Chapter 1

Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse

In the introduction I said that the goal of this work is to foster a democracy
(of) thought among the disparate fields of philosophy, theology, and ecology. This democracy (of) thought is not an end unto itself, but is necessary in order to denude these discourses of any pretense to a hierarchical
posture over the others. This in turn will allow us to treat material within
these discourses as just thatsimple material that can be distributed and
organized in a different ecosystem (of) thought. This chapter serves to survey these fields as they are currently organized in relation to one another.
In terms that will be discussed at length in part III, we will examine the
ecotones or the limits of their identity as they come up against one another
as already constituted, though unconsciously, as ecosystems (of) thought
(an ecotone is a transition zone between two different ecosystems, often
there will be a blending of elements from two different ecosystems and
species will be present in the ecotone that are not present in either of the
two bordering ecosystems). I will trace their limits and the spaces at their
limits where they blend (ecotone) and in these limit-ecotone spaces we will
find what remains unthought within their strict borders, what remains
presented as if unecological in being thus thought, and we will then begin
to identify the perversity of nature foreclosed to thought. As we will come
to see, it is this blindness of these discourses to the perversity of nature
foreclosed to thought, their refusal or inability to allow scientific ecology
to infect and mutate their own thinking about their own thinking, that
lies behind their remaining unecological in thinking nature.
Recognizing the perversity of nature is recognizing that nature is stranger
than any one regional knowledge, be it philosophy, theology, or scientific
ecology, can capture. Recognizing the perversity of nature means recognizing the radically foreclosed character of nature to thought. In terms that
A. P. Smith, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature
Anthony Paul Smith 2013

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A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

I adapt from Laruelle, nature becomes a first name for the Real. Laruelle
gives this definition to first names, Fundamental terms which symbolize
the Real and its modes according to its radical immanence or its identity.
They are deprived of their philosophical sense and become, via axiomatized
abstraction, the termsaxioms and theoremsof non-philosophy.1 A
certain term, chosen in part for its fittingness with the Real, is transformed
from its philosophical sense or meaning and thought according to certain
axioms of the Real. The sense that nature is foreclosed to thought is a
mutation of the historical philosophical stance toward nature, transmitted
through its Greek filiation, that nature loves to hide.2 As Pierre Hadot
has shown, this underlying idea about nature has been able to accommodate a variety of very different philosophical visions about nature, from
its original meaning in Heraclitus that the death of things is unavoidable,
What is born tends to disappear, to the modern antagonism between
the Promethean and Orphic attitudes.3 The first, combining the attitudes
of both magicians and scientists, claims that nature has hidden itself in
mechanization and that mechanics itself can unveil nature and reveal its
secrets, which are of or can be turned into human use. The second, sharing much in common with the green notion of small footprints, seeks to
unveil the spiritual secrets of nature, to unveil nature though contemplation, art, and poetry and thereby take pleasure in this knowledge without
any particular concern for its use. While there is certainly an antagonism
between these two attitudes, there is also a fundamental amphibology: for
both, nature is veiled and can be unveiled.
This is not what our axiom, that the perversity of nature is foreclosed
to thought, means. Nature itself is not veiled, nature does not love to
hide; no, nature is radically immanent as the Real. That is, the metaphor
of natures veil already beguiles one into thinking that there is something
other than nature, something we can appeal to outside of nature. Yet, if we
think nature in an ecological thought we have to recognize that the veil is
also nature! No, nature is not veiled, but thinking this allows our regional
knowledges to think that they can unveil nature, that they can touch and
circumscribe nature with thought and thereby either exploit her for our
own gain or save her. Our contemporary climate, both in the physical and
intellectual sense, is determined by a single force: the neoliberal capitalist ideology that demands everything reduce its value to the quantitative
measure of money so that it can produce more of this measure. Nature,
though, appears to be purposely deviating from what is accepted as good,
proper, or reasonable in capitalist society. Nature itself appears to be refusing to go away, to separate itself off from culture and the human person,
and insists on inhering to every part of culture and within every human
person, and it resists bowing before capitalisms demand, to be measured as

Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse

15

something relative rather than the radical condition for any relative measurement.4 This is not hidden from us; we know the perversity of nature.
It is present in our bones, the aches some get when a storm is coming and
the way that weather is no longer a matter of mere conversation but of life
and death concern.5 We are witnesses to the perversity of nature as we are
an instance of its perversity.
In other words, which will be explained in more depth in part II, the
causal relationship of nature to thought is a unilateral one. Nature, as a
name for the Real, determines all thought; in the last instance all thought is
natural. This may cause certain misunderstandings. For instance, someone
may read this and think it means that thought has no influence or causal
power in the world. This would be to confuse two levels of autonomy, the
relative and radical, for, of course, thought can affect things in the world.
An idea can lead to or participate in a change to a society. An idea can lead
us to destroy an ecosystem or to restore a degraded one. Yet, none of this
destroys or saves nature as such. The thought can never become unnatural;
it is never not a real idea and what is real is natural. Thought can have real
effects, but cannot affect the Real; thought can think the unnatural, but it
does not do so unnaturally.
Allow us to step back for a moment, before diving into the local material of specific thinkers, and survey the whole of the field from a little
higher up. We have three distinct regional knowledges, what we call ecosystems (of) thought: philosophy, theology, and ecology. These identities
may seem too pure in the simple separation here, for, as regards philosophy
and theology, there has been no actual purity of either that we can locate
in the history of thought and the same holds true for ecology, as it found
itself developing among and responding to philosophical and theological
notions of nature. The messy reality of these discourses gives me no offense
and it does not need to lead into mystification. After all, though Spinoza
devotes the first part of his Ethics to a treatise on God, surely a theology
by definition, no one feels all that uncomfortable calling him a philosopher. In the same way Aquinas, while clearly devoting much of his work
to pure philosophical matters or matters that seemed removed from the
everyday problems of religious believers, he is nevertheless a Doctor of the
Roman Catholic Church and we have no difficulty referring to him as
a theologian. Finally, though Aldo Leopolds classic 1949 work A Sand
Country Almanac bears upon certain philosophical problems, both metaphysical and ethical, he was never a professor of philosophy but rather
was a forester and eventually became a Professor of Game Management in
the University of Wisconsin-Madisons Department of Forest and Wildlife
Ecology and no one seems to think a professorship in philosophy was stolen from him.

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A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

We are comfortable calling the work of one a philosophy, the other

theology, and the third ecology. There is a deeper reason for that comfort than mere institutional status, where they did their work or where that
work is now taught, and it goes to the heart of their identities as distinct
practices of knowledge. Their identity as philosophy, theology, or ecology
has to do with the material of thought that they work with and the way
in which they work with that material. For example, both Aquinas and
Spinoza wrote about God and nature, in both cases their material can be
said in the abstract to be the same and both even engaged significantly
with Christian and Jewish scripture, but their stance toward that material
and subsequent practice differs radically. Aquinas approaches problems
from the perspective of a Christian theologian; all his work is ultimately
concerned with the particular reception of revelation within the Roman
Catholic tradition. Thus, when it comes to nature Aquinas himself recognizes that the philosopher and the theologian think in very different ways,
the theologian according to the light of doctrine while the philosopher
considers creatures (creation or nature) as they are. Aquinas explains,
The Christian faith, however, does not consider them as such; thus, it
regards fire not as fire, but as representing the sublimity of God, and as
being directed to Him in any way at all. For it said: Full of the glory of
the Lord is His work. Hath not the Lord made the saints to declare all His
wonderful works? (Eccles. 52:1617)6

Spinoza, insofar as he is not working within a particular community of

faith and aims at a universal knowledge that undercuts conflicts concerning the specifics of dogma, is quite different. While in the aforementioned
passage we see Aquinas ground his distinction between philosophical and
theological metaphysics in a passage from scripture, Spinozas considerations of scripture as revelation lead him to posit the superiority of natural
knowledge over revealed knowledge. He writes, I prove that the revealed
word of God is not a certain number of books but a pure conception of
the divine mind which was revealed to the prophets, namely, to obey God
with all ones mind by practicing justice and charity.7 This is revealed
knowledge in the sense that it is given to the people from positions of
authority, but revealed knowledge does not clash with natural knowledge,
which is equally divine.8 In fact, for Spinoza there is nothing in revealed
knowledge, as claimed by particular traditions that cannot be known more
securely in natural or universally revealed knowledge.
In some sense, then, when we use theology in the course of this work, we
refer to a relating of everything back to God as understood within a community that has arisen around a specific understanding of a revelation.9

Nature Is Not Hidden but Perverse

17

The material is reality itself, but the posture taken toward reality is determined by the development of dogma in the light of a particular revelation,
while philosophy, especially at its limits in thinkers such as Spinoza, aims
to think from a position that it takes to be more universal, unmoored by
strict boundaries (though there are of course some) and to find some kind
of secure grounding for knowledge outside of particular or local revelations.
Here the material is also reality itself, but the stance is more universal, in
varying degrees, and an attempt to think a universal ground of knowledge.
This means that philosophy can dismiss more easily certain antagonisms
between certain dogmatic statements coming out of a religious community
and what knowledge derived from nature or from outside of that religious
community, but it also means that philosophy tends to split up thought
itself in a way that theology does not tend to, for instance, between revelation and ground. These are both incredibly schematic definitions and not
intended to bestow any kind of absolute judgment on either theology or
philosophy, but only to delineate distinct fields by way of strong tendencies
in terms of material worked with and the practice of working on that material. As will become clear throughout this chapter I find within both fields
aspects that are problematic in terms of thinking ecologically and aspects
that are indispensable. We can, however, give a definition to ecology that is
a bit more precise. While the material of philosophy and theology is reality
itself, a necessarily abstract definition if we are to include all the various
philosophers and theologians valued as such in the history of thought, the
material for ecology is more concrete and common among ecologists. The
primary material is that of the ecosystem, discussed at more length later,
and it is from the concept of the ecosystem that working with any other
material is practiced, be it philosophical or some physical material within
a particular environment.
These then are our three distinct regional knowledges that we move
within in this work. We can speak of their limits as regards each other
because of the dominant tendencies we have located, which also avoid any
kind of naive, strict separation or desire for purity among them. What is
most at issue is not the relationship of philosophy and theology, often an
antagonistic one that every philosopher and theologian has some opinion
on. No, what is most at issue here is the relationship between science and
philosophy or theology, specifically between ecology and philosophy or
theology. Not as regards the historical relationship between science and
philosophy or theology, which has been both antagonistic and beneficial,
but as regards this specific science, ecology, and the stances that philosophy and theology take toward it with regard to their own thought. First,
we will examine the relationship of ecology to philosophy or theology,
which I simply call thought in this section. This is important because

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A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

the overdetermination of scientific ecology by prior philosophical or theological images of thought tends to go unacknowledged. Corollary to this,
many miss the fact that certain key concepts in ecology are responses to
that overdetermination and therefore these concepts could be taken up
within philosophy and theology as well. I will then turn to the relationship of philosophy and ecology, and a short section on recent philosophies
of natures bondedness with physics, while saving a wider discussion of
philosophys relationship toward science in general until the next chapter.
While I discuss a variety of different philosophical positions, from
those whose work is self-described environmental philosophy to phenomenology and new philosophies of nature, they can be separated into two
general types. The first I call the subsumption type, where science must
be subsumed into philosophy for it to think, and the second I call the
bonded type, where philosophy is understood to be bonded to natural science, specifically physics, in its own philosophical operations. With regard
to the second I will show that philosophies of nature have not engaged
with ecology, limiting their scientific contamination and in the first I will
examine the very limited engagement with ecology that environmental
philosophy has. Finally, I will turn to theology and ecology and trace similar limits, though understanding the relationship of science and theology
requires a different typology. While some environmental theologies have
some sense of a bonded element with ecology, this is always relative to
a theological subsumption that is inherent to theological practice since all
things must be related ultimately back to the divine. Thus I differentiate
two types within this theological subsumption of science: the declension
type and the inflection type. The first sees in scientific thought the shape
of a decline common to secular thought in general that, at best, can point
to its own failures (such as environmental catastrophe in ecology) and the
second accommodates scientific thought as much as possible within the
general bounds of its theology for the overall goal of bending or realigning
those destructive aspects in both science and theology (such as anthropocentrism or chauvinism).