 New York Times article novelist David Foster Wallace paid tribute to Roger Federer with an article titled Roger Federer as a Religious Experience.1 Besides a gleeful applause of the tennis player, Wallace makes a riveting point about a very specific kind of beauty that he calls kinetic beauty. In describing Federer’s grace (among other things the ‘liquid whip of a forehand’) Wallace reflects on a ‘religious’ experience of being wonderstruck by how, on rare occasions, ‘bodies’ cross over the boundaries of normal bodily-ability. Wallace describes this phenomenon as ‘human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.’ This moment of ‘affect’, where Wallace is able to discern between ordinary moments and what he calls ‘Federer Moment’, is referred to as ‘poesis’ by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in their book All Things Shining.

The same affect is also experienced in moments of reading poetry where the meaning of a specific word exchanged between the poet and the reader requires the latter to have discerned it from not just other possible meanings of the word, but from other possible scenarios where they could have encountered the word.

Poesis, a personal skill of discerning meanings, although lost in the arena of natural and political explanations, is still an indivisible part of how humans explain reality. To become aware of poesis is not only to become aware of one’s ability to discern or make sense of the world, but also at the same time become aware of one’s ability to direct one’s explanation of reality. What we get as a result of this awareness, first of the contingency of explanations and second of the poesis, is a more layered understanding of the earlier question – as sentient but limited beings, when we speak of the planet through our perspective-dependent world-conception, how do we/can we actually refer to a perspective-independent planetary?

We suggest that the act of ‘actually referring’ is in fact an act of intuitional leap taking, and that our access to a knowledge of the ecological, the planetary and the drift, is possible only through perspective-dependent world-conception. However, with an awareness of personal poesis, our explanations including that of the planetary drift, expand to include the fact that real events show themselves to us through our choice of perspective. Through the use of poesis, we must be able redirect our ecological explanation which currently addresses environmental echoes, towards addressing the resilient planetary, and the whole that is the ecological.

We must also address this through the noosphere of ideas. This plan of redirecting our ecological explanations implies a reconstruction of the general heuristic, once its loop-fed determinism is collapsed into a noological specularity. The latter represents the explaining-narrative’s reflection of itself assimilated into itself as an ongoing process. This noological specularity offers at once a steady world-concept with the possibility of an evolving perspective. A re-direction of the ecological explanation towards the planetary caters both to our need for a ‘robust’ world-concept and to the planet’s need for a non-rigid perspective.

References

Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category’, Critical Inquiry 46(1), 2019.

Bernard Stiegler, ‘General Ecology, Economy, and Organology’, in Eric Hall and James Burton (eds.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2017.

Stuart Glennan, The New Mechanical Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Semiotext(e), 2011.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita. Revised and updated. Vintage, 1991.

Stephen R. Palmquist, Kant and Mysticism: Critique as the Experience of Baring All in Reason’s Light. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, ‘All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age’, Adam Academy Journal of Social Sciences 1(2), 2011.

Vladimir Vernadsky, ‘The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere’, 21st Century, Spring-Summer 2012, pp. 10-31.

Footnotes:

1. David Foster Wallace, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’, The New York Times, 20 August 2006.